table of contents - Missouri Western State University

Transcription

TABLE OF CONTENTS
POETRY
PROSE
Mary Stone
Erin Kempf
Summer 1987
Wake
Months After Leaving
Untitled
2
The Seductress and One-Night Stands
4
Predispositions: A Bitch in Training
16
Caterpillar
25
Captain Big Bitch
33
The Proud Malcausky
34
Mongrels -or- Life During Wartime
42
Effigy
52
By the Book
61
Kevlar
64
Cinema Psychosis
70
Unfinished Story
82
5 Levi Smock
John Gilgun
In the Chair
14 Kynslie Otte
Meg Thompson
Her Five-Foot Hammer
Even Terrorists Get the Blues
Ocean is the Dry Sand’s Gravy
21 Jesse Frazier
22
24 Ryan Bradley
Erin Kempf
It’s Been Fun, Sort of
29 Logan Garrels
Logan Garrels
Relocating
From a Math 110 Notebook
8
3 Jessica Wilkinson
30 Susan Zion
31
Hans Bremer
Brett Kiser
Namaste
5th Avenue
38
39 Laura Baum
Roxanne Chase
Biology
67 Ashley Rainsbarger
Jesse Frazier
There’s a Place Called Peace of Mine
76
Jourdan Huffman
The Ghost with a Heavy Heart
Deaf and Blind: The Human Condition
Brooke Kuykendall
What I knew of Nondis Barrett
Richard Lewin
76
Nathan Larsen
Photography
78 Melissa Cox
Pollinating
80 Joshua Comninellis
Brittany
Color Coded
81
Life Expectancy
BC
ART
Sam Perkins
6
Duomo Duo
40
La Sacra Bibbia
41
Saw Horse
60
7
Brandon Paxton
15
Zach Sauls
Double Negative
Leann Pridgen
Ink Drawing
13
Ink Drawing
32 Jacob Lutes
Ink Drawing
51
Christopher Marley
Walking Leaf Cycle
63
Photography
69
Photography
20
Photography
75
BC John Gilgun
Tea Bowls
FC
Canvas 1
SUMMER, 1987
I’d been playing under the sprinkler
in my peach party dress
when he found me.
He clutched a plastic bat,
tied the green hose in two knots
and dropped it to the lawn.
He walked back to the house,
his untied boots branding
knife blade shapes
in the wet dirt.
I drip-dried on the sidewalk
in the morning sun
let my face touch the air for a while
as my body unclenched itself
from step-father’s hiss.
When the last dribble of cool water
dropped between my toes
I lifted a bruise-purple leg to my chest
and picked wet blades of grass
that clumped to my bare ankles
like wet stitches
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MARY STONE
WAKE
MARY STONE
for Mother
Grandfather lifted me into his arms,
gripped my thighs as we moved past
a cloud of black dresses, toward the casket.
The wall to my left held oddly still.
Grandfather’s face pushed into the base
of my neck, his nose twisted in the curls of my hair.
He leaned me into the casket
to nudge her good-bye. It was unnatural,
these scabs of rouge brushed on her lips and cheeks,
the way the gray shone through petal skin.
They had folded her hands,
placed a rosary between them
like a destiny, emerald beads
glinting off silver seams of the casket.
A rub of light pillowed her body.
The silk and ash and light collected
where my lips grazed her cheek,
an open palmed slap,
tearing the sun away
for days.
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MONTHS AFTER LEAVING
The second time you opened
the closet door and pissed,
I threw a washing machine at you.
Pushed you into the laundry basket,
slapped your sunburned chest
and left white handprints that bloomed
over your breast.
The outlines pulsed like light,
crawled back to the center,
disappearing my palms, each finger.
Your face squatted in these hands,
pushed into them, each feature
a sliver of window broken,
tacked into my palm.
My hands would sting
for months after leaving
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MARY STONE
UNTITLED
MARY STONE
I would like to see you open your back to me,
lifting your arms above your head,
your spine warped as an old book,
backbones bristled pages that flutter
and crack as you bend –
so I can push my finger
into the meat between each bone,
unhinge the crusted pages –
read each bruised word.
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NATHAN LARSEN
Canvas 6
POLLINATING
MELISSA COX
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THE SEDUCTRESS AND ONE-NIGHT STANDS
“What’s the matter, baby?” she asked. Her voice twinkled with mischief. A wide smile spread
across those pouty lips. “Is something wrong?” She let a giggle slip. I couldn’t think, needed to sit
down, wiped sweat from my brow. She raised an eyebrow and pouted her perfect red lips.
“No. I don’t believe it…how--”
“—Easy, she left you. You were lonely, you were falling to pieces, your life was a constant
repetition, you wanted to get out of the norm. Your nice slacks, your ties, your buttoned down shirts,
your polished shoes and shiny car needed me; you needed me,” she cooed. She walked around examining me with her eyes. “So here I am.” She held out her arms like a model in a game show displaying
a prize and danced around.
“No...” I shook my head. “You’re insane. I needed a change, something new, but not this. You
don’t even know what you’re saying. You’re just a fucking loony.”
She walked into the bar and I couldn’t help but stare. She had long, black straight hair that
flowed past her shoulders, long legs, nice...dress. Very nice red dress. She had a symbol tattooed on
the front of her left shoulder. I wasn’t sure what it was or what it meant, but I’m sure that it was sexy.
And I knew from one look that she was trouble but in a very good way. She was the kind of girl that
would tear you apart. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that sort of thing just yet, but I was more than
ready to find out. I didn’t think that I had the chance until she sat down next to me at the bar. With
every toss of her hair and roll of her eyes as she scanned the men around the pool table, I realized
that I wanted her.
“I know you want me,” she coos. Her dress shimmers under the bar light. “I can see it in your
eyes and I can’t guarantee that I’m good for you, but I can promise that your world will be turned
upside down.” The smoke of the cigarettes creates a fog around her. And those lights reflecting off of
this smoke illuminates her soft, light skin.
“That’s all I could ask for. A little bit of world rearranging wouldn’t do any harm on my end.”
“Let me rephrase that. I will rearrange your world, but I don’t do one night stands. I’m not
going to sleep with you and disappear if that’s what you’re looking for. That’s not how I work.”
“Well, we could always just meet here tomorrow night. That would make it a two-night
stand, technically. Then after that, maybe we could have a third. After all, that’s what dating is, right?
A series of one night stands. A stand doesn’t have to mean sex; it can mean dinner or a movie with
some heavy making-out afterwards, right? Eventually it leads to sex though. And you continue this
series of one night stands until you or the other decide that you’re tired of sleeping together or that
you want to sleep together forever.” There I go, trying to be witty. Stumbling all over the place like the
drunks I see at the bar every weekend. I really hate my life. She smirks? I didn’t kill it? Wow. She’s
stunning.
“Are you asking me to date you? That’s what it sounds like to me.”
“No, definitely not. I mean, not...I didn’t….yes. Yes, I guess I am according to that logic.”
“What a charming notion. I really like that. All but the sleeping together forever part. Who
wants to be roped into that lifestyle? Where’s the appeal in settling into that perfect life on the perfect street in a perfect house? It’s so…”
“Perfect?”
“No, boring.”
Drink your beer, Adam. Don’t fuck this one up. “What’s your name, mystery girl?” I am a
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ERIN KEMPF
fucking idiot. I wish I was a smooth talking man. ‘Mystery girl’? I hate my awkward self.
“That all depends on the occasion. To strangers who I’d like to keep as strangers I’m Jenny,
but if I like you, I’m Andrea.”
“So, which do I call you?”
“You can buy me another drink. And can call me Andrea. What can I call you?”
“Adam. The name’s Adam. Bartender, two beers, please.”
“I think you’ve had enough, buddy. You’ve been here four hours now,” came his reply.
I stepped out into the brisk winter air and shivered. My foot caught an ice spot and slid from
beneath me, but I grabbed onto the pipe railing just in time and regained balance. I looked around
to make sure no one had seen my fancy footwork, cleared my throat, thrust my ungloved, cold hands
into my pockets, and continued down the steps from my apartment to the lot around back.
I stared at the cracked and frosted sidewalk that wrapped around the building as I glided
over it. The bricks that made up the apartment complex were also cracked and falling to pieces. It
was a wonder the building didn’t cave in every time the door was slammed as the harassed inhabitants hurried in from the bitter air. The whole town within a ten mile radius of where I lived was falling to pieces like the bricks that held my apartment complex together. The roads weren’t the greatest
either and were in desperate need of work but when you live in an area like mine, you work with
what you have I guess.
I didn’t always live in this place. Where I came from is a bigger dump than this ever could
be. The lawns were green, neatly mowed, new spacious apartment complex, human-made china
sets, hand-made rugs and curtains, a television much larger than a person could ever possibly need.
There were fine restaurants, fine wine, fine friends. And there was Jade. She moved in with me, and
we were inseparable until she dumped me. I didn’t know why at the time. We had everything anyone
could possibly want and need. But then I found out that he had a beach house in Maui. I told her I’d
save and buy her one too. He was tough, could pack a punch and started fights; he had a way of getting things. I hadn’t been in a fight since grade school. And I lost. To a girl. He was known and feared
on and off the street while I was feared in the marketing business. I didn’t take the time to learn his
name, nor did I take the time to meet him. I didn’t try to stop her either. I thought she’d come back. I
had been engaged to Jade for a year after dating her for three and I forgot what it was to want someone other than her. I spent every night for six months crying. Then after that I just became numb,
stopped living, and became a shell of who I was. She didn’t want me. I had a hard time dealing with
that. And my apartment went to hell in those six months before I moved out. I left everything. I
didn’t want it. I hated what I had; when I woke up the next morning, it didn’t make me happy. It was
pointless. Where I lived, it was nothing but an apartment full of waste, a home without comfort.
I rounded the corner, fumbled for my keys and found myself rushing to get into my car for
shelter against the bitter wind. I was going to meet Andrea. This was yet another one of our one night
stands. I forgot how many one night stands this made. Was it twelve? I don’t know; I stopped counting after six. These “one night stands” we were having weren’t quite what I imagined they would have
been. We would usually do things that would be disruptive and potentially harmful. It was always her
idea. Many times I tried to disagree, but it didn’t work. I never knew what to say to anyone in order to
stand up for myself.
“Adam, just throw the fucking rock through the window. See, this is why Jade left you. You’re
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too big of a pansy. Don’t argue. You know I’m right and you’ll lose. Toss the fucking rock.”
“I can’t. This is illegal and I don’t have money to pay for the damage. I don’t have a record. I
can’t get a record. I’m not a pansy either. I don’t see the point in this. This is dumb.”
“This is a test of how well you can live out of the ‘boring’ life you were in. This is a test of
how manly you are, how able you are at doing shit that proves that you’re not a conformist fuck like
the rest of the world. This is a test of how willing you are for your world to be rearranged. Throw the
fucking rock!” She shouted in my ear. I watched as the glass splintered and melted. I dodged a few
pieces and missed the majority of them. A few splinters dung into my arms I held up to protect my
eyes. Andrea seemed to have been missed completely by the glass. It floated past her, nearly touching
her, like she was invisible, unable to be touched.
“How-” I started to ask but was cut off by her insistent, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
The alarm was flooding my ears and we skipped away, her high giggle singing along with the
alarm, her heels clicking on the pavement. We skipped back to my house, not stopping once, and
then we had our first one night stand. She had asked me about the leather rope I wore around my
wrist when we were lying next to each other. I told her I never took it off; it was there to remind me
of where I had been in life, and where I was to end up, but mainly just a reminder of my past. Jade
and I had matching ones we wore. It was a stupid concept, like friendship bracelets or whatever, but
it was the last thing that I had of Jade, our stupid ideas.
I was meeting her at the bar where we first crossed paths. She didn’t tell me what the plans
were for the night, but I was game for anything. She’d worn me in and I knew to just wait and see
what would happen. I kept checking my cell as if I half expected her to call, but she never did. She
called me on my home phone but never my cell. And she’d call me at the oddest hours wishing to
go out on a one night stand. Whether it was three in the morning or 7:35 in the evening, it would be
random and I would always go. I was so attracted to her and I think it’s because she was everything I
wasn’t. She was wild and daring. I was safe and quiet. She was confident and sexy. I was shy and the
only thing sexy about me was my bank account. Opposites attract because they are the other half of
another. She was the half that I wasn’t, so it just made sense.
When I walked into the bar and saw she was wearing loose fitting blue jeans and a red shirt.
I was a little startled. She always wore heels and dresses or skirts. She loved showing off her legs as
well as her other assets. We stood in front of one another staring at each other. I guess it wasn’t too
out of the ordinary for two people to wear jeans and a red shirt coincidently. Maybe it just so happened that we were getting close enough that we were thinking similarly now. She wasn’t wearing any
make-up, none of that eyeliner she loved, that was out of the ordinary. She looked, tired, vulnerable,
and exposed.
“Come here, follow me.”
“Wait, should we get drinks or something?”
“Sure, if you want.”
I approached the bar. Before I could ask, the bartended cut me off. “You’ve been racking up
quite a tab. I’m going to have to say no until you pay.”
“Okay.” This was so embarrassing. Can he even do this? I reached into my pocket for my wallet but it was missing. I just had it. It couldn’t have gone far.
“Here,” Andrea said, handing me my wallet.
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ERIN KEMPF
“How did-“
“-you just set it down on the stool seconds ago.”
She led me up the stairs to the upper level of the bar, through the main room to one in the
back. There was a side door that we went through. It looked like a storage area. There were empty
beer bottles lying around and there was a collection of dust sitting on the windowsill. I walked over
to examine the dust that had been collecting. I didn’t feel her at my side any more. I looked to see
she was standing by the door still. I walked back by her and looked in a glass cabinet beside us. She
stepped closer to me. In the glass I saw my reflection and nothing else; the contents of the cabinet
were the wallpaper to the reflection of my face. She moved away and I saw no change in the glass
reflection.
“Can we be here?” I asked. My voice echoed in the large dark room.
“Shut up.” She laughed closing the door. Her eyes darted around the room, like there was
someone waiting in the shadows, waiting for a signal to attack. She walked further into the room. I
followed. A bracelet she was wearing was caught onto a table and fell off her arm. I scooped down to
retrieve it for her. I had it in my hands before she had the chance to hiss. “Don’t touch that!” I looked
it over in my hands. It looked familiar. I glanced down to my wrist and saw that my bracelet was
missing. The bracelet in my hand was mine.
“Where did you get this? Are you stealing from me? Is that why we’re here? You’re going to
tell me that you’ve been taking my shit? That’s how you had my wallet, isn’t it?”
“Adam,” she said with a sweet drawl and stepped back into the shadows. “Of course not. Oh
silly boy, keep your shirt on,” she teased. “This is my bracelet. I didn’t steal anything from you.”
“What are you talking about? You’re making no sense…” None of it did. And I knew. The
glass that night had missed her, like she was invisible. My wallet, my bracelet. The glass case held
only my face. I turned quickly to find her, but she had had stepped into the darkness again. “Where
are you?” I placed my hands on the walls to hold myself up. “Where are you? This can’t be…”
“Adam, I know what it’s like to drive a little more dangerously, take corners too quickly,
speed through yellow lights and run stop signs just to get a taste of life, hoping that being closer to
death will show me how to live. The difference between wanting to die in order to be dead and wanting to die in order to live is that if you want to die, you’ll die and that’ll be the end of everything. It
will be the ultimate adventure. But if you live, you’re no longer afraid of death anymore and you can
do anything. Nothing scares you. Do you know why I do this? How I know? “
“Because I know.”
“Yes, because you know this also. You’ve been there too. And I know. I was there.”
“It can’t be. I see you. I talk to you. You really are here.” I looked around the empty room. The
fleeting light from the street danced with the shadows on the walls.
“I know everything you know. I’ve been everywhere you’ve been. I’ve seen everything you’ve
seen.”
I started to shake. “You’re me. I am you. We are the same. You don’t exist.”
“Nor do you in that case. You made me up. I’m a voice in your head, but I am more because
you gave me that power. You brought me to life.”
“No. You’re real. I can see you. I can touch you. I can hear you.”
A hand seized my collar. She pulled me back to the glass cabinet. I saw my reflection. Not
hers, just mine once again. I couldn’t breathe. I took a step back.
“The Seductress and One Night Stands.”
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ERIN KEMPF
“What’s the matter, baby?” she asked. Her voice twinkled. A wide smile spread across those
pouty lips. “Is something wrong?” She let a giggle slip. I couldn’t think, needed to sit down, wiped
sweat from my brow. She raised an eyebrow and pouted her perfect red lips.
“No. I don’t believe it…how--”
“—Easy, she left you. You were lonely, you were falling to pieces, your life was a constant
repetition, you wanted to get out of the norm. Your nice slacks, your ties, your buttoned down shirts,
your polished shoes and shiny car needed me; you needed me,” she cooed. She walked around examining me with her eyes. “So here I am.” She held out her arms like a model in a game show displaying
a prize and danced around.
“No...” I shook my head. “You’re insane. I needed a change, something new, but not this. You
don’t even know what you’re saying. You’re just a fucking loony.”
She started to walk like she was leaving, only to slowly turn and point at me with her red-polished
finger. “Technically, you’re the ‘fucking loony.’”
“I need to think,” I said aloud.
“I can hear you if you don’t talk aloud.”
“Be quiet. Let me think.”
The bus pulled up to the stop and the older lady sitting next to me at the bench gave me one
last strange look before steeping aboard. The sunlight gleamed on the shiny metal when the bus left.
I stared into the street. Where was I supposed to go?
“You know that no matter what you do I’m not leaving you alone. If you try to get help, I
won’t let you. I have the ability to overtake power and make you do things you never would have.
How else would I have gotten you to throw rocks into windows?”
“Shut up,” I said quietly.
“How would I have gotten you to do things? How else could I have possibly gotten you to do
the things that you never would have done?”
“Shut up!” I said louder.
“We threw rocks through windows, we ran from cops. I did that for you. You need me. You
can’t move on.”
“Shut up!” I yelled. I stood up.
“So dramatic,” she sighed. I sighed. Always so dramatic.
“You’re right. You won’t let me move on.”
“Exactly. I can’t move on. You can’t move on. We need each other.”
You’re right. What would happen now? I could go to a shrink. The loony bin would be welcoming for the both of us. Don’t think about it. You can’t get rid of me. You’re right. I like having you
around. I like being around. Let’s go see a movie. At a time like this? That’s the last thing that should
be done. What are you going to do? Call someone? There’s a new thriller I want to see. This is better
than any other one night stand could result. We only have to pay for one movie ticket. One ticket.
Forever.
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ZACH SAULS
Canvas 13
IN THE CHAIR
“The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne.”
To humble yourself
before a kitchen chair
on a Sunday morning
is a more fundamental
spiritual experience than
going in your rosary bead
and missal drag to Mass
and also more democratic
and therefore more American.
