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Author: Editor
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Above Lyman’s Riffle
Memoir by James Ross Kelly
The old man’s house was falling down ten years after his death; twenty-years after, the whole south face of Lyman Mountain and Ernie’s place by the Rogue River, was divided up and there were expensive homes built at various river viewpoints and no notion of Ernest Lyman, who had lived there for almost a century—was in anyone’s mind. However, one year after he’d passed, on a hot August, dusk evening that was beginning to cool, I waited for the red glow down river and Vaux’s swifts darted through warm air and willows along the river. Swifts in the red day glow off in the west and evening light.
That evening I could see to my right, the hundred year old black walnut and cherry orchard across the road, and up the hill the road that would take you to Ernie’s hard rock mine, and below the mountain as it turned north, Sam’s Creek was trickling in through the willows upstream from, where I was standing.
Once I had seen a specimen nugget come out of Sam’s Creek, which was as big as your thumb and weighed over an ounce. The nugget had come from a small inner tube dredge, sucking gravel off the bottom of the creek for gold fines that settled after the gravel rattled across a shaker board. The dredger came up with a frogman mask and then showed Jack and I the nugget of that day’s find. Ernie let the guy, Jack’s friend, dredge the creek. The man had tried to offer Ernie half of what gold he dredged. Ernie waved him off, despite living in the old falling down house; he’d invested well and had no need for money.
This evening I’m watching the brick chimney, from Ernie’s house, that juts upward from its tin roof at the bottom of Lyman Mountain. Ernie’s parents built the house when he was two, in 1898— when the mine began to pay. He was born across the road not far from where Ernie let me tear an old apple packing shed down two years before his death. The apple orchard had been gone since shortly after the Second World War. The shed was full of nineteenth and early twentieth century artifacts, a “Coolerator,” with only three bullet holes in it—I took the old upright icebox home and kept food in it on the porch in the winter, and would throw in a block of ice in the summer and it would cool beer for three days, despite the bullet holes. As the packing house deconstructed, behind the siding on the inside wall, written in penciled-in childlike scrawl, a scribe from 100 years ago had written, “Amen, Brother Ben, Shot at a Rooster and hit a hen!”
Later, from a ladder, I sided my house with those old Douglas fir lap boards, which were brown and richly weathered with reds, and gray and gold hues— while my own children, my real wealth, squealed and ran across my own side hill seven miles away.
This years ago evening, the Table Rock Black-tail deer were waiting for the near darkness of after dusk for a drink of river. Now the swifts begin to draw close. For one minute they come together in ever tightening circles, closer and closer together. Then as one— they swirl into a whirling black-funnel-down-cloud fifty feet in height above the house; and they are into-the-chimney—in one second, or two.
If I could take you back there I’d want you to make you fly with the Vaux’s swifts that had been up and down the river feeding on flying insects. You’d come together when they began to draw close. You’d come to the high, rapid twittering, high whistled chipping, and in ever tightening circles, swirling and swirling you’d spin collectively together in a great pinwheel-like circle. A gyre coming more and more altogether directly above the chimney—then suddenly, in one morphic resonant being with them you’d come down and into a whirling black-funnel-down tornado-like cloud; fifty feet in height, above the house and then into-the-chimney, full of this day’s hatch settling and chittering for a brick gripped sleep. When you came back I’d tell you a lot of things are like that.
The old man said the little birds used the chimney every summer as long as he could remember. Yet this was the last time I saw this. An hour before, casting and mending my line that evening, I had taken a ten pound hen summer steelhead in the riffle above the falls; on wet fly, a Teeter’s weighted-woolly-worm. Ernie had told me ten years before— it was an evening riffle.
James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. Most recently, he retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the better part of the last decade in Alaska. He started writing poetry in college, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems have appeared in Westwind Review, Open Sky, Siskiyou Journal, Don’t Read This, Table Rock Sentinel, and other journals and anthologies.
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Conspirators – Fiction by Judith Serin
When Clive broke up with Clara, who worries if she is intelligent, he told her that their relationship was only sexual. When he left me, always unhappy with my body, he said I didn’t really turn him on. Our common hurt was what brought us together. We felt he’d negated us, body and soul.
We met at a party in my cousin’s backyard. Bonnie steered me past her overpoweringly fragrant jasmine vine to a small woman sitting on the shaded bench.
“Celia, my dear, you must cheer Clara up. She’s feeling rotten about a man.”
“Really?” I stared at the beautiful, flower-like woman. “Me too,” I added after Bonnie strode away. My cousin was too close to my our family for me to let her know about the failures in my personal life.
“Aren’t they fuckers?” Clara’s voice was low and slightly guttural.
