Editor Assistant Editor Advisors Fiction Editor Associate Editors Art

Fall 2012 Volume 6.2
Straylight
Editor
Dean Karpowicz
Assistant Editor
Fiction Editor
Danielle Rose
Danielle Rose
Associate Editors
David Haight
Kim Gragen
PJ Carter
Art & Layout
Maria DiMauro
Kathryn Mendez
Public Relations
Tim Lawler
Advisors
Carey Watters
Mark Bilbrey
Poetry Editor
Emily Harring
Associate Editors
Sarah Towle
Dylan Falduto
Website
Hailey Foglio
Laura Bauer
Podcast
Carl Rollmann
Cover Artist
Dan Barber
Self Portrait
Straylight
Straylight is a journal of creative and visual arts, published biannually
by the University of Wisconsin—Parkside and is supported by funding
through the English Department, the College of Arts and Sciences, and
SUFAC.
Business and Editorial Address: Send all correspondence to Straylight,
care of the English Department of the University of Wisconsin—Parkside,
900 Wood Road, Box 2000, Kenosha, WI 53141-2000.
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sent via regular mail should include a self-addressed, stamped envelope
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In the body of the email, include a brief bio and any information about
previously published work. Indicate whether you would grant permission for your work to appear on Straylight’s web counterpart at the time
of the print publication. Work will remain online at least until the next
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back to the artist upon publication.
© St ray li g h t 2012 Is s n : 1 9 4 6 - 3
­ 8 6 3 CONTENTS
FICTION
The Things We Keep; the Things We Leave Behind
Carried Away
POETRY
Some Ghost of a Dream of Long Ago
A Palatable and Mutable History
face
Prideless
FICTON
Another Afternoon at the Paramount Café
POETRY
Yarrow
The Dog of Hearing
The Dog of Conversing
father, son, holy ghost
ART
Portrait of Africa
Gassed
Time for a Nap!
Degeneration
Killer News
Cheedeera
Windy Chickens
My Muse, My Love
Cat Lilies
Encounter with Sheryl Crow
Japanese Skyfall
Wonderment
Self Portrait as a Warped Object
Megaphone Crow
V2 Rebranding
Shane R. Collins 1
Elisha Wagman 10
Nick Knebel
William Walsh
Monica Scholle
Steven Niemi
24
27
28
29
Lawrence Farrar 30
Kate Belew
Mark Bilbrey
Mark Bilbrey
Jacob Donaldson
41
42
43
44
Rachel Bullis
Jennifer Thompson
Jose Miguel Amante
Jessica Ange
Jennifer Thompson
Brittany Parshall
Spencer Elizabeth Karczewski
Samantha ("Mewtant") LaVassor
Anna Frederiksen
Robert Anderson
Benjamin Friedrich
Adrienne Mata
Dan Barber
Brittany Smith
Tyler Hahn
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
CONTENTS
FICTON
A Double Homicide
Crockett in the Pacific
POETRY
Correspondence
Lament
Haunting
Arms Like Wires
Larry Graham 60
Carl Hoffman 67
Amanda Thayer
Amanda Thayer
Lindsay Knapp
Karen Barsamian
81
82
85
86
Fiction
Shane R. Collins
The Things We Keep;
the Things We Leave Behind
Over the past few weeks of riding, Ryan had made
a habit of looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t sure what
he expected to see. Occasionally he thought he heard
something behind him. It was all in his head, of course,
but sometimes he swore he could hear a low thrum like
a diesel engine in high gear. When he craned his neck, he
half expected to see an eighteen-wheeler mere feet from
his back tire. Other times, the sound was more primal,
more malevolent. Like the rattling growl of a grizzly
bear. How fast could a grizzly run when chasing down a
caribou? Ryan looked over his shoulder.
The road flowed like a river of asphalt into the
horizon, completely straight, an optical illusion with no
ending or beginning or memory at all. All he could see
were the tips of the Rocky Mountains poking above the
horizon like clenched teeth.
Ryan was unlike the handful of other long distance
bicycle riders he had met along the way. He didn’t wear
neon, polyester biking clothes. He wore jeans and t-shirts.
He didn’t camp along the way to get closer to nature or to
save money. He enjoyed soft hotel mattresses. He didn’t
live off a steady supply of trail mix and Gatorade. He ate
fast food and pizza and kept a thermos of black hotel
coffee with him at all times.
Ryan wore a small backpack where he kept a
change of clothes, a few magazines, and a toothbrush.
Besides a few pieces of clothing, everything Ryan had he
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had bought along the way. When his t-shirts got dirty, he
threw them out and bought new ones at tourist shops.
The only sentimental belonging he had was a crayon
picture his daughter, Mallory, had made for him that he
always kept in his right leg pocket. It showed two stick
figures holding hands. One was tall and green and had
brown hair. The other was short and pink and had yellow
hair. There was a blue house behind them with a pair of
bicycles, and at the bottom it said, “I Lov U Dady.” Mallory
was five.
Up ahead, Ryan saw a highway diner, and he pulled
off into the parking lot. He sat at the bar and ordered
coffee, toast, and a plateful of bacon. The best part about
biking eight hours a day was that he didn’t have to worry
about what he ate anymore.
There was an old newspaper on the bar, and he
pretended to read it while he bit into the overcooked
bacon. It was a habit he had developed after eating at so
many restaurants alone. Ryan thought that it made him
look comfortable with his aloneness and discouraged
conversation with waitresses and other nearby diners.
He looked up from the paper for a moment, taking
a sip of his coffee when he noticed a young blonde woman
at a table in the corner of the diner. She was watching
him, and when he saw her, she smiled and waved at him
with her fingertips. She was in her early twenties, maybe
five or six years younger than Ryan. She had a round face,
and freckles covered her high cheekbones. When she
waved at him, Ryan looked away, but not quickly enough.
He paid the tab, added a generous tip, and left
the diner. The door’s cowbell marking his departure.
Ryan was unlocking his bike from the lamppost he had
tethered it to when he heard someone behind him.
“You were in Federal Heights last night, right?”
He spun and saw the blonde behind him. Her
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Fiction
teeth, too big for her smile, looked even brighter in the
prairie sun.
“You stayed at the Holiday Inn, didn’t you? I was
there. Are you biking cross-country, too?”
“Uh,” Ryan said.
“My name’s Mandy.” She stuck out her hand.
He looked down at his bike lock. He hadn’t gotten
the chain off yet. If he had, he might have been able to
smile, shake her hand, and then have jumped on his bike,
making a clean getaway. But with the chain still locked,
he didn’t see a socially graceful way to escape. So he
grabbed her hand and said, “Ryan.”
“How much farther are you planning to go today?
Maybe we can ride together.” He wondered if she was
smiling or if her face was just made like that — a perpetual
expression of coy enjoyment.
“Sure,” he said.
Mandy brought her bicycle around while he
finished unlocking his own. Ryan walked his bike over to
the road, waited for a pickup truck tugging a horse trailer
to pass, and then mounted the bike, riding east.
The road ran straight, and they took turns taking
the lead. When the shoulder widened, they rode side-byside, and Ryan was relieved that Mandy didn’t insist on
talking while they rode. She was fit and attractive, and
Ryan liked the way she looked in her biking shorts.
The shoulder tapered off again, and Ryan took the lead.
“Why do you keep doing that?” she called from
behind.
“What?”
“Looking behind you like that. Lots of people bike
down this road. The cars are used to it.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Take a right up ahead.”
There was an intersection coming up, but he
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couldn’t see why they should turn.
“Why?”
“Turn!” she called.
Ryan turned, and they rode in silence for about
two miles when they came upon a deep gorge. It was
narrow and so deep that he couldn’t tell if there was a
bottom. The rock walls were the same rust as most of
New Mexico and Arizona.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Mandy asked. Her mouth hung
open, and she looked as if this were one of her life’s great
experiences — as if this gorge would change her and the
way she thought of life from now on.
Ryan leaned over the bridge, gripping the metal
guardrail. He saw a crack in the ground. He hoped it was
a rhetorical question.
“How long have you been riding?” she asked.
“Three months.”
“Really? Wow! I’ve only been riding a couple of
weeks. I started on the Golden Gate Bridge and bee-lined
it here. Where have you ridden?”
Ryan shrugged but thought. He knew this wasn’t
a rhetorical question. “I rode north through Oregon and
Washington but stopped at the Canadian border because
I didn’t have my passport. Then I rode past San Diego and
had the same problem at the Mexican border. So I rode to
Yosemite and headed east since then.” Ryan realized how
crazy it was when he said it aloud.
“Wow,” she said, sounding impressed rather than
skeptical of his mental wellbeing. “Are you riding for a
cause?”
Ryan pushed a pebble across the bridge until it
rolled over the edge and plummeted into the oblivion.
“Not really.” He waited, listening for the sound of the
pebble hitting the side of the gorge, or perhaps the
bottom — if there was one. But a car drove by and he
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couldn’t hear anything except for the grinding of tires
against concrete. “Are you?”
“I’m riding for breast cancer awareness,” she said
cheerily. “I get money from sponsors for every mile I ride.
My aunt was diagnosed last summer.”
Ryan nodded. He realized this was the longest
conversation he’d had in months.
“Are you getting tired?” Mandy took out a creased
map from her bike’s saddlebag and laid it out on the
side of the bridge. “There’s a Quality Inn only ten miles
farther.”
Ryan nodded and hopped back on his bike while
Mandy folded the map.
2
As they neared the Quality Inn, Ryan saw it was
the centerpiece in a town the size and shape of a postage
stamp. Bright lights dotted the town’s confines, boasting
gas stations, fast food joints, and pizza cafés.
Ryan pulled up to a red light — the first light he
had come across all day — and pointed to a brick building
decorated with so many neon signs that it looked like a
squat Christmas tree. “Let’s stop and get a beer,” he said.
He was feeling good. It had been good to ride with
someone else. The act of spending time with another
person was like a vacation spot from his childhood that
he had forgotten until returning by accident, standing at
the intersection of the white-sand beach and the strip of
tourist shops and lobster grills, fondly recalling summers
long lost.
“Beer?” she said as if the word was foreign and
she was testing it out for the first time.
“Yeah,” he said, and he pulled into the parking lot
before she could say anything else.
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They got a booth, and he ordered a pitcher. “Do
you like wheat beers?”
“Umm,” she said, looking at the menu. She looked
lost, as if she hadn’t understood the question.
“So what do you do?” Ryan asked when the pitcher
came. “When you aren’t riding cross-country.”
“I just graduated from college in December,” she
said. "I have enough savings to do this until the summer,
and then I’ll get a job. You?”
Ryan sipped the beer to buy some time. “I’m
a website designer for a company in Silicon Valley,” he
said. It wasn’t a complete lie. He had been one just a few
months ago.
“Wow,” Mandy said and sipped her beer. He
wondered if she was buying time, too.
The pizza came, and Ryan nodded and smiled
as Mandy told him about college. She had gone to UNM
and had a laundry list of ready-made stories about frathouse antics, final exam crises narrowly avoided, and an
assistant field hockey coach who asked her out on dates
and who she had gracefully turned down.
Her stories were a pleasant distraction. Her style
of storytelling was safe and comfortable: he knew when
to laugh, when to frown, and when to say, “That was nice
of you,” by gauging her facial expressions. She smiled
even when telling her stories, but there were nuances to
her smiles. Ryan felt guilty for having wanted to escape
her earlier.
The waitress came and laid their check facedown
after they had finished the second pitcher and declined a
third. Ryan grabbed the bill.
“Oh, let me pay,” Mandy said.
“No,” he said. “Please.” Ryan pulled out his wallet.
But when he did so, Mallory’s crayon drawing fell from
his pocket.
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Fiction
“What’s this?” Mandy asked, reaching down to
pick it up before he had even known he’d dropped it.
“Wait, no,” he stammered, but it was too late.
She had picked it up and unfolded it with the same care
and precision as when she’d unfolded the map earlier.
Grinning, she looked at the drawing.
“Who made this?”
Ryan looked at the check and pulled out a credit
card. “My daughter made it for me.”
“Aw,” Mandy shrieked. Had they been outside,
astronauts might have seen her smile from the space
station. “Where’s your daughter?”
Ryan almost didn’t answer. He looked over his
shoulder, silently cursing the waitress. Where had she
gone? He looked back at Mandy. His eyes dropped. “She
died.”
Mandy’s smile faltered. “Oh.”
