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EP Allan Jennifer VanBuren Rosemarie Crisafi Scott Malby Ashok Niyogi

Les Wicks Patrick Carrington Kelley Jean White Rochelle Hope Mehr Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb

William C. Houze Janet Lynn Davis Terry Lowenstein Yvette Merton Cory Mesler

 

  

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Weeds

by EP Allan


Hail to the weeds
with their thick green
riot
        the uninvited guests
drilling pneumatic roots
through the wispy chatter
of corn and dianthus

Their tenacious lives
neither bass obbligato
nor tenor
                but a shrill
violin sawing tunelessly
through the stately
eggplant’s ode to friendship

Unwanted
                    Unloved
they do not care
but return
through poison
                            yanking
& fire
bold with stale armpits
unlaved feet
bucked toothed
knob kneed
& fat
elbowing their odious
smug way up to & in
the black loamed
feast

 

 

Ancestral Pleasures

by EP Allan


What hedonistic pleasures
did our ancestors partake
before the opening of Yemen
& coffee
               Peruvian chocolate
or Indian toast & tea

Was it just chunks of meat
spitting blood on the fire
the smoky broil of flames
waving in the salivating
night
          a goat-skinned
carafe of murky
fermented purple grasped
in greasy unwashed palms

What were the class divisional
pleasures before ice cream
before dusty venetian blinds
choked with the cough of spiders
before the clear glass
window’s sealed eye watched
the wind in the sequestered
thrill of central heating
while the snow stumbles
beyond the pane
                           & the trees
shiver ice
                    before the shower’s
steamy kiss & the cling
of chemically softened towels
before they could thumb
through magazines of fashion
& shoes & gourmet recipes
teaming with exotic
spices
            before the doorbell
rang what did they have
for winter’s Tuesday
& the languid thrill
of bottles lined in waiting ranks
upon a polished table

 

 

The Green Day

by EP Allan


the sun’s blue eye watches
green worlds pulsating
in the swimming irradiated
ethereal sea
                      pirouetting gyroscopes
spinning emerald life
through the lonely celestial
vacuumed silence
                                unquestionable nothing
lacking even the mitigation of death
& old ice
               an empty silence
waiting the dusty feet of angels
dreaming night
                           orange fish
& lederhosened fat cherubs
tenoring papageno
                                  on erato’s
stringless lute
                         to toe their winged
steps of sea green imagination
through the pin-point tears of stars
& sing silver
                      while below mere men
sweat the night for insecticided
wheat thins
                    genetically cancerous
plums & slice their brother’s
throat for a pint of oil

 

 

Possibilities of the Infinite

by EP Allan


possibilities of the infinite lurk
around each sun dappled corner
to spring out in shrieking
tires & the crumpled
blood wet kiss
of fender & glass

yet how easy to forget
pretending that these days
of fat or despondency
will continue
                         in an eternal line
of coffee cups
                          or working
9-5 at a mind numbing
job until the eyes are empty
marbles of insipidity
staring out from faces
more hideous than a corpse
of dull tv shows
                              or movies
scything away the hours
the limited hours
in which we can be
& do
          & feel
into masturbatory muscle
men grinning with snake
oil & stupidity
                          defeating
evil dung men
with pinched rat faces
& fat foreign
bank accounts
floating in south american
cocaine

yet the infinite is always
there waiting for its interest
due
       & the other day
standing at the airport
grey sleet rain pounding
the tarmac deathly wet
was not the infinite between us
the way the bullet
proof wire window
separated the passengers
from those staying behind

waiting for that flaming
mass of steel & silicone
to thunder off into the stagnate
grey underbellies of clouds
not knowing in those
last hand waves would be
the last
             or if you would
return and we could go
back to pretending
eternity
              even as the cabin
door sealed the promise
or threat of the future
& lumbered upwards
& out
            into the infinity
surrounding

 





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Estate Sale

by Jennifer VanBuren


On every linoleum-covered table
we find jars of charcoal blackened rice
jammed with unsharpened pencils.
Their print, worn by time not fingertips.

insurance companies
funeral homes
car dealerships

We search drawers for a pencil sharpener
but find only complimentary pocket knives
several plastic-handled potato peelers
a rusted carrot-shredder
and tarnished letter opener.

Only dull edges to make a point.

We list the things that might sell
and jot down notes for the ceremony
on the backs of envelopes that promise
you do not need to subscribe
to win.

The hardened erasers smear our words
with greasy red streaks
instead of deleting
all places we went wrong.

 

 

Doxology

by Jennifer VanBuren


Greg blackens out select letters
on the worship bulletin, sending his sister
cryptic messages about the bullfrog tenor
and how he flicks flies as they buzz around his
beehive headed wife. She watches the children
from the soprano section, front row.

Suppressing giggles, they shrink
from mother's sharp elbow jab
and sideways stares.

They drop origami dollar bills
into offering plates
pass it down pew by pew.

Doxology.

Mother's voice never
rises up like the owl-nosed lady
with the feathered hat
or even like Mrs. Krauss’ hunch back mother
whose voice wavers in weakness but still
hits the high notes.

Mother stays low,
sings in steady, even tones.
Does she not know the melody?

Her children have not yet learned
she is the understated bottom
that holds them up with her steady alto strength.
But they will.

 

 

Night watch

by Jennifer VanBuren


You sit atop this high roof
over triangular spaces made safe
from the escape of hot air, rising.

Basement is dirt, all skeletons cleared
He takes care of things

Asks only for a click and flash,
perhaps a line of verse
penned in his slim-lined pocket book.
Always willing to share a piece with a stranger—
save those napkins for chins and foreheads.

He takes care.
His wide thumbs untie muscles
knotted and tight from
carrying heavy things.

With saw-toothed promises, he
parades spectrums of lady images
sepia skin tone, black and white
haze streaked halo,
colored lips and nails
each for my choosing.

We like the ones in the box stores,
thin straps with confident step
their tired eyes almost hide
that low glow of brewing embers
waiting only for our oxygen to
ignite for the roasting

He takes care of things.
Corsage pinned delicate,
finger slides under georgette
touching skin only as intended

Taking control of the drip
drip drip, never neglecting
tight fit O-rings, washers.

Today’s image:
loud stomp boots
planted in tall grass,
the tornado far south
spins new winds that lift a light wave
of fine hair off his collar

and that is where I fit in.

 

 

Conversation #10:  Sauna
Title:  saunas are too hot for mortals

by Jennifer VanBuren


My lion, my lover,
have you ever felt such heat?

Demons and animal spirits
escape through open pores,
impurity falls like rain
into the watering hole.

Sweat and steam warp this paper,
and bleed blue letters beyond recognition.
Always these pages will bear the crease,
stain and shadow of our ghostly conversations.

Remind me again
how you deserted religion
when they tried to make you believe
matter is empty space.
That day you decided it all must be filled
with impossibility.

You ran.

Tripped into me, and like
dry bread soaked in milk
you felt yourself soften.

I hold fingers safe from
downhill speed of bicycle spokes
whose motion fills emptiness with the
misconception of matter.

Keep feet below your heart
until my presence dissolves the illusion of substance,
heat evaporates the myth of existence.
everything becomes true
and light as youth.

The weight of silence breaks.

You told me
You are dangerously close

but it was you who passed
into the edge of flame.

 





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Eyrie 

by Rosemarie Crisafi


Belt straps snap red bands;
slit streaks into the skin
of thighs encircling the prism
mirror like shrill chimes.

Hawks disfigure the bridge
below the tower, talons grip,
screaming in refrain the tenor
your pink tongue could never shape.

Then your teeth, too frozen to nibble,
suck an acidic tonic.
It stretches over you a cerulean cloth
to hide your halos.


 

The Photo Shoot

by Rosemarie Crisafi

1.
She does not understand
at barely 16
how anyone could pay more
than her father ever earned
for the contours of cheeks,
the manner bones project,
or the determination
of breasts.

Wind blown and exposed,
there must be other ways
to please her mother
but there is celebrity,
make-up, and always,
teasing nipples.

Headshots to body shots,
a camera moves
in and out
as efficiently as a physician
palpating.
It is her job
to bear the thrusts
of strange tongues.

2.
Mother said, in time,
the scars fade;
it will make her more beautiful,
more balanced.
Laying back,
arms raised behind her head
picturing
saline filled
silicone shells,
incisions around the areola,
the numbness
(in some cases, permanent).


 

Writing at Constitution Marsh

by Rosemarie Crisafi


Amidst the exclamation points of mountains
and the rock cliffs of the Hudson Highlands,
inlets and channels break the lines
of Martyr's Rock, winding through brackets
of cattail stands.

Brown cigars and yellow spikes hang above
the sentence, stiff as semicolons; furry stalks
hold wind on the shore. Beside violet
blue apostrophes of thick pickerelweed,
wood ducks swallow acorns whole.

Graceful necks bulge with peristaltic colons.

Muskrat dens surround turtles basking
in a small ellipsis of sun. Long-billed wrens dot
Indian Brook gorge. The slash of the hillside
cuts to the swamp's edge, where snapping turtles
bury their eggs within the mud's parentheses.

 

 

Marionette

by Rosemarie Crisafi


That grin has only lips, not a face.
It laughs without wrinkles.

Stooping, making yourself smaller,
knotting your stings, you take up less space.

A stiff tongue, says, "I love you", accent
misplaced, a block played by a school child,

rhythm slow and hollow, stopping unexpectedly,
speaking a strange dialect without pronouns.

Changing the subject, only to untangle,
letting a joke dance across the floor,

your nose is wood only it does not grow.

 





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Strangling the singing bird

by Scott Malby


a.
In this wilderness of being

I am blind, lifting the skirts
of rainbows, while the wind
rummages through me
speaking in the jargon
of sinners, saints and thieves,
luring me over the cliffs
and erotic spillways of life
filled with the quintessence
of my own fireweed and yap,
therefore blessed
and necessary are the apostles
of light, whose existence
makes all songs possible;
Air, Ocean, Fire, Earth.
The eyes in them praising
that enchantment of being
which delights us all.
But in us is also a sky
of choking birds where
each flight taken
is an exuberant sacrifice
made radiant and holy
by our griefs, as unpredictable
as rain kissed by the blue
and icy mist of an artic
winter reflecting the sadness
and longing of tears one wound
at a time, both beyond
and beneath, vibrations
like the singing of birds
cleansing our bones.

b.
Where did they go?

The sun was an ocelot,
the full moon, a Siberian lynx
when I discovered them
rummaging through my head.
I greased their bodies with spit
and gave them birth.
I watched them fly,
hoping the land of morgues
would grieve us by.
I found instead, the further
they flew from my tongues heat
the sun and moon were all
they cared about.
They've traded my blood for light,
they are faithless and
I don't know where they've got to.

c.
To move forward efficiently

is what I mean.
I mean that the past
is an old fiction
and we are inevitably caught
in its evolution
we can never fully express.
Let us agree to deviate.
No patriarchs. No Madonna’s.
Only in death do we become
free of ourselves.
Creation is an escapist activity
where we escape
back to fundamentals
where we
hit the ground running
where we......we....
make that news making us.

d.
In the rookery of singing birds

It's not wise
to crow about yourself.
In every direction
sounds are amplified.
But to sing about your time
with you in it, is a calling.
Bringing you in from the cold.

 

 





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Anguish

by Ashok Niyogi


Boundary Walls

no tricks with words
no help from the geese
this is now
in the wake
of the swimming flock
this is gravity
perched on Target
owl that sees all
pigeons line up
for military drill

in gathering dusk
the evening people
unleash pets
unleash poems
unleash black
unleash fear
in mixed body odors
the cult of the occult
in coarse grass

spring rain all mixed up
contradicting direction
bringing to ground
the color of the setting sun
poignant smells of thirsty earth

it is summer now
has been for relentless years
pain in summer suffocates
eyes glaze over
as those of a mutilated deer
I scratch my heart
with ingrown toenails
I pinch the ulcers
until there’s blood
but no answers

alive
and not wishing death
seeking deliverance
from this hunter’s trap
the shimmering gold
on palm tree tentacles
the entrapment of the skull

Snake

they go about their daily chores
gastroenteritis and parties
weight watching and career woes
zombies climbing ladders
bedecked in finery and jewels
blind to the mad snake in their midst

their perfume is past the expiration date
the snake they have shoved under the carpet
is a Death Row inmate
from country to country they extradite
and keep him gorged on fresh strawberry
mind games prevail
freedom is foul
and yet
the snake sheds skin
and flows into their boring lives

they are embarrassed about snake smell
they mortally dread the excitement
as they do true venom
not prescribed by psychiatrists or palmists
not due for increment or bonus
not even capable of filling an empty day
full of memory and recrimination
this is one dangerous game
this midlife rebuilding from venomous roots

the carpet moves
sinister
the snake coils
rears up its head
licks at the sky with forked tongue
until it is hit on the head
eyes smashed into palate
distended tongue
it coils back into itself
to repair and recuperate

Palampur

my boots squelch
between rows and rows
of trimmed tea trees
a flock of green parrots hear me
and noisily fly away.

the sparrows are rather more curious
or perhaps hungrier
they look bedraggled after the rain
wet feathers make them look thinner
the squirrels have drops of water
on the tips of their bushy tail.

across the undulating valley
the mountains reveal themselves
beneath their white shrouds
they are immortal
as are two leaves and a bud.

all of us drink in the afternoon sun
spiders mount central guard
over shimmering rainbow cobwebs
lizards stop and start
filled as they are with the joy of life
the crows unnecessarily make too much noise.

the car is functioning perfectly
the Vodka helps
it also helps that
there is no great poem on the anvil
no fairy words
with which to win damsels’ hearts
the tea trees have no heart
no social cultural or occupational plans
just fragrance
from two leaves and a bud