And the sprocket’s red glare
proves my bike is still there;
Oh say can you see a fig-newton
on me? Teach me to care and not
to care about an ordinary kitchen
chair: life lies in the verb seeing.
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JOHN GILGUN
BRITTANY
JOSHUA COMNINELLIS
Canvas 15
PREDISPOSITIONS: A BITCH IN TRAINING
On Dieting:
You are a perpetual dieter, always with a diet coke. Now, there is a bowl of shiny Snickers between
us. You bought them for the smell, you say, and because you love to cook. You would offer me your
leftover lasagna or a piece of your chess pie, but instead there is this bowl of Snickers between us that
you bought for the smell. There are my hands in the bowl too, tickling the wrapper edges. I grab
the Snickers delicately; a snowflake on fire, and you let the crinkle symphony intoxicate your brain,
endorphins loose and crackling like popcorn. You wait for the hesitant surprise of each pop. You’re
waiting to die, slavering. I mash the peanut candy in my mouth and kiss your forehead so that the
smell stays. I imagine you smashing your face in with your own mouth, trying to eat yourself. I don’t
even like Snickers.
On Color-blindness:
You give careful attention to your blazer, and you use Brute aftershave. You won’t settle for anything
less. You douse all over with baby powder. You don’t sweat. Everything is clean and pressed. Everything bitter, matte. Everything is vomit. You arrive tonight in a brown jacket with olive trousers.
You look like garbage in a Dumpster, trailing your yuck behind you as you mingle, and people poke
and claw at your shoulders. They want to know you as I know you. They want to help you pick out
your loafers. They ask what exotic aroma you have bathed yourself in. I expect they know about the
wretched discord of colors before them, but no one says anything. They don’t care. They want you
to be their glue, but they don’t know you like I know you. They don’t know that you specialize in
pieces and light fragments.
On Languages:
You want to learn French for the sexy sophistication, Russian for the power, but you actually only
know English, like everybody else. And what about the Italians? The Spaniards? The Japanese?
Well, Japanese is what everybody is doing. The ones who wear their summer kimonos in Barnes and
Noble and order Earl Grey tea. The ones who pay Javier an extra fifty bucks for lawn care if he smiles
widely when they say “gracias.” You tell Javier he shouldn’t capitalize on their discriminations. The
ones you hate. You imagine him forgetting words one day, every single one. You wonder what you
could capitalize on.
On T.S. Eliot:
Nobody really likes T.S. Eliot, unless you are:
A.)An old hippie who missed out on the fact that being a hippie is no longer groovy, cool or out of sight, man.
B.)A Ph.D. who also subscribes to description A,
Or,
C.)A prick named Carl who uses words like “undulating,” “precipice” or “rubbish” to describe everyday situations.
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JESSICA WILKINSON
You do like him. No, you appreciate him, the man. You don’t like him. You can appreciate
him, you say, for his courage. His courage is a limp hairpiece, and you grovel at it as if it were mink.
Would you ask him to sign it, your limp hair, or maybe right above your left breast? Thanks for the
good times, love TS, right above your collar bone, the mole on your neck dotting the “i”? Ta-da. Tada, or something equally useless? I too can disturb the universe. I know your secrets, tada. But I
presume nothing, or maybe everything. At least I presume something.
On Waiting:
Nobody flosses as much as they should. I have an unnatural distaste for it. What is a natural distaste? It could be that. Five minutes from now, you are going to ask me. All other aspects of my
oral hygiene are top notch. My sanitary-nervosa doesn’t purposefully neglect my gums. It’s a texture
thing, really, like wax under my fingernail. I do have the courage to lie to you. I do floss every night.
I’m letting you down, but you’re as momentary as a dentist. I’ve let less momentary people down,
I think. Family. Bosses. God. I’m nervous. Why do you require everything from me, and then
nothing? You ask me why I’m always early. You think it’s weird. You think it’s weird that I’m always
waiting.
On Anticipation:
I am a grape professional. I know all the best wines and how to taste them. I know how to squeeze
the pulp from a grape like I’d squeeze an eyeball from its socket; a clean cut from the skin. I know
grapes are your favorite. I made you a grape pie, once, set on a white paper plate, and you sucked the
purple stain from the paper; it wasn’t enough. Tantalus couldn’t get his grapes and you ate them all,
and it isn’t enough. What he didn’t know is that he had all he wanted of grapes. He had the reflection of grapes, the grape anticipation. You can’t suck that dry. All that anticipation is enough to fill
you. It is the only thing that fills you.
On Graphic Organizers:
I don’t want your fact pyramid. It’s a bullshit pyramid. It’s a 2D pyramid, otherwise known as a triangle. It’s not a pyramid, and you have no power for it. You tell me the facts are at the top, the important truths. They’re all wriggling and writhing at the tip, waiting to be oozed out like toothpaste.
All that pressure blows it, and it does nothing for my cavities. My cavities don’t need the truth. It is
not true. It’s bullshit. Let me tell you that, and I’ll tell you what is essential, what is fact, if you like.
It’s not right, putting it all on the top like that, what matters; what is real. What matters is the base.
What’s real always lies at the bottom. You and I lie at the bottom, and all your important ideas above
us swirling into brown vapors.
On Scene Kids:
Scene kids are ponces, and may include boys with long hair, girls with neon or hound’s-tooth pants,
boys and girls who read manga, boys and girls who read manga romantically to each other, and
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PREDISPOSITIONS: A BITCH IN TRAINING
anyone who wears shoes that look like Bazooka Joe comics. They steal CDs because the world owes
them. They have daddy issues just because. They listen to music with their bottom lip puckered,
as if Nico and Tom Waits are tugging at it with their talons. They drink green tea with their cheeseburgers, and they don’t like you or their parents. They are metaphorical orphans. I hate orphans.
On Being Nosey:
You brushed past me again today. Only an inch this time, maybe less. The space between people is
so electrical; my hairs are still standing. Later today I’ll find you in the library or the hallway again.
You’re so quiet. I’ve asked you a million things. What’s your favorite movie? Do you like coffee?
Where do you live . . .you move away from my questions. I think soon, tomorrow, I’ll force you into
a corner in the darker, public spaces. The microfilm room, or behind the psychology periodicals. I’ll
tell you I want to peel your eyelids back until all your eye is fresh and sensitive in the library air. Tell
me your secrets, damnit. Tell me please. Then I will buy you a bagel, if you’re as hungry as I am.
On Blood Blisters:
You have a blood blister. You won’t die, but you may be poisoned. You won’t let it go, even though
it’s tender. It’s funny to think that your own blood can poison you. Blood is vital. If you lose too
much, you will die. You need it, I think, and your blister won’t let it go. But it’s not yours anymore.
It’s trapped in a blister, dead and toxic, a cesspool of your own blood. You cradle your finger under
the fluorescence, squeezing and pinching. You are unsure of what to do. What if it finds its way
back into you? What if it is waiting in that blister to get back in and poison you? You cradle your
finger, pressing until it is white. You should chop that finger off. I will chop it off.
On Doubt:
You have some. You have some about me, but that may be your redemption. It is. I love that. You
doubt my stability, as you doubt your own. You have your doubts that I am wrong about you, and
that’s okay. I do have your number. I’d love you if you were always so full of doubt. Doubt makes
you beautiful, like that pensive gush of air in Double Dutch. If you were always like this, I wouldn’t
hate you. I would lick the beaded misery from your forehead, and you wouldn’t trip.
On the Miserable:
Why do I hate you? You, so miserable with life’s consistency. Your life is shredded, like coconut. It
tastes okay, but I hate your texture. You make me lumpy and dry. I feel so normal and adequate; I
feel so sellout. I feel fine, but you: you hate me. But I hate you too, for being so hungry for nothing. Remember that bagel I bought you? I ate the ring, the yeasty flesh. Yeast grows things, whole
cultures. You ate the hole.
On the Atmosphere:
Don’t call me boring. I don’t watch All My Children or buy Reader’s Digest. I do cook. I like cleaning
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JESSICA WILKINSON
my apartment with ammonia and vinegar. I can talk to you about books and movies, but why? You
make everything beige; you take my books and beige-ify them. I have to run from your beige intellectualism and watch Paula Dean butcher carrots and lady squash, julienne-style. The atmosphere
brightens around her, rosy orange—suddenly less beige. The sparkle and spray from her knife could
catch me on fire. I could catch you on fire. I will light your beige eyes with Paula’s rosy spray.
On You:
You are you, April, my dentist and that prick named Carl. You’re a famous mystery, the color-blind
soda drinker, and Stephen Dedalus. You are affected by snow. You don’t like your best flaws, and you
cherish the shitty ones. You don’t let me talk to you anymore; you think I know too much. I don’t,
really, but I know enough about you to need you. You are you. I Love you. You put yourself out
there; you make me know you. I like to twist you like the tip of a chess piece before my queen kicks
the shit out of yours. She can be such a bitch, and you. You could’ve been a bitch too, before you
caught me with that lion. But you caught me, no you. You are you, you are you, you are you, you are
you are you. But now I’m the bitch.
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JACOB LUTES
Canvas 20
2
HER FIVE-FOOT FARMER
MEG THOMPSON
They built a golf course next to the farm I grew up on.
Women in salmon-colored polo shirts flip sand wedges,
red from the dust and the clay and the sun, into the air,
and my dad gets hit in the head with a golf ball
while he’s driving his tractor, rolling up leftover bean stubble
for the cows, topples off. His tractor, the loud one
that vibrates windows, drowns the tremolo of sheep,
moves without him. Had he been sitting when he drove,
the balls would have just nipped the top of his hat. Now they plop
into the topsoil, surrounding him like unwashed eggs.
He would never sit, my mom tells the sheriff. He was
too short to see. My dad buried in a Midwestern plain,
I try to remember how loam feels, bright and black,
turned over and over by dozens of blades.
I wander malls for perfume that smells like second-cutting hay.
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EVEN TERRORISTS GET THE BLUES
“I think the reason terrorists do what they do is because they don’t have enough love in their life.”
-sentence from a college freshman’s composition paper
They wake up at night to make a sandwich. They can’t sleep.
Little bit of mayonnaise, roast beef, sesame oil, balsamic vinegar—
they can’t just make a sandwich.
Terrorists usually have a second job
to support themselves,
sometimes at sandwich shops.
Kosher salt, a pinch, terrorists sprinkle on the bread like freezing rain.
They eat chips, too.
Their hand in and out of the bag,
not completely unlike the sound of feathers.
Terrorists eat slow, think of birds preening.
They make strange salads,
cheese and garbanzo beans,
watching Stargate SG-1.
Look how sad they are.
Some terrorists try going back to college,
a new haircut,
or local Renaissance Fests.
Get a hobby, terrorists’ friends say.
Terrorists experience inner turmoil.
They drink and start running,
try to get into the gym but the doors are locked.
Look, they’re so sad.
They pull the door handles,
flecks of rust sticking to their hands.
I talk to my sister when she’s drunk.
Through the phone, the feathers of her laugh.
Are you a terrorist, I ask?
She’s a sophomore in college.
Maybe the sad ones got to her,
whisked her to Denny’s
where they placed their hands on her stomach,
asked her how hungry she was
when that wasn’t what they cared about.
In the booth, she gets sad with them. Look.
It’s hard to tell.
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MEG THOMPSON
I can only tell because she’s my sister.
I see her mouth open,
I see their fingers touching her lip.
When we were kids
I used to draw on her face when she slept.
Rachel, I want to whisper, because that’s her name.
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OCEAN IS THE DRY SAND’S GRAVY
Your spaghetti noodles are thin, waving blond,
like a wig in a pot of boiling water
or worms in the ocean’s heat vents
and the tone of your voice is like the night
you boiled potatoes until they were soft as faces.
I have nothing to give you, except these faces,
you said, with your back to me.
I don’t know why you sounded forlorn.
I was sitting at the kitchen table with a plate.
The potatoes looked uneven, worried,
wet as sand. You peeled them twice,
which I didn’t know was possible.
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MEG THOMPSON
CATERPILLAR
LEVI SMOCK
The pause was incomprehensibly long. Click. The lock turned. Without a word I knew he
had changed his mind. Door handle shook as I placed my hand on it. Steady now. Breathe.
“Uh, I unlocked the door,” Chas said flatly from inside.
The floor plan of the apartment was an exact reversal of my own. The furnishings were
somewhat nicer, despite the tacky Nascar hood that hung decoratively on the back wall. I had the
strange sense that I had walked through a mirror and found the world on the other side was not
quite what I expected. No burnt light bulbs or discarded aluminum foil scattered in dark corners.
Chas had already walked away from the door, towards the kitchenette. His shirt was off. On
his back was a colorful half finished tattoo of Alice staring up at the Caterpillar sitting on a toad stool
and smoking a hookah. Sweat sparkled on his temples. He rubbed his shaved head with the butt
of his black pistol. When he turned I could see he had been crying. His eyes were swollen and red
they seemed too take up to much of his face. He had the beginnings of a beard and his mouth hung
slightly open.
“Whatever you do, don’t touch my guns. I get nervous when people start messing around
with them.”
Chas nodded toward the rifle sitting behind the door. I glanced at it quickly and tried to
capture its details like a photograph in my mind.
“I won’t.”
Chas nodded and made his way over to the couch and looked up at me expectantly. I didn’t
know what to say.
“You want a beer?”I asked dumbly.
He looked right through me.
“No man, I don’t want a beer.”
“Mind if I get one?”
“Help yourself.”
He pointed to the fridge, in the kitchenette. I took my time. I needed to slow this. He was
on edge and I had no real game plan. He had both cans and bottles in the refrigerator. I grabbed a
bottle; it seemed the more useful of the two.
****
Sara had been my high school girlfriend. She had been beautiful. She wore these knit sweaters that she never buttoned with tight t-shirts underneath them. The sweaters always slid off her
shoulders and she was constantly shrugging them back up. She bobbed her hair. It was always two or
three different colors.
It had been short lived, but we had remained friends afterward. Good friends. So good that
after college we made a plan. We rented apartments in the same complex. It was one of these trilevel buildings. The stairwells were decks that attached to the outside of the buildings. Sara’s apartment was on the second level, mine was on the top. The idea was that we would watch out for each
other.
****
“Look, I know Sara asked you to come down here, but I don’t really feel like company.”
The beer went down the wrong pipe. I coughed
He came over to me, clapped my back with the empty hand
“Okay?”
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CATERPILLAR
Who am I kidding? I can’t save this guy. Hell, he’s patting me on the back.
“I’m fine.”
****
“I’m fine,” Sara sobbed.
But she wasn’t. She had shown up at my apartment bawling. I had wrapped my skinny arms
around her. She had drenched the shoulder of my red Flash t-shirt. When she pulled away and
looked at me I wished I had combed or put a hat on before I had answered the door.
“Chas didn’t come home from work last night. I called him like twenty times. He didn’t answer. I thought maybe he went for some drinks after his shift, so I drove by Mickey’s. When I pulled
up he was getting in the car with some girl. I screamed at him, but they were already driving off.”
****
“Sara’s the only thing that matters to me. I don’t know what I was thinking. This bitch has
been calling me. We used to hang out, before I met Sara. Back then I was all messed up on powder,
any kind of powder.”
He was crying, this big, shirtless ex-marine blubbering and gasping for air between sobs.
What do I say? I didn’t have to say anything. He started back in.
“You know when I was in the corps, the shit we did, I just needed something to take my
mind off it. You know?”
I nodded. I had no idea.
“So I started in with this chick and the shit. It was Sara that got me back up on my feet. She’s
the reason I had been clean as long as I had. It was just a couple of screw ups, but I messed it all up,
everything that matters. I fucked it all up.”
****
“I followed them to this shitty little house. Trashy furniture all over the yard. I pounded on
the door and this bitch answers, Chas is standing behind her. They’re both loaded. Chas still has
the foil pipe in his hand. He tried to tell me nothing happened. I ran back to my car, told him if he
wanted her he could have, that we were done. I told him to come today and get his shit out of my
apartment while I was at work. Oh! Oh! And the whole time this skank’s baby is screaming in the
background.”
****
“I’m gonna end it. If I don’t I will just screw something else up. I don’t know what else to do,”
he said.
I needed to say something.
“What about your family. You have family right? Don’t you owe it to them to think about
this?”
My voice was so shaky. Was I saying the right thing?
****
“He showed up at my work. My work! Screaming. Saying he couldn’t live without me. He was
hysterical. Mr. Burkowitz heard it all, came out of his office. Before I knew what happened, Chas had
him over my desk and choking him. Mr. Burkowitz’s, face was purple. His head looked like a grape
being squeezed. I didn’t know what to do. Then, Chas just let him go. He had this look, like he didn’t
know what was happening and then he just left. I had to beg Burkowitz not to fire me.”
****
“You don’t know ’em, they wouldn’t understand. Maybe you should go. I think you need to
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LEVI SMOCK
go.”
He shifted the gun frontwards. He was on the couch, but his knees were pumping. If I leave I
don’t know what will happen. I can’t leave now.
****
“When I got home he was there. He had his guns out. I think he was high. He was, so I don’t
know. He keeps saying he screws everything up. I can’t talk to him. I wish he would calm down so I
could talk to him. I don’t know what to do. I’m all he’s got, you know? He doesn’t talk to his mom.
His dad hates him. He the last time Chas talked to him, he got drunk and called into work the next
day.”
****
“I’m not gonna go until I know you’re alright. Okay?”
“You and Sara have been friends a long time, right?”
“We have.”
“Do you think, I mean, she told you what happened, right? Do you think that she will forgive
me? I mean, do you think she could take me back, ever?”
I took a long pull off the beer and almost choked again.
****
“You gotta call the cops on this guy, Sara. He’s dangerous. He’s no good.”
“Don’t say that. He’s just gone through a rough time. He needs somebody to take care of
him, somebody to give a shit. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. He’s acting suicidal. Every time I try
to talk to him he goes nuts.”
“Ready to forgive him?”I asked.
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do, right now. I just don’t want him to hurt himself.”
The ways she looked at me, I knew what she needed. I had to take care of her.
“Do you want me to talk to him? See if I can calm him down?”
Her face as puffy and heartbroken as it was perked up. God, she’s cute.
“Will you? He really has always liked you, Matt.” She smiled, wiping her nose with the Kleenex that I gave her. “He always says that he wished he had little buddy, like I have with you.”
****
“Don’t think about Sara, right now. You need to concentrate on getting things right in your
life.”
I finally had a plan. I pulled the phone out of my pocket.
“Do you trust me?
“Sure. I’m not handing you my gun though.”
“Never ask you to do that. But I do want you to take a risk. I want you to call your father.”
“My father, I don’t think you understand.”
“You said you trust me.”
“I, my father, we don’t get along.”