The obscenity put me at ease. “Christ, yes, and this one you wouldn’t believe.”
“Mine was worse.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
We compared notes. Clara’s story of a blissful beginning, uneasy middle, and final betrayal was familiar, similar to my story, to the stories which many of my friends tell about their one or two disasters. Then she mentioned the name Clive. The dates of our relationships overlapped. We discovered the depths of his treachery.
We became friends. There was an immediate intimacy between us. We could talk endlessly about Clive with a degree of obsession we hid from others. Clara didn’t say, annoyance tingeing her voice, “Why don’t you just forget him?” She knew the answer.
We did things together to distract ourselves. We discovered that we liked the same movies, the same parks, the same cafes. We spent much of our days together, since we both worked part-time. I taught art classes to small children and their mothers. She was a secretary to a psychologist who once a week good-naturedly tried to seduce her, while she good-naturedly refused. Jerry was remarkably easygoing. She told me that he didn’t protest when she pulled the filing cabinet down on herself by opening the two top drawers at the same time, the day after Clive broke up with her. She sat sobbing, surrounded by papers, until her employer returned from a long lunch and helped her straighten up.
Events take on significance later. Once Clara appeared in the doorway of my classroom, her face streaming with tears. The mothers shifted in their low childs’ chairs.
“Clar,” I ran to shield her from them, “are you O.K.?”
“Yes. Get back to work; I’ll wait in the hall.” She slid her back down the wall and landed sitting, her knees drawn up, as though she were pulling into a shell.
I returned to the classroom and busied myself mixing paint, my back to the mothers. God damn their eyes, I thought, for the first time understanding the phrase. I didn’t want our sorrow to be observed.
“Hope your friend feels better,” Mrs. Gruber remarked at the end of class as she pushed Johnny out the door.
“I’m sure she’ll be all right,” I answered brusquely. Clara huddled in the hall, staring through the passing procession of knees. “Did you notice the figure Johnny drew today?” I continued. “He’s really developing fast. The blue painting…” My eyes were drawn to some movement or change. Had Clara left? I didn’t see her. Then she was there again, crouching motionless.
Mrs. Gruber coughed delicately. “The blue painting,” I responded, “is very, ah, thoughtful, sophisticated.”
I watched Mrs. Gruber click down the stairs, her firm hand on Johnny’s wrist as he thumped from step to step. “Come in,” I called to Clara. “I’ve got to clean up. What happened?”
“I just needed to see you.”
I put my arm over her shoulder, holding my paint-crusted hand away from her mauve flowered blouse. “We clash,” I said, fingering my red apron.
“It’s a disguise. So people won’t know how close we are.”
“Conspirators.”
She smiled slowly. “Yeah, it’s us against Clive and the world.”
Another time she lost me for a moment. We were at an art opening I felt obliged to attend. I edged the crowd with Clara, trying to seem absorbed in Billy Sagan’s slick, expensive paintings. “So this is how he does it,” I gestured at a large canvas of geometric shapes. “The colors this year; it’ll go with any room your decorator designs.” I glared at the genial drunk in the center of the crowd. He saw me, flopped his hand, and smiled lopsidedly. “Nice work,” I shouted.
I turned back to the wall. There were too many people there that I recognized and might have to speak to, and they were dressed too flamboyantly. What had I been thinking of, coming to an opening without jewelry, a hat, or a period costume? I felt conspicuous. I hated the crowd for their successes, for the way they chatted and laughed, the way they slid, plastic wine glass in hand, from one conversation to another. There was Laura Rogers moving toward us like a ship. I knew what our exchange would be like. I would admire her ponderous ceramic necklace, which, of course, she had made herself. She’d ask me what I was doing and I’d answer that I was still teaching kids and finding time for a few drawings. I’d ask her what she was doing: another grant, a new show opening soon, a choice teaching job.
“Celia?” Clara turned slowly, peering through the crowd.
“I’m right here.” I put a hand on her shoulder.
“Huh?” She whirled around. “That’s funny. I didn’t see…”
“Oh Celia, and who is your gorgeous friend?” Laura bore down upon us.
A few days later we sat in a cafe. I played with the sugar in the bowl. I wanted to relate last night’s dream: Clive chasing me into a public bathroom, my terror as I waited in the gray stall, knowing he would enter when the other women left, knowing he had a knife in the pocket of his pale blue jacket.
I wanted to hear how Clara would interpret this, what sexual connotations she would catch. I wanted to spill the frightening dream onto the white tablecloth between us, letting her rearrange it into a daylight phrase.
But a man was watching us. I was angry at the intrusion, angry at his arrogant expression, angry because I was sure it was beautiful Clara who interested him.
