Search

by Naomi Leigh The saving grace was that the bar was loud and whatever comments Connor did or didn’t make and whatever comments Esme did or didn’t hear were probably at least partially drowned out by Kylie Minogue and whirring floor fans. Stay forever and ever, and ever, and ever La la la la la la la la But he did make the comments, of course. She knew he did because she knew Connor Anderson and she’d known him since he was a boy with a bowl cut and a gap between his crooked front teeth that his tongue was always glued to and he used to walk up to her door at the end of the cul-de-sac and jump high enough that he could reach the doorbell and her mom would answer. Hi Mrs. Findlay, is Natalie there? And she always was there, and when they sat in the basement frozen in time beneath the humming of the HVAC and the incandescent lights she was pretty sure they could play Mario Kart and munch on Oreos together forever if not for the ill-timed interjections of beeping ovens and dinner calls from moms. And sure, Connor never let her play Mario, but she liked Toad almost just as well anyway. She also remembers when Connor became a man. It happened in ninth grade, four or five years after the halcyon days of Mario Kart—she was on the lacrosse field because the girls’ team played right before the boys’ team and when Connor showed up with his teammates she ran to hug him. At first she thought he was wearing shoulder pads underneath his pinny but he wasn’t, and he towered over the defense pole which he gripped with one hand as the other half-heartedly encircled her. She heard his teammate say Get it, Ando and she saw Connor smirk and raise his fist and make a little humping motion before mouthing I’m sorry to her quietly enough that his teammates couldn’t hear. It wasn’t so bad, all things considered, Natalie figured. Antonio became a man when he sent her a Snapchat of his dick. Hunter became a man when he got his first girlfriend and stopped talking to her for a year. I don’t know, Nat, she’s being fucking crazy. That night her mom tried to comfort her with Carvel chocolate hazelnut from the mall food court, and it worked for a minute until she noticed a stray Oreo chunk had found its way to the lower corner of the waffle cone and the memories felt so close and the present so distant. Natalie snapped back to the present and the lacrosse field faded from her vision, replaced by the bar’s floor-length mirrors and gauche lounge chairs and double entendre cocktails. She saw Esme standing there, her short hair curly and her skin glowing despite the heat, but Esme’s characteristic wide smile was gone and in its place was a furrowed brow. She was sweaty and her eyeshadow mixed in with her sweat and it was dripping down her face while she yelled at her. She couldn’t make out every word but she was able to hear the important ones—This fucking cis white guy…I swear to God Natalie tell me I won’t get thrown out of this bar right now…This fucking city needs to ban transplants… She met Esme’s crew through some mutual friends at The New School and she thought it might be good for Connor to tag along. After all, Connor had confided in Natalie after one too many G&Ts that he wanted new friends and that the other guys were fine, but they were kind of assholes. All they talked about was work. And Connor didn’t want to be an asshole. He told her he wanted to party in Brooklyn, and she didn’t have the heart to tell him that there were assholes there too, with different asshole styles and different asshole words but assholes all the way down. She also didn’t have the heart to correct him when he’d tell her she was so chill, because who doesn’t want to be chill? After all, Natalie reasoned, compared to her friends, maybe she was chill. She never policed her exes’ following lists, and it even made her laugh when Connor showed her Dave Chappelle’s skit about women who dress slutty. Natalie’s mom used to groan when her dad laughed at old Sam Kinison skits about frigid wives and repressed husbands, but her mom also thought Friends was the pinnacle of comedy, so what did she know anyway? The last time Natalie brought Connor out with her friends, it went about as smoothly as a drunk night with him could. They had all just left a downtown Manhattan gallery meet-and-greet with an open bar where they saw their friend Angel’s latest exhibition–Uncarved Dreams. Connor behaved about as well as she could have hoped in a room full of “totemic wooden sculptures dedicated to honoring queer Afro-Indigenous bodies,” although he did whisper “my body’s got some wood, too” at one point to her, and Natalie giggled after quickly looking around to make sure nobody else heard. They were about to descend to the train at Chambers Street when Esme saw the City Hall Park fountain behind them. “It’s so hot, I swear I could jump into that fountain right now if I didn’t spend two hours on a full beat,” Esme sighed. “You dare me?” Connor interjected. Natalie’s chest tightened. Here it is, she thought. But Esme didn’t flinch. “I fucking dare you Connor.” Before she even finished the sentence, he was off to the races. He threw off his white linen button down and chinos until he was only in his boxers, sprinting to the fountain and swan diving into the pool of water. After several seconds he emerged, and soon began to thrust against the phallic sculpture at the center of the fountain, like it was the most natural next course of action in the world. “My totemic queer body, ladies!” he shouted. To Natalie’s relief, Esme was laughing so hard she was struggling to stand upright. He smirked at Natalie from the fountain, and raised his eyebrows at her. See? He said with his eyes. It’s all good, Nat. And then she laughed some more. Connor made her cry sometimes, too. Ever since sixth grade when Connor and his dad moved to a smaller apartment with fewer ghosts, Connor’s mom changed every few months. Sometimes it was whichever marketing major he was dating at the time. Other times it was a bottle of Woodford Reserve, or Roxicodone, or the unwashed cotton sheets of his bed in Kips Bay that sheltered him for hours longer than they were supposed to on a weekday morning. But most often it was Natalie. On one such morning Natalie was tucked under those sheets with him, after yet another failed attempt to get him out of the house, he leaned over to her and kissed her on the forehead. She would’ve loved you, Nat, he whispered. And he held her tight and she held him back because he needed it and because, she figured, sometimes you just do a job not because it feels good or because it even makes much sense at all, but because somebody asked. And now Esme wasn’t yelling anymore but crying. Connor looked at Natalie and she hoped desperately to find another knowing look in his eyes that would assure her it’s all good, but it wasn’t there. Instead he shrugged and he mouthed that he was sorry but his teeth were perfectly straight and his hair was combed to the side and she pretended not to notice his gestures. It occurred to her that she’d held Connor through tears so many times and Esme so few—and she saw before her another job to do—so she pulled Esme toward her and ran her fingers through her hair as she guided her to the bathroom. Just to be there in your arms Won't you stay Won't you lay Stay forever and ever, and ever, and ever Naomi Leigh is a writer based in New York City.

