“Cells of Solitude” by Alexa Mergen

blue-and-green-music-(Cells of Solitude)
Blue and Green Music by Georgia O’Keeffe, circa 1919

Rain. Each drop a finger tap on the roof, gutters gurgling. When the sun reemerges, northern California will green up like a piece of bread in a damp bag. To replicate an island’s edge, I’ll sleep in my car beside the cold ocean north of San Francisco behind a curtain of wind.

1. A woman with an English degree, I taught school, roping young people like calves into the corral of literature to discuss the human condition. Coaxing them to think, write. But a good teacher labors all the time, without the space of hours an artist needs to walk the open fen of creative thought. My stories’ characters stayed stuck mutely in scenes, the next line of dialogue impatient to be transcribed.

2. A photo of Georgia O’Keeffe’s classroom shows assignments hung on the wall, easels in rows. O’Keeffe taught school and painted until she could not sustain both, then chose painting. She tossed out, she said, everything she had learned to depict what she saw in a way that others might see anew. About flowers, shells, rocks and bones, she wrote, “I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.”

3. On colorful walls and in plexiglass cases at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM), collages, paintings, and sculptures of self-taught artists reveal the depth of the well of creative enthusiasm: a ship glued from popsicle sticks; tiny scenes of prison life stitched from embroidery thread. AVAM proclaims: “Visionary art begins by listening to the inner voices of the soul, and often may not even be thought of as ‘art’ by its creator.”

4. At the men’s maximum-security prison near my home, the incantatory power of sound erases snow fences of race and gender. The inmates and I share each others’ poems and those of favorites, like Mary Oliver: “maybe just looking and listening/is the real work./Maybe the world, without us,/is the real poem.”

5. Artists’ work holds a heart before we know their biographies. When I fell into Jean Toomer’s “I Sit in My Room” I assumed the poet, like me, was a white woman. I hope he, whose father was born into slavery, forgives my laughable error. The poem whispers to any soul seeking to understand through a pen.

I sit in my room.
The thick adobe walls
Are transparent to mountains,
The mountains move in;
I sit among mountains.

I, who am no more,
Having lost myself to let the world in,
This world of black and bronze mesas
Canyoned by rivers from the higher hills.
I am the hills,
I am the mountains and the dark trees thereon;
I am the storm,
I am the day and all revealed,
Blue without boundary,
Bright without limit
Selfless at this entrance to the universe.

6. Through Yale University’s Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities, you can view online two pages from Toomer’s journals. The simple notebook with lined pages resembles the kind the inmates and I use, purchased for a dollar or less. People are logging thoughts, each phrase a beam in a cathedral never to be completed.

7. With journals as portable studios, we make things and make up things. We strive to make up to the world for our limits, each new creation–poem or painting–another hat tossed into the ring of the attempt to understand the depth and breadth of the human condition.

8. By studying what happens when the sound of a jet disrupts their chorus, biologists learned that the songs of spade foot frogs form a musical camouflage that protects them from predators.

9. Each person’s poem or picture enters a biophony of interrelated soundscape across time and space, like Yeats’ song of Innisfree: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;/There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,/And evening full of the linnet’s wings.”

10. Art is our ant farm, our honeycomb, labyrinth, the anthology of infinite pages; each poem is a rain drop on its way to an ocean.

 

 

Alexa Mergen edits the blogs Day Poems and Yoga Stanza. Her poem “Distance,” published in Solo Novo, was a clmp Taste Test selection. Alexa’s most recent chapbook is Three Weeks Before Summer; and a full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Salmon in 2015. For a full list of published essays, poems and short stories, please visit alexamergen.com.

Read an interview with Alexa here.

“The Knock Down” by Margot Taylor

Endangered Sea Creatures
“Endangered Sea Creatures” by Elizabeth Leader, Mixed media

Sarah married a man who was building a boat to sail around the world. She loved that he was so intrepid, so exactly her idea of a man. She loved that, with John, her life wouldn’t be ordinary.

But it all went wrong the day they set out, into a fresh breeze and a glittering sea, as England thinned to a pencil line, and the sky turned to lead. She blogged about it afterwards; about how the wind built and the sea heaped up and a wave like a house slewed the boat and knocked her down; and how water fell on them like concrete and the sail seemed it would be buried forever but slow as a waterlogged bird it lifted somehow miraculously out of the sea.

She blogged about how they turned, and ran before the wind, and crawled back into Falmouth; how they tied up, and went into the cabin, and waded through bedding and floating food.

She didn’t blog about John, how she went to him to be held, and he was shaking, and instead she had to hold him. She didn’t blog about how, in the following days, and the following weeks, he seemed smaller. How she wanted to plump him up like a cushion, knock him back into being him.

“Hey,” Sarah said. “Everyone thinks we’re amazing.”

She read from her laptop. ‘“Omg you guys are awesome.” And this one. “You crazy sons of bitches. Totally mad – but bloody heroic.” And another. “Do it for me. Live the dream.”’