Dream

Sometimes it is in a morning dream
And to catch it in the morning
In between the lawn mower noise
And distant BARTs speeding away
is not easy

but that is what poets are for
to do all this time consuming catching

I lie in the womb of an octopus
caressed by all eight tentacles
in warm waters deep under
inside the white underbelly

they will harpoon my mother in her belly
and bring us up alongside
tentacles drooping
tomorrow

my poetry will be a clear soup
garnished with dead herbs still fragrant
I will think of those starfish I bought
and dried on the beaches of Nakhodka

we looked outwards you and I
on a clear day we imagined
we saw the shores of Japan
the octopus have no such imagination

but in the morning dream
it was your shampooed hair
with that seaweed formulation
and yesterday’s fragrance
lingering in your woolen cap

I woke up and crawled into a chasm
permanent with huge shards of old ice
fragrances are temporary I rationalized
without money they are not funny

so here I am at the bottom of this ice pit
walls inching in on me
with fingernails and toenails I push
to preserve my sanity
and shriek at the top of my voice
the noise fails to reach
the seaweed in your hair

mocked and despised
by other prisoners of life
we look into the whites of each other’s eyes
and recoil
only rock-ice
no soil
only day no night

only shrieks of today
that echo back from all tomorrows
which I have written away
by way of an account payee check
that keeps bouncing back

I Went Blind

when I finally went blind
I held on to images I had last seen
deep-froze them for some future thaw
and carried on with my ablutions

I know those wispy clouds have gone
the geese fly back to the lake
I hear them
the staircase still creaks
the kitchen knives are just as sharp
I feel it is summer
there must be much troubled water
in the mountain spring
the Mexicans must be out for river trout
school is out
so children must be jumping into pools
all over Fremont

I touch  and feel
you let me
my discovery amazes you amuses you
assuages your guilt
I sense vibrations
these are not silent sobs
just arrested breathing
defense mechanism against an alien touch

 





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Beside the Road to War

by Les Wicks


Like a currawong's wing
combing tangles of air
or the pulse of waterskin on this sated lake
                                                        let me be lazy.

Beside the bat-squeal shifting, pitch fruits of a roosting tree
twigs accrete by the hand's-span brook ...
          a minute dam of tadpole consequence.
                     White cockatoos weed & grumble—
                     we cannot ask for still
                                                    so let me be lazy.

Stock markets crumple then soar,
money gibbers around the globe.
Roads stretch to fit our waistlines
as soldiers camp on contended land.
The Cyrillic of white
on the black swan's wing
is no battle plan for any general.
                                                But my eyes are indolent
                                     & those paths will not crack the world.

A cranky call from the water hen to planes overhead
then I am back amongst gesticulated argument
still based in the caves—
"we need more", "they want ours".  Greed & Fear again.

Willows trawl the lake,
eels archive the histories of mud.
Time to replace the old tribal gods—
they've started & won every war.
           The Peoples of the Book
           should throw those books away.
                      There comes a time when blood outweighs the ink.
My father is dead,
let the wet-coal tortoises mind the plinth
& we'll sing our hymns to fish.

A seagull is whisking a cloud in the shallows—
your sleep is disturbed!  You're lunch!
What surrounds us is not serene.  Crows are singing Little Lamb, each
weed is a contest.
But it's the violence of the blinking eye, hum of the skin.
When blood is let loose
millions of cells become individual lives with their own
brief dramas & fates.  Is each worth any less
than the great lumpy thing that grew them?

I'd chain our leaders to weathered wooden benches
until the infection of birdcall subdues their hands.
           Immobilised eyelids will surrender
           to a day of casual forage.

We need peacekeepers
to patrol our heads.  With lazy as our prayer,
train ourselves to say enough.  Intelligence will listen as each day
becomes its own statement of intent.

 

 

The Problem with Sydney

by Les Wicks


Hard being poor in this city
but easy to feel rich
as seagulls skim a tablecloth harbour like credit cards.

Heat rises—exhaust of property auctions/
the negotiation of stone & fig.
I try to read the Sanskrit of cirrus—
puzzles of the immense—
seeing the tattoo of a rose on a whale.

I understand the problem
with our need to all do less
                                       but how can Pajeros seem too much
                          beside profligate sand at all the gateways to deep ocean?
                                                                                                             What tile is garish
                                                            beneath a sky with flight paths engraved in gilt?

                                                      This will never end.
The sun hovers
like a poker-lampshade in epiphany.

 

 



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Marielle's White Shirt

by Patrick Carrington


They saw the neon palm, heard
salt air whisper a gypsy’s promise
to tame their nightmares, shrivel
the bad dreams small.

Five for foreign-eye crystal
to read their wrinkled scars, ten
for tea leaves or tarot.  The future
was cheap, draped in Persian print
and rhinestone, but prophesy
glittered from her like diamonds.

For butter and eggs, she stepped
from trailers of vagabonds into summer
sun, from campfires where guitars play,
where tomorrow is serenaded and sold
to anyone willing to pay for its lies.

But autumns on the boardwalk
were different, all plywood and time.
In a white shirt, she walked by the sea
that was more her father
than the one she never knew.

Always, she went to the clutch
of the water, its old eyes, knowing
the arms and stares of other men
were tricks of her own dishonest craft.

Even when the sea gave her nothing,
deserted with ease and no word
of farewell, she stayed.  Because
she could not abandon the storm
that created her, or a love
as pure as her fallen cloth.

 

 

Union Square

by Patrick Carrington


Dawn is a peeping tom, intruding
blink by blink.  Truth’s spy lighting
its flares, shocking the naked.
They hide their eyes and cover
their breasts, reach for clothing.
In alleys and archways, homes
of the homeless, they feel the burn
of binoculars as its lamps expose
their barren fields.  On church steps,

they sense the sunbeams steal
their beauty in a sudden gospel of light.
Revelation spreads the shining threads
of its religion, stitching the centers
and corners of bodegas and basements
with filigrees of embroidered reality.

They squint, the actors who play
in the theater of deflecting darkness.
They long for the veil that covers
day’s face, its pimples and pockmarks.
They are the unwelcome, and cherish
the hissing masks of midnight
that strip them for love and twist
them with ecstasy.  Lost lepers
who become spotless in the medicine
of starlight, healed and pure.
Home again.

 

 

Scrubbing Macgillycuddy's Reeks

by Patrick Carrington


So strange, returning to this hill
and standing in my own footprints,
ground-frozen fossils that flinch
under an unknown man, regretting
their shape and seeds. They sunk
in mud that day of torrent, lightning
flashing over the rock glaciers as I
begged the rain to clean me, to take

my sins and scrub them, scrub
their hidden bends and buckles
like it does the fine foldings
of red ridge on Macgillycuddy's Reeks,
those thousand bloodshot eyes
looking over Killarney Town
as a worried father fretting above
his sick son’s straw cradle. I begged

the heavy water to make me stay,
to lock my loose feet in the marks
they made. To make me stay and be
what I was and should be. A father
like those rocks. A man. A good man

who puts his whiskey down, his hat
on the rack and boots under the bed,
and checks his baby’s breath. Dripping,
slogging up a devil’s ladder, I pleaded
with the sky to take the harsh wires
of his brush and scrub me like stone.

Now, sun-baked and suffering under
Carrauntoohil’s metal cross, I can see
the whole of Kerry as summer roses
ask their thorny questions. I can look
straight across the drowned river valley
of Kenmare Bay and into the window
where I left them with a tam-o’-shanter
and a cupboard full of empty glass.

 

 



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I love my mitochondria

by Kelley Jean White


full of the DNA of Eve
whispering of mothers
grandmothers:  O goddess-
in-waiting, sing!  We will meet
in the goldring of starfall
and carry you home.

 

 

I never tasted honey but

by Kelley Jean White


I assembled a hornet’s nest in my bowels
a bee dance in my head
the little barbed stingers fly out my eyes
and in at the nose
the mouth just smacks
honey honey
and the belly promenade
lays down a paper roar
against winter
and the rule of
brittle ice

 

 

In the wilderness of the eternal

by Kelley Jean White


my soul is seeking a little clearing
not far from a stream, a promising
little place to pitch a canvas

 

 

I turned the dial to NPR and

by Kelley Jean White


the voice was there in the car
with me:  150 years old
the sound
the very sound
the bugle
the bugler
the sound
the charge of the light brigade
cold hard brass
a modest old man
I had meant to remember his name

 

 



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When it ends

by Rochelle Hope Mehr


Does it end in a flash
or an umbilicus of doubt
Are we liberated
or crushed asunder in the abyss

What assonance
after a paraffin lifetime of sealing wax
and the watch fire of candles
candles tenuous
candles tenuto
candles tainted
candles engraved
candles brave
candles grave

 

 

gardening

by Rochelle Hope Mehr


smoothing things out
too many thorns
pierce the air

pat the earth down
cover over the seeds
maybe they'll grow

 

 

Fugue

by Rochelle Hope Mehr


I fade away
Light loses luster
How many lumens escape

Into lunar landscape?
What is this new shape?
I’d like to phosphoresce

Persistently at your feet
Neither borrowing nor lending light
Burgeoning no urge—

Secure from my flight.

 

 



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Hesper's Babies

by Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb

Waiting, waiting, and waiting more
since the summer edge of spring,
eager, impatient, anxious
as if we were the expectant parents,
we watch her become round,
the growing smoothness of her abdomen
concealing sweet, new life.

Finally,
it happens in warm, nocturnal quietude,
but I'm not privileged to view the miracle
until the morning after
my husband has already left for work.
Wanting to share the occasion,
I call to leave him the message
that Hesper has had her babies.

The receptionist responds appropriately
with a pronounced "Oh" of endearment
reflecting joy at the announcement,
not knowing who Hesper is—
only that she has given birth
and is special to us.
I do not elaborate on the babies
who dwell, unconscious, developing
as their eight-legged guardian
grasps her pear-shaped eggsac,
pedipalps resting against the silk
as though she were whispering
a greeting through that papery skin
to the hundred or so young within.
Hesper is a typically good mother;
it is the nature of Latrodectus hesperus,
the largest, western black widow.

 

 



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"Call Me When You Can"

by William C. Houze


in every machine death
oil and metal bodies glistening
chaos in one's mind and body
lines waiting to converge
on the face of America

of a piece it is our face
the hotels death camps
and what of the books
that foretell of nothing

no release in sex or prayer
priests masturbate to Bach
dead christs and buddhas
for sale at summer's end

mullahs and imams crying
kids shooting kids for fun
old glory covers the dead
no politician dares to speak
truth and lies a pudding

lovers lie arm in arm
time curves with space
the machines running
no one watching us
it is astronomy on tv

what meaning is this
a kiss in the rain or snow
birds not singing or flying
can you change a fifty
call me when you can

 

 



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Burial

by Janet Lynn Davis


It’s not like in the movies:
no expansive green hillside
overlooking a flawless
earth. The sun isn’t
beaming and blood-free.
Voices aren’t in tune.

Truth is, you’ll probably find
yourself in a crowded corner
with others who have left
before you.  You’ll feel
the feet of your mourners,
but your home won’t be in dirt.

As for those still here
to tread the windings,
none can know the spaces
in their hearts that will form vacuums—
preserved from frost and coals.
Maybe never to be unsealed.

 

 

Fog (on my birthday)

by Janet Lynn Davis

It stumbled across the highway
               like a drunkard.
Or maybe it knew just what
it was doing.  Maybe its intention
was to swallow me whole,
toss me around, spew me out.

Ultimately, it served only
as a marking:  the veiled opening
to another year.

 



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tweedly-dumb and tweedly-dee, the voice of authority

by Terry Lowenstein


the cheshire cat frowns
as words cascade off paper
and crash to the floor
to lay in abandoned heaps
of broken tea cups, tarnished silver
shards of sugar cubes

a clam shelled broom
attempts to sweep away
the tide of yesterday

as a clean shaven carpenter
bemoans the walrus's absence
and the white rabbit stares
at his silent watch

the hatter speaks
with forgotten brevity
as the room turns upside down
and monarchs yield their crowns

 

 

harvesting plums

by Terry Lowenstein


fall and harvest
synonymous words
that softly whisper in my ear
and speak volumes

I smile reflecting
on pomegranate seeds
dried apricots and tests

those we study for
and those life serves
up unexpectedly

 

 

hidden in the space of a small bite

by Terry Lowenstein


a definition emerges

the yin and yang of mentality
broken down into
new building blocks
that together form a table

not of metabolic equation
but of rationality and eros
human psyche revealed
in a simple truth

you are what you eat

 





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Turning to Alchemy

by Yvette Merton


Moroccan night stenciled between aging moons
inching their way past floating tents and hidden
bazaars reaching a point of saturation,
eclipse of tongues transports us back to times
of bread and wine broken after sunset
lost on the pages of bibles,
wiping hands in oil, palms inward face
kneeling before a Sultans table,
we gather momentum strangers in jackets
turning an eye, alchemists with wood wind
pipes changing metal to gold.

 

 

The Devil has a song

by Yvette Merton


All bones white hang from a coat
outer skin labeled crisp shirts,
I saw him dressed on a mannequin
glass front my only escape,
violin grooved between shoulders
and plaster of Paris chin,

Funeral music fiddled from strings
he unfolds an offering such flawless deception,
when hairs on my neck stand up
survival withstands the call of minstrels,
eye’s sideways rove, turning into his head
exterior skin is perfect, untainted snow,
while walking his fingers hold the bow
deep humming bumble bee drone.