by Daisuke Shen Faces At times, I have fooled others into thinking we are the same. Inside lovers’ rooms, I would squeeze the other’s face—soft at first, then so hard it often scared them—under false pretenses of intimacy. But I only wanted to feel their incendiary contours, the limitations of their cheekbones. I never allowed anyone to do the same. You of all people know that the world is not fair to people like myself. I was working the graveyard shift as always, at the job no one knew I had. Exhausted, I almost slipped on it. A plain, completely unremarkable face; of course I believed no one wanted it. It fit me perfectly. Every day I wore it, washed it, slept and dreamed inside of it. People began to smile at me. I quit my second job. But one day I walked into the courtyard and all my new friends with their summer hair fell silent. Dietary Freedom My first day of dietary freedom felt majestic and grotesque. I found myself thinking about whale arteries, which are shaped like large foreskins with the penises missing inside. I ate twenty bags of Planters’ honey peanuts and four bags of Cheerios. I tried to eat my brother’s ancient CD’s from high school, but they cut the edges of my mouth. I am beginning to think that freedom is overrated, that CD’s should be made more edible, and that in two days I will walk down the aisle to marry a woman I do not love. Sex in Kitchens I am fucking a man on his expensive designer table. I have been riding him for around 30 minutes already. My thighs tremble with effort. He makes no sound and does not even look much at my body; his eyes are fixed upon my face, the gaze something more intense than pleasure—an unsettling and inarticulate hunger. In the warm light, his kitchen is disconcertingly clean — all marble, not a dirty plate or stain in sight. Even my sister, the cleanest person I knew, would at least leave a glass out from time to time, and then she died. When I first entered his apartment, I’d taken off my shoes. They belonged to a previous lover. I scoped out the bathroom while he pissed. There was nothing in the enormous bedroom save for a mattress, one potted plant, and a carton of Parliaments. When we first met, we were on molly. The drug makes me too open, open enough for all the good stuff to come out. I told him my dream about the doctor and the woman crouching like a cat on a kitchen island, the whole kitchen somehow fake-seeming, a movie set, the long white surgical table upon which they would lay my mother. How she’d clung to my arm, pleading: Don’t leave. She’d cried just like that when she’d lost custody of me as a child, desperate, pathetic: Don’t leave. He told me nothing about himself, not even his name. He asked our friend for my number after I left. After fifteen minutes: a slight inhale. He holds my cheek as I start crying. I know he is prematurely grieving me. I cry not because I am sad, but because of how clean his kitchen is, how small our fucking makes me feel. DESIRABLE ORGANIC CHICKEN I sold naked photos of myself while dying. Think: desirable, organic chicken. Confetti unspooled from my ceiling. It wasn't my birthday. There was no cause for celebration. I'd fucked a man and a man'd fucked me. Those are two separate sentences that mean two different things. In that summer I moved into a room the size of a castrated Buddha's palm. I grew fat and happy in the city, like a chicken before slaughter. I never say his name out loud, but now you'll want to know: ( ) On Sundays, church organs praise a God I've long since left behind. Daisuke Shen is the author Funeral, co-authored with Vi Khi Nao (KERNPUNKT Press 2023). Their debut short story collection, Vague Predictions & Prophecies, is forthcoming August 2024 from CLASH Books. www.daisukeshen.com. Instagram: @ginsengmasque Twitter: @dai__joubu

By: Zachary Swezy Before the Fall There was a focus committee forming for Chai City. He told them he wanted the townspeople to be made of little curry pies but the focus committee ended up being rather unfocused due to hunger. Things unfolded nonetheless. Once the foundation was laid, the jasmine planted, and the smell of masala wafted through the air—it was properly Chai City and it was to hell with any unfocused focus committees. The people made out of curry pie ended up being people who ate a lot of curry pie which was quite alright, economically. A lot of objects were made out of gold which was the style of the times. So, these were aptly named the Golden Ages of Chai City. Babar was regarded as lofty and magnanimous. His people knew him to be well-read and well-intentioned. As one of his first orders of business he nationalized a pickle factory for the people, but named it after himself. King Babar’s Pickle Factory was operated by a number of women he knew from his time in the restaurant industry. They specialized in chutneys and tinned fish. The nonperishables went well with the curry pies and every citizen received a quarterly payout from the company. When Chai City was inevitably colonized and razed by invading Brits, as an elephant displaced, Babar found it in his best interests to move on in search of new stories. Everything was gone, except the pickle factory. A Brit and their kippers, as the saying goes. Academia Seeking shelter from his daily reality and a new home in the world after the fall of Chai City, King Babar was accepted into the refuge of Academia, not quite The Real World, which like the television show named after it, is oppressive with violence. In school, he encountered the philosopher, Derrida, and the way human language tried to place people in the driver’s seat, separate from God and in the end quite separate from other men. He outlined the idea for a show called ‘Of Mice and Minerals’ in his notebook during the first lecture. It wasn’t very good but it had potential. In his painting class, he learned that art can function in many ways. For most of Babar’s life the primary function was to glamorize or amaze. His collection in Chai City was huge and historic before it burned. When he learned in school that art can re-awaken us to the merit of life as we’re forced to lead it, he decided to spend his whole life understanding, through art, why he was forced out of his home. Love and its loss In poetry class, Babar Arvind, The Elephant in the Room, met Her. The one. The one who Muhammad Ali Jinnah had declared the national flower of Pakistan. Jinnah, nicknamed The Hummingbird by his acolytes, was so taken with the young beauty, Jasmine, her namesake was planted in every courtyard in the capital city. She wasn’t even Pakistani but no one was fazed. She was considered by many to be the unofficial princess of Pakistan and as such she felt very bored. Eventually, she got so aggravated that she went to art school. She studied hard, reached the top of her class, and once again became pigstuck with ennui. When the unofficial Princess Jasmine met the deposed King Babar, Lotus of Half-India, they were both severely tired. Once they hit it off, they spent a lot of time watching old movies and waiting for greatness to find them. For six endless months the two students dedicated themselves to becoming bored of one another. Babar could tell it was real love because she would watch bad reality television shows off his broken laptop screen with him. They couldn’t see a thing. When their romance ended it barely felt like an ending. He told her to work on her posture and she refused. It seemed a bit melodramatic to him but that was that. The climax of their relationship didn’t come until exactly one year after they parted ways. Babar felt restless, as a lot of sophomores tend to. He bought a moped but that wasn’t cool and he wanted to stop doing Midnight’s Children stuff. He would not let himself be happy. Neither Jasmine nor Jesus could hold him permanently in their heart, not the way he wanted—and he couldn’t hold them either. On the advice of a pink-haired witch named Angel Aglaomorpha, on the night of a strawberry moon, he cast a spell. That is to say, he took a poem from his notebook and lit it on fire. Then he prayed and prayed to God. Despite his skepticism the spell worked. Calamitously, It worked on a macroscale and in the completely wrong way, as spells tend to do. When Babar set out to reunite the Lotus and the Jasmine, he, silly as he is, forgot how universal that metaphor could be. It was a sloppy spell and a heavy-handed poem. The morning after the strawberry moon, he rolled over to find his phone. Opening his News app, he could immediately see the effects of his spell. Pakistan had declared its undying love for India. They were to be wed. The amount of paperwork and political turmoil was untold. Muslim and Hindu families that had been fissured in the 40’s reunited at long last. The Hummingbird, former leader of the All-Muslim League and Governor General