“Listen to them, John.”

He shrugged and looked away.

“Fine,” she said. “Whatever.”

The boat was cleaned up and ready again. John checked the forecast every day, but couldn’t make the decision to leave. So they shopped at Tesco, read their books, and slept. Sarah wanted to blog about the shrimp she found swimming in circles in the loo, but if she blogged, people would ask where they were. The shrimp stayed a day, then must’ve got bored, because he left. Other boats touched down like migrating birds, and left again, and every time another boat left, Sarah would look at her husband, to see if he saw how easy it was for other people.

John reached from his bunk one night and touched her arm. “Don’t be angry,” he said.  When she knew he slept, she turned on her laptop and started to type.

‘Wending our way up a distributary of the Orinoco. The most amazing thing today–little fish swimming in the loo, shards of brilliant colour. Water hyacinths float past like carpets and the butterflies are half a foot across. We lie awake at night listening to the hoots, screeches and grunts from the jungle all around.”

She smiled. How her friends would envy her as they read her post over their cornflakes.

“Cheer up,” she said to John, next morning. “Things aren’t so bad.  Why don’t we get a takeaway and a DVD tonight?”

She allowed enough weeks for a passage to the Pacific before she blogged again saying she had sat on a rock with a sunbathing iguana in the Galapagos. A few months later she told about their temporary work picking oranges in California. Then Alaska and she had them stepping onto a frosted deck into a morning so raw and brilliant it hurt. She told of an iceberg nearly hit and a blue whale passing like a submarine under their hull.

Back in Falmouth, England, when the winter gales blew, Sarah and John moved a little further upriver and tucked themselves somewhere snug, near a thatched pub which did cream teas, and a village shop.

“Check this before I post it?” Sarah said from her laptop.

John read over her shoulder.

“What?” she said. “What’s so funny?”

“We saw penguins in Alaska?”

Sarah stared at him, then knocked her head with the flat of her hand. “Stupid.”

John caught her hand in his. “You know what? I’m sick of ice and polar bears.”

“I am too,” Sarah said. “So where shall we go?”

“I’m thinking maybe … Hawaii? White beaches, palm trees, rum cocktails. If we catch the trade winds we could be there in no time. How does that sound?”

 

 

Margot Taylor lives near Taunton, UK, and works in her local library. Her short fiction has appeared in the Willesden Herald Prize anthology and online at Pulp.net, been performed at Liars’ League in London, and is forthcoming in Storyglossia.

Read an interview with Margot here.

“Wonder” by David Licata

The Bridal Couple (Wonder)
“The Bridal Couple” by Elizabeth Leader, mixed media

The voicemail made no sense so I listened to it again: “Sarah, it’s Paul, Stephen’s been shot.” He paused for a few seconds. I heard him swallow and exhale. “We’re at St. Mary’s in Jersey City. You’ve got to get here. There’s a lot of blood. He’s been shot. You’ve got to get here!”

I listened to the message again in my car and then called Paul, Stephen’s brother, but still I didn’t understand. How had my husband been shot? Why? Was he okay? Somehow I drove to the hospital and found the ER and met Paul and two uniformed policemen. One officer—a short stocky man with a crew cut—did all of the talking. He told me, matter-of-factly, that Paul and Stephen had walked into a convenience store, the store was held up, guns were fired, and a bullet entered Stephen’s head. He finished with “I’m sorry,” before he and his mute partner disappeared.

At some point, a doctor appeared and told us Stephen was dead. I thought for a second that everyone had gone insane. Then I thought it was an elaborate, cruel joke. Someone led me to a seat; someone else offered me a sedative. My skin felt foreign. My eyes were closed tightly one minute, wide open and unblinking the next. Every question I asked had an unsatisfactory answer.

I asked to see Stephen and someone led me to a room where he lay on a gurney, lifeless. It was a Stephen I had never seen and I vowed not to remember him that way, but for years to come this was the only image of him I could conjure.

Gail, my brother’s wife, my best friend, met me at the hospital and got me out of there. Every car sped by us on the turnpike and it took forever to reach my exit. Traffic moved unusually slowly on Fort Lee Road, my town’s east-west thoroughfare.

“What the hell?” Gail pulled alongside a donkey drawing a wooden cart with red, white, and green bunting draped around it. A man in a dark, rustic suit one size too small drove the donkey. In the bed of the cart sat a mariachi band and a young couple dressed in late 19th century Mexican wedding attire. He wore a black suit, white shirt, and string bow tie. She held a bouquet of red roses and wore a crocheted shawl over a white lacy gown with ruffles at the hem. They were smiling and beautiful and enjoying the music. Their skin glowed as if it had absorbed centuries of Mexican sun and was just this instant emanating it. This was a strange thing to behold.

“Are they opening a Mexican restaurant around here?” Gail asked.

“Not that I know of.”  I turned off the radio and opened the window. A blast of December cold smacked my face. I wished it were colder.