Ryan nodded. He wondered what he should say
next. He’d never talked about it before. Even when he
had gone to the lawyer to collect the life insurance policy
for Mallory and his wife — ex-wife really, they’d been
separated for a few months — and even when he had said
to the lawyer, “Why do I collect Kelly’s policy, we weren’t
together,” and the lawyer had said, “Because she hadn’t
gotten around to changing her will,” even then, when the
lawyer asked, “Are you doing okay?” he had shrugged and
ignored the question, collected the checks, and left. What
was the social convention when a tired trucker killed
your wife and daughter? Should he tell her about the
funeral, or about all of the horrible sympathy cards he had
endured or about the flower arrangements that he had
watched with horror as they withered and died? Should
he tell her about the home he and Kelly had bought when
they were Mandy’s age, about what it was like to stand
in the driveway of that house, wearing the same suit he
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had worn for weeks without dry-cleaning it, waiting for
the realtor to drive up with some young couple, grinning
from ear-to-ear and saying, “We love the bay windows!”
or “Does the basement leak much in the spring?” and him
smiling and cringing because he knew they wouldn’t buy
the house? What about the perverse elation he had felt
when the house finally had sold? Maybe he could tell her
about how immediately afterward, he had cancelled the
lease for his apartment, sold all of his furniture, DVDs,
and golf clubs in a yard sale, and whatever hadn’t sold,
he had illegally dumped in a green dumpster behind a
Trader Joe’s? Maybe the most rational thing to say would
be about how the only thing he had kept was the picture
and the bicycle. And the only time he had cried had been
when, at the yard sale, he had sold Mallory’s bicycle,
which matched his own except for the training wheels,
the bicycle that she had loved and had ridden with him
every Sunday afternoon.
“She died in a car accident,” he said.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
Ryan nodded. It was the worst thing she could
have said.
At the Quality Inn, they learned that there was a
basket weaving festival in town over the weekend, and
every room was full except one.
“We can split the cost and save money,” Mandy said.
Mandy laid her saddlebags on the bed closest to
the window and took out a t-shirt and clean shorts. Ryan
flipped through channels while she took the first shower.
He lay in bed that night, staring at the ceiling. The digital
clock’s crimson digits ticked by far too slowly. He tossed
and turned, and when the clock said it was midnight, he
sat up and rubbed his eyes. He looked over at Mandy.
Moonlight slipped in through the heavy shades and he
could see that in sleep, Mandy did not smile. Her mouth
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was open. She looked pretty as she slept.
Very quietly, Ryan grabbed his small backpack
and slung it over his shoulder. His night vision could just
barely see the lines in Mallory’s drawing. At night, he
could not tell the difference between the colored crayons.
Pink looked the same as green. In the drawing, the two
people looked identical except that one was taller and
one had long hair. Ryan smoothed out the drawing’s
deep-set creases and placed it on the dresser drawers
between the TV and the little booklet filled with delivery
food menus.
Ryan had lied when he told Mandy he was going
cross-country. He wasn’t riding toward the east — he
was riding away from the west. As his fingers left the
wrinkled paper for the last time, he realized he had been
holding his breath. He was too far gone to stop now. It
was another habit.
He looked back one last time at Mandy. He
wondered if she would keep the drawing or if she would
leave it for the maids. He hoped that she would keep it
and remember him, but he couldn’t say why.
It was difficult to ride alongside the highway at
night. Once or twice, he nearly rode off the shoulder and
into the ditch that followed the road. At this hour, there
was little traffic. Most of the eighteen-wheelers kept to
the interstate. In Ryan’s head, he heard a whirring sound.
It reminded him of the thrushing sound of a boat’s inboard
propeller. It terrified him. Every minute or two, he looked
over his shoulder, scared so much that his hands gripped
the handlebars, trembling, scared at the thought that he
would look behind him and see Mandy pedaling after
him.
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Elisha Wagman
Carried Away
The door opened and inside the elevator stood
Mrs. Munch, a fat neighbor of indiscernible age thanks
to plastic surgery. Her skin stretched so tightly over her
cheekbones that Molly worried a kiss would tear it. She
wore a tweed suit with glittery buttons and patent shoes.
Next to her was a metal shopping cart, and like Mrs.
Munch’s heels, it sparkled in the fluorescent light.
Molly thought of her daughter Jackie, threeyears-old and stuffed in a snowsuit. Jackie giggled as she
travelled the aisles of the grocery store in the shop cart. It
was safer and cheaper than taking her to an amusement
park.
“Are you going to return it?” Molly said. She stepped
inside and inhaled the scent of Mrs. Munch’s perfume, a
noxious blend of lily and rose.
“It was here when I got in,” said Mrs. Munch.
“Then you won’t mind if I take it?”
“What do you plan on doing with it?”
Molly had expected a simple no. She studied the
panel above the doorway where translucent numbers
glowed a ghastly green. Five, four, three … “I’ll convert it
into a planter,” she said.
Mrs. Munch bristled. “That’s how it starts. And
the next thing you know Mrs. Shwartz is drying towels
over the railing.”
“We all have dirty laundry,” Molly said.
“Do it and I’ll report you to the condo board.”
Molly grabbed the handle and spun the cart around
forcing Mrs. Munch to jump sideways to avoid being hit
by the front wheels.
10
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“Report away,” Molly said as the elevator door slid open.
“You don’t belong here,” said Mrs. Munch as she
scurried from the elevator to the hallway.
She’s right, Molly thought. I belong with people,
not sheep. That’s how she saw the other tenants: a herd
of conformers bleating vacuous complaints. There wasn’t
an original amongst them.
Molly knew she was different. It wasn’t just that
she saw beauty in other people’s garbage or that she
refused to replace things when they fell out of fashion. It
was the way she viewed life, as if it was shards of glass
best swallowed swiftly. That is, in fact, how she described
it to her daughter when she first learned that Jackie drank
to numb to the pain. “Life is disappointing,” she told her.
“You better get used it."
What she didn’t tell Jackie was that she harbored
a secret hope that in some small way she could make the
world a better place. She didn’t tell her because she knew
how fake it sounded, like a platitude in a greeting card.
The desire was authentic, but she had failed to act on it.
Somehow, Molly knew the shopping cart could change
that.
She pushed the cart through the lobby, which
was filled with overstuffed couches, plastic plants, and
bad reproductions of art in gilded frames. Her neighbor
Mr. Hinkle sat, as he did every day, in a wing chair by
the window, reading a detective novel. He told Molly
that he liked mysteries best because they made him
think, something retirement from public service seldom
required of him. He looked up from the book as she
wheeled by, and half-waved.
“Where’s the sale?”
“Wish I could take it all back,” Molly said. She pushed
the cart outside and onto the sidewalk. She struggled at
first, forcing the wheels past cracks in the cement. These
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weren’t the well washed aisles of the grocery where the
cart normally rolled. No, it was the pedestrian strip of the
middle class, where condos flanked fractured sidewalks
that nobody used.
Every building on the street was constructed from
brown brick and had identical rectangular windows.
When she bought the apartment, she thought the street
seemed methodical and neat. Now it felt callous.
Molly seldom questioned Toronto’s reputation
for being as clean and cold as its skyscrapers. She had
grown up in a worn pocket of the city, in a four-story
apartment building nestled between tall maple trees.
She remembered games of war fought on battlefields
of gravel and the tartness of the lemonade her mother
mixed in the tiny kitchen that overlooked the beltway,
an abandoned railroad track where joggers sprinted and
dogs meandered.
She looked skyward, her view obstructed by
overhanging balconies. Under the umbrella of darkness,
she felt the city seep through her skin, an ice cube melting
in the inferno.
Wring motivation from melancholy. That’s what
her mother had said so often it was tattooed in her mind.
At the end of the next block, she paused to inspect a desk
dumped by the side of the road. Her fingertips, light as
feathers, traced the grain in the wood. A few nicks and
one gouge. She could save it.
Her husband, David, had scratched a desk she’d
bought at Goodwill and restored in the quiet of their
backyard. While he grilled pork chops and red peppers,
she stripped paint from the desk’s limbs. They worked in
compatible silence, each pausing to sip the chardonnay
David had bought during a weekend excursion they’d
taken to Niagara.
Seven months later, David used the edge of his car
12
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key to scratch the word enough into the top of the desk.
“We can’t grieve forever,” he said.
Molly pushed David away and pressed herself
against the desk to shield it from further harm. She
couldn’t speak because whatever language she possessed
drowned in a whirlpool of rage. She hated him, not just for
destroying the desk but for what they had become, two
specks hurled through darkness. David sought the light,
while she knew that none existed. The following day, she
moved out.
She flipped the desk upside down, lifted it by
the legs, and put it in the cart. She pushed onward, past
the pharmacy, the bank, and the bagel shop. When she
stopped at a red light, she noticed a woman in a yellow
sports car staring at her. The woman looked vaguely
familiar but it was hard to be certain through the slightly
tinted windows. She took a step toward the car as the
window slid down, and Pamela Pinsky, her daughter’s
friend, waved from the driver’s seat.
“I meant to call,” Pamela said.
Molly’s hand flapped like a fly swatter. “I’m fine.”
Pamela’s gaze shifted from Molly to the shopping cart.
“Collecting for the church bazaar?”
“Keeping busy,” said Molly.
“I can take you home,” Paula said. “The desk will fit
in my trunk.”
“Wouldn’t want to trouble you. Besides, I need
to return the cart.” The truck idling behind Pamela’s car
honked. “You better go.”
Her lips parted and for a second, Pamela looked as
though she would speak. Instead her lips stretched into a
smile. She waved twice, the way a nervous child bids her
parents farewell on the first day of kindergarten.
Molly blinked and Pamela was gone. Just like
Jackie.
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The last visit with her daughter had gone badly.
She had found a set of china at Value Village, the plates
and bowls adorned with irises, and they reminded her of
Jackie. She bought the set despite cracks in the saucers and
chips in the cups. She took the dishes home and washed
them by hand before wrapping each piece in old linen and
packing the set in a box. She tied a bow with red ribbon
and taped it to the top. On the back of a used envelope she
wrote her daughter’s name in big, bold letters and leaned
it against the box.
She spent the remainder of the afternoon
preparing dinner. She put pot roast in the slow cooker,
peeled potatoes, and shucked peas. She hated everything
about peas, their putrid color, their mushy center, their
sugary taste, but Jackie loved them so she pretended to
like them just as she pretended to enjoy her daughter’s
turbulent visits.
Jackie arrived thirty minutes late, smelling like
scotch.
“You could have called. The roast is wrecked,”
Molly said as she took Jackie’s coat and hung it in the
closet.
“We can order pizza,” Jackie said. She kicked off
her shoes and one landed next to the cat crouched in the
corner. The cat hissed and swiped the shoe with a claw.
“Cut it out, Chloe. I’m not in the mood.”
“You’ve been drinking,” said Molly, her hands on
her hips. “I’ll call your sponsor.”
“She’s in rehab.” Jackie sat on the sofa, the one
Molly had recovered in blue velvet, and put her feet on
the trunk that served as a coffee table.
“Then we’ll call someone else.”
“I already called my therapist. He said I should
sober up here and go home tomorrow.”
“You hungry? The peas and potatoes are okay.”
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“I just want to sleep,” Jackie said.
Molly grabbed an afghan from the closet and
draped the blanket over her daughter.
“Call me if you need anything,” she said switching
off the light.
The next morning, Jackie was gone and so was the box.
2
Molly steered the cart along the sidewalk, as the
contents rattled against metal with each step. The clatter
annoyed her almost as much as the spasms in her stomach.
She needed food. There was a diner up the street, one of
the few remaining greasy spoons in the city that served
homemade soup and hot turkey sandwiches. She headed
toward the restaurant, grateful that the curbs sloped at
the crosswalk. She wondered how many accidents people
in wheelchairs had to endure before the government had
agreed to fund the mini cement ramps.
Thick, cumulous clouds blocked the sun. Molly
untied the sweatshirt that hung from her waist and
slipped into it. She shoved the cart over a clutter of
crushed soda cans and cursed as one of them snagged a
wheel of the cart. She wrestled the wheel free and pushed
the cart forward but the injured wheel dragged instead of
rolled. Molly grabbed the cart from the rear and towed it
the final few feet to the diner. Nestled next to a wall, the
restaurant’s awning would protect it from rain.
The clouds overhead had darkened to indigo. They
reminded her of Picasso’s blue period, the one critics say
marked his descent into depression. His painting La Vie
had troubled her since she had first seen it during the
honeymoon she and David had taken in Malaga. She felt
the anguish of the young couple as their baby was taken
from them and she cried quietly until David insisted they
Volume 6.2
15
leave. He didn’t appreciate the painting or her public
display of emotion. She should have realized then that the
marriage was doomed. No point in dwelling on mistakes,
Molly thought as she entered the diner. What’s done is
done.
Bright bulbs of light blurred her vision, and she
gripped the counter to steady herself.
“Can I help you?” a waitress said.