 

 



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O How I Dreamt of Things Impossible

by Corey Mesler




And woke to find the world a bath of silver light
where romped the unfettered figures
of my past.  The bed fairly sang with joy, bodies
unlimited by law or reason. This morning,
may it last forever, or until the angels get wind
of our furious participation, and they
jealously restore us with their swords and their fire.

 

 

Color

by Corey Mesler


A scattered rainbow
of fruit loops
in my daughter’s bowl
this morning
pleases me beyond knowing.
It is such a simple
thing I almost let it go by
without writing
these few poor words, this
daylight ode.

 

 





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The Secret Diet  Barbara Jean Tannert Outfield Dunes  Mark Miklosovich Kitchen Fan  Lisa Braxton Forever is too Long  Rob Rosen The Bones Syndrome  John P. Matsis

Imaginary Friends  Samantha Cleaver No More Shortcuts  Paul García Living a Sermon  Jack Swenson Missing:  Presumed Not Dead  William Gladys

 

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The Secret Diet                                      

by Barbara Jean Tannert                                                                          

y little Roy started third grade today.  He's a pear-shaped boy, and extremely sensitive.  When I discover the Spanish onion, the unopened can of tuna fish, the Granny Smith apples, the empty Ginger Snap box, the utensils, the three custard cups sticky with the remnants of chocolate pudding, I realize just how nervous he must have been these past few days.  School has never been easy for Roy.  He has such trouble making friends.  It's just terrible to think of him sitting in his new homeroom so pale and miserable.  Last week he asked if I could teach him lessons at home, like Ma does for Laura and Mary in the Little House books.  "Why, think how bored you'd be staying home day after day," I told him.  "Think of everything you'd miss!"  But the terrible thing is, I didn't mean a word I said.  I was thinking how it might actually be nice to have him home with me.  He's so quiet and intelligent and interesting, not at all the kind of child you're glad to see get on the school bus in the morning.

Shimmying out from under the bed, brushing dust bunnies from my hair, blinking at the bright daylight, I can only sigh.  Respecting his privacy, I remove only the custard cups, which I need for baking.

There's a pumpkin pie in the oven and an Indian pudding cooling on the kitchen counter.  It's nearly eighty degrees outside, but once Labor Day is past I start on the Autumn desserts.  Baking is my special gift.  I make everything from scratch, including fourteen varieties of bread.  Growing up, I thought dessert meant slick canned peaches swimming in syrup.  Or tinny-tasting pudding that schlopped ready-made from a plastic tray.  Or a mountain of mealy, flavor-free ice-cream with its lava flow of brown synthetic syrup.  "Oh, stuck up Miss Picky," my mother would say when I pushed my "treat" away.  She never was much of a cook and, after Pop up and left, it only got worse.  Imagine giving an eight year old child frozen waffles for dinner, or the left-over macaroni and cheese for breakfast!  And my mother served everything with such enthusiasm.  You'd think she'd spent hours in the kitchen whipping up a gourmet delight.  Everything about mom was slightly overdone, a trifle inappropriate; her red hair, billowing out behind her, always seemed too long, her thin face too made up, dresses too loud, heels too high, laugh too anxious.  For her own supper, she'd think nothing of wolfing down a quart of Diet Fresca and a family bag of barbecued potato chips.

When I was twelve, I started teaching myself to cook.  For my birthday, I asked for a springform pan and an illustrated cookbook.  "My goodness, what a little old lady you are!" she said, and bought me this elaborately fuzzy pink sweater with beads instead.  I didn't cry, but I did refuse to speak to her for the whole day.  That evening, she drove to the mall and bought my pan and my cookbook and a ruffled white apron.  She tapped on my bedroom door and, when I opened it, I saw my elaborately wrapped presents waiting in the hallway, dappled with bright blue ribbons, and her perfumed shadow disappearing down the stairwell.

Putting the stew together, I'm worrying about Roy.  I can't stop thinking about that strange assortment of food waiting in the dusty twilight under his bed.  It's not like him to be so secretive.  And—good heavens—the last thing he needs to sneak is food!  I've even been teaching him how to cook.  He comes shopping with me now, and the baking aisle is already his favorite too.  It's less crowded than most and there's something wonderfully solid and reassuring about the fat sacks of flour and sugar, the old-fashioned tins of Hershey's cocoa, the brown bottles of Grandma's molasses, the faint sweet smell of vanilla lingering in the air.  We confer on the weekly dessert menu.  "How about a steamed chocolate pudding?" I'll ask.  "A pecan pie?  Stuffed apple dumplings?  Baked pears in Hazelnut Caramel Sauce?  Scottish Oatcakes?"  Roy will say, "Yes, yes, yes!"  Sometimes he does a little dance.

"You'd better watch that kid's weight," my mother told me last spring on one of her (thankfully) infrequent visits.  "You don't want him to end up like Augustus Gloop."  She looked as thin and bright as ever in skinny white pants and a green and purple cotton shirt, her hair layered and sprayed up into a fluffy crimson poof.

"Who. . ." I said

"The fat boy in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," she said.  "That book you used to talk about so much.  You pretended all the characters lived in your room.  What an imagination you had then.  You just devoured those books when you were little."  She noticed my scowl.  "Well, Roy's not quite. . ."

"I should say you are!" I exclaimed.

"Oh, don't get so stroppy."  She flitted out into the garden, began skittering around the gardenias like a little chipmunk.

Like a lot of kids, Roy's got some baby fat to lose.  A little spare tire is all.  Nothing to be concerned about.  Now me, I'll testify before judge and jury that I'm overweight.  Twenty five pounds, according to Doctor Pirhabi.  But I'm fit as a fiddle and Evan tells me I look great.  I'm certainly not the vain type that worries about her thighs and hips and liposuction possibilities.  Life is too short.  You take my mother.  She diets herself dizzy, and do you think she's happy?  Can she focus on anyone but herself for more than five minutes?  Do you think she's ever been able to keep a man?

The butter sizzles in the crockpot.  I add shallots, onion and garlic and turn up the heat.  Veal medallions dredged with flour.  Stock, wine, tarragon, chervil, basil, parsley, salt, pepper.  The words even taste good when you say them out loud.  From the kitchen window I can see the big, matronly school bus.  It stops and releases Roy.  He looks pale and harassed.  His shirt-tail droops down sadly between his thick little legs.  He hurries towards the house.  Behind him, the bus lurches off down the street with a yellow groan.

The dear slumps at the table and tries to smile.  My heart slumps with him.  His coffee-brown eyes, larger and milder than mine; his soiled cream dress shirt with the crescents of perspiration under the arms; his soft black mushroom of hair.  My boy.  The barber cut his bangs too short last week, leaving his face doughier than usual and with a vague expression of faint surprise.

"Was it that bad, pumpkin?" I ask.

"S'O.K.," he says.  Chin quivering, he pushes his new notebook back and forth with his fingertips.

"Would you like some pudding?  Cream on top?"  I'm surprised that I say this.  What I meant to say was, "Honey, can you tell Mommy why you're hiding food under your bed?"  I suppose I'm afraid of shaming him.  I don't want him to think I'm mad.

"Yes, please", he says.  His whole face takes on a bright, focused look, the expression of someone spotting a friend in a crowd of strangers.

We eat our pudding in the sunny private of the kitchen, enjoying its warmth, and the pleasure of each other's company.  The veal stock reduces in the pot and gives off a thick delicious meaty odor.  I have a vision of Roy as a baby, his intelligent gaze, his surprisingly virile crop of thick black hair, the sure solid manner in which he inhabited his romper.  "Are you my boy?" I used to ask, as he nursed with that thrilling but sometimes unsettling force.  "Are you all mine?"  Evan used to laugh and tell me the novelty of having a child would wear off, but honestly it hasn't.

"So, tell me how school went," I ask now.

Roy licks his index finger and picks crumbs off his plate.

"Don't do that.  It's bad manners."

He folds his arms, looks chagrined.  "I drew a good horse in Art," he says finally.

"That's wonderful!  And what about all your other classes?"  He starts to tell me about a disturbing math teacher of his, but I'm staring at the alien scrawl on the cover of his new notebook.  Big block letters written with one felt pen, unsuccessfully scribbled over with another.

"FAT PIG" it says.  I meet Roy's eyes.

"I'm going upstairs," he says.  And I let him go, feeling as though I'm the one whose been terribly insulted.

Evan's a salesman for Nike and he's on the road at least four days out of the week.  "Swooshing around," he calls it.  Some wives would complain, and it's true I get a trifle lonely now and again, but I think we're awfully lucky.  Time apart makes time together more exciting.  I came to that conclusion myself long before I read it in McCall's.  I wish he were home tonight, though, so I could tell him about the notebook.  I stamped an old Santa Claus sticker from last Christmas over the slur but, somehow, that seemed even worse.  So I tried to peel it off, and then scribbled over the whole torn mess with black magic marker.  Eventually, I just threw it in the trash.  I'll buy him a new one tomorrow.

Roy drifts into the kitchen just as I'm getting ready to serve dinner.  He shoves his plump little hands deep in his pockets and stares hopefully at the stove.  "Is it ready?" he asks.

The steamy essence of veal stock, tarragon and garlic rises from the stew pot when the cover's lifted.  The rich aroma makes me feel guilty, and piggish.  I can feel the corners of my mouth salivating slightly.  "Few minutes," I say.  "We can start on our salads."  I've made an enormous salad, hoping to dull Roy's appetite for the stew.  My intention is to put him on a kind of secret diet where I just reduce his portions, and cut down on fat and sugar in the cooking.  No dry toast or artificial sweeteners, just a little moderation.  He'll slim down and never know what hit him.

"Salad?" he says, looking startled.

"Go on and sit down, Honey," I say.  Watching him shuffle over to the table, a faint but stubborn image of one of those clowns whose bottom seems filled with water pops into my head.

Roy stares down at his food as he eats, one arm crooked protectively around his bowl.  I gave us both scant portions.  For dessert, I intend us to have thin slivers of pumpkin pie.

"So tell me something," I say.

"Like what," he says, flicking his eyes over me.  He spoons his food quickly, purposefully.

"Well. . ."

He drops his fork into his bowl.  "Can I have seconds?" he asks.

"Um. . . How's about waiting a few minutes so your tummy can tell your brain it's full."

"But I'm hungry now!" he says.

"That's because the message traveling from your stomach to your. . .Roy!"

He's on his feet, hurrying over to the pot.

"You've had enough.  Don't you want your dessert?"

"I want more!"

"No," I tell him.  He sits down, looking stricken.  "For heaven's sakes."

After he finishes his pie sliver, Roy gives me a wounded look and slumps upstairs.

As soon as he's gone, I sneak some spoonfuls of stew from the pot.  Then, all of a sudden, I find myself ladling faster and faster, my arm moving up and down like a piston, feeling more and more ravenous with every bite.

Around 2.a.m., the faint buttery smell drifts into my bedroom like a yellow ghost.  I follow its waft through the dark hallway, down the stairs, and into the bright warm kitchen.

Over his blue pajamas, Roy is wearing my apron.  His cheeks are flushed, his hair mussed from the pillow.  He stares at me in horror, knife poised over a mound of chopped onion on the cat-shaped cutting board.  The counter is littered with bottles of hot sauce and Worcestershire, a bowl of beaten egg, a sweating carton of half and half, and an enormous mound of grated cheese.  The skillet sizzles on the stove.

"What on. . ."

"I'm making you an omelet!" he cries.  "For breakfast in bed!"

I take the skillet off the burner, set it down firmly on the counter with a bang, to show him I'm angry.  But I'm not really.  I'm even proud of his choice of ingredients, of how adept he seems in the kitchen.  But his round little determined face tells me that things have gotten a little out of hand now.  "Go upstairs, Roy," I tell him, firmly.

"But mom, I'm absolutely starving," he says, desperately scooping at a handful of cheese.

"Drop it!"  I grab his strong chubby wrist.  "No."  He wriggles and, with his free hand, he grabs another handful and stuffs it in his mouth.

"Ahm weely weely hongy," he sputters.

"Damn it Roy."  I shake him hard, amazed at first by his strength and my sudden fury, and then by the sudden sharp impress of teeth on the fleshy underside of my arm.  I let him go.  Breathing heavily, Roy retreats over by the screen door, chewing violently and swallowing hard, his chins trembling, the fading glint of triumph in his little piggy eyes.

I begin to cry.  "Tomorrow," I say, "I was going to scramble you some eggs!"

 

 

                                                                                                        
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Outfield Dunes                                            

by Mark Miklosovich                                                                          

e found him sitting by a glass door that overlooked a dirt hill.  It wasn’t much to look at, this earthen run-off, but at least Jack was getting a little sun on his face and the semblance of fresh air, or so we thought.  We didn’t consider what it must be like to sit at the edge of the outdoors, held back by these aquarium walls for the sick and the old.  Jack squinted into the late afternoon light, his hands crossed neatly on his lap, with an expression that no man could read.

“Hi Pop,” my fiancé Bella said to her grandfather, “What are you up to?”  She kneeled down at his side with the grace of a woman who’d spent years growing beneath him, listening.

“Don’t know,” he said.

“Well,” she said, stiffening a bit, “I think it’s almost time for dinner.  How does that sound?”

Jack made a raspy sound in his throat.  He looked up with clear blue eyes and shook his head in a slow rocking motion, saying, “Smells like a shit pot in here.”

“Dinner will make you feel better.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, they sure as hell better move these dunes,” Jack said.

Bella looked at me and her eyes were like storm clouds descending on pale green ponds.  Lightning zigzagged across her eyes in bloodshot expression.

“Pop, you’re not at the beach,” she told him, “you’re at the hospital.”