“What’s wrong?” Clara asked me.
I leaned toward her. “That man’s looking at us.”
She turned. Her eyes met his. “Are you looking at us?”
He half rose. “Yes, you look too good to ignore.”
“Well please stop. We want to talk. You’re making us uncomfortable.”
He slumped back into his chair.
“Clara, that was fantastic. I never know what to say to them.” The man gulped his coffee and left. “I just get so flustered.”
“It’s O.K. Men looking at us has been bothering me lately too.” Her shoulders drooped.
I poked the spoon into the sugar. “I wish we were invisible.” I looked up. Clara was gone.
“Clar!”
“Celia?” I felt a hand grope for mine.
“Clara, are you there?” The table where our hands were clasped was empty.
People looked in our direction. What would they do to invisible women? I heaved Clara’s weight toward the back door. A small strip of grass behind the building. I crumpled, panting.
“Clara, what should we do?”
A gasp or stifled giggle.
I lay back on the grass. I held up my hand and looked through it at an alligator shaped cloud. My breathing slowed, sank. The sky darkened. I saw the flesh of my solid hand.
Clara sat nearby, her legs crossed tailor-fashion. She had lost her air of exhaustion; she looked alert, interested.
“Celia,” a smile of greeting, “you’re back. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. It just happened. I didn’t feel anything. It just sort of happened.”
“Let’s try it again.”
I stared at her.
“Come on. Think about something you want to get away from. I know, that dinner party I told you about, the one when Clive talked to that woman photographer all night and I didn’t know anybody.” Her shoulders sagged; her image wavered. She was gone.
“Clara, come back!”
“It worked.” Her voice was exultant. “Come on, Celia, try.”
“I don’t want to. Please come back.”
“In a minute.”
I felt scared, lonely. I thought that there had been plenty of times when I would have loved to be invisible. The high school dances, before I knew better and stopped going. Oh God, trying not to stare at Walter Griffin as he sauntered in my direction, but also not looking away in case he did want to ask me to dance.
I started. I couldn’t see myself. I reached for Clara’s hand.
We went in and out of being invisible. Our lives didn’t change much. Lighter and more pliant than most people, we floated in this new element, entering museums and movies for free, watching others unobserved, though it was hard to remember not to talk, and more than once our voices puzzled or scared some passerby.
Before, we had avoided going anywhere near Clive’s house, though we were drawn to it, imagining the blue shutters, the brick stairs, the one pine tree in front. Now, invisible, we walked past it often, gorging ourselves on pain and the freedom to feel it. Once, we peered in the kitchen window.
“Wonder If he still keeps a jar of caviar in the fridge,” I said.
“And green olives.”
“Ugh,” I responded. Clara liked to eat bitter things. I loved everything fattening, sweet or salty.
“You know, he keeps the back door key under the third geranium.”
“I know.” I thought ruefully of Clive’s luck; I had never let myself in while Clara was waiting for him in the bedroom room with a book.
“Let’s go in.”
“Clar!”
“Why not? I’m hungry.”
The key clicked, scaring me. We entered cautiously. The house reeked of his presence and I wanted him. I also wanted to smash the antique porcelain fu dog in the hall, to kick the Oriental rugs into a heap, scrawl on the etchings, and, most of all, to batter the shiny, inscrutable suit of armor that stood on the landing of the stairs. His perfection, his horrible self-sufficiency.
“Clara,” I whispered. I had gone into the living room without her. I called into the doorway of each room except the bedroom. If I didn’t find her soon, I knew I would wait, visible, on Clive’s bed for his appearance, probably with a startled woman holding his hand.
“Hi,” she answered in the kitchen. “I’m eating.” An enormous sandwich, several layers of cheese and meat, lifted into the air.
A few evenings later we felt restless. There were no movies we wanted to see and Clara’s television bored us. The summer air settled on my shoulders. I stretched my arm; it was like moving through soup. “I wonder what he’s doing.”
“Fucking.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“We could go see.”
“Okay,” I surprised myself by agreeing.
He was alone. He lay among his colored pillows, the sheets crumpled around him. His body was thin, long. He looked vulnerable, yet closed. We stood several feet from the bed, holding hands, trying to be angry. Clara sobbed once and he stirred, an uneasy sleeper.
“Should we go?” I whispered.
“Yes. Oh, he looks so innocent.”
I pulled her toward the door, my stomach furry. She reached out as we passed him and laid her fingers on his thigh. He sprang up.
We clattered down the stairs and fumbled with the front door lock. In the uproar of our escape, I can’t be sure I heard his voice, higher than usual, shouting behind us.