The music was lively, the colors so vibrant, and the clothes and the people in them were lovely. It was surreal and beautiful, and I remember in that moment thanking god that I still had the ability to experience wonder. I could see something, hear something, and appreciate beauty. My eyes filled. We followed the cart and I realized I hadn’t been breathing.

Gail accelerated passed the cart and I closed the window. “That was really weird,” she said.

I watched the scene fall into the distance in the side-view mirror. Then Gail made a right turn on Glenwood, weaving through the suburban streets until she pulled into our driveway, my driveway.

“What time is it? I have to pick up Stevie!”

“Greg picked him up,” Gail said. “He left work and picked him up. He’s at our place now.” Apparently we had already been through this.

“How do I tell him his father’s dead? How do I tell him that?” We’d been through this, too.

Gail’s answer this time was to simply place her hand on top of mine. The softness of her touch started me weeping again.

After what seemed like a very long time and no time at all, I opened the door. A force kept me in my seat. I couldn’t exit the car. Gail met me on the passenger’s side.

“I can’t go in there.”

“Would you like me to go with you?”

“No.” I managed to turn my head to look at her. “I can’t go in there.”

“Why don’t we go to my house?” Gail said.

“I’d like to see that cart again.”

Gail backed out of the driveway and drove to where the cart would have been had it stayed on Fort Lee Road and continued at its slow pace, but it wasn’t there. She drove in concentric rectangles, but we didn’t cross its path again. It didn’t matter anymore. We drove all around Bergen County. Day turned to dusk turned to night and Gail put the headlights on but I wanted them off because I wanted to drive in utter darkness.

What was the point of light?

 

 

David Licata is a writer and a filmmaker. “Wonder” is part of a collection of related short stories, another of which, “There Is Joy before the Angels of God,” was published in The Literary Review. In addition to TLR, his fiction and nonfiction have appeared online in Hitotoki, The New Purlieu Review, Word Riot, Sole Literary Journal, and others. His films have shown on PBS stations across the country and screened at festivals all over the world, including New Directors/New Films (curated by The Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA), the Tribeca Film Festival, and dozens of others. Along with the short stories, he is currently working on a feature documentary, A Life’s Work.

Read an interview with David here.

“In Flight Safety Card” by Lauren Eyler

Eve and the apple
“Eve & The Apple” by Elizabeth Leader, pastel on Fabriano paper.
(See also “The Undertow” by Katie Strine.)

While everyone is trying to cram their luggage into the overhead compartments, you take the benzos out of your pocket.  There are six because you are too addicted so less would be a waste of time.  You press your tongue against the roof of your mouth so you can place the pills beneath it. The drug eases through the capillary walls.  The sedative ducks the bile, the acid.  Immediate. Straight. It swims pure into your bloodstream.

As the pills dissolve, you pull on your hoodie.  You’ll be hot.  The air-conditioning doesn’t come on until the plane leaves the ground, but you suck it up.  You run the wires of your earbuds between your T-shirt and the hoodie’s fleece lining.  The benzos are still thawing as you place the buds in your ear and cloak your head.  This is all so the flight attendants won’t see you and tell you to turn off your music until the voice says, “It is now okay to use portable electronic devices.”  You’ve done this a hundred times now and the plane has never crashed.  This is the only rule you break while flying.  You always make sure your seat back and tray table are in their full upright position and you would never, under any circumstances, tamper with the smoke detectors in the restrooms.  It’s a federal law.  You take most federal laws very seriously.  Probably.

Before you shut your eyes, you take the copy of SkyMall from the seat pocket in front of you   and turn the pages until you find the steps you can buy your wiener dog so it won’t break its back jumping on and off the couch.  Once you find it and read the description and see that it still costs seventy dollars, you have a vague feeling of comfort, the kind like an itch has been scratched.

The plane begins to taxi. It means all the doors have been shut and locked, the one that has always been and the one that leads to the cockpit.  The flight attendants are in the aisle asking for your full attention as they demonstrate the safety features of the aircraft.  You can’t hear them because you have the volume all the way up, but your earbud slips and words creep in, “You will find this and all the other safety information in the card located in the seat pocket in front of you.  We strongly suggest you read it before take-off.”

Your finger brushed the laminate as you removed the SkyMall, but that’s as close as you come to taking their suggestion.  As a child you studied the card, saw cartoon people rowing yellow blow up rafts, sliding down inflatable slides.  Even then, you knew those slides weren’t the same as the slides at the park.  Nothing about those yellow slides was fun.  You have the card memorized.  It gave you nightmares.  Now there are other things.

But really that’s not the reason you don’t read it.  You don’t bother because you are in the after.  You never forgot watching the Pentagon burn from a friend’s row house or the planes flying too low over the campus.  And you’re still attempting to solve all the math problems that the too still water, that the too intimate thrumming engendered. What is the derivative of your anxiety in relation to the number of times you place your laptop in an individual container?  Can you determine the upper limit at which you stop visualizing a bomb in each bag without an apparent owner?  Is the square root of “Let’s Role” real or imagined?  Are the answers the fundamental theorem of life as it is now?