“Like hell I’m not.  We’ll see about this; I’m not paying for a hotel with dunes in my way.”

I could tell Bella didn’t like taking something away from her grandfather, no matter how far away Long Beach Island was from this suburban Philadelphia hospice.  She helped him get out of his chair, telling him, “We’ll get to the beach again, don’t you worry; next time it will be a real nice house.”

“And who’s this guy?” Jack said, looking right through me.

“That’s Steven, you met him on Thanksgiving.”

“Is that right?”

“Are you hungry?” Bella asked him.

“Hold up, wait one minute,” Jack said, agitated and looking over his shoulder at the glass door, “I paid the lady $500 for this place.  She’s not pullin’ a fast one on me.”

“Which lady?” she asked.

“Christ,” Jack said, “You can’t even see the ocean.”

“Let’s get you back to your room for dinner.”

Jack made a spitting sound as he shuffled towards his room.  He stopped to grab onto the wall for a second, saying, “I’ve got money, plenty of it … I’m telling you, I’m not spending one more nickel here.  The food’s rotten.”  Out of breath and wheezing, Jack reached behind him for a wallet that wasn’t there.

“What can I get you Pop?”

Jack shook his head like she’d just asked the simplest question; I mean— his expression shouted, isn’t it obvious what I want?

“Ice cream for Christ sake.”

“We’ll get you some,” she said.

“Hope so,” he said—pushing his tongue between his bottom lip and his dentures.  As he did this, I noticed how transparent his skin was.  I felt like I could see inside him to where his muscles clung to thin bones and his blood pooled just beneath the surface.  As I turned to go get him ice cream, he said to Bella, “Feelin’ lousy Minnie.  Maybe tomorrow the dunes won’t be so high.”

I stepped away for no more than 20 minutes, a man on a mission for ice cream.

****

When I returned, Bella was watching television on the bed with her grandfather.  The Phillies were playing the Sox, bottom of the fifth.  Jack had an untouched tray of food at his side.  A nurse came in and encouraged him to eat.  He wouldn’t take his eyes off the game.  Ten minutes later, a Sox player hit a pop-up fly to left field.  Jack’s eyes remained glued to the screen.

“Now I see it, ‘bout time,” he said.

“What’s that Pop?”

“Right there,” he said, “The ocean.”

Bella turned toward me for an answer; I didn’t know what to say.  Instead we watched Jack’s eyes lock on the stadium’s fence line, a solid blue and red form growing as the camera zoomed in on left field.  Jack smiled in that way that smokers get right after lighting up a cigarette:  smooth, controlled, relaxed; the television offered the silhouette of a man against the outfield wall—a fisherman, the glimpse of a fan’s hand—a distant whitecap, an errant piece of trash—a seagull, until the ball was released from its arc through the sky and landed in the player’s mitt.  Baseball had become the beach.  Jacks’ smile lingered.

“How about that catch?” I asked.

If he heard me, his face didn’t indicate any reaction; he watched as the television cameras panned up the outfield wall.  And just above the lip of left field’s retaining wall—where the ocean meets the shore, there was excitement in the stands.  The cameras lingered on the front row, a frothy array of screaming fans, until those faces became smaller and smaller and the view receded into the depths of the stadium and an indiscernible horizon.

“Ice cream Pop?” Bella asked.  “Steven brought you some soft serve.”

“Ok,” he said at a whisper.

Afternoon turned into early evening as we watched for another pop-up fly, another view of left, right or center field but it didn’t come.  Bella started to cry.  I felt like an outsider.  Jack held his granddaughter’s hand, taking it gently at first and then firmly in a silent agreement.  They remained very quiet and still as they waited for the dunes to pass, hoping for a clearing so that Jack could see, at least one more time, his beloved ocean.

 

 

                                                                                                        
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Kitchen Fan                                                   

by Lisa Braxton

                                                                                                                                              

ilton had raced against the clock before, but this time was different.  Oh, sure, on a bad day he would race to take his spot on the assembly line at the tool and die plant before Supervisor Stokely made the rounds.  There were the countless times he had put his short stubby legs to work rushing to ticket counters at the track to place a last-minute bet on the ponies.  He’d even raced to get to momma’s funeral back in 1967.  At the last minute, Aunt Jewel and Cousin Mary decided to come along, but they just couldn’t decide which mourning dresses to bring.  So Wilton ended up practically breaking the sound barrier as he navigated the Impala from Jersey to Fletcher’s Funeral Parlor in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

But this time was different.  Wilton slowly eased himself up in bed and pulled the chain on the light bulb.  He’d hardly slept at all.  That rickety old fan in the kitchen window kept up such a racket, but that was the only way he got any kind of ventilation at all.  He let his feet drop limply to the floor and wedged them into a pair of worn, brown slippers.  Every movement was an effort, but Wilton knew he had to work as quickly as possible.

He paused for a moment to think back on the ominous words of Doctor Boone.  Words that echoed in Wilton’s head over and over again.  They were about as soothing as the sound of a sledgehammer meeting concrete outside his apartment building at six in the morning.

“Wilton, you know I don’t mince words, so I’ll just come right out and say it.  I think you’d best get your affairs in order.  You don’t have much time left.”

What was happening to his body?  Only a year ago, Wilton was able to knock back a scotch and soda like it was Kool-Aid.  The younger fellas at Fanny’s Pool Hall were impressed.  They had a hard time keeping up with him.

The decline had started gradually.  One day at the plant, as Wilton walked upstairs to the canteen, he couldn’t catch his breath.  His friend, Lester, called out to him.  “Hey big man.  Did you have a hard night or what?”  Lester helped Wilton hobble to a lunch table.  The episode was brief, but frightening.

Then there was the fishing incident.  Wilton loved to fish.  By himself.  He caught a big one, was reeling her it, when he thought he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning.  Shooting pain sent him hurtling on his back to the floor of the boat.  Thank goodness he was spotted by some fisherman.

But the real lightning bolt came later after the terrifying ride in the ambulance, when Wilton found himself peering up at Doctor Boone from a hospital bed that seemed separated from the rest of reality by a sea of dull, green curtains.  Wilton felt so stiff, he could barely concentrate on what Ol’ Man Boone had to say.  Doctor Boone wasn’t encouraging at all.

“There’s no point in implanting a pacemaker, Wilton.  This is your second heart attack.  The first one was pretty mild, but this one was massive.  I’m amazed you’re still here.  With this second attack, the damage to your heart is severe.”

That hospital visit was two weeks ago.  His last for sure.  The floor creaked under Wilton’s weight as he stood up and shuffled his way to the medicine cabinet.  After some fumbling, he found his bottle of heart pills and read the label: DO NOT TAKE ON AN EMPTY STOMACH.  TAKE WITH PLENTY OF WATER.  Upon further inspection, he realized the bottle was empty.

A diseased heart.  Fifty years ago, that same heart nearly got Wilton into the kind of trouble that some of his henpecked buddies had lived to regret.  But Wilton had been too smart for that!

Back then, Wilton’s heart was pumping strong, full of passion for Robin Mae.  She was a pretty thing:  small waist, ample hips, full lips, bright as a fresh rose.  He showed Robin Mae more passion, more good lovin’ than she’d ever known.  They were teenagers in love.  The sweethearts of Fayetteville High.  Until she told him her big news.

“But how could you be pregnant?” Wilton asked.  “You used the Vaseline like I told you, right?”

“Yeah, I used it,” Robin Mae said, sobbing.  “But cousin Johnnie says that only works if you light three candles in front of the dresser mirror and blow them out within five seconds.  You laughed at me when I said I needed to do that, so I didn’t.  So everything’s your fault.  Now you’ll have to marry me.”

Marry her?  Being in love was nice and all, but Wilton wasn’t about to squeeze into a custom-made ball and chain.  No, no, no.  A few days later, the sound of the whistle from the Shenandoah and Western Railway beckoned him.  The train was traveling north.  If he hurried, he could slip into one of the cars as a shipment of good ol’ country ham was being loaded.

After Wilton got off the train in Jersey and took up residence on the couch of one of his favorite nieces, Sylvia Jean, he heard that he wasn’t the only one who had shared his “passion” with Robin Mae.  It seems that she was sharing those rosy lips and other charms with Preacher Walker, Percival, who lived across the mountain, and Wallace, Wilton’s brother.

Robin Mae gave birth to a boy, Mark Jacobs.  He was deep brown, about Wilton’s complexion, but he was tall.  Well over six feet.  So there was no way that Mark Jacobs could be his boy.

But thinking about it now, as Wilton sat down at the Formica-topped kitchen table, he wished he had gotten to know the boy.  Wished he had found some good woman to share his life with.  But, of course, it was too late.  It was too late for just about everything.  But there were still a few things he had to hurry up and do.

The fan in the kitchen window was rattling in its usual fashion.  As annoying as it was, it did keep him company.  He got it for almost nothing at the Goodwill store down the street.  The blades were full of dust, but Wilton didn’t feel up to taking the whole thing apart to clean it.  ‘Sides, he thought, he had to reserve his strength.

He cocked his baseball cap and wiped at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his hand.  That fan really wasn’t cooling him off at all.  Then he hoisted himself from the kitchen table and shuffled over to the portable bar he had set up in the front room.  He poured himself a highball—against Doctor Boone’s orders —and took all the energy he could muster to rip a corner off the sports page.  In a frail, jerky penmanship he wrote:  “All my earthly goods are hereby willed to my niece, Sylvia Jean.”

Sylvia Jean.  Perfect Sylvia Jean.  She was always trying to please everybody.  Do the right thing.  When she was just an itty, bitty ol’ thing, no more than five years old, she’d stand tippy toe on a wooden box so she could reach the kitchen wash basin and try to do the dishes.  By the time she was 12, you could count on Sylvia Jean to baby-sit all the little kids in the valley so the older people could go out drinking on Saturday night.

Years later, as expected, Sylvia could be counted on in Wilton’s time of need.  Sylvia and Peter had only been married six months back in 1955 when Wilton hitched a ride on the Shenandoah and Western Railway up to their tiny one-bedroom apartment in Jersey.  The conversations were lively, the food was good, and they didn’t charge Wilton a dime.  And that foldaway sofa bed in the living room wasn’t too shabby either.  But after a while, Sylvia and Peter were always holed in the bedroom when they got off from work.  Wilton scarcely ever saw them.  Well, he didn’t care.  At least now he had the TV set all to himself.

But then one day curiosity got to him, and he decided to put a highball glass against the wall and take a listen.  He’d learned that off of a couple of those detective shows that came on Saturday nights.  The sound was muffled, but not too muffled.

“Peter, give Uncle Wilton some time,” he heard Sylvia say, shouting and whispering in the same breath.  “He’s only been here a few weeks.  I’m sure he’ll go out and look for a job and then…”

Wilton has heard enough.  Fine!  If they wanted him to find a job, he would go out and find a job.  Who knows?  Maybe he would even buy a new TV set for the living room once he got steady employment.  And why not?  He was getting a little sick of having to play with those rabbit ears on the old set all the time anyway.

But then, a few months later, just after Wilson had gotten the job at the plant, he came home after working the swing shift and oddly, there was nobody home.   And even stranger than that, all the furniture was gone.  The TV and sofa bed too!  There was no food in the icebox and the lights wouldn’t cut on.  Well, that was years ago, and Wilton had decided to forgive Sylvia and Peter for their rudeness.

As dawn turned to day, sunlight streamed through the blades of the kitchen fan, casting a playful light show across the worn furniture in the front room.  Wilton swallowed hard on his drink and took one more look at the tattered piece of paper and folded it over twice.  He needed to leave the document in a special place so Sylvia Jean could find it.  After another gulp of Scotch, Wilton willed himself across the creaky floor back to the bedroom.  He yanked the closet door open and tugged at the cord so that the naked bulb lit up the room.

He reached in and pulled out his luggage bag.  He let it plop heavily onto the bed and slowly unzipped it.  Inside was a new pinstripe, three-piece suit.  Navy.  A white shirt still in the wrapper and a navy tie with flecks of white.  Navy cotton socks with the tag still on.  Wilton took his last will and testament and tucked it into the breast pocket of the suit jacket.

He could feel his heart starting to race and each breath became an unwelcome chore.  He gasped for air.   Wilton was relieved that he was able to finish his work.  With the last bit of energy he had left, he stumbled back into the front room, and landed in an overstuffed chair.  In the distance, he could hear the kitchen fan rattling with predictability, whirring in rhythmic fashion, creating its own song.

 

 

                                                                                                        
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Forever is too Long                      

by Rob Rosen

he small, county clinic I work for sees very few emergencies.  Since we are in farm country, the local population is spread out over vast acres of fertile land.  Most patients I see come in sporadically with minor injuries associated with their professions.  They get kicked by their animals, or get their fingers stuck in a machine of some kind, occasionally there is a joyous birth, or an untimely death, but, for the most part, my days are considerably less hectic than my city counterparts.  I am also afforded the luxury of knowing all my patients personally and can pretty much name every neighbor in a fifty-mile radius.  This is why that particular day was so unusual.

Jed, a third-generation farmer I’d known since childhood, helped my patient in.  He was bleeding from wounds on his arms and legs.  Jed looked no worse the wear, but was clearly shaken up.  “What happened here, Jed?” I asked, after we lifted the man onto an examining table.

“Hit him with my tractor.  The fool was walking through my cornfield.  I heard a thud and a groan, and found him lying on the ground.  I brought him right in to see you, Doc.  Think he’ll be okay?”

Jed was white as a sheet and sweating profusely.  The patient, though covered in blood from some fairly deep gashes on both sides of his body, would obviously survive.  My nurse, Dolores, was already cleaning him up for me.  I took Jed into the waiting room before I went back to work on the man.

