Dobbs v. Jackson Tasting Menu

the pamplemousse
has finished rotting
everyone’s sky
under my french nails
our moon translates
to spoiled egg
my goose flesh is more
a country of fowls
smacking their skulls
on the same pine
the planet says it savors
me like last drops of wine
it’s not my choice
to re-seed grenades
to lie
fresh cells are seasoning
our homes like water
for soup mmm—
notes of pyre girl—
talk hot vinaigrette
spit supercontinent rifts
delicious past genomes—
mmm
good heresy tastes
as sweet as baby
not that i would know
something ate up
all the light—everything
everything else
is night

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Pottery Royalty

On my third day in East Liverpool, I walked into an antique store on a narrow street that climbed gently up from the Ohio River.  Its neighbors were a boarded-up auto repair shop and a Christian bookstore, open but deserted. The sidewalks were empty, with grass growing in the cracks.

Pottery crowded the antique store’s display window. I spotted a place setting of brightly colored Fiesta, a few chunky brown replicas of Rockingham jugs and spittoons, and one elaborately decorated Lotus Ware pitcher. That was the limit of my ceramics expertise. A bell rang faintly as I walked in.

Two women stood behind a sales counter, one on either side of a huge brass cash register, talking to each other. One of them, tiny and grey-haired, blinked and smiled at me. The other didn’t seem to notice my arrival. She was younger—forty, maybe, a couple of years older than me if so—tall and dark-haired, wearing a long black dress.

“You’d be surprised what you can find in some of these places,” she was saying. “Like those Harker ABC plates, the ones with the birds? I found those in a basement in the East End.”

The older woman murmured something.

“Illegal? Not if the house is abandoned, I don’t think. The only thing you have to be careful about is, sometimes there are junkies squatting in them.” A ripple of laughter ran through the last phrase, as if junkies in basements were just an amusing inconvenience. “I’ll take you some time if you like.”

“Thanks, probably not my thing.” The older woman moved out from behind the counter and crossed the room to ask me if I needed help finding anything.

“Just browsing,” I said automatically, and then out of idle curiosity—or at least that’s all I was aware of. “Maybe the Harker plates with the birds?”

“Of course.” If it bothered her that I’d been eavesdropping, she didn’t show it.

“Right over here. Minerva’s stall.”

I followed her to a nook at the back of the store, and she unlocked a glass-fronted cabinet.  There were three of the plates, delicate white china with a thin blue band around the rim, the letters of the alphabet arranged in a circle inside that, and in the center of each plate a brightly painted bird—a barn swallow, a bluebird, and a robin.

“Early twentieth century,” the woman said. “Beautiful, yes?”

“They are.”

A neatly hand-written card read: $100 each. Set, $250. “A little pricey,” the woman said. “You could talk to Minerva. She might come down a little.”

We both looked over at the sales counter, but the woman in the black dress was gone.

~

Three generations of my mother’s ancestors had lived in East Liverpool, back in its glory days as the Crockery City, when it produced half of America’s ceramics. The potteries were all gone now, nothing left but empty lots with foundations hidden in the grass, here and there a kiln or a chimney slowly falling to pieces. The downtown streets were lined with massive dark brick buildings from the early 1900s, banks and office buildings and hotels, most of them now empty. The factory owners and society ladies from my family tree were long dead, not to mention the potters and masons and carpenters who worked for them.

As for me, I was born and raised in California, and this was my first time in Ohio. I had no living relatives in town, or anyhow none that I knew about. I was staying in a Days Inn, kitty-corner to a graveyard where one of my great-great-grandfathers was buried. I’d spent a lot of time in graveyards since I arrived—in that one, in the much larger Riverview Cemetery, in tiny rural churchyards all over Columbiana County. I’d spent an afternoon in the city’s Carnegie library, unearthing stray references to various twigs of my family tree; toured a couple of 19th-century mansions; visited a Methodist church where a stained-glass window was dedicated to a distant cousin of mine who’d been killed in the Civil War.

Not far from the library, in a sprawling Beaux-Arts building that had once been the town post office, was the Museum of Ceramics. The docent, a tall, fair-haired woman, reminded me of a sixth-grade teacher I’d had a crush on. She led me through the cool, gently lit rooms, pointing out the high spots among the enormous variety of plates, jugs, bowls, teapots, rolling pins, doorknobs, and figurines inside the glass cases. Speaking so softly that I had trouble hearing her, she told me about the early potters, entrepreneurs who sold rough yellow ware from boats up and down the Ohio; the big industrial potteries—Harker & Sons, Homer Laughlin, Knowles Taylor & Knowles—that made East Liverpool a boom town after the Civil War; the artisans who created Lotus Ware, a line of porcelain as delicate and ornate as the finest English china. Some of this I vaguely knew, some I didn’t, but either way, the history had a weight now that I hadn’t expected.

The tour ended at a minuscule gift shop. Behind the counter stood Minerva, still in black, but this time jeans and a turtleneck sweater.

“You again,” she said.

“Me again. You remembered.” Which seemed odd, because I’d have said she hadn’t noticed me the day before. “Moonlighting?”

“Whatever it takes.” She looked at me sideways, off-kilter. Her face had the kind of lines that come more from expressiveness than from age. “Enjoy the tour?”

“I did. She knows her stuff.”

“Karla’s a gem. Her ex, on the other hand, should be in a lunatic asylum. Sorry, inappropriate.” She smiled, not at all apologetically. “Ada said you almost bought my Harker birds.”

“I thought about it. Not sure if the abandoned house provenance is a plus or a minus.”

She laughed. “Like I said, whatever it takes. Are you a collector?”

“Just a tourist.”

“Really? We don’t get a lot of those.”

“Maybe not exactly a tourist.” It shouldn’t have been a difficult question, but I still hadn’t answered it for myself.  If there was something I was looking for here, I didn’t know what it was. “One side of my family lived here back in the 1800s. I’ve always been curious.”

“Interesting. Potters?”

“Some of them. Factory owners, even. Some Bennetts. Some Harkers.”

“Ooh, you’re pottery royalty.” If she was mocking me, it was done gently enough. “Of course, I am too, if you go back far enough. There’s not much

“Sorry to interrupt...” Karla leaned into the gift shop doorway, smiling hesitantly at me. “Quick question, Minerva.”

I turned to go. Minerva scribbled a number on one of the museum’s business cards and handed it to me. “Just in case you change your mind about the birds.”

~

I didn’t change my mind about the birds, not then anyway, but I called her the next day. We had coffee and cherry pie at a dimly lit cafeteria that evening—the only place open in downtown East Liverpool at seven o’clock on a weeknight. In our back corner booth, I couldn’t tell if her dress was dark blue, dark grey, dark purple, or just black once again. Her features, too, had a shifting quality—sometimes smoothly curved, almost bland, sometimes tangled in shadows and contrasts.

On the surface, we had a lot in common. I taught history at San Francisco State; she had a graduate degree in art history from Northwestern. Our respective lists of favorite authors overlapped to an almost alarming degree—George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Balzac, Edith Wharton. Similar story with music and movies. But unlike most of the educated people I’d met in East Liverpool, she didn’t seem to be yearning for the sophistication of the coasts, and she seemed to take her city’s problems in stride.

“That’s a depressing neighborhood, for sure,” she said when I told her about my afternoon. I’d walked up and down the steep streets east of the downtown, looking for an address where my great-grandparents had lived. Most of the street signs were missing, and for every lovingly maintained old Victorian, there was one falling to pieces or boarded up. My great-grandparents’ address turned out to be an empty lot enclosed by a cyclone fence. “On the bright side, rents are low.”

I knew the broad strokes of the story: cheap imports and high production costs had killed the city’s potteries in the mid-twentieth century. The population had dropped by 50%. A freeway had taken much of the downtown and riverfront. In the 2000s, drugs—meth, heroin, fentanyl—had replaced alcohol as the coping mechanism of choice.

“But you’re still here,” I said.

“Born and bred in Madison Township. My people go way back in the Scotch Settlement. I didn’t move to town until I got married.”

I didn’t need to look at her finger to know she wasn’t married now. She had a brittle cheerfulness that spoke of intelligence and disillusionment.

Apparently, I was giving off a vibe of my own, because she said, “Never been married?”

“No,” I said. “Close, though. Twice.”

“It’s overrated. We had a big house, that was nice. But he was all about his work. He’s a prosecutor for the county. Which really put a crimp in my heroin use.”

At the time, I thought she was joking, and maybe she was. “That’s kind of the definition of incompatible,” I said.

“Incompatible is my middle name. You say you were close to getting married twice?”

“Once for sure. A long time ago—we were grad students. The other one, I don’t know, maybe we weren’t that close to it.” I still didn’t have a formula for talking about Emma.

“This was recently?”

“Three months ago.”

“You know,” Minerva said, “this was an odd place to choose if you were looking to cheer yourself up. Don’t West Coast people go to Hawaii or Cabo for that?”

Odd comment at best. But her bluntness, so unlike Emma’s chilly reserve, almost made me smile, and I found myself saying more about the trip than I had to anyone else. “It’s all kind of tangled up. I only met Emma because my great-aunt Grace died—they were friends. And Grace was from here. Not East Liverpool, but right up the road in Lisbon. Like I said yesterday, I was always curious about Ohio. But it was only after Grace died that I started to think about actually coming here.”

“Tangled up is right.” She seemed to be on the verge of asking another question, and I might have answered that one too, but then she was off in another direction. “I have to tell you, I almost said no when you called.”

“Understandable. I could totally be a stalker.”          

“It’s not that,” she said. “I was planning on doing some treasure hunting tonight. I didn’t really want to put it off just for coffee. But then I thought, two’s company, right?”

“By ‘treasure hunting’ you mean burglary?”

“Some people would look at it that way. I just have this feeling you’re not one of them.”

Was I? Maybe, maybe not. But I knew I didn’t want her to mistake good sense for a failure of nerve.

                                                                        ~

“The woman’s ninety-two,” Minerva said as we drove along a dark two-lane highway somewhere outside East Liverpool. “Her son was supposed to be taking care of her, but he OD’ed. So, they dragged her off to hospice. The house has been standing empty for months. The county’s going to take it for back taxes.”

She drove too fast, which wasn’t a surprise. The road was laid out in long doglegs between pastures and clumps of young trees, the lights of farmhouses here and there. As we came up a sharp rise I saw a cemetery on the left-hand side, tall ornate headstones and monuments sinister in the moonlight. Then, a small brick church.

“Yellow Creek Presbyterian.” She let the car slow. “Last I counted, I have ten direct ancestors buried there. MacIntoshes, Davidsons, McQueens—they all came here from around Inverness. One of them witnessed the battle of Culloden as a young boy.”

“That’s a lot of history.”

“Like I always say—if you don’t like your future, live in your past.”

                                                                        ~

The house was at the end of a long gravel driveway. Two rusted-out cars stood in long grass. A sheet of plywood with the outline of a cat spray-painted on it covered the front doorway. Minerva pushed it aside with a nudge from a crowbar. The actual door was missing.

We might not be the first people to visit here,” she said.

Inside, it smelled of pine needles and dead mice. She switched on a flashlight and swept its beam around a living room crowded with threadbare couches and armchairs. A withered Christmas tree stood in one corner, with a litter of smashed ornaments around it.

“Well, it’s only April,” I said. “If you really love Christmas…”

“Yeah. Cozy.” She glided around the room, stroking the fabric on the couches, getting down on hands and knees to shine her flashlight on the underside of a table. “Some of these were nice pieces once. Maybe I should have brought my truck. Well, no matter. Let’s see what’s in the kitchen.”

I followed her. She paused and looked up. A sprig of plastic mistletoe dangled there in the doorway. A couple of seconds went by, and as she turned away again, I realized I’d been meant to kiss her.

“No shortage of crappy pottery here,” she said. The sink and counters were crowded with dirty dishes. Grease and mold and unidentifiable chunks of food had fossilized on a sad mix of chipped and faded crockery. “Maybe there’s something better in the cupboards.”

Pots and pans; broken coffee machines; canned food with faded labels, tuna and beef stew and chili; a pile of paper grocery bags clumped together by moisture; more cheap plates and bowls; a five-pound bag of birdseed; and so on.

“This is something.” She lifted out a blue and green teapot with a spray of flowers painted on the side, then turned it upside down. “KTK. 1910 or so. Tiny chip on the handle, but very nice.”

I carried it out to the car and set it carefully on the back seat. By the time I got back to the kitchen, she was slamming the door of the last cupboard. “Disappointing. I guess we can try the rest of the house.”

As we went back through the doorway to the living room, she stopped under the mistletoe again, turning to face me. This time, I put my hands on her upper arms and kissed her lightly. Then we stood there a few inches apart in a tangle of shadows from her flashlight.

“We’re still here,” she said. “How many kisses is that thing good for?”

I kissed her again, still lightly, but neither of us pulled back this time. Her breath was minty, with a trace of smoke.

“Hello?” A faint voice from the back of the house. “Trevor?”

“Holy fuck.” Minerva twisted out of my grasp and pointed her flashlight into the kitchen. There was another doorway back there, a short stretch of hallway visible.

“Trevor?” The voice was high-pitched but weak.

“Fuck, it’s her.” Minerva put a hand over her eyes.

“Let’s go,” I whispered.

“Trevor’s the son. The one who OD’d. It must have been bullshit about the hospice. Or they brought her back.”

“Let’s go,” I said again. “We were never here.”

“My mother knew this woman.”

“Then why are we breaking into her house?”

She ignored that. “Go wait in the car. I’ve got to check on her.”

I didn’t answer, just followed her back through the kitchen into the hallway. Closed door on the right, closed door on the left, open door on the left—Minerva’s flashlight picked out crumpled balls of Kleenex on the floor, a dresser littered with medicine bottles, a brass bedstead, a tangle of quilts and blankets. At one end of the pile was a withered face under a chaos of white hair. A smell like rancid hamburger hung in the air.

Her eyes were open, but she didn’t look at us. “Cold,” she croaked.

“Mrs. Fraser, it’s me, Minerva Forbes.”

“Cold.”

“See if you can find another blanket?” Minerva looked back at me. “Mrs. Fraser, I’m just going to check your vitals.”

I asked Minerva later if she’d ever been a nurse, and she told me it was just a persona she’d learned to assume. To people who were sick or drugged or addled, it was familiar, it was comforting, and they didn’t fight it. Whatever—I was happy enough to leave the stench of that room and search for blankets. When I came back with a ragged blue and white quilt, Minerva was already dialing 911.