“I’d like a table,” said Molly. “Preferably a booth.”
Her legs ached, and she wanted to rest them awhile.
The waitress’s smile was as phony as her blondefrom-a-box hair. “We’re a little full right now,” she said.
Molly scanned the room. Yes, the restaurant was
busy but it wasn’t full. She could see a vacant booth in the
back near the staircase leading to the bathroom.
“I’ll take that one,” she said pointing to the empty
booth.
“It’s not clean,” the waitress said.
Molly was about to tell her to clear it when Mrs.
Noble, a widow who lived in her building, approached.
Molly had seen her sitting at a booth in the front, sipping
tomato juice but hadn’t waved. The woman talked too
much for Molly’s taste.
“Why don’t you join me,” Mrs. Noble said. “We can
catch up.”
She didn’t want to, but the waitress wasn’t making
any effort to reset the booth, and she was tired. So tired in
fact that she felt she might faint.
“That’s very kind of you,” Molly said. “At least
someone around here has manners.”
She and Mrs. Noble slid into the booth. Molly
stretched her right leg but didn’t rest it on the bench. She
was a guest and would act appropriately even if it pained
her.
The menu the waitress had tossed on the table
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Fiction
was difficult to read. Each letter was shadowed by a twin
and vibrated on the page. She held the menu away from
her, and then brought it closer.
“Use mine, dear,” Mrs. Noble said handing her
a pair of half-readers speckled in rhinestones. Molly
searched the menu for a soup and sandwich combo but
couldn’t find one.
“When did they stop serving soup?”
Mrs. Noble patted Molly’s hand. “Why don’t you
have something more substantial?”
She couldn’t recall having a proper meal since
Jackie ruined the pot roast. Pushing the cart had made
her ravenous. She ordered the chicken souvlaki platter
and a small salad.
“It’s my treat,” Mrs. Noble said. Her lipstick had
bled and pooled a little in the corners of her mouth and
when she smiled, as she did then, she reminded Molly of a
clown.
“I can pay for it myself,” Molly said. She unzipped
her purse and dug inside for her wallet. Tucked in the
billfold were two crumpled dollar bills. She sighed. What
she needed was a decent meal and some rest. She heard a
crack of thunder outside and hoped the rain would pass
quickly so she could return the cart and go home. “Thank
you,” she said.
“I’m sorry to hear about Jackie,” said Mrs. Noble.
“Must be very hard on you.”
Molly blushed. She knew the walls of her
apartment were thin but she hadn’t realized neighbors
could eavesdrop. She wondered how much they had
heard. Mrs. Noble’s rutted brow told Molly they knew
everything.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” Molly said, her fingers
toying with the cap of a salt shaker.
“Still, it couldn’t have been easy.”
Volume 6.2
17
“What is?” she said.
Mrs. Noble nodded, and they didn’t speak again
until they finished lunch. Molly used a napkin to wipe the
grease from her lips and said, “I need to wash up.”
She walked across the diner towards the staircase
that led to the restrooms. A woman and child sat in the
booth Molly had been refused. The little girl had long,
brown locks that fell in tight curls around her shoulders,
and when she smiled at her mother, she revealed two
missing front teeth. “That woman is funny looking,” the
girl said. She pointed at Molly who could see a half-moon
of fuchsia painted on the girl’s fingernail.
“Ssh,” the woman hissed and then looked up at
Molly and said, “Sorry.”
Molly shrugged her shoulders and smiled. Jackie
had said worse when she was a child and she remembered
how embarrassed it had made her feel. “Kids say the
craziest things,” Molly said. “It can’t be helped.”
Going down the stairs proved painful, and by the
time Molly reached the washroom and sat on the toilet
her knees throbbed. She detested how people popped
aspirin for every tiny ache and pain, but today she would
have gladly chugged an entire bottle.
She remained in the stall a long time, giving her
knees a chance to rest. When the pain dulled a little she
limped to the sink. As she scrubbed her hands with soap,
she stared at her reflection in the mirror; tendrils of hair
had escaped from a ponytail and exhaustion had cast
a crimson web in the whites of her eyes. The child was
right. She did look odd, like a modern Medusa.
“You all right?” Mrs. Noble’s bulky frame filled the
entrance of the restroom.
Molly dried her hands with a paper towel and used
the corner of the crumpled sheet to wipe sweat stains
from her neck. “Fine, thank you.” She tossed the towel in
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Fiction
the trash and pushed past the woman to the hallway.
“Why don’t you come home with me?” Mrs. Noble said.
“Thanks,” said Molly. “But I’ve got to take the cart back.”
She and Mrs. Noble climbed the stairs single file.
Molly led the way. At the top, she saw that a young couple
sat at their table. The woman was the sort Molly detested,
a breathing billboard of brand names. She crossed the
room and pounded her fist on the table. Water flooded
Formica. The woman slid closer to her husband who
mopped up the spilled water with paper napkins. He
yelled, “We need some help here,” and the waitress, the
one who had denied Molly the table, appeared.
“These people stole our table,” Molly said.
“We’re finished,” said Mrs. Noble. “Let them have it.”
“Get her out of here,” the waitress said. “Before I
toss her myself.”
Mrs. Noble tugged on the sleeve of Molly’s
sweatshirt. “Let’s go.”
Molly jerked her arm from Mrs. Noble’s grasp.
“You’re a bunch of cowards. And you,” she said, stabbing
the air between herself and the waitress with a finger,
“are a bully.”
“I’m counting to three,” the waitress said.
“Chickens!” Molly said. “Just waiting to be
slaughtered.”
Mrs. Noble pulled Molly away from the booth and
steered her outside, into the rain.
“You can’t keep doing this,” Mrs. Noble said.
“They’ll lock you up.”
“It’s a free country,” said Molly as she walked
towards the cart.
Mrs. Noble shook her head sadly and walked in the
opposite direction towards the parking lot. She stopped
and turned when she heard Molly scream.
“What’s wrong?” she said. When Molly didn’t
Volume 6.2
19
respond she ran towards her. “Are you hurt?”
Molly pointed at the cart. Rust flaked from every
spine, and grime coated the handle. Warped wooden legs
jutted from the cart at odd angles. They reminded Molly
of dismembered limbs.
“No one will want it now,” Molly said.
“Let me take you home,” said Mrs. Noble.
She hadn’t travelled all those miles to abandon the
cart.
“Will it fit in your car?” Molly said.
Mrs. Noble’s mouth opened but only a sigh of
steam escaped. She shook her head no.
“What if we unscrew the wheels?”
Mrs. Noble turned and walked towards the parking
lot. The rain fell heavy now and she used the arm of her
coat to shield her head. Molly chased after her. “We could
tie it to the roof.”
“I can’t help you,” said Mrs. Noble as she unlocked
the car door and climbed inside. The engine revved, and
seconds later the car peeled out of the parking lot.
Molly knew she didn’t have the strength to drag
the cart home. That’s when she had the idea to call David.
She checked the corner for a phone booth but didn’t
find one. She remembered one being near the bank but
when she walked there all she found was a beaten up
newspaper box. She halted a woman who carried a box
of doughnuts in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other,
and demanded to know the location of the nearest phone
booth. “Lady, they’re as dead as Jesus on Good Friday,” the
woman said. “You gotta get a cellphone.”
Jackie had urged her to get a mobile phone, had
even threatened to buy her one for Mother’s Day, and
Molly had laughed. She should have accepted Jackie’s
offer. If she had, she would be talking to David and not
searching for a phone in the rain. She walked back to the
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Fiction
cart and stood next to it under the awning and cursed her
poor judgment.
A man exited the diner and Molly heard him talking
to someone even though he was alone. She couldn’t see a
phone but guessed he wore one of those fancy do-dads in
his ear that allowed him to communicate wirelessly. She
grabbed the tail of the man’s coat as he passed.
“I don’t have any change,” said the man. He yanked
his coat from her grip and dusted it with his hand.
“I need to use the phone,” Molly said. “It’s an
emergency.”
“Hold on a sec,” the man said and Molly assumed
the command was meant for the person he had been
speaking with before she interrupted him. He stared at
Molly in her soaked suit and then at the broken cart. “I’m
not giving you my phone.”
“You can dial for me,” Molly said. “Please. I need
help.”
She gave the man David’s number and hoped he
was home. “She says she’s your wife,” the man said. Molly
mouthed ex and he nodded. “Your ex-wife, I mean. She
needs you to come get her.” The man rolled his eyes and
Molly guessed he was being treated to one of David’s long
lectures. She smiled and stroked his arm. He brushed her
hand away and said, “So, are you coming or not?” Molly
tried thanking the man, but he stormed off before she
could speak. She leaned against the cart and waited for
David to arrive.
She didn’t recognize the Volkswagen as it pulled to
the curb and honked. The last time she saw David’s car it
had been black, with a small dent in the rear fender. This
one was white and a convertible. He got out of the car
and ran toward her. She noticed how much he had aged
since the last time they saw one another. Deep fissures
sliced his forehead and his skin sagged as if someone had
Volume 6.2
21
stretched it from his face and it failed to snap back.
“I’ve been so worried,” David said, hugging her.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I did.”
“Before this,” he said. “I’ve looked everywhere for you.”
The idea amused her. David had barely bothered
with her while married and now that they were separated
he was eager to seek her out. “Well I’m here,” she said.
“And so is the cart.”
David looked over Molly’s shoulder at the buggy
brimming with junk and flinched. “This is what you’ve
been doing?" he said. “I’ve been tearing my hair out trying
to figure out what happened to you.”
“I need to get the cart home,” Molly said.
He tilted his head slightly to the left, the way he
did when Jackie had a fever he feared wouldn’t break. “I
need to get you to a hospital.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me that a shower
won’t cure. The cart, however, is another story.”
He wriggled out of his coat and wrapped it around
Molly’s shoulders. She could smell his cologne on the
collar, a blend of cedar and sea salt. “First the hospital,” he
said, pulling her toward the car. She wrestled free, ran to
the cart, and grabbed the handle. She dragged the cart a
foot before David stopped her. A crowd of people watched
through the diner windows while the waitress stood in
the doorway smoking a cigarette.
“Want me to call the cops?” she said.
“I got it covered,” David said. To Molly he whispered,
“Please don’t make this worse than it is.”
She didn’t care that she was embarrassing him. In
fact, a small part of her enjoyed seeing him suffer. But she
needed his help and antagonizing him was a guaranteed
way to ensure the opposite.
“I’ll go if you agree to take the cart," Molly said.
22
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Fiction
“Where?”
“Tabernus. You have to convince them to take it back.”
“They’re closed.”
“Then promise you’ll take it tomorrow.”
“Closed,” David said. “No longer in business.”
The news consumed the little resolve Molly had
left and she sat on the ground. Her legs trembled, and her
head hurt. She felt David’s hand on her shoulder, firm and
warm. “I’m calling an ambulance,” he said. She laid back
and looked at the sky, a black pool illuminated by a string
of sparkling lights.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if Jackie were up there?” she said.
“You know I don’t believe in that stuff,” he said.
“How long has it been?”
“Seven months, twenty-two days.”
“Sometimes,” Molly said, “it feels like hours.”