“Who is he, Jed?” I asked.

“Dunno.  Never seen the guy before.  Better question is, why was he walking through my field like that?  Where was he headed?  Ain’t nothing past my farm but the woods and the lake, and that there is private property too.  Anyway, Doc, he gonna be okay?”

“Sure, Jed.  You done good.  It ain’t your fault, so just go on home now and I’ll call you later.”

I was patting him on the shoulder and escorting him out the front door, when he turned to me and added, “Something ain’t right about that one, Doc.  I practically had to drag him in here.  Even after I hit him like that, he just kept wanting to go wherever it was he was going.  So either he’s scared of doctors or maybe he’s on the run.  You know as well as I do, Doc, that strangers in these parts are about as rare as snow in July.”

Jed was right about that one.  Still, I reassured him that I could take care of myself, and the stranger, and that he should just get on home.  We shook hands and he left.  I went back into the examining room, where Dolores had already finished cleaning the patient up.  The wounds were fairly deep, but all it would take was some routine stitching on my part.  As I said, the guy would survive, though he’d have some scars he’d have to get used to.

I smiled at him as I approached.  He looked at me and smiled back.  “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Adam,” he answered.

“Adam what?” I asked, as I started to work on him, with Dolores’s help.

“Just Adam,” he responded.  The smile never left his face.  Dolores looked up at me quizzically.  I was beginning to believe old Jed.  Something wasn’t right about the guy.  And it wasn’t just the mystery behind the accident either.  There was something else.  Still, I had work to do, so I pushed my misgivings to the back of my mind, for the time being.  Anyway, he didn’t seem dangerous.  If anything, he was practically the most serene patient I’d ever seen, considering the severity of his cuts and bruises.  He even managed to hum as I worked on him.

“That’s a right pretty tune.  What is it?” Dolores asked.

“Just an old hymn I know,” he responded.

“You a religious man?” I asked, curious about his background.  But he didn’t answer.  He just laughed to himself and continued his humming.  Again Dolores looked up at me, probably thinking the same thing that I was, which was that the guy was definitely hiding something.

In any case, I finished him up and told him what he needed to know in order to keep the wounds from getting infected.  He seemed to not pay attention, like he was eager to get out of there and away from me.  Then he did something that nobody ever did—he paid me in cash.

“If you give me your insurance card, I can bill them for you,” I offered.

“No need, but thanks,” he said, and left quick as a snap.

Dolores walked in a minute later.  “Strange,” she said.

“Maybe he’s just not a people person,” I offered.

“No, I mean he was physically strange.  Didn’t you notice it?”

“Notice what?  He looked normal to me.  Young, handsome, strong.”

“Yes, he was all those things, but now name something remotely negative about his appearance.”  I paused and thought about what she said, and realized in an instant what she was getting at.  She continued, “He had no blemishes.  No moles.  No freckles.  No cuts, scrapes, or scars, except for the wounds he came in with.  He was, if it’s possible, perfect.”

I realized the absurdity in what she was saying, but couldn’t argue with her logic.  In fact, thinking back, I couldn’t recall seeing any of those things either; and that was strange, as she had said.  Still, I let it go.  No use pondering things that didn’t concern me.  I simply wrote it off to good genetics.

Ironically, it was the genetics thing that got me to thinking.  What if Jed was right?  What if the guy was hiding out?  What if he was on the run from the law?  After all, he wouldn’t give me his last name, or an insurance card, and he did pay in cash.  The only thing he left behind was a lot of blood.  And if he was a criminal, then perhaps the DNA in that blood could help to identify him.  It was worth a shot anyway.  Besides, I figured, I’d be helping the authorities to find him.

I sent the blood samples to a friend of mine at the state’s criminal lab.  I also called Jed and told him that the guy was fine, and not to worry.  I asked him if he’d seen him again.  He said he hadn’t.   Perhaps the guy was a thousand miles away already.  Perhaps I was getting carried away and the stranger was just some average Joe with nothing to hide.  And yet, the whole thing seemed annoyingly odd to me.

After an anxious week of stewing over it I finally heard back from my friend.  “Where’d you say you got that blood from again?” he asked.  I sensed he was nervous.

I recounted the story to him, and then asked, “Why?  Is he some mass murderer or something?”  There were now two of us that were nervous.

“Nothing like that, Abe.  The sample you sent me yielded no DNA traceable to any known criminals.”  I breathed a sigh of relief.  That is, until he continued with what else they found.  “The DNA’s not traceable to anyone, Abe.  It’s like nothing the guys in the lab have ever seen.  All the genes are dominant.  No recessives at all.  And no mutations either.  This patient of yours is more related to some prehistoric man than to any species found on the planet in the last forty thousand years.  It makes no sense.  Can you explain it?”

Honestly, I couldn’t.  He was certainly no prehistoric anything.  He was as flesh-and-blood human as me.  Then I remembered what Dolores had said.  He appeared perfect.  A perfect man, with a perfect genome.  But how could that be?  Man had evolved thanks to those very mutations.  How could there be anyone without them?  Who or what the hell was this guy?

I thanked my friend and told him I’d keep him informed if I found anything else out; which I fully intended on doing.  Jed already told me where he’d been heading.  I knew the place well.  I’d fished there as a lad, but hadn’t been back in many years.  It was out of the way.  So far off the beaten path as to be considered remote.  A perfect place to hide.  But from what?

I headed there first thing the next day.  It was a beautiful spring morning.  The dew still clung tenaciously to the seasonal blooms that filled the valley surrounding Jed’s property.  The smell of manure and freshly planted farmland reminded me of my childhood.  The foreboding I’d felt when I awoke was quickly dissipating.  Besides, I had brought a small pistol with me, just in case.

Thirty minutes later, I was standing before the lake.  The light dappled off the misting water as a flock of birds came in for a unified landing.  My breath sucked in at the beauty of it.  I wished I’d brought my fishing rod instead of a gun, but thought the better of it when I spotted the tent.  Then the stranger stepped out and was followed by a lovely, young woman.  The two looked strikingly similar. My heart raced as I approached them.

“Morning,” I said, once they spotted me.  At first they looked like two deer caught in the headlights, but once the man recognized me he noticeably relaxed.  He whispered something to the woman before they both drew near to where I was standing.

“Morning,” he said, with the familiar smile.  “What brings you out here?”

“Just checking up on my patient,” I lied.

“A doctor who makes tent calls.  Must be a rare thing, these days,” he said, and then laughed.  The woman echoed this.  She was quite beautiful up close, and even more closely resembled the strange man than I originally surmised.  They must be brother and sister, I thought.

“Us country doctors like to keep tabs on our patients.  Speaking of which, how are you healing?” I asked, as I walked in closer to have a better look at him.

“Doing well, thanks to you,” he answered, showing me his arms and legs.

I looked him over, and then eyed him with alarm.  “Your wounds are healed.  Completely.  There are no scars.  No traces at all that you were injured.”

“Must be your fine stitching,” he said, as he pulled his arms away.  The two of us stared keenly into each other’s eyes.

“He knows,” the woman said, breaking the silence.

“Yes,” her companion agreed.  “He most certainly does.”

“Have a seat, Doctor,” she said, and motioned for me to sit on a nearby flat rock.  I’d sat on that very same rock more than fifty years prior.  It was an eerie feeling.  Still, I did as was told.  They stood in front of me and smiled even wider.  I placed my hand on my gun and waited.

“There will be no need for that, Doctor,” he said.  “We wish you no harm.”

I moved my hand away and nodded at him.  “Fine.  And please, the name’s Abe.  All my friends call me that.”

“Abe,” he said.  “Short for Abraham?”

“Yes, it is.”

“A biblical name,” he said, and held his wife’s hand.  “Such as my own. Adam.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” I said, as the light went on in my head.  “This woman is not your sister then, I take it, but your wife.”

“You’re a smart man, Abe.  Yes, this is my wife, Eve.”

“Strange coincidence,” I said.

“Coincidence?  Not at all.  I am Adam.  Eve was born of me.  Hence the resemblance I sense you see in us.”

I gulped and my arm twitched nervously at my side.  “But that’s a myth.  A fable in the bible.  It’s no more real than the snake or the tree of knowledge.”

“Oh, for certain, my friend, there are many stretched truths in the bible.  It was written, after all, in the hand of man.  And man is a most fallible creature.  But the words passed down from generation to generation started with the two of us.  It is a cautionary tale, and one worth remembering.”

I didn’t immediately respond to him.  It was, naturally, a lot to take in.  “So that is why your DNA has no mutations and your genes are all dominant.  I suppose that makes sense.  The mutations, and thus the recessive genes, would have come later,” I finally said.

“And it is why we have no blemishes,” as your astute nurse seemed to notice.  “Our Father did not make us to be imperfect.  Though, as you know, it is how we turned out anyway.”  Eve blushed and gripped her husband’s hand even tighter.

It was funny, endearing really, that even after all those countless generations upon generations, they still obviously loved each other.  Then again, whom else could they have turned to?  “But what of evolution,” I thought to ask.  “Are we all descended from you then?”

“No.  That line died out a very long time ago; just as many species have over time.  You see, our Father made all the creatures you see today, and many more you do not.  Evolution took place just as you say it did.  The apes you come from evolved and eventually resembled my descendents.  Since those primitive creatures lived among us, it was as expected that they would eventually take on our characteristics.  They learned from us, and as their genetic material mutated over time, natural selection allowed for the strongest to survive.  Your kind supplanted ours.  As we are in His likeness, so now are you.  There is no disparity between science and religion.”

“But then why has there never been a fossil record of your people?” I asked.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  We returned to the earth as He commanded it.”

“Not all of you,” I said.  “There are still two left.”

“Yes.  Just the two.  We were born eternal.  But the punishment for original sin was that we would not stay as such.  Eventually, we will perish, as have all our children and our children’s children.  As will you and your children.  It is the circle of life.  We hope some day to complete our circle as well.”

“You do?” I asked, surprised that they should wish such a thing.

“Forever is too long to live, my friend.  One sees too much.  Feels too much pain.  Observes too much suffering.  Life can be beautiful, but it can also be horribly ugly.  As a doctor, I’m sure you know that only too well.”

I nodded and understood.  “Do you mind if I ask you one more question?” I said.

“Please do,” Adam said, and Eve nodded her approval.

“This place we sit in.  It isn’t Eden, is it?”

The two laughed.  “It is, I assume, that for you.  But not for us.  We are never to return to the place of our childhood, as you have clearly done today.  It is but another punishment we must endure.  Still, we seek out places like this.  To remind us of what we lost.  It brings us happiness, for a time.  Just as it has done for you, now.  Beyond that, we must live and survive exactly as you do.”

I smiled at the couple and stood up from the rock.  My bones creaked and my back ached, but, as they said, I was happy to be back there.  We shook hands before I took my leave of them.  I wished them well, and they wished me the same.  I sensed my circle would be finished long before theirs, but knew that eventually they’d complete their long journey, as all creatures must.

I returned to that spot a month later, but they had sadly vanished.  It wasn’t their garden, after all.  It was mine.  And it was where I returned to frequently after that day.  They were right that it brought me happiness.  I wished it hadn’t taken me so long to reclaim it.  Then again, my time on this earth is but a drop in the bucket compared to theirs, and for that I am now surprisingly glad.  Forever really is too long, it would seem.  Too long indeed.

 

                                                                                                         
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The Bones Syndrome                                 

 by John P. Matsis

lenora was born precocious, all six pounds-eleven ounces and twenty inches.  By the time she was four, she was into insects—those creepy and crawly things that at their very sight made her older sister, Liz, shake and take flight to her mother’s bedroom and her mother to scold, “Elenora, what in the world do you think you are doing with those things in my house?”

It didn’t matter what her mother would say or how hard she shook her finger, for there was this special drive inside of Elenora, an inborn instinct of sorts, forcing her to explore the world of many-legged creatures.  While other girls her age, propped up Barbie dolls in front of little tables and poured make-believe tea into delicate plastic cups, Elenora collected those creepy, crawly creatures that were endogenous to her neighborhood and sealed them inside of Mason jars along with blades of grass or perhaps a tender, newly sprouted leaf.  Sometimes she would add a rose pedal as a special treat for her friends.

She would place the jars, filled with her insect friends, in secret places.  There, she would observe and talk to them, and given sufficient opportunity she would come to recognize each and every one as a special friend, even imparting to them a name of endearment.

They were creatures with many long legs and curious bodies, some shaped like teardrops, others with bodies long and straight as a pencil.  Some of them had fragile antennae that flapped in uncoordinated, odd directions, other possessed small, nearly invisible wings that would take flight with the minutest of provocation—a tap to the side of the jar with her fingernail, a kiss imparted to its lid.

And if one died, she would bury it in a special place and recite a prayer on its behalf.

As the years passed and the metamorphosis from child to teenager took place, her interest of insects grew into an obsession and she distanced herself from her peers who had no such particular interest, isolating herself to the point of being reclusive.  Her parents, liberal in their thinking, thought it was merely a passing phase of youth, like acne eventually giving way to smooth skin.  But eventually it was apparent that it was more than a passing stage; there was a serious problem.  They consulted a number of learned psychiatrists who offered little help, suggesting psychotherapy and certain medications.  But the medications had serious side effects and the psychotherapy was of no value.

Eventually they consulted with Dr. Jeremy Bones, the chairman of psychiatry at the state medical school.  He was a physician of distinction:  the author of numerous scholarly texts, the editor of a prestigious national journal of abnormal behavior, and a psychiatrist who had a special interest in the bizarre—those certain conditions that he could write about, perhaps encountering a new, yet to be described entity to imprint his name…The Bones Syndrome.