of Pakistan, turned over fifty times per second in his grave. He was moving fast as hell. Bengalis and Kashmiris stood befuddled, wondering where they fit in now. The ripple effects were innumerous, and brought Babar not an inch closer to his past love. IndoPakistan First on a whim and then with the noble goal of elevating journalism into Art, Babar boarded a plane headed straight to the Indo-Pakistani border. He wanted to collect all of the stories he could. Upon arrival, he remembered to call his school. “I’m going to livetweet the reification of Indo-Pakistan.” “Is That Art?” they asked. “It will be,” he answered. His first tweets: “Shit’s popping off.” “Who’s in Indo-Pakistan?” “The McDonald’s menu here is wild, bro.” They received little attention. While “Indians make due when kush comes to shove,” and a photograph of himself by the Ganges captioned “Reporters and locals agree, this river does indeed smell crazy,” garnered middling popularity in low-brow circles. They told him he could have three credit hours towards his independent studies and he could defer the rest of his classes until his return. They were very understanding of his plight. One of his first basic observations was that Indians don’t typically eat cows, and Pakistanis don’t typically eat pigs. He didn’t really see how that would be such an issue until the state-mandated vegetarianism came into play followed by the black market meat, the chicken poachers, the bloodshed, the thousands slewn in the street, and finally the armistice known as The Great Goat Curry Caveat. Everyone could agree on loving goat curry. From Kashmir to Mumbai, Kids Were Being Curried with Great Fervency, one headline read. Years of observations took place. He made himself almost at home, nestled in the mountains. A lot of other journalists seemed to think that the reunion of India and Pakistan was more devastating than the separation. Alot disagreed. School felt like a different lifetime. He became frustrated with them and himself. None of them were connecting the dots. One hand would say something partially true and the other would deny it all. He himself was failing to identify the cohesive themes of the embroilment. He read story after story, each one revealing itself as incomplete. It seemed a mess, not quite like war but not wildly different. When he did read a particularly stirring piece by one of his fellow journalists he’d grapple with his own insecurities. In IndoPakistan, on many days the large elephant was beaten relentlessly for his effeminate manner of speech. People called him “Gaynesh.” Not everyone took kindly to his sorts. One day he grew bored of it and fled the border country and the Kush mountains and the river Ganges. With the sinking feeling about how the school would receive his tardy return, he was again desperate to find a new home. It was on his departing flight while reading the articles he and his colleague produced that he realized all of their stories together began to hint at the beautiful truth he was looking for. He realized then that it took a lot of stories just to tell one. Art School Dropout Because he neglected to check in with his professors for two years, Babar failed out of school. Mercilessly, they had also found a new pickle supplier. To cope, he attended art therapy, where he developed a rare candida yeast infection in his brain^. With his savings dwindling, he decided to live in a leaf cutter ant colony due south of where he was in school. Unfortunately, they had no home for such a large elephant so he lived in the jungle chatting with them and recording their thousand and one stories instead. They had never seen someone so big before and they regarded him regally. The rent he paid was next to nothing and together they formed a modest company of mushroom farmers. He felt right at home. The space was lush and secluded—the clay ruddy and malleable. It was a place the Gods had fled. Babar delighted in making Khôras with his small elephant mouth. He made amorphous statements, noises that danced around words and meanings. If the blind runner Lavi Pinto had not hobbled up to Babar’s encampment, he may have transcended language, given enough time. “Do you know where you are?” asked Lavi behind a pair of circular glasses with one snake curled around two darkly mirrored lenses in a figure eight. “This is where I am. I live here with those very cool ants. They cut down leaves. See,” He showed him, “To feed their mushroom." He was sheepish, afraid to give this unstable man the wrong answer. “Mushrooms? This is Wackistan! Mediocridad! Aren’t you bored?” petitioned Lavi with a loud flatness. Lavi had been blinded in the Helsinki Olympics by a few stray grains of sand. Babar had never heard of those countries but they didn’t sound like great places for him to call home. Nothing seemed to compare to Chai City but he enjoyed frolicking with his boys here. “It’s dreadful here. No single event can significantly change the total, you know?” informed Lavi. He stood and lectured—that was his thing. Babar kind of knew but he thought Lavi was describing a lot of places. He tried to remember what little he knew about statistics. “There is a place with black swans and dragon kings.” The elephant’s hairs perked up tentatively. “It’s the opposite of here, it’s called Extremistan*,” coughed Lavi, rolling a cigarette. Babar hesitated but finally decided to play along. “What’s it like? The place, I mean. Are there a lot of black swans or just the statistically probable amount**?” Lavi exhaled curls of smoke and explained. Apparently, Extremistan is a place equally as tyrannical as Mediocridad. The tyrants there are: The Singular, The Accidental, The Unseen, and The Unpredicted. It is a place subject to Type 2 Randomness. It literally produces black swans. Wealth, Scalability, Celebrity, Planetary Mass, and even humdrum Economic Data all reside there. In truth, the tyrannical boredom he suffered in Mediocridad and everywhere else could make any place sound appealing to the former King. He was a real do-anything kind of guy, he thought. “Tell me about the Dragon swan,” said Babar. “Dragon Kings live beyond Power Laws,” Recited Lavi. “Hm.” “Seriously, check the Wikipedia page!” “They are events, large in size and unique in origin. Think: stampedes, forest fires, earthquakes, or smaller, brain activity.” Lavi soliloquized, “Dragon Kings are more predictable and even more profitable than black swans.” “Lavi, if we are in Mediocridad as you say, what hope is there for us to escape the Tyranny of the Mundane?” With venom in his eyes he said, “I can do acoustic levitation. I have a 3D bioprinter. Ok? T-cells on deck, man. I mean I have a degree in complexity sciences from the University of Chicago.” Babar saw doubt stinging at Lavi and draining him of his charisma. Their conversation came to a halt. Lavi sat smoking in silence while his face contorted from one pained expression to the next. It occurred to Babar that Lavi had not seen himself in many years. He looked weird. A Heroic Journey “Listen,” said Babar, “I’m taking a brief sabbatical from my studies. I am doing self-guided learning. Those leaf cutter ants are teaching me some farming basics. I have a small patch of mushrooms if you’d like me to saute some. I also have them pickled.” Lavi perked up when he ate. “Once we get to Extremistan we just have to produce more stories, more digressions—then we wait for the wealth to roll in. That’s how you make your own black swans.” He crunched into a pickled mushroom, smiling. “Look, you already refused your call to adventure.” “Who are all these animals? When did I refuse what?” asked Babar. “Before I met you. Haven’t you studied?” “I have,” replied Babar. Indignantly gathering up his belongings and packing them into his overnight sack, Babar asked about the stories they would produce once they reached their destination. Lavi rambled off narratives interminably. --- “I thought you were blinded in Helsinki,” worried Babar as Lavi led the way through a dense forest, another piece of border country, this time between the mediocre and the extreme. The longer Babar followed Lavi, the easier it was to see that Lavi had never finished a story in his life. Babar was in the same position he’d always been in: he was stuck with a man suffering his same delusions. Just as Babar’s hopes reached their nadir, a large onyx swan cropped into his field of vision. He thought he had another rare infection in his brain but the statues soon started to outnumber the trees. I think I’d like to be mediocre, Babar thought. Let the predictable become meaningful. Extremistan They reached Extremistan. Typical inhabitants were either gigantic, like Babar, or extremely small. Numbers paraded around without limits, completely unrestrained, even the lewd and lonely ones. “Totals” there were determined by