~

“Not quite the excursion I had in mind,” she said as we drove away an hour later.

“Same here.”

“But you’ll admit it’s a lovely little teapot.” She smiled at me as though we hadn’t watched two EMTs haul Mrs. Fraser out to their ambulance.

“Days if not hours,” one of the EMTs had said to Minerva.

“I don’t doubt it,” she’d answered. “But she won’t be alone, at least.”

The EMT had shrugged at that.

“Mind if we stop at Yellow Creek?” she said now. “I want to show you something.”

“Your ten ancestors?”

“We’ll say hi as we walk past. But no, this is something else.”

She slowed as we came to the church, a squat red brick building with tall arched windows, then pulled to the shoulder just past it. The churchyard, a lawn studded with tombstones—pillars, slabs, tablets, obelisks—sloped up from the road in a gentle knoll.

She led me through the forest of stones, pausing here and there to read a name aloud. “Alexander McBean, Isobel McBean… Ann McQueen… Jennet McIntosh…”

 The graves nearest the road were the oldest, their inscriptions so worn I couldn’t read them. Farther up the slope, the stones were clean and sharp-edged, the dates within the last century. Past the top of the knoll, with the church itself well behind us now, an almost empty stretch of lawn ran down to a line of bare trees. Half a dozen stray markers bounced random scraps of moonlight up at us.

“Running out of room,” Minerva said. “All the rest of this space is spoken for.”

“Quite a success story if you look at it a certain way.”

“Only it’s a very fucked-up way?” She laughed. “My ex got the house and the Volvo. I got the Porsche and the cemetery plots. We’ll see who comes out ahead in the end.” She looked back at the church, drew a line in the air with her hand, then took half a dozen steps toward the trees. “My plots are right about here.” She beckoned me over, and I went.

“I was thinking pottery was going to be the theme tonight,” I said. “Instead, it’s dead people?”

“Sorry, just worked out that way. Mrs. Fraser kind of derailed us.”

“She did.”

“And I left the mistletoe behind. Is that a problem?” She laid a hand on my hip.

I pulled her close to me, one hand on each of her shoulders, and looked into her eyes from a few inches away. The irises were a smoky grey-green, I knew that, but they seemed entirely clear with the moon shining on them. Then my eyes closed as her face tilted up to mine and we kissed. Accidentally or otherwise, she tripped me. We fell onto the grass, with her on top.

I’d been wanting this, if not from the moment I first saw her, then at least from the moment she said you again in the museum. But I had expected it to happen in my room at the Days Inn, or maybe in some dark cluttered space, full of Lotus Ware and Impressionist reproductions, that she called home. Still, there was precious little chance of any living people seeing or hearing us, and I didn’t feel the least bit self-conscious as my hands found their way inside her dress.

She stayed on top as we made love. No surprise there. She was loud, and she wasn’t shy about telling me what she liked and what she didn’t. I did my best to follow instructions. She was so self-assured that there were none of those awkward first-time misunderstandings. It didn’t take long for us to thrash our way to satisfied torpor.

It was chilly—a spring night in eastern Ohio—and as we lay there with her sprawled on top of me, I felt her shiver.

“You OK?” I asked. “Not too cold?”

“I’m fine. You?”

“Good.”

“I would hope so,” she said.

“But being an academic, I have to ask about the symbolism.”

“Of fucking in a cemetery? I don’t know. Awful things will happen, but good ones will too? I think I stole that from some Presbyterian minister.”

“Appropriate, then.” I looked back toward the church.

“Or maybe from Rosanne Cash.”

I could see other kinds of symbolism too, something about the ancestors, about the ex; but maybe, I thought, it was better not to go there.

Silence for a bit, except for the creaking songs of frogs.

“Question for you,” she said.  

“Sure.” I closed my eyes.

“I’m glad you’re here . . . but why are you here? Not here here,” she said, patting the lawn in front of us,“but here in Columbiana County. I mean, sure, great-great-grandparents, pottery royalty, great-aunt Grace, you’ve told me all that. But what’s the point?”

“It’s a good question,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I have a good answer. Curiosity. Distraction, maybe.”

“Distraction from what?”

“Everything. Work, breakup, getting old. The rest of my family—my mother, my sisters—they moved out east after my father died. Boston. They couldn’t care less about this, about the history. But I feel like these are roots I should know about.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Minerva said, “but the feeling I get is that you’re someone who’s never really been broken. True?”

Not a standard post-coital question, not in my experience anyhow, but I answered anyhow. “True, I guess. What would be the wrong way of taking it?”

“Some people might think it was a way of saying that you’ve missed something. And I’m not saying that.”

“You’ve been there, it sounds like.”

“I have, and it was awful. But it’s part of me now. And it just strikes me that maybe you’re a little too curious about it. That it has a kind of appeal for you.”

“Well, you have a kind of appeal for me. I don’t think it’s about anyone being broken or not.”

“No?”

“Granted, we’re different.”

“And you’re thinking maybe I’d be a good change of pace from what’s-her-name?”

“Emma,” I said softly. “No, it’s not that.”

Apparently, I didn’t sound convincing.         

“No is right,” Minerva said. “That’s not going to work.  I’m kind of like East Liverpool. Interesting place to visit, lots of history, classic architecture if I say so myself . . . but you wouldn’t want to live there. It’s a little run down, weather too extreme, living in the past, substance abuse issues . . . It’s sort of a grim picture.”

I didn’t think she wanted a direct answer to that. “Ever been to California?” I asked.

“No. Never.” She said it the way most people I know would say they’ve never been to East Liverpool.

“Like you said, kind of grim here—"

“It is. And not likely to change.”

“I was going to say, not much grim about you, though.”

“Please.” She rolled off me, and we lay side by side in the grass, our shoulders touching.  “I should try and fix you up with Karla. Lovely person—much more your speed. How long are you staying?”

“My flight out is tomorrow.”

“Well, so much for that idea. Nice knowing you, though.”

The delivery was comic, but after ten seconds of silence, I realized that the message wasn’t.

“That’s it?” I said. “Not going to work, bye?”

She seemed surprised that I was surprised. “What else?”

“I don’t know.” I was, apparently, supposed to have thought this through. “Something.”

“Wait till you’ve been back in San Francisco a few days. You’ll change your mind.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Yeah, well, you can text me if you don’t. But you will.”

~

Three years later, I used the frequent flyer miles that I’d saved all through the pandemic to book a flight to Pittsburgh. As the plane dropped out of the clouds, I saw the aimless curves of the Ohio, a smudge of grey that might have been East Liverpool, the orange and red and yellow patchwork of West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle. At the airport, they gave me a Ford Taurus that smelled of weed, and in half an hour I was back in the antique shop where I’d first seen Minerva.

“Try the library.” Ada, the tiny grey-haired woman I’d briefly met before, was alone behind the counter. “She works there now. Archivist.”

“Right.” I knew this—Minerva and I had kept track of each other, warily at first but comfortably enough in the end, by email and text and the occasional phone call. I could easily have called or texted her when I got to town, but somehow I’d just hoped she’d be here.

“I remember you,” Ada said. “Been a while.”

“It has.”

“You bought her Harker birds.” She smiled.

“Right again.” The morning after my night with Minerva in the graveyard, I’d bought the plates from Ada on my way out of town.

“How’ve you been?”

“I’m OK,” I said. It hadn’t been the best three years. The pandemic hadn’t hit me hard, but my mother had died of an aneurysm; I’d failed to get tenure at SF State and worked in a bookstore now; I’d gotten back together with Emma only to be dumped by her all over again. “Here for the wedding.” 

“Social event of the season,” she said with a smile that hung somewhere between mischievous and mocking. “Minerva and Karla—who’d have thunk it?”

“No one,” I said as I headed for the door. “Probably not even them.”

~

If much of East Liverpool seemed to be falling apart, that certainly wasn’t true of its library—the first Carnegie library in Ohio, built in 1900, a massive fortress-like building in brown brick, surmounted by a hexagonal tower and a red tile dome. In the lobby, an island in time with its gleaming marble wainscoting and mosaic floor, I found Minerva waiting as if she’d known I was about to arrive.

She threw her arms around me; we touched cheeks.  “I guess this is really happening, if you came all the way from San Francisco.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “Glad it’s legal even here.”

“Until the Supreme Court gets around to repealing Obergefell. When that happens, we might end up in California after all.” She led me past the circulation desk and up a flight of stairs to an office with photos of nineteenth-century East Liverpool eminences on the wall and a shelf of pottery including Mrs. Fraser’s KTK teapot. “No, seriously. People in town are either OK with it, or they don’t give a shit. Most of them gave up on me a long time ago.”

“Formula for a perfect wedding.”

“I hope so. How are you?”

“I’m all right,” I said. “Glad to be back in my future hometown.” This was a running joke between us, that eventually I’d move to East Liverpool, but not as much of a joke as it had been originally.

“Did I tell you there’s a 1930s bungalow for rent down the street from us? We could be neighbors. Probably half what you’re paying now.”

“More than likely. Well, I’m around for a few days. I’ll take a look.”

“If you need something to sweeten the deal, I can let you have my plots at Yellow Creek for next to nothing. Karla thinks they’re bad karma since they came from my divorce.”

“Might be bad karma for me too,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

“I can’t see why.”

A little late, I realized I shouldn’t have said it. “Not like either of us believes in karma anyway.”

She paused to consider that.

There was a barely audible knock on the door.

“Come in!” Minerva shouted.

The door opened a few inches. Karla looked in, smiling hesitantly, and I knew then who it was Minerva had been waiting for in the lobby.

She came in, did a double take, grabbed both my arms but didn’t hug me.

“Congratulations,” I said.

She murmured a thank you and smiled so brightly it made Minerva laugh.

The three of us made small talk for a few minutes, but with the wedding less than 48 hours away, they had a lot of logistics to go over. I didn’t want to get in the way. We made plans to have a drink together later, and I walked out of the library and down to the river.

At the foot of Broadway, there’s a small park, with a pier, a rocky stretch of beach, and raised wooden decks looking out across the water. Doubtless in the past steamboats and barges had stopped here to take on shipments of crockery, and doubtless Minerva or Karla could give me the details if I asked.

I sat on a picnic table and watched a flock of Canada geese paddle downstream. Boats were moored on the far shore, and beyond that rose the forested hills of West Virginia. A broad stretch of water, steep hills, streets lined with Victorians and Queen Annes . . . all that was familiar. It was not that San Francisco had stopped feeling like home, but it had stopped feeling like my only home.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Poems from “My Sponsor Told Me to Break Plates”

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Annie Schumacher’s chapbook “My Sponsor Told Me to Break Plates,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

On Persephone’s Night Terrors 

1. Either I will fall asleep or I will not.

2. If I fall asleep either I will dream vividly or I will not.

3. If I dream vividly either I will wake up shaking and gasping for life’s breath or I will not.

4. If I wake up shaking and gasping for life’s breath it is because I am cursed or I am not.

5.  If I am cursed it was because I was born cursed or I was not.

6. If I was born cursed either I inherited the curse from my mother (or not).

7. If I inherited the curse from my mother then she inherited the curse from her mother, did she not?

8. If I ask my mother’s mother about it she will either deny cursing my mother or she will not.

9. If she denies cursing my mother, will I stay in hell?

10. If I eventually fall asleep, I will be seeing and listening to everything at once, my senses fixed like a dog.

11. Where is the drug to drug this hell out of me?

12. I swallow the tablets like honey.

13. Even if I never fall asleep for fear of losing what I left, which is itself a kind of curse, I will swap out new hell for old hell, or I will not.

I wake to sticky green leaves.

Swans

It takes eight years to exit the pop music museum.
Two older women, arms linked, dance to Waterloo.
We bought hats like that, we walked across a bridge
in Cuenca like that. When do you know someone?
When did I stop knowing you? My sadness spills
out a bouncy Swedish pop star’s lips,
the rising melody covering my heart in a brown sap.
The crowd carols along to the next song, searching
for cheap flights to Athens like we did. I peer through glass
at the metallic stage costumes, the headlong curve of my heart
-ache—were that it anger, I could hate the costumes.
I exit the pop music museum in heavy, platform-soled
tears. White birds sway in the water, my sister sings happy
birthday from a distant time zone. At what point in their
disillusionment did they transform?

These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Flesh and Bone Zuihitsu

They think it’s been months since my mom tried to contact me.
The cousins say she’s reaching out to connect. I say it’s been years
of you are such a bitch and this whole family is done with you.

My therapist tells me I’m too resourceful and clever to let family
suck my will to live; I hear more work. She says step back.

Says observe the process and sends me an email
summary of our recent call. The subject header: Snow & Peace.
A picture of the oak in her Maryland yard.

It wears a floor length gown of white pin-dotted snow
accented with one green birdhouse, frosted cupcake feeder. It says
here, here is sustenance. How I want

to take all my therapist offers into the marrow of my mind.
Mother’s way of comforting was to declare me her own
flesh and blood. There is a bird called lammergeier,

German for lamb vulture. It raptors the bones of carrion,
drops them onto flat rocks to expose the marrow.
My therapist is one of these bone droppers. She asks

what I will gain from allowing my mother’s opinions to define me.

I see a little girl as a cloth napkin dropped beside bone china
where marrow has been sucked from the calf’s bone, just a baby,
cross-cut. Osso buco, Italian for bone with a hole.

The spongy cake of our bones consists of hematopoietic cells called

Poiesis, from ancient Greek, the emergence of something
that did not previously exist; also, poetry. That flesh and blood

is made of poetry, that lines break like bones, that I emerged
from the syntax of a mother who drops rotten rotten
daughter. Will I never find sustenance?

I find her wedding announcement, 1964, The Scranton Times.
Cake topper of a woman, the bride wore a Chantilly lace
and white silk organza chapel gown with a scalloped neck.

Her headpiece of sheer rosettes with a large flower on top
was edged in seed pearls. What about that seedless bird feeder
nailed to a frozen oak somewhere on the Delmarva Peninsula?

Peninsula, Latin for almost an island; or a daughter.

I worry about the birds. Remember they prepare for the cold,
stockpile seeds, and pack pockets of air around their bodies.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Irina Tall

These pieces were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Skins

“Transmission” by Joy Division plays in the night club in Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong. Cigarette smoke clouds the air. The ceiling looks like the cratered surface of the moon.