As any competent doctor should, he put Elenora through the standard psychiatric tests, Rorschach and such.  Sophisticated blood tests were performed to assess for any obscure disease, and a MRI spectrographic scan of the brain was performed to exclude an occult metabolic abnormality.  Lastly, she was referred to the University Medical Clinic for an exhaustive physical examination by the best of doctors.  Not surprisingly, every test and examination came back as normal.

Intrigued, he decided to personally take charge.  Almost always in the past, he would merely oversee a patient’s evaluation and management, leaving the day-to-day care to his subordinates.  But this time his curiosity was aroused, for he had a special gift when it came to sensing when a case was especially unique.

Elenora sat across from the doctor’s expansive, mahogany desk, properly dressed in a tan sweater and brown pleated skirt that fell well below her knees.  Her legs were crossed at the ankles and her smile had a curious upward curl.  Her entire expression glowed of serene confidence.

“I’m Doctor Jeremy Bones,” he would address himself to her.

She answered, “Yes, I know.”

Following a few minutes of the usual doctor-patient chitchat, he asked, “tell me about your…hobby…your interest in insects.  Are there any special species that interest you the most?”

Her eyes blossomed.  “Where should I start?”

“Let’s start from the very beginning.”

She began, rambling on with great enthusiasm.  Dr. Jeremy Bones listened with great interest, marveling at her level of scientific knowledge.  And she would explain that insects far outnumbered other species, that there were 170,000 species of butterflies and moths alone…that moths had wings that folded back, tent-like, while the butterfly’s wings rested erect and that the moth’s antenna was thick and feathery, where as the butterfly’s was thinner with only a focal thickening at the very tip.

And to prove her point, she would bring with her on the sessions that followed Mason jars filled with her friends.  She would extract and place on her hand various specimens, pointing out with a hand-held magnifying lens their various unique features.  Sometimes she would pet them gently and coo and they responded by shaking their bodies in contentment.

Dr. Bones would sit in amazement and observe, mesmerized by her degree of scientific knowledge, entranced by the special bond that she had developed with the creatures—her ability to communicate with a lower life form.  He would take notes to document his observations and it became clear that her behavior represented a yet-to-be-described syndrome…The Bones Syndrome.

As the therapy sessions stretched from weeks into months and against medical ethics, he made no attempt to alter her obsessive behavior.  Rather, he would feed upon the abnormality.  He would ask questions regarding her special relationship with insects and she would respond with an even greater degree of enthusiasm.  In time she permitted him to handle some of her special friends.  She would place them upon his finger, cautioning him to be careful, not to show the least sign of apprehension in that they would sense it immediately and could respond unpredictably.

In time, he too, became nearly as knowledgeable as she, eagerly looking forward to each session.  He would look at her expressive face, her pouting lips, her sparkling blue-green eyes and think thoughts that a doctor of psychiatry should not.  And she would feel his penetrating glances and her skin would turn uncomfortably warm.

It was to be their last session.  Elenora’s obsession had not abated and her parents had become disenchanted with Dr. Bones, sensing that there had evolved more than usual doctor-patient relationship between the two.

On this final session Elenora would bring with her a single Mason jar; within it would be her favorite insect perched upon a brown twig.  She would extract the twig and bring it close to her face, nearly to her lips.  She would explain to Dr. Bones that this insect was unique—that on the front of the cephalothorax there were six eyes arranged in pairs, forming a perfect semicircle, whereas most insects of this species had eight eyes.  With a hand-held lens she would bring into focus the insect’s long, thin brown legs covered with fine hairs rather than the customary spines.  She would beam with excitement as she adjusted the lens to demonstrate the dark violin-shaped marking on its bulbous abdomen.

The doctor would observe her every move, his non-professional eyes flashing back and forth from insect to her blushing skin.  With each movement of his probing eyes, she became even more uncomfortable.  And as his hand moved across his desk, she would interpret it as a threatening, inappropriate gesture.

The twig would drop onto his desk, and as if obeying her command, the brown recluse spider, its long legs moving in a whirl of purpose, would also interpret the doctor’s action as inappropriate.  With a spring of its legs, it would land upon the doctor’s arm, crawl quickly to the neck, and impart a venomous bite deep into his flesh.

Upon completion of its task, the brown recluse would return to the twig; Elenora would smile with gratitude, stroke its body gently with her fingertip, and return it to its Mason jar habitat.

Although the bite of the brown recluse is seldom fatal, the doctor would suffer a fatal anaphylactic reaction, and along with his demise, The Bones Syndrome was laid to rest as well.

 

 

                                                                                                      
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Imaginary Friends                                                   

 by Samantha Cleaver

lint knocked down every snowman that Sandy made.  One after the other, she built them; tall, short, fat, thin, with carrots for noses and scarves around their necks, with ponytails and mohawks.  She draped vests and sweaters around their powdery shoulders.  She drew jewelry and make-up on them with food coloring.  Again and again, Clint knocked them down with sticks, rocks, his hands, or his feet.

“Stop it!” Sandy shouted.

“Make me,” said Clint, kicking at the body of a tall snowman.

“I’m telling.”

“Go ahead,” said Clint and stuck his tongue out.

Sandy did not tell on Clint, there was no point.  Instead, she left Clint in the snow, refusing to let him inside when her mother called her in for hot chocolate.

“Where’s Clint?” her mother asked.

“I left him outside,” Sandy replied, and dropped five marshmallows, one after the other, into her mug.

“You left him in the cold?”

“Yup.”

“Why?”

“He’s a pest.”

On the plane, Brigid leaned over and shushed Jason.  “Stop it!” she whispered, one finger extended and pressed over her pursed mouth.

“Stop what?” her mother asked.

“Jason is ruining everything,” Brigid replied.

“What is he doing?” her mother asked.

“He’s coloring in my coloring book and trying to eat my pretzels.”

“I see,” said her mother and returned to reading her magazine.

Brigid’s father looked up from his book.  “Thank goodness we didn’t have to pay for an extra seat for this,” he said, amused.

Brigid and Jason fought for the remainder of the plane ride.  When the plane landed, Brigid opened the seat-pocket in front of her and let it slap shut.

“What was that?” her mother asked.

“Jason’s in there,” Brigid said. “He’s in time out.”

“You’d better get him,” her mother replied. “We’re getting off the plane.”

“No, thanks.”  Brigid puffed out her chest, stuck her nose in the air and walked off the plane, dragging her little suitcase behind her.

* * *

As Sandy grew up, she forgot about Clint.  After Brigid left Jason on the plane she never looked back.  Years later, Clint and Jason, themselves old friends, met at a bar in Brooklyn down the street from Imaginary Friends, Inc. where the two worked.

“Hey, man, what’s going on?”  Clint said, taking a sip of his beer.

“Not much,” Jason replied, swigging his vodka tonic and grimacing as the liquid cleared a path down his throat.  “What’s up with you?”

“Oh, nothing really.  I got a new tattoo.”

“Oh yeah?”

Clint pulled up his shirt, revealing a twisting snake that slithered up his stomach almost to his armpit.

“That’s awesome,” Jason said.

“Thanks.”

“You get any work with that thing?”

“No, not really.  I’m okay for a few days and then as soon as I have my shirt off, because we’re on the beach or something, the kid gets scared and disappears.”

“Oh, that sucks.”

“Yeah.  But it is good for a few laughs.  Besides, the ladies like it, if you know what I mean.”

Jason chuckled.

“So what are you up to?” Clint asked.

“I just got done with a job in Chicago.  Some rich kid needed a playmate for a few days so I got called in.  It wasn’t so bad.  I got to live in an apartment on Michigan Avenue, overlooking the lake.  Great food, a full bar, and the kid had a birthday party so I got to play games and eat cake and ice cream.”

Clint nodded.  “Could be worse.”

“What are you going to do next?” Jason asked.

“Don’t know.”  Clint finished his beer and motioned for the bartender to get him another.  He lit a cigarette.  “You know, now that I have this tattoo, I’m thinking maybe I’ll start to get some piercings.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.  Like, there’s this piercing you can get that enhances sexual pleasure, if you know what I mean.”

Jason smiled.  “I do.”

“And there’s this tongue thing you can get where they split the tongue up the middle so it looks like you have a snake tongue.”

“Wow.”

“I would have to change my line of work though.  No kid is going to hire a guy with a snake tongue and I don’t know if I would want to work for the ones that do.”

“True.”

“But, I think, hell with the kids.  I’ve been in this business too long already.  I’m sick of being dumped on.  Who takes a job that gets no recognition, literally?”

Jason swirled the ice cubes in his drink and enjoyed the sound of them clinking together.

Clint continued.  “Like, I remember this kid Sandy I worked for years ago.  She used to scream at me just for fun.  She was building all these stupid snowmen, decorating them and shit.  All I did was have a little fun and knock them around.  It got so that she was knocking them around too, she had fun with it.  Then she started yelling at me, top of her lungs, you know, and then she was really having fun.  It was like therapy for her, screaming at me.  Anyway, when all the snowmen were knocked down she left me out in the cold.  I had to end the job early.”  Clint shook his head.  “Sometimes I hate kids.”

Jason nodded.  “I’ve worked for a lot of nice kids and I’ve been lucky.  But the worst kid I ever worked for was this Brigid.  She got all pissed because I ate a pretzel or something, and then she left me in the pouch on the back of an airplane seat.  I had to wait until the plane took off and the next passenger opened the pocket to get out.  It was horrible.  Ended up somewhere in Utah and had a hell of a time getting to the next job.”

Clint laughed.  “That sucks.  What would you do if you weren’t an Imaginary Friend?”

Jason shrugged.  “I don’t know.  It’s the only thing I’ve ever done.  I’ve thought about being a ghost, or a spirit, but I don’t think I have the patience to haunt anybody.  There’s a lot of down time, you know?”

“Yeah.  I’m thinking of putting in my resume for a haunt, I could really go along with that, I think.  Especially if I go with this whole snake thing, with the tattoo and the tongue.  I could specialize, you know.  And those jobs are short, show up, scare the shit out of people and leave.  Lots of vacation time.”

Jason nodded.  “You could be really scary.  People wouldn’t know what was coming at them.”

Clint took a swig of a fresh beer.  “A snake ghost.”

Jason sipped the last of his vodka tonic.  “Hey, I gotta go.  I’ve got a job starting in a half-hour.  Some little kid’s got a boring baby sitter tonight.  It’s across town.  I’ll see you around.”

Clint nodded.  “See you around.”  He turned back towards the bar.

* * *

Across town, Benjamin stared at his tower of blocks.  “Don’t do that Jason!” he yelled as the tower tumbled down.

 

 

                                                    
                                                    
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No More Shortcuts                            

by Paul García 

y wife and I were having lunch at an East Village restaurant with my brother Leo.  Laura asked him, “Nice coat.  Where’d you get it?”

“Nice, huh?  Camel hair.”  Leo stroked his chin, then gestured at me and asked her, “Did my brother ever tell you about his shortcuts?”

Laura, grinning, faked petulance.  “No, he didn’t.”

“Way back, before our parents died.  I was in first grade.  Your husband here said, ‘Leo, we’re gonna take a shortcut to school today.’  We went through a used car lot and across the freight yard.  A giant dog, big as a bear, chased me through a puddle.  I tore my good pants climbing a fence.  We were late for school.  I had to bring a note from home.  After explaining his ‘shortcut’.”

Leo looked at me.  I smiled, and nodded to my wife.  “True.  Every word.”

I sighed.  That dimly remembered incident had occurred before we lost our parents in the tenement fire.  I was grateful he could confirm our shared biography.  I had been eight when the City of New York placed us in the orphanage.  Soon, we were separated.  I left for a foster home, a secure, middle-class family, which eventually adopted me.  The rest of my upbringing was without trauma:  public schools, college, Christmases...

Leo was my only relative.  I thought of him every November 11th, his birthday.  I was a high school sophomore when my parents suggested we locate him, so that he and I could stay in touch.  Calls revealed he had remained at the orphanage years after I’d left, maybe for the waxy burn scars along his neck.  Then he went to a household providing wards of the state with bed and board.  According to Leo, he shared a room with five boys in three sets of bunk beds.  He told me the family had two sons of their own, each with his own room.  He said this without resentment, as though his world were an accepted feudal hierarchy.

We were both in high school, both good at sports, both discovering girls and cars, yet aspects of our lives varied incomprehensibly.  When I called him on his fifteenth birthday, how could it be, I wondered, that there had been no cake?

He said, “Well, they all said ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.”

I said nothing, thought, Yeah, but they didn’t sing it.  That, the saying nothing, signaled the gap between our worlds.  I didn’t mention that my birthdays were observed with cake and ice-cream parties, with cards and presents from friends, and —“Make a wish!”—candles to blow out.

We corresponded.  Mom and Dad allowed me phone calls, which became more important than letters.  Leo was too cautious to describe his life freely, experiences foreign to me:  being caught shoplifting; his fistfight in an English class; run-ins with the police; drinking bouts—all “wrong” in every way I’d been taught, but I neither approved nor condemned.  Dumb with fascination, I had nothing comparable to share in these vaguely illicit phone talks.

Then one of my calls to him was answered with, “He don’t live here, so don’t call no more.”  I was about to begin another search for Leo when a letter came:

Bro:

As you can see from the address, I am in reform school now, for a B&E (breaking and entering) while “Drunk and Disorderly.”  Violation of probation.  I don’t remember much about it, so I must have been drunk, maybe even disorderly...

He went on, described the grounds, daily routines, the other kids, where they were from, and what they had done to be “sent away.”  He enclosed the Visiting Sunday schedule.