At my apartment we fell into the two fat chairs. Clara finally spoke, “I bet he was really scared.”
Her face twisted between a smile and a sob. My mouth twitched and we laughed.
“Oh God, can you imagine? He must be petrified.”
“Good.”
“Celia,” Clara looked at me eagerly, her full-lipped mouth half open, “Let’s go back; let’s really scare him.”
“Yes.” My tongue lay in my mouth like a pastel lozenge. Evil had a delicious taste.
For a week we didn’t talk about that night. We stayed visible and saw several movies. On Friday we went to a department store. The number of customers surprised us until we realized it was lunch hour. I felt uneasy among the crowd. Clara gasped. “Look.” She pointed and vanished.
Clive stood by a table, examining a bolt of blue cotton printed with enormous red roses. The blue matched his eyes and, possibly, his living room curtains. In the daylight, I saw he had gotten very tan.
His head turned, and I disappeared, reaching for Clara’s hand. We stood still. I was afraid the shoppers would bump into seemingly empty space, more afraid to try to push through them. Clive bought several yards of the fabric and left with the parcel under his arm. The store began to empty; lunch hour was over. “Let’s get out of here.” I pulled Clara into visibility.
That evening we went to his room. It was sunset, the sky a tender pink-tinged blue. Colors fluoresced in that light–the geraniums by the door, the roses on the new cloth draped over the living room sofa. We climbed the stairs quietly. Clive lay against his pillows, his right hand resting on an open book by his side. He was looking at some treachery, his eyes reflective, inward. He wasn’t thinking about us.
Clara gripped his arms. I sat on his legs and unbuttoned his shirt.
His mouth, like an O, floated above us, the screams issuing from the cream colored ceiling, the round moon scaling the window.
Judith Serin has taught Literature at CCA for many years. Her books include the poetry collection, “Hiding in the World” (Eidelon Editions), and an artist’s book featuring Serin’s poetry in collaboration with book artist Nikki Thompson, “Days Without (Sky)” (Deconstructed Artichoke Press). She has published numerous short stories and poems in journals and anthologies.
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Bloodwork at 341
Flash Fiction by Ric HoebenHere, it reeked something sulphurous of an election day, and none of the big political names meant anything of significance to me. All I craved after was getting back to the resort and out of the steamy haze of summer sidewalk.
My wife, she’d had me call down to the liquor store to see if they were open—she wanted that blueberry vodka stuff again, we’d been tearing through the bottles going on four day straight, we’d been put up for her week’s vacation at the Pampas Inn, and all of it smacked of something she and I were not greatly accustomed to in our normal days of bluejean living. I’d been laid off from General Electric for a thinking problem, wifey had slaved as a paralegal back home in Sellars, slaved so damn hard her boss gave her this fat relax week at his condo. And so, we had lobster, we had impolite sex, we had jacuzzi, we had the sticky linger of blueberry in the mouth each morning, waiting to greet us with its great, morning punish.
I got myself down to the familiar brick store, sniffed it, licked its walls. Inside, they knew my name now, they smiled at my face now, they said hello to my liquor eyes now—I was their boy, the new daddy on the streets. They probably thought I’d become a regular, a man they’d see on and on for years, a man from just over on the South Causeway. But I was far, far from home. I paid for the Smirnoff half gallon and nodded and left out the ever-bell-clanking door.
It had occurred to me that I was a dying animal. I’d been living it, day in/day out, dehydrated, depressed, head in a fog, and testosterone at a record low, had given up smoking, even did a few push-ups here and there, none of it built me back up. I thought the present resort trip would help. It had not.
Cloudy, cloudy, cloudy, I ran square into a bum. A Mexican one, and the precious vodka shattered as he whistled tunes unknown.
“What the hell?” I screamed. “As if I am not feeling bad enough, as if I am not thinking about suicide some nights!”
He scooped down to pick up the shards of glass. Why, I wondered, did a bum pass by these affluent paths anyhow, who was he in his Latino skin and why here?
“Go to church?” he said from his kneel. He had no sweat about him, even in flannels and beard.
“Look, daddy, you really shat on my parade here, and I’m thinking you better give ‘em to me.”
“Give what?” he fired back.
“Whatever money you’ve cadged for today, you give it all on over to me. You rained on it, you rained on my parade. My wife’s, too, daddy.”
“For years I’ve come down this way. For years I’ve been looking for a cross. Plenty of churches, but not a damn cross on any one of ‘em.”
He put out his hand as if he wanted to shake mine, as if he were a gentleman golfer, as if his Jaguar were parked just in earshot.