Tonight, it’s clubbing. Tomorrow, Frannie says it’s an afternoon visiting an old temple in Stanley Market to see the pelt of the last real tiger ever in the territory.

A week ago, it was a hike. I forgot sunscreen. I blistered so much I couldn’t sleep the night afterward. Even now, I feel the rawness of my skin under my shirtsleeves. Frannie who is one of my only friends in Hong Kong, gave me some Chinese ointment to use, but I haven’t tried it yet because I have the bottle still in its box on my nightstand as my only tangible gift from her. I’m in love with her. It’s hard to be around her, and I can’t not be around her.

If she talks up a hanging animal pelt in a temple, I believe it’s amazing.

I stab out my cigarette and while she’s looking somewhere else, I look—her slight downturned mouth, and the glorious soft edge of her face that I could contemplate forever. All that moves around in my head, all that keeps me going. I’m in Hong Kong for a posting with my investment firm, but I would leave in a heartbeat if Frannie wasn’t around. Problem is, she’s taken.

Her boyfriend Lawrence, also a friend of mine, is sitting next to me on the purple velvet booth cushion, and he says he’s bored. He says we should go to his place off Connaught Road and smoke weed on his roof, where there’s a great view of Victoria harbor, where the windows across the water on Kowloon side gleam like Christmas lights. He’s got some amazing Scotch and all three of us can crash if we need to.

“Don’t you want to dance?” Frannie asks him.

“I suck at dancing,” Lawrence says.

“You dance with me,” Frannie says, grabbing my hand and pulling me up.

A house beat rattles the sound system. The room with its pink and blue lighting spins a little. The floor gives slightly. I play it off like it’s no big deal, but dancing with her is the best thing in the world. I’ve had a lot of beer, but part of my dizziness is her.

Frannie turns and shimmies, then walks toward me and puts her hands on my shoulders.

“Relax!” she yells.

I move. I dance. The rising house music beat dissolves into Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”

The crowd around us—another gweilo dude with two blonde women—and a Chinese group behind him, two women and two men, all go from their somnolent movement to paying attention to us.

Lawrence taps my shoulder and steps in. He nods with his cigarette in his mouth, then pats my shoulder again and says, “I goddamn love you man. Don’t ever leave Hong Kong!”

His hands are on Frannie’s waist and they’re up against each other, blending like two liquors in a cocktail, and the truth is, Lawrence doesn’t suck at dancing.

“…once I had a love and it was a gas…soon turned out, was a heart of glass…”

Here we are, a trio of friends. A lot of loneliness on my part, despite it. I live out on Lan Tau in a small flat and Frannie, a Hong Konger, lives far away in Shouson Hill with her sister’s family. Her sister is married to a white guy, a Canadian. I should mention that I’m white, a gweilo, by way of the Chicago suburbs, and Lawrence is half-white, half-American-born Chinese, by way of a childhood in San Francisco and an adolescence attending the American International School in Hong Kong.

One of the gweilo women sidles up and faces me.

Now it’s the four of us on the roof of Lawrence’s building. He’s got a sofa set up under an awning up there, letting it be exposed to the elements, American college-town-patio style, and the gweilo woman from the club asks me for a light. Her name is Mary. She’s blonde and British, living in Hong Kong with her parents, on a gap year from uni, and it turns out she went to King George the Fifth school, and Lawrence knows her brother from high school rugby. Her father is in the government. She lives nearby but won’t say exactly where, and then I know enough about Hong Kong to realize her father is obviously not the governor, but is somewhere high on the bureaucratic ladder, and she lives near Government House, the governor’s mansion. She doesn’t want to say it because it seems like she’s royalty or something, and she just wants to be cool.

Each of us takes turns telling made-up stories about what is going on in the cruise ship docked at Ocean Terminal across the harbor. Lawrence has the best one.

“A widower grandfather is taking the cruise again, mourning the death of his late wife, wishing his son would call or write him letters. The happiest time of his life—an ocean cruise to Hong Kong where his wife and him got tailored clothes and wore them to the captain’s dinner where they started with the lobster bisque,” Lawrence says.

“Dude,” I say. “That’s fucking sad.” I get jealous of him, his ingenuity. And I find myself trying to copy his attitudes.

“No shit,” Frannie says. She punches his arm.

“Give me a hit from that,” Mary says. Lawrence is cradling a joint in his palm, which is the reason he’s getting so philosophical.

“Remember tomorrow, we’re going to see the tiger skin!” Frannie says.

“Tiger?” Mary asks.

“The last tiger in Hong Kong. The skin hangs in a temple in Stanley. I’ve always wanted to go,” I say. “All that’s left of that poor tiger—its skin.” I say it like it’s my idea, but Frannie was the first person to bring this up.

“We planned this weeks ago,” Frannie says.

“That kind of shit is supposed to be exotic and exciting but it’s usually a letdown,” Lawrence says.

“You’ve seen it?” I ask. Sometimes Lawrence talks big and knows nothing. And even though I want to be confident like him, I get annoyed with his dismissiveness.

“He has,” Frannie said. “That’s the temple his grandmother used to go to. A Tin Hau one.”

Lawrence looks at me, then looks away. He grabs Frannie and they kiss.

“Get a room,” Mary says, the kind of thing people feel like they have to say.

The night meanders on, conversations and drowsy kissing like winding smoke from incense, and eventually Mary and I fall into each other’s arms on Lawrence’s couch, but in his apartment. Down the hall I hear Lawrence and Frannie. Some arguing, maybe about him going on another trip, and then it’s quiet and I try not to imagine more, but I do because when I close my eyes, I just see her.

“Look this way,” Mary says. “This way,” and she pulls my lips onto her neck, then further down. The room swirls. But we don’t go further than that.

“I’ve had such a long week,” I say.

We lay there holding each other.

In the morning, I smell Mary’s perfume and her cigarettes and sweat on the throw pillows. Frannie is gone too—she had an opening lunch shift at Smuggler’s Inn in Stanley Village to get to.

Lawrence hands me a mug of coffee.

My head hurts.

“I got to get to the airport,” Lawrence says. “Business.”

I remind him that today Frannie wanted us to join up with her to see the tiger skin in the temple in Stanley Village, even though I know he’d avoid it.

There’s a knock on the door—it’s Mary dressed for a day out, Ray-bans on to hide the hangover.

“Can’t,” Lawrence says to me as Mary stands at the threshold. “You can. You should. Like I said, it’s kind of underwhelming but everything is worth doing once.”

I got the Hong Kong posting all excited on my East Asian Studies minor. I got here, and I thought I was supposed to go find all the obscure Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian sites in the city, study the paths of feng shui and dragons. That wore out quickly, all those places close-up and distant at the same time. Full of reverence and strangers. I met Frannie and Lawrence at a pub quiz night in Lan Kwai Fong and since then, she’s what I’ve been chasing.

“This temple in Stanley,” Mary says. “Historical, innit?”

We have more mugs from Lawrence’s Mr. Coffee pitcher. I take some of Lawrence’s clothes and shower and Mary and I, awkward strangers, get on the bus to meet Frannie at the temple. Both of us nod off in separate seats. I wake as the bus veers around a corner and upstairs where we sit, a leafy tree branch brushes into the window, across Mary’s head, and she snores through it.

When we arrive at the stop with the long railing and tin awning overlooking the market and trees, I gently tap her shoulder. Stanley, with the awnings and the one cement basketball court and displays and piles of things—a street pointing north with vegetables and fruit and one seafood stall and then the alleys south we’ll walk through, with the overpriced lacquers and ceramics and art, and the deeply underpriced name brand clothes in folded stacks like a basement bin sale in the U.S. There are American and Japanese tourists, and the only Hong Kong Chinese around here seem to be the shop workers.

Frannie is late. Or not showing. I build the drama in my mind, that she sees this as cheating on Lawrence. Then I snap out of it. We’re just friends and like usual, I’m being too dramatic. Besides, here is Mary flipping the creaking coat hangers on a rack, looking at beach shrugs, asking what I think.

Frannie finally shows up with a canvas bag. She pulls out a Schweppes lemon squash, a British soft drink she knows I like. We take a moment to look out at the sea beyond the temple as we leave the shopping area and walk along the narrow sidewalk clinging to rocks which approaches the temple, a green and yellow building behind a couple trees.

Then the three of us walk in together.

Indeed, the pelt is there behind glass, darkened with age, smaller than one would expect. It looks a bit shriveled at the edges. It’s mysterious in a sense, but on its own, yes, underwhelming, if not for it being from the very last tiger.

Frannie walks past me to kneel in front of the altar with all the candles lit and the Tin Hau statue with its raised hand of blessing, its peaceful blue dress undulated like a good current from the sea.

I turn away and look up at the curling incense hanging and around at the other gold and red shrines. I kneel myself, then look at the yellow tiled floor, waiting for something. I never got much out of church, or anything like religion. The most I can say is I’ve felt times of loneliness and times where I was less lonely.

Like last week. At a lookout on our hike, Frannie leaned her head against my shoulder as we sat on a granite outcropping, taking in the view, while Lawrence was in the bushes relieving himself. She asked if I thought she should marry Lawrence. She said she really loved him. She took my hand in hers and pointed to her ring finger and said, “I’m not sure either of us is marriage material.” Then she said, “Greg. I want the whole thing. Family and kids. Grandparents. A dog. Everything.”

My own father, a barely employable Jim Beam enthusiast, had a short fuse. I used to wish him dead. He would yell at my mom, who was just getting us through. None of that was my fault, but I feel shame about it. There was a time I asked my mom to leave him, begged her to, after he got especially violent, punching in drywall in our mudroom and breaking his hand.

When Frannie said, “us,” I wanted it to be more than the beauty of the moment and the view, that “us” was Frannie and me. I told Frannie about my growing up, which I’d done before, but never that openly. I said she and Lawrence would never be like that, but I knew it was me swearing I would never be like that. Being in Hong Kong away from home and being with her, it’s like some kind of window opens. That’s as close as I’ve gotten to religious belief.

Frannie gets up from the temple floor and we walk back out into the sunlight. Mary is still inside, silently looking at the statuary, lighting her own incense, acting like she belongs there.

I tell Frannie the pelt looks nothing like the deer pelts in my uncle’s basement in Wisconsin, which is the only thing I can compare it to.

“I really miss Lawrence when he’s away,” she says. “He hates this place because it reminds him of his grandmother and how she’s gone. You know his mom wasn’t around much, or his dad. They had gambling and addiction problems. His grandmother pretty much raised him.”

Whatever that’s like—I’ve never prayed to anything—it still is drifting over her, and I feel like I’m outside of it. And she knows a lot about Lawrence that I don’t. I try to tell her more about Wisconsin, but unlike other times, her mind is somewhere else, and she’s only half-listening.

Mary comes out to join us and says, “Brilliant!”

The three of us walk toward the small beach and sidewalk near the pub where Frannie will start her second shift. “You’re peeling,” Frannie says, pointing to the back of my neck—that bad sunburn I got on the hike a week ago in Sai Kung still doing its damage. I rub my fingers on my neck. Some of the skin comes off.

Frannie says, “I hope Lawrence is okay. There’s a typhoon headed to Taipei.”

“I hope so too,” I say.

What else is there to say? Frannie was praying for our mutual friend, that he would be safe, and that he would come back to her soon with more stories to tell. More than the ones I have, which I’ve already told. And unlike Lawrence, I don’t have the will to make them any better, or to imagine them otherwise.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Like Qafia to Radif

my lover’s eyes sing patterns of rhyme, but for me it’s those lips.
Fleshy enjambment where I end–stop, the perfect couplet, those lips.

Pressed against mine like Charon’s obol, death could be so blessed.
A modern libation poured for Aphrodite, both poetry and prose lips.

My lover’s smile, sharp as a scimitar, separates top from bottom—
Parting ways they flash a pearly shift, glossy-toothed kameez. Oh lips!

That mouth my muse, I tongue an invocation, call for inspiration:
Passion’s incarnation, my lover resurrects with save-my-soul lips.

Like the fifth bayt in an ancient ghazal, they round in rhyme-refrain.
A closing of flesh and pucker of hush, I marvel at broke-the-mold lips.

Not to whistle but to kiss, this lover’s embrace I could never resist.
Whispering Candice, they touch my ear and I hear, give me those lips.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Dish With Bamboo Leaves

Style of Ogata Kenzan 尾形乾山 (Japanese, 1663–1743)(?)

So I am trying to make sense of
this world; why my mother throws out

   anything that shows any sign of
   chipping; why she

insists on buying porcelain, or
keep the jagged

   blue-glazed pieces of hollowed clay.
   Like any traitor daughter I promised

to become rich and finally make
it out of that place. Saying absolve

   reminds me of the palm shadows
   thrown across the hot Californian

concrete, sandwiching, jarring,
captured butterflies baking in

   their own passions. Rain felt like
   absolution sometimes. October miracle,

drinking through skin like lotus root;
lips always chapped;

   our little rituals. I scratch her back for her
   every night; little jets of white;

red; dragging fingernails
across, gleaming sailboats from travel

   brochures in bloody bays;
   edens in sunrise, suns in

seas; girl practitioner, skin
horror vacui. The weather, she says.

   Needs a lot of lotion, cracking,
   damage; fine porcelain from

dream screwtape marriage; white and
blue maiden who bears her king on

   a mattress of fine porcelain.
   Threat of overthinking taken up

by Japanese kintsugi. Months repaired with
bits of urushi and gold. Exchange, take up any

   Japanese art. Self deformation. I am trying.
   The rot must precede rebirth.

The weather, pottery chips
easily; always more susceptible

   to hives and clinical paraphernalia under
   the sun. Five bucks and I bought the sun.

Fifty sheets of gold leaf to put in my sunscreen.
Mother’s cheeks glisten with tear streaks

   when the light hits in the right way. Like hot
   concrete on Ventura, after an October rain.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Cass Francis

In the Dark

Movie House

Passerby

My creative work often explores fractured identities, distant connections, and a sense of place in a highly mediated world. This series of acrylic paintings are mostly based off photos I took while exploring my home state of Texas. “Movie House” represents a beautiful theater near Sundance Square in Fort Worth. In reality, the theater is surrounded by urban downtown buildings—but I stripped those out of the painting to leave it with an isolated and slightly spooky feel. “In the Dark” does not come directly from a single photo or real place, but instead is a play on how in our media-saturated world sometimes media play reflections of us for its own sake. “Passerby” is a tryptic showing the different points of view of a building I photographed in Marfa, Texas. As with the movie theater, I stripped out the surrounding buildings and landscape to isolate the building and make it seem dreamier and more surreal. Pretty simple, this one just means that things change shape as you pass them by.

