Author: Editor

I Am Screaming at the Top of My Lungs
By Chet Kozlowski

The first time you meet him it’s at that crazy corner of 23rd and Broadway, where that building that looks like a long piece of layer cake comes to a point. It’s where the streets are the widest, where they all come together and cross over each other and split apart every which way. It’s late afternoon: lights switching, horns honking, pedestrians pedding, cell phoners barking. So much hubbub it’s amazing more don’t collide. It’s a very complicated place, and you just watch your shoes and go with the herd. You’re small enough to glide through, young enough to go unnoticed. What’s more invisible than a girl with a skateboard? You mutter lyrics and scratch your itchy nose. You’re heading home after doing the bag in the park with Demo and the crew. Who cares about the chaos? The bag makes it all a warm blur.

You’ve been hearing him without even knowing it. His voice is just one of the street sounds, until you get closer. Then it slices through: “Can somebody please assist me? Won’t somebody give me hand?” A chant, clear and patient, over and over.

You’re not one to be curious, but you look up now. There he stands, in the middle of the sidewalk. “Won’t somebody just help me, please? I need assistance.” Nobody answers him. The crowd surges past, breaking around him.

You’re not one to stop, but you do now. The herd behind you jostles and swears. He stands rooted against the tide. “Can’t anybody help me here?” He clutches a stick to his chest. “I am screaming at the top of my lungs,” he says, which makes you giggle, because he’s not. He’s just talking loud and clear, like a teacher leading a fire drill.
You’re not one to help, but now you’re standing in front of him. Up close, he’s a big guy, maybe as old as your dad, crewcut, khakis, sneakers and a yellow tennis shirt. He stares over and past you, straight ahead.

You clear your throat. “What do you need?” you say. Your mouth is gummy — that’s the bag — and your voice sounds like it belongs to somebody else.

He cocks his head and peers down. “I need help crossing the street,” he says. His eyes roll around, knuckles in brine. When you don’t answer he asks, “Are you there?” He can’t see you. He’s blind.

“I’ll help,” you say.

“Good.”

You don’t know where to touch him. “Take you by your arm?” There’s a food stain on the front of his tennis shirt. The collar’s all twisted.

“Let me put my hand on your shoulder,” he says. You come around. “Short,” he says. You walk him to the curb.

Traffic lurches and whooshes past. “Busy corner,” you say.

“Tell me about it,” says the blind man.

“Gotta wait for the light,” you say.

“You’re a kid,” he says.

You shrug.

“Not many kids stop for me.” The light changes.

“You’re a good kid,” he says.

“Cross,” you say, and you lead him into the street.

The crowd comes at you. No ducking and weaving now, you’ve got this guy in tow. A straight path is what’s called for here. Make way.

“Folks stop for me, but not many kids,” he says. “I’m at this corner every day. I ask for help and sometimes I can feel somebody right next to me, not saying anything. I hear them breathing. I say to them ‘Can you help me?’ and they just don’t answer.” His hand is soggy on your shoulder. “What is it with people?”

You shrug.

“What’s your name?” he says.

“Abra.”

“Abra?” He snorts. He gazes up blankly; his eyes roll. “What’s your last name, Kadabra?”

Ha ha. Like you never heard that joke before. “It’s short for Abigail Ramona,” you say. “That’s my whole name. Abra’s my nickname.”

“Pick up your feet.”

“What?”

“You shuffle your feet.”

“Do not.”

“I can feel it.”

“Curb,” you tell him. “Step up.” You two made it to the other side.

He lets go of your shoulder. “There’s a restaurant right here, right? A Keough’s or something?”

You look around, see nothing but a stone wall with windows. “It’s a hotel, I think. No restaurant.”

“Yeah?” He flicks out the stick he’s carrying; it telescopes into a cane. “Oh well. You should stand up straight, you know.”

“I do.”

“You slouch.”

“Do not.”

He clicks the skinny cane on the sidewalk. “It’s never too early to develop self-respect. Stand tall.”

Your shoulder twitches where his hand was. You still feel it there.

He cocks his head. “Hey, you’re not coming from shop class, are you?”

“No.”

“Making model airplanes?”

“No,” you say, but you know what he means. You sniff your shirt.