I snarled and walked back in the direction of the high throne of the wife, empty, desolate. I’d have to conjure up some story, get another Andrew Jackson out of her mauve purse and march right back down the same, stupid street. My ears rang and the haze of my head pounded—I would have done sloppy murder for a thick cheeseburger and a Mountain Dew, but nothing like that existed in the Gehenna as I knew it.
Each step hurt, and I wanted to vomit all of the anxieties of my life out across the glimmer of the flagstones underneath me. What had bitten me, what had come up in me? My tongue tried to escape my body, my fingers did not move as commanded, my brain could not control even my bladder, and I gave over to peeing, draining it all down my Walmart khakis. I’d done this before, but it had been a while. Now here it had happened again, here in public with cars passing and crisp mailmen walking, and four irons a-hitting. Here I stood drenched in my dying.
He was right. He was damned right.
I saw a church, something straight out of a Clint Eastwood, and then another one, taller, like a standard out of South Beach, and a small pink one, immaculate was its garden, its awning, its arbor, but it had no cross to speak of—none of them churches had a cross. And this fact, for reasons unknown, was one enormous, hard pill to swallow.
I began to run, my piss-wet, sloshing legs somehow finding an energy, past the identical condos and mailboxes and seashell prints and oyster decorations and garden gnomes, but never a cross, never a cross, never a cross. The very word got stuck in my higher functioning: cross, cross, cross. Shitless, I could not stop running and looking as quick as my eyeballs would work for me. I flew down Addison Avenue and saw flamingoes and highschoolers tanning their round buns, but no old ruggeds thereat. Sprinted up Victory Lane and saw the Import Cars place and a woman and her dalmatian and her husband pumping iron as he walked alongside her, but what I wanted to find would not come out and be shown.
I ran myself ragged, as they say. Ran myself to the point of thick exhaustion, sat down on a corner and tried to summon something new. My wife? Could I call her? Could she come get me? Could she leave that damn king size and that damn watermelon and that damn ocean breeze smacking her pale thighs and come straight down to real life and fetch me? But I did not even know where to tell her I was. The streets had become something unfamiliar. The election signs were long gone, that eternal striking of Titleists, absent.
***
Looking to my port and then to my starboard, I found the drizzle. I knew the storm would press on, I’d seen the weatherman dance and ramble on about it, back in the morning, when she and I were sharing cantaloupes and coffees and working off the vise of the hangover and there being nothing much more to do than fish-stare at the goofy weatherman and the soaps, like our parents always did, like our grandparents always did, like some things never change. But under the graying drip of rain, I hunkered down and realized that all nature of things did change, that cells die and nations war and people get fired in America and babies are born with or without you and leaders fall and money not only talks but shouts sometimes and, and, churches and yards and businesses exist in motion without Jesus crosses to them. My testosterone was low, and I had no job, and my only friend anymore was my wife and her big thighs and her lackadaisicalness. The tranquil drizzle turned into regular and, then, after that, supreme. The drops came on with a mean sting to them, and I caught sight of a fine canopy of live oaks to sit myself under and wait out things. I crawled after that spot, my nails in the soft earth, my useless body going along with their small gains, and finally, painstakingly, I reached the shelter of love, that abode of power, the endless castle of home.
Ric Hoeben, M.F.A. from The University of Florida, lives in Georgetown, South Carolina, by the coast. His most recent work has been found in Tampa Review, storySouth, Glimmer Train, James Dickey Review, Clapboard House, The Monarch Review, Spork, Atticus Review, Hobart, Connotation Press, Burrow Press Review, Pithead Chapel, Umbrella Factory, the Newer York, and Waccamaw.
image courtesy of Tomo Sodoge via unsplash
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Over the River and Stabbed to Death – Essay by Randy Osborne
My childhood home is for sale – bank property, cheap – because of the murder in the backyard. I might buy it.
Not murder by the standard of law, the jury decided, but a violent and fatal act just the same. And not in the yard but in the main room of the house, the room where my grandmother Madeline worked her sewing-machine treadle decades ago. See how she pushes the fabric through and the needle jumps and cloth cascades off the table. The Singer whirrs, its clackety chatter like celluloid flapping loose on a full reel when the movie’s done. The curtain can never lift on that screen again, of course. Ridiculous to think. And yet.
Here’s what happened at 1802 S. Fourth St. in Rockford, Ill., about a week before Christmas 2011, according to trial testimony. Terry Johnson, 47, visits resident Raymond Gitchel, 59, for the purpose of smoking cocaine. They smoke cocaine. Johnson tries to steal a bag of heroin from another guest. He and Gitchel argue. Gitchel tells Johnson to get out. Johnson refuses. The dispute grows noisy, and someone appears from the second floor of the house with a baseball bat. But Gitchel acts first. He plunges a knife deep into Johnson’s thigh. Johnson cries out to all present, “He just stuck me!” Then to Gitchel, “I can’t believe you just cut me! I can’t believe you just stuck me!” Finally Johnson limps away – trouser leg no doubt soaked already – complaining that he will need stitches. He doesn’t get them. The knife has sheared his femoral artery. Johnson is bleeding to death.