“Okay, but he’s still your father. I want you to tell him what’s going on. If you don’t get along,
the worst he can do is not care, which is what you expect, right?”
He nodded, with that vacant, slack jawed, can-I-have-some-more-French-fried-potatoes,
look on his face.
“But what if he surprises you? When he hears what going on, it could be what gets you back
to building a real family.”
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CATERPILLAR
LEVI SMOCK
“I don’t know.”
I pressed the phone into his palm.
“You have been doing things your way and they haven’t been turning out so great, right? Just
try this one thing for me.”
He looked dubious, but started dialing.
“I’m gonna go outside and get a smoke. Let you have some privacy.”
That stupid nod again.
“Dad? Dad, its Chas.”
The door closed behind me. I stood next to it long enough to hear Chas raise his voice. After
that he locked the door again. I figured the rest would take care of itself. Like I said before, Sara and I
had a plan.
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IT’S BEEN FUN, SORT OF
ERIN KEMPF
Teetering on the edge of collapse, the end, etcetera.
Flood San Francisco with “shallow inventories”
It’s Biblical, the flood.
And Bruce Willis may have triumphed, but the implacable universe is left dejected on the edge of the
bed.
Disaster is averted: suspense is foreplay.
Hemorrhaging in the credit crunch, the face of Earth wet with its efforts; it is always their past—our
present.
It is self-consciously gray and bleak, rather slow and determinedly “gritty” how “we” fucked up and
how “we” brought this on ourselves. How
bad can one really feel about that when the Chrystler building enshrouded in ice is so beautiful?
There’s a double-blind if the end is gorgeous or exciting, it’s not really awful. After the world ends
one end of the world clearly isn’t enough.
Zombie disasters come in every flavor. With zombies and vampire movies, it’s with love we should
“Give them time to recoup, the better to glower at us from the horizon again” or perhaps this is with
heroism when the claim “We have no comment, thank you very much.”
Since the 30’s, films like Deluge and Fin du Monde have rendered the end. Look: this meteor is going
to crash into this building, this solar flare erupt, that giant wave will knock down those cities. At least
it’s been fun, sort of.
Canvas 29
RELOCATING
it was a dead man’s house—
the landlady’s great uncle. in the basement,
i found his things packed and stacked
in dole banana boxes marked kitchen,
dining, bedroom one, two, three,
and even furniture. i had been told
do not touch the dead man’s things. i unpacked
the boxes and filled cupboards with cups and plates,
set lamps on nightstands, pushed
a table and chairs in front of the bay window
overlooking the street. i filled old pots
with dirt and set them on the porch,
placed copies of reader’s digest on the back
of the toilet and arranged
the boxes in every room, covered
with sheets and pillows. but i slept
on the couch. often, i drank
coffee and walked down the hallway
and stood in every doorway, expecting
to find somebody sleeping or waking. i wonder
what the neighbors thought of me living alone
in a big house. did they blame me? what did they think
late at night when i would turn on every light
and open every curtain and sit
on one side of the table
and weep
because i could not
replace it? i could not
fill this space enough.
not even a dead man’s things
could bring life
into this strange new home.
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LOGAN GARRELS
FROM A MATH 110 NOTEBOOK
LOGAN GARRELS
the crunch of corn stalks
and in Kansas the feral
children feast, laughing
so many boxes
she is moving out today
i make one last plea
frost webs the windows
of my car. i drive into
the sunlight, squinting
my sprite is empty
gone without respect for me
i am not happy
the morning sun shrinks
shadows on the grass. robins
tilt their heads—listen
uncle yule is dead
his house waits to be emptied
by reading the will
mom and dad fighting
the child caught in the middle
mimics swinging fists
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ZACH SAULS
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CAPTAIN BIG BITCH
KYNSLIE OTTE
I watch her in slow motion as she lights another cigarette. The smoke dances up her fingers, past her
lips, and down into her lungs. It escapes when she speaks. “What if you wrote a story about a superhero who rides a giant green turtle?” I chuckle when she says this, pretending not to take it seriously.
The subplots and suburbs are whirling around in my mind all the while. I immediately resent my
reaction when I snap out of my trance and notice she looks a little hurt. I attempt to redeem myself.
“I’m sorry, honey. I wasn’t laughing at the idea; I was laughing at where I would go with that.” Her
disappointment turns into a tiny, crooked smile, and the lines on the right side of her face bend to
fit her expression. There’s a feeling in my gut that accompanies her little crooked smile. It’s a lot
like the first shot of Jack after a long, long day. It trickles down my throat and leaves prickly tracks
behind as it swims into my stomach. It’s warm, it lingers, and it triggers an automatic response. I
don’t wince at her smile as I would at a shot. It’s a different response. I smile back shyly, without
realizing the muscles in my face move faster than my mind would approve of. She makes me feel like
a child. She reminds me of a time much more innocent, though few of our actions scream innocence
or purity. The song playing softly in the background is by her favorite artist. She notices, and her
big brown eyes light up. She stubs her cigarette and the smoke hangs in the room comfortably, the
way our jackets hang side by side on matching hooks. She turns the stereo up, and pulls me from
my chair. “I love this song! Come dance with me.” She throws her arms around my shoulders and
swings her hips to the beat. She frowns at me when I don’t follow her lead. “Jessi, come on. You
know I don’t dance.” It frustrates me when she does this, because she knows I can’t dance. And I
hate lookin’ like a fool. She doesn’t understand how I’d much rather watch. I watch her closely,
intrigued by every step her flat little feet take, and the movement of her hips as each measure of the
song sings away. I dance in my own way, with my pen and paper. My pen moves in sync with her
body. My words dip and twirl as she does. She is my muse. My inspiration comes from her nature,
her words, her motions. She is my fix, no needles required. She is my penguin; the one I gave my
perfect pebble to. Together we swim through the monotony of our mediocre Midwestern lives; just
as Captain Big Bitch will swim through life on the back of a giant green turtle.
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THE PROUD MALCAUSKY
Stanley’s uncle Anton had passed in August at the age of sixty-five. His heart had given out
from intense electrical trauma, which was not entirely uncommon for the men of the Malcausky
family. Over the years, the family name had become synonymous with: “a hardworking electrician
of pure Russian heritage,” throughout most of Tennessee. Stanley could remember Grandpa Dmitry
leaping from the kitchen table, and breaking two chairs and a hip as he reenacted the last moments
of Ervin Malcausky, The Cable Cutter, one of the family’s greatest electrician Heroes. The death of
Ervin The Cable Cutter had been nothing short of a tragedy. Uncle Anton’s death, on the other hand,
was not. He was a family embarrassment, such as most magicians are. Not only did Uncle Anton die
dangling from the branches of some crooked walnut tree, but even more shameful, he had blasted
himself upthere by his own mis-conjured lightning bolt. Times Free Press read: “Self Proclaimed ‘Supreme Wizard of Chattanooga’ Found Dead in Tree: Tennessee Looks to Ban Public Use of Magic.”
Luckily for the rest of the Malcausky family though, Uncle Anton’s story was bumped to page two.
Page one had been dedicated to the blind kid, Mitch Silberstein, who had been hooked on hallucinogenic drugs.
********
Stanley curled up the newspaper, laying it down on the rotting green bench. Saint Venantius
Cemetery had over the years become a true landfill for shame. Among its tombstones are some of
Tennessee’s great failures, including Robert Hermens, an engineer noted for inventing the Flightless
Helicopter, as well as Ballistic Transportation. His memorial service was not particularly well attended. The cemetery, void of anything resembling pride, withered in its own humiliation. Its loose soil
shrank back with each step, and the scattered gray oaks were stripped bare, their dry golden leaves
raked into little heap and left beside their roots. Even the cement pathway had cracked under the
weight of continual disappointments.
Down one such broken trail jaunted a ridiculous man. Drowning in an extra-large trench
coat and an even larger mustache, he approached Stanley. The man’s arms fixed at an absurd ninety
degree angle.
“You need a hug, son.”
“Excuse me?”
“You are Stanley Malcausky, right? Your uncle just passed. That means you need a hug, silly.”
The man beckoned Stanley closer with the bobbing of his mustache, and the reshaping of his hug.
Stanley looked around to make sure no one saw the actions of this odd man whose every
gesture was like a drowning victim’s. When the man spoke through his massive mustache it was as if
from under water.
“No thanks,” Stanley said.
“Fine,” he said, “you go right ahead and bottle up all them emotions, but it’s not healthy I tell
you. Sooner or later you have to let them out.” He sat close to Stanley.
“The name’s Timberlin. I am your Uncle’s lawyer. My secretary, Miss Nabert, was the one
who asked you to meet me here today to discuss his final wishes.” Timberlin laughed and slapped Stanley’s thigh. “There isn’t much to talk about really. He
would look me in the face and say, ‘Tim, it is simple, the kid gets it all.’ That is the kind of man your
Uncle was, but I am sure you knew that better than most.’” Timberlin waited for an answer. But Stanley didn’t have one, not for this man, or his proud
family, or his dead Uncle, he had never even had one for himself. Timberlin sighed when he saw
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JESSE FRAZIER
Stanley’s face. “He really did care about you, son. Anytime I played him a hand of ol’ magician poker, all he
would ever talk about is you… like that time you and he made that quirky little wand together. Oh,
that is such a delightful story.”
“What wand?”
“Oh… I guess you were … eh … still pretty young back then and…” Timberlin’s voice fell into
the depth of his mustache. He cleared his throat to halt the impending silence.
“Hey, well I’ll see you back here at four o‘clock tomorrow for his funeral; still got a gaggle of
chores to do before everything is ready. I know it is a lot to deal with, son.” Timberlin put on his best
smile, and patted the inside of his trench coat. “But I’ll keep that hug tucked away for when you’re
ready for it, and I’ll even keep Puka at my place tonight.”
“Puka?”
Timberlin pointed to a mass of gray moving around a newly dug grave. It wasn’t the first
time Stanley had seen a troll. There was an episode of Cops where they had to euthanize one to catch
a cocaine smuggling magician. Turned out the magician had been creating these little white golems
that would march right up to parties and dissolve into snort lines. It was a big hit for the ratings.
Puka, however, was different; he had the harrowing pure black eyes of a horse, an under-bite that
almost swallowed up his crude flat nose, which was framed by two brownish stalagmite canines. His
body matched his face, a merging of beast and raw earth; with skin the color and texture of gravel,
and thick groves of dark orange, moss-like fur.
Timberlin submerged two fingers into his mustache and whistled. Puka turned his head, his
beady eyes catching the light, and then lumbered through the headstones of the many failed magicians buried in the cemetery. With each step he grew larger than Stanley thought possible, until he
finally stopped in front of the much smaller beings. It was magic hour as the magicians called it, a
time when all spells and rituals are amplified, and the sun sinks behind the snow capped mountains,
or into an endless sea of lush pines, or in this case, the enormous hairy shoulder of a one-ton troll.
“Stanley, this here is the finest bred troll you ever will see, and so very well trained, oh my
lantern you wouldn’t believe it.” His mustache sloshed with excitement.
“Watch this. Puka, kneel.”
The ground shook.
“Isn’t that just the darndest?” he laughed. “Now you go ahead and try, go on.”
Stanley stepped back; he was not familiar with how to use control. It had been used on him
however, many times, such as when he was a small boy and his mother told him, that this was the
last time he’d ever visit his Uncle Anton. “Like what?”
“Well any ol’ trick you’d tell a dog to do.”
“Okay… uh, Puka, shake.”
Puka heaved his large hand in front Stanley’s chest. Puka’s fingers were stumpy compared
to his massive palm, which was scarred, burnt, and completely callused from years of Anton’s failed
attempt at advance levels of sorcery. Still unsure of the creature in front of him, Stanley reached for
Puka’s hand, despite his knuckles being as hairy as Stanley’s legs and nails being as thick and brown
as cardboard. Stanley’s hand vanished in Puka’s fist. It was warm. Stanley felt the rhythmic surge of blood
with every slow beat of Puka’s heart, but there was something else woven into the pulse, something
that crackled, something electric. It was a feeling he had not felt since he was a small boy. It was
magic; it was his uncle’s magic. Stanley pulled his hand back.
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THE PROUD MALCAUSKY
********
“Do you feel that little one? That is magic; it’s you, me, us.” Uncle Anton said these things
as he placed the boy’s hand on a block of walnut wood engraved with a mix of ancient Russian and
Latin marking. The boy turned it over in his little hands, scrunching up his face with scrutiny. He
giggled, putting his ear to the wood. “It’s, it’s singing!”
The wood hummed, shaking slightly, each symbol glowing in rhythm.
“That’s it, little one.”
“It’s warm!” The boy laughed. Anton breathed in sharp. Power zipped through the boy’s
knuckles, lighting up his finger tips, and seeping into the wood. The wood jolted slightly, as shavings
of walnut slid off and dancd in the air like tinny ribbons, until only a smooth and quirky wand was
left between their palms. The boy stared spellbound by the magic that Uncle Anton and he had just
created.
Anton kneeled and took the boy’s face in his thin hands, letting the magic envelop the
child’s beaming grin. “You are going to be the most—” His voice cracking, “—the most amazing Wizard this world has ever seen.”
Whipping his eyes, he ruffled the boy’s messy black hair and laughed lightly, “I’d bet my life
on it.”
********
Lifelessly, Stanley trudged through the hall of his apartment, unable to look up at any of the
forty-three portraits that hung on the wall. Each portrait held in its frame the hardworking face of
a proud Malcausky. There were thirty-one electricians, seven carpenters, four welders, and a single
hair stylist. There was simply no room for left for any magicians or young men who had yet to choose
a path in life. Stanley collapsed into his futon. He reached for his blinking home phone, feeling each
fiber in his enflamed shoulder knot up as he saw the name on caller I.D. He braced himself, it was his
mother.
“Stanley I know you are a tad bit upset by ‘him’ passing away, Oh didn’t I always say that he
end up in some tree one day? Didn’t I? Anyways, the real reason I was calling was to give you some
great news, Malcolm’s Electrical is hiring—”
Stanley tossed the phone against the wall, not hard, but just enough to ease his annoyance
and send the AA batteries tumbling to the floor. He reached under his pillow and pulled out a Polaroid with worn corners and frayed edges. It had been taken out one of the family cookouts, one of the
only one Anton had been allowed to attend. Everyone was smiling, even if forced. On one side stood
Stanley, his family’s hands griping his shoulder, and on the other stood Anton, alone and half out of
frame, but sheepishly smiling his lopsided grin.
********
It was more than a little overcast the day of the funeral. Large ink splotch clouds in varying
shades of black and gray churned in the sky like a witch’s cauldron. The wind was just as ominous,
whipping without any signs of mercy through the few huddled mourners, showing complete disregard for their fall coats, thermal underwear, or Mr. Gilbert’s thoroughly chafed nipples.
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JESSE FRAZIER
The guest list, although sparse included Timberlin, and Miss Nabert who both arrived ninety
minutes early just to make sure everything was perfect. Next were the two Russians, Lev, and Petro.
No one really knew their connection to Anton, but they had claimed profusely to have been his very,
very best friends, as soon as they had convinced Timberlin to provide Zyr Vodka instead of wine for
the ceremony. Alongside the Russian stood the four wizard representatives of AMAM – the Association of Modern American Magicians – who argued among themselves about which Harry Potter
book best represented “serious” magic. At a further distance clustered half a dozen or so families who
had showed up, mainly out of guilt, to repay Uncle Anton for his kindness and not for his spells, a
point they made abundantly clear at any opportunity.
Timberlin and the four wizards, stood in front of Anton’s casket which was cheaply designed
but at least adorned with rich and fragrant cedar wreathes that had been laced with thyme, rosemary
and wild mints. Timberlin cleared his throat.
“Friends, today we are gathered here to witness the passing of a great magician, and an even
greater man.” He then called guests by name to step forward and say their final regards. Each of
the Wizards placed a protection spell, or charm, each one flashier than the last. The Russians were
hurried along by Miss Nabert after they had decided the only way to bid farewell to a country man
was to finish off a bottle of vodka in a drinking game between the three of them. Lev lost. Uncle
Anton won, and Petro cried for one of the greatest drinking buddies he had ever known. The families
eventually herded their way to the coffin. Some tried to make magical signs they had seen on a TV
show. Most fumbled with a quick, insincere thank you, and then left the funeral. Others walked up,
blackberry texting away or the light of a PSP shining on their faces, and said a forced farewell that
included “blah, blah, blah.” Lastly, Stanley forced his way through the crowd of people and a single
troll to where his Uncle lay.
“You told me there was magic out here,” Stanley whispered. His chin trembled with each
chilled breath. “What am I to do with that now… I don’t know what to… I don’t know.”
He reached deep inside of his jacket, and pulled out a frail, crooked walnut wand; it had
been worn smooth from uncertain hands. “This is best left with you old man… I-I never could hold it
right.” He placed it on the coffin head, and thumbed the name Malcausky. He turned the name away
from him and faded into the crowd of people.
There were no magicians with lopsided grins standing there, no little boys that giggled at
chess pieces coming alive or a wand being carved by magic. Most of all, there was no proud Malcausky in the crowd, only sad and ordinary people. As everyone left, Puka watched through the flow
of oily tears that spilt down the cracks of his gray face until only he was left.
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NAMASTE
Within you, there’s a ridge
on which the entire cosmos rests.
I bow to that ridge, carry
its subtle sweetness in my mouth
as if it is the spring of your being.
I soothe my tired hands
in its stillness, bathe
in its love, ingratiate
myself with the wisdom
of its winds.
When you are dwelling there,
know I am, forever, dwelling there,
and that our atoms are
inseparable.
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HANS BREMER
5TH AVENUE
HANS BREMER
They stretch their scraped arms,
grip, and dangle from the thicker limbs.
When their joints strain, their knuckles pop,
they plummet into the piles
with a force reserved for tarnished knights.
Sunlight dulls the cold flush
of their jaws. Dust motes swarm
the space between their clenched excitement
and some unjust misery.
I prop myself up with a splintered rake,
try to forgive the emptiness
flooding the last reaches of our yard.
The boys seem oblivious now,
but hushed arguments
have seeped into their eyes.
I notice it holding them hostage
when their mother and I occupy
the same room.
Intention has a way of going bankrupt.
Wedged against the arm of our rotten swing,
my wife refuses to smile.
The boys call to her as they jump
to another limb, fall into the cavernous
scratch of wide, dried catalpa leaves.
Money, or the lack thereof, deadens
my wife’s stare. Her cheeks are ashen
beneath the brim of her black hat.
I want to coax her up and out
of this gray silence that permeates
even the gutters of our weathered house
but I, too, refuse, return
to my quiet labor.