“I just picked up a whiff off you. Strong smell. Like turpentine. Or glue of some sort.”

That’s the bag, you want to say. Demo sprayed a lot this time. The smell clings to your clothes. It’ll wear off by the time you get home, but right now, whew.

“Oh well,” he says. “Better hope nobody lights a cigarette near you.” He turns and starts tapping his way up Fifth. “Thanks for the help, Abigail Ramona,” he calls back. “See you around.” And then he’s gone.

On the walk home you go back to watching your shoes.

What’s he say, the blind man? He needed help and you helped him and he starts talking trash. He’s wrecking your high with this hoohah.

What’s he mean, self-respect? You got it, as much as you need to.

Short? Maybe, for your age. Slouching? Makes it easier to slip through the cracks. Shit, what’s he know about anything anyway? He’s blind. Goodbye, Buddy, you should’ve said. Don’t walk into any walls. That’s one thing you know. There are walls everywhere. If he could see, he’d see them there.

Walls to get over, walls to get around. You try to be the smartest, the fastest, the best, but the walls always come up in front of you.

There’s the wall of how much you know and how much you don’t. The wall of how pretty you are and what clothes you wear. The wall of not understanding no matter how much it’s explained. That’s why being with Demo’s so good for you.

Demo says chill, you chill. Demo says run, you run. Demo sprays inside the bag, says breathe deep, you breathe deep. Take a whole headful, Demo says. Demo says and you do.

The bag doesn’t break down these walls, or get you over them. It just makes you not care they’re there. So what does the blind man know? Some walls you can’t get over, no matter how much you don’t shuffle or slouch or have self-respect. All you really need is the bag. The bag makes things better.

By the time you get home you’ve got yourself convinced.

You see the blind man again, weeks later, in a bus shelter. You’re with Demo and the crew and he taps in. Everyone goes quiet. He folds up his cane and stands to the side. He holds it to his chest. You ignore him.

“Can somebody tell me when the #42 comes by?” he asks.

Nobody answers. Demo and the crew snicker, and you do, too.

“Can any of you assist me? I know you’re there.” That calm request.

But something’s in the air and he sniffs it. That’s the bag.

“Abra?” he says, but you don’t answer. “Abigail Ramona?” Demo and the crew wonder and nudge. But you just look away and watch your shoes. 
— 7/21/03, New York City

Staking Claim
by Vanessa Hua

Years before my mother died, my sister was prepared.

Ilana arrived home one weekend, clutching two packs of Post-Its. “It’s time,” she said, handing me a yellow stack. She unpeeled a bright orange sticky note, and slapped it onto a pint-sized terracotta warrior that guarded the living room, a gift from our great-grandmother.

The industrious chemists at 3M invented the sticky notes to free people from the tyranny of paper clips and staples. The jaunty curl of paper wound up on all kinds of never-before-possible surfaces: in a choir book to mark various hymns, on an eyes-only memo from your department head, and on the kitchen counter, as a Dear John note. Or on your inheritance.

“Olen, let’s not worry when Mom goes,” she said. “You hear about those families fighting over nothing at funerals, because there’s no will. It’s easier to divide it up now, when we’re not so emotional.”

She slapped another Post-It onto a wooden radio, the big heavy kind they made copies of at Restoration Hardware. I looked over at my mother, who curled up on the couch with a mug of green tea. The vulturing of her property did not perturb her.

“It’s okay with me,” she said. “Whatever you kids want to do.”

Her attitude was typical. My father was killed when I was a baby. A pizza delivery truck in on-coming traffic hit a deer, flinging the buck into the windshield of my father’s Buick. After that, my mother saw no use in getting in the way of what was supposed to happen. Fate interrupted the mundane.

I flicked the Post-Its like a cartoon flip-book under my thumb. It would be different if Mom were hooked up to life support, or fading away in a rest home. But she’d had us young, sometimes mistaken for a big sister when she dropped Ilana and I off at elementary school.

Now she ran her own country antiques store in Sutter Creek. She wore sleeveless tops that showed off her strong and tanned arms. When I helped her with pick-up and deliveries, she had no problems holding up her end of the oak dressers and teak armoires.

Five years earlier, I had moved from New York back to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada to finish my dissertation on Civil War folk songs. I had never been comfortable in the city, with its endless squirming crowds and heaps of garbage left for pick-up each night.