The benzos are wrapping tight around your brain.  You will feel lighter in three to four minutes.  The air you breath in will come without the strain of gravity.  And pretty soon the air will be free from the box cutter you used to rip through masking tape when you worked at a bookstore.  This oxygen will silence the image of a slit throat and the gurgling that goes with it.  And all the equations will sleep.

The music is humming to you.  Gentle lyrics speak of places you can go where your high won’t fade away, where the poets write in looser verse, where you can curl into the Olympus Mons.

You inhale.  The words, the drug, have wiped away the cartoons, the math, and the final piece lifts from your skin.  Understand, you don’t believe in God, but you can hear your preacher saying, “You either get where you’re going or you end up at your Father’s door.”  Until the plane touches down, that door is open.

 

 

Lauren Eyler is from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.  She has been published in The Saint Anne’s Review, Bluestem, The Rumpus and other journals. The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue.

“The Catfish and the Top” by Sheila Meltzer

Catfish
“Plastic Reef” by Elizabeth Leader, Mixed media on Fabriano paper

The catfish lay on her side, long slender whiskers drooping, head spinning like a polystyrene float snagged by a whirlpool. “I really caught something bad this time,” she moaned.

Her partner, hovering beside her, was beside herself. “I’ve had just about my fill of this bottom feeding,” she near-about growled. “You’ve been kept down here long enough, Dorita. Look up there at those manicured koi flaunting their glowing pink scales in the sunlight. That’s where we belong, that’s where I want to see my chickadee.”

“Might be the cast-off worms I had for my third breakfast.” Dora coughed delicately. “There’s something scratchy caught in my throat, feels like nylon fishing line. If you’d be so kind as to fix me a cup of hot sludge, I’ll be back to my old self in the flick of a minnow’s tail, you’ll see.” Forgetting that she didn’t have eyelids, the catfish bravely tried batting her lashes at the big brawny red-tail.

She remembered how her parents’ eyes widened when she told them of the engagement, how they clamped their fins close against their bodies and backed away, scandalized. “Sí, sí, red-tails are catfish too, but only distant relations. We cory cats are peaceful homebodies, scavenging close to our roots. Who knows where this kind wander, getting into who knows what business, eating who knows who to get so monstrously big.” Just the same, the fair femme found the dark, speckled upper body, the dramatic red fins and the cocky attitude irresistible.

Sucking on a bloated cigar butt she’d plucked from under a piece of driftwood, Bruna continued the opulent dream tucked behind her crystal eyes. “You’d be a fool to waste your life in obscurity, snout up to eyes in mud. I have connections in high places.  We’ll blow this pop stand, get you on a cleansing algae diet, and present you, my delectable confection, to the upper crust.”

Dora, hacking up the last of the nylon refuse, reflected on the good old days when you could feast on whatever dropped by, and grow contentedly fat to a healthy old age of five, surrounded by doting small fry. Pollution’s been so bad lately, even the breeders are doing nothing but brooding. The bottom, she regretted, was not what it used to be. Bruna spoke the truth; she was too beautiful a specimen to spend her life down in the dumps when a bright future twinkled above. So it was, that with a farewell sweep of her tear-soaked barbel to the estuary floor, she followed her lover where none of her clan had ever ventured before: up to the top.

Blinded by the sun, Dora’s first impression as they surfaced was of the foreign-tongued greetings that reached her ears. “Mm hmmm, I’ve never seen white look quite so good.” That crack earned one peacock bass a swipe from the blackfish at his side. “Marina baby,” cooed one trout to another, “let’s ask Dr. Gilles about some kinky whisker implants!” Even a pair of male ibises, sharing a banana on the shore, paused to urnk salaciously in her direction. The catfish blushed deeply, a spectacular vision on a pure albino. Would these be her high connections?

Soon the riffraff returned to their customary primping and pimping, leaving the new arrivals to make their accommodations. Bruna led her jewel to a vast viridian field, some kind of invasive plant that was skimming huge areas of river surface. “Just like I promised, there’s plenty more where this came from” and with a shower of puckers, a must-dart-off-to-see-about-something-important, and a no-need-to-trouble-yourself, she was off.

Off to the oyster shack, accepting accolades and favors, from piranhas and other predatory types, in return for promised introductions to their own pale, submissive and desperate bottom-dwellers.

“Is it true they’ll eat anything?”

“Do they keep that virginal blush even in the hot season?”

“Will they willingly go wherever you lead them?”

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Meanwhile Dora applied herself to the petrol-flavored plankton. She bumped against some of those glowing goldfish scales, in reality Brahma beer bottle caps.  She helped extract a handsome young milk frog from the grasp of a plastic six-pack yoke. Why hadn’t she thought before about the source of the debris that was invading her home mud? On the other fin, no root structures, no sunken trawlers to take shelter under.

Exhausted under the unrelenting glare of the sun, her skin began to blacken, her vision to dim, the truth to become clear.