Canvas 39
DUOMO DUO
Canvas 40
SAM PERKINS
LA SACRA BIBBIA
SAM PERKINS
Canvas 41
MONGRELS -OR- LIFE DURING WARTIME
I. KURT COTARD
DISCUSSED: Opposing Affinities of Ethnicities, Geographical Distribution and Fires, Effects of Feng
Shui on Imprisonment, Hubcaps and Tiny Victories.
It’s difficult terrain, getting sleep in this goddamned heat; the unconscious equivalent of
dragging the carcass of an antelope across unplowed fields. Kurt lies on the couch, in the hotel room
of Ke’ilu, barely awake enough to hear a stunted groan coming from the closet. The hotel room is
made up of pieces: an old rotary Zenith television points at the window, gray screen reflecting heat
lightning in the horizon; there’s a bucket filled with bowls of dried Campbell’s vegetable soup; there’s
piles of circular flyers and newspapers and magazines, all advertising cellular phones, post-traumatic
stress counseling seminars, and gem appraisals; there’s several bags of foreign currency and a fly strip
above the grill; there’s a wash tub and the belly of a clarinet; an end table with a Smith and Wesson;
a couch; a locked door. He tries to dream of being back in Missouri, flanked by neighborhoods of
conifers, pears, persimmons, hunting around topiary and mobile homes. He’s hunting a hundred different species of deer. Kurt tries to dream of a hundred foreign, warm bodies dragging over the dirt,
skittering on the underside of leaves, where the sunlight is dimmed to a velvet and dogs run. The
dream obliges. The groan from the closet gets louder.
Kurt rolls over on the couch. He tries to work the protests out of his ears, the groan’s sound
rippling through what he understands is a tiny, pliant victory: the illusion of not being stuck here.
Not being trapped either in Esfahan, with its steel factories and minarets, or in Ankara, with its air
that tastes like salted bread, or in any of the other cities, all endless and furring up the Middle East
and its arteries.
A wooden slap erupts out of the closet.
Kurt jerks up.
Revolver, Eckhard had said.
Christ, he said.
You’re holding that like you mean it.
Kurt grabs the pistol from the end table.
He looks. The hotel room has its traditional clay walls. It has its rug-strewn floors. It has the
cheap disinfectant they toss in the toilet bowl, which has a sickly chemical purple smell. It has an
open closet. The closet contains an Arab, stripped down to his boxer briefs, bound and gagged to a
chair.
The boxer briefs have the name MITCH printed on the elastic band. Sharpie, all capitals.
Mitch’s head is shaved, and it’s a bad job, like he shouldered a side of beef in a slaughterhouse, but
Mitch did it out of solidarity. Mitch’s brother is going through chemotherapy. Solidarity. There’s fear
on the Arab. There’s suggestions of manacles and high wires attached under the skin.
Mitch’s chair has tipped over.
It’s the last in a succession of blows.
Kurt walks to the closet.
He aims the pistol.
Kurt wonders if he’s been showing signs of strain lately.
Maybe he should take some Valium. Some Robitussin.
Mitch is tanned and half-slouched, chest in intense animation. His leg shakes back and
forth, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, and there’s some phone numbers that have been written on his
inner thigh, in case of emergency. They’re also in Sharpie. The movement reminds Kurt of what he
saw on the television the other night. California fires. A news-shot showed a deer running in a panic
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RYAN BRADLEY
over a ridge, its hide ablaze, burning reddish-yellow. Firefighters and volunteers stood with shovels
and axes and Black Diamond boots, trying to get the goddamned thing out. Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rata-tat.
Mitch tries to yell, his foreign cadences spreading around the gag.
Kurt listens to the Arabic spill into the room.
People rave about the music of these Middle Eastern languages.
Look at that, they say. That’s something. Runs like a foreign dishwasher, a foreign car.
Change the belts and the oil, and it’ll never age a day.
Kurt hates people like that. Their goddamned ears are ugly. Who says English can’t last, can’t
be romantic? After all, isn’t the word coochie, in its mongrel American way, music?
Kurt stares intently at Mitch.
Poontang’s a song, Kurt says.
The Arab stares back, eyes filled with uncertainty and confusion.
Kurt sighs, still smelling the smoke on his clothes from the bar he burnt down last night.
He levels the sights of the pistol on Mitch’s head, but Mitch keeps screaming and trying to
wiggle.
Kurt squints, pivoting the revolver this way and that, aiming at small and delicate openings.
Now stop your goddamned squirming, Kurt says.
You know, Kurt says.
I’ve killed before.
Professionally, that is.
Once it was with a fork and a .22.
Professionally.
Kurt drives the hammer of the revolver back.
Mitch screams, and tries to launch himself on top of Kurt, thinks he can drive his weight
down on Kurt’s gun arm.
Mitch only kicks a little on the floor, scooting the chair in a little semi-circle.
He braces himself.
Mitch knows he’ll hear it after the bullet has already bored through his hair, teeth, blood,
shit.
Sound travels more slowly through denser materials.
And for Mitch, everything slows, and these are his thoughts:
The day is so hot already, and Mitch recalls wanting some money, maybe some baked beans
or pets or plants or a magazine full of celebrities like Ed McMahon, because maybe it wasn’t stealing, it was solidarity; wanting ice chips and borrowing was solidarity; wanting an Arby’s sack and
borrowing, solidarity; breaking into this apartment, wanting butterscotch, wanting the sun to turn
into moonlight and the moonlight to turn into hair, it was solidarity; just coming into the apartment
to look around to borrow, borrow, borrow, it was okay, and now it isn’t okay, it isn’t okay, opposite of
fine, borrow a clean surface; and now Mitch realizes that one of his hands has slipped out of the loosened ropes, and now it’s there dangling behind his back, dangling and now there will be no noise,
and then the slug will plunge in, and then there will be noise, solidarity; and now there’s a knock on
the door and—
There’s a knock on the door.
Kurt sucks on the air hard and gulps it.
Mitch screams.
Canvas 43
More knocking.
Goddamn your face! Kurt yells.
Who sent you, Mitch? They coming to pick you up now? This about the bar?
The knocking continues.
The door ain’t open, ain’t ever open, Kurt says. This is how you get shot, Kurt says.
If that’s you, Eckhard, Kurt says, you got the playbook all wrong. No time for a goddamned
screen pass.
The knocking keeps up. Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat.
Kurts grabs the back of Mitch’s chair and maneuvers it back into the closet, hunched over
and shuddering as the chair’s legs drag a low pitch across the floor, not noticing Mitch’s arm hanging
outside of the ropes.
Kurt speaks to the Arab:
You wait there.
He closes the closet door on Mitch.
The Arab kicks in a frenzy from behind the door, making sounds like tools in the dryer.
Kurt tries to ignore it.
The pistol is tucked into the sweatband of Kurt’s pants as he makes his way to the door and
looks through the peephole. It’s a small blessing that Kurt is actually wearing pants today—this casa
particular didn’t need no shirt, no shoes; no spare or jack. The persistence of the knocking either
says amphetamine addict or Eckhard, but when Kurt looks outside he sees a native kid, still wearing cobalt-blue pajama bottoms and yammering. He’s boyish and freckled. Not swarthy or womanly.
Probably selling religion. Kurt releases the deadbolt and yanks the door open.
Who the hell are you? Kurt asks.
Perry, the kid says.
I want my money.
Looking no more than twelve, the child forgoes politeness for a hydrangea-blue eminence.
Eat shit, Kurt says.
I want my money, the kid says. Euros.
Fuck off, Kurt says.
I know you have it. Payment.
In the background, Kurt can hear the muffled sounds of Mitch in the closet, extending like a
current.
Kurt never understood why most people were so against what he did; it seemed an appropriate response to a world that was crippled by the narcissistic—the more talented, beautiful, or desirable would eventually face the real horror of zits and tumors, balding and aging—in Kurt’s own way,
he was sparing them.
He briefly considers shoving the kid down the stairs.
My money, the kid says.
Eckhard promised me.
Training me to be a tour guide.
Eckhard lied, Kurt says.
I thought that part was obvious.
Want money, Perry says.
Get your goddamned hands out of your pockets! Kurt says.
Payment, Perry says.
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RYAN BRADLEY
What? What the fuck are you talking about?
Euro, Perry says.
That’s bullshit.
Money, Perry says.
Somebody forgot to take the morning-after pill with you, kid.
Kurt shoves the child back away from the door, watching him teeter and collapse on the
ground, the body-and-soul theory spinning.
These little things are why Kurt hadn’t come back home at all.
Kurt slams the door.
As he walks back into the apartment, Kurt ignores the rest of the sounds that are suddenly lighter than air: the drumming feet against the closet door, the half-crying outside the main
entrance. He’s euphoric. Hilarious. Pulling the revolver from his waistband, its blued finish now
covered in the dim glaze of sweat, he places it back on the end table, and collapses on the couch.
Last night.
Do me this favor, she said last night, pressing the matchbook into Kurt’s palm.
Watch me run the stairs, Vanya had said.
He should try calling her.
All this music, gone or broken.
Every once in a while a fantastic, tiny little victory comes along that he must try to be
grateful for. A tiny victory so small it requires magnification under a lens in order to be understood.
Today the victory is this: he can escape this shithole in his sleep. Eckhard will be back soon enough.
Leaning his head back on the couch, he makes a chronicle of obsessions. He always does this when
the weather gets rough. He tries to dream about Missouri again, about towers of hubcaps, and his old
garage with its decades of National Geographics stacked beside the kerosene, and about feeding the
dogs that lived across the street, and about Vanya. Always about Vanya.
The kicking continues.
Kurt doesn’t even notice when it stops and the closet door opens.
The dogs roam the streets outside with their red tongues, strong and good, slobbering out of
their souls.
It’s a monumental occasion.
II. ECKHARD SIMULCRUM
DISCUSSED: Sex-Based Decision Making, Burning Down Neighborhood Bars, Dangers of the Internal
Combustion Engine, Peddlers and Aubergistes.
It began easy enough.
Take this package here. Drop this paper grocery bag atop these stone-and-cement steps, or
in front of this slick two-door, or just behind that crowd of teenage vendors, you know, the ones with
the sullen faces and thick arms and legs.
Easy.
Just do your best, they said.
Of course, your best is not my best, and my best is not your best.
It’s a touchy subject.
But we’ll try you out, see if we like it.
Your best, that is.
Easy.
Canvas 45
And these were the things they first told Eckhard.
He thinks of this as he drives his Ford Aerostar, which still has bullet holes perforating its
side panels, through the cobblestone and dust streets that sit slab-sided and low around the Hotel
Ke’ilu. Horse-drawn carts and clay buildings and raggedy Czech Republic machinery and crowds of
subservients wearing burkas cough past. The old sunken Middle East. Noon. It’s hot and Eckhard
keeps his hands on the wheel. Ten-and-two. Forward motion.
He’s getting the hell out of town.
Kurt thinks he’s coming back; let him think it, let him think whatever he wants, let him even
keep the money from that botched job, because Eckhard is sick of the bitter stuff, is making a hasty
vanishing act.
There’s a photograph taped to the dash board. It’s warped and distorted with water spots.
Those are from when Kurt made him explain who it was in the portrait and Eckhard had ended up
crying like a goddamned titty baby, holding the picture up to his mouth.
Best girl I ever had, he said.
Agnes.
Nympomanic.
Couldn’t help it.
Eckhard crosses an intersection that’s the frontier of a poorer neighborhood, and passes by
the charcoal, charcoal-black remains of a tavern, and he momentarily hits his breaks.
Pitch, soot, burntblackburnt.
Goddamn you, Kurt.
The dilapidation has brought out street life and inspectors, and that woman in the low-cut
red dress Kurt was talking to last night. That Vanya.
This wasn’t why they had come here at all.
Last night Eckhard had watched them as they talked in the bar, alongside all the other occupants that looked like the revolutionaries of Fidel’s Twenty-sixth of July Movement—all of them had
beards and cigars and were talking, bleating, talking. All Eckhard had really wanted was a smoke.
But he had still heard.
You should buy me a drink, Vanya had said to Kurt.
Kurt had smiled and held out a handful of dinar, had folded her fingers back over the banknotes. He leaned in and brushed her slate-colored hair, whispered in her ear as a second drink was
poured and set down next to the first one, which was still full.
Eckhard thought Kurt was like a sailor, floating on an exaggerated erect penis for a mast.
Stupid sex-based decisions.
Vanya had smiled, her lips parted just enough to reveal a crescent moon of teeth, which in
turn parted just enough to let her hiss:
Not unless you’d be willing to do me a favor.
Do me this favor, she said.
She pressed the matchbook into Kurt’s palm.
Eckhard hoped that Kurt had gotten his fill of whatever he was after—the collarbones, the
lips, the smell of water and herb perfume, whatever—because he had probably just blown their
cover.
Nearing a stop sign, he thinks about the time Kurt drank too many wine coolers and went
out and bought weeviled grain, talking and screaming to the street that he wanted pancakes, pancakes, professionally.
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RYAN BRADLEY
It’s full of bugs, Eckhard had said.
Fine, Kurt said. It’s fine. Heat will kill them.
And aren’t you hungry?
And all of it had tasted like unground pepper.
Eckhard thinks all of these things.
Then it happens in an instant: he’s cut off by traffic; a knifing in dreamland.
Eckhard slams on his brakes, narrowly avoiding being hit by a local driving a sun-red Snapper riding lawnmower, and the front calipers of Eckhard’s van squeal in protest. A jarring shock
hammers through the van; Eckhard’s abdomen seizes. A loud, low crack is heard. Eckhard grunts.
The van settles to a stop.
He gives the bastard in front of him the horn.
He feels guilty.
Since the military had started scouring the aisles of the town, they had taken away most
privately owned automobiles; the brass was always thinking about explosives being drilled into the
floorboards, or maybe they were thinking about custom rims, or maybe it was just some of that
vulture shit. Eckhard didn’t know. But the locals were always thinking too, and the entire town had
taken to driving riding lawn mowers around the desert. Kurt had asked him one time where he
thought they had all come from, all these lawn mowers, because the only cars he had seen for sale
were Buick Roadmasters with four hundred thousand miles on them, or that one extra-cab pickup
that had Also sprach Zarathustra permanently jammed into its cassette drive.
Eckhard didn’t know that either.
Pressing down on the accelerator, Eckhard tries to get the van high-stepping again, but the
engine only groans. He tries again, and this time the engine doesn’t stir. He tries again. The van gurgles and spats out the smell of gasoline.
He tries again.
Eckhard keeps trying, his big Black Diamond boots stomping on the pedals, the rubbery,
rotten hoses of the van accomplishing nothing.
He tries again, giggling the keys, shifting the transmission, hitting the steering wheel.
Nothing.
He tries again.
Everything’ll be fine, Eckhard says.
Traffic quickly backs up around the van, and a hundred earnest, foreign voices rise up
around Eckhard like music.
Fine.
Fine.
Eckhard thinks the traffic will have to just settle down and sit in the streets for a while—but
people never like driving alone anyway, right? And the van’ll start, and the other drivers will come up
alongside with their John Deere’s and congratulate Eckhard, slap him on the back. Thanks for keeping us company, they’ll say. Impressing us.
He tries again.
The voices around him get angry, and hands start to beat against the van, rocking it.
The van still won’t start.
He tries again, and is thinking about lowering himself down in the seat and calling a cab
company when he hears sirens start to approach.
Eckhard bites his lower lip, hard.
Canvas 47
He digs his tongue into his cheek.
He checks the rearview mirror.
Rapport wasn’t easy to build with natives here, but Eckhard had tried; he had been training
one kid in particular, Patrick or something, how to be a tour guide, was instructing him in the honest
trade of trinket sellers, peddlers, aubergistes. That wouldn’t help if the police, or the military—fucking psychic abortions, both—caught Eckhard, knew what he was doing here. The military had a way
of putting an indelible mark on everything, even an exotic landscape of golden domed mosques and
sand dunes.
Eckhard opens the glove box, reaches in and pulls out a semi-automatic pistol, then jumps
out of the van, looking stepped on, pooched out; the occasional coordinated jeer hits him, but he’s
used to being scrubbed down, laid out in the coals. It’s hot, smells like iron, gasoline, as Eckhard
winds his way through the crowd, back towards the hotel.
If he can’t drive away from Kurt, then he’ll make sure Kurt goes away—to where? Into solar
flares? Into heat, or Mohammad, to moonlight, or twisted napkins, or just not-life?
Kurt didn’t know the answer to that, either.
He walks toward the Ke’ilu, passing hungry stray dogs with their eyes held apostolically
aloft, his mind set on murder.
III. PREVIOUSLY WITH MITCH
DISCUSSED: Hotel Construction, Terrorism and 7-Eleven, Paint Colors, The Fine Art of Burglary.
Mitch had been casing them both for a while.
He had heard them say that they had done some trafficking, some extorting, had been in a
few sticky patches, had a bad deal that left a client disemboweled, a van shot up, and several bags of
currency torn and borrowed. Borrowed.
Mitch had heard most of these things from the wax-paper thin walls that enveloped their
room as he made his rounds delivering towels and trays of Turkish coffee through the hotel.
But then, Mitch heard many things in his profession, things unable to hold their own weight
when delivered through the echoes and interference of the nightly news-shots. One evening, after
attending to a headachy travel agent, he had stood staring at the faded hotel tapestry when he heard
a room scheming about combining a large hadron collider with a 7-Eleven Big Gulp. It’d go off like
the big bang, they said. It’d turn New York or London or Helena, Montana, into pure polystyrene—a
modern Pompeii of plastic. That’s what they said. Mitch just didn’t find the terrorism productive:
in an age of recession, global climate change, tourism, and Doritos, he didn’t want to sit around
and think of ways to destroy. If he could, he would’ve made a Day-Glo bomb, exploding it over the
capital cities of the world, painting them in aurora pink, Saturn yellow fluorescent, carbon arc torch
oranges, and top coats of blues and reds and viridian. Everyone would be swirling and sniffling after
it happened, and would stop their boundless investigations of celebrity and political knowledge to
look, to feel. At any rate, Mitch informed the authorities of the room’s plan.
Which is what Mitch almost did when he first heard Kurt and Eckhard talking.
There, on the second floor, he would have said.
He could have made inside jokes about it later.
All of those things could’ve been, like worlds inside different atmospheres, if it wasn’t for
Mitch’s brother going through chemotherapy. If it wasn’t for needing money, capital, escape hatches.
And after that, breaking in and stealing—wait, maybe not stealing exactly, maybe borrowing—was
for the first time doubtlessly considered.
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RYAN BRADLEY
That afternoon Mitch had knocked on Kurt’s door.
There was silence, so he tried a couple more times, had felt the pressure in the back of his
head from adrenaline and blood and nerves. Hacking at it.
He had stepped back from the door, fished around in his pocket, looking for the key he had
swiped from the front desk.
No, not swiped.
Borrowed.
Mitch leaned against the wall.