Despite the change in habitat, I had trouble writing. The chunk of fool’s gold, the poster of constellations that glowed in the dark, and the wrinkled 1987 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in my bedroom placed me in childhood, the wrong century.
“Go ahead,” I said. Ilana, three years older, had always used her head start over her little brother to her advantage. She laid down the rules, and I would hold back, trying to figure out how to catch up.

She plopped Post-Its on more than she’d be able to fit in her tiny condo, and even on items that clashed with her sleek décor. She didn’t have a husband, or a house, or kids, but was already staking claim to the accessories of her future life.

Ilana was a San Francisco attorney who specialized in lawsuits to prevent what could happen. She came home rare enough to make her visits a production – ones that justified my mother cooking my sister’s favorite biscuits, each time– but often enough to avoid guilt.

Soon, the living room looked as if a flock of monarch butterflies had touched down, the orange notes fluttering at times in the hot breeze. I held off. There wasn’t much I wanted, wasn’t much I could see in my future. But that afternoon, I hid what mattered in the crawl space of the garage, under a crate of encyclopedias and a pile of wooden tennis racquets.

The next morning, the camera I’d stashed was sitting in the coffee table, tagged with an orange Post-It. I cradled the Rollieflex in my right hand. I’d found my grandfather’s camera when I was a teenager.

Its twin lenses looked liked an odd pair of spectacles mounted on the rectangular case, which rested on the small end. The camera had a large square viewfinder on top. People couldn’t tell when you were taking a picture.

She’s done it again, I thought. Taken what I wanted, without even knowing, without spite. Ilana had the present and the future all wrapped up. I only had the past.

“I was looking for my old cheerleading uniform in the garage, and found this,” Ilana said, sweeping the Rollie away from me.

“Don’t you think it will make a cool decoration, for when I get a guest bedroom? I wonder if it works.”

“It does,” I said, tugging it away.

“You’ll have to show me how. Maybe I’ll take it now, instead of waiting,” she trailed off, even she unable to say “when Mom dies.”
I considered Solomon’s choice, and let the camera slip out of my fingers.

The lenses shattered against the tile floor, and a large crack shot through the case, over-exposing the photos I’d taken of bleary newlyweds stumbling out of a B&B, of my unsuspecting mother, beautiful, at the shop counter, of a gold mine tower silhouetted at sunset.

We stared down at the smashed pieces.

“Ouch,” Ilana said. “Then again, I just got a digital camera, so maybe I didn’t need more junk to clutter up my place.
I picked up the Rollie and looked through the viewfinder: nothing. Nothing plus me.

Chibas Speaks
by Steve Almond

(for Eduardo Chibas 1907-1951)

August, 1951. In Havana, in a studio the width of his arms, Chibas speaks. His voice swells with heroism. Clustered around wooden radios the shape of cathedral doors, listeners reach to adjust the volume.

Chibas says: Batista is a thug, the university has become a refuge for murderers, Cuba, with her beautiful girdle of mountains, her sea bass and garlic, Cuba starves. In her elegant buildings, American gangsters feast on steaks and shoot disease into our women. Roulette wheels spin and the Arawak die. Father Varela, with his elegant proofs, dies. Jose Marti dies. His victorious love and turbulent appetites, dead; moral progress fails, gives way to tailfins and murder. All that remains of history is the gesture.

Chibas speaks and thinks not of the words (they are always the same) but of his father. When Chibas was a boy, his father built him a toy bridge from slats of wood. Chibas smoothed his fingers along the wood for hours, pretended to march off to work with his father, a little man in a little coat and hat.

Where is that bridge today? He wonders this even as he speaks to the poor and the hopeful of Cuba, as he laments what the island has bec
ome. There is no goodness left in this place. His father told him this.

The time has come to face the truth, Chribas says, to wake ourselves from centuries of slumber.

But something is happening. Something is happening to Chibas as he speaks; a slice of mango is falling into his mouth; like a second tongue, only sweeter. The fingers of his first lover are grazing his stomach, the glorious stink of the melacon fills the hazy studio, his father’s lemony cologne, applied, with a gentle dab of the thumb, to the back of his neck. These are the minutes he wishes were a thousand years.