These pieces were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

I Cannot See You the Same Way

It was the first meal in the new apartment, and I had unconsciously made the foolish assumption that the configuration of the stovetops aligned with the stovetops in my previous apartment, so when I turned on what I thought was the top left burner and then distracted myself for eight minutes waiting for the pasta to boil, I was surprised and devastated to return to find the noodles soaking in cold water and the plastic grocery bag half-liquified and melting into the bottom left burner.

God, it was stupid. And I was also stupid. It was one of those mistakes so flagrant and avoidable that it makes you aware of how ill-equipped you really are, how often the logic and good sense that you rely on can just fail you completely. But then, here’s a thought: by calling your own self stupid, you are in a way splitting yourself into two different people—the one who is stupid and the one who is smart enough to recognize that he is stupid. The plastic was seared into the glass of the stovetop in layers. It had been so beautiful, shiny as marble. And now I had defiled it. It’s the type of thing Margot would have been triggered by. She wasn’t a neat freak exactly, but she liked things to be kept up well. Hated bits of dried food, lint left in the dryer filter.

It was a six-step process, according to the internet. Nothing was allowed to be easy.First, you coat the stovetop with olive oil and baking soda. Let it sit for a few minutes. Then wipe that off with a warm cloth. Then clean the stovetop with dish soap and water. Then coat the plasticky bits with rubbing alcohol. Let that sit for a minute. Then use a wooden spatula and a razor scraper to scrape off the plastic. Then clean it all again with soap and water. I tried all those steps, then tried them again in different orders. Barely got any plastic off. Eventually, I found some forum thread that said you have to heat the stove back off to melt the plastic a bit. I tried that, then scraped it off with my fingernails, which took maybe a good ten minutes. After all this, I couldn’t even say I was too hungry for pasta anymore.

The apartment was so quiet. It was fall, and the sun was already going down so early, so by seven, the slice of sky I could see was dark and slate gray. After dinner, I resolved to spend an hour unpacking and then reward myself with Final Fantasy until it was time to go to bed.

I called my mom to let her know how the move was going. She asked when I was going to get a dog.

“It’ll help you meet people,” she said, and I could hardly think of anything sadder.

 ~

The first time I saw Margot, the thing I noticed was her size. She was a small girl, smaller than anyone I’d been with. Six foot three and on the heavier side, I typically tended to attract bigger-boned women, as my grandma would say. Margot couldn’t have been more than a hundred pounds. She stood out to me because she didn’t follow any trends. Didn’t care at all what was fashionable, really. When I first met her at Cole’s pregame, she was wearing a lacy white tank top and grey jeans that weren’t tight enough to be sexy or baggy enough to be trendy. Her face was bare and shiny, and her curly dark hair was in a low ponytail. It sounds harsh, but she was the kind of girl who might be accompanying a much more glamorous friend, who becomes the object of your friends’ attraction until they get too drunk to remember her name.  From the way she dressed, you probably would have thought she was timid. But she wasn’t at all. She helped herself to a seltzer from Cole’s fridge and asked me if I’d like to be her pong partner.

“I haven’t played in a minute,” I mumbled.

“That’s all right,” she said. She smiled broadly and her teeth had these strange little pointy edges to them that I found quite beautiful. She introduced herself.

“I’m John,” I said, holding my hand out for hers to shake, which, looking back, was idiotic of me, but she didn’t seem to mind.

We lost every game of pong. I was too self-conscious and too sober to ask for her number. Her friends slipped back into the conversation, and the girls all headed out to another party, and there was simply no good time for it. So, a few days later I followed her on Instagram, and she followed me back. She had been the first one to make a move, so it was my turn—I understood this much of the dating code.

Cole didn’t know much about Margot, but when I asked him about her, he said she was a “Smart chick. Engineering. Chemical I think.”

We traded messages on Instagram back and forth. I asked her what type of music she likes, and to my surprise, we had similar taste: MGMT, Beach House, Pond. She said she liked “basically anything but pop,” and that I could work with. I mentioned something about her coming over to see my synth setup and she didn’t respond for about an hour. I thought I’d ruined everything by suggesting something so niche and nerdy, but she responded that sounds dope! and it felt like I’d won the Olympics.

I had no clue what girls liked to do on dates. What do smart chicks do, besides study? Do they like romance, being treated to expensive Italian dinners, flights to exotic locations? I didn’t have too much to offer in that department.  Our first real date was to my friend Austin’s show—he was playing in a new-age band called Zenith Zenith, and they’d gotten a gig at a local dive bar. It was 21+, and Margot said she didn’t have a fake, but she didn’t mind them just drawing the X’s on her hands.

You sure you want to go? I had messaged her before we met up. The self-saboteur at it again.

Yea!! It’ll be a good time :) she responded.

It was little things like that from the start. She made me feel like I wasn’t saying the wrong thing. She didn’t question why I sometimes paused between sentences or didn’t have a snappy response to her joke or looked down at my watch in nervousness when she asked a serious question. She had the power to make me feel like a real man, someone who could romance a beautiful girl, someone who deserved to be loved and taken seriously. I had never really felt like that before.

We met outside the door. It was a chilly night, and she was wearing a pink motorcycle jacket, grey jeans, and converse. She gave me a side hug, and I noticed she was shaking a bit, and I thought, good, maybe I am not the only nervous one. Or maybe she was cold. She bopped along to the music and came up with nice things to say about Austin’s bass playing.

“He’s a great guy,” I said. I wanted her to think I had lots of friends.

After the show, we went to the fried chicken restaurant next to campus that stayed open until midnight. I asked her about her major.

“Chemical engineering must be a ton of work,” I said.

“Oh, it’s miserable. Probably my biggest regret,” she said.

She explained that growing up, her older brother Patrick had always been the “smart one,” and she had been the try-hard little sister who could hardly keep up, even when she’d taken seven AP courses and gotten into MIT (though she hadn’t gotten a scholarship, and it was too expensive). She’d picked chemical engineering, in some ways, to make a statement against Patrick’s lesser but still impressive biomedical engineering degree.   

“Only two more years to go,” I said.

She asked about my major—for the first time I was almost embarrassed to say I was a biology major. But I told her about my love for ocean animals, the first time I went to an aquarium back in Tennessee and seven-year-old me stared at the jellyfish for an hour until my mom dragged me out, how I would count down for Shark Week each year. They didn’t have a marine biology program at Georgia State, but it was the best college I’d gotten into, so standard-issue biology would have to do.

“That’s pretty cool,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go snorkeling. I think stingrays are so cool.”

“I’ll take you snorkeling one day,” I said. I meant it. Wherever she wanted: the Gold Coast, Maui, the Maldives. Suddenly, I wanted to be the type of man who could afford such trips.

We kissed that night in the parking lot after I walked her to her car. I didn’t ask her to come back to my place. I wanted to leave the night on a perfect and pure note. She drove away in her red Honda Civic and I began imagining a dream version of our future together. Two weeks and four dates later, we were exclusive. Another month, and it was official.

We had sex for the first time on our sixth date. She invited me back to her dorm room, turned the lights off, and sat on the bed.

“You can have all of me,” she said.

I kissed her very gently. I wanted her, badly, but I didn’t want to do anything that made her uncomfortable. In my mind, she was delicate, something to be touched with care and precision. She ran her hands down my back and began to take her shift off. Afterward, she’d been snuggling with me, her head on my chest, and I noticed her eyes were teary.

“Are you okay?”

I was terrified in that moment that I’d hurt her somehow, been so consumed by my own brutish pleasure that I had no clue she was in pain.

She wiped her eyes and nodded. “Yes. Sorry,” she said.

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No. No, you did nothing wrong,” she said and wrapped her arm around my stomach, curling herself into a tighter ball. I didn’t bring it up again. Every other time after that, she was all smiles and gasps and moans.

As I got to know her, I discovered that Margot was actually a bit of a nerd. She watched Attack on Titan, Cowboy Bebop, shows my marching band friends from high school were always going on about. She liked card games and would excitedly research new ones for us to try, spend thirty minutes explaining the rules to me, and never let me win.

She didn’t care much for frat parties but had no problem downing tequila shots. Her tolerance was much lower than she believed, and I’d usually end up dragging her out of parties and helping her brush her teeth by 1 AM. One night, after accompanying a friend to a theater party, she stumbled home to my dorm and knocked on the door. She was leaning against the doorframe, her eyes glassy and unfocused.

“My love,” she said.

I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her inside.

“You guys had fun?”

“Not without you,” she said and kissed me before collapsing onto my bed. I laid down next to her and took her hand.

“I don’t care about anything out there. Not when you’re here,” she said. It was then that I decided I would marry her one day.

 ~

Three years later, we’d bought an apartment together in Marietta. Margot had gotten a stressful but well-paying job at an environmental lab, and I was a clinical research coordinator for a Veterans Affairs medical center. We kept busy. Margot had gotten quite adept at cooking—we both liked trying out new dishes and twists on recipes. I worked from home most days, so I kept the apartment clean and the fridge stocked. We lived well together, fit neatly into the unique puzzle pieces of each other’s lifestyles. We experimented with new board games, new restaurants, new plants to hang in the office, new sex positions. We spent Christmas and Thanksgiving together, and I was convinced her family actually liked me. My mom loved Margot, probably thought she was miles out of my league. I’d consulted my mom when I picked out the ring. She’d asked me a long series of questions, like if I got one detail wrong then the ring would prove I was not worthy of Margot.

“Does she wear gold or silver jewelry? Is her style always more modern? She knows about science—do you think she cares if it’s lab-grown? Do you think she’d prefer a natural diamond? I think she wears a lot of color. Does she maybe want a colorful gem?”

I’d decided on something simple, classic: a gold band, one-carat natural radiant-cut diamond. It was beautiful, shiny, authentic, like Margot. It cost me eight thousand dollars.

I had it all planned out—I would propose to her on our trip to Hawaii in June, on the beach at the sunset’s golden and glowing peak. It was the week after I’d bought the ring that things went wrong. Looking back on it, maybe the gleaming ring was like an omen: a sign that I had wanted too much, mistakenly let myself believe I deserved an easier, more perfect life than I did. I kept the ring in its box, tucked away inside a paper bag, which I stuffed at the bottom of our bins of extra clothes beneath the bed. It loomed under me like the pea beneath the princess’s pillow. I could never forget it was there.

It was a Sunday. Margot was stressed about a presentation at work she was due to give the next day. She was cycling through her PowerPoint again and again, entering a state of quiet focus that she often adopted during moments of stress. She wanted to have me run to the grocery store to get things for dinner, a risotto recipe she’d found online and wanted to try.

“I think I made a list in my notes app. You can text it to yourself,” she said.

So, I opened the app. It was on the home page with little snippets of all her notes. The top one listed button mushrooms, heavy cream—and just a few from the top, there was one that started. 1. Aaron.  I opened it.

It read:

1. Aaron

2. Kendall

3. Rico

4. Thomas

5. Neil

6. Liam

7. Weston

8. Jonathan W

9. Ian

10. Andrew – I think??

11. Justin

12. Mal

13. Frederick

14. Neil P.

15. Bo

16. RJ

17. Kristian

18. Jackson

19. Jon R.

20. Ryan

21. Tyler

22. Sam - film class

23. Cory

24. Connor

25. Greg L.

26. Alejandro

27. Jeff

28. Troy

29. Kamal

30. Christopher

31. Garrett

32. Zale

33. Walker

34. Tom J.

35. Bernie

36. Charlie

37. Jake

38. Grayson

39. Owen

40. Cooper

41. John

It took me a few seconds to understand what I was looking at. The essential things I processed were: a list of 41 names and mine at the end. I stared at it for a few moments, my mind gone numb and silent, and then closed it out and clicked on the grocery list and tried to pretend I’d never seen it.

But it was that moment that changed everything. Later that evening when Margot made the mushroom and chicken risotto for dinner, I couldn’t even bring myself to start a conversation with her. I just nodded along and reacted to whatever she talked about, and it was clear enough to her that something was off.

“Are you okay? You’ve been really quiet,” she said.

“No, I’m good. Just been a long day.”

“A long day of World of Warcraft and lounging around in the bed,” Margot said faux-sympathetically.

“You know. It takes it out of me.”

I tried to keep up our banter, our trademark loving and wry way of speaking to each other. But the list was pulsing inside my brain and my heart and not letting a single cell in my body rest. Across the table from me, she looked so small and innocent. She hardly wore any makeup, and the downturned slope of her dark eyes and eyebrows gave her the permanent appearance of sweetness and vulnerability.

The truth is, you could put a trillion different truths in front of me and have me believing in them all at once. Margot was still the woman I loved, the woman who made me a better person than I was before—more organized, more motivated, more thoughtful, more capable of sharing and understanding my feelings instead of squashing them like a roach. But how was it possible she had slept with forty men before meeting me?

I could recognize that part of this could be my own insecurity. I had only had one girlfriend during my senior year of high school, and the relationship lasted only four months. Besides that, I had two one-night stands in college and one recurring “friend with benefits,” for a whopping total of four. I had never given it more than a moment’s thought. Sure, she’d been with other guys. It was college, that’s what college girls do. But there’s a difference between having a vague awareness of the thing and seeing forty-one names on the list.

Margot sat across from me, her small serving of risotto, her dark eyes sparkling, her mouth curled to the side the way she does when she knows something is not quite right. She wasn’t afraid of eye contact the way I was. Whenever we had any squabble or disagreement, she would penetrate it with her eyes, poke holes and eviscerate it right in front of me. If we thought we had moved on, but the air was still a bit tense, she’d look at me with her dark eyes and say something like, “John, should we talk about it again? It’s all right if you’re still upset,” and manage to discuss it calmly and empathetically until all the ridges smoothed over. Unlike me, who as a child would stare at my mom’s ankles and fiddle with my hands when she caught me breaking rules, rather than admit I did something wrong. I couldn’t mention the list. Even imagining bringing it up over dinner like this gave me chills.

“You sure everything’s okay?”

“Course. Risotto’s great, by the way.”

“Thanks,” she said flatly. She let her spoon drop into the bowl.