What if one of them had a gun? Or maybe not a gun: maybe a pool cue, or a knife, a used car
salesman, anything persuasive.
It took nearly give minutes to get his courage back up.
Finally, he crouched down in front of the door and dug in the key
He worked the deadbolt over.
The door started to open, wiggling free from the latch with a small whine. Mitch pushed on
the door with his weight.
And it was then that Kurt yanked the door open the rest of the way.
Mitch lost his balance, stumbled. Kurt came down on top of him, using his fists and knees.
It was downhill from there.
And, Mitch noted, the bastard had a gun.
IV. CURRENT GAINFUL EMPLOYMENT
DISCUSSED: Goodbyes.
Kurt wakes up with the thought that perhaps he should be more positive about his situation
here. For balance. Yawning, the light from the goddamned desert starts to leak through the tissue of
his eyelids. He wonders momentarily how long it took for that instinct to evolve—how many years
have to pass before mongrels and strays have something in common with somebody like—well, hell,
himself, or maybe Prince Edward or something. Yawning again, he opens his eyes to see that Arab
trying to clumsily pick up the Smith and Wesson from the end table.
The closet door is open.
Mitch’s chair is tipped over, and the ropes are strewn across the floor.
It’s the last in a succession of blows.
Kurt leaps at Mitch. He grabs his wrist and twists.
Mitch yanks back. The pistol is pulled between the two of them.
It’s a delicate act.
The pistol retorts, firing a slug that explodes into the advertising circulars, sending charred
pieces of glossy newsprint flying.
The sound is deafening. Cordite fills the air.
Mitch raises his hands to covers his eyes, and Kurt bends the pistol free.
Eckhard has made it outside, and is covered in sweat and dust from slogging past the display
windows and the salmon-colored clay-sided walls and the crowds of the burka-clad, and is trying to
comfort Patrick or Perry or Phillip, saying, I hope Kurt is proud of himself and yes—yes, you’ll get
your money, and that looks like a nasty bruise—when the shot goes off. Eckhard pushes Perry to the
side and pulls out his pistol. He opens the hotel door to find Kurt and some local struggling, and it
looks like Kurt has the drop on the guy with his gun arm. Eckhard aims, and tries to remember not to
go too fast, but they keep squirming around, and he tries to remember his breath control, inhale and
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RYAN BRADLEY
exhale, and sight alignment, and trigger squeeze and—
Eckhard’s pistol makes a thunderclap.
Both Mitch and Kurt spin.
Mitch dives to the corner of the room.
Kurt stumbles backwards, the hollow-tipped bullet exploded in his belly. The old rotary Zenith television is adjar, and Kurt can see his reflection in its gray screen, can see all the old nastiness
of his gut spilling out.
It’s a delicate thing.
Kurt tries to think of a hundred foreign, warm bodies dragging over the dirt, skittering on
the underside of leaves, where the sunlight is dimmed to a velvet and dogs run.
Kurt can remember that, before the Middle East, on the big hunting trips he’d check all the
fluids in the pickup: the gasoline, the oil, the antifreeze, the transmission, the brakes. None of them
would be a drop low.
Kurt raises the Smith and Wesson. The revolver erupts.
None of them a drop low.
Eckhard’s head jerks as if slapped. There’s a neat line of blood.
Kurt collapses in a heap, his revolver skittering off to the side. Eckhard follows.
Mitch looks at Kurt, sees his mouth gasping with a wondrous pink foam, a hole requiring
darkness like a star. Mitch looks at the revolver on the floor—a tiny mechanical animal made to
sing—and thinks about picking it up, finishing the old savagery. But some instincts have evolved
more than others, and Mitch turns to walk away from the scene, perhaps calling the authorities. He
leaves the door open, and if anyone took it into consideration, they might at some point see Perry
walk into the hotel room, leaving with several bags of foreign currency—heading outside to where a
riding lawn mower waits, driven by a woman in a low-cut red dress. If anyone took it into consideration, they might see several of the dogs from the outside making their way in, heading to the apartment with their red tongues, strong and good, slobbering out of their souls.
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ZACH SAULS
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EFFIGY
Today is your thirteenth birthday and your father has picked you up from school in the
purple minivan. Your friends are excited about your party tomorrow because you said something
about having a piñata. A kid named Zack Duncan had a donkey piñata at his party a few months ago.
It was a big hit. You were there. But you are still unsure about the whole piñata idea for fear of being
labeled a copy cat. And you don’t even have a piñata yet. But the piñata and name calling are the least
of your worries.
Since turning thirteen you have noticed things as if for the first time. Like girls. This is most
noticeable because you hardly ever looked at girls before your thirteenth birthday, and suddenly you
can’t help but stare. You haven’t kissed a girl yet, but you are hoping at your party, in your room, away
from the chatter of everybody outside. For this reason you invited Edie Carver, a popular girl in your
class. She’s not the most popular. Maybe in the Top 15, at least. You are hoping this scores you points
by having her at your party, and you are hoping your class ranking improves if you can get to first
base with her. Second seems like a long shot, though you’ve heard things. There are other noticeable
things too. You have noticed the changes happening to your body, things you’ve learned in seventh
hour Health. Descending testicles. Arm pit hair. Pubic hair. Broadening of shoulders. The dancing
pitch of your voice when talking to girls. Morning wood. These things are important, though they are
nothing in comparison to the changes happening to your father.
Your father has been through two divorces—one from your mother and one from himself.
The divorce from your mother happened in part because your father’s personal divorce. You can
remember that day in sixth grade so well, coming home from school and dropping your backpack
inside the door. It was quiet, though. At that time you couldn’t remember when it had been so quiet
before. Maybe at night. But at night there were always crickets and sirens, and the rough sound of
the wind grating itself against the window screen. Since then it has been the quietest day of your life.
Coming home and entering the house was like being deaf for a moment. All sound seemed vacuumed from the carpet, the furniture, the appliances buzzing in the kitchen, the entire house. You
could hear faint weeping drifting down the hallway from your parents’ bedroom, and you thought for
a moment maybe somebody in the family had died, maybe a great aunt far away in Michigan you had
met one time as an infant. You crept down the hallway as if you had broken into the house and didn’t
want to be heard, stepping around every possible squeak in the floor. The door was partially open,
enough for you to see inside. You could see your father sitting in a chair, and what you remember the
most was the way he was sitting. He had his legs crossed, knee-over-knee, and his fingers were laced
together, cupping the top kneecap. Your father wasn’t crying. You watched and listened. “I don’t see
what the big deal is,” your father said. “I was only trying it on.” Hearing this made you notice what
your father was wearing. He had on your mother’s spring dress, the one with colorful splotches of
yellow and orange. You weren’t sure what was happening, but you knew you had seen it before in a
movie with Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes. You stepped away from the partially cracked-open
door and went to your room, confused about a lot of things. You were confused about your own body,
as it had begun to change and develop. Most of all you were confused as to why your father was wearing your mother’s clothes. But how your father dresses is the least of your worries.
Since coming home that quiet day in sixth grade your father has undergone several operations to become your mother. He no longer is a man in the cock-and-balls sense he always talked
about. He throws back his head everyday and swallows handfuls of pills to accelerate his development. You are both becoming other people, you into a young adult male and your father into a
middle-aged woman. The problem is the pills aren’t working as properly as they should, leaving your
father with a partial mustache and beard he still has to shave. It grows back fast, leaving his face
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looking gray and dirty hours after he shaves. Your father grows out his fingernails and paints them
on a weekly basis. You wonder about this from the hallway, your father reclining in his leather Barcalounger, his fingers fanned on a thigh, dabbing each nail delicately with clear lacquer, pursing his
lips to blow on them.
Though your father is becoming your mother your real unchanged mother is so so sorry, so
goddamn sorry she left you with your father. That day you came home was the day your mother left
and stayed in a hotel two towns away where she now lives. She gave you the choice of living with
her, she begged you, but you couldn’t bear to leave your friends and what little reputation you had
at school. You were twelve going on thirteen at the time, and this was the first really big life decision
you made. You stayed with your father because he was simply your father and you still had so much
to learn.
But your father is pissing you off. He believes you should do this and that for your party. In
the purple minivan, on the way home from school, your father says something about purple and
pink bunting covering the snack tables, some balloons, maybe a clown. He knows a guy. How many
kids have clowns at parties these days? Any? “It’s a dying tradition,” your father says. “Dad,” you say,
and your father says, “Carol. Call me Carol.” You think it’s ridiculous your father makes you call him
Carol, but names are the least of your worries. You have things to say to your father, but you can’t
speak after noticing your father is dressed in a purple blouse and beige skirt and dark sunglasses that
seem to wrap around his face. He looks like your grandmother. Everybody knows about your father’s
transition, and it embarrasses you at school. You are unsure anybody will even attend your party,
but from asking around today you are sure there will be at least twenty or thirty kids there, give or
take. You look at your father. You look at his thick hands hanging over the steering wheel like heavy
drapes, the purple nail polish. You want to laugh at him. You want to clutch your stomach and bend
into yourself like a folding chair and laugh. You want to tell him how ridiculous he’s being and mock
him. But you haven’t laughed since that quiet day in sixth grade, laughing at the idea of your father
in women’s clothing. You stopped laughing after you knew your father was serious. Not being able to
laugh is the least of your worries, though it’s right up there.
Your father parks the purple minivan in the driveway. You get out and take the shortest route
to the door, your backpack on your shoulder to conceal part of your face. Your father is wearing heals,
maybe the second or third time he’s ever worn heels because he’s terrible at wearing them. You can
hear the heels clicking against the pavement. You can feel the neighbors across the street scrutinizing the scene in the driveway. Your father is not a fit man and the blouse and skirt does nothing to
help his figure. To people not knowing about your sex-changed father they might think your husky
aunt from out of town now lives with you, has a mustache, and takes you to school every morning.
You finally get inside, feel sheltered and secure, safe, and drop your backpack by the door.
You begin to pace frantically in the living room. There are things you want to tell your father but
are unsure of how to say them. What was the vocabulary list for the week? Were there any words to
describe this moment? You haven’t been very good at expressing yourself since that quiet day in sixth
grade. Third hour Art has been horrid. Not being able to express yourself is the least of your worries.
You feel you are about to crack under the weight of the first day as a teenager. You calculated there
are only 2,556 days left until you are twenty years old. You believe every day won’t be this bad. But the
pressure will always be there as long as your father is around, and as long as there are people to tell
you how much you look like your father when he was your age. You want to tell your father to stay
away from the party. After all you didn’t actually invite him. Carol invited himself.
The front door opens and your father steps inside. He begins fanning his face with a hand.
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He says something about hot flashes and glistening. “Dad,” you say, and your father says, “Carol. Call
me Carol.”
“Dad.”
“Carol.”
You realize you cannot have a conversation with your father. Having a conversation with
your father is what you miss the most. You can no longer have the meaningful father and son relationship you feel you once had. You can remember evenings with your father in the backyard, tossing
a baseball back and forth. You remember how it was just you and your father at football games and
times on the lake. Your mother didn’t condone violent sports activities. But your father was there,
cheering, and he was there after every game. You remember when he had a good job, before the
transition, when he could afford to pay for things your mother wouldn’t allow. This is probably one
of the reasons you stayed with your father. He bought you all the video game systems and nearly any
game you wanted. You were somewhat popular because of this. Classmates always spent the night.
Now you are unsure you even have a father anymore. Your father is now a microwave salesman, and
he can’t sell anything. You wonder why this could be. Either your father is a poor salesman or Carol is
ruining sales. But your father’s sales record is the least of your worries.
You look at your father. He’s reaching for his head, grasping the black wig and pulling it off.
He shaves his head to wear the wig correctly. You can see the beads of sweat leaking through the top
of his head, sliding like avalanches down the sides of his face. The person in front of you looks nothing like the father you remember. Aren’t father’s supposed to be manly? Aren’t fathers and sons supposed to take each other’s sides in arguments with the mother? Your father looks more like a cancer
patient. You wonder where it is your father has gone.
You step in front of your father and grab your backpack and head to your room. You have
things to do before your party tomorrow. You still haven’t decided if you want a piñata. You can make
one if you have to. Most of all you haven’t decided on what you will tell your father or how you will
say it.
Good morning. It is the day of your party. You wake up and feel twice as old. Being a teenager is exhausting. Or it is because you had a late night covering clothes hanger skeletons with paper-mâché.
The pieces are dry now and ready to be painted and assembled. It’s probably the best thing you have
ever created. It is sitting in the corner, half your size, staring at you. It has a humanoid shape, modeled after you. You stare at it for a while, wondering what colors to use, what candy to fill it with.
Your father is in the kitchen making breakfast. You smell it. There is music playing. It
sounds like Gloria Estefan. You get out of bed but stop. You notice your room is more girly than you
last remember. There are sports posters of your favorite baseball players on the walls. The shelves
that line the wall opposite your bed hold up valuable baseball cards, memorabilia cards with pieces
of bats and jerseys, things you have collected. But you look beneath all this to the bottom shelf.
There are two stuffed animals leaning against each other. One is a pink bear, the other a purple
giraffe. How did you miss these? You kneel in front of the shelf and pluck both toys from their spot.
You look at them, examine them in your hands.
Then your door opens and closes. It opens again and in comes your father, backing his way
into your room, into your space. He is carrying a cookie sheet with a plate of toast and scrambled
eggs and bacon. There is a glass of orange juice and milk and a bowl of cereal. Then there is a tall
vase with a couple of red roses stuck inside. You don’t mind the food, but what the hell? Your father
turns to you.
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“You’re already awake,” Carol says. “This bacon smells horrible.” He sets the tray on your desk
near the door. “Oh, I see you’re playing with the toys. You’re not too old for those things yet.”
You don’t know what to say. Since becoming a teenager you are noticing so many things it
drives you crazy. Like your father’s stuck-on eyelashes. You look at them. They are enormous and
black, big as fanned peacock feathers. You’re afraid they may fall off into the cereal and choke you.
You want to laugh, but you can’t. Why can’t you laugh? You also notice your father’s head and the red
towel wrapped around it. He’s wearing a woman’s robe that is too short for him, stopping mid-thigh.
If there were any fruit stuck in that towel your father would look like Lucille Ball being Carmen Miranda.
“Oh, you’ve made your piñata,” Carol says.
You still don’t know what to say. You stand there, holding the stuff animals as if you are looking at some new creature. You can’t remember ever seeing your father like this, even though you’ve
lived with him ever since the transition. You’re either afraid or shocked this person backed into your
room, into your space, and is now creeping around, admiring the pale pieces of your piñata.
“Don’t,” you manage to say, rushing to shield your father from viewing the piñata. You do
this as if your father is some art critic preparing to dissect every technique, every strip of paper used
to create the piñata.
“What is it?” Carol says, peeking around you.
“It’s going to be a donkey,” you say, but you are lying. Even you have no idea of what those
pieces will become. For all you know you might assembled them they way Picasso paints, an arm attached to the head, and nobody will have any idea what it is. You haven’t created it yet. Right now it
looks like you, and you might as well create yourself and hang it from a tree and bash it.
You father shrugs, turns and leaves. He has a swagger as he leaves. A swagger of all things.
He walks one foot directly in front of the other, the way models walk. You aren’t sure where you father is, but you know that you never want to go there.
So you sit down on the floor and begin assembling the pieces of the piñata. It’s a delicate
process. You don’t want to dent or destroy the torso and limbs. The torso is the biggest part, hollow,
ready to be filled with candy. The arms and legs dangle from their sockets. The head is large and
leans to one side as if the neck is broken. You finish connecting every appendage and set to work
painting it.
As you are painting you realize how hands-on you’ve become. You’re a whiz at paper-mâché.
You try to remember the last time your father was hands-on. Before Carol, your father had the ability to fix anything. He could make things out of wood. If an appliance blew a coil, your father could
be counted on to fix it. It saved having to buy new things. Your father made tables and chairs. He
could upholster. But since becoming Carol, your father can no longer fix anything. The skills he had
seemed to have died with the removal of his penis. Now, whenever something breaks, he will call a
friend to come over or an actual repairman, something he would have never done before. He hated
hearing “repairman.” You can tell if something breaks. You will hear Carol let out several frustrated
sighs then begin to whine and ask herself, “Why isn’t this working?” Carol will call you into the kitchen or living room, wherever the broken item, and ask you to get it working. But you’re not hands-on
when it comes to electrical things like televisions and blenders. Your father never taught you anything like that. You remember the one time you did learn something, though you quickly forgot it
because you did not understand circuits. Your father had taken apart a radio because the speaker
wasn’t working. There was a soldering gun and solder on the kitchen table and your father with the
cracked open radio on his lap, picking at the circuit board with a screwdriver. You stood next to him,
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watching his hands. His hands were dark and hairy. They worked like a surgeon’s, picking at green
and yellow wires, positioning things just right. He was scraping solder off the green plastic circuit
board, positioning the splayed wire into the connection. “Here,” he said, “hold the solder right here,”
and you held the spool of solder so it was touching the wire. Your father took the solder gun and
clicked it, held the hot tip against the solder and made it drip onto the wire and seal the connection.
You and your father were working together. You and your father were fixing this radio just so the both
of you could listen to a baseball game because it wasn’t on TV that night. He explained things to you
while he soldered. He said the speaker has a magnet and coil of wire and electricity causes vibrations,
creating sound. Your father was a man, and he was teaching you to be a man. But you forgot everything. You forgot what he said about circuits and the power of electricity.
The piñata is coming along great. Your painting abilities have improved since taking art
classes. You have painted the limbs the color of skin. You are working on the face, the eyes and
mouth. The piñata looks almost cartoony. It’s probably not a piñata anymore, you think. You paint
on a dress, one like Edie Carver wore to a dance last fall, with orange and red splotches. You paint red
lips and short eyelashes. It looks like Edie Carver the more you work on it. Then you take black paint
and ruin it. You paint a mustache and beard, and the piñata no longer looks like a piñata but more
like an effigy of your father.
A couple hours before the party, your father takes you to Dollar Tree to buy candy. Your father is wearing a knee-length maroon skirt and ivory blouse and a five o’clock shadow just after noon.
He said something about being balmy outside and put on something cooler. His purse is hanging off
his arm. You head for the candy aisle while your father browses a rack of plastic jewelry.
You and your father come to Dollar Tree often. Your father buys groceries here, bath products, and plastic jewelry. Since microwave sales have slipped things have become tight. You no longer
get stacks of video games each week. Around the time of Carol’s birth you noticed the quality of
lunches and dinners dropped off a cliff. You and your father ate vast amounts of meat, packages of
steaks stacked in the freezer. You enjoyed it, sitting across the table from your father, both of you
with a knife and fork in hand, sawing away at a slab of muscle. Now you eat
canned meat and boxes of macaroni and cheese because everything is a dollar at Dollar Tree.