He has to remind himself: this is really happening. This speech, these words, the plan behind them. He has to remind himself: duty.

The address is over. In his trouser pocket, the pistol is dense and cold. What is death but the end of a bridge that connects us to childhood? What is goodness but a kind of awful bravery? Chibas thinks: Forgive me father. He alone knows what comes next.

Steve Almond is the author of the story collection My Life in Heavy Metal, as well as a nonfiction book about candy bars, forthcoming from Algonquin Books. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, Playboy, Other Voices, The Mid-American Review, Nerve, and many other magazines. “Chibas Speaks” originally appeared in Story Quarterly. Steve lives in Somerville, Massachusetts and teaches at Boston College.

Manhattan-based artist Matt Cervenka studied at the School of Visual Arts and S.U.N.Y. at Farmingdale. Extensive travels in the Southwest, Mexico and Europe have provided inspiration, and Matt has incorporated their cultures in his work. Presently, Matt enjoys working with gouache, pen and ink, acrylic, and mixed media.Austrian Television’s Tema recently aired an interview with Matt, featuring his animal portraits. See Matt’s New York Cityscapes at Portable Muse.

contention
by Jenny Pritchett

One evening at the end of May she stood with one hand holding open

the refrigerator door, staring at the grid of shelves.

“We need more of something,” she said.

He looked up from the stack of essays he was grading. A blossom of

red ink, like the mouth of a geisha, had formed where his lips met.

“What are we out of?” he asked.

“Everything. There’s nothing in here.”

She hitched her jeans at both hips and squatted, the light from the

refrigerator bulb scalloping her face like a peeled apple. She had lost

the weight from the twins already; he could imagine the jaunt of her hip

cupped in his hand. She stood, gripping puckered plastic bags in both

hands—what had been dill, carrots, basil, now muddy and smearing.

“I was going to do something with these,” she said, holding up the

herbs before tamping them into the top of the garbage pail beneath the

sink. “Waste of money.” She heaved the pail to the back door, leaving

the bag open.

“Not that much money.” He bared his teeth, rapping them with his

pen.

“Still money.” She slid the crisper drawers in with her boot and

swung the door of the refrigerator closed. The condiments rattled in

their jars.

“I don’t feel like cooking tonight,” she said.

“So don’t.” He swung his head back to his stack of essays. It was

unbelievable what the kids expected him to read. He scribbled in a

margin, “Huh??”

“What do you feel like?” She pulled at the hair at the nape of her

neck. He sat before her at their heavy, all-purpose table, heels hitched

on the rungs of a splintery chair.

“Anything’s fine with me,” he said.

She sucked the inside of her lip, watching her husband. Then she

turned and left the room. He watched the far kitchen wall, listening to

her exit through the plaster and paint, the footsteps, keys, door,

gravel, the smacking shut of the car door. He looked down at his stack

of papers. The sudden silence had mired the words in front of him. He

felt untied and wasn’t certain he was capable of grading tonight. He

imagined himself running through the kitchen to the front hallway,

nabbing his jacket from the hook he’d hammered into the plywood, the

balls of his feet spinning in the gravel as he chased down the car,

panting, leaning in the driver’s side window with his lopsided grin.

“Tony’s,” he would say to her. “My treat.”

Instead, from the front window, he watched the headlights of their

car bounce into the near-dark, past the McKutcheon’s house next-door and onto the new asphalt four-way at the end of the road that led to town.

He pulled back the curtains she’d made, tiny blueberries he pinned to

the window with the tips of his fingers. It was seven-thirty. The

evening stretched before him like a marathon.

Jenny Pritchett lives and works in San Francisco with her boyfriend,
Sean, and their 140-pound English mastiff. Her fiction has appeared
in Boulevard, and she is working on a collection of short stories,
most of which reference her home state of Illinois.

William Diehl lives in Loma Linda, California.

counting love
by erin mcclusky

n equals what is left

There was no way to solve for n. They had tried, but the papers had been wrong; an algebraic equation does not always yield the same result in Wisconsin as in California. In his last letter to her he went over the proofs he had done in California and she couldn’t find anything wrong with his math, but in Wisconsin the variable n came out different. She held his letter and his answer for n and knew things would have to end between them. She knew this was emptiness but she couldn’t make herself believe this was 0; the round parallel curves seemed too smug to her. She liked the resignation of 5, the swagger of 7, the lank stance of 1. He is 1, she thought. His thinness never stopped her from wanting more of him.