Volume 6.2
23
Nick Knebel
Some Ghost of a
Dream of Long Ago
i thought / but was too quick / the fool's mind / a
lame restart / and dropping / the brick / and lands
like lead / a short stop
/ a sudden end
and forc'd / into moonlight / we saw / too bright
/ the eyes dead of / the tiger in the / stream / ing
down into light / the sun's / on another day / another time
drea/reali/ms/ty
and wash'd / away / went / cargo hold / that they
paid 600 dollars a month for / live a life / for another / why would you / question / everything / and
bestow / that life for the crows /
we begin //
we begin / for the crows / that life / and bestow /
everything / question / why would you / for another,
live a life / that they paid 600 dollars a month for /
cargo hold / that went away
/ and wash'd
the scene into the darkness / but no one ever
thought /
to watch the actors say / their lines / or to listen /
to the play
24
Straylight
Poetry
and papercuts as punishment / a thousand at a time
/ the world slept / with eyes forc’d closed / just
looking for a sign
stop. /
don't / forward / now / and into / the waves / fire
engulfs the acrobat / but the trick is the same /
whether she is ten thousand feet in the sky / or if the
rope / is just an inch high
i don't even know the truth / that it was fine / and
all at once the world / changed its mind / and everything you thought you knew / dying, spent, //
through
i like sleep / more than most / because it separates
/ the man / from host / and you talk about / connecting / when all we want is to leave / wrapped in piano
strings / and words / upon the sheets / the book
and sleep / for seventy six hours / just a second
more / please don't knock too loudly / or better yet
at all / upon what looks like / the old wooden door
better / you think / and death walks / to someone
you once knew / in the world where time / splits at
every slight / turn and decision / that might / make
you the one / of a hundred thousand billion versions
/ of yourself / that you are // and the stranger's
family / weeps in black / on a too hot day in june /
too hot / for funerals / and songs of the dead / weeping / are those their voices / whispering laments /
as you sit outside the rest / while a bird retreats /
before, better / she thought / now / into the nest
Volume 6.2
25
things they said / when you're tired / of the blinds
/ not being able to close / off the living / from the
world outside / your head / tanks down, and away /
and someone gets locked up / for what they call help
/ for twenty eight days / but you know better / that
after people measure the time with their yardsticks
/ and thirty have come to pass / its just the actor’s
face / that lasts
i / didn't even wonder / why / wonder again / too
much / the windows / shriek in the rain / inviting it
inside / and making its acquaintance / they nod their
heads / bowing / tossed aside // a piece of paper
/ faded brown / in time / splits itself in half / one
jumps out the window / the other flies around the
room / devoid of anything but shadows / and tries to
find / a light / but it went out / two years ago / the
rain started / no shadows in the night
a bustling winter night / tried to pay attention / but
attention wouldn't take / my money / he said no /
when I tried to pay / instead / he brought his friends
/ grief and happiness / and fighting / making ends /
of beginnings from times ago / and when it was over
/ cold blood / dripping on the snow
26
Straylight
Poetry
William Walsh
A Palatable and
Mutable History
What I remember of Canada is a sandbox, a beach pail,
a crying girl holding a large plastic ball. An old man
in a plaid button-down shirt at the Mohawk Apartments,
who might have been the maintenance guy,
took the pail from me and gave it to her.
The next day in the sandbox, she had a stick
which at some point for some unknown reason
she rammed in my mouth, knocking out my front teeth.
Everything dulled to a black and white electrical fog
of hurt, including the blood on my t-shirt.
That was my introduction to women, a tough journey
ever since, moving from darkness to light and back
to the seams of shadows where life is rolled up
in a rear pocket and the moon is the taste
of a woman’s neck glazed with Tequila. Sometimes
the barriers in communication are greater
than a lack of vocabulary, where life’s familiar path
toward redemption is a dumb numbness
of insight as we deny what was
or simply attempt to revise a new outcome.
Volume 6.2
27
Monica Scholle
face
such a sad face in a clear box for display
the new start, entertainment lines.
wash your brain
live to feed off the daydreamers
peer into eyes of innocence
laugh at the light sound of a pure tear drop
such a pretty face, they constructed of that blind girl
only sees her reflection. a size too small
old years sink
their eyes change.
new sensations
dream broken
beauty underneath
look. its fright
28
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Poetry
Steven Niemi
Prideless
He told Noah to build an ark.
He offered me supper.
Take my sins away,
So I can make more.
A walking, talking dream
Cracks in the riverbed
lead the scorpion
to the burning lion.
In his arms she sleeps.
How can he be a lion
When he’s lost his teeth?
But his mane is full
The pinch stings. But.
The venom is cool and
A prideless lion still has pride.
He paws the scorpion,
into his gums.
Open eyes, full mouth, short hair.
In his arms
The smell of noise.
But he’s still good
She says.
Water park.
Delivery.
proof.
enough.
home.
her.
enough.
Maybe that’s why he went to His house with for her.
Volume 6.2
29
Lawrence Farrar
Another Afternoon
at the Paramount Café
Hector Ewert peered through clear plastic framed
glasses into the street below his second floor efficiency.
He sighed; nothing had changed. It was a day like every
other day. He did not know what other kind of day
he expected it to be. Still, he felt disappointed. Some
inchoate, undefined longing clutched at him. He tried to
wish the feeling away. But he failed.
He checked his watch (two o'clock in the afternoon)
then stepped into his tiny bathroom, where he postured
in front of a mirror. Hector sighed again. Random gray
hairs and, worse yet, splotches of gray intruded into
his once solidly ash blond crew cut. Forty and, as he
described it, a bit more, Hector was a self-effacing, selfcontained man. Nonetheless, vanity exercised its private,
attention-grabbing demands. Perhaps one of those hair
products for men they advertised on television …
Hector picked up a neatly folded newspaper,
tucked it under his arm, and went out in the hall. He
locked the door behind him, jiggling the handle — just to
be sure. You could never be too careful. Then, his left hand
sliding along the worn smooth banister, he negotiated his
way down the dimly lit stairway, stepped out in the street,
and set off on the two block walk to the Paramount Café.
It had become a Saturday afternoon ritual — coffee and
perhaps a piece of pie. It had also become the high point
of his week, and nervous anticipation gripped him, as it
always did.
Hector strode purposefully along. It was an
30
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unremarkable day, like every other unremarkable day —
neither hot nor cold; the air comfortably warm, neither
humid nor dry; the sky neither blue nor gray. Somewhat
pleasant. Yes. He supposed it could be considered a
pleasant day, but one quite ordinary.
Like the day, Hector, too, seemed unremarkable,
a bit round-shouldered (too many years hunched over a
drafting table), a man of middling height and middling
build. He had put on a dark blue open neck shirt, crisply
laundered; tan gabardine trousers, sharply pressed; and
sensible brown shoes, diligently polished. He exuded a
kind of shabby gentility.
Neither in the city nor out of it, Hector’s street
featured nondescript shops, restaurants, and two or
three story apartment buildings. It was that hodgepodge
kind of street where you could buy a used book, grab a
quick meal, repair a vacuum cleaner, pick up a bouquet
of roses, get your nails done, select a child’s toy, or, if so
inclined, have your fortune told.
The neighborhood had seen its better days. The
Olde English street signs and decorative lamp poles once
installed by civic minded businessmen had fallen into
disrepair; mosaics of cracked concrete decorated the
sidewalks; and here and there For Lease signs on empty
shelves leaned against dusty windows. In any number of
places, a mason’s trowel or a painter’s brush could surely
have been put to good use. A bus rumbled by spewing
fumes and demanding right of way from a delivery truck
with flashing lights. It was, Hector thought, a thoroughly
ordinary place, like thousands of other ordinary places.
He passed a pair of drivers playing backgammon
on the trunk of a taxi, disregarded the paper cup extended
toward him by a homeless man, and sidestepped an
elderly woman creeping along behind her walker. He’d
encountered all of them before in the course of this
Volume 6.2
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32
weekly passage to the Paramount Café. The rather grandly named Paramount Café was,
in fact, an ordinary café, like every other ordinary café.
It occupied the ground floor of a two story building,
the second floor given over to apartments. The café
blended nicely into the undistinguished homogeneity
of the structures that were its neighbors. Its gray stucco
exterior was unremarkable, save for a few clinging
strands of exhausted ivy and for its sidewalk windows
that invited passersby to gaze directly in at customers
wolfing down their sandwiches and beer. In warm
weather, the proprietor cranked down an awning and
crammed three or four tables outside on the sidewalk,
forcing pedestrians to pick their way through the diners
or to step into the street to get round them.
Hector paused on the sidewalk and, as if by way of
confirmation, contemplated the neon sign in the window.
Open, it said. It was a pinkish red sign. Open, it said. Of
course, he already knew the café was open, but the lighted
sign welcomed him, marked the café as a place where he
would be accepted, where he could drink coffee at his
ease, read his paper undisturbed. A regular customer,
after all, he claimed the rights and privileges pertaining
thereto. He could pass time. He could find refuge from
the everyday, oppressive, and — truth be told — lonely
life he led. Not only did the place provide sanctuary. Above
all, Norma Driscoll, a waitress, worked in the Paramount
Café. In Hector’s world of ordinariness, he considered
her anything but ordinary. She was, alas, much too young
for him, perhaps fifteen years too young. He searched
for a proper description. Perky? Almost pretty? No. He
decided she was actually pretty. He thought of her shortcropped black hair, her lustrous white skin, and her eyes
that seemed to have seen it all — and been made more
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Fiction
knowing by the experience. She stirred in him a faint
hope, a slim hope, but one he knew in his heart to be
delusional. Fifteen years too young and likely wooed by
a veritable cavalcade of suitors. Still, when he thought
of her, feelings long dormant touched him. Hector could
dream.
Heart thumping with excitement (his doctor
would disapprove), Hector pushed through one of the
long handled double doors, crossed to the counter, and
climbed onto a stool. The owner and cook, Jack Bligh, a
large man, bull-necked and shaven headed, grinned at
him and pointed at a printed sign hung above the cash
register. In God We Trust; All Others Pay Cash. It was their
private joke. Hector always paid — and he always paid
cash.
Although the noontime crowd had cleared out, the
air remained ripe with cooking smells — whiffs of garlicladen spaghetti, lingering traces of bacon, and touches of
some savory soup. Hector liked the smells; he liked the
old movie posters, the incongruous paper lanterns, the
red and yellow flowers in little bottles decorating the
tables. He thought of the other patrons as comrades; he
knew some by name, most by face. True, people rarely
spoke to him, but they sometimes greeted him with a
welcoming smile, an upraised hand, a friendly nod. The
atmosphere in the place, familiar and ordinary, reassured
him.
As Hector put down his newspaper, the heel of
his hand came to rest on a sticky spot — perhaps jam,
perhaps syrup. It smudged and tore his paper. About to
call it to Norma’s attention, he had second thoughts. He
did not want to begin his afternoon sojourn with what
she might take to be a complaint, a criticism. On the
other hand, she might appreciate being made aware of
the condition. What to do? He decided to say nothing, at
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34
least not initially. Perhaps he would mention it later. He
sat silent as a Trappist monk.
“What’ll it be today?” Norma asked. “The usual?”
The usual. Confirmation that she remembered him,
that he occupied a niche, however modest, somewhere in
her mind. He felt reassured — the usual.
“Yes, please.” He lifted his eyes and smiled. He
ordinarily said nothing more. But now, emboldened, he
added, “How are you today?”
“So so. How about yourself?”
Her response, he concluded, revealed her interest
in his well-being. What a wonderful feeling.
“Fine. I’m fine, thank you.” Perhaps he could
mention his stiff neck. No, that might seem too intimate,
too forward. But surely it would not be untoward to
reiterate that he felt fine. “I’m just fine,” he said.
“That’s good. I’ll be right back.”
He watched her take several steps to the large
silver urn located behind the counter. She moved with
what struck him as feline grace. Comely, perhaps that
was the word he’d been searching for. She merited being
described as comely and, he thought, shapely. Her beige
waitressing dress and white apron simply failed to do her
justice. Simply failed.
“Here’s your coffee, honey,” she said. She placed
the cup and saucer in front of him. Why had she included
the little container of cream? Didn’t she remember he
didn’t use cream? Fortunately, the fact she called him
honey compensated for this small slight. Anyone knew
honey was a term of affection.
“It’s a pleasant day outside. Quite nice,” Hector
said. He wanted to say something more interesting, but
nothing came to him.
“Yeah. I guess. Doesn’t look real sunny though.”
He detected a slight nasal quality in her voice. It’s barely
Straylight
Fiction
noticeable, he told himself.
Norma moved down the counter to tend to an
elderly couple who’d come in for a late lunch. The old folks
smiled, and Norma laughed. What could be so funny? She
disappeared into the kitchen, and Hector picked up his
paper. He sipped his coffee and worked his way through
the international news.
When two young men from the power company
slid into a booth, Norma reappeared to take their orders.
Again, Hector could not hear what they said, but Norma
dismissed the two with a wave of the hand while they
laughed convulsively. Hector hoped they hadn’t been
rude. Some of these young fellows treated waitresses
with a lack of respect.
His mug nearly empty, Hector signaled for a refill.
“How you doing over here?” Norma asked when
she arrived with the glass pot. Attentive to his needs. No
doubt about it.
“Fine. Just fine.”
“Just let me know if I can get you anything else.
How about a piece of pecan pie?”
“Maybe later. Oh, by the way, there’s something
spilled here on the counter.”
“Be right back.” She went off to the sink and
fetched a wet cloth.
“Sorry about that,” she said on her return. He
wished she didn’t chew gum, but it was a habit easily
forgiven. He watched her hands as she wiped away the
spill. Red with work, nonetheless, her fingers showed
themselves to be slender, sensitive-looking. Was he the
only one who’d noticed?
He nursed along the second cup of coffee. While so
engaged, he removed a pencil from his plastic protected
shirt pocket and tried his hand at the paper’s crossword
puzzle.
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36
“You look ready for that piece of pie. How about it?”
she asked.
“Yes, please. But do you have apple?”
“Sure thing. How about a scoop of ice cream with
that?” Something extra; how thoughtful.
“That would be good.”
She returned and said, “Pie á la mode. Here you go.”