a handful of extreme events. While history leapt forward like a tiger, and fluttered its wings like a hummingbird, it took the participants of history a long time and a lot of stories to understand what was going on. After merely twenty minutes inside the city walls, Babar was approached by armed guards. “Come with us, elephant,” said a tiny man dressed in all black, who spat when he walked. Babar looked back at Lavi, who was fist deep in a bag of grain, chatting gleefully with a man over the constantly fluctuating price of it. He felt like complying. When they reached their destination, Babar was quickly made-up and rushed on stage where he was struck dead in the eyes with a spotlight. He was on a live-taping of This Indo-American Life. The audience wanted to know his story for some reason. Babar did what the situation required. He told the audience about the siege of Chai City, the brave women of his colonized pickle factory, how he fell in love and how in his heartbreak he tried haphazardly to heal a whole nation and then document it for art school. Babar told them how he felt listless sometimes and thirsty for knowledge. In IndoPakistan he learned how little he really knew about geopolitics and how he came to love the tapestry he and his fellow journalist wove together in a very human and imperfect attempt to understand their shared history. He felt ambitious. Babar talked passionately about the mosaic he planned to craft out of the stories told by the leaf-cutters. Our hero discussed the blind sprinter and how he helped lead him to a conclusion. Rapt, the people wanted to hear more. He said he wanted to keep piling on regrets and forgetting them. He wanted to live his life in little yarns. He said he was tired of being bored and he was planning to give up the addictive substance, cold-turkey. Overnight, his episode of This Indo-American Life became a black swan event. The elephant felt like a lottery winner. The event generated millions of stories. He did a book tour. He went on television. A production house eventually bought his story and syndicated it a staggering amount of times during Babar’s life. Once the Ayatollah Mitsubishi declared a fatwa against him, he knew he had made it. Resolution Wealthy and famous, Babar visited school where they presented him with an honorary doctorate in Creative Writing. When the king traveled to Indo-Pakistan he saw there was still turmoil heavy in the air and understood that people will live in a wound and have to make it their home. The logic of why love spells are always so tricky was firmly planted in his brain, but at what cost? Lavi died pushing some boulder up a hill for one of his films. Babar had warned him, as his producer, not to do that sort of thing—but that didn’t make him any less sad to lose his mentor. Ultimately, when the elephant mustered up the resolve to return to Chai City, it laid in predictable ruins, tangled in bureaucratic holdups and endless discussions about parking and zoning. The lone chorus of a pickle factory’s many refrigerators filled the air and the ponds bred jasmine and lotus flowers so fragrant with stories of deep life in the undergrowth. ^ https://maudlinhouse.net/candida-songs-of-brain-yeast/ * You may blame the equally hated and loved economist Nassim Taleb for the stupid names ** Not very many Zachary Arvind Swezy is a poet and author living in Chicago, IL. He has had work featured by The Poetry Foundation, Paper Magazine, RÚV, Maudlin House, and others. Some people seem to like him.

By Lina Buividavičiūtė (translated from Lithuanian by Ada Valaitis) Girls in boarding schools, teenage girls, watched by nuns in black habits, an old film, banal dichotomy: the girls’ white blouses – the girls’ dark hearts, the girls’ light heads – the girls’ dark crotches. During the day, the girls learn: memento mori homo homini lupus est, they cross-stich and make pudding, during the day, the girls dance rounds – so very dainty, with aprons, they play piano, dance the waltz with one another. At night, the devil rolls up the girls’ white blouses, at night storms play along the girls’ nipples, at night, all of the cracks in the walls and souls are wet from the girls’ dreams, they dream of six werewolves that pant deeply, pressing against their parted lips, a cross falls from the door where it hung – the wind was so strong; they don’t get what that werewolf is doing, they almost don’t get it, but he does it well, his tongue is pointed and quick turning six circles around the girls’ bodies. Girls, why were you screaming, why were you wailing last night – we had nightmares, we dreamt a black beast. Through my fault, through my fault through my most grievous fault, but allow me to dream about that beast tomorrow night. Every night. Lina Buividavičiūtė was born on May 14, 1986. She is a poet and literary critic. Her poetry is published in "Matter", "Masters", “Proverse poetry prize" contest anthologies, "Beyond words", "Beyond queer words", "The Maudlin house", "The limit experience", "Cathexis northwest press" magazines. Upcoming publications will appear in "Drunk monkeys", “New millennium writings”, “Beyond words”, "Beyond words anthology" and "Poetry online" magazines. Ada Valaitis is a translator whose work has appeared in in numerous collections and journals, including the Vilnius Review, Washington Square Review, The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature, and How the Earth Carries Us – New Lithuanian Poets. She served as a contributor to Transitions of Lithuanian Postmodernism: Lithuanian Literature in the Post-Soviet Period and Lithuania on a First Date, and as a translator for the award-winning documentary film The Invisible Front. Ada holds a Master’s degree in Literature from George Mason University.

by Bethany Cutkomp The moonlit garden churns before their eyes, trading a star-flecked sky for a lawn freckled with clovers. What an acrobatic night! When the first sprite stumbles and sprawls among the petunias, her witnesses double over in hysterics. The pansies glare. The tulips shut their petals. At the edge of the pond, the bullfrogs grumble to themselves. The faerie folk let their grip on their blossom goblets weaken, sloshing liquid onto their slippers. Too funny! Too funny. Something stirring their guts and thoughts seems off, but their lips feel too fuzzy to articulate. They press sticky fingers to their mouths and hum, slurring disjointed harmonies to the crickets’ tune—marvelous music to frolic to. Fumbling for each other’s hands, they skip and trip over their own feet. What fun! What danger! Twirling themselves into enchantment, they lose track of their minds and sensation in their limbs. No longer safe from themselves, the dancers drop dead by sunrise, succumbing to exhaustion and vomit in their lungs. Field mice pause, wrinkling their noses at decay warmed by daylight. Once fungi eat away the remaining flesh and mark their graves, mortals marvel at the dew-kissed ring formed in the morning grass. Bethany Cutkomp (she/her) is an emerging writer from St. Louis, Missouri. One day, she hopes to publish YA novels and befriend the wild opossums that live under her porch. She has work appearing in Worm Moon Archive and Split Rock Review. You can find her on Twitter at @bdcutkomp.

by Christen Lee Three nights after the new moon, I search the sky for what’s almost not there. You can just make out that thread of white piercing the black like a needling comma, A pause, while the world continues counting days and moons, years cycling the burning sun on this earth with its birthing and dying and everything that fills the in between. But tonight it’s spring and nearly alive on this green stretch of possibility. See how hope pokes through, soft shoots rise up to face the waxing moon. Of course it’s only natural to fall in love with what’s born and to suffer what’s lost. And it’s so easy to feel time’s gravity in the thick blood dusk, the night closing in like a lover’s goodbye leaving us tilted on earth’s axis and spinning toward ruin. Look at the bird with the broken wing lying motionless under the nesting oak. And I think, at least he knew that rapture of flight out here in this sacred space. And in this way I bargain my sadness on and on. We spend our days threading new ways through joys and sorrows on and on. So I root for the moon to spot me thread me back onto the solid ground. How I need a silver lining that cosmic life line to steady me in this giant empty that reaches on and on as far as the eye can believe. Christen Lee is a family nurse practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has been featured in Rue Scribe, The Write Launch, Aurora, Humans of the World, Sad Girls Club, 2022 New Generation Beats Anthology, Wingless Dreamer, The Voices of Real 7 Compilation, Ariel Chart, and The Elevation Review among others.