Later, one of Gitchel’s housemates reports Johnson begging for help outside. Everybody ignores this. “Oh well, he should have left,” Gitchel remarks. The temperature sinks to 21 degrees that night. Next morning Johnson lies face up in the grass beside the chain-link fence.
What should we do, somebody asks. “I don’t know,” Gitchel says. “I’m going to make a sandwich.”
My grandmother Mad would love this story. I love this story. She raised me.
On pulpy detective magazines Mad raised me. On Poe and Hawthorne and the Bible (Old Testament only, please). On mythology, too, which is why Johnson’s thigh injury makes me think of the Grail King, his grievous wound, his barren land.
Mad raised me alone, her husband having jolted the family by leaving for some strumpet he met at work. An old man. They could hardly believe the sap still flowed. But when does it ever not?
In news video the day after the crime, trench-coated cops tromp the plank steps of Mad’s yellow-taped front porch. The same steps where I once sat, chin in hands, and waited for my life to start. I would grow up a writer or doctor – if the latter, a surgeon, specifically. I would incise people. The blade, like words, can harm or heal. Or I would be a radio star.
Gitchel paid $40,000 for the house in 1999, the year of my second marriage; today the bank asks $8,365. But the roof leaks, the wiring’s shot, and the furnace is stripped. “I don’t even go inside,” the real-estate agent tells me. Floors are falling through. The place is condemned.
Many scholars of the Grail legend believe that the word “thigh” is a euphemism for genitals, the king’s injury “a dolorous stroke.” Dolorous. Delores.
***
On a night in 1986, Ronald Ower became another man knifed and left to die in Delores Park, my favorite patch of San Francisco green. Teenagers wanting to “rob a faggot” attacked him as he made his way home. I learned about Ower while researching morel mushrooms.
A delicacy prized by chefs all over the world, the morel belongs to the genus Morchella.
Species names roll out like a magical chant: esculenta, rufobrunnea, augusticeps. Ower, a university student and aspiring biologist, was the first to cultivate morels. The New Scientist took notice. “Morel enthusiasts rejoice!” The day was near when they’d no longer need to “grovel through the woods” for “a few of these delectable fungi.” Ranging tan to black, morels are unmistakably phallic, as an author hints in the journal Mushroom. “I step back, circle and, for a moment, admire the spectacle. Stooping, I run my fingers gently along the surface of the cap, in and out of the grooves and hollows, down the long rubbery stem.” In the Midwest, the 1960s witnessed a morel bonanza thanks to Dutch elm disease’s massive kill-off. All those rotting stumps.
Ower grew morels on his kitchen table. He filed for a patent, outlined his methods in Mycologia, and signed a development contract with an agricultural biotech outfit in Michigan. But by the time his patent cleared, Ower no longer dwelt among the quick.
His killing happened, coincidentally, on the night of my birthday. Because I scan the world non-stop for such discoveries, I can’t help but notice also that Ower’s initials match my own. It makes sense to me that his last name, spelled as if to suggest a debt, is pronounced like a unit of time.
***
In 1967, my mother clinched her own second husband and retrieved me from Mad. Our time felt less deep than I expected. I had her at last, yet I didn’t. He had her, in that bedroom down the hall. This my mother and I shared: During the damp seasons, we foraged in the woods for morels. “Delicious because they are wild,” she told me, herself now less wild than ever.
Super-domestic, in fact. Free of the workplace and happily kitchen-bound, she refined her cooking skills to the delight of my retired stepfather. A few years passed. They decided to scale it up. They bought a restaurant.
Here I washed dishes, and swept floors, and met Cheryl. Doe-eyed, full-lipped Cheryl, 16, with a pageboy haircut and springy step, at her first job, waiting tables. The sexual draw was almost immediate, and mutual.
I was 21, and I was the son of her boss. She wasn’t even legal. I didn’t care. Did, but didn’t.
Also I was the obvious choice, wasn’t I, when Cheryl’s parents told her that she could only attend the outdoor concert at Sinnissippi Park if accompanied by someone older, someone responsible?
The music is nearly over. Cheryl sits between me and her friends. I am behaving. But then, I can … feel her. I turn and meet her stare. Reader, I lean into that jailbait. Her lips first a pliant mash, then breathily open. Noses to cheeks. Tongues teaching each other, being taught. It goes on for about a half-minute.