He now decided her small features lent her a
kind of sweet faced, Kewpie look. But her eyes seemed
disinterested. He suspected she likely found him boring
as gray paint in a closet.
“Did you hear about the two antennas that met on
a roof, fell in love and got married?” she asked.
His reverie interrupted, Hector looked puzzled.
“I’m afraid, I don’t … ”
“The ceremony wasn’t much, but the reception was
great.”
Hector smiled. “Oh, I see the reception
was … antennas.” She was joking with him. She’d never
done that before.
His elation was brief. Norma walked away to give
the old couple their check. This time he caught snippets
of their conversation. He heard her say, “Did you hear
about the two antennas that … ” She was sharing the
same joke with others. Hardly inappropriate, yet he felt a
little disheartened, a little envious. It rendered the earlier
sharing less special.
A third cup of coffee seemed like something
of a stretch. He glanced at his watch. He’d been in the
Paramount Café for the better part of an hour. Certainly
no one pressed him to leave. Yet, he felt awkward — just
sitting there. Perhaps one more cup.
“Mind if I look at your paper for a minute? I’d
like to check the movie listings.” Oh goodness; she had
returned.
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Fiction
“Please. Here.” He scooped up the entertainment
section and handed it to her.
She stood behind the counter, holding the open
paper in two hands. “Do you ever go to the movies?” she
asked from behind the paper.
“Not often, I’m afraid.”
“Here it is. There’s a show at the Rialto I’ve been
dying to see. Eight o’clock.”
Hector said nothing. His mind whirled. Was she
suggesting they go together? Impossible. He dismissed
the notion as deluded.
“I don’t like to go alone, though. Know what I
mean?”
No. He didn’t know what she meant. Not really.
Perhaps it was an invitation. What to do? What to do?
“Oops. Customer. Thanks.”
With that she handed back the paper and whisked
away to tend a man and little boy wearing baseball caps.
Were they going to or coming from the game? It didn’t
matter. Norma’s remark about the movie showing had
captured his full attention. Hector laid the paper out on
the counter and ostentatiously scrutinized the listings.
His stomach knotted. Should he ask her? Could he ask
her? She might think him presumptuous, even fresh.
Did people still say fresh? Probably not. Almost anything
seemed to go these days. Still …
He raised his eyes and saw her bringing him
the check. “Don’t feel rushed. Take your time,” she said.
Perhaps delivering the bill without being asked to do
so simply provided an excuse for her to talk to him. She
wanted him to stay. That must be it.
She looked at her own watch. “I get off at seventhirty. Just time to make it.” Was she merely thinking
aloud? Or had she transmitted yet another signal?
“I was wondering if perhaps you would … ” He
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38
foundered on the shoals of indecision. “I was wondering
if perhaps you … would be good enough to bring me
some more coffee.” His resolution failed, the magic carpet
of anticipation transformed into an elevator hurtling
straight down. Few things, it seems, are more incalculable
than the ebb and flow of confidence.
“Sure. It’s on the house,” she said and stalked off.
At least he believed she had stalked off. Had his
failure to respond irritated her? Disappointed her? Or had
he read more into her words than they warranted? Hands
over his face, he deliberated behind his palms. Be honest
with yourself, he thought. You’re an absolutely ordinary
person. There is no way she could be interested. He
allowed his mind to explore their exchanges — nugacities,
all nugacities. In assigning meaning to any of them he’d
deceived himself.
Hector extracted a five dollar bill from his wallet
and placed it on top of the check. He drained his cup
and stood up, ready to leave. Norma had disappeared
into the kitchen and, he decided, it would be best to be
gone before she returned. Like a man experiencing pain,
he walked slowly toward the exit, twice looking back
over his shoulder. He thought he glimpsed her coming
toward the door. But although he lingered outside on the
sidewalk, she did not appear. It had been nothing other
than a glorious, but childish, dream.
Wrapped in a cloak of martyred melancholy, he
trudged back to his apartment building, made his way
up the shadowed stairwell, fiddled with the key, and let
himself into his confining little apartment.
There’d been a brief respite at the Paramount,
his afternoon there an elixir he hoped would carry him
through the coming dreary week. But already a fresh
wave of loneliness rolled over him. He sank into his old
recliner and stared at the television set, without turning
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Fiction
it on. Today had eclipsed yesterday and would soon
evaporate into that insubstantial yet moving thing called
time. And time slipped by, carrying him along with it. He
could find no language for what he wanted to express.
He wanted to weep, but could find no release. There was
no escape from the dreary, humdrum life he was fated to
live. Or was there?
He pried the cap off a bottle of beer, nibbled some
crackers, and munched a little Brie. Lolling in his recliner,
a sense of serenity embraced him, and he began to smile.
In some respects it had, in fact, been a better than ordinary
afternoon at the Paramount. He should have realized it.
Norma had talked to him a half dozen or more times.
She’d joked with him. And she’d hinted she would like him
to take her to a movie. His assessment had been wrong.
He had given up too soon. He wanted to believe this.
And did. Perhaps some of that hair treatment, perhaps
next week … He experienced a jumble of thoughts and
counter thoughts as he anticipated another afternoon at
the Paramount Café.
Then it struck him. Why wait? The time for Hector
Ewert to act had arrived. Damn right. The time had
arrived.
At seven-twenty, freshly scrubbed and outfitted in
gray slacks, a white shirt, and checked sport coat, Hector
Ewert stepped back into the Paramount Café, now busy
with customers. He hovered just inside the door. Two
or three of the regulars greeted him as they passed by.
The room had become lively with the clink of cutlery, the
murmur of voices.
Norma emerged from the ladies’ room precisely
at seven-thirty. Her waitress garb abandoned, she was
dressed in a simple white blouse, straight brown skirt,
and flats. She carried a purse.
“Hi, Mr. Ewert. You forget something?” she said
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when she reached him at the door.
“Yes. Norma, I forgot something.” He looked at his
shoes, and then screwed up his courage. “I forgot to ask
you if … if you would like to … to go to the movie with me
tonight? The one at the Rialto.” Nervous apprehension
grabbed at him, and he trembled at the expected answer.
But he had made up his mind. He had to escape the
ordinary. At least to try.
Her lashes fluttered, like those of a southern belle
in an old movie. “Why, Mr. Ewert. I thought you’d never
ask.” She looped her arm through his, they went out the
door, and he hailed a cab. What could have been but never
was now might be. For Hector Ewert, it had turned out to
be an extraordinary day.
40
Straylight
Poetry
Kate Belew
Yarrow
The herb of Achilles, carried into battle to heal the
bleeding of his soldiers.
I will lick your bleeding
only to end it. Staunched
blood flow in the fawn
that the coyotes
found first. I will be your
herbal abortion. Let nature
take its course. Slick womb
with clasping leaves, rotted
roots. It is time to let go.
The tannins, and the yellow.
The Navajo throw me
to the wind at night.
Chew me for toothaches.
I will grow as your wild thing,
calling the devil on the hill.
The burial mound. I rise
toward the moon. Hitching a ride
on Achilles’ heel. Call me witch.
I’ll always come back to you.
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Mark Bilbrey
The Dog of Hearing
What did the deaf dog say
To the other deaf dog
I don’t know
how my wounds
compose my skin
no story but now
no story but
I fear the emptiest
now I
listen to my digestion please
if I’ve whispered once
a thousand psalms
dirt on the paw
heart on the air
no story we didn’t say
and we never said
where have you been all my life
in the hot snapping ends of every dendrite
your love is old and eats well
and you can have it
each alveolus full
42
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Poetry
Mark Bilbrey
The Dog of Conversing
Let’s talk about what carries
a tune in the well.
Contingent continent
please let me live in you
as I let song well up
and spill my face
deep into my neighbor’s that
damn dog’s damn
hollow
mostly air and slobber
errant love note.
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Jacob Donaldson
father, son, holy ghost
I was twelve when I stabbed
a man three times in the belly
with a skinning knife,
he plundered children’s purity. knelt
on the gravel I asked him
Where’s God now, walked
back inside. liberated a
shotgun hidden away like the nights
he visited, adopted plague. preacher,
double barreled, Adam’s apple
I pulled the trigger. pellets
flew out like quail, relieving
a neck burdened by vile
thoughts. the blood reminded
me of an orphic sunset
glistening on waters of Mississippi,
snake doctors flew by,
but offer devils no aid. I threw
him in the lake, gar shadows shot
under gloomed water, tincture
bleak with pestilence, named
each cut father, son, holy ghost.
44
Straylight
Art
Rachel Bullis
Portrait of Africa
Black & White Ink Bottle
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Jennifer Thompson
Gassed
Relief Print on Hand-Colored Paper
46
Straylight
Art
Jose Miguel Amante
Time for a Nap!
Traditional Watercolor
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Jessica Ange
Degeneration
Digital Media
48
Straylight
Art
Jennifer Thompson
Killer News
Intaglio Print
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Brittany Parshall
Cheedeera
Digital Art
50
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Art
Spencer Elizabeth Karczewski
Windy Chickens
Relief Print
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Samantha ("Mewtant") LaVassor
My Muse, My Love
Brass, Copper, Fabric, Glass & Found Metal
52
Straylight
Anna Frederiksen
Art
Cat Lilies
Relief Print & Fabric
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Robert Anderson
Encounter With Sheryl Crow
Linoleum Relief Print
54
Straylight
Art
Benjamin Friedrich
Japanese Skyfall
Felt Tip Pen
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Adrienne Mata
Wonderment
Digital Media
56
Straylight
Art
Dan Barber
Self Portrait
as a Warped Object
Tapestry
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Brittany Smith
Megaphone Crow
Digital Media
58
Straylight
Tyler Hahn
Art
V2 Rebranding
Digital Media
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Larry Graham
A Double Homicide
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Researchers
know more about it now than they used to, but it seems
the more they learn, the more they realize they need
to learn. Recently, for instance, it was discovered that a
parent — such as a soldier returning from war — who
exhibits symptoms of PTSD can transfer those symptoms
to his or her children. It’s a little like exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke. But why, the researchers wonder,
do some of those children develop “second-hand PTSD,”
and others do not?
2
One account of “second-hand PTSD” begins on
October 23, 1957, in the vicinity of Portland, Oregon.
In 1957, the term PTSD has yet to be invented. Doctors
still refer to it as “shell shock” or “battle fatigue” or “war
neurosis.” It’s still a condition to be ashamed of, a disorder
that an ex-soldier feels compelled to hide. Soldiers are not
supposed to complain, especially if they return from war
physically intact. There’s something suspicious about a
soldier or an ex-soldier who claims to be injured when
there’s no physical sign of injury. For this reason, most
ex-soldiers suffering from this condition do not seek
treatment.
Two such ex-soldiers, veterans of World War II,
play a part in this account. After the war, both men buy
small farms next to each other. Both have an eight-yearold daughter. The girls, Sissy Rollins and Amy Smith, are
best friends.
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Fiction
2
October 23, 1957. Because two fences and a wide
pasture separate the girls’ houses, Sissy’s father has just
finished stairs (he calls them stiles) over the fences.
Today, for the first time, Sissy climbs up and down the
first set of stairs, skips through the pasture past the dull
cows, climbs up and down the second set of stairs, and
jumps squealing from the last step into Amy’s arms. After
a little dance together, the girls pause to wave across the
pasture to Sissy’s father, who stands at the far stair. Sissy
has inherited her father’s course red hair, his freckles,
and his squared features. She blows him a kiss and jumps
up and down as she waves.
But he doesn’t return the wave. He only nods, lifts
his toolbox and walks back toward the house, extracting
a small bottle from his coat pocket and raising it to his
lips as he goes.
“It was nice of your dad to build the stairs,” says
Amy. She has her mother’s pale blue eyes and blond hair,
which is cut short like her mother’s. She resembles her
mother so closely that people in town often stop, take a
second look at them, and smile.
“He’s kinda crazy,” says Sissy.
“My dad’s crazier than yours,” says Amy. This
week, Sissy and Amy have been comparing families. It’s
been a friendly competition.
“I doubt it,” says Sissy, repeating a phrase that
drives their third grade teacher — and all the parents of
the third graders who use that phrase over and over — to
distraction.
“My dad gets mad,” says Sissy. “And hits things.
Hits them with his hammer.”
“That’s nothing. One time my dad hit my mom.”
“My mom talks to her typewriter. My brother talks
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to Sputnik,” says Sissy. The girls skip in unison toward
Amy’s house, where they will sit in the living room in front
of the big oil heater and play with their dolls until Amy’s
mother calls them to lunch. They will act out scenes that
illustrate aspects of their family’s “craziness,” then fall
back on the carpet in paroxysms of laughter. Sissy and
Amy can make a game out of anything.