By: Schuyler Mitchell Future me is washing her dishes in the sink Sockless, cockeyed, prone to puckering Her fingers drop waterlockets on the linoleum Future me sucks the sauce off, presses thumb to teeth Hides sun in quiver Parts the soft pink flesh of cheek And scoops out rusted timewrinkles Future me knows bodies like pirate maps and witch spells Dark matter, fishflight When the bottom drops out and the bottle rocket blasts, She knows how to waive her grief Crave sweat in the hum of twilight Future me is roaming through seaside caves and Discovering lost things and Holding them out to you in the palm of their hand, Saying, here, this is what I’ve gleaned from life, and Here, future me is breaking and entering – Didn’t you see? They dropped off their slumberwishes in the foyer Then collapsed on a pillow of moth wings Tied cherry stems to bedframes And fed oranges to sugar spies (Future me waxes and wanes with the seahorses To hell with ocean tides) No girl nor woman, future me is just a magnifying glass And a lamppost And a moonmass of undulating light Future me is humble but desirous Kind, maybe even gentle now But most of all, future me is swaying, singing, in the kitchen The ceiling parts I look up I see stars Schuyler Mitchell is a Brooklyn-based journalist and writer, originally from North Carolina and California. Their reporting and criticism has been published by The Intercept, Los Angeles Magazine, and Consequence, and their poetry has appeared in the Agave Review.

By: Blanka Pillár Somewhere there was a crossroads near the border, in a smoky child's face with round eyes. Blue-yellow brick low houses and dark green pine trees surrounded it, and in summer the purple statices opened in the garden; in spring, the hot sunlight stretched across the forest canopy. Round Eyes’ first memory was of this landscape, where years of warm embraces and happy barks were repeated over and over again. They called this place Life; it was as they imagined the world of fairy tales. Until now. Something shook the earth. It shuddered, deep and angry, as if the grey sky had fallen. Morning dew covered the blades of grass and a thick mist descended on the cool ground. Even the air swirled backwards, and the birds flew far away. The family ran out of the brick house and stared at the Thursday shadows. The child’s button eyes watch as all the spring, summer, autumn, and winter gather in two grey canvas bags, as the faltering zipper is pulled on the resin-scented warm wool sweaters and the smiling stuffed elephants, as Mother and Father pray in whispers, as they lock the door of Life without a key. Lacking a vehicle, they walk away from the crossroads, the blue and yellow brick low houses, the dark green pines, the purple statices, and the memory of warm hugs and happy barks. The round child's face fills with hot tears, with the helpless sorrow of incomprehension and lack. She doesn't know where the touch of silky grey dog-tails and the fresh scent of the short-cut lawn has gone; before and behind her lies an endless sea of concrete surrounded by barren trees. All around her, words she had never heard before, harder-sounding names of unfamiliar places are repeated with terrified powerlessness. Meanwhile, time's arrow marches on, the wind picks up, and the horizon bends to dark blue. The Mother takes a brown bun from her canvas bag, caresses the child's cold face, and then holds theirtiny body close to her, cradling and humming the song she used to sing when the family was ill. The melody rings sweetly, filling the lonely night and drowning out the deafening noise of strangeness. Twilight and dawn meet; dust is heavier on their feet, and their eyes look wearily into the bare winter. Life lies farther than the round eyes and the darkening child's face could possibly look back. They can only guess where they are going, leaving fading footprints on the edge of towns, hoping to cross something larger soon. They dare only believe that the sun will come out the next day, that there will be night, and that the clear sky stars will shine with the same piercing light. Blanka Pillár is a sixteen-year-old writer from Budapest, Hungary. She has a never-ending love for creating and an ever-lasting passion for learning. She has won several national competitions and has been a columnist for her high school’s prestigious newspaper, Eötvös Diák.

By Keegan Gore Hank works the mid shift. When he gets in at nine am, they radio for him to mop up some blood on the fourth floor. Blood isn’t too hard to clean when it's fresh. It only becomes a problem when the blood dries, and then Hank has to really put some muscle into it. The new floor cleaner the head janitor bought makes the floors glow white like the moon. When he squints he sees someone staring back at him: a disheveled old man is trapped inside the tile. The man looks a lot like Hank. He waves at Hank and smiles. But Hank scowls and refuses to wave back. He splashes more mop water on the floor and scrubs hard until the man disappears under the suds. Some days are worse than others. This is a phrase Hank says. On break, when the sun is tauntingly high in the sky, he scours the parking lot for pretty stones. If he can squeeze a stone, even for a moment, maybe he can gather enough strength to go back in. Thirteen years. That is how long Hank has been working at the St. Mary’s Hospital. Thirteen years. A quarter of his life. In the morning before work, he makes earl grey tea and sits by his window. He records the weather. Rainy today, he writes. A low mist hovers over the mountains. Jim always thought it was silly that Hank wrote about the weather. “Who cares?” Jim once said. “Why write something down that no one will read?” “I’ll read it,” Hank responded. “Later on.” “Why would you want to read about the weather?” “Because I know I will want to remember.” “Oh, c'mon,” Jim shook his head. “Give me a break. When you’re old you won’t know your ass from a hole in the ground. And when you’re dead, you won’t know anything at all.” Hank would sketch Jim in the margins of his notebook. He had a long face, like a horse. Some mornings Jim would take Hank’s cold hands and breathe warmth onto them. He’d be the first to wake up, hunched over the woodstove in his dirty old long johns, lighting the fire. Out the window, Hank would see tiny droplets of dew on the twisted branches of the pine trees. They looked like little pearls. Jim had two missing molars. One on each side of his mouth. Sometimes, while kissing, Hank would accidentally tongue the empty sockets where his teeth used to be. “Hey,” Jim would say. “I told you to knock that out. They’re sensitive.” “Sorry,” Hank would whisper with his eyes still closed tight, one hand on Jim’s cheek. It was always so dark when they kissed. Dark like the mountains: you know there’s a lot out there—ridges and textures, inclines and declines—but in the night it looks like nothing. Sometimes Hank would wake up to Jim shaking. He had bad nightmares where he would be paralyzed, figures emerging from the shadows. “They look just like normal people,” he said. “Like people you’d see walking around the grocery store or out at the movies. Except they’re missing something on their face. Either their eyes, or nose, or mouth. They stand over me and I get the feeling they want me to do something, but I don’t know what. And I can only lie there and waste away while they come closer and closer, and soon you’re gone and I’m gone and all the trees and the rivers are gone, and the mountains are flattened, and there is nothing, except for them, as far as the eye can see, and it feels like drowning.” Jim grew up very religious, and he couldn’t help but think these nightmares were somehow tied to his childhood. Whenever they drove past a church or religious sign, Jim would recoil. Regarding Jesus’s body on the cross, he thought it was obscene. “Why do they have to always show the poor guy suffering?” Jim said. After he gets off work, Hank walks around the river near his cabin. He has a big canvas bag that used to belong to Jim. Mostly he collects medium sized stones. He likes the oval stones best, the ones that have been worn smooth by the river. Those are the prettiest. It isn’t the shape so much as the texture, the way they feel in his hand. Their feeling helps him forget himself. He has found several stones that resemble people. One of them was shaped exactly like a human head with two eye holes, a nose, and a small slit for a mouth. He keeps this stone in the