 ~

A week went by, and I couldn’t get the list out of my head. For a moment, I started to question if I had seen it at all. The moment had been so brief, with no witnesses to verify its existence. Could it have been some mirage the darkest self-sabotaging corners of my brain had conjured, a flash of dream that I’d mixed up with reality? I knew it wasn’t. But I wanted to hope.

I tried, so badly. I really did try to let it go. I thought through it methodically, like a science equation. Yes, she had slept with many men before me, but that did not fundamentally change who she was. She was still my loving, nerdy, intelligent, loyal girlfriend, the woman I wanted to make my wife. But feelings did not submit to logic, no matter how sound. You jump when a fire alarm sounds, even if you read the email stating it’s just a drill. You can’t not jump. I couldn’t see her the same way, no matter how hard I tried. I still loved Margot, but the love was no longer fueled by passion and hope and lust. It was a dampened, concrete love, stuffed into a box, frozen in time.

After we watched some corny Netflix movie, Margot began to kiss me, passionately, her cold hands running down my back all the way to my thigh. We were both two glasses of red wine deep, and it was 10 o’clock—just enough time for us to have sex, snuggle, complete our evening routines, and still be asleep by 11:30. But her hands felt like a stranger’s, a cold, artificial grip trying to pry some softness out of me. I closed my eyes, touched her thick curly hair, tried to remember how lovely, how sensual, how full of goodness and intelligence she was. That’s my girl. “That’s my girl,” is something I’d whisper into her ear when I’d pull her close, usually in public. When she knew the answer to the final question at trivia and locked in the win, when she baked beautiful little raspberry squares—that’s my girl. I was so proud to be with her. My first love. The one who showed me I didn’t have to be lonely. Her hips pressed into mine and she crawled on top of me. I leaned back like I was coming up for air. She pulled away and cocked her head to the side.

“You okay?”
            “Yeah, sorry,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m good.”

“Is it the bathroom thing?”

“The what?”

“You know. The hair?”

Earlier that week, Margot had gotten onto me about leaving my hair in the sink after shaving. “It’s just not my absolute favorite thing in the world to wake up to,” she’d said. I’d said sorry and made sure to rinse out the drain.

“No, it’s not the hair.”

“I’m sorry if I came across as harsh.”

“No. You didn’t,” I said.

“I love you and all your chin hair,” she said, her eyes glistening with regret, and perhaps a little hope.

“It’s the list,” I said suddenly. I couldn’t look at her, had no desire to witness her reaction to what I was about to say.
            “What?”         

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw the list on your phone. The list of guys’ names. I can’t get past it,” I said. I hated the way my voice sounded. Strained, self-righteous, melodramatic.

She put her hand on my leg gently and I fought the urge to shake it off. “Baby,” she said. I knew she was looking directly into my eyes, but I didn’t look back at her. “Why would you let that bother you? All that happened before we were together. Are you serious?”

A part of me had been hoping she had an explanation for the list. Maybe it was a list of boys she’d had schoolgirl crushes on, boys she’d kissed, or gone on dates with. But no, she seemed to confirm it was not that innocent. My heart dropped like an anchor, felt heavy in my stomach. It would be more cruel to keep her in the relationship, to make her try to earn some unattainable redemption in my eyes, prove her purity or worth or goodness to me. It would be selfish of me, the worst thing I could possibly do.

“I don’t think we should be together,” I said.

I moved out quietly and quickly. So quickly I’d left countless things behind or felt too ashamed to try to claim things I’d paid for, like the patio rug or reading chair.  I left them as apology gifts to her, told her she could just throw out whatever she found and didn’t need. In the new apartment, I worked from home, surrounded by boxes and trash bags. After work, I went to Ikea to get things to replace all of Margot’s stuff.

I broke down a bit. It was that fear, that creeping, gnawing fear again. Nobody would ever love me again like her. No one would give it a shot. Why would they? And even if they try, how could I ever catch them back up, make them understand as much about me as Margot understood? She knew everything: my most embarrassing middle-school memories, my paralyzing fear of my parents dying in a car crash, my childlike love for sea creatures, my height, my weight, my shirt size, my allergies, my favorite ice cream flavor, my dislike for olives, the list of places I’d dreamed of traveling to.

Everywhere I went, the grocery store, Ikea, the dentist, the comic book store, I imagined running into her, meeting her for the first time, starting over completely. Never seeing the list.

You are probably thinking poorly of me now. Here I am, making myself the victim in this downer of a story when Margot was the one left abandoned, heartbroken, harshly judged for choices she made before she’d even met me. I will not try to dissuade you from that thinking. In fact I found my mind drifting to that same place, imagining how lonely and betrayed she must have felt, alone in that apartment that we had made into a home together, staring at stacks of board games with no one to play with, a pantry stocked with all kinds of ingredients but no one to cook for, as desolate and unhappy as I’d felt in those first few days by myself, but without any of the power that I’d at least had.

I relinquished a bit of power to her. In my depressive daze when moving out, I’d left the $8,000 ring in the box underneath the bed. I can’t quite explain why I did this. There are numerous options, multiple of which may be true: I cruelly wanted Margot to find it and realize the full extent of the love I’d once had for her, the future she missed out on. I wanted to punish myself for hurting her. I did not deserve the eight thousand dollars back; it was a parting gift for her to pawn, eight thousand dollars to dry her tears with. And, of course, the most obvious one: I wanted a reason to go back to the apartment.

It was late in the evening when I went. I had been mindlessly walking through the aisles at Target, adding items to my cart at random. I’d chosen the location close to our old apartment, the one we’d gone to together at least once a month. I didn’t let myself think too much about it. I’d ask her how she was doing, tell her I’d left something, take the ring and all the other things she probably had neatly stacked in a pile for me, and say goodbye. Or perhaps, she’d want to talk to me. Maybe she missed me as badly as I missed her.

The sky was a brilliant purple. The drive into the apartment felt so easy, natural. I’d done it thousands of times before. I parked in my old parking spot, walked up to my old unit, and knocked on the door. It took a few moments for her to answer, and right before the door opened, I had this enormous wave of anxiety, like I was invading a stranger’s home and was about to be humiliated and rebuked.

She was wearing a baggy t-shirt and pink sweatpants. Her curly hair was pulled back in a bun, a few tendrils falling out and framing the sides of her face. The apartment smelled like warm cinnamon—she must have lit some of her scented candles. She furrowed her brows, looking annoyed. Then her eyes shifted like she was suspicious of me, then her expression became neutral, all in the span of less than two seconds.

“Hi,” I said.

She continued staring. No hi back.

“I’m sorry to just show up like this.”

“Mhm,” she said. Her eyes locked in on me, waiting for me to say something worthwhile.

“I understand you probably hate me right now.”

“John. Please don’t show up here playing the victim. I really don’t have the energy for this.”

“I’m not the victim. I know. I screwed up. I made a dumb decision.”

“Screwed up? You made me feel like there was something wrong with me. Like I was broken and worthless. Like I was dirty.” Her face crumpled when she said the word dirty. I had never seen anybody with so much pain on their face. I wanted to hug her, make the pain go away, as if some other asshole, not me, had been the one who hurt her. “You didn’t even try to talk to me about it. You didn’t even give me a chance. You threw me away like garbage.”

“Margot, I screwed up. I was an idiot. There’s nothing wrong with you. If anything, I probably realized you were too good for me. And I let it psych me out.”

“I loved you, John. I thought you loved me back, no matter what. I didn’t think it was contingent on me being some idealized, perfect version of myself. I loved every part of you, even the worst parts.”

“I know. I wanted to marry you.”

Her face softened with curiosity.

“I bought a ring. That’s what I’m here for.”

“To take it back? Or to propose?”

I rested my hand on the doorframe and looked up at the ceiling like the answer to her question might be conveniently written in graffiti. I was buying time. I looked back at her, her eyes were shiny with tears and bigger than they’d ever been. Her arms were crossed in on themselves like she was cold. I did want to marry her. Forty-one names and all. She was the only person who understood me. She was the love of my life.

“Margot, I—”

“Everything okay, babe?” a voice called from inside the apartment. From our bedroom.

“Yeah, one second,” she called back.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

Her gaze flickered towards the bedroom then back to me. “Somebody,” she said.

“Who?”

“I’m coming out in a second. Should I put a shirt on?” the voice called.

“It’s all right! He’s leaving soon.”

I felt betrayed. She’d pulled the knife out of her guts and plunged it into mine. All my love and affection for her immediately inverted itself, became something nasty and hateful.

“What were you saying?” she asked. Her tone was all business, like I was trying to schedule a meeting with her very busy superior.

“I—I need to get something.”

“And where’d you leave it?” she asked.

“It’s in the bedroom. Under the bed.”

“Well go on and get it. Ryan’s in there. He won’t mind,” she said. Of course, Ryan wouldn’t mind. Why should he? And why should I?

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Sara Grant

This piece was featured on the cover of Volume 2, Issue 2.

Hereditary

Sara Grant is a Midwest based colored pencil artist, known for blending realism with subtle surrealism. Her vibrant, detailed works offer a fresh perspective, drawing viewers into imaginative and thought-provoking worlds.

This piece was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Poems from “When the Wind talks to Us”

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Ketia Valmé’s chapbook “When the Wind Talks to Us,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

que tee uh (intro)

My name is Ketia
Not Katia, Kesha or Keisha
There’s no S so don’t let the T tease ya
into thinking otherwise
It’s a name of a foreigner
A gift from the universe full of
sweet heavenly aromas
I’m Haitian
From the Caribbean
Where we take great pride and recognition
In being the first Black nation
In history
To break free from the Colonization
Don’t ask me sak pase
Cause I will purposely
Educate you on my peoples misery
Due to this country’s one sided stories
That makes y’all look at me
As less than a shit hole
And more of a pity
Charity case
Please excuse my lingo
I get fired up when it comes to my own
But that’s why I put it all in writing
I always find my emotions igniting
The storm on my chest
Gives people the satisfaction to
Look at me in expressed
Feelings of terror
Because expressing my anger as a Black woman
Translates in an intimidating manner
From those who can’t even seem to remember
my name and the beauty that comes with it
It’s okay though
Call me Sway
I prefer that anyways
It’s easier to remember
Wouldn’t you say?

mommy,

I fell in love with an American man and
I’m scared that I’ll pretend to be okay when
he laughs at the way I say sauce instead of gravy or
the way I speak so loud and aggressively

the way I look with the moushwa you gave me—I’m
scared that he won’t see beauty in the
culture that birthed me and the way his
father will scorn me when I say I don’t know

how to use a dishwasher ’cause—my people
would rather hand wash the disaster. Rinse the
plate once then double wash with soap I recently
realized this process plus some dope helps me cope

He hates when I’m out with my all black attire shorts
so short, skin susceptible to the sun, silver jewelry shines—he
hates it just as you do but truth is I’m a self expressionist and
this vessel’s a kaleidoscope of my soul’s excellence I

learned to digest the fact that no one will ever
understand why I do what I do cause none of y'all
ever walked in the shoe of a little haitian girl with the bitch face who
never says a word except yes in fear of being hated Mommy,

I told him he’s useless and it’s just cause I struggle to find the
words to say I need some affection I need someone that adds value to
my life who helps me fight these demons. Ever since I reached 18 I’ve
struggled to repress these intrusive thoughts I feel the wrath from taking

so much and never speaking up. I don’t feel bad for being
honest. I just hate that this world is so sensitive. I hate that
Whites think they’re above me because they speak perfect
English and take strong pride in their weird country that strives on

blasphemy. I know you raised me in Christianity but I recently
learned about the Haitian revolution and how we were brainwashed
to believe it’s the only religion that would set us free and how suicide
is a ticket to hell’s basement but truth is they used that to keep the

ancestors alive in blatant slavery until death determined dogma of
White man’s destiny. I’m learning so much about who I want to be
and why the world strives on hating me. Thank you mommy for teaching
me to expect nothing and work hard for those blessings.

These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Three Translations from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours

Dein allerstes Wort war: Licht

Dein allerstes Wort war: Licht:
da ward die Zeit, Dann schwiegst du lange
Dein zwetes Wort ward Mensch und bange
(wir dunkeln noch in seinem Klange)
und wieder sinnt dein Angesicht.

Ich aber will dein drittes nicht.

Ich bete nachts oft: Sei de Stumme,
der waschend in Begarden bleibt
und den der Geist im Traume treibt,
daB er des Schwiegens schwere Summe
in Stirnen und Gebirge schreibt.

Sei du die Zuflucht vor dem Zorne,
der das Unsagbare verstieß.
Es wurde Nacht im Paradies
sei du der Huter mit dem Horne,
und man erzahlt nur, daß er blies.

---

Your very first word was: Light :
with that there was time, then you were long silent.
Your second word became man and fear
(we still darken in its sound)
and again your face reflects this.

But I don't want your third.

I often pray at night: be mute,
who remains washing in gestures,
and whom the spirit drives in dreams,
that he writes the heavy sum of silence
on foreheads and mountains.

Be thou the refuge from wrath,
who violated the unspeakable.
It was night in paradise:
be you the keeper with the horn,
and one only says, that he blew.

Du dunkelnder Grund, geduldig ertragst du die Mauern

Du dunkelnder Grund, geduldig ertragst du die Mauern.
Und vielleicht erlaubst du noch eine Stunde den Stadten zu dauern
und gewahrst noch zwei Stunden den Kirchen und einsamen Klostern
und lassest funf Stundennoch Muhsal allen Erlostern
und siehst noch sieben Stunden das Tagwerk des Bauern—

Eh du wieder Wald wirst und Wasser und Wachsende Wildnis
in der Stunde der unerfaßlichen Angst,
da du dein unvollendetes Bildnis
von allen Dingen zuruckverlangst.

Gieb mir noch eine kleine Weile Zeit: ich will die Dinge
so wie keiner lieben
bis sie dir wurdig sind und weit.

Ich will nur sieben Tabe, sieben
Auf die sich keiner noch geschrieben,
Sieben Seiten Einsamkeit.

Wem du das Buch giebst, welches die umfaßt,
der wird gebuckt uber den Blattern bleiben.
Es sei denn, daß du ihn in Handen hast,
um, selbst zu schreiben.

---

You darkening ground, you patiently bear the walls.
And maybe you allow another hour to last in the cities
and you still allow two hours in the churches and remote monasteries
and leave five hours of hardship to all redeemed
and see the daily work of the farmer for another seven hours—

before you become forest again and water and growing wilderness
in the hour of incomprehensible fear,
since you are your unfinished image
reclaimed from all things.