But this is the last day they will be such good
friends. Tomorrow, Sissy and Amy will go their separate
ways.
Amy
62
Tomorrow, Amy will move in with her father who
has an apartment downtown. She will meet the girl in the
apartment across the hall, who has a record player and
a prodigious collection of vinyl records. The girl owns
every record Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, and Bill Haley have
made so far. She also has a wonderful library of movie
magazines. She and Amy will lie on the floor for hours
listening to the records and studying the magazines.
Amy will begin dressing and talking like her new friend.
She will become a different person, someone her father
understands less and less as time goes by. Eventually, he
will stop trying to understand her.
As she matures, Amy’s beauty will flower. She will
develop her mother’s high cheekbones and full, almostpouting lips. She will let her blond hair grow, and later,
ten years from now she will flick back her hair and smile,
and males will look into her startling blue eyes and forget
for a moment what they were talking about. In high
school only the brazen boys will approach her. She will
experiment with them briefly, but will find them shallow
despite — or because of­ — their bravado. She will turn to
older males, and begin dating college men. In college she
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Fiction
will encourage the attention of men with graying temples
and established careers.
She will seem to be one of those calm women who
are in control of things. She will move and speak and
dress with the confidence borne of beauty. But she carries
a vivid memory of that day in 1957, and it won’t leave her
alone. She can’t talk about it. The memory doesn’t fade as
she ages­ — it grows more real. By the time she reaches
forty, it causes her to withdraw completely from her
friends and family­ — from her husband, even — because
it crowds everything else from her mind. It causes her to
watch TV for hours on end, not caring what she watches,
seeking only distraction. It causes her to jump whenever a
door slams or a piece of silverware drops to the floor. She
begins sleeping in the living room, wrapped in a blanket
from her childhood. She curls into the fetal position and
covers her eyes with the palm of her hand.
Eventually, doctors will diagnose her condition
(incorrectly) and recommend admission to an institution
for treatment. Her husband will visit regularly, twice a
month, and sit with her in front of the TV as long as he
can bear it – usually less than an hour. After the visit he
returns home and sits at the kitchen table the rest of the
day, drinking himself into a stupor.
Sissy
Tomorrow, Sissy will move in with her maternal
grandmother, a widow of fifty-three. The grandmother
knows the healing power of music, so she teaches Sissy
to play the piano. Every night Sissy will bang on the old
piano while her grandmother sips whiskey and entertains
a handsome man with a heart condition and too much
hair. Sissy discovers she can play almost any song she
hears. While she plays, Grandma and the handsome man
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sing at the tops of their voices and applaud wildly. Sissy
can do without the singing (they sing off-key), but she
craves the applause.
When the handsome man is away, Grandma
drags Sissy to the coffee houses around Portland State
University. They sit in the back and sip hot chocolate
and listen to men and women in turtleneck sweaters
reading poetry. All the verses are morose and laden with
gratuitous obscenities. The air is thick with smoke and the
anticipation of doom. People gather around Grandma’s
table and bemoan the State of Things, and everyone talks
to Sissy as if she’s an adult.
Sissy loves it. In the care of her grandmother she
adjusts to things. She learns to look outward, beyond her
own life. She contracts a playfulness that compliments
her razor intellect, and this remains with her all her life.
It makes her irresistible to certain men who recognize
the sensual dimensions of her wit.
At age eighteen­ — in 1967 — she says goodbye
to her grandmother and drives to San Francisco with a
drummer. She sings and plays the piano in his band. The
band members get into psychedelics, claiming the drugs
clarify the music. She finds that the drugs only scramble
it for her, so she drops out of the band and enrolls at the
University of California at Berkeley.
She earns a PhD. in music and lands a seat on the
faculty at Berkeley. Her home in the hills above Oakland
becomes a perennial halfway house for homeless poets and
other indigent illusionists. She reads a novel a week, always
a murder mystery. One summer she tries writing her own
novel and is surprised when the first publisher who reads
it buys it. She writes prolifically after that, always a murder
mystery with a musical term in the title and a music person,
place, or thing in the resolution. She becomes something of
a cult figure among college music and literature professors.
64
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Fiction
Amy’s Mother
But today — October 23, 1957 — Sissy and Amy
are just two little girls playing before the big oil heater
while Amy’s mother works in the kitchen.
Amy’s mother smiles as she listens to the girls. At
times like these, she knows that the divorce was the right
thing to do. Even though the couples in the neighborhood
will no longer invite her to their parties, even though
her co-workers gossip behind her back about whom she
is dating (she is dating no one), even though her own
mother argues that the ex-husband didn’t mean to hurt
her — that he deserves another chance — Amy’s mother
knows she did the right thing.
She can live without walking on eggshells now. She
doesn’t have to listen for a certain tone in her husband’s
voice. She can live her own life, now.
She heats Campbell’s Soup, mixes tuna with
mayonnaise, and sets the table. She calls the girls as she
spreads the tuna on toast.
The girls tumble into the kitchen. They have
grown tired of their game. Sissy has another idea. “We
could hammer my mom’s typewriter like my dad did.”
Amy complains, “That doesn’t sound like fun.”
“I could show you how he looked when he did it.”
Sissy lolls her tongue out of her mouth and shakes her
head up and down. Her hair flops around her head. “I can
yell like him, too.”
Amy’s mother stops spreading tuna. She sits
down. “Your father hit your mother’s typewriter with a
hammer?”
“He was mad,” says Sissy. “Way mad. I thought
they were getting a divorce. But it’s okay now. It’s the way
they keep their eagle-ism.”
“Eagle-ism?”
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“Their balance. The way they keep their balance. The
day after he hit it, he bought her a new typewriter — and
flowers. Everything’s okay, now. He promised she can
write whenever she wants to.”
Amy’s mother touches a finger to the hairline scar
that runs through her own lip and halfway to her chin. The
scar doesn’t hurt anymore, but she winces every time she
touches it.
She finishes the tuna sandwiches and sets them in
front of the girls. The girls watch each other eat, and giggle
from time to time for no apparent reason.
When the girls finish eating, Amy’s mother picks
up the dishes and wipes the table. “When you go home,”
she says to Sissy, “I’ll walk over the stiles with you. Is that
okay? I want to talk to your mother — just for a minute.”
2
Sissy leads the way over the stiles. Amy’s mother
follows, and Amy comes over the stiles last. Amy complains
of the cold, but Sissy giggles as they climb each of the
stairs. They’re climbing Mount Everest, she informs them,
and she’s the leader.
She opens the door to the back porch. “My mom
will be in her study,” she says. Then, as she opens the door
to the kitchen, she calls out, “Mom?”
The study is next to the kitchen. It used to be the
pantry before the shelves were cleared and the typewriter
brought in.
“Mom?” Sissy stops at the door to the study. Her
mother lies face-down on the floor. The back of her head is
rumpled and scarlet.
Amy’s mother gasps. She pulls Sissy back from the
door. Then she hears a noise behind her. She turns in time
to see the hammer begin its short, blurred descent.
66
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Fiction
Carl Hoffman
Crockett in the Pacific
In the beginning, before I understood history or
knew what a history teacher was or felt more than an
inkling of my lifelong obsession and career, let alone the
veiled but ineluctable power of the wars that shaped my
country’s life and my own — before, in fact, I understood
anything, there was Victory at Sea. It was there on Saturday
afternoons, or was it Wednesday or Thursday nights, and
it swirled out of the TV with soaring music and flashing
films of ships and sailors and airplanes, maybe the most
exciting show I had ever seen, the show that taught me
what I have known ever since. My education, compulsion,
and life story were born together in front of the TV set, in
my father’s presence, perhaps at his behest, when I was
five years old and open-mouthed at the sight of racing
destroyers and rainbows of antiaircraft fire twinkling
toward the onrushing kamikazes.
One Saturday was a typical bright afternoon in the
San Fernando Valley when my father called from the den:
“Janet, Carl, it’s time.”
When he called, I was playing in my bedroom. I
yelled, “Just a minute, I’m coming,” because even though
Victory at Sea was my favorite TV show, just now I was
performing a task that required a lot of concentration,
setting up the last wall of a stamped-metal toy Alamo
on the carpet near my bed, so I could play Davy Crockett
with plastic soldiers. It was a job I hated to leave halfdone, even to watch Victory at Sea.
But he insisted on promptness. “They’re running
a commercial,” he said from the next room. “You have
sixty seconds.”
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“Here I come!” Working feverishly, I lowered the
last section of wall into position, so it was finished at last
and ready to withstand the siege that would commence
as soon as I was done watching television. I sprang up
and ran into the den, hearing my mother say something
from the far end of the house.
“Just in time,” my father told me. Wearing a t-shirt
and old pants today like he always did on Saturdays, he
was already seated in front of the TV, taking the first sip
from a glass of whiskey on ice. I threw myself onto the
couch behind him and stared at the television, just in time
to hear the first chords of stirring Victory at Sea music
that rolled out of the set — Boom, Boom, Boom, BOOMBOOM — music that even when I was five carried me to
another part of the world, the vast reaches of the Pacific
Ocean that my father had sailed across when he was a
soldier in World War II, and there on-screen were the
waves, rising and falling, rising and falling forever, while
the sun sparkled in a long silver path leading toward a
tiny island faraway on the horizon. A white V-for-Victory
appeared in the distance, superimposed on the ocean,
growing larger and larger as the music surged and a
voice-of-God narrator intoned, “And now, ‘The Pacific
Boils Over.’” Or maybe he said, “And now, ‘Midway is
East,’” or maybe, “And now, ‘Rings Around Rabaul,’” as my
mother entered the den, moving slowly because she was
fat with a baby in her stomach that would soon be born
as my brother Tom. She asked, “Have I missed much?”
“It’s just starting,” my father said, and sipped his
drink as my mother sat on the couch next to me, the two
of us behind him in his chair, the music changing abruptly
to an oriental tinkling as the screen flashed pictures of
Japanese women wearing kimonos and wooden platform
shoes on the streets of Tokyo before World War II began.
We saw autos and streetcars and long avenues that
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Fiction
resembled those in American cities, although different,
too, with foreign-looking buildings and strange cars, the
voice-of-God explaining the happy lives of the millions
of productive Japanese people working and going about
their daily business, and even at five I marveled at the
quaintness of the people and automobiles that looked
so different from the modern ones I saw in Van Nuys.
Besides, even then I knew that World War II was looming
in the near future for the people on-screen, and soon they
would have to deal with the terrible anger of the United
States. I even felt slightly smug, because I knew it, but they
didn’t. But the music altered again, becoming menacing
and off-key, the images changing to Japanese armament
plants making weapons, Japanese ships massed in an
anchorage, Japanese soldiers carrying rifles and machine
guns and flashing swords, swarming over parts of the
world where they didn’t belong, a map showing the dark
blob of Japan reaching out toward other countries with
an octopus’ tentacles, the music turning particularly
sinister as they plotted and practiced for the attack on
Pearl Harbor, planes swooping low over the water until
they dropped their torpedoes with a tremendous splash.
“They developed specially-modified torpedoes
for the attack,” my father explained. “Otherwise they
wouldn’t have worked in the shallow water.”
I glanced at him blankly, not understanding what
he said, then back at the set. Now the music changed again,
becoming relaxed and dreamy, and we saw Americans
living in Hawaii, where there was always time for one
last aloha, the sun shining on palm trees and warships
at anchor, bands playing and sailors tossing baseballs,
hula girls draping flowery leis around the necks of U.S.
naval officers. The music hushed, and out of the silence a
lone telegraph key played dit-dot-dit-dit-dot as it radioed
the Japanese carriers lurking off the coast: “Climb Mt.
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Niitake!” the attack signal. With low music growling in the
background, mustachioed airmen dressed in bulky flight
suits that made them look like bears trundled across the
windswept flight decks toward their planes, the admiral
standing quietly on the bridge and nodding his head,
giving the signal for the launch, and hundreds of planes
roared off for the long flight to Pearl Harbor, toward the
unsuspecting Americans who were just getting out of
their beds that Sunday morning.
My father said, “Here they come.”