bottom drawer of his nightstand. Another one looks like a man with his arms spread out in a T. He keeps that one tenderly under his pillow. One year ago he stumbled upon one that could’ve been said to resemble him, with his same bad posture and remarkably slender figure. But he quickly threw that one back. All of this would’ve been remarkable to Hank if he didn’t believe in God. With God, nothing surprises him anymore. The world itself is a miracle. He puts a small stone on the bed of his tongue, sucks out the copper taste of the mountain, spits it back out onto his palm, and then throws it wide against the skin of the river. To Hank, God isn’t a voice per se, but a feeling. An urge. Like wanting to eat or drink or smoke or make love. The urge of God lights a kindling inside his mind that drives him out of bed. He uses industrial strength glue to cover every inch of the walls in his cabin with flat, oval stones. For the wall facing east, every stone is red. For the wall facing west, every stone is blue. A constellation of iridescent rocks shimmer from the ceiling. Using fishing wire, he has tied some to the rafters above his bed. They sway ever so slightly every time he opens or closes the door, appearing to nod to him. * Seven years ago Jim was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease. Jim’s body began to attack itself. He grew very weak, and eventually could not stand anymore. During this time, Hank often fantasized about a third Jim—a Jim stronger than these two warring Jims, who could step in and put an end to all this nonsense. Of course there wasn’t a third Jim. In reality, there weren't even two Jims. There was just one, and that one was going to die. Around the end of his life, Jim had to stay in St. Mary’s. Jim’s family hadn’t seen him in a long time. He rarely talked about his family, but when he was dying, they all came to visit him. Every day, as he cleaned up various spills and messes, Hank had to walk past his room. In the evenings, when Jim’s mother and father and brothers had left, Hank would come in. He’d sit by Jim, move his hand under the sheet, and squeeze his wrist. Jim was so sick and they had him on so many drugs that he couldn’t really talk, but when he looked up at Hank he smiled. His eyes were sweet and milky. Poor Baby, Hank thought strongly. Poor Baby. Hank would stand up and make sure no one was about to walk by before he did what he really wanted to do: kiss Jim on the forehead. He’d let lips stay on the wrinkles of Jim’s skin for a minute or two, and then he’d hum. MmmMmmmMmmMmm. The hum was tuneless but it had a rhythm. Hank could feel the electricity inside Jim’s brain. His lips tingled with it. Jim might’ve giggled or grunted or hummed back. He might have closed his wet eyes and fallen asleep. A couple days before Jim finally died, Hank was sitting by his bed when Jim’s mother walked in. She had forgotten her purse. “Who are you?” she asked, startled. Hank was startled too. He stood up immediately. “I’m Jim's old friend,” he said. “Oh my,” she said, a hand to her chest. “Bless your heart. We didn’t know he had friends.” “He has a lot of friends, “ Hank said. “He was very popular.” “We went to church together,” he added. Jim’s mother looked down at Jim. His eyes were closed and he looked like a mummy. All shrunken and small. She put her hand on his cheek. “Did he ever mention us?” his mother finally asked after a long silence. “Of course. All the time,” Hank said. “He talked about you all the time.” They had lived together for thirteen years. When he passed, Hank was lying awake in his cabin, an hour away from the hospital. He knew Jim had died because he felt it. The feeling was like a stone stuck in his windpipe. What else could he do but choke? If God allowed the devil to strip Job of his wife and children, If He reprimanded him from a broken sky, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" If He blinded to Paul on the road to Damascus, If He commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Issac, ordered Noah to build an ark, appeared before Moses as a burning bush, visited Jacob in a dream, and came to Constantine in form of a cross in the sky, brighter than the sun, then surely it was not out of reach that He would command Hank to collect stones. After all, every rock was born from Him. What rock does not contain within itself some parts of God? * At night, after he has filled the canvas bag with stones, he comes back to his cabin and showers, lights the woodstove, and makes jelly toast. He goes outside and looks at the stars. Sometimes, he finds they have lost their luster. On the best days, they stir nothing within him that isn’t already present. Keegan Gore is a writer from Orlando, Florida. He holds a B.A in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from Goucher College and is currently pursuing an MFA at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. His work has been previously published in Five Points.

By: Alba Rakacolli Before the world crumbled in on itself, she sewed its history into her tablecloths. Each piece of cloth contained scenes of all she knew and some things she felt, etched in the vivid colors of embroidery thread. Sometimes, a tablecloth would have only a single scene that spanned its entirety, swallowing up anything she sat upon it. Other fabrics would contain thousands of tiny scenes that worked together to hold the weight of the dinner plates. She stitched everything imaginable onto the tablecloths, from centuries-old battles with mottled brown horses and glinting spears, to the previous day's market with shining red tomatoes and bright watermelons. Most of them would remain tucked away, folded neatly after she had finished them. She embroidered tirelessly. The light in her little house at the top of the hill remained on throughout the night, as constant as the stars to the townspeople below. She kept a record of all their lives from birth to death, filling in family lines until no space remained on a tablecloth before pulling out another. Should someone be lucky enough to be invited to dinner, and should they decide to attend, she would ask them what, specifically, they wanted saved. Saved was the word she always used. Every dinner was accompanied by a tablecloth with the guest’s life featured in fine thread; as the meal came to an end, she would point to a blank spot amidst the imagery and say, Choose what you feel is most important for the center. Some townspeople could answer immediately: they wanted their children's births recorded, or their wedding days, or the day they first tried cherry pie. To those, she smiled and began to pick out the threads she would need. Others took longer, asking, Is it alright if I come back? To those, she nodded, told them that when they knew what they wanted they could whisper it in her direction and she would know too. Some took days to do so. Some took years. Others took until the end of their lives, when in their last moments they looked toward her little house and whispered that they wanted this, being surrounded by loved ones, to be saved. Some called her a witch, said she was collecting the memories to cast a spell that would curse them all, trap them in her tablecloths. Others called her a seer, on account of her choice of words, said she must have known of a great calamity coming and wanted to preserve what she could. Others believed she was the goddess of time come to experience life on the mortal plane while recording all that she saw. All commented on the fact that she never seemed to age and that no one could remember a point when she didn't live on that hill. She never confirmed nor denied the theories, allowing the townspeople to speculate all they wanted. Though no one could say that she kept to her own–somehow, she knew the goings-on of the town and the world without asking a soul–she never pried, and she never told anyone anything they didn't need to know. She attended every wedding, brought gifts to every birth, and regularly bought from the farmer's market, all with a gentle smile and a soft voice. When asked why she was saving history in her tablecloths, she would simply reply, Do all things not deserve to be remembered? Alba Rakacolli is a graduate of the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. During her time there, she worked as one of two Editors in Chief on UMN's undergraduate arts and literary magazine, The Tower. In her free time, you can find her knitting, baking, and spending time with her partner.