It’s easy to be fooled by what’s on top—not all that glitters is gold, fish.

 

 

Sheila Meltzer holds a PhD in linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center. She lives in Berkeley, hunts software bugs for a living, and dances, for joy. In weekly writing workshops she’s begun coaxing out a life’s worth of buried treasure. Her loot has appeared or is forthcoming in Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Lowestoft Chronicle, and The Citron Review.

 

“Real Work” by Andy Edwards

alone together alone (Real Work)
“Alone Together Alone” by Peter Groesbeck

Now he works in public administration, planning department—hospitals. After his tour in the Stan he got the degree and the job. A very good looking wife and a house not too far from bars appropriate to a certain level of presentation, a certain image projection. That’s all fine. Yet before this finer period there was the clinic at Bagram air base.

Porn and liquor smuggled through in Listerine bottles killed the off time. You just drill out that little nipple on the base of the bottle, leave the cap sealed and then you rinse and fill. Hot glue gun to replace the nipple. Those were the days. The nights were real work.

Over there the stars are overwhelming and so he’d go out early to the gate calls and stand around stamping his feet, look at the ridgelines far off. They’d call in from the perimeter and he’d watch the headlights and the dust trailing in the dark. The guards would clear the Afghanis before any medical personnel made contact. So in general the only issues in the contact were logistical.

Their trucks were old Toyotas that will run until the end of time. Rusted and patched with linens and 100mph tape and pocked with AK rounds. They looked like they’d already seen the end of time and returned. In the dark the native men acted like children. Turning over their dead in the US supplied rubber bags made no sense to anyone involved, but it was a regular occurrence.

It was the real work.

We’re 90 percent liquid. If you don’t let air get to a body the liquid doesn’t return to the atmosphere as it decomposes. The liquid should have its own name. Phrases such as body fluids just don’t cover the necessities of description. The smell is concentrated in the bag also. Our ancestors evolved instincts to be overcome by this smell, to run from it wafting on the breeze. The Afghanis got a few trinkets, a little swag bag of candy and transistor radios for turning the corpses over.

The real work is to haul awkward bags of fluid and bones that were once a body.

Get them in the Humvees somehow. Five or ten at a time and prop them on each other with the two ends secured so that shit doesn’t go spewing all over everything on the drive from the gate shack to the morgue complex. Accidents happen.

He’d ride in the passenger seat and think about the eyes of the men. Where were they going now but back into the desert and the mountains with their bags of candy and their bugged radios? They had no porn. They had hashish though didn’t they? Their eyes in the headlights of the vehicles were like those of goats somehow, passive only to a point.

As they make the mile back to the compound that smell coming off the bags is remarkable, but it’s the texture of the affair that seals it up so he’ll always, always remember it all. The way the fluid slops inside as they haul it at the ends. The way the long bones fold together in the middle like toothpicks in a ziplock.

He wanted to go Special Forces. To make the bodies rather than catalog them. To be special.

The real work is in storing bags of liquefied bodies in a room saucy with them. The masks don’t provide much relief. It comes through the vents into the admin office. It’s on your clothes until they go to the launders. And even then sometimes–somehow–it’s in the folds.

The bags are thick and black and the zippers are rated to 700 pounds of force. Bill me. Only, the rubber material, for reasons of olfactory chemistry and governmental finance seem to absorb, take on and seem to retain the smell forever. One Time Use, is stenciled on the exterior.

No shit.

Walking to the bar sometimes that smell is on his fingers, even though he just showered and changed into clothing befitting a well-employed young, urban man with acceptable tastes in propaganda and inebriants. It’s there and then it’s gone.

He thinks maybe it’s the sewer, but Portland sewers are deeply contained and serviced at regular intervals exceeding industry standards. It’s a good city. Even in the rain, the bars are very warm. He knows it can’t be the sewers and he knows it cannot be real.

No the real work is over. Isn’t it?

 

 

Andy Edwards is a writer and tracking instructor. He lives at the end of the Applegate Trail in southern Oregon.

Read an interview with Andy here.

“Craving” by Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer

helpless (Craving)
“Helpless” by Peter Groesbeck

On the day Ivy Auntie went missing, Sriya Polgoda wished, once again, for more help. Her husband, Dharmapala, was already doing much more than facility maintenance. In addition to shopping for the week’s supplies of rice, fruit and vegetables, he fed Joseph Uncle his morning rice broth spoon by spoon, mollified Miriam Auntie during her shouting spells, and coaxed Jit Uncle to use the bathroom regularly so he would not soil himself.

And of course, he kept an eye on Ivy Auntie. When she disappeared, Dharmapala tore down the lane in the Polgodas’ rusted motor scooter, teetering around the corner garbage dump with the tires screeching so loudly that Miriam Auntie ran into her room. He knew Ivy Auntie could have wandered onto the main road and been hit by a bus in the rush hour traffic. But he found her in the vegetable stall at the top of the lane, trying to pin a ripe tomato into her hair and asking to buy a wedding sari. Dharmapala settled her in a three-wheeler hailed from the main road, and followed the three-wheeler back to the house.