We pull away and cast our eyes at anything elsewhere, dizzy.
The rest is hardly worth telling. Cheryl’s friends take her home. At work Monday we’re both shy. I speak to her in a distant way, almost cordially after that, certain that I’ll be taken into custody any day.
My parents sell the restaurant, and it’s years later when I see Cheryl’s wedding notice. The last name of her fiancé is peculiar and sticks with me – might have anyway – and his first name is the same as mine. Naturally, I attach meaning to this, take points. She wanted me.
***
2013: Jurors acquitted Gitchel of murder but convicted him of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced him to five years in prison, with credit for 508 days served. At the Rockford newspaper’s website, where I went to comb the archives for details, the current front page blasted news of a major drug bust. “Nearly 30 people have been taken off the streets along with around two million dollars’ worth of cocaine, marijuana, and prescription drugs. Among those arrested [are] a dentist, a high school football coach, and other area professionals.” Out of curiosity, since I knew a few people in town, I scanned the names – and there he was. The other Randy.
Had their marriage lasted? I Googled. Located him, but no Cheryl. Here’s a Facebook photo. Paunchy fellow in hotel pool with blonde babe, definitely not Cheryl. Rings on their pertinent fingers.
More legwork brought me Cheryl’s address. The Google street view shows a single-level house, solid white, set back from the road under a grove of trees that dapple the sunlight. In the driveway a small car, also white. Maybe it’s the weekend, she’s home. By herself?
I would contact her. Not online – that’s too impersonal. Phone call? Potentially awkward.
A letter, I’ll compose a letter. Everyone appreciates real mail with handwriting, ink.
No, I will do none of this. Nor will I buy Mad’s old place in some sorry attempt to grow again what can sprout one time only, and best existed wild. A torn, scattered-to-the-winds patchwork impossible to stitch back together.
But I hope Cheryl has replaced him, replaced the Randy that I foolishly imagine “replaced” me. Gendered humankind roams the earth with lonely holes and then each of us ends up in one. Nomads. Monads.
How can I, this bag of meat, dream ideas from nothing but air, make sparks in mud? How can I begin to know myself, before the credits roll? As with poor Johnson when he staggered from the Gitchel house, nobody wants to hear our shocked complaints. The wound is worse than we know. It finishes us.
Randy Osborne’s essays are listed in the Notable sections of Best American Essays 2015 and 2016. His writing has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Full Grown People, The Lascaux Review, Flyleaf Journal, Empty Mirror, Identity Theory, 3Elements Review, Bodega, SLAB, Loose Change, Green Mountains Review, Spry Literary Journal, Scene Missing, Thread, and other small magazines, as well as the Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal Constitution, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His work has been published in four print anthologies and nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, as well as Best of the Net. This essay originally appeared in SunStruck Magazine.
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Everything I Know About My Great Grandfather – Memoir by Walburga Appleseed
My great-grandfather had a Bavarian accent, a German passport, and an eye made of glass as a souvenir from fighting in the First World War. He played the zither. My great-grandfather married a woman from Basel-Land, a local beauty who obsessed about tidyness and created stunning embroideries which she displayed on their dark-red sofa and which my mother, the grandchild, wasn’t allowed to touch. He played the zither for my mother. She played the concertina. Later, they played together. My great-grandfather knew the ouvertures to all the operas and operettes ever played at Zürich’s theatres during his lifetime, his favourite being Rossini’s “Wilhelm Tell,” and whenever he went to the opera, he’d take my grandmother, his daughter, with him.
My great-grandfather with surname Gammel, blond hair and blue eyes, mysteriously turned into a Swedish citizen when the Second World War broke out and my grandmother and her German passport lived too close to the border and needed to invent neutral origins to keep her going through life in a hostile Swiss village. He brewed beer for a living. My great-grandfather brewed beer for a living and lived in an apartment in the middle of Zürich, with the river Limmat flowing on one side, the railway track running along another, and a large road along a third side, and my great-grandfather took great pleasure in all three of these features, because he said he never got bored at home–sittting out on the balcony, waiting for the 15:20 train up north, or the 17:30 train down south, watching the boats along the river, or the trams, cars and horses on the road. He brewed beer and played the zither. My great-grandfather had to leave his beloved apartment when he couldn’t live on his own anymore, and he eventually died in an old people’s home somewhere in Zürich, of neglect, or abuse, nobody knows which exactly, and my grandmother was too busy running a farm, bringing up four children and dealing with abject poverty to be able to investigate. I’ve still got the zither.