I am not Colin Farrell falling in love with Rachel Weisz in the 2015 mediocre absurdist dark comedy, The Lobster. By: Megan Cassiday Instead, I am thinking that it is better to be alone than to stab myself in the face with a cheap butter knife in a local diner’s bathroom, of how I’d rather be stuck in a fish tank in the living room you share with your new girlfriend, “this is my ex, she’s a lobster now.” Instead, I am thinking about walking outside after the credits wrap and you repeat one more time that it’s just “not your kind of movie”, of stripping all of my clothing off in the front yard, buying a ticket to the zoo and slipping into the flamingo enclosure–at least there would be more than one of us here. Instead, I am thinking that I might like to forget how to read, blink away everything from Kafka and Metamorphosis, on identity and what it means to be someone, on existentialism and the TV static I get in my hands when I think about the universe swallowing me whole. Instead, I am thinking about taking seven pink feather boas from the gift shop and caking them to my body with mud, about practicing my balance and how to fall down and if the other birds would really care that I wasn’t organic, authentic, homegrown. Instead, I am thinking that when it’s late at night in this zoo, when the janitors have swept past and the keepers have long gone home, I might crawl out of my strawberry skin, slither over to the ponds where the koi and the turtles and the frogs are, float on my back and look straight up – I am thinking about if I will think about what it might be like to truly exist. Megan Cassiday is a creative writing student from Michigan. Her work has been featured in Versification, CLOVES, Roi Fainéant, Bullshit Lit, and others. You can find her on Twitter @MeganLyn_

By Denise Kline Jenny’s sleep had been full of strange scenes—a woman knitting nothing but air, the knitting needles clacking as she rocked in her chair; an apple as big as a watermelon on the kitchen table; a starfish crawling up her bedroom wall. In the morning, her mother had touched her forehead with cool fingertips and then taken her temperature while Jenny, propped up against her pillow, watched the tip of the thermometer throb in time with her heart. Her mother removed the thermometer, angled it toward the lamp on the bedside table, frowned and patted Jenny’s arm. Jenny closed her eyes and listened as her mother’s slippers shushed across the bedroom floor, down the hall and into the bathroom. Water splashed in the sink and the medicine cabinet door squeaked open. Then her mother was back at her bedside with an orange pill cradled in her open hand. “This will make you feel better sweetie,” she said. Her mother placed the pill on the tip of Jenny’s tongue. She bit down on it. If I ate a flower, it would taste like this, she thought. She sipped water from the glass her mother tipped against her mouth. Jenny stretched in her bed. Across the room, her gray plaid uniform jumper and white blouse hung on the closet door. By her desk, her book bag was packed and ready. Not today. She wouldn’t have to wear her scratchy uniform and carry her heavy book bag. She pulled her blanket up to her chin. Downstairs, in Don Riddick’s TV and Radio store, Mr. Riddick had turned on all his radios. They all played the same station. Jenny closed her eyes and listened to the music. Lots of violins sounding silvery and happy. Then a man’s voice, rumbly and deep, announcing the name of the song. Jenny didn’t care what the name of the song was. She just liked the violins. The man paused the music and said rain was coming this evening. A steady rain with gusty winds. Jenny’s eyes ached. She was thirsty and wanted to sip from the glass of water her mother had left on the bedside table, but her arms were too heavy to move. She took a breath and opened her mouth to call out to her mother, but, no, she wanted to sleep more than to drink water. Sleep began to sweep her away, taking her slowly. On the cusp of sleep came the things she saw just before she drifted away. She never knew what she’d see. Today there were trees behind her closed eyes. They stood in a black line as snow fell out of a torn, gray sky. It was the last thing she saw before she slept. When Jenny woke, the radios downstairs were still playing. The violins were gone, replaced with trumpets. Jenny closed her eyes again. She saw the trumpets, all of them gold and shiny and played by hands in white gloves. No faces, no arms. Just the shiny trumpets and the white gloves. Jenny opened her eyes. She heard a hiss and smelled starch and hot cloth. Ironing Tuesday. Her mother never just called them ‘Tuesdays’. Jenny swung out of bed. The floor was cool against the soles of her feet. She went to the window beside her desk and drew the yellow curtain aside. This was the window she liked the best. It was big and overlooked Bethlehem Pike. There was always something to see. She watched the traffic. First came a red car, and then a black one, then a green truck, and a red and white milk truck, then nothing for a few seconds and then a school bus. No kids were on the bus. She pictured her empty desk in her fourth grade classroom. She sat in the row by the windows. On clear mornings like this one, the sun was so bright through the windows that the air around her sparkled with chalk dust. Maybe her desk was the only empty one in the classroom. A big splash of sunlight falling across it. Mr. Campbell came out of his grocery store across the street. He carried a basket of green apples in his arms. The breeze lifted the ties of his white smock. He put the basket on the sidewalk under his front window. The sign in his window blinked on and off. Campbell’s Market in red letters. She imagined touching the sign. It was warm, in her mind, and each time it blinked, the sign made a sizzling sound like eggs frying in a pan. Mr. Campbell went back inside his store and brought out more baskets full of cucumbers and tomatoes. He lined them up under his window, pushing them in place with the toe of his shoe. When she went to Mr. Campbell’s store to run an errand for her mother, he sometimes gave her one of the red and white peppermint candies he kept in a bowl by the cash register. He told her to savor it. No one she knew used the word “savor” and this made the candy feel so fancy that she always saved it for later. If he didn’t have any other customers, he’d talk to her about his days when he was a boy working in this same store, never thinking he’d own the place someday. He’d been a delivery boy. Almost all the families in Flourtown knew him, he said. He’d been in the place Jenny lived in when it was still a house and not Don Riddick’s store with an apartment over it. At Christmas time, the family in the house always invited him inside and he’d sit in their dining room lit by candles from the chandelier. The candle flames made the wood floor shine. They’d bring him a mug of hot apple cider and a plate of rolls still warm from the oven. Butter too, big pats of it in a cold dish. Sometimes they’d give him a sack of chestnuts and oranges to take home with him. Jenny asked about what happened to the chandelier and the pretty wood floors. Mr. Campbell said the people in the house died and then the house sat empty until someone came along and made it into something else. The iron hissed in the kitchen. Then came the clean smell of steam and starch. Her mother’s slippers shushed across the kitchen floor. Next to Mr. Campbell’s store was Stonewright’s Plumbing. A gray spigot, big as a dinner table, hung above the entrance. A drop of water, made of something hard and shiny, hung below the mouth of the spigot. Mr. Stonewright was on a ladder, polishing the drop with a white cloth. He held the drop with one hand while he polished with the other. Jenny used to worry the spigot and drop would fall to the sidewalk and hurt someone. Her father had taken her across the street and they’d stood together, their eyes raised, her father with his hands in his pockets. He was quiet for what Jenny remembered as a long time and then finally he said, “They’re made of tin, I think. Tin’s not that heavy, Jenny. They won’t fall off.” He’d put his hand on her shoulder and then he’d winked and said, “But the drop, if it did get loose, would roll right down the Pike. That would be quite a sight.” She’d laughed and he’d laughed with her. Then he told her gently, “Be a child for as long as you can, Jenny.” Her father was a radio announcer. He had a deep, friendly voice. His voice was his living, he said. When her father was still at home, Mr. Riddick tuned all the radios in his store to her father’s station and Jenny would listen to him as she got ready for school. He was the voice that said “Good