I had my driver’s license, and Dad lent me the car so I could visit Leo.  I was elated to be driving almost a hundred miles on my own.  The Detention Center signs, clear and no nonsense, left no question of where to park, by what door to enter, and what I was not permitted to have on my person.

A Corrections Officer asked me if there were alcohol, drugs or weapons in the package I brought Leo.  No, only the cigarettes and candy he had asked for and some magazines and books.  I signed in, then entered a long, echo-filled room divided by a table running its length, visitors to one side, inmates on the other.  Wrapped up in my new experience of the long solo drive, I’d come without preconceptions; I was surprised to see high school age prisoners.  They all had the same buzz cut, the same khaki chinos, brown boots, and green tee shirts—like the student body of an ROTC program, until I picked up on the scars, tattoos, and the leisurely, swaggering gait common among them.  I took my numbered place at the table.  There were partitions separating me from the visitors to my sides and from the space directly across me where Leo would sit.  I didn’t wait long.  He appeared in the doorway across the room.  For the merest fraction of a second, he acknowledged me, and then raised his arms to be frisked.  The guard pointed to me.  Casually, without looking in my direction, wearing a blank-serious expression, Leo approached.  He strolled across the visiting room with the same leisurely swagger, his shoulders rolling and tilting like a boxer’s.

“So you got here okay.”

“Yeah, no trouble finding the place.”

“Good.”

He still wasn’t looking at me but around the room, sharp-eyed, taking in everything and everyone else, it seemed.  I drew his attention.  “So, tell me, what happened.”

“Ah, I got drunk, got stupid.”  He rubbed his eyes and sighed.  I waited.  My kid brother seemed like an old man.  He continued.  “I’ll be here four months.”

And that was it.  He was done talking.  I asked myself why I was there, visiting.  What could I offer?  The silence grew heavy.  I broke it.  “I brought the cigarettes you wanted, and candy, and some magazines and books.”

“Good.  Thanks.”

I acknowledged that the burden of conversation might be on me.  I asked, “When’d you start smoking?”

“I don’t.  I can use them like money, to buy stuff, favors.  You know?”

I didn’t know.  Clearly, our fates diverged.  The things we didn’t say to one another ratcheted each another click of distance between us.  I named the magazines and the kinds of candy bars.  The talk became superficial and strained.  He was my brother, but we hadn’t even shaken hands.

After the visit, my parents commented that I seemed “down.”  That was accurate.

Leo worked in a restaurant until his parole was over, then, as I was entering college, he dropped out of sight.  I picked up my Bachelors and Masters degrees without hearing from him.  I took work as a high school teacher in Maine, married, and had a daughter.  Each November 11th, I thought of Leo.

Then, Christmas 1985, I received a call.  “Hey bro. Merry Christmas.”

“Leo!  Where are you?”

“In a motel in Texas.”

In a motel?  On Christmas? flew through my mind.  I knew that the more thoughts I kept to myself, the greater the divide between us would spread.  As kids we had talked about running away from the orphanage, to go to Texas, to be cowboys; I asked, “Are you a cowboy?”

He laughed.  I had not heard his laughter in twenty years.  “No, not a cowboy.  I was out of the country.  Don’t want to talk on the phone about it.  I’m heading back to New York.  We can get together up there.  So, how’s married life, Papa?”

I was stunned, spluttered, “How did you know?”

“Oh, I’m just good at playing detective.  I’ll call you when I’m back in the City.  Everything okay?”

“Uh, yeah.  Merry Christmas, Leo.”

“Merry Christmas, Bro.”

And he hung up.

Six months passed.  One Friday, when I came home from work, my wife said, “Hon, there’s a letter from a detective agency.”

“A detective agency?”  I studied the envelope’s black logo.  “Sensitive and Secure Investigations.  Omnia conspicimus.”  I tore it open and read,

Dear Bro:

As you can see, I have started a business.  So, here you have my phone number and address.

Take care,

Leo

That was it.  I explained the letter and, as best I could, my brother, to Laura.  She thought it was “wonderful” that he had written, that we could be “reunited.”  I called.  He would not leave the city, but he encouraged my visit.  So, I reserved a hotel room for the weekend.

I met him at his tiny office.  He caught my glance at a futon rolled up against a wall.  “I once saw a sign that said, ‘If you lived here’—”

‘“...you’d be home by now.’  So where were you while I was in college?”

“Mostly Guatemala.  Four years there.  A little time in El Salvador.”

He pronounced the Ls like a native, his tongue tip touching the roof of his mouth instead of the upper front teeth.  I would have to fish for answers.  “There was a war in Guatemala!  You weren’t a tourist.”

“Yeah.  You’re right.  Civil War peaked in ’82.  Then, the first elections put Cerezo in office.”

“Did you have anything to do with it?”

He looked into my eyes.  His gaze was like looking into a mirror, for the genetic similarity.  Beyond that, the look was hard, as though he were tolerating my naiveté, assessing how much I could be trusted, and how much he owed me as a brother.  He rolled up his sleeve to show the dimple in his bicep from a bullet.  “A souvenir.  I can’t say much.  People died, some bad, some good.  I know it didn’t make headlines up here.  Down there, when the guerrillas were squashed, the terrorism stopped.”  He paused, then grinned.  “It was like the Wild West, but with helicopters.”

It didn’t matter; it was good to be with my brother.  I hugged him.  He was all muscle.

He patted my back.  “Good to see you, Bro.”

And it was good to see him so fit.  At forty-five, I was developing a middle age bulge at my waist.  Leo was buff.  Though I outweighed him by a good forty pounds, I wouldn’t have wanted to scrap with him.

He grabbed a frayed rain and shine.  “Let’s eat at the Cuban-Chinese place on West Fourteenth.”

Walking the six or eight blocks there, conscious of myself as a ruralized New Yorker, and with him a dyed in the wool Knickerbocker, I wanted to seem knowledgeable in our hometown.  I said, “Cross here; it’s shorter to cut between those buildings.”

We crossed the street and were taking the alley through the block to Fourteenth when an approaching young man stopped in our path.  He held an automatic pistol in plain sight.  “Hol’ it up.  Wallets and no trouble.”

I felt frozen, as if my muscles and bone had locked up.

Leo already held his open wallet up, close to the guy’s face.  “Here you go.  This what you want?”

The mugger’s vision obscured, Leo grabbed and turned the gun upward.  The man’s trigger finger was bent backward and he was now staring into the barrel.  He went for Leo’s throat with his right hand, but Leo had already let drop the wallet and with his left hand latched onto the guy’s genitals with a steely grip.  The kid raised his arm to—what?  Punch him?  Reach for the gun?  But Leo dug his fingers into the soft meat like the jaws of a trap and the hand never came down.

Leo spoke in a low growl.  “Let go the gun or I’ll blow your head off.”

Leo passed me the gun.  It was heavy.

The robber stood over Leo with one hand in the air.  Leo pulled and the guy knelt.  Then Leo said, “Let me get a better grip."

He slipped his right hand onto the guy’s sac from behind and twisted.  "There.  How's that?  Better?"  The robber stared unseeing at the wallet on the ground and breathed through his mouth.

Leo knelt on one knee behind him and pointed to his wallet.  "Hand it to me."  The guy did this with some difficulty.  Leo pocketed the wallet.

I stood there stupidly, the pistol pointed at the pavement.

Then Leo asked him, “What size coat?”

The guy breathed, “Huh?”

Leo let go.  “Get up.  Take it off.”

It took a long time for the kid to rise to his feet.  And he didn’t really stand all the way up.  But he managed to get the coat off.

Leo folded it over his arm.  “Lucky you only lost a gun and a coat.  Now fuck off.”

The guy hobbled east on Fourteenth and we continued west.  Leo pocketed the handgun without comment.  I was stunned silent.  Halfway up the block we came to a dry cleaner.  He dropped off the coat.  “Yeah, Tuesday’s fine.”

Outside, we walked a few silent paces more.  At the door of the Cuban-Chinese he said to me, “No more shortcuts.”

The following spring, Laura and I shared lunch in the Village with Leo.  She asked him, “Nice coat.  Where’d you get it?”

Leo’s eyes flitted to mine, then he answered, “Yeah.  Nice, huh?  Camel hair.”  He stroked his chin.  A grin flickered across his face, and then, gesturing at me, he asked her, “Did my brother ever tell you about his shortcuts?”

I hadn’t told Laura about the foiled mugging.

Leo went on.  “Way back. I was in first grade, when your husband here, said, ‘Leo, Let’s take a shortcut to school...’”

When he finished, he looked at me.  I nodded.  “All true.  No more shortcuts.”

 

                                                                                                        

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Living a Sermon                                  

by Jack Swenson

"It is easier to preach ten sermons than it is to live one."--Anon.

y wife had the new vet pegged as one of those religious nuts.  "How do you know that?" I asked.  My wife said it was something the woman said as she left the animal hospital.   "God bless you," or words to that effect.  "Oh, oh," I said.  "Find out if she voted for Bush.  If so, we'll find another vet."

When I began to add two and two together, it didn't come as any great surprise.  Her starry-eyed, "I know something you don't" look, her little smile.  And her prices.  She charged twice as much as our former vet, a friend who retired and sold his practice to the new gal and her husband.  Typical, I thought to myself.  A Christian on Sunday; all business the rest of the week.

My wife and I are not atheists, but we're not churchgoers, either.  And we're not happy about all the prattle these days about family values and faith.  We live by the Golden Rule, do unto others, not to others every chance you get.

One thing my wife and I do is feed and take in lost or abandoned animals.  We trap the stand-offish ones.  We try to find the owner by checking with the local animal shelter and by reading the newspaper classified ads.

We have a houseful of animals, so we can't take in any more, but we cage the strays for a day or two, get them to the vet for their shots, if necessary have them neutered, then find them homes if we can or release them and continue to feed them if we cannot.  Currently we have two stray cats camped in our backyard.

We didn't need to trap Monster.  He was friendly and unafraid of people, a handsome grey, long-haired male cat.  Monster was less than a year old, but he had feet the size of a mule's.  He is going to be a big cat.

To make a long story short, we checked with the shelter and failed to find an owner, so we took the cat in for a day or two, then my wife took him to the vet to be neutered.

She came home with the cat and bad news.  The vet couldn't do the procedure because the cat had a serious medical condition, which would have to be taken care of first.  The unlucky animal had a herniated diaphragm.  His innards were out of place, his lungs the size of walnuts and his liver sharing space in a cavity with his heart.  The affliction could be surgically repaired, and the vet assured my wife that animals who have this surgery generally do quite well, but it was costly.  The vet estimated that it could cost as much as $4,000.

We are not rich, but believe it or not, if it had been just the money, we might have gone for it.  But there was the recuperation time to consider also; we would have to nurse him for three weeks.  And then what would we do with him?  How could we find him a home?  Who would take a "damaged" cat?

It's always hard to put down an animal, especially one who is bright-eyed and not at the moment suffering, but we concluded that there was nothing else to do.  My wife called the vet and made the appointment.

The day came, and with heavy hearts we took the animal to the hospital to be euthanized.  My wife was in tears.  When called, we brought poor Monster into an exam room and opened the cage.  He lay there on his back, happy as a clam, like a lazy vacationer spread out on a chaise lounge in the sun by the side of a swimming pool.

We gave the attendant the information she asked for and signed the necessary papers.  Then the vet came into the room, and the attendant left.  The woman greeted us with a limp handshake and a beaming smile.  I could have strangled her.

Then a remarkable thing happened.  The vet began to talk, and I couldn't believe my ears.  What she proposed was to take the cat herself, get the surgeon to do the operation for $400 (he owed her a favor, she said), keep the animal before and after the surgery and supervise his recovery, then find a home for him.   She had a friend who lived in the country, she said, who would take him if no one else would and make a barn cat out of him.  "It would be a pretty darn good life," the vet said, smiling her cheery smile.

My wife and I were stunned.  Of course we agreed to the plan.  We stumbled out of the clinic with our mouths open.  We spent the rest of the day on Cloud Nine.

That night, before supper, my wife asked me if I wanted squash or green beans with my crow.

 

 

                                                                                                                      
                                                    
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Missing:  Presumed Not Dead                   

by William Gladys

lthough cattle and sheep were no longer gathered there, the Byre was more than a simple Byre to Daphne, it was her newly adopted abode; the undisclosed retreat from her fake father's trying presence as she called it.  When I first saw her she was a gangling but pretty girl of thirteen.  It was unequivocally, like at first sight.  She was reclining on a pigmy haystack with her older married sisters Margaret and Anne, while Betty; Anne's twin sister took a photograph of the three of them.  The family resemblance was perceptible, and this was confirmed later when some areas of family minutiae were disclosed to me.  Her titian hair, tied in two long pigtails and red bows which matched her red gingham dress was arresting.  Her eyes, a distinctive blend of hypnotic green and blue were dominated by the sparkle in the green.  When she smiled and waved, an inner kindness and softness was generated within me!

I was shuffling by at the time;—according to mum I shuffled everywhere— to get a sack of King Edward potatoes from the local store, but when I returned later with the sack of potatoes slung over my shoulder she had gone.  Weeks later, shuffle or no shuffle our friendship was cemented.

I am Tom Waterford, fourteen years old, and as I learned later, precisely a year older than Daphne.  I lived with my parents who ran the Black Lion Pub in an unprepossessing market town on the English-Welsh border.  The three of us—I am their only child—moved there nearly six months ago.  Dad an optimist, was bored working for the Council housing department and existing in Digbeth, a brick, concrete and fumes filled suburban "hell hole" of Birmingham, and was anxious for "a new start with fresh air in our lungs."