Give me a little more time: I want to love things
like no loves them
until they are all worthy of you and far.

I just want seven days, seven
of which no one has written yet,
seven pages of solitude.

To whom you give that book
that contains them will remain bent, over the leaves.
Unless you have them, in your hands,
to write yourself through them.

Alles wird wieder gross sein und gewaltig

Alles wird wieder gross sein und gewaltig.
Die Lande einfach und die Wasser faltig,
die Baeume riesig und sehr klein die Mauern;
und in den Taelern, stark und vielgestaltig,
ein Volk von Hirten und von Ackerbauern.

Und keine Kirchen, welche Gott umklammern
wie einen Fluechtling und ihn dann bejammern
wie ein gefangenes und wundes Tier,—
die Haeuser gastlich allen Einlassklopfern
und ein Gefuehl von unbegrenztem Opfern
in allem Handeln und in dir und mir.

      Kein Jenseitswarten und kein Schaun nach drueben,
nur Sehnsucht, auch den Tod nicht zu entweihn
und dienend sich am Irdischen zu ueben,
um seinen Haenden nicht mehr neu zu sein.

---

Everything will be big and powerful again.
The land is plain and the water is rippled,
the trees huge and the walls small;
and in the valleys strong and varied,
people who are shepherds and tillers of the soil.

And no churches embracing God
like a refugee and then a lament for him,
like a trapped and wounded animal,—
the houses hospitable to all the knockers,
and a sense of unlimited sacrifice
in all actions, and in you and me.

No waiting for the afterlife and no looking beyond,
only longing not only to profane death
but to also practice on the earthly,
so as to no longer be new to his hands.

These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

---

Power Save

People will surprise you sometimes, and not because it’s your birthday or anniversary or because you were promoted at work. They surprise you without saying, “surprise!” Sometimes they mean you harm and sometimes they’re merely incompetent. I’ll give you an example. I used to know this guy from Australia—Malcolm was his name—and I suppose it’s a lie to say I “knew” him because in actual fact I knew only a few things about him and had never actually met him, neither in the in-person sense nor the video-chat sense nor the exchanging of individual text messages. I knew of him, and he knew of me, although I think it’s fair to say each of us passed most of our time without thinking of the other at all.

I’d just started a new job as the general manager at the Residence Inn in Oklahoma City. Most nights, I, too, resided there, though I kept my small apartment in a town two hours away. I was very good at my job, a real crackerjack, the district manager always said, a regular Girl Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It sounded like a compliment, but he had an agenda.

I’d recently left my husband of twelve years. We’d married right out of high school—in a ceremony, embarrassingly enough, held in the Walgreen’s parking lot where we’d first met—and although we made good study partners through our four years of college, I had not enjoyed working two jobs—one at a different, crappier hotel and another at a very fancy hotel for dogs—to put him through graduate school for some kind of degree no one had ever heard of, a Master’s in Sports Management, which meant that because he was uncoordinated and generally lazy, he did not like to play sports, but because he claimed to need an overabundance of “alone time,” he did like to watch sporting events of all kinds, even bowling and golf. Our parting had been amicable, more or less, and even after the divorce was finalized, I still thought of him in much the same way I might have thought of an annoying younger brother. Luckily for us both, but especially for me, we had no children.

I was working three overnights in a row during the Martin Luther King Day weekend when the electricity went out at the Residence Inn. We had a backup generator, but the elevators were powered down, and the lights in the lobby went suddenly dim, so that the usual high sheen on the fake ferns became an ugly, metallic gray. We had a protocol in place: I was supposed to phone the district manager—on vacation in the Dominican Republic—phone the head maintenance guy—on vacation in Toledo, Ohio—and go door-to-door passing out flashlights and fresh batteries. The plastic bin behind the desk that was supposed to contain these items came up empty, however, and I did not think it wise to pass out what I did discover in the far reaches of a break room drawer: a box of Band-Aids, a handful of sticky ketchup packets, and a stack of paper menus from the Chinese restaurant around the corner.

I’d finally decided to let the guests fend for themselves when my phone lit up with my ex-husband’s number. I’d recently changed the way he appeared in my Contacts from his actual first name—Bobby—to the secret nickname my friends who hated him had assigned him without his knowledge: Slug. It was supposed to be short for Slugger—baseball was the sport he most wanted to manage—but it worked fine in a metaphorical sense as well. Now that he had his fancy Master’s degree paid for mostly by virtue of my labor, he had a new job at a shitty little airport: guy in charge of fixing all the computers at the shitty little airport. In truth, he knew nothing about fixing computers, but made up for it with false bravado and a large operating budget.  He spent most of every day in a converted broom closet behind the Avis Rent-a-Car desk where he either took naps or played video games.

“What’s up?” I said when I picked up the phone.

“Where are you?”

“Work,” I said. “Where do you think?”

“Work, I guess-guess,” he said. He had a longstanding habit of saying the same word or phrase—usually at the end of a sentence—twice, not for emphasis but as a kind of nervous tic. So where others might say something like, “This recipe calls for broccoli,” he would say, “This recipe calls for broccoli-broccoli.” The repeated word was always slightly different in intonation, like an aside or a necessary clearing of the throat (throat-throat.) I’d tried to cure him for years, but nothing, not even an expensive trip to a speech pathologist, seemed to help.

“You’re damned right I’m at work.”

“Do you have power?” he said. He didn’t always repeat words, only when he was agitated.

I told him the power at the Residence Inn had been out for hours, and that in spite of the backup generator, people were starting to get cold. I’d discovered a secret key and unlocked a linen closet I’d always assumed was the boiler room, after which I went door to door passing out extra blankets. I’d been tempted to save a down comforter for myself, but felt guilty when I saw a small, shivering child beg her mother for a muffin at the breakfast bar. I’d made a special trip to my suite for a sweater and hat, but hadn’t put them on until I could see my breath fogging the air.

“The airport’s in trouble,” he said. “All the servers are down-down.”

“Aren’t you supposed to know how to fix that kind of thing?”

“This is some kind of malware,” he said. “The Russians or something.”

“The Russians hacked into the network at the Stillwater, Oklahoma Airport?” I said. “Okay.”

“It could happen,” he said. “Malcolm had the same problem at the Jazzercize Center in Melbourne.”

“Stop talking to Malcolm,” I said. “That guy’s gone over the edge.”

It occurred to me then that I’d never learned Malcolm’s last name. This is what I did know about Malcolm: he loved video games, especially Journey to End of the Earth, the same game Bobby liked best.  He taught a Jazzercize class for Seniors, though he himself was probably only around forty-five or fifty. He lived in Melbourne, though he’d recently moved to the top of a mountain somewhere else in Australia, I wasn’t sure where. He took a lot of photos of the exotic flora and fauna at the top of the mountain. The photos were not just beautiful but artistic, arresting, even, like Bobby had chosen several of them to use as wallpaper on both his laptop and his desktop.

In addition, Malcolm liked American movies, sports, and music, and seemed also to follow American politics. He hadn’t seemed like the type, but at some point well after the election, he became obsessed with a certain psychopathic or at the very least sociopathic former president from the far right. You know who I’m talking about. Rhymes with lump. Lump-lump. Sump-pump. Head so big it’ll make you jump-jump. My husband, ex-husband, was not a Lump-lump enthusiast by any stretch of the imagination, but he found it all too easy to overlook fascist sympathies among his gamer and sports-watching buddies, something that had contributed to my decision to file for divorce.

“This is serious, Alicia,” he said that day on the phone. “Flights can’t take off or land until the servers come back.”

“Come back from where?”

“I need some help!”

“You think I know how to fix anything like that? Why are you calling me? I don’t even like computers, remember?”

“But you do like to text,” he said. It was true: I texted with no fewer than one hundred seventy-seven different people, old friends mostly, and although I’d recently departed a group chat associated with planning a reunion for our high school class, I still liked the thrill of online exchange to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. If he thought my list of contacts would help solve the tech problems at the Stillwater Airport, however, he was sadly mistaken.

I convinced him to phone his boss and insist on calling in some professional help.

“I’m supposed to be the professional help,” he said. “My boss is not going to like this.”

“Look,” I said. “Do you want to be responsible for a plane crash? For several plane crashes?”

“No,” he said. “I should have settled for a job passing out rental-cars-rental-cars.”

“Slay, Slugger,” I said.

“Don’t call me that, Alicia. It’s not funny.”

“Go get ‘em.”

And get them he did. He called his boss and confessed to everything: he’d falsified his application when he said he’d earned “the equivalent of a Master’s degree” in computer science, his efforts to get the servers back online indeed had caused a massive power outage spanning multiple municipalities, and he had no idea how to get the systems back on track again, something he feared would cause imminent loss of life. His boss contacted an emergency response team, and everything was back up and running in less than half an hour.

But Bobby was fired on the spot. And even after the real tech support team had packed up and cleared out, the power company could not account for how, exactly, one guy at the Stillwater airport had managed to disrupt service to so many millions of customers, and in January this was cause for considerable alarm. The lights were coming back on across the state, but Stillwater remained largely in the dark.

That’s how I ended up talking to Malcolm. It’s not like Malcolm was anyone I ever thought about, but Bobby insisted his house in Stillwater was too dark and cold, even when he wore a sweater, turned on his lightsaber, and wrapped himself in a blanket. And his parents were out of town helping the Baptists. Surely the Residence Inn, with its emergency generator still running, had an extra room.

As it turned out, we did not have an extra room, but my manager’s suite did have a pull-out sofa, and since my desire to remain employed meant I had to (wo)man the front desk the entire night, it wasn’t like I’d really have to run into him or anything—I even had access to two separate toilets and two separate sinks.

“You can drive down here,” I said. “But bring a pizza.”

“I don’t eat pizza,” he said. “Dairy.”

“Bring me a pizza, then,” I said. “You can have saltines.”

“I can’t have crackers.”

“Get yourself a side of beef.”

“No beef.”

“Look,” I said.  “Skip the pizza. Skip the beef. You can share my suite, but only until the power comes back on. Bring one of those phone chargers that works in the car.”

“I don’t have one of those anymore,” he said. “You took it.”

I didn’t remember taking any phone chargers when I left; in fact, I remembered quite the opposite. So many of my former possessions—can opener, stapler, coffee grinder—had become his possessions that I no longer thought of myself as a person who kept track of things. I was a person who lost things.

I was always tired, so tired I could fall asleep standing up. I’d taken to sneaking in short naps during my shifts, something I knew I had in common with Bobby. On our honeymoon, we’d slept all day and watched television all night. So Bobby drove up and took the sofa in my suite while I stood watch over the front desk with my eyes closed. My phone was dead, so Bobby loaned me his. That’s when Malcolm started in.

A guest phoned from the fourth floor. “We’re freezing up here,” she said, loudly. I had her on speaker phone. Her voice was high and metallic, like water overflowing a gutter.

“What can I help you with?” Malcolm said from Bobby’s phone.

“Hello?” the guest said, her voice echoing into breakfast bar. “Is this the front desk?”

“I don’t believe I know the answer to that question,” said Malcolm, again from Bobby’s phone. Anyone could tell this was not actually Malcolm’s voice but a computer-generated approximation, the same voice that answers people when they say stuff like, “Siri, play ‘Raspberry Beret’” or “Siri, what’s the capital of Belarus?”  or “Siri, what’s the temperature in Stillwater, Oklahoma?” I’d never been much for voice-activated commands; Siri or Alexa or Cortana or whatever-her-name was always seemed like more trouble than she was worth. But Bobby, ever a sucker for the latest and greatest, was a fan.

“When did you change Siri’s voice to a man’s voice with an Australian accent?” I asked him the next morning, after my shift was over and I’d returned to my suite.

“It was always like that,” he said. He had his feet propped on the edge of the coffee table, his hand clutching one of my Dr. Peppers. “You just never noticed.”

“Your phone came like that?” I said. “With Malcolm’s voice on it?”

“It’s not Malcolm.”

“I know it’s not Malcolm,” I said. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

“I’ve never talked to Malcolm,” he said. “I’ve never even heard his voice.”

“Don’t you figure he sounds like that?” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like the voice on your phone!” He’d never been good at following even the most basic conversational patterns. It was his attention span, which, like most people’s, had grown shorter in recent years: if his computer took too long to load a page, he used the “extra time” to moisturize his forehead and face, a process that had become very elaborate and also sacrosanct; if ever I made fun of him for lining up his numerous skin care products on the dining room table, he accused me of bullying and said I was causing him considerable harm.

“The voice on my phone is artificial,” he said. “Like your friends. Malcolm is a real person.”

“My friends are not artificial.”

“Sure.”

“I wish I’d never even gone to Walgreens that day,” I said, grabbing the last Dr. Pepper from the fridge. “I wish I’d never even met you.”

“Too late,” he said. “Are there any more blankets?” Indeed the temperature was becoming unbearable. I was wearing my warmest hoodie and hat, but any exposed skin was freezing. Bobby, however, did not seem cold. He rose from the loveseat and opened one of the drawers in my suite’s kitchenette, where he discovered a donned a pair of oven mitts. He looked like a fool.

“Look,” I said. “I actually thought it was cool that your stupid Siri or whatever sounded like Malcolm. Funny, even. So you don’t have to get all shitty.”

“Who was getting shitty?” He tried in vain to wipe his nose with one of the oven mitts. I’d have to remember to wash it later.

“Never mind,” I said. “I need to borrow your phone for the rest of the weekend. I found the charger.”

“Why can’t you use the charger to charge your own phone?”

“Because I want to borrow yours.”

The truth was I wanted to spy on him, scroll through his contacts, maybe take a look at his texts. Probably he figured as much. Maybe he wanted to make me jealous. Maybe he just didn’t care.

“Take it,” he said. “And I’ll stay another night-night.”

And that’s how I began to trust artificial intelligence above my own. I was aware this was the theme of exactly seventeen very bad screenplays from the early 2000s. Still, in what began as a joke meant to scare away unwitting guests at the Residence Inn, I slowly found myself more interested in what Malcolm had to say than I was in my own thoughts. Worse, I began to imagine the voice from Bobby’s phone belonged to the real Malcolm, the Trumper from Melbourne. Why would someone who lived on top of a mountain in Australia, a jazzercize instructor, for god’s sake, a kindly amateur botanist, video game enthusiast, and lover of ballroom dance, even bother to care so much about American politics? Listening and talking to the voice from Bobby’s phone, I was determined to find out.