While Sriya was guiding Ivy Auntie into the house and toweling tomato juice from her hair, Dharmapala bathed three lotus flowers in filtered water and placed them before the Buddha statue in the foyer. He knelt in gratitude, chanting the five precepts. What motivated him was not the money they would have lost if Ivy Auntie had got lost or injured, or worse, killed. For Sriya, running a home for the aged was a way to make a living, but Dharmapala cared for Ivy Auntie and the other three mentally infirm patients as if they were his own family. When Miriam Auntie splattered her brinjal curry on the wall, or Joseph Uncle clamped his mouth shut during his feedings, Sriya sometimes had to retreat to keep her patience. But Dharmapala’s compassion never flagged.

After Ivy Auntie wandered off, Sriya cajoled Ivy Auntie’s brother, Mr. Peiris, into paying extra for a helper. She said they needed someone to watch Ivy Auntie in the daytime when the garden gate stood unlocked. Mr. Peiris found Sriya a helper. The helper was his cook’s cousin, a young woman named Anandhi. When Anandhi arrived two days later, Sriya noticed that her hands were broad and callused, that her neck was sturdy, and that she bore herself with confidence. She knew Anandhi would be capable. She did not pay much attention to the luxuriance of Anandhi’s hair, which fell to the bulge of her rump, or wonder why she left it untied. Anandhi’s eyes, which had whites as flawless as the inside of a coconut, looked sideways, but Sriya only noticed the determination in them. She was satisfied that Anandhi could handle Ivy Auntie’s recurrent tirades, and the tantrums Miriam Auntie threw when told to keep her feet off the dining table.

“We have been blessed,” Dharmapala said to Sriya at the end of Anandhi’s first week. Sriya, who was oiling her wiry hair after her bath, agreed, but she remembered what he’d said when she first mentioned wanting a helper.

“Craving ease is only going to get us in trouble, you said,” she reminded him, tying her petticoat strings around her stout waist.

“It is true, as the Buddha said, that craving leads to suffering,” Dharmapala said. “But our need was great. And now our burden is less.” He smiled at her in the mirror as he buttoned a clean shirt over his sarong. His teeth were still white in middle age.

Sriya secured the pleats of her cotton sari with a safety pin so they would not loosen when she lifted Jit Uncle’s feeble body off the toilet. “Take Anandhi to the market with you,” she said. “She can carry another basket.”

When she heard the scooter revving, she went to the front door. “Bring back a good hand of bananas and two papaws,” she called to Anandhi. She knew Anandhi could gauge when the papaws were ripe.

Anandhi closed the gate before looping the baskets over her arms and mounting the precarious passenger seat. She had to clasp Dharmapala’s waist to keep from falling. Her hair was still loose, a silk veil down her back. The wind would tangle it terribly, Sriya thought. She wanted to warn Anandhi to tie it up, but then the scooter burst away, scattering pebbles like confetti. Sriya pulled Ivy Auntie, grumbling, back into the house.

Soon, Anandhi offered to take the patients for a daily stroll down the lane. They could walk away from the main road, she said, to the temple at the Palwatte junction. They needed stimulation and fresh air. Dharmapala agreed. He would go along to help. Walking would strengthen Jit Uncle’s legs, he said. And Sriya would have a little time to herself, to rest.

The stillness in the house when they left each afternoon was bliss. One hour was all it took for them to wander, stroll and stumble to the temple and back. Sriya stood at the kitchen sink and watched the monkeys playing in the trees. There was no need to listen for crashes or shouts or falling bodies in the patients’ rooms. She took the vanilla bean from the tea tin, kept there to flavor the patients’ morning tea, and held it to her nostrils. She watered the crotons that were starving for the attention the patients sucked out of her. She listened to the breeze rustling the bougainvillea bushes. She rubbed coconut oil on her cracked skin. She stood outside in the failing light and admired the orange streaks in the clouds. One day, she looked for the American Godiva chocolates that Joseph Uncle’s nephew had brought when he visited Sri Lanka. Sriya unwrapped the silver foil on each and ate them all.

Then came the day when she noticed the flowers before the Buddha statue in the foyer. The edges of the araliya petals were brown, their sanctity spoiled. There was no moisture left on the pewter tray that bore them. It was Dharmapala’s task to wash fresh flowers every morning and proffer them on the tray. That had been his practice for two decades, since their marriage. Sriya threw the dead flowers away, leaving the tray empty.

That night, after the patients had been fed and put to bed, Sriya beckoned Anandhi. She noted the luster of Anandhi’s skin and the roundness of her hips. Anandhi’s hair gleamed. The daily strolls and weekly motorcycle rides had done her good. “We cannot keep you here any longer,” Sriya said. “You must leave in the morning.” Anandhi claimed innocence, but Sriya had nothing more to say.