In the candy aisle you grab one package each of the popular candy, like Snickers and Reese’s
and Butterfinger. Kids at your school don’t go for the off-brand, imitation candy. When your father
finds you in the aisle you have an armful of candy. Your father has an armful of blue and pink plastic
earrings.
“That will melt,” Carol says. “You can’t put chocolate inside a piñata and hang it in the sun.
Put that back and get this.” Carol holds up a 50% More bag of candy corn.
You are so pissed.
“This is what I want,” you say.
“It’s going to melt,” Carol says, and takes the Snickers and Butterfingers from your arms. You
could throw a fit, stomp and scream that you should have what you want because it’s your party. But
you risk becoming your own version of Carol, and this is what frightens you more than anything.
You give in, let Carol take the candy from your hands and replace it with candy corn and
Yum Yuppers and bubble gum hard as concrete.
“These don’t melt,” Carol says.
You realize your father is beyond repair. There’s no coming back. Before the operation he
would have let you have anything you want. Carol won’t let you have a thing. The piñata will suck
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now. Edie Carver won’t even let you into the batter’s box. Your party will probably be a disaster.
Later in the afternoon, just before people are to start arriving, you’re in your room, cleaning.
You make sure everything it stacked just right on your shelves and all your clothes are put away, out
of sight. Carol is in the kitchen putting together party favors. You don’t care what Carol does. You realize now how much things matter when you’re a teenager. You didn’t think it was a big deal you had
to fill the piñata with cheap candy. But it got into your skin, made the back of your neck itch, made
your eyelids twitch. You have seven years to go.
The piñata is covered with a white sheet. You don’t want anybody seeing it yet. Especially
Carol. You wonder what people will think. But you’re done caring. Today feels like the worst day of
your life, like that quiet day in sixth grade.
You try remembering more about that day. You think hard, make your brain hurt trying.
You can remember the way your father was sitting, your mother on the edge of the bed with her face
in her hands. Your father’s face had no expression. You couldn’t tell if he was upset or happy. But
his eyes gave him away. You squinted, trying to see them better, but you were too far away. Still, it
was like he had no eyes. He didn’t blink, his eyes didn’t move. He must have been looking at darkness. Your father was somewhere else, his eyes distant and void. After all, he was only trying it on,
and maybe he was looking through somebody else’s eyes, like you, seeing everything old like it was
new. You think about what power that has, to look at everything differently, the way everything has
changed, how everything will continue to change.
Carol knocks on your door. You’ve been standing in the middle of your room. Carol says
some kids have arrived. How long have you been standing there? You walk past Carol to the front
door. The kids that have arrived are nobody special. Some chubby blond kid and a girl who isn’t Edie
Carver. You can’t remember their names. There’s too much going on. You tell them to go through
the house to the backyard. Carol ambushes them from the kitchen with two purple party favor sacks
decorated with glitter. They’re not sure what to do. Carol has a visible beard. They’ve never met her,
so it’s like taking candy from a stranger.
In the backyard Carol has managed to borrow a few picnic tables and decorated them with
purple bunting. It’s sunny outside. There’s a small card table with a punch bowl and plastic cups.
There is a small stereo for music and dancing, though you have no desire to dance. There’s a separate
table for gifts. The chubby kid and girl didn’t bring anything. Your party is off to a great start.
Carol steps onto the patio behind you and says, “Your mother is here.”
You go inside. Carol disappears to the kitchen. Your mother is standing in the living room,
holding boxes of presents wrapped in blue paper. God, did she bring presents, enough to fill the
table alone. She sets them on the floor and hugs you. “You’ve gotten so big,” she says. “You’re growing
up.” She keeps hugging, squeezing you like a stuffed toy. You know she’s trying to make up for the
past year, leaving you, trying to be a part of your life more than ever. But you don’t care anymore than
you will tomorrow. You think living with your mother will probably be like living with Carol.
Soon, other kids start arriving with their parents and the present table begins to have more
than just your mother’s gifts on it. Carol is handing out party favors as the kids file through the kitchen to the backyard. Each kid takes a sack in their fingertips, unsure of what to do with it.
Outside, the chubby kid is just now opening his sack. He takes out a small square of something, unwraps it, takes a bite, and spits it out. “It tastes like soap,” he says. He removes other things
from the sack—bottles of hand lotion and shampoo and creams. “No candy?” the kid says and crumples the sack on the ground.
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You feel yourself wanting to vomit, as if your stomach is doing jumping-jacks inside you.
There’s maybe ten kids here, nobody popular enough to win you any points when Monday gets here.
Where’s Edie Carver? She’s supposed to be here. You’re sure of it. You’ve been planning for it, planning to ask Edie Carver to your room, tell her you like her so much, that you like like her. You know
this will be a shock to her because you haven’t spoken to Edie Carver for more than two sentences.
Carol baked a cake this morning with your name on it in purple icing. What’s with purple?
It’s not your favorite color. But you’re unsure if Carol knows your favorite color. She’s finishing it in
the kitchen, carefully lathering it in light purple icing. Carol calls it lavender. You know you don’t
want to eat any cake for fear of turning into Carol. You have your reasons—you’re thirteen now.
You’ve already seen so many things.
Happy Birthday. Now your party can really begin. Edie Carver is here. She arrived while you
were greeting guests in the backyard. Everybody was wishing you Happy Birthday. You notice Edie
Carver opening the door to the patio. She looks elegant, you think. She’s wearing a dress to your
party, a light dress because it’s so hot out. You like how it looks on her, the way the dress stops just
above her knees, how the color yellow makes her glow.
Edie has a present for you. She’s holding a light blue bag with white tissue paper sticking
from the top. She moves toward you, and the way her dress swings makes your stomach trip over
itself and tumble down a hillside.
You like like her, and you want to tell her. So you ask her to your room. You’ve got something
really cool to show her, you say, and she goes with you.
You walk her past Carol sticking candles in the cake. She’s humming to herself. You turn
down the hall and you feel your eyelid twitch. It feels almost like that day in sixth grade, down the
hallway to find your father in your mother’s clothes. You shut your bedroom door behind you, and
Edie Carver wants to know what it is you have to show her. She’s smiling. Her smile, you think,
stretches from one end of the horizon to the other like the arc of a rainbow. It’s so big and bright you
could die now and forget your thirteenth birthday.
“What’s that?” Edie Carver says, looking at the piñata covered with the sheet.
You’re afraid to show her. The piñata is nothing like Zack Duncan’s donkey piñata, which
she probably liked more than she will like your piñata. But you so her anyway because you’re thirteen
now, and you need to feel things out for yourself. You pull the sheet off.
“Cool,” she says. “What is it?”
You tell her it’s a piñata for your party, but stop there. You don’t tell her you think it looks
like your father, and like you at the same time.
“I love you,” you say, and reach for Edie Carver’s round face. You feel her face in your hands,
the way they fit her face you think you were meant for each other, and you kiss her. It’s awkward because you’ve never done this. You’re trying things out. Your lips move like a horse’s, flopping against
hers.
Edie Carver pushes you away, but it feels like she’s pulling into you, and you believe more
than ever you’re scoring points, that on Monday morning everybody will be looking at your differently. You believe you’re a man now.
“Gross,” Edie Carver says. She almost screams it. She pushes you again and you fall against
the wall. She runs from your room, probably to tell everybody how much you suck at kissing.
If you could see yourself right now, if you could look into the cracked open door the way
you looked in on your parents, you would think you look like your father because you do. You have
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no expression and your eyes are void and distant, staring off at something. And Edie Carver just ran
from you the way your mother ran from your father, as if she just caught you trying on her dress. You
feel yourself becoming more like your father everyday. In a way, you think, you’re just like your father,
but you’re more like an effigy, just a crude cartoon drawing of the man you’re most likely to become.
Happy Birthday.
Carol yells from the kitchen. She says the party can’t start without you. You wish it would.
You want everybody to leave, but you think you can salvage this day.
You grab the sheet-wrapped piñata by the throat, carrying it over your shoulder like a dead ghost.
You walk down the hallway. It feels like a death march, like the walk before an execution. You stop
at the closet, take an old jump rope and broom from the closet. You break the broom handle in half.
You’re sure Edie Carver is outside telling everybody what happened. She’ll probably never speak to
you again. Monday will be so awkward.
You’re standing at the door to the patio, the weight of the paper mâché and paint weighing on your
shoulder. Everybody is lined up outside like a gauntlet. Edie Carver is wiping her lips. Your mother
is holding a camera in front of her face. Carol is holding your cake, your name in purple cursive. The
chubby kid is eying the cake. Everybody is looking at you.
You step onto the patio like stepping onto the moon for the first time. Your first real steps as a man
are important, enormous. You walk through everybody and they start singing. Carol lights the candles. You’re looking at the tree in the backyard, the low branch to hang the piñata from. You yank the
sheet off and tie the piñata to the branch and stand next to it, holding half the broom in your hand.
Carol goes from smiling to a flatline.
You don’t say anything. Since living with Carol the past year you have lost your voice. You
haven’t had a say in anything. This is the moment where you can finally tell your father, and Carol,
how you really feel because today revolves around you. You take a washcloth from your pocket and
tie it around your head, covering your eyes.
“Not yet,” some kid yells, but you take up the stick and swing.
You miss.
You begin to laugh. For the first time since that quiet day in sixth grade you’re laughing. It’s
dark behind the blindfold and you’re laughing. You’re laughing at how ridiculous it is your father is
a woman. You’re laughing at yourself for missing the piñata, laughing with everybody else now. It’s a
relief to laugh, as if all the weight of the world has rolled off your shoulders and splashed into water.
You’re yourself now, and at the same time you’ve become somebody else. You aren’t sure who, but you
know it’s not your father because you no longer have a father. Wherever he is you don’t miss him. His
absence gives you the opportunity to create yourself because any clues as to the man you might have
become are lost with your father, lost to Carol, lost as you begin another swing.
Canvas 59
SAW HORSE
Canvas 60
SAM PERKINS
BY THE BOOK
SUSAN ZION
“Baby’s First Year.” That’s the book I’d been looking for. I pulled the pink satin book out
of the dusty oak bookcase and sat down in the brown and gold plaid easy chair next to the south
window. I had the house all to myself. My daughter was getting married in a few months and I had
orders to find pictures of her for the slide show that would be shown at the reception.
There, pasted in the front of the book was her pink-and-white baby announcement,
trimmed with a pink satin bow at the top. “Lily Belle Benson—born May 19th 1985—6 ½ lbs, 19
inches long.” Underneath the announcement was her first baby picture taken at hospital, a tiny mass
of curly gold hair wrapped in a soft pink blanket.
Before she was born, we took classes to know how to care for our baby girl. We took classes
after she was born to make sure we would be the best parents we could. Everything by the book for
our girl. That was a discipline I had learned at the academy. Follow the rules.
I wish life were a textbook. When I was a rookie at the academy, I learned training procedures are the foundation for becoming a good firefighter. Follow the book when checking air tanks,
mask, helmet, chainsaw, axe, boots, gloves and turnout gear. Follow the book when going into a fire.
Fire is distorting. Fire makes you lose your way. Know where your partner is at all times. I learned to
trust what I learned in the book and not to try and fight fire by what I think I see.
When I entered the academy I wanted to be the perfect firefighter. I would save the day,
be the hero. Six years on the job had changed me. I no longer saw each fire as a chance to help my
fellow man. Instead, I saw people who were careless. People who expected me to clean up after their
mistakes. I saw needless deaths—needless waste.
Why is this? Why are people so careless? Why are lives taken when most fires can be prevented? The pain and agony of fire victims forever alters their lives by destruction. Why does God
allow this to happen? Now, I do my job and go home to my family. Live today. Tomorrow you may
die. At least, that was my philosophy until the summer Lily turned seven.
It was a hot June morning. I was sleeping soundly when the thunder woke me. I decided to
get up and get ready for work. I’d slept at home that night and was going into the station that morning to work a 48-hour shift. As I looked out the south bedroom window, lightning danced across
the sky. An ear-splitting clap of thunder shook the windows. My slumbering spouse slept on. How
could anyone sleep through that racket?
A white streak hit the house next door. Smoke mushroomed over the roof and sparks began
to fly. There was a bright glow in the kitchen.
“Jaime!” I yelled, “call 911. The Benson’s house is on fire!” Jaime sat straight.
“Lily’s over there, she stayed for a sleepover,” he said. I felt the adrenaline kick. I’d slept in
my cut off sweats that night, so I put on my work boots and grabbed my gloves.
Carolyn Benson was on the porch screaming, “The girls are up there!” I opened the window
and yelled, “I’m coming over, stay outside.” My heart was beating 200 miles per hour. My kid was up
there. My baby. Carolyn was waving her arms up and down like a seagull trying to take off.
“Get them out, “she screamed.
“They’re going to be okay,” I said. “The fire department is on the way, but I’ll have them out
before they get here.”
I carefully opened the front door. The house was starting to fill with thick, black smoke, so I
dropped to the floor and crawled towards the bottom of the stairs. The air was filled with the smoke
of burning insulation. The crackling of short circuits sputtered throughout the rooms. Sparks were
flying. I wondered what electrical fire was racing behind the walls.
My eyes scanned from side to side, looking for any signs of erupting fire. I crawled up six
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BY THE BOOK
SUSAN ZION
steps to the landing way—then climbed eight more steps, the smoke right behind me. The flames
shot up the back stairwell. A sheet of flames stood at the end of the hall. Rhythmic waves of heat
came closer. Thick inky blackness floated over me, stinging my eyes. I wished I had my air mask.
There was Jaycee’s bedroom door. I slowly opened the door and stood halfway up. I could
see two small forms on the bed, my Lily and her best friend. They were unconscious, but alive as
their bodies twitched, reacting to the heat. I made my way towards them. The smoke was getting
thicker. How could I do this without my partner? On the wall was a melting picture of Jesus standing in front of a door. Underneath were the words “Knock, and the door will be open unto you—ask
and you will receive.” It had been a long time since I’d believed in God. The only thing I could believe in was my knowledge and my ability to use it.
The flames were jumping up two sides of the mattress and circling around to the third. The
girls were in the center. I’d never read the rules for this situation. I dropped on my knees. “God,
help me. Get these girls out safely.” I couldn’t do this alone. I felt a surge. Energy flowed through
my body. I wasn’t. I put an arm around each girl, bear-hug position, and pulled them off the bed.
The flames were licking the other side of the mattress. Smoke was rolling over the bed. They slipped
out of my arms because my skin was melting. The curtains were melting. The room was melting.
I wrapped my hands around each girl’s wrists. Lily slipped out of my grip. She was breathing, barely.
“Lord,” I muttered, “I need your help. Help me.” The crackling ceiling was rolling with
flames. Soon it would collapse. I was woozy with heat—like I was drunk. Can’t stop. Not now. I
didn’t. I grabbed Lily’s wrists again. Strength filled my melting arms and I pulled both girls off the
bed.
There was more fire than smoke. I saw a clear spot in the doorway. I put Jaycee over Lily and
bent down as close to them as I could. I used myself as a shield as a I pulled them through the burning doorway. Flames bit me as I pulled them out of the bedroom into the hall. The skin on my back
slid down my pants. I was close to passing out, each breath heavy and my tongue thick with black
soot. I couldn’t swallow. I was suffocating at the top of the stairs.
The fire had started down one railing; it would jump to the other side soon.
“Please help me,” I whispered. Down eight steps, the landing was getting weak. I heard
sirens. Red and blue lights flashed. Six more steps to go. I saw lights. I heard voices say, “We’re
coming up. Stay where you are.” There were my buddies, from company No. 60, at the bottom of the
stairs.
I don’t remember much after except lying inside the ambulance, hearing my husband Jamie
say “Amy, they’re going to be alright. The girls are going to make it. Lily’s conscious. She wants to
know how her mommy is.” I’d always had a partner, if only I’d asked.
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DOUBLE NEGATIVE
BRANDON PAXTON
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KEVLAR
You never forget the first dead body you see. I’m not talking about great aunt Midge, whom
the mortician painted to make it appear that she had lain down in a pine box for a twenty-minute
cat nap. No, I’m talking about a body that has been neglected for days, weeks, even months. They
say you never forget your first lay either, but I’ll be damned if it ain’t easier for me to recall that day
in Kosovo than it is to summon up Trish’s apartment and the scent of vanilla incense covering up the
smells of passion. What that says about me, I don’t know, but I have seen a slew of flesh flicks—willingly, mind you—but have never gone out of my way to see another corpse. Unless you count great
aunt Midge.
The setting was Kosovo, May. I had been in this third world country since after the New
Years, having volunteered for the deployment. Now I’m not some gung-ho-send-me-off-to-battlefor-the-damn-glory type of fellow. I just wanted the hazardous duty pay. And it was a wise choice on
my part. When a soldier is deployed he spends nothing—all his meals are free—and he gets a little
extra monetary portion from Uncle Sam for the prospect of getting shot at. All a soldier must buy
during a deployment are the basic toiletry items: shampoo, soap, shaving cream, and all that other
hygienic shit. The wise soldier deploys as often as possible so he can leave the military with a nest
egg, and I fancied myself as wiser than the average MP.
My team consisted of the leader Sergeant Hollis, who had the wingspan of a damn 747. He
always wondered why none of us could keep up with him on the track. For every stride the lanky mutant took, I took three. The driver was Specialist Livingstone, a young man of unrivalled ambition.
Our unit had a two-hour layover in Ireland and he checked the country of shamrocks and potatoes
off of his self-pleasuring list. The assistant gunner was Private Morton, whose fear of community
showers was a test of our gag reflexes. His body odor, a stench like stale corn chips, was torture in
that Humvee. Fortunately for me, I was the gunner; my head was thrust out to the elements, courtesy
the gunner’s hatch. I smelled the untainted Kosovo countryside and not Morton’s triple-overtime
B.O. I was a simple Midwestern boy with Midwestern morals and J.G. Taylor Spink Award dreams.
Rounding out our team was an Albanian interpreter named Sime, who gave every incoming soldier
the greatest advice. Never shake hands with any native. Toilet paper was a luxury few people in Kosovo had.
The day was like any other day. Driving along the main supply route I was unaware that I’d
get to see my first real corpse that day. Since we were nearing our end date in Kosovo, the cameras
were clicking like a tribe of African Bushman. We all wanted to capture the beautiful Kosovo countryside on film to take home and show our loved ones. Soldiers have their reasons for taking photos
of foreign soil with themselves in the frame. Livingstone wanted to remember the features, Morton
wanted to achieve a sense of control through the camera, and I wanted to use the photos to seduce
broads stateside—show them that I indeed served ina hazardous arena. Women tend to look at a
hardened man, a la Humphrey Bogart, with a little more hunger than some bastard who tells tales
with no proof.