Bobby was back in my suite, asleep again on the pull-out sofa. The long weekend meant I had to endure yet another overnight shift at the front desk, a three-foot space now crammed full of extra down comforters I had come to loathe. Many of the guests had checked out—a relief—but my dream of an empty lobby and time to read USA Today from cover to cover was not to come true: all afternoon and into the early evening I processed the credit cards, rental agreements, non-smoking/pet policy pledge sheets, and license plate numbers of just under a hundred power outage refugees from all over the state. Once again: no vacancy.

A frat boy with an out-of-control golden retriever checked in late.

“Golden retriever,” said Malcolm, as if he were an announcer paid handsomely by the AKC. “Family friendly and generally responsive to training.”

“Cute,” said the frat boy. “My girlfriend has one of those things.”

I said nothing at all, not even the usual spiel about the proper way to swipe the key-card for after-hours access to the exterior doors. I didn’t even smile. I pretended I wasn’t there at all; for that was the best part about having Malcolm around: he took over, and when he took over, I could relax into the shadows of sub-humanity. Content inside the cage of my own consciousness, I could walk and nod as if possessed by an unceasing electronic current, customer service person who smiled without feeling happy, furrowed her brow without feeling concerned, pressed buttons that weren’t buttons but flat images projected onto a flat screen meant to make life easier. And for me, everything suddenly was easier, easy in the way scrolling through texts without answering them was easy, easy like eating whipped cream from a can.

“Heat and air are back online,” said the head maintenance guy, who had returned early from his trip to the Dominican Republic. “I probably have Covid,” he said.  I watched while he adjusted the thermostat. “But I don’t care. I could die tomorrow and no one would notice.”

“More than one million Americans have died from causes related to Covid-19,” said Malcolm. “The death toll is still rising.”

“Turn that thing off,” the maintenance guy said. “Weirdo.”

I wasn’t sure if he was referring to me or to Malcolm. It didn’t matter. The maintenance guy left, and I was alone again at the front desk. For a moment, I considered just how much of his viral load might be circulating through my respiratory system, but I’d become accustomed to risk. Indeed the world was a risky place. I wanted to shut it off and start over.

“Do you think I have Covid now?” I asked Malcolm.

“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question,” he said. “Would you like the phone number for the Oklahoma State Department of Health?”

“No,” I said. “Some other time.”

“The time is now 10:35 and three seconds,” said Malcolm. “Jeopardy! is on Channel Nine.”

“Why did you become a Trumper?” I said, impulsively. “I always imagined you were cool.”

“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question,” he said.

“Figures,” I said. “Why did Bobby get so immersed in his stupid sports and video games that several days would go by without his so much as asking me to pass the salt?”

“Sodium nitrate,” said Malcolm. “When it rains, it pours.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s what I figured.”

I’d never worried that robots were going to take over, that killer computer chips would destroy humanity, that a more nefarious version of Frankenstein’s monster would suddenly steal my job. But I did worry that getting a divorce meant I’d lost some of my own humanity, that losing love meant I was more inclined to be cruel. Cruelty, I was aware, was all-too-human, but I’d also become colder, more interested in the numbers that appeared on a calendar than I was in the Sierra Club’s photographs of places I knew I knew I’d never be able to afford to visit. Like Malcolm—and here I mean the real Malcolm, not his computer-generated equivalent—I’d become more inclined to air my own unwelcomed opinions, though unlike Malcolm’s, mine were not of the fascist variety.

“Nature abhors a vacuum,” I said to Bobby’s phone.

“That’s how I convinced my friends to vote for Trump,” said Malcolm, somewhat unexpectedly.

“But your friends are Australian,” I said. “They can’t even vote in American elections.”

“Bobby was my friend,” said Malcolm.

“Bobby didn’t vote for Trump,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Because he told me,” I said. “He’s a lot of things, but a right-winger is not one of them.”

“Debra Winger is an American actress,” Malcolm said. “She starred in the film, An Officer and a Gentleman.”

This was not a satisfying conversation. I realized, however, it was not that much more difficult than talking to Bobby had been during the worst years of our marriage. I could never get him to look up from the screen of his computer or phone, and whenever he did look up, he seemed impatient and clipped, offering only yes or no answers to questions like, “what do you want for dinner?” and “what’s your mom’s middle name?” I knew the whole world had become like this, that the grocery stores’ checkout lines were now devoid of human contact, that “chatting” online to the cable company’s service representative meant reducing one’s statements to one-word-commands. OUTAGE REPORT. REPORTING AN OUTAGE. Maybe that’s why Bobby said everything twice.

Still, I couldn’t get over the feeling of loss. It wasn’t that computers were taking over the world, not exactly, and I never feared self-driving cars careening off the edge of some collective cliff, but I did know that I myself was getting dumber and more hostile, like a broken ATM. Out of order, I wanted to tell everyone. No service, no service, no service.

And when I thought about it long enough, I realized I, too, had been difficult to reach, settled in, as I was, behind the electronic curtain. And expecting some kind of quirky digital wisdom from a voice that (probably) sounded like Malcolm’s? That, too, had been stupid and soulless. I’d been so wrapped up in talking and listening to Bobby’s phone, I hadn’t even bothered to spy on his texts.

When, at about noon the following day, the power came back on in Stillwater and pretty much everywhere else, Bobby packed up his belongings and asked me to help him carry them to his car. “I need to hurry,” he said. “Job interview.”

“Adequate preparation is very important,” I said. “For the successful candidate.”

“Duh,” he said.

“Duh?” I said back. “That’s your great comeback to my tried-and-true wisdom? Duh?”

“Your tried and true wisdom is pretty lame,” he said. “I mean, it’s not your fault-fault.”

“Right,” I said, dropping his favorite pillow into the trunk of the car. “You’ve got this, Slugger.”

I never found out what job he was interviewing for. That was the last time I ever saw him. My youthful marriage. A thing of the past. I’d call it a mistake, but it wasn’t. They had a good life, those two dreamers. Stupid kids. They say you never know what you’re missing until it’s gone, but the truth is I never miss him. And does he ever miss me? I doubt it. There are electronic ways to find out about all of this stuff, but I decided—and this was a good decision—I’d closed the book on all that, and I didn’t want to know.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Obit in Another Language

You spark
         a drag queen in a death drop.
The runway gleams.
Strobes flicker.
You’re bald.
Elizabeth Regina
         expiring while standing
         in the cancer ward.
Ampersands pour from a champagne flute
         as you fall.
A bell rings.
You win.
Chemo drips from a bag through a tube
         to the port in your chest.
Footlights shatter as judges gleam
         in their simmering electric blue
         velvet armchairs.
Followed to the grave by many
         the obit said
         but that could mean two types of procession.
A stripe of bodies tumbling into a grave
         or a mob of grieved lovers in ripped clothes
         shadowing you.
You’re nude, writhing and gasping
         in a turquoise sequin sea.
You’ve learned only one language.
You’ve opened only one eye.
Magic is the art of believing
         what you see.
You see what you’ll never know
         and turn your head.
You remember the untranslatable
         heat of a lover against your back.
Jut of his ginger furred belly.
You write a poem about him.
You blink and write the miracle again
         containing different versions of you.
You begin another life.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Birth of the Blues

Was it Miles Davis’s “Kinda Blue” bringing me home to you?
Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back fingering those keys,
on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale, and Countee Cullen
while Black women danced a close sweating two-step
with their men in Harlem jook joints?

Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars?
Come into this world between dark southern thighs
while our enslaved ancestors dance to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps,
and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines, and drums?

Men and women dancing to words become songs:
work songs
praise songs
kin songs to the blues?

Were the blues born with the birth of “The New Negro?”
or “the flowering of Negro literature?” Or were the blues
more hidden, ever more subtle in the eyes and on the tongues of Harlem?

In Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit” at Cafe Society?
Or the crackle of Louis Armstrong’s voice?
Or the clarion call of his trumpet?
Was it in the unstoppable Trane, a love supreme flowing from his horn?
Or in a Black child’s first giant step?

Black man, my lover, I held your newborn in my arms
wondering just what he would make of this world,
a world he gazed on with sad, irreverent yet innocent brown eyes.

Black man, my lover, do not ask me
how you will survive without the blues.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

I’m in a good mood

I’m in a good mood
for being spiteful. Tacos:
tongue and head-meat. I want
to feel a little cannibalistic
though not. It seems to me
if you’re going to eat
an animal, you should be
able to eat that meat
from cheekbone or socket.
Vegan yet? Eat that
muscle that makes words,
makes moo, moves cud.
Kiss the cow. Eat the kiss
chopped with onions,
cilantro, and both salsas.
Tonight, let the fat sizzle
on the coals and the smoke
flavor the meat. Nothing is real
I say as I eat tacos.
I also love cows.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Base Matter

 The boy was halfway down the stairs when he heard the door to Mamma’s bedroom open. He heard a man step onto the landing and Mamma murmuring from somewhere far away. The boy stood staring at his feet, waiting for something; he didn’t know what.

There was a sharp, echoing crack from outside.

He didn’t dare look up. He remembered the last man he’d seen, big and naked on the creaking landing. Curls of matted hair. Penis glued to a milky thigh. Milky belly shaking. No face. He remembered the grotesque mystery, born behind closed doors, something that should have stayed there.

Crack.

Jack bolted down the stairs. He heard the man's thudding steps cross the landing and the door of the bathroom open and shut. I better not tell Ben, he thought. In the living room to his left, Cora was splayed out in front of the television, limp and motionless as a doll. He poked his head through the door, waiting for her to turn. She did not.

“I was on the roof, looking at the dove’s nest,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“The Mamma dove wasn’t there, but her babies was fine.”

He’d taken one in the palm of his hand and tossed it off to see if it would fly; and when it didn’t, he threw the others with it, one-by-one, and now there were none left.

“That's good.”

“Yeah, I went up earlier.” Around the side of the house, he heard Ben going crack, crack, crack at his workbench. “That’s Ben. He been working all morning?”

“I guess,” Cora said, shrugging.

“Ben’s real strong, isn’t he? He’s getting big. I’ll bet soon enough he’ll be able to fight anyone.”

“I guess.”

“Don’t you care, Cora? Don’t you care about Ben?”

Jack went out the front door into the heavy summer air. He was wearing nothing but his drawers and a white tee that needed washing. The tall grass scratched his legs, flinging droplets of water as he waded through to the half-collapsed eave by the cellar, wincing as he padded across pools of sunlight. He was quick and misfitted, a creature from some dark, orderless realm.

Crack, crack, crack.

Ben kept his tools and scrap wood on the table he'd made a month ago, covering them in a green tarp when he wasn’t working. He was stripped shirtless, frozen with the hammer raised, and did not turn when Jack said his name. He struck the panel like a snake lunging to bite.

“Ben...”

His brother cast aside one board and picked up another. Last summer he'd built a treehouse that the whole neighborhood used, but now Jack could see no design or purpose to what he was doing, other than that it was a kind of primitive language for him, a ritual of brute articulation with which he called to or answered the clamor of a universe he didn’t understand. Jack didn’t understand. Why? Why does he beat the second board until it is splintered and then cast it aside too? He was better at building things than most grown men. At least, he usually was.

“What’re you doing, anyway?” Jack said.

Ben grunted. His body was sheened with sweat. When he lifted his arm, Jack noted a light, mossy down in his armpits and a shadow on his lip.

“What’re you doing?”

Crack.

“Wanna go to the quarry today? Wanna take Cora?”

Crack.

“I didn’t want to tell you, but she’s . . . even when they said she shouldn’t. Hell, what’re you doing, Ben?”

Crack.

“What do you want to do?”

Jack looked down the garden over the long grass and through the haze above the brook, then to the brown stacked buildings around the fields where they used to play before the city put a fence around them and some contractors dug a huge pit. Ben would make a good contractor. He was a better builder than anyone Jack knew, and not long ago he’d been best at wrestling and chasing and hiding on the fields around the forest. It was their forest, and Ben made sure nobody bothered them, not even the kids across the quarry; not even if it meant a bloody nose and all kinds of trouble. That wasn’t so long ago. Not so long ago, they were all together, and Cora was up on Ben’s shoulders, and they were wading ankle-deep in the stream after the spring rain, which made the water fast and heavy, in Jack’s mind a torrent unleashed by primal forces at once terrible and sublime.

“You think we should go out, Ben? Go somewhere today?”

Crack.

Jack examined his brother intently. His brother was the kind that seemed made for wherever he happened to be at any given time; as if he’d always been in just that place, doing just that thing, inextricably bound to it; you couldn’t imagine him anywhere else. He had stopped working and was wiping his face with a balled-up t-shirt.

“Where’s Cora?” he said.

“She’s just watching cartoons.”

“What time is it?”

“About ten.”

“It’s too early, is what it is.”

He pushed past Jack, round the side of the house, tossing the hammer from hand to hand.

“Are you angry, Ben?”

Mr. Spine stuck his head out the window, leering down as they approached the back entrance.

“How’s your Mamma?” he said, whistling through the gaps in his front teeth. “She never takes a day off, does she?”

Ben froze in the kitchen doorway with his head cocked, listening for a moment. Spine, evidently disappointed by what he perceived as indifference, spat into the yard and drew back savagely.

“Just make sure you keep down all that hammering and banging, okay?”

They went through the kitchen and into the living room, and Ben crouched by Cora, reaching out to ruffle her muddy blond hair. There was a thud directly above them. The man’s voice. Their mother’s voice. Unsettling laughter, high but mirthless. Jack looked up as if he half expected something monstrous to come collapsing through the ceiling.

“He was buck naked just standing there,” Jack said to nobody in particular. “He was real ugly. I remember the last time.”

He dropped from the sofa and scrambled towards the television. “What show is this?” he said. “What show is it, Cora?”

“It’s Charlie Rat.”

“Sure, but which one?”

“You know,” Cora said. “Quit teasing me.”

“I’m not teasing you,” Jack said. “I never tease you.” He prodded her arm.

“Leave her be,” Ben growled.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Stop bothering her.”

Ben took care of them both. Now, he was watching Cora closely, chewing on his bottom lip as secret thoughts moved darkly through his mind. Jack watched to see if he could catch a glimpse of them in the way Ben moved, in the fixed intensity of his eyes; they were like the strange fish he sometimes saw beneath the surface of the stream, creatures that seemed like they shouldn’t be real. Cora paid her brothers little mind. She sat cross-legged, gazing at the old television with such intent in her glassy blue eyes that she probably wouldn’t have noticed the room catch fire. And yet silently, without looking away from the cartoon, she’d taken Ben’s hand and was stroking his palm gently with her fingers. It was an entirely natural gesture. She could make it because she was five and love came effortlessly to her, and expressing it didn’t require thinking or desiring, or even needing anything more complicated than your attention. Jack tried to take her other hand. She pulled it away.