She knew she would have to write to him. She had found his kidney in the toe of her running shoe and she wanted to know where she should send it to or if he would rather come and get it himself. He was already missing 5 inches of intestine that he had left with his last lover and she thought he would probably want his kidney returned. When they met he told her about the missing intestine and the 2.4 grams of skin tissue gone from his thigh and the piece of rib and he asked her if she would fix him, make him whole. She was always breaking the ends of pencils and the edges of her fingernails, so she told him she couldn’t help. She thought that would be the end of him. But he sent her lists of square roots and radicals and mixed fractions and she started to bend to him. He stood outside her apartment and recited finite equations up to her window, and after a while she let him come inside, sit at her table and talk.

He told her about how he died for the first time. He fell in love with a beautiful accountant who would have nothing to do with him and his imaginary numbers. He begged and pleaded for the accountant’s love but the accountant would not have him. The accountant wanted numbers to be real, to be whole, and divisible by 2 if at all possible. Over coffee, the accountant told him their love would never make sense, that there was no sense in their going on like this. The accountant got up from the table to leave and he, in a fit of desperation, grabbed onto the accountant’s bag. He and the accountant struggled over the bag, the accountant finally yanking it from his hands. The accountant’s payroll book slid out of the bag and fell open on the ground. The shock of seeing the perfect whole numbers written neatly in rows and columns in the accountant’s even hand killed him instantly. The accountant felt bad about killing him and brought him back to life but still refused to see him. He left California and moved to Wisconsin because, he said, when you die once you want to die again.

In Wisconsin he gave 5 inches of his intestines to a nun who prayed to St. Erasmus. The saint was martyred because he spoke too often of a theory that was a loose thread which, if tugged, would unravel everything that passed for the fabric of reality. The nun who prayed to St. Erasmus believed in the saint’s brilliance and directed her prayers to an image of him next to a ship’s windlass. St. Erasmus had escaped from persecution on a ship sailed by angels and, when they saw him depicted next to the windlass, his believers thought he had been martyred by having his intestines wound like the ship’s rope around the windlass. The nun who prayed to St. Erasmus believed that St. Erasmus had come back for her and that, to maintain the image of sainthood, he imitated the saint’s wounds and pulled out 5 inches of his intestines and wound them around a spool for the nun. The nun begged him to leave her and to carry his thread into the world. So he left the convent and the nun had the 5 inches of his intestine wound on a spool placed in a reliquary.

He told her that prayers to St. Erasmus will ease abdominal pain and he said that he always thought love would be like the loops of paper that his mother taught him to twist once and tape together at the ends. He could trace the entire circuit of the paper with his pencil and the line would travel inside and outside the paper curves. His mother said that this was infinity: the ability to draw a line and not stop.

The stories he told sitting at her table were like this. She didn’t need to say anything. She listened carefully and sat with him while he talked. When he was done he stopped talking and she pulled out a pad of legal paper, yellow with red lines, and they worked on proofs, silently, until they were tired. She didn’t regret bringing him into her life as long as he did not ask her a second time to fix him, to make him whole.

There was an evening when he sat down and told her that he had to leave because he did not think he would die in Wisconsin. He told her about his room in California with a bed and a 75-gallon fish tank for his two carniverous fish. He shared sushi with his fish; he ate the rice and nori and they ate the flying fish roe. He asked her to keep the things from his room in Wisconsin; there was a bed and a one-eyed toad in a jar and a one-eyed python in Tupperware under the sink. After he left, he started to send her proofs, he didn’t write about his past loves and what he had lost, the things he talked about when they sat together at her table; he only wrote numbers and variables. She went over his equations carefully and sent him new proofs and corrections. She bought a pink-toed tarantula because she started to miss him. The tarantula had two eyes and the python slid into a funk because he was envious.

He sent her a telegram like they did to announce a death in the Civil War and it said,

I always wanted STOP love to be STOP something I could keep STOPbut love is STOP nothing but water and stars STOP n equals what is left STOP (more…)