In the Polgodas’ darkened bedroom, Dharmapala sat slumped on his side of the bed, his head in his hands. Sriya removed her sari and laid her head on the pillow. She hoped they would not lie awake too long; she knew Miriam Auntie’s shouts would wake them before dawn. Then there would be bodies to wash and heave and wrap in clean clothes, curries to concoct and tempers to soothe. There would be no time for rest.

 

 

Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer has fiction published or forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Quiddity, The Summerset Review, Notre Dame Review, Stand, Literary Mama, Epiphany: A Literary Journal, and other venues. In 2004, she won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for a story that was subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She has a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Felician College in New Jersey. Her website is www.ruvaneeevilhauer.com.

Read an interview with Ruvanee here.

“Meat-Red Leaves” by Garrett Quinn

second temptation (meat-red leaves)
“Second Temptation” by Peter Groesbeck

You folded the photo of your husband into the inside of your left boot, the edges crimped and frayed, wet with mud and sweat. The last thing you wanted was Thomas finding it, ending the expedition early, leaving the Sumatra Island behind you on one of those tight, jostling planes, your shoulder bumping his with each turbulent shift.

“How much farther do we have to go?” you ask, the Nikon D300 and its various lenses inside the airtight case, tugging against your collarbones.

“Not much. We can’t,” he says. He turns to look at you, droplets swinging from his tight braid, glasses misted with condensation. You asked about the braid the first time you met him and he said it was a tradition from an Indonesian tribe. It showed virility. Then you attempted to say the tribe’s name, perfecting it, repeating it after him until it felt like he had prodded into the pockets of your mouth.

You had sex with him for the first time on a hammock outside the hostel, the palm fronds quivering from your movements. It had been seventeen days since you touched your husband. Then again on a cot beneath a mosquito net while a moth with the wingspan of your hipbones beat against the fabric. It frightened you—how easy it was the second time. That night a beetle squirmed into your ear and, with a thin twig, Thomas fished it out, digging so deep that you became dizzy, like when you pull your eye away from the viewfinder after you’ve been focusing too long. You held his thigh as he poked the paint splotch, abstract tattoo beneath your right breast. Your early twenties, you said, a phase, intellectual rebellion.

The machete swings from his hip and you can see how much the blade has dulled from the vines he’s sliced through. You realize that maybe there is no way back, that you’ve come so far the only thing left to do is trail his sweat-stained shirt until you emerge on the other side, in a land where no one speaks your language and no one has cheekbones as sharp as yours.

You smell it first, and you’re expecting a dead animal. This is the one thing you’ll remember years later—the rotting stench of the flower clogging your throat before you see it, the white splatters on its thick, meat-red leaves; the entire flower resting on the dirt, so big that it frightens you, that you feel like you’ll fall into the floral opening and Thomas won’t be able to pull you out. You’ll remember standing next to him, your breath caught somewhere in your esophagus.

Before your photographs are even published you will lose both men, so you’ll celebrate alone in a silent apartment with an eight-dollar bottle of wine. But here, you sweat so much you can feel it beneath your fingernails. Here, vegetation tugs at your elbows and your ankles and never lets you go.

 

 

Garrett Quinn is an MFA candidate at Wichita State University and is the fiction editor for mojo. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, Barely South Review, Used Furniture Review, and various other journals.

“After Philip Marries Mildred” by Behlor Santi

missed connection After Philip Marries)
“Missed Connection” by Peter Groesbeck

Strawberry-scented lotion. It cost $10.83 at Sephora — money that could have bought steak, a bag of shrimp, or a box of chocolate. I knew better, yet here I was in the bedroom, slathering lotion on my legs. It felt like cold kisses. My skin became softer. I scolded myself for breaking my budget.

What would my husband say?

As the late-autumn sun lowered into the horizon, my husband came home. He entered the kitchen, his gas-station uniform smelling strong. He kissed me on my cheek, his lips raw, and he held my hips.

“You smell like a strawberry tart,” he said. “Making anything special?”

I pulled away and I stated that I was serving chicken stir-fry tonight. The kitchen’s light contrasted with the darkness of the living room. Since we had no TV, the house remained quiet — except for a car rolling down the street.

“Nope,” I replied. “Just homemade Chinese. Takeout is bad for you.” I laughed. “How was your day?”

“Pumping gas into car after car,” my husband said. “Forgetting that I want to be a writer.”

“Everybody wants to write,” I replied as I tossed cut-up chicken and veggies in the wok. “Publishers like to be choosy.” I looked at my husband’s blue eyes. They were so brilliant when I first met him, but tears and crow’s feet had overtaken their beauty. I urged him to get an MFA. However, my husband knew college friends who earned MFAs and worked at Starbucks and Target. He decided to write about working at a gas station. I had to stay on a strict budget.

My husband would eventually realize the truth.