Sitting on the couch with my legs tucked under
me, I leaned toward the TV set as I became more and
more excited. This was always my favorite part of Victory
at Sea, when the action started, when the documentary
footage — which in later years I perceived was usually
real but sometimes restaged using actors and extras,
and sometimes entirely artificial, with miniature ships
floating in a water tank and scale-model aircraft hung
from wires — became swift and slashing, a whirl of
rushing ships and swirling planes, sailors running and
guns going off, and although the battles varied each
week according to what part of the war was featured,
the conflict always featured heroic Americans pitted
against insidious enemies. As I watched, huge formations
of warplanes peeled off for the attack, and the gallant
Americans, taken at a disadvantage through the devious
machinations of the Japanese, piled out of their bunks and
up to their anti-aircraft guns, shooting back courageously
as the ships in Pearl Harbor flamed and exploded around
them. “Wow,” I said, “wow,” totally lost in the images
rolling in front of me, the camera moving swiftly from
angle to angle, the viewpoint of the men on the ground
and in the ships, the sights seen by the pilots in the air,
dive bombers plunging from the sky, grimly determined
machine gunners firing at them, flak and tracer flicking
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and shimmering toward the enemy planes, then the
bombs falling and an American battleship exploding, the
music roaring to heights and crescendos as the attack
proceeded.
“Just look at that,” my mother said, and got up
wearily, as if she was tired of lugging her stomach around.
“I have to check the washer.”
The planes flew away and the music changed
again, becoming hushed and low-key, even mournful,
because now the battle was over. Survivors floundered
in the water, swimming for lifelines or heaving themselves
over the gunwales of the lifeboats; a battleship rested on
the bottom, sunk at anchor, its main deck awash but its
superstructure gushing smoke, sailors swarming on the
upper decks. Onshore, grimy medics lugged stretchers
bearing dead men in white sheets, while the voice-of-God
intoned something like, “Warrior, rest. Thy task is done.”
Then somehow we were in Japan, seeing more women in
kimonos parading through the streets in a long double
line, each of them carrying a little wooden box.
My father sipped his drink. “Their sons are in
those boxes,” he told me.
I stared. The boxes were way too small to hold
anybody’s son, even if he was a baby. “How did they get
inside?”
“Their ashes are in there.”
Once again, I didn’t understand what he was
talking about, but it didn’t matter, because now we were
back at Pearl Harbor, which was returning to life. Out
of the sunken ships and smashed airplanes, the gutted
hangars and machine shops, the wreckage and rubble left
by the explosions, American determination was working
a miracle, as ships rose from the bottom, buildings were
repaired, new sailors and Marines replaced those killed
or wounded. The U.S. command was gazing westward
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across the Pacific, the admirals studying their charts and
calculating the way to Tokyo, getting set to order their
ships and soldiers and airmen off to win victory on land,
victory in the air, Victory at Sea, the forces of democracy
surging across the globe, onward toward the inevitable
triumph of freedom, the stirring music rising and rising,
because even though many Americans had died, the war
had just begun, and soon enough the Japanese would
never know what hit them. The ocean waves appeared
once more with the superimposed V-for-Victory, the music
surging just before the screen flashed a commercial.
“Pretty good,” said my father. “And I was there.”
“You were there when things were tough!” I
exclaimed, because that was what my father always said.
“You bet, buddy boy,” and he polished off his drink
and said, “I was riding my motorcycle.”
“An Indian!” I shouted, because I thought that was
a funny name for a motorcycle.
“First an Indian, then a Harley-Davidson,” he
explained for what must have been the twentieth time.
“We got replacements after about six months.” He laid his
glass aside. “Now I’ve got to run an errand — ”
Mother reappeared in the doorway: “Is it over?
Did I miss the end?”
“’Fraid so.” He started to rise. “I’m going to the
drugstore.”
“Could you spend some time with Carlie?” my
mother interrupted him.
He stopped and looked at her. “Honey, you know
how much I like that.”
“You’re gone most of the time. Soon the baby will
be here and we’ll both have less time — ”
“I really need to get some razorblades. There’s
some other errands too.”
“Jackie? Please? I’ve got to finish the wash.”
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Fiction
My father took a deep breath. He turned to me:
“Do you want to look at my picture book?”
“You bet, buddy boy!” I shouted.
“Thanks, Jackie,” my mother said, and disappeared
again.
My father said, “Back in a minute. I’ve got to fill up.”
I waited eagerly on the couch, almost breathless
because looking at his World War II photo album was
even better than watching Victory at Sea. It seemed like
an hour before he came back, carrying another glass
of whiskey and the album. He sat next to me and took
a drink before opening the book on his lap. “Here it is.
There I am.”
The first photo was a black-and-white portrait of
my father wearing his uniform. I had seen it before, but it
always amazed me. “There’s you, Daddy!”
“You bet.” In the picture he wore a thick dark
heavy dress jacket with pleats on the pockets, over an
equally dark shirt with a somewhat lighter tie. I could
recognize him easily because his observant eyes and
thick eyebrows were exactly the same in the photo as
they were now, although overall he looked a lot younger,
and combed his hair in a strange pompadour.
He explained, “That was taken at a picture studio
in Adelaide.”
“Where’s that?” I already knew the answer, but I
wanted to hear him say it.
“Australia. A big country across the ocean. I’ve
told you that before.” He sipped again from his whiskey
and turned the page, and this time it was him and five
other soldiers in front of a tent, all of them wearing pants
but no shirts, all of them squinting into the sun.
“Is that in Australia too?”
“That’s right. The airstrip at Darwin. Those are
my army buddies. We all slept together in that big tent.”
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“I can see one of the bunks.” It was visible just
inside the tent flap, lit by a slant of sunlight.
“That’s not a bunk, it’s a cot.”
“I can see that cot.” I corrected myself because I
wanted to use the right name.
“You bet.” He drank from the glass and turned the
page. “There’s an anthill.”
A jeep was parked in what looked like a stretch
of desert, the driver standing next to it. Next to him was
the anthill, at least seven feet tall, made out of dry mud
with ruts down its sides, like a miniature mountain, like
one of the strange formations I saw in TV shows about
the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. I exclaimed, “It’s
bigger than that jeep! It’s bigger than that man!”
“The ants were about that big.” He held up a thumb
and finger. “They climbed all over the place. Sometimes I
felt something tickling under my pants and found ants
crawling up my leg.”
“Wow. Did they bite?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes not. There were all kinds
of bugs in Australia,” he said.
I started to chant, like he did sometimes: “Leaping
bugs, hopping bugs, skipping bugs, dancing bugs, green
bugs, yellow bugs — ”
Slowly, he joined in: “Red bugs, orange bugs — “ — flying bugs, walking bugs — ” Daddy sipped
from his glass.
We continued flipping through the album. All the
photos were black and white, and I realize now that the
bulk of them came from his days in Australia, especially
his thirteen months at the huge Air Force base in Darwin,
where he served in 1944 and 1945. Some of the shots
were tiny, no bigger than postage stamps, taken with
what he described as a G.I. camera, and I was thrilled by
the sepia-toned snaps of fighters and bombers taxiing
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Fiction
down the landing strips in billowing clouds of dust,
the beer-barrel shaped P-47s and the semi-truck-like
B-24s, the other men in his company with their strange
hairstyles, my father on his motorcycle in his corporal’s
uniform with jodhpur riding pants. The album was
organized chronologically, and eventually we made it to
his six months in the Philippines, the photos becoming
stranger now because they included buildings that were
just as foreign-looking as the ones in Victory at Sea,
although also different from the ones in Japan, with less
pointy roofs but lots of thick white walls and palm trees
along the streets, my father explaining the pictures were
of Manila, the capital of the islands. One that especially
struck me showed a solid-looking white stucco church
whose five-story steeple had been knocked askew, so it
didn’t point straight up like every other church I had ever
seen. It pointed off at an angle.
“That looks funny,” I said.
“It sure does,” my father said.
“It looks like a clown’s hat.”
“I suppose so.”
“How did it get that way?”
“Probably artillery fire. The army was still fighting
the Japs when I got to Manila.”
“What’s artillery?”
“You know. Cannons.”
I nodded. Plastic cannons had come with my
Alamo set. Toward the back of the album was the
strangest photo of all, of a brown-skinned little boy,
maybe even younger than me. He stood next to the door
of a grass hut, wearing nothing but a white undershirt. I
could clearly see his penis, and looking at him made me
feel strange and hilarious because Mother always told
me to cover myself up before going out in public, and I
had never seen a photograph of anyone who was bare. I
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laughed and shrieked, “Where’s his pants?”
“He doesn’t have any,” my father said, and his tone
of voice told me this wasn’t funny. “His family is too poor
to buy them.”
I realized I had to be serious. “Oh.”
“There were a lot of poor people in the Philippines.
Poorer than anyone who lives in the United States. They
don’t have nearly as much as we do.”
“Oh.” I felt a little embarrassed for laughing.
Clearly, this wasn’t funny at all.
“I saw them.”
For a moment I didn’t say anything. Then I asked,
“Is that his house?”
“Yeah. It was made of grass, like it would blow
over in the first rainstorm. They didn’t have any lawn in
front. After I took this picture he started playing in the
dirt because he didn’t have any place else to go.”
His voice still sounded strange. He set his drink on
a coaster and shut the photo album. “Carlie, I need to get
razorblades. Do you want to ride with me?”
“Uh-uh, no thanks, Daddy, so long.” And I ran away
because I wanted to play Davy Crockett. He went out to
the car and I ran into my room, forgetting the little boy
with no pants. It had been fun to watch Victory at Sea
and look at the album with him, but now it was time for
my soldiers. I liked Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett maybe
even more than I liked World War II, and last Christmas
Santa had brought me a toy set consisting of stampedmetal walls painted to look like adobe, and the miniature
replica of San Antonio’s Alamo church, complete with the
trademark hump on top of the building, plus ninety or a
hundred plastic figures representing the Mexican army
and the coonskinned defenders. Kneeling, I laid my cheek
on the carpet and inspected the stronghold’s walls from
floor level, seeing what the Mexican storming party would
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Fiction
see as they marched against the fortress. Now, it was time
to set up the defenders. About fifteen plastic frontiersmen
garrisoned the Alamo, brown and red and tan and green,
wearing buckskin and aiming muskets, and the stampedmetal walls of the fortress featured platforms that allowed
me to place them in firing positions from which they
could rake the oncoming Mexican horde, while from the
barricade at the gate their single cannon could massacre
any attackers who got close. Davy Crockett himself stood
atop the church behind the hump, a beige figure with
his feet planted and his rifle, Betsy, in his hands, a pose
based on an advertising photo of the actor who portrayed
him; I deliberately placed him in a spot where everyone
could see him, and the Texans would be able to hear his
shouted orders. Then I turned to the attackers, the blue
plastic Mexican soldiers with tall tubular hats who had
four cannons in a battery placed where it could hit the
church, and who far outnumbered Davy and his men. I
set up the Mexicans in three long ranks, a formation that
overlapped the walls and would allow them to move like
doomsday into the teeth of the Americans’ fire. I took a
moment to admire the setup, then gave the order under
my breath: “To the attack! Move out!”
Making crashes and explosion sounds with my
mouth, I re-fought the battle as I had worked it out a halfdozen other times, the Mexicans advancing in their long
lines like blue robots who were mowed down by the fire
of the Texans, but there were never enough defenders
to stop them completely, so the Americans were driven
back step-by-step from the walls, the Mexicans hoisting
up their plastic storming ladders, the Americans falling
one-by-one just as they had on the Disney TV show. As
the battle continued, I was convinced I was re-enacting
history as it had actually occurred long before I was born,
the soldiers on the walls and Davy atop the church, loading
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and aiming and firing, loading and aiming and firing, and
I knew they were fighting for Texas independence in a
battle to the death, just as the real Davy and his men
had long ago. The hosts of Mexicans hurled themselves
across the walls, ruthlessly bayoneting every American
who got in their way, then threw themselves against the
final bastion of intrepid Americans by the church. Now
Davy was left by himself on the church roof, facing the
assault alone with his musket, Betsy. Soon Davy, too,
would be dead, just like all his men, and I didn’t want that
to happen, but there was no way to avoid it, because I
was re-enacting history.
I studied the situation as Davy reloaded Betsy for
the last time. Down below, the Mexicans were preparing
for the final assault, some of the blue soldiers hauling
the storming ladders into the courtyard, and Davy
considered shooting at them, then realized he had only a
handful of bullets left, and he had to save them. So there
was nothing he could do but watch through his slitted
eyes in his grimy face. Maybe now that he faced death
he recalled his long life as a scout and hunter and soldier
and Congressman, all of which I had seen in the Disney
television series. Maybe he remembered how he and his
Tennessee Rangers rode to Texas to aid in the fight for
freedom, because he was an American, and Americans
believed in freedom. Maybe he even said it out loud:
“Freedom.”
“Freedom,” I muttered.
Then a Mexican officer shouted in Spanish,
and Davy had to stop thinking, because the Mexicans
were bellowing and screaming in a language I couldn’t
understand, raising their plastic ladders against the
church wall, Davy standing to meet them, his shot from
Betsy bringing down the first Mexican soldier. Then he
swung Betsy like a club because there was no time to
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reload, the blue soldiers swarming around him just as
they had on Walt Disney Presents, and moments later,
fighting heroically, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild
Frontier, died on the roof of the Alamo.