As we neared Hayek Hills, two mountains of equal height nestled side by side and named
after the voluptuous actress who had the decency to visit us on a USO tour, Livingstone pulled the
Humvee off the road to get a good picture of the terrain. Hayek Hills was situated in the Kosovo
countryside with no homes, farms, or bombed buildings within miles. A serene setting. A creek
flowed from down the mountains and crude bridge—everything in Kosovo was crude—was built for
passing vehicles; usually farmers carting loads of cow shit, their only means for fertilizer.
Livingstone got out of the Humvee and removed his Kevlar. The rest of us saw an opportu-
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BRETT KISER
nity to stretch out and exited as well. Livingstone placed his Kevlar helmet on the bridge’s railing
before he acquired a shot of Hayek Hills. He stepped backwards, camera raised to his eye, and tried
to get the peaks of the Hills into the shot, but couldn’t quite get the proper angle. When his back
slammed against the railing of the bridge, he knew he had reached his limitations, but was unaware
that he had caused the Kevlar to plummet into the creek. Morton’s cackle informed him of his blunder.
“Goddamnit, Livingstone!” Sergeant Hollis said, more amused than perturbed, “get your
damn brain bucket.”
Livingstone took off down the hill with me following. I was more eager to watch his despair
at losing his helmet than to help him retrieve the item.
“See, your little game of one man tug-of-war has turned your brain to spaghetti, boy,” I said
in jest.
Livingstone failed to see the comedy in the event. He thought only of being forced to buy a
new Kevlar once we reached camp that evening. He scaled down the hill, belying his unathletic bulk,
and trailed his helmet as it swam with the current. More than an item of military gear, the Kevlar was
the chief line of defense—what saved your skull from a stray bullet. The overturned helmet began
accepting the water with the leisurely pace of a man flipping through a raunchy magazine; it slowed
with current and began its easy descent.
I said in delight, “That bastard will be dreamin’ with the fishes, son!”
Livingstone grabbed a long stick and used it as a pole to retrieve his sinking helmet. I
watched with the eagerness of a man witnessing a gambler lose his savings account at the blackjack
tables. But before the lone circular digit was reached in his account, Livingstone lassoed the Kevlar
by the chin strap and yanked it out of the creek.
“Didn’t think I’d get it, did you, asshole?”
I smiled. “You’re a Grade-A bassmaster, Livingstone.”
After Livingstone’s helmet incident, we traveled along the MSR and pulled the Humvee over
to eat our lunch: those simple, package meals all soldiers detest—the Meals Ready-To Eat. Parked
near a slanting hill that had been marked on our map as a mine field, we ripped into our MREs and
began to eat.
In the countryside of Kosovo a soldier’s ability to entertain himself is tested. There aren’t
any damn outlets to plug in your Nintendo, or ball diamonds to play a pickup game of baseball. No,
living your dreams of smacking a Bert Blyleven curveball over the fence are forfeited when all that
surrounds you is vast nothingness. But sometimes the Gods of Chance smile upon you. A group of
cattle was roaming through the mine field and we all took notice, crossing our fingers for the chance
of watching one of the large beasts take to flight.
“Hey, a farmer is approaching,” Sime said. A native in patched up coveralls walked in our
direction.
The farmer seemed happy to see us. He also had the look of a man with something on his
mind. He approached us and spoke to Sime in their native tongue. One eye was on the farmer, as we
wondered what he was saying. The other eye was trained on the cows, hoping against hope for some
fireworks.
Sime turned to us. “He said that he has found a mass gravesite.”
The prospect of seeing a cow fly lost interest as Sime relayed the farmer’s words. Mass
gravesites weren’t uncommon in Kosovo, but since their civil war had been over for some time and we
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KEVLAR
BRETT KISER
were sent in to keep peace, it was assumed that most of them had already been located.
“He wants us to follow him,” Sime informed. ‘He’ll take us right to the site.”
Leaving Morton to guard the Humvee, we filed in behind the farmer. When he led us toward
the mine field, our interest surrendered to trepidation.
“It’s in the damn mine field?” Sergeant Hollis asked in fear.
Sime nodded, “He has a trail that he walks. Just stay on his trail.”
Timidly, we followed the farmer who seemed unaware that he walked through a mine field.
We kept our eyes to the ground and followed him, scanning the ground for signs of buried explosives.
“If I die in a damn mine field, knowing it’s a damn mine field, I’ll be pissed off,” I said to no
one in particular.
We followed the farmer for what seemed like an eternity, but we hadn’t been more than fifty
yards from the Humvee. Fear enhances distance. The farmer came to a halt and motioned to an old
sniper’s nest just off his trail where inside lay four corpses of former soldiers. Cast in the hole with
the sinister nonchalance that only a human can own, the bodies were in the latter stages of decomposition. They had clearly been killed during the civil war and tossed in this nest, lost to time, lost
to human interest. It was the saddest, grimmest scene I had ever seen. I thought of these men: sons,
fathers, brothers, cast into a hole with no ceremony—no care. Death is an uncaring son of a bitch.
Even more uncaring during war.
Five months after we found the mass gravesite in Kosovo I saw my next dead body. Back in
Fort Polk, Louisiana, patrolling the streets—keeping the post safe for all the ungrateful bastards that
see MPs as merely a deterrent to fun—I was called out with my partner to the housing quarters of an
E-7 in the field artillery. He had been on leave for two weeks and failed to show up to his unit after
his two-week furlough expired. So his unit called the MPs and had us check up on him. I expect his
superiors already had an idea as to his demise, and didn’t want to be the ones to make the discovery.
When I opened the front door, the smell in the room informed me and my partner what
rested inside. Seated in a Lay-Z-Boy, with a knocked over bottle of Wild Turkey at his feet, was the
sergeant. I couldn’t tell how long he had been dead but he certainly hadn’t killed himself that night.
“Tell the desk sergeant what we found,” I informed my partner, a wide-eyed private who saw
his first dead body that evening.
I looked at the grim posture of the sergeant. Taken back to Kosovo, I was surprised that I
thought of Livingstone’s Kevlar and not the mass gravesite. Livingstone, who wasn’t the most gifted
physical specimen in the world, raced after his fleeting Kevlar, refused to surrender it to the water.
He fought for that damn thing, refused to let it drown. I knew, when I looked down at the sergeant,
that he would have let his Kevlar drown. He would have watched it sink into the creek.
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BIOLOGY
ROXANNE CHASE
Soft lavender petals unfold, moist from the welcoming anticipation,
Longing to be brushed with breaths that restore and surround them;
Mottled light casts cooling shadows of healing rays that reach deeper inside,
With it comes the reflecting shade of jealousy,
The fingers that were once harsh now tenderly encircle this broken stem of life,
Holding it firmly as the hllow end slowly releases its sweet nectar of life’s energy
Pouring back into the dark places where roots were once bound.
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THERE’S A PLACE CALLED PEACE OF MINE
i’m there
lost here
smoothing the back of an Atlas
feeling the creases it bears
wondering what State i’ve been in
worrying i’ve left too many of the right dreams
like youthful treasures placed in cardboard
forgotten in one of the moves
my youngest brother is Joseph
but he doesn’t have citied eyes
his irises flow
like light on rain
i’m concerned i’m more saint joe
just another joe
my only sister is Portland
forcibly graceful like the storms
i don’t remember
a childhood of puddles
when they were little and could play anywhere
climbing up my shoulders like giggling satchels
dancing footprints down my spine
i’ve never stopped carrying them with me
i look for myself in faded merry-go-rounds
and awkward last goodbyes
for a Man
or a boy
there’s a place called me.
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JESSE FRAZIER
LEANN PRIDGEN
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CINEMA PSYCHOSIS
To put it simply, Topher Andrews was intimidated by the fear of being average. The life he
led was boring, but perfectly adequate. Just nineteen years old, he lived at home with his parents,
Thomas and Tammy, and his younger brother, Tyler. The Andrews home rested just on the outskirts
of a typical upscale suburban neighborhood, filled with typical, perfectly average people. Topher
hated it.
He would much prefer to live in a crappy run-down apartment at the center of the city. Better yet, Topher would rather have no home at all. It would be a terribly exciting way of living, never
knowing where you’d sleep that night, never knowing if you’d manage to find food before the sun
set. It’d be dangerous, but Topher craved the excitement. He wanted to have adventures, just like the
characters in the movies that he watched daily. Unfortunately, it seemed he was doomed to live an
ordinary life. Because of this, Topher’s only refuge from all things bleak and mundane was his seemingly endless collection of movies.
It was this very obsession that had led Topher to the Youthfront’s School for the Troubled
Youth. It all started when he had watched Aladdin for the first time at five years old, and decided to
try jumping off of the roof with a “magic carpet.” His experiment didn’t go too well and resulted in
an uncaring lecture from his parents, but Topher had shrugged it off. Over the next few years Topher
perfected the art of being his favorite movie characters. At breakfast, he was the dinosaur Little Foot,
knocking over the cereal box and creating a mess. On the playground at recess, he was Peter Pan,
mercilessly brandishing his sword. Then one day, while he was being Ben from Night of the Living
Dead, he mistook his brother for a zombie and threw his clock radio at him. When his brother had
finally returned from the emergency room, his parents told him firmly that he would begin attending
Youthfront the following Monday.
The change of schools didn’t cause any dramatic change in his life. He continued turning
into various characters to cope with life and his obsession with movies carried on. His life was as
exciting as it could be, considering he changed personalities daily, or so he thought.
Then she came along.
It was the beginning of Topher’s senior year when he first saw her. She was a junior, from
what he could gather. She wasn’t extremely pretty, but she was hardly ugly. She was average, Topher
decided silently. Normally he hated anything that could be associated with that word, but not her.
Something about her was different.
For the following week, Topher was Jackson Rippner from Red Eye, studying the girl so meticulously that he was certain she’d soon catch on if he weren’t careful. The information he gathered
that week was frivolous at best; she hated milk (or at least, she didn’t drink it), she was incredibly
social, and she was constantly writing in a faded blue notebook.
One day, during lunch, she caught him staring. As Jackson Rippner, Topher smirked, allowing just a hint of teeth to show. She tilted her head curiously, before nudging the person sitting next
to her. Topher lowered his head, so he would appear as unobtrusive as possible. When he looked
back up, she was walking towards him.
He panicked. He couldn’t meet her as Jackson Rippner. He didn’t want to alarm her, after all.
A list of thousands of movies flashed through his mind almost instantaneously. Blindly, he grasped
for one. Joel. He would be Joel Barish from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Joel was kind and
funny, if not a bit eccentric. He could do this. She sat down at his empty table, lips tilting into a
crooked smile.
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LAURA BAUM
“Any particular reason you were staring at me?” she asked. Topher shook his head.
“No. No reason,” he said, trying to make his voice as soft and melodic as possible. The girl
studied him for a minute.
“My friends told me not to bother talking to you. They think you’re schizophrenic.” She
paused a moment.
Topher allowed his lips to tilt into a semi-smile.
“The last I checked, no.”
She tilted her head, a tiny frown crossing her face. Topher remained in character, a charming
smile pasted on.
“You’re not very good with people, are you?” she said.
Topher froze, caught slightly off guard.
“Why do you say that?”
“You don’t talk much.”
“Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating,” he replied, quoting Joel from the
movie.
“Fair enough. Well, I’m Scout,” she said.
“Scout?”
“Yeah, like from To Kill a Mockingbird. My dad was obsessed with it for the longest time.”
“The movie or the book?”
Scout wrinkled her nose slightly. “Does it matter? The movie is based on the book, so technically the book, I guess.” Topher nodded slightly, taking a bite of his egg sandwich. Scout continued
staring at him, blue eyes piercing through his disguise.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“I told you my name. This is the part where you tell me yours,” Scout said impatiently. She
tapped her fingers on the table. Topher took another bite of his sandwich, chewing thoughtfully.
“Well, that depends.”
“On what?”
“On the day. Today I’m Joel Barish,” he said. He gave her a lopsided smile. Her eyebrows rose
skeptically.
“You sure you’re not a schizophrenic?” she said blankly.
“Like I said, it depends on the day.”
She remained silent, staring at him contemplatively, before leaning forward to tap on his
milk carton.
“Drink up, young man. It’ll make the whole seduction part less repugnant.” She smirked as
she quoted one of Clementine’s lines. Topher felt his face light up despite himself and smiled at her
appreciatively. She grinned.
“Ashley, we gotta get back to class,” a voice yelled from across the cafeteria.
“I’m coming,” Scout called over her shoulder. Topher’s grin fell and shifted into a confused
frown.
“I thought you said your name was Scout.”
“It is.”
“But she just called you Ashley,” Topher said pointedly.
“Well Joel, you said it best- it just depends on the day. I’ll see ya around.” With a wink, she
stood up and walked away. Topher couldn’t stop the wide grin that crossed his face. He decided that
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CINEMA PSYCHOSIS
Scout suited her far better than Ashley, so that would be her name.
The next day Topher was the charming, suave Ferris Bueller. Usually this would require him
to ditch school, but seeing as he had no girlfriend or best friend Cameron, he figured attending his
classes was probably for the best.
At lunch, he winked as he passed Scout’s table. Her eyebrow raised, and she almost immediately stood up to follow him. It was working already, Topher thought smugly. His charismatic charm
was irresistible. No sooner had he sat down then Scout was in front of him, eyeing him oddly.
“You okay?” she asked, tilting her head. Topher grinned and leaned back.
“Never been better,” he said, winking at her again. Then a thought occurred.
“Hey, what do you say to ditching the rest of the day?”
Scout wrinkled her nose. “Ditching?” she repeated, nonplussed.
“Yeah! We can go get some real food, enjoy this beautiful weather—”
“It’s snowing outside,” she interrupted.
“Maybe drop by an art museum.” He continued on as if she had never spoken. “Let’s do it!”
She studied him for a minute, forehead creased in thought. Finally, she spoke:
“Look, Ferris, as much as I’d love to, I’m no Sloanne.” She smiled softly at him. “Maybe
another time?”
Usually this would be the part where Ferris would use his quick wit to con her into doing
what he wanted, but something about the look on her face made him stop. Topher shrunk in his seat
a little bit.
“Yeah, okay. Maybe next time,” he said. She smiled again, stood, and then walked back to her
table. Topher was left alone.
Two days later, Topher woke up and decided that it was going to be one of those days; therefore, he would be Dwayne from Little Miss Sunshine. He pointedly ignored his family at breakfast,
grabbed his bag and headed to school. Even the prospect of seeing Scout, Ashley, or whoever the hell
she was, did nothing to improve his mood.
The teachers had learned to ignore Topher, for they never knew what kind of response they
would get. All morning, Topher’s bad mood seemed to escalate until finally it was lunch. No sooner
had he sat down with his food then Scout plopped down on the seat across from him.
“So who are we today?” she asked with a toothy grin. Topher glared. She arched an eyebrow
in surprise. He huffed and crossed his arms.
“What? Are you not speaking now?”
Topher scowled.
Scout tilted her head, and then she quickly reached down into her backpack and pulled out
the faded blue notebook and a pen. She pushed them towards him. He sighed. Taking it, he scribbled:
Today I’m Dwayne.
“Dwayne?” she paused thoughtfully, taking in his scowl. “From Little Miss Sunshine?”
He glared in reply. She didn’t seem to care.
“See, there’s a flaw with that though, because Dwayne talks about halfway through the
movie. Since it’s halfway through the day, shouldn’t you be talking by now?” she asked. Topher
thought on this for a few moments, eyebrows furrowed.
“Damn it. You’re right,” he finally muttered.
“I always am,” she said shrugging. Flipping open the notebook, she went to the back page
and scribbled something down.
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LAURA BAUM
“What’re you writing?” Topher asked. Scout looked up.
“Do you really wanna know?” she replied seriously.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t,” he said tersely.
Rather than being offended, she grinned.
“Wow, you really commit to the characters, huh? Talk about a pissy attitude today.”
She leaned towards him, her smile fading a bit.
“Everyone at this school is here because they’re fucked up. That’s just a fact. I’m here because I have a bit of a sociopath complex.” At Topher’s look, Scout reiterated.
“I lie. A lot. And I have no problem manipulating people if it means that it’ll get me where I
need to be.”
She pointed down at her notebook.
“My therapist recommended writing down every lie I tell. For every lie I tell, I’m supposed to
tell the truth about something, and write it down next to a lie. Showing you my notebook would fall
under the truth category.”
Topher shifted in his seat to get a better look.
“What’s it countering?” he asked curiously.
Scout shrugged.
“It counters me lying about my name yesterday. I’m pretty sure my parents have never even
read To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“Why did you lie?”
“Why do you lie?” she immediately countered, voice a tad sharp.
“I don’t,” he said, but the words felt like a lie.
“Yes, you do. Granted, you don’t lie to others. What you do is worse; you lie to yourself,” she
said, eyes warm and sympathetic even as her words cut into Topher. “You can’t cope with your crappy
life, so you pretend you’re someone else. That’s lying. It’s sad. You’ll never have an original thought or
idea, because you’re too afraid to be yourself.”
“That’s not true.”
“Liar.”
The pair sat in silence for a few minutes. Topher gripped the edge of the table tightly until
his knuckles turned white, eyes closed. He heard a sigh, then the sound of a chair scraping across
the linoleum floor. Seconds later, he felt something warm drop down beside him. He opened his eyes
and was startled to find Scout sitting scarcely an inch away from him. Her hand slid over one of his
gently.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry. Sometimes when I’m thinking
something, it just spills out.”
He shook his head, pulling his hand out from under hers. She exhaled sharply.
“Topher, do you want to know why I told you my name was Scout?” She smiled faintly when
he nodded. “It was because I already knew about you. I figured if I told you a name from a movie, it
would strike up a conversation. It didn’t play out as well as I had imagined.”
Topher pursed his lips.
“Why would you even care what I think?”
Scout shrugged, offering him a hesitant smile.
“Figure it out yourself,” she said.
Standing, she walked to the other side of the table, picked up her backpack and shoved the
blue notebook inside of it. An inexplicable panic filled him as she turned to leave.
Canvas 73
CINEMA PSYCHOSIS
LAURA BAUM
“Wait,” he called, throat rapidly drying.
She turned towards him.
“Uh—would you maybe want to hang out after school? We—we could go see a movie, or
something.”
“That depends. Will you be coming as Topher, or as someone else? Because I’m not too keen
on the idea of going out with a fictional character.”
“It’s not a date,” Topher clarified sharply. Scout rolled her eyes.
“Crazy or not, boys are all the same,” she taunted. “Fine. Will you be coming as Topher when
we hang out?”
Topher shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not really sure who Topher even is anymore,” he admitted.
Scout smiled crookedly at him.
“Well, you have the rest of your life to figure it out, don’t you? Wait for me after school and
we’ll make plans then.” With one final smile, Scout waved, then left. Topher stared down at his pudding cup.