My mother, a pragmatist, had gloomily remarked earlier, "we will need all the friends we can get in a straight laced Welsh chapel community," as on a bleak, wet and cold day our crammed removal van arrived in the town, and I remember wondering at the time whether the locals would prove to be as unwelcoming as the weather.  To my relief,  however, Daphne Boone, also a newcomer, had moved into a small slate and stone rented cottage in Church Street just a few weeks earlier, less than a quarter of a mile from our new home, The Black Lion.

My friendship with Daphne was uncomplicated.  We never argued illogically, and consequently were able to discuss fairly intimate matters without embarrassment.  She frequently referred to Rodney, her mother's new partner in disconsolate terms, an attitude that unsurprisingly aroused my interest and stirred my resolve to work like a first-rate detective and solve whatever was troubling her.  Her foremost reason for withdrawing to the Byre was to get away from "Rodney's probing, fat clammy hands."  Although her mother reassured her "there was nothing to worry about, he's only being fatherly," Daphne, on the other hand,  knew intuitively that Rodney was being far from paternal.  He and her mother had not married, he was her live in partner, a stranger, and could never replace her real father who died from prostate cancer three years earlier.  It was dread of the unfamiliar and the persistent probing of clammy hands that drove her to seek out my company in the Byre, where after school we compared notes and homework.  Our shared passion was the arts, English literature, poetry and world music, although classical composition dominated, being a major component of the school curriculum at that time.  During the winter months, we lit candles to read by, and strived unsuccessfully to make toast from the inadequate energy the flickering flames provided.

The Byre, an unpretentious building, was known to the locals but never used by them.  To reach it required a bodily endeavour that would deter all but the stout hearted, as it was situated on the grassy slopes of Ben Mila Mountain three miles from the edge of town.  The ground floor of the Byre was large like our pub parlour, but clearly a cosy and intimate meeting place.  Although we never kissed or cuddled there, we christened it our Trysting house nonetheless; the place where we discussed all manner of things freely.  Its rusting corrugated iron roof kept us secure from the unremitting rain.  In stormy weather the heavy downpour was loud and exciting, like Wagnerian opulence, but when moderate, soothing like a melody from a Corelli sonata.  The stone walls rebuffed the chill in winter, and after years of absence, the lingering sweet odour of cows was united with that of a carefully arranged carpet of dried hay and bracken for the floor.  A pair of dilapidated and rotting doors leaned dejectedly against one side of the byre; abandoned and scarred by time and the harsh environment.  The opening where they used to be was replaced with old sheets of flaking corrugated iron, each one lovingly carried the three miles from town.

The Byre fashioned an extraordinary amalgamation between us, and became a magical place.  Our maturing imagination ran wild and free, sometimes in parallel at other times not.  In the flick of an eyelid the Byre became a splendid cloud of nimbus on which we floated, or an unexplored island in some wild and stormy ocean.  Sometimes it was just a Byre on a winter's night, filled with the illusory sweet breath of animals chewing their cud.  At others it became a theatre where lines of twentieth century poets, Robert Frost, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Sylvia Plath were recited, or the best bits in Shakespeare's tragedies re-enacted to an invited audience of thousands.  Dressing Rodney's clammy hands to look like a horse and feeding him to the tormented equines in Macbeth, or stabbing him with knives for him to exclaim "Et tu Daphne" gave us a lot of enjoyment.  But most memorable, was the moment when Daphne crept into Rodney's bed chamber as the guards slept in drunken stupor at his feet, to stab and slash his throat, pronouncing with glee, "Injustice has been acquitted, the scoundrel is dead!,  but adding with a just audible whisper tinged with regret, "yet who would have thought he had so much blood in him?"

Daphne's rare moments of violence contrasted with her generous and gentle nature.  However, this was particularly noticeable when in the presence of animals either domesticated or wild.  Dogs and cats came to her willingly; horses and cattle nuzzled her, and birds, conscious of her compassion, pooled an empathy that ensured they remained abnormally close to her.  With our backs against the byre we marvelled at the high-flying antics of enormous flocks of starlings.  Their cavorting aerial ballet mesmerised us for what seemed hours but in reality was only a few minutes.  Do you think they are displaying for me? she once remarked.  It seemed an odd and conceited comment, but on reflection I think they were!  Their configurations of spirals, circles, and long roller coasters wheeling this way and that were harmonised aerial masterpieces.  It may be difficult for people to comprehend, but in that moment, as they flew by in perfect unison, first one way, and then the other, the flock reformed into a huge bird image, to salute her in a celebratory fly past.

"Their amazing supernatural pièce de résistance" Daphne called it.

It was during our second year at the Byre, however, that over a very short period, a series of events occurred that changed our perceptions of reality forever.  Three months earlier, Rodney had been arrested for assaulting her mother and sentenced to 18 months in jail.  Prior to being whisked away to prison he promised in no uncertain manner "to get both of them on his release."  This was a threat that distressed them a great deal and had a deleterious effect on her mother's already taut nervous system.  Secondly, the birds in the vicinity of the Byre began to act bizarrely.  The oak trees that dotted the landscape became unexpected havens for a variety of species but mostly starlings, which oddly, roosted most of the time and no longer took to the air to flaunt their aerial expertise.  The ominous, silent and unmoving density of the flock was so heavy, that it threatened to bring down one of the sturdy and handsome deciduous trees that had stood for more than half a century.

It was a hot sunny day, when the uncanny and concluding event came to pass.  I used the biblical term, because at the time, the occasion seemed to warrant a biblical milieu.  It corresponded with an event that was recorded in a South American nature documentary I had seen about six months previously.  A few hours before its arrival—a vast swarm of mosquitoes—the entity that was the jungle, had, inexplicably sensed its coming and settled into a sombre silence.  The indigenous inhabitants, attuned to and familiar with the rare catastrophe, had covered every part of their bodies with a coating of thick mud and were able to survive the murderous onslaught.

This was the deviant foreboding that filled the air outside the Byre on that hot afternoon.  As the unseen force strengthened, it formed an insidious but felt denseness around Daphne.  Terrifyingly, Daphne was being sucked inexorably into a void intent on removing her from the corporeal world that surrounded her.  Unable to speak or extricate herself from its grasp, she could only mouth words of help in my direction as I strived to rescue her from what now seemed a shocking inevitability.  Afraid and cowed by the magnitude of the presence that  sought to control her, I stood powerless and unable to help.  As the minutes passed, Daphne was gradually fading from my view.  Frantically, I tried to raise the unseen veil that had descended.  At one time I considered running to the town to summon help, but realised that by the time I returned she would have disappeared.  It was in this submissive and numbed state of mind that miraculously; the horror which had transfixed me was resolved.

The primeval oak that for days had been bearing the encumbrance of thousands of starlings was abruptly relieved of its burden.  As if summoned, the flock descended en masse and quickly encircled Daphne to free her from the force that had embraced her.  Momentarily, her re-established freedom left her stunned and immobile, but as reality dawned she grasped my hand and we fled like birds from a cage to the safety of the town.  Looking back we could see that the birds had formed a large circle and were shepherding something to the pinnacle of Ben Mila Mountain.  Moments before they vanished from view we gave long and thankful waves, and Daphne blew them a kiss.

Days later, we questioned the reality of the event, although we had decided not to reveal the experience to another soul.  Did it really happen, or were our minds duped in some strange way, making us victims of complicated fantasy and delusion?  If it did occur however, where was the flock taking it? To the sea perhaps, which was only ten miles from the point at which it disappeared?

It was just seven days after the happening, while I was at school that an unmarked van arrived at her mother's cottage and took them both away.  When I returned in the late afternoon there was a letter waiting for me.  It was brief, but not without fondness.  This is what it said.

"Dear Tom, We made the decision to leave the area and settle where Rodney cannot harm us.  It is because of this that I am unable to let you know where we are going.  Sorry!  The incident at the Byre has unnerved me as well, and I could never return there, even though it was until that moment a paradise for both of us.  I hope you understand.  Your true and grateful friend as ever, Daphne."

A few months later, we gave up the tenancy of The Black Lion and returned to fume-filled Birmingham.  We are still there, Mum's taking a degree at Birmingham University as a mature student, and Dad managed to get his old job back with the housing authority.

As for me, I often wonder about Daphne and the happy times we had together.  I think I was in love with her at the time, and possibly am still?  This may explain why during the summer months all my tee shirts have her face on them with the caption:  Missing:  Presumed Not Dead, and a contact address below!

 

 

                                                                                                                      
                                                    
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Jade Doskow Jeremiah Stansbury

Duane Locke Derek McCrea

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Nocturne (Dawn)

Jade Doskow

 

 

 

Dead Souls

Jade Doskow

 

 

 

They Keep Calling Me

Jade Doskow

 

 

 

Tribute, (Rocinha, Red Hook)

Jade Doskow

 

 

 

Tree Portrait (Shimmer)

Jade Doskow

 

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Wish Me Well

Jeremiah Stansbury

 

 

 

Monkey Bars

Jeremiah Stansbury

 

 

 

Panda Milk

Jeremiah Stansbury

 

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Mystic Vegetation

Duane Locke

 

 

 

Dragonfly

Duane Locke

 

 

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Vikki Leffel Dec. 31, 1945—July 6, 2005 My Friend Vikki                                                                                                                  by Pamela Boslet Buskin                                                            ear, dear little ex-roommate Pam..." That was how Vikki began a letter to me in 1965.  In her letters and cards, Vikki often expressed a more tender part of herself than she usually expressed in other ways. And now, it's 2005—40 years later.  I am writing this today, on a Saturday morning in May while Vikki is still with us because I cannot imagine life any other way. Vikki has been here—part of my life—for 42 years, since we were assigned to be college freshman roommates in 1963. I was shy, naive and unsophisticated.  I was totally intimidated by Vikki before I even met her, when that summer the college sent me her name, address and a photograph. Her name alone was formidable enough—"Victoria Elizabeth Power"; her address—Bronxville, New York—even more so, after my parents told me it was a very rich, exclusive community in Westchester.  In her picture, Vikki was wearing what looked to me like an elegant satin ball gown.  Maybe from her debutante party, I thought.  (It in fact was the standard Bronxville High School yearbook portrait.)  Her hair was perfect and smooth, her pearls were real. She had what I interpreted as a smug, haughty expression.  But most intimidating of all was her size—somehow the camera angle made her appear not just heavy but also about six feet tall.  I envisioned this snobby, stuck-up rich girl towering over me. On the first day of school, my parents and I arrived early, unloaded my things and went out to lunch.  Then they dropped me off at my dorm.  With a lump in my throat as they drove away and great trepidation about meeting Vikki, I headed upstairs to my new room. I opened the door and there was Vikki.  Not quite what I had expected. She was barefoot, wearing a loose madras shift; her hair—which I soon learned was the bane of her existence—was frizzy from the humidity.  She was unpacking and bickering with her mother about where to put things.  Best of all, she was so tiny that I towered over her. After her mother left, Vikki and I went downstairs to a dorm orientation meeting.  We sat on a table at the back of the room, together but apart from the other girls.  We paid little attention to the speakers and amused ourselves by making cynical comments about everything and everybody else. By the time the meeting was over, we were best friends, and would remain so for the next 42 years. And now Vikki is dying, and I cannot imagine life without her. *  *  *  *  * And now it's June.  Yesterday afternoon, Fred called.  Vikki was too weak to talk so I asked him to hold the phone to her ear.  I told her I loved her and it has truly been an honor to be her friend all these years and I would miss her forever.  I tried not to cry because Vikki doesn't like emotional displays.  But I couldn't help it. And then, days away from dying, Vikki was still taking care of me:  "You'll be okay, Pam," she said, "you'll be okay." "I know," I said, and we said our last, wistful good-byes. But that night, when she could barely speak, Fred called again and said Vikki had something she wanted to tell me.  He held the phone for her.  Her voice was weak but steady.  "Hi, Pam," she said.  "I just want to tell you where I'm going to be."  I knew she didn't mean the cemetery.  I wondered if she was hallucinating. "Remember that star you gave me for my 40th birthday?" she said.  I had no idea what she was talking about.  "Remember?" she said.  "The star you bought for me and you named it after me?" Then I remembered.  Some company had offered stars for sale, which meant that for $60 or so you could "buy" a real star and name it whatever you wanted and that name would be registered forever in the Library of Congress.  No one else could ever buy that star (at least from that company), and you would receive a very impressive certificate with the name and exact location of your very own star. I thought Vikki absolutely deserved her own star, so I bought one for her and named it the Victoria Elizabeth Power Leffel Star. But by now, 19 years later, I had forgotten all about it. "Remember that star?" Vikki said. "Of course!" I said.  "The Victoria Elizabeth Power Leffel Star!" "Well, I just wanted you to know that that's where I'll be," she said.  "There's a little map that came with it so I know where it is.  I just wanted you to know that." "Okay, Vikki," I said.  "I'll find it and I'll wave up to you and send you all my love." It was the greatest gift she has ever given me.  Right up to her last hours, she was the most generous, thoughtful, giving and loving of friends, although she would never describe herself that way. Then we said our real last good-bye.  But now I'll always know where to find her. *  *  *  *  * And now, it's weeks later.  Amazingly—but not really, if you know Vikki—she is still here.  I have spoken to her a number of times.  Fred calls for her and gives her the phone.  One time, before she said hello, I heard her giving Fred very long, detailed instructions on when to add the sauce to the veal marsala he was preparing.  Of course, she hadn't been able to eat in months.  But she sounded exasperated.  "Did you get that Fred?" she said.  "Do you understand the principle?"  I laughed because she was still very much Vikki. I told her that now I was going to have to amend her eulogy again, which made her laugh, as I knew it would.                                  Return to Contents Return to Top of Page