I paused again to study the mounds of plastic
carcasses that lay heaped around the Alamo, and they
gave me a strange feeling, one that made me breathe a
little deeper and slower, even feel a trifle light-headed,
as though I was in the presence of something important.
I knew Davy and the others had sacrificed themselves
fighting. But somehow I also understood they had helped
something bigger and more important than themselves
to be born, the Republic of Texas. And even though the
defenders were gone, Texas would live on because of
what they had done. I could just barely comprehend it,
and it sent a ripple through the hair on my arms. General
Santa Anna and his Mexican army might think they had
won the battle, but I knew that really, it was just the
beginning. The Mexicans couldn’t really win, because
they were fighting Americans, and Americans never
lose. “Americans never lose,” I whispered. As a Mexican
detail lowered Davy’s body from the Alamo’s roof and I
surveyed the masses of plastic bodies, I said it again.
That was how I became a history teacher.
But there’s also Daddy’s life, and mine, which
continued as they had that afternoon like railroad tracks
aimed at the horizon, paired but parallel, pointed in the
same direction but seldom or never touching, him and
me united but separate. Showing me Victory at Sea was a
great gift, one of the most important ways he ever shaped
my existence, but he never knew it, because I never told
him, and in the years since his death, I have often wished
that was different. It helps a little when, in the early
2000s, on the spring mornings when my U.S. History or
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American Studies classes are studying World War II and
I show an episode of Victory at Sea to give them a hint of
what the United States felt about its role in that conflict,
I imagine him sitting off to the side in the classroom. He
is dressed in his t-shirt and worn-out pants, just what
he wore as we watched the exact same episode in 1950s
Van Nuys. This time there is no whiskey glass for him to
sip. I can see him glancing back and forth between the TV
screen and me with a look of dawning comprehension on
his face, his sharp sober observant eyes under his thick
eyebrows as he discovers something about the life we
once lived together and, just for a moment, wiser than
before, we’re father and son together, together in the
same room as we were when I was five.
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Straylight
Poetry
Amanda Thayer
Correspondence
I tell you my fears,
secrets shared,
and so you return them in echoes
spinning into a golden thread of trust.
Whispering back at me a woven thing of beauty;
corners that cover my edges and hem me in
blanketing all of me.
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Amanda Thayer
Lament
You swallowed everything.
I stood in the roar
but a whisper,
and drowned.
Your hands enclosed me;
noose upon the soft of my neck
you stole my breath away,
and my time.
Crushed the flower upon my cheek;
pink bud to garish red.
Laid me to waste;
a foreigner pillaging my vineyards.
In you all was consumed.
The belligerent years of match to chaff;
the spark of violence and lust,
and all ignited.
In you all was lost.
82
In you I was destroyed.
The great oaks of my walls
lowered to the enemy.
It was the hour of the dirge;
my lips raised a welcome song.
I crafted you a disguise
and fell for my Trojan horse.
I penned in pretty fiction;
an ink blot tongue twisting you
into a false image.
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Poetry
I laid me down
at the altar,
a sacrificial lamb.
Priestess of this high place.
Sweet communion wine
blood red on the lips and bitter insides.
I broke the bread,
My body broken for you.
Crushed in your hands
Of capable rages.
Your endless appetite
you left me no crumbs.
In you all was squandered.
You stole all of me.
You emptied my holding;
pirated the hull of my ship.
A great wealth
all lost to you,
all taken.
The unfair scales;
I did not count the cost.
I saw for you redemption;
You offered me destruction.
I saw for you restoration;
you offered me the blindfold
The fire stolen from my balded eye.
Scalped my glory;
my shorn head a trophy.
Shame to shame;
and one by one I made your trades
till my hand lay empty.
All aces lost
and with them my kings.
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This for that.
And I was found wanting;
emptied out upon the shore,
the remains pillaged
my entrails scavenged.
You shipwrecked all of me.
The unguarded well;
a spring of death.
We broke into our own wineries
and I lay beneath the feet of your press.
You bled me dry.
And in still days
the aroma rises;
the mingled notes of hope and despair.
We never mixed well.
You still steal;
I lose the waking hours
where you come like night terrors
from the empty left side of me.
I forget you cannot hurt me here.
You come like a shadow still
stretching your fingers long and black,
eerie and elongated,
creeping across the lawn into my day.
I have given you a good long stretch of my past
and yet you are hungry still.
I forgive you
but I do forget, I lost all of me.
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Poetry
Lindsay Knapp
Haunting
You walked away and never looked back,
I screamed silently and thought my absence would
make you miss me
But I was already two miles too late
And you were living on a different plane.
When we spoke in pockets of time
Between bolts and rugged state lines.
You used language I’d never heardLike an unwanted bearded kiss
Bristly and crass.
But I dug so tight and tried to fight
For you to remember those golden times.
You cursed those days and the shame of your ways.
To me, you were only sixteen,
A slice of a dream that was still unseen.
Don’t fold me into that pile of your life;
The dirty laundry and all you despise.
I was a bright light.
And I was a whisper of love.
Now you’re sitting pretty.
Do you ever miss me?
I knew you when you didn’t know yourself.
And I couldn’t hold you … here
But I can’t touch you there.
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Karen Barsamian
Arms Like Wires
When I hug you I like to think about how you’re
electrical,
how we’re machines,
with small turbines,
and how we break.
I think eons ahead, where our bodies are not.
Well used.
Forgotten.
I like to think about how we’re electrical,
how we will break.
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Straylight
Fall 2012
CONTRIBUTORS
Jose Miguel Amante is a nineteen-year-old Filipino
college student. He is a self-taught artist and likes to
paint and watch wildlife films and animated movies.
Robert Anderson is from Racine, Wisconsin. He is a
special student at the University of Wisconsin — Parkside
working in relief and intaglio printmaking.
Jessica Ange is a super senior getting her bachelor's
degree in digital art with concentrations in graphic design
and web design. She does freelance design work and is
one half of the art studio PinStripes Studios. Sometimes
she pretends she is a cashier at a certain well-known
grocery store, but other times she is just an artist.
Dan Barber's artistic goal is to address the viewer as
intensely as possible. He is currently working in film and
would like to be a performer in digital video.
Karen Barsamian is an aspiring librarian who enjoys
Victorian literature, poetry, and time travel. Writing is
a life-long passion that drives her academic career. She
has been lucky enough to work with local author Kathie
Giorgio and has been published in the Windy Hill Review.
Kate Belew is a student at Kalamazoo College. This
past summer, she spent time writing under the Nature in
Words fellowship at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute.
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Mark Bilbrey's poems and essays have appeared in
Action Yes, LIT, Versal, 42opus, VERSE, and The Villa. He
lives with his wife and two mutts in Claremont, California.
Rachel Bullis is a senior and an art major at the
University of Wisconsin­—­ Parkside. She enjoys
drawing, printmaking, and photography and truly loves
experimenting with different colors and media.
Shane R. Collins writes in the Green Mountains of
Vermont. While not writing, he enjoys many outdoor
activites such as hiking, camping, fishing — and yes, biking.
He is the editor and founder of The Speculative Edge digest.
He is currently an MFA candidate at Stonecoast.
Jacob Donaldson is a twenty-six-year-old former
infantryman in the United States Army. He lives with his
four-year-old son and wife in Sardis, Mississippi. He is
currently a student at the University of Mississippi.
Lawrence Farrar As a career diplomat, Lawrence
Farrar served in Japan (multiple tours), Norway, Germany,
and Washington, DC. Short-term assignments took him
to nearly forty countries. A Minnesota resident, he has
degrees from Dartmouth and Stanford. In addition to an
earlier appearance in Straylight, his stories have been
published in such magazines as: The MacGuffin (twice),
Red Cedar Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Evening Street
Review, G.W. Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Colere,
Worcester Review, 34th Parallel, Blue Lake Review, and
New Plains Review. He also provided credited assistance
to the author of a Hiroshima memoir published in New
Madrid.
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Straylight
Anna Frederiksen enjoys looking beyond reality to
create her own world. In her art, she uses 3D objects,
patterns, and texture. Her inspiration comes from the
beauty of nature and pop art.
Benjamin Friedrich is an artist that loves to use ink
and marker in all of his work and tends to find inspiration
in cityscapes, nature, and old cartoons.
Larry Graham lives in Sacramento, California. His
stories have appeared in The Sacramento News and Review
and in Susurrus, the literary journal for Sacramento City
College. One of his stories will appear later this year in
Listening Eye. He has written news stories for the Santa
Paula Chronicle (Santa Paula, California).
Tyler Hahn is a graphic designer and printmaker living
in Kenosha, Wisconsin who specializes in silkscreened
gig posters and illustration. His clients in the past ranged
from national music acts such as of Montreal, Dr. Dog,
and Father John Misty to commercial package design for
small Milwaukee businesses.
Carl Hoffman “Crockett in the Pacific” is an early
chapter from Carl Hoffman’s memoir Take His
Children Home, which deals with his coming of
age as an American during the post-World War II/
Vietnam years. Another excerpt, “Guadalcanal,” was
published in an earlier edition of Straylight. Currently,
Carl teaches U.S. History and American Studies at
Hathaway Brown School in suburban Cleveland, Ohio.
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Contributors
Spencer Elizabeth Karczewski is a senior at the
University of Wisconsin — Parkside, graduating with
a bachelor’s degree in digital art. Spencer currently
works as a student designer and digital photographer
for Parkside and is a member of the Racine Arts Council.
Along with her love of design and photography, she also
has a passion for relief and screen-printing and enjoys
combining them both into her design work.
Lindsay Knapp is thirty-two-years-old and lives in
Racine, Wisconsin. She’s a snarky idealist. It’s backwards
and upside down. She holds hope by a rope of cynicism
or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, she loves
mangoes in the winter.
Nick Knebel is a junior at the University of
Wisconsin — Parkside studying English and writing. He
has studied poetry extensively under Mark Bilbrey and
likes to swim and play the piano in his free time.
Samantha ("Mewtant") LaVassor works in multiple
mediums, lately with a focus on art metals. Her inspiration
comes from those close to her and she creates as a
declaration of love.
Adrienne Mata is working towards a bachelor of fine
arts degree at DigiPen Institute of Technology, located in
Redmond, Washington. She loves video games and hopes
to someday work for Riot Games.
Steven Niemi graduated from the University of
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Wisconsin — Parkside in December 2012 as an English
major with a writing concentration. This is his first
published work.
Straylight
Contributors
Brittany Parshall ("BParsh") is a Chicago-based artist,
illustrator, and designer. She focuses on digital graphics
and fine art, creating many wild and whimsical pieces.
Some of her goals are to design one hundred album
covers, publish her childhood stories with updated
illustrations, and inspire a positive, creative message in
the mind of everyone she meets!
Monica Scholle is an English major at the University
of Wisconsin — Parkside. Dr. Mark Bilbrey introduced
contemporary poetry to Monica in 2011; she has been
writing ever since.
Brittany Smith is a senior at University of Wisconsin — Parkside. She studies illustration that varies from
traditional to digital. Brittany is currently working on
two graphic novels. She enjoys crows and other birds as
subjects in her pieces, being jealous of their ability to fly
at any moment. To see more of her art, please check out
pinstripes-studios.com.
Amanda Thayer is a graduate of Columbia College
Chicago. She has been published in the Racine Mirror and
is an award winning artist. Her custom design work is
currently worn by the Grammy nominated band Skillet.
Jennifer Thompson is a current art student at the
University of Wisconsin — Parkside in Kenosha. She will
be graduating in the spring of 2013 with a printmaking
concentration and a background in illustration and
animation. Her work contains emotional symbolism
pertaining to the negative side of human nature. Most
of her pieces tend to be clean and straightforward
with heavy contour lines and a cartoon aspect.
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Elisha Wagman is an MFA candidate at The New School
and possesses a graduate diploma in fiction from the
Humber School for Writers. She is currently working on
a novel and a collection of short stories. Her stories have
appeared or are forthcoming in Fiction Fix, Sheepshead
Review, and Bartleby Snopes. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
William Walsh has published five books: Speak So I
Shall Know Thee: Interviews with Southern Writers, The
Ordinary Life of a Sculptor, The Conscience of My Other
Being, Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary American
Poets from 1951-1977, and most recently David Bottoms:
Critical Essays and Interviews (McFarland). His work has
appeared in the AWP Chronicle, Five Points, The Flannery
O’Connor Review, The James Dickey Review, The Kenyon
Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The North
American Review, Poets & Writers, Rattle, Shenandoah,
Slant, The Valparaiso Review, and elsewhere. He is also a
world-renowned photographer.
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