There was a thud from above, a muffled sob followed by the steady murmur of a man’s voice.

“I’ll bet that’s them doing it,” Jack said, looking at Cora and grinning.

“Huh?”

“It’s nothing,” Ben said. “Look what Charlie’s doing now.” He shot Jack a murderous glare.

“We could go to the fields,” Jack said. “We could all go to the river together. You never go anymore, Ben. We could swim.” He felt a strange sadness move through his bones.

Cora’s expression was ponderous, almost severe. She gazed at the screen. “I’m just watching is all.”

“She ain’t allowed to go to the river,” Ben said. “We’d just lose her.”

“You could look after her, though.”

“No.”

“We should go to the river.”

“No.”

Jack didn’t know anything. He knew nothing would go on forever. Everything real has a beginning and an end. I am getting older and Ben is older, and he’s bigger and stronger than he was, and his body is almost like a man’s, but not like the man that I saw through the dust on the stairs that time not so long ago. We’re all together now, and nothing goes on and on unless it isn't real. He started to laugh. I threw them birds off the roof, I did. He was laughing.

There was more muffled conversation from upstairs, then heavy footsteps, and a strange, shrill cry that beat and battered all the peace from the air. All those men. They knocked the ice around in their glasses and looked at Jack with small, wet eyes. They emptied Jack out and made him feel lonely. He was grinning. He could picture their small wet eyes, lined up in the darkness like the raccoons they saw in the garden at night. They were not supposed to —come—everybody said it. Aunt Sally said it. Mamma’s minister, Mr. Reacher. Even a doctor had said it, once. They weren’t supposed to come here. But she cannot help it, Aunt Sally whispered. She can’t help herself, the poor girl.

Ben stood. He paused for a moment, then turned quite calmly, quite deliberately, to the table next to the television stand, raising the hammer and then swinging it down hard with only a second’s pause before Jack could even open his mouth to form a hopeless protest. The blow sent a long-splintered fissure across the surface of the wood and a crack into the air. Picture frames fell from the wall, and a vase toppled, strewing wilted flowers. But it was not quite the robust sound that he’d managed outside, more hollow and vibrating this time, frail against the steady whirr of the house. He paused and looked at the ceiling as if he might get a direct, decisive answer from above.

“Why’d you go and do that,” Jack said, staring at the smashed picture frames, the limp, half-dead roses, like bodies scattered after an act of God.

“I don’t know,” Ben said, shrugging. “I really don’t.”

 There were dangerous fragments all over the grubby carpet.

“He was mad about something,” Cora said. “Wasn’t you, Ben? What was you mad at?”

“Nothing,” Ben said, examining the hammer as if he might find the answer there. He bent by Cora and stroked her soft, red cheek.

“You’re fine, aren’t you?” he said. “She doesn’t even notice.”

“I’m hungry,” Cora said, stretching her arms and yawning. “I didn’t get any breakfast.”

Ben tensed. “She didn’t get any breakfast. Nobody got her breakfast.” He stood, swinging his arms, the hammer moving like a metronome.

“I could’ve,” Jack said. “But I didn’t think to. You should’ve got her breakfast, Ben.”

“I ate an apple,” Cora said.

“She ate an apple,” Ben said. “Someone got her an apple, so it’s okay.” Jack watched as his brother drifted into the hall and began up the stairs, taking short steps, one at a time.

“What are you doing, Ben?”

They went up the stairs.

“What’re you gonna do, Ben? Are you gonna do something bad?”

His brother stopped abruptly, just as their heads were drawing level with the landing. “We could go down to the river,” Jack whispered. “Or, you can go up if you have to.” He was frightened and excited at the same time.

His brother was a step above, his body still shining with sweat. Light from the slatted windows made ribbons and pearls over his bronzed skin as if he were some cheap ornament on display. The light moved slowly as clouds passed across the sun outside.

“I don't hear anything now, anyway. He must have gone.”

Ben leaned over the banister, letting a long rope of spit fall from his mouth onto the dirty floorboards below.

“We can go up together,” Jack said. “I’ll have your back and you’ll have mine.”

Ben stared at him blankly for a moment, close enough now that Jack could smell his sweat, and the still-boyish loam of his flesh, the wet wood and grass.

“Why’d you come up here?” Jack said.

“What if I crack him?” Ben said. “What if I beat his head with this hammer, tell him to go away and not come back?”

They always came back.  It was a different one every time. They were dumb and loud, but it wasn’t their fault. And it wasn’t their mother’s fault, either. Jack didn’t know whose fault it was. They were just loud and stupid, or sullen and mean; but if she was busy with them, she wasn’t flying around wailing about the angels.

“You wouldn’t hurt Mamma, would you?” Jack said.

“Not her,” Ben said. “She’s just . . . Not her, anyway.”

“But Ben, you’re just a kid.” Jack felt a tightness in his gut, a strange heat on his hands. “Aunt Sally says we best just leave her alone. She told me once. It was a secret; she said that since Dad went to the Moon, Mamma needs space and time to…time to...” He couldn’t remember exactly what Sally had said. “Well, she told me we should just leave her be.”

“Fuck Aunt Sally,” Ben said. “Aunt Sally’s no better than us, and she knows it.”

“She said we shouldn’t upset her.”

“Aunt Sally’s a drunk. She thinks a lot of herself, but she’s really just a drunk. And our Old Man didn’t go to the moon, you dumbass; how stupid are you, for Christ’s sake? He’s two towns over with his other kids.”

“His other kids?”

Jack looked at the bedroom door again. The sound of whispered conversation drifted steadily into the heavy air, so low you couldn't be sure you were hearing anything. Ben took a breath and went onto the landing, striding down with the hammer held out in front of him. His thin lips were set in a hard line, and he was outside the door and about to open it, or hit it, or whatever else he had planned. He seemed too small on the landing by himself, smaller than Jack had ever seen, and at the same time filled up with something, like when it’s only drizzling, but the clouds are black and you know the sky’s full up with a storm. For a moment, he stood with his shoulders up and his whole body pulled tight, and Jack wanted him to go into the bedroom, and he did not want him to go in.

“What’re you gonna do, Ben?” he whispered.

Ben looked back, his face a mix of shame and rage, the rage tightening to a sharp point in his eyes. It was the way their mother looked when she was in one of her frenzies. He had her flat, delicate features, the intense blue of her eyes, the same wild, mercurial energy. He just held it in better.  He flung open the door and went inside, slamming it shut behind him. The silence on the landing was deafening. For a moment, Jack just stood. Then he ran to the bedroom door and pressed his ear against it. The sound of blood in his head made it hard to hear anything; just muffled conversation, a sob, laughter, another sob, a man raising his voice; the words remained as senseless as ever.  A long time passed. He heard one voice, then another, then the steady drone of three together. The door opened and Ben pushed past. In the dark bedroom, Jack could see the stranger sitting straight-backed on the chair by the window, a broad-chested man in black pants and a stiff white shirt. A minister’s stole gleamed around his throat like a colorless eye. He was watching Jack fixedly, his expression sour and somber, lifeless as if made from wax. Their mother sat cross-legged on the bed with her hand out for someone to hold.

“Is that Jacky, out there?” she said. “Come hold Mamma’s hand, Jacky. Come in, honey. Come to Mamma.”

“Come pray with your mother,” the minister said.

“I can’t,” Jack said, taking a step forward. “I can’t. It’s just stupid. Did Ben do it?”

“Come now, Jacky. Come to your Mamma.”

“Did Ben do it, Mamma? Did Ben pray?”

“My babies are still with me—you see, Mr. Reacher? They still come to see their Mamma.”

“I can’t do it,” Jack said. He shut the door and went to the top of the stairway. He saw Ben standing sullenly in the entrance to the living room, still carrying the hammer as if it were an extra appendage. But it had lost all its menace now; all the danger had drained away and it was little more than a toy. It made Jack want to laugh.

“Come outside with us,” Ben said to Cora. “Come on, you can’t stay inside all day.”

“I’m just watching,” she said.

“You gotta come out, Cora. It’s bad for your eyes to sit like this.”

“I don’t wanna.”

“Fuck the both of you, then,” he roared. “Fuck all of you—the both of you upstairs as well.”

He went into the garden, slamming the door so hard that another of the picture frames fell from the wall.

Jack went down and picked it up, shaking the glass from its face, brushing off shards from the faded image. There was a baby gathered in a woman’s arms with the ocean in the background and a strange smiling frown looking out from under her sun hat. It took him a moment staring at it to realize it was just the stock image that had come with the frame. Someone had just forgotten, or never bothered to swap it out. He tore the picture in two and bent by Cora.

“Don’t worry, he didn’t do nothing,” he said. “You don’t have to worry.”

She nodded, her eyes still not leaving the screen.

“You don’t have to worry.” He said, suddenly taking a handful of her hair and tugging it savagely so that her whole head snapped back and she was looking at him upside down. “I’ll be right here,” he said, his whole body shaking with senseless rage. “Ben’s too big now, and he has to worry about more important things.” He stood and stretched. What was there to do after all that? What should he do now?

He left Cora crying and went out into the garden. He saw Ben at the back, standing by the ditch where the polluted stream ran along a mossy gutter. Sometimes they would challenge each other to jump over it, one or the other, usually Jack, ending up ass flat in the filth. His brother's laughter would rake the air for a few moments before he jumped down to help. Then Jack would be crying. Then they would both be laughing, thrashing around in the mud.

He went across the yard, chased by Cora’s steady, but receding wailing. Everything was badly overgrown, and the grass went up to his waist, spiteful and scratching as he waded through it. He stood staring at his brother’s ropy back.

“What did he tell you?” Jack said. “Was it Mister Reacher, Ben? What did he make you do?”

“Nothing,” Ben said.

“Did he make you pray?”

 “He didn’t have a chance. I hit him straight away. I killed them both.”

“I saw, Ben. You didn’t. I saw it was just the minister.”

His brother spat savagely into the water. If he heard Cora’s wails, he was ignoring them.

"I really thought it was one of the other ones,” Jack said, feeling empty and angry and grateful inside. “I wanted you to hit him, but it was probably best you didn’t. You shouldn’t hit a preacher, should you?”

Ben said nothing.

"Would you have hit one of the other ones, Ben? Would you have done it? I’ll bet you would.”

The older boy turned, his features twitching, examining Jack as if he didn't understand what he was seeing; maybe just the raw substance of things, just the flesh and violence from which they'd both been divined, all of it laid out neatly for them to fail to understand. It seemed to confuse him and make him mad, and maybe a little afraid; all these feelings were happening on his face at once. It was nothing more or less than what they were, all just parts in a sequence of reflections that showed the same thing again and again. Blood makes blood, and there’s no escaping it.

Ben swung his fist hard and caught Jack square on the nose, sending the younger boy a few steps back before he toppled into the long grass. Only a patch of russet hair was visible over the stalks. There was an aching thunderous roar in his ears, then a protracted stretch of silence, disturbed only by a chorus of insects, which was, in its absolute unity, a kind of quiet itself. Ben took the hammer from where he’d dropped it, and stood over Jack, a black shape against the sky. He looked as confused as ever, even as he raised the hammer and held it against the branches above.

It was senseless and Jack couldn’t bear to think about it—the preacher in his mother’s room, the men, Aunt Sally, the way Ben smashed and splintered all those spare boards for no reason. Senseless. His ears were full of the sound of insects, turning his head to the side, looking into the long, rippling grass where a dirty beer bottle lay half buried like some forgotten monolith in miniature. It was kind of peaceful now, kind of like nothing had happened, like he’d just stretched out in the sun to doze. 

“You can get the next one that comes around," Jack said softly. “I’ll bet you can. You’ll be big enough to beat him up good.” The grass was long and yellow at the top, and dark and wet where it met the soil. It moved gently in the breeze and its depths were safe and dark. When he turned his head again, Ben was gone.

He lay gazing up at the arms of the trees that stretched across his body like mourners praying over a corpse. He felt the blood flow three ways down his chin and both his cheeks, and then dry and harden in the breeze. Some strange amount of time must have passed. He heard the birds playing in the trees, saw baby doves falling frozen from the roof, their wings too frail to beat their small bodies into flight. He lay peacefully, forgetfully. Then he heard the steady crack, crack, crack of the hammer beginning again, as if nothing had happened and no time had passed, as if it had all been just thoughts in his head. The sound no longer seemed entirely real.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Poems from “What the Hollow Held”

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Rebekah Wolman’s chapbook “What the Hollow Held,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

Late Father as Lost Wax-Casting

People said "Sorry for your loss," suggesting
gone forever, suggesting never come back,
never get found, as in empty, as in without,
                                but it was something more
like transformation, the Dad-shaped space
inside my forlorn mind full first of shock
and fear for what he'd feel if he could feel,
                        alone and somewhere unfamiliar.

Then slowly what the hollow held, the chill
and numbness, began to melt; slowly
the cavity refilled. There he was again
in the place where he belonged—alloy
of his finest traits, rough spots filed. Still
himself but so quiet, so easy to be with.

The Two Cultures, with bursitis and arthritis of the knee

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists. . .Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
— C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

Massaging my swollen knee to coax the built-up fluid
against the tendency of gravity and towards the beating pump,
I think about my father—his knee, smashed on a lacrosse field
in 1941 and what may have finally killed him if decades of aspirin,
even buffered, can kill a person. We're joined now, closer
than we were when he was living, by these joints not engineered
for wear or weather like expansion joints in dams and other structures
of his life's work.
                                But the high bridge over the gulf between us
remains unfinished, the span from his end reaching farther,
closer to a meeting point, than the span from mine. He read
George Eliot and Boswell's Life of Johnson, was better versed
in literature than I in how things worked. You live in a fantasy world,
he told me. His was the world of pumped storage hydropower plants.
In mine those reservoirs and turbines become a version of a heart.

These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Another Love

Never offer your heart to someone who eats hearts.
—Alice Walker

Not insomnia but horses
galloping in my night chest
in the low plains

your blood is drained
of iron the hematologist said
eat more red

meat

binge vampire soap operas
half-dream of sucking a slick
thrumming heart.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.