After dinner, I retired to the living room with my copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Philip Carey’s failed quest to be an artist led me to my situation. I still smelled the expensive lotion on my body. In the back of our one-story house, I heard the shower run. Hot water and soap washed grime off my husband’s strong and finely muscled body. I wanted another night with him, even if he couldn’t make it in New York City, London, or Paris.

I slipped in a bookmark and closed the pages. Water continued to peal on the tiles of the shower. I left the dimness of the living room. In the bedroom, I took my clothes off, reminding myself to be more frugal — for my husband’s sake. I walked into the bathroom. It was misty, like a spring morning. As I slipped into the shower, my husband smiled at me, his blue eyes bright again. He held me. He kissed me with his softened lips. With Castile soap, my husband washed the day off my breasts, my stomach, my cunt. In that moment, I wanted him to clean me until I was perfect.

I didn’t smell like a strawberry tart anymore.

 

 

Behlor Santi lives in New York City and works as a freelance writer. She’s published fiction and poetry in such magazines as Cortland Review, The Dead Mule, and The Sidewalk’s End.

Read an interview with Behlor here.

“Advent” by Randon Billings Noble

Advent. Private Devotion

“Private Devotion” by Suzanne Stryk 2001

The first Christmas Grandma spent with us she haunted our house like a pink ghost, creeping around the borders of rooms, unexpectedly opening bathroom doors, rifling through cabinets for peanuts or aspirin, finally settling into the center of the couch to watch whatever game show we had turned on so she would watch too. Her smell trailed after her – slightly bitter and liniminty — trapped beneath the same rose-colored sweat suit worn day after day and washed with too much fabric softener. When she broke her usual self-imposed silence it was a surprise, especially when she would interrupt our conversation and warble how beautiful the service was, as if her husband’s funeral, which had taken place only days before, were a regular Sunday morning ritual. Now that she was alone, with no Grandpa to distract us from her growing dementia, it was harder to not to see it.

The next Christmas was worse — we knew what was coming. By then nearly every week my father received a large manila envelope from Florida with his full name scrawled across its front — Grandma’s mail. She sent him everything she didn’t know what to do with, not only bank statements and phone bills but also postcards of missing children, glossy packets of coupons, catalogs for lingerie, for bird feeders. When we called, she confused us with relatives from the other side of the family. Sometimes we came home to arguments she had with the answering machine, hearing Dad’s voice and not understanding why he didn’t talk back to her. He would call and explain, trying to force his words through her haze, but the clouds never lifted, and in a month there would be another blurry message full of hurt and confusion: Why won’t you talk to me?

So the third Christmas I hid. When my exams were over and my papers turned in I ran away from New York and took a train to Rutgers. There was a boy there, a warm shape to lean against and hide behind for a few days. When I arrived, however, there was no hiding — he was in the middle of both a party and a head cold, which meant that I spent the first part of the night letting a plastic cup of beer grow warm in my hand and the second lying awake on the floor of his room while he sprawled selfishly across the twin bed above me, unconscious from cold medicine.

In the morning I asked him to drive me home, the trees lining the highway dark gray yet iridescent like bird feathers, and by the time we pulled into the driveway I had almost forgotten what I had been hiding from. I just knew that I was going home, home to Mom and Dad and tea in the morning and TV in the evenings and car rides to the grocery store and all the offhand talks we’d have over the kitchen counter or down the stairs that somehow said everything in their thoughtless, careless way. But as I opened the door and let loose my usual ‘Hi, I’m home!’ I knew she was there, could feel the change in the house, the guilt closing in because I wanted to keep what we had, just the three of us, ours.

And then one Christmas she didn’t come. She stayed in her Florida nursing home, too frail to travel. And then, early one December, she died.

I was older then, and had lost some of my heartless innocence. When I saw my grandmother in her casket, wearing deep pink lipstick and a jewel-toned jacket, I smiled. She looked like herself – her old self – the lady who had played Scrabble and drizzled icing over pound cakes and took me swimming in a high-tide ocean at the Jersey shore. I held her hand, now cool and hard, and tried to tell her how sorry I was about the way I resented her for the last few years of her life, for an illness she could not fight, even if she had been aware enough to want to.

Then it was Christmas again. Now her absence was more simple: it was complete. She was not alone in Florida. She was not with us but without us, living on a separate plane of fallacy and confusion. She was in a cemetery twenty miles away, untroubled by the way a faucet worked, or a calendar, or a sitcom’s plotline.

On New Year’s Day I woke up back in my apartment in the city, the windows looking east down Twenty-Third Street, away from my parents’ house and the now-empty guest room, towards the bright windows across Seventh Avenue, where the heavy gray clouds moved westward across the sky.

 

 

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist.  Her work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times; The Massachusetts Review; Passages North; Propeller Quarterly; HER KIND, a blog powered by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts; Brain, Child online and elsewhere.  Winner of a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan and the Linda Julian Non-Fiction Award from Emrys Journal, she has been a fully-funded fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and will be a resident at the Millay Colony in the fall of 2013.  You can read more of her work at www.randonbillingsnoble.com.

Read a conversation with Randon here.