It was a weird feeling, just existing at that moment. Just being. Learning to be content with
who he was, not who he pretended to be. Learning to be content with being average, but at the same
time, not average. He wasn’t entirely sure if he liked the feeling, but he figured he should at least give
it a try. He needed to give Topher Andrews a chance to come up with his own character.
Canvas 74
JACOB LUTES
Canvas 75
THE GHOST WITH A HEAVY HEART
“The end is near,”
the preacher spews,
wiping the sweat from his brow
with a white towel.
I’m not listening though.
Ibide my time doodling animals
on the margins
of Ecclesiastes,
my pen giving life to two pelican heads
coming out
of the same body,
a sloppy arrow pointing at each one,
one arrow attached to the scribbled name “Forget-Me-Not”
and the other attached to “Love.”
The pews are lined like soldiers,
each ready for battle,
preparing themselves to hold the weight
of the heaviest thoughts in the world,
the biggest questions,
the deepest hatreds,
ready to be still and hold the hands
of people without a hand to hold.
I scan the pew that I sit in.
Next to me, my mother’s head is down,
like the pelican heads I drew,
the floorboards looking back at her.
If I didn’t see her lips moving,
silent prayers going up to a God I used to know,
I’d think she was ashamed
to be here.
I see men who look like cowards,
children who look like angels,
and women who look like vapors,
the emptiness
of these people
somehow filling me.
I’ve come to a heavy conclusion,
one that weighs a little more than a human heart,
not the kind of heart with arteries
Canvas 76
JOURDAN HUFFMAN
and veins
hanging limp like dead birds
from its ventricles,
but the kind that beats when everything hurts,
and drowns itself when the tears
race each other
out of the eyes.
No, for me, the heart isn’t even an organ,
but an entity,
a child that lives between our ribs,
one that we were supposed to protect
and keep warm.
Instead,
we kicked him.
We kicked him so hard that his blood fell out,
like words,
the ones that didn’t matter then,
the ones that don’t matter now.
I have come to a heavy conclusion,
one that weighs more
than a two-headed pelican,
a conclusion that you’ll forget,
or love,
or be ashamed of,
one that you’ll want to protect
and kick all at the same time.
The heart is a heavy thing,
too heavy to carry around in my chest
any longer.
I am giving up the ghost.
Funny thing is,
the ghost is you.
Canvas 77
DEAF AND BLIND: THE HUMAN CONDITION
Fall me out of your mouth,
like rabbit feet,
the chasm at the base of your throat
crumbling under the weight
of words
that won’t come,
their tones left shaking the walls
of your esophagus.
Dance me into a coma,
the kind that holds me lifeless
just long enough
for you
to fall in love
with someone who is better
than me
in only one way:
She’s
conscious.
Open me with a butter knife,
just sharp enough
to puncture the skin
and disappear below,
a metal scuba diver from your kitchen drawer,
and just dull enough
to come up for air
just as quickly as it hit bottom.
Hold me in your left eyeball,
the one that twitches in the morning,
before you’ve had your coffee,
and brushed your (always) yellow teeth.
Mold me into a contact lens,
and let me cover all your tracks,
hiding behind your 20/200 vision.
(Lucky for you,
the blind see what the rest of us
can’t.)
Lie me out of your face,
the one with a mouth that I would live in,
if given the choice,
the lips hiked up like my skirt,
Canvas 78
JOURDAN HUFFMAN
her skirt,
your skirt?
Give me one chance to make your mouth move,
to make that Red Sea part,
reveale a tongue that doubles
as a spewing device
for all
the words
That
I
don’t
wan’t
to
hear.
(Lucky for me, I’m deaf.)
Canvas 79
WHAT I KNEW OF NONDIS BARRETT
A regular at St. James Inferno
‘68 in San Fran, oh by the bay, Honey
she said, here, you were expected
to leave peanuts on the floor, the bar piled
high and airplanes hung from the ceiling,
my husband was a sailor, and we was young once
and oh so foolish, her hand resting against her chest,
as if to sing “I Pledge Allegiance.” I tried
to imagine a young Nondis,
with the world like loose curls on her shoulder
Canvas 80
BROOKE KUYKENDALL
COLOR CODED
RICHARD LEWIN
That Black-White man
That one over----He----isn’t like the
there.
Amazing!
Others.
But,
Maybe that’s why
I always
I treat him
Thought all
Like
White-black men
A man.
Were alike.
Canvas 81
UNFINISHED STORY
It was Sunday night and I sat at the dining room table with him. He was making me read Bible
verses. It was nearly May and me and my family lived with Grandpa, his dad. I was two weeks away from
my twelfth birthday.
“Read it Ashley,” he said. “And if you don’t understand I’ll explain it to you.”
That morning I watched him preach to a church of about twenty-five people. He raised his fists in
the air, stood up on the pew and praised God with a fury. He was a preacher this month. Last month he was
a car salesman told me he didn’t believe in God. The month before that, I think he was a mechanic.
“If there was a God, then I wouldn’t suffer like I do,” he said.
But I held on to this month. I thought maybe he did change. I thought maybe God really did show
him the light. I began to read a verse from Exodus: “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey going
astray, you shall surely bring it back to him again. If you see the donkey of him who hates you fallen down
under his burden, don’t leave him, you shall surely help him with it.”
“Do you know what it means?”
“Be nice to your enemies,” I said.
“Forgiveness,” he said, correcting me. “Always forgive.”
The following Monday evening he came home drunk and angry. Looking back, I think it was the
day he went to court and maybe the day he found out he’d be going to prison for awhile because of nonpayment for child support on children of a previous marriage.
“This is all your fault,” he sneered at Grandpa. “I was sixteen goddamn years old. You shoulda
never signed those papers. You shoulda never let me get married.” I knew he wouldn’t be in church that
Sunday.
Grandpa tried to ignore him but he just got louder and angrier. Finally Grandpa just went to bed.
He shut up, turned out the lights, and sprawled out on the couch to watch TV. Mom and my sister were
already asleep. I was sitting on the floor and he had the channel tuned into TV Land.
I don’t know why, but I felt bad for him and curled up next to him on the couch. This was something I always did as a little girl.
We lay there listening to Archie Bunker tell Pollock jokes. I felt his Wild Turkey breath on the
back of my neck, felt it creep up through my nostrils, and burn into my eyes. Something grew hard between
the back of my legs. He breathed harder. His hand rested on my thigh. For a moment I actually scolded
myself for having foul thoughts. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Then I ripped myself from the couch and announced that I was tired. Something wasn’t right.
I walked past my sleeping mother in the room behind us and climbed the attic stairs to my bedroom. The full moon shone through my window, letting in just enough light to guide me towards my bed. I
lay there listening to my sister sleep, her breathing in sync with the pounding of my heart. I heard the sound
of a door slowly creaking open. Light footsteps made their way up the attic stairs. A dark figure appeared
on the other side of the room. I couldn’t see his face but I knew it was him. He tiptoed towards my bed and
then got underneath the blanket with me. I immediately turned away from him and faced the window. He
breathed hard, put his hand on my breast.
“No,” I said. I couldn’t understand what was happening. My life was turning into one of those
lifetime movies. He was one of those men. This wasn’t happening to me. I was prepared to bite, to kick, to
scream bloody murder. There were three other people in the house. They would hear me.
He pleaded, “Come on. Your mother isn’t giving me any. It’ll be fun.”
“I said no. Please leave.” It was almost polite, like refusing cookies from a girl scout.
To my complete relief and astonishment, he stood up from my bed.
“Don’t ever tell your mom. Don’t never tell no one,” he said.
Canvas 82
ASHLEY RAINSBARGER
I didn’t sleep that night. I just stared up at the moon and tried to remember who I was before then.
I knew that someday I would be twenty something and still haunted by what had just happened. I knew I’d
write stories about it, hear songs that reminded me of it. I knew there would be nights when I’d cry myself
to sleep and then nights when I’d have terrible nightmares and wake up cold and clammy. I knew he’d
never apologize. I knew he would never admit that it had ever happened at all. At the same time I felt guilty
for hating him. He didn’t rape me. Would it feel any worse if he had? Would it be any more disgusting, any
more repulsive, any more heinous?
The next morning I was afraid to go downstairs, afraid to face him. But I would have to. It was a
school day. I walked down the stairs to find my parents sitting up in bed watching television. He gave me a
big smile and gestured for me to sit between them. I crawled into the bed and leaned on mom.
With a frown I said, “I don’t want to go to school. I feel sick.” It was the truth.
“Well you can stay home today.” I knew he wouldn’t object. “I have to go pick up your brother
from work. You want to go with me?”
For some reason I did. I thought maybe I had a bad dream. Maybe it didn’t happen. I went with
him, and then he dropped me off at home like nothing happened. He never said a word about the night
before. I walked inside. Mom was doing dishes in the kitchen. My sister was at school and Grandpa was
still sleeping. I walked towards the attic door and then opened it and sat on the attic stairs. I sat there for
a long time listening to the clink of plates and glasses in soapy water. I pictured my mom with a dish rag
scrubbing hard with her long chipped fingernails and wrinkled dishwater hands. I knew I had to tell her. I
had to find the words.
I don’t remember much between the time I sat in the attic stairs and the time we moved in with
Grandma, Mom’s mom. When I try to think about it I see horror on moms face. I see my uncles moving
boxes from the house to the car. I see Mom yelling at Dad. I see Dad yelling at Mom. I see Grandma standing in the driveway, looking up at the house, looking up at me, as if something had been broken. Not long
after, I remember being in a room with family. Grandma sat on the couch, looked at me and smiled. She
knew. Everyone in the room knew but no one could say anything. I sat down on the couch and put my head
on her lap. She ran her long, bony fingers through my hair. I felt her nails run across my scalp.
A few days passed by and Mom took me to the Noyes Home. I always thought it was an orphanage but Mom said there were people there who wanted to ask me questions. I felt sick again. We walked
into a tiny office where a woman sat behind her desk. She held out a box of toys.
“Pick one.” She smiled. In the box was a copper-colored, stuffed triceratops. He was ugly and
shiny and felt like a Beanie Baby. I took him from the box. On his bottom was a tiny black tag that said
Triggor.
“Thank you,” I whispered. The lady explained to me that a man would take me into a tiny room
with a two-way mirror. Behind the mirror was camera. He would ask me questions, but I didn’t have to
answer if I didn’t want to. I remember the room, the mirror, the man, but I don’t remember the questions or
how I answered them. I only remember squeezing Triggor and wanting the entire experience to be over.
I had my twelfth birthday two weeks after the incident. I invited a few of my girlfriends over
and we had a slumber party in Grandma’s basement. For some reason I decided that we should play show
and tell. I instructed that all of us get out something from our sleeping bags and tell everyone why it was
important to us. Most of us still slept with a stuffed animal anyway. When it was my turn I hesitated for a
moment and then told everyone about where I got Triggor and what happened to me. I think it was a desperate attempt to talk to my peers. Everyone went silent. They stopped breathing and just stared at me with
a combination of pity and embarrassment. I never told the story to anyone again.
Canvas 83
UNFINISHED STORY
ASHLEY RAINSBARGER
He went to prison after that, but only because of the child support. He would write letters to Mom
and sometimes she would read them while she was drunk and tell me about how he was a worthless father
and husband. Other times she would call me a liar and say he said that it never happened. Sometimes I
would just go to my room, squeeze Triggor and cry. Other times I would yell back and tell her she was stupid and that it did happen and she was a bad mom for questioning me. Sometimes when I yelled at her for
being drunk she would accuse me of taking sides. As if I couldn’t be mad at her because what he did was so
bad that she would always be a better mother than he was a father.
“Your father raped you, and you’re yelling at me?” She slurred.
“He didn’t rape me. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. I hate you.”
Eventually the fights stopped. I learned to ignore her and she usually apologized when she was
sober. He wrote me a letter once while he was in prison and explained that I didn’t have to be afraid of him.
But he still didn’t acknowledge that it happened. He never said he was sorry. I felt like I was going crazy. I
thought maybe I really did make up this entire story in my head. That must be why he won’t admit it. That
must be why no one will talk about it.
Months later the law changed and he was let out on house arrest. He stayed with his mom. Mom
said that she and my sister were going to visit him and that I could go to if I wanted. I agreed to go and to
this day I don’t remember why. I guess I can’t blame a lot on my twelve-year-old self. I must have been
confused. When we visited him it was like nothing had changed. I looked into his eyes. I searched for an
inkling of regret, of self pity. I waited to hear him say it, I’m sorry. I never saw it. I never heard it. And now,
ten years later, nothing. My twenty-two-year-old self wants to forgive him anyway and get on with my life.
But my twelve-year old self is still looking out that window, up at that big, white moon. My twelve-yearold self is hoping to come across his donkey some day, standing near a cliff. Canvas 84
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES
Laura Baum is a senior at Missouri Western, majoring in Theater and Video with an emphasis in
Screenwriting. In 2007, she won the Fanlib Writing Contest.
Ryan Bradley is an undergraduate majoring in English Literature at Missouri Western State University. He is in the 37th year of his bachelor’s degree, and is looking forward to long-term employment.
Hans P. Bremer is a former student at MWSU, and the current manager of Kansas City’s oldest rare
bookstore, Spivey’s. His work has appeared in numerous small press publications through the years.
He is a former editor of Soundings: A Journal of the Living Arts and Lost Creek Letters. His work has
appeared in the anthology (and compact disc) A Gang of Poets, and he released a compact disc of
music, The Ballads of Ned Hurt, in 2009.
Roxanne Chase is currently a sophomore at Missouri Western majoring in English Literature. She
has had two essays published in the past, “Walls Built of Words; Warm Blankets Made of Paper”
(second place) and “With the Blink of an Eye” both appearing in the Spring 2009 “Discovering The
Student Discovering the Self: Essays From English 100.”
Josh Comninellis is studying Theater and Cinema at Missouri Western State University. While he
enjoys theater, much of his time is devoted to filmmaking. The university has recently purchased
several photos of taken by Comninellis, one of which appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of Western
Magazine. His photography stems directly from a childlike appreciation for the simple beauty of
light in all its various presentations.
Melissa (Bitterman) Cox is a 2007 EFLJ alum of Missouri Western State University. Melissa worked
on both Canvas & The Mochila Review staff; her work has appeared in both. Melissa owns Lifeshots
Photography in St. Joseph.
Jesse Frazier is an undergraduate attending Missouri Western State University. His studies involve
both theater arts and creative writing.
Logan Garrels is a senior English Literature major at Missouri Western. His fiction has previously
appeared in Canvas.
John Gilgun is a retired professor of English Literature at Missouri Western State University. His
first book, Everything That Has Been Shall Be Again: The Reincarnation Fables of John Gilgun won
multiple awards for its design and content, and the novel, Music I Never Dreamed Of was nominated
for the Lambda Literary Award. His work in ceramics was recently showcased at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art.
Canvas 85
Jourdan Huffman has been writing for as long as she can remember. She is the copy editor for the
Griffon Yearbook at Missouri Western and she has been a staff writer there for three consecutive
semesters. In her free time, she loves to obsess over killer whales and Lady Gaga. In a dream world,
she would spend all the days of her life in front of Shamu’s tank at Sea World. Her poetry has been
published in Central High School’s literary journal. Jourdan is a sophomore pursuing an English
Education degree.
Erin Kempf is an undergraduate attending Missouri Western State University, and a staff member of
Canvas.
Brett Kiser is an undergraduate enrolled at MWSU.
Brooke Kuykendall, a graduate of Missouri Western State University, is a published writer and
photographer.
Nathan Larsen is a Graphic Design major at Missouri Western State University, where he also studies photography and painting.
Richard Lewin attended St. Joseph Junior College in the 1950s and earned a BA in English from the
University of Missouri. His love of writing, especially poetry, has prompted him to devote more and
more time to this activity.
Jacob Lutes is a junior at Missouri Western State University, majoring in Speech Communication
with an emphasis in Organizational Communications. He entered the field after taking an introductory digital course at Western. His photography has since been used in advertisements for the
university.
Kynslie Otte is an undergraduate attending Missouri Western State University.
Sam Perkins is enrolled at Missouri Western State University, and is currently studying art and
design.
Leann Pridgen has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design, as well as Studio Art (Photography).
She has been published as a finalist in Photographer’s Forum Best of College 2010, as well as Photographer’s Forum Best of 2010.
Ashley Rainsbarger is a happy wife and working mother of two. She graduated from Missouri Western State University in May, 2009 and currently works at Cerner Corporation in Kansas City, Missouri
as a Documentation Developer.
Zach Sauls is a junior majoring in Graphic Design at Missouri Western State University. He likes
coffee and he likes tea.
Canvas 86
Levi Smock graduated from Missouri Western State University in 2009 with a degree in Literature.
His writing has been featured on the online crime fiction website, Thuglit.com. He has been invited
to become a 2010 Screenwriting Fellow at American Film Institute.
Mary Stone’s poetry has appeared in Spring Formal, North Central Review, Flint Hills Review, FutureCycle Poetry, and the forthcoming Touchstone, among others. Mary earned her BA in Literature
from Missouri Western State University, and is a first-year MFA student at the University of Kansas
in Lawrence.
Meg Thompson teaches English at Missouri Western State University. Her current creative
projects include writing lyrics for satiric rap and pop songs about St. Joseph, Missouri (“Belt
Romance,” “Show-Me A State of Mind,” etc.) and learning ukulele. She is from Ohio, the Idaho of the
northeastern Midwest.
Jessica Wilkinson is a senior at Missouri Western State University, where she studies the effects of
milk and cookies on the psyche of athletes. She is an obsessive food pusher who fills her spare time
not writing and forcing tasty treats on those who claim to be “dieting.” She wins, always.
Susan Zion is a novice writer and a returning student at Missouri Western State University, currently studying Creative Writing. She previously perused studies in vocal performance and organ at
MWSC. She is a well-known musician in the Midwest.
Canvas 87
CANVAS STAFF
Editor
Ryan Bradley
Faculty Advisor
Bill Church
Staff
Austin Bledsoe
Heather Fields
Logan Garrels
Andrea Irvin
Cara Johnson
Alex Keiffer
Erin Kempf
Richard Lewin
Lexi Moore
Zach Sauls
Ashley Snyder
Jessica Wilkinson
Susan Zion
Production Consultant
Terrry Schroll, Community Press
Front Cover Art
Zach Sauls, Design
Leroy Skalstad
Andy Bullock
Acknowledgements:
The Canvas staff would like to thank the Missouri Western State University Foundation for its
generous and ongoing support. We also thank the Missouri Western Department of English,
Foreign Languages and Journalism. Further, Canvas would like to thank Christopher Marley for
allowing the reproduction of artwork first featured in Pheromone: The Insect Artwork of
Christopher Marley, published by Pomegranate Communications, all rights reserved.
Canvas 88

table of contents - Missouri Western State University

Transcription

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