Morning Delaware Valley” and told people whether it was going to snow or rain and when the sun was going to shine. He also told them the places where traffic was bad and the names of the songs he played. But he was in Palm Springs, California setting up a new radio station. He wrote letters and tucked pictures of Palm Springs inside the envelopes. Nothing but palm trees and big open dusty spaces and hills off in the distance. She imagined her father taking the pictures, raising his small brown camera to his eye, lowering it, taking a few steps forward or back, raising the camera again and finally snapping the picture. It’s just a desert, Jenny thought. Flat and hard, the sunlight falling like something hot and heavy on the brown earth. She searched the pictures for dark places where there might be trees. She loved trees. She especially loved woods that were so thick that even in the middle of the day the sun barely got past the treetops. She’d shiver a little in the backseat of the car when they passed woods like that, but it was the kind of shivering that came when she saw something beautiful. But her father loved this new place. It was clean and dry, he said in his letters. Her mother read his letters to Jenny, but her voice sounded like she was reading a story and trying to be happy about the end. Her father said in his letters that they’d be together as soon as the radio station was up and running. Jenny asked her mother how soon was soon. She never had an answer. Getting a radio station on the air sounded like something that would take a long time. Jenny pictured her father busy far from home as he filled shelves with the record albums he’d play and hung pictures in his office. The busier he was, the sooner he’d call to tell them to pack everything and come out to Palm Springs. Her mother stood in the doorway. “Jenny,” she said. “You should be in bed.” Jenny obeyed, slinking on her bare feet to her bed. Her mother felt her forehead and then took the thermometer from the bedside table. She shook it and smiled as Jenny opened her mouth. Mother and daughter quietly waited. A man whistled somewhere close by. Something metal clanged on concrete. Dunlap’s Garage next door was open for business. Jenny’s mother removed the thermometer, read it in the lamplight and then ruffled Jenny’s hair. “No fever, kiddo,” she said. “Now you need some breakfast.” They ate at the kitchen table. Scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice and a treat for Jenny: hot tea with milk. From the window beside the table, Jenny looked out at the backyard. The backyard belonged to Mr. Riddick. He’d given a patch of it to Jenny’s mother to plant a vegetable garden. Every spring, her mother planted tomatoes, carrots and green peppers. Jenny helped her when the time came to tie the vines to stakes with twine. Rain had fallen all day yesterday and puddles as small and bright as coins shined in the soil waiting to be turned. When they finished eating, Jenny helped her mother wash the dishes. The window above the sink looked out over Dunlap’s Garage. Through the open Venetian blinds, Jenny watched two mechanics, their arms streaked with grease, as they smoked cigarettes in the parking lot. They inhaled and exhaled the smoke like they were hungry. Beside Dunlap’s garage was the house that filled the rest of the window, right up to the top. Burt’s house. Burt was in his backyard, dressed in the suit and black hat he always wore, hands in his pockets, head down. If all his thoughts were written in a book, Jenny knew the book would be thick and heavy. On summer days and sometimes after school, Jenny sat with Burt on the porch of his big house. He called the house his honeycomb. Three stories tall, full of rooms. Burt told her this was the last boarding house in Flourtown, but the rooms were usually empty. “People are more well to do these days and don’t need to live in small rooms,” Burt said. “Not like when I was a young man.” Burt was seventy-eight years old. No one Jenny knew was as old as him. He was thin and moved slowly, like he was thinking out each thing before he did it. His face was long and wrinkled, his eyes so deep-set she knew they were green only when he stood in the sunlight. And he’d nearly died once. Jenny had never met anyone who’d nearly died. He was a boy when it happened, younger than she was, he told her. He’d run into the woods when snow started to fall. The flakes were as big as feathers. The snow fell and fell and the wind blew so hard that it felt like a fist slamming into his chest. Everything around him turned white, like the whole world just disappeared all at once. He curled under a tree, his knees drawn up to his chest and he cried. Jenny had never heard a man say he’d cried, even when he was a boy. “You really believed you would die?” she asked. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I was sure my time had come.” And Jenny wondered what it must be like to know you’re about to die, but the thought was like being locked alone in a dark room and she shook her head trying to get rid of it. Finally, he made his way back home, he told her, but then his voice got low and deep like he was about to tell her a secret. “Blizzards scare me to this day,” he said, “the way they just swallow the world and everything in it.” When her father left for California, Burt said to Jenny, “You must miss him terribly.” She did miss her father terribly, she said. Her mother called him every other Sunday afternoon, timing the call with a tiny hourglass with sand that sifted from top to bottom in three minutes. The last time she called, her mother handed her the phone and told her to be quick. She’d asked her father when they were coming out to California and all he’d said was soon. He asked her about school and Jenny told him school was fine, but she still wanted to know how soon was soon. “Soon,” her father said and that was all. And then her mother took the phone back and told Jenny to go to her room. In her room, Jenny sat on the edge of her bed. Her mother had lowered her voice so Jenny couldn’t make out the words, but her voice was different. Whispery and upset, like she was trying not to shout. Jenny looked up at Burt. His eyes were on her and she realized he’d been watching her the whole time she was thinking about how much she missed her father. He’d pushed the brim of his black hat up on his forehead. “I moved far away for a while, too,” he’d told her. “Painted church steeples in Boston and picked fruit in California. Moving far away, it’s hard to do, but it’s a good thing, too. While I was away, Flourtown got polished up in my memory. So I came back and here I am taking care of this old place.” He’d smacked the porch step with the palm of his hand and laughed. Jenny wanted to laugh, but nothing was funny about Burt living alone in a big empty house. Jenny watched from the kitchen window as Burt took a cigar from his coat pocket. He lit it with a match, tilted his chin upward, breathed out the smoke, turned and walked back to his house, in and out of the shadows of the trees, his head down. As he walked toward the house, Jenny felt suddenly far away as if she and her mother had already packed their bags and left for California. Burt would still be here, alone in his big old house while she was living in a strange place. She’d write to him so he wouldn’t seem so far away and she hoped he’d write back about his house and what was happening in Flourtown, everything going on just as it was now and just as it would be when she was far away. Her mother gently touched Jenny’s arm. “Get back to bed, Jen. A little more rest will do you good.” Jenny sighed and nodded as she gazed out the window. The men were still at work in the garage. One of them whistled something sharp and tuneless. The windows on the top floor of Burt’s house reflected the sky and the clouds. She walked down the hall to her bedroom, skimming her slippers on the floor so she made the same shushing sound her mother made as she walked from room to room. She went to her window and watched a woman in a brown coat, a yellow kerchief tied tight around her head, pick apples and tomatoes from Mr. Campbell’s baskets. The drop above Stonewright’s Plumbing shook in the breeze and Jenny imagined standing below it, catching it as it fell, her father beside her as she held the drop in her arms. Good girl, he’d say. Jenny leaned her forehead against the window. The cool glass trembled slightly. She closed her eyes and sighed. Tomorrow, California would still be far away and she’d be back in school, sitting beside the windows, waiting for the sun to climb in the sky until it was high enough to shine across her desk and turn the air around her bright and warm. Denise Kline resides in Virginia.