Walburga Appleseed likes her chocolate dark, her wine rich and her fiction short. Her flash fiction has appeared online and in print. She recently won the Winchester Prize for flash fiction. In a parallel existence, she also writes for children. Visit her online at https://walburgaappleseed.com.
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The Quiet Place – First Fiction by Roberto Reyna
We’ve been together for as long as I can remember. The origins of the GHST club may have been a mere façade, but the same cannot be said for its importance to us. We came up with the idea for a fake community service club to complete our school requirement in what felt like an instant; it wasn’t hard, the four of us literally make up GHST. I’m Grey, you could say that I’m always a step ahead of the others, making me the natural leader.
Heath is the quietest among us, but he’s always listening. Sara, although I’d never admit it to her face, is the smartest; she just needs to work on her arrogance. Timothy is a bit reckless, sometimes too headstrong for his own good. We’ve been friends ever since we met, so many years ago, at the orphanage. I’m thoroughly convinced, that if it weren’t for these specific circumstances, we wouldn’t have become as close as we are now.
We all agree, every day at school is exactly the same, save for one small difference; in one way or another, every day is, in some way, blander than the day before. The school is always so loud; so much yelling, so many footsteps. The loudest sound is the constant drone that comes from nowhere. The best part of every school day is when we meet up for GHST. We finally shut the door on the overwhelming pounding that persisted throughout the day, but we are still in the school, so it is still loud. We don’t really do anything in GHST, it’s usually best to just sit in silence until we decide to go back to the orphanage.
When it’s finally time to leave school and end what lasts forever, we all walk to the subway together. Sara guides Heath when he forgets his walking stick. Timothy stops every once in a while to catch his breath, or use his inhaler if need be. I walk a couple steps ahead everyone. The rattle of the tracks echoes in our heads, no one says anything about it, but it’s clear that we all hear it. Just when we are all ready to continue the routine, Timothy yells, “Hey! Look at that!” Before anyone can react, he jumps onto the tracks and dives onto the ground. I dive in after him, with Sara right behind me, and try to get him out before anyone gets hurt. Heath stumbles without Sara to guide him and falls onto the tracks too. The rumbling gets louder, a bright light flashes, I can hear so much that I can’t hear anything. Timothy helps Sara lift Heath and I glide out after them. We all take a second to collect ourselves on the platform.
“What were you thinking!?” Sara yells at Timothy.
“Check it out,” he says, holding a bright, white scrap of paper in front of our faces.
Heath clutches his arm and says, “I could’ve broken something.” We decide that it would be best to just walk to the orphanage at this point, so we do.
We push the heavy door open and try to walk in as quietly as possible. All of our footsteps creak and the sound bounces off the walls. No one notices, though. Everyone seems a bit more somber than usual. In the living room, Timothy shows us what he found on the tracks. “It’s a map”, he says. “Everything looks straightforward enough, except for the destination. It says that it leads to ‘the quiet place’”. Sara stares in awe at the paper.
“Is he telling the truth?” Heath asks.
“I think so,” Sara responds.
We decide that we have to follow it. Tomorrow. We will leave tomorrow. We all go to our rooms to sleep, Sara clutches the map and stares at the ceiling, unable to sleep as usual. Timothy breathes heavily. Heath tosses and turns in bed. I’m already asleep.
It’s time to go. We open the door as softly as we can, but the hinges squeak with every inch the door moves. We are out. “It looks like the map only takes us into the woods, but it stops pretty abruptly, it might not be safe,” Timothy remarks. Our silence reassures him that nothing can hinder GHST. A homeless man lies, asleep, on the sidewalk. He looks tranquil. Sara drapes my jacket over him. She feels cold, but she doesn’t feel like she needs it. We don’t even stop for a second.
Suddenly, the buildings twist into trees, the sidewalks melt into dirt. The wind rips across our faces and we cover our ears. “Where are we?” Heath asks.
“We aren’t there yet”, Sara replies. A dog circles us, his cries make Heath grimace. Timothy offers the dog his sandwich, Heath follows by handing Sara his water bottle which she pours out for the dog. We keep pace.
“The end is coming up,” Timothy declares. We find two paths at the end of the trail. One leads up a steep hill and the other seems to be blocked by fallen trees. After careful judgement, we decide to walk up the hill. I feel different. So do Heath and Sara and Timothy. They run up the hill just in front of me. Timothy sprints faster than he ever has before. We reach the summit. Beautiful trees that sway gently in the wind surround a park. An old sign reads, “The Quiet Place.” We all stop, I can hear everything, we all can.
“Let’s go sit on that red bench,” suggests Heath. Everyone walks over. We all sit down.
“I’m tired,” says Sara. We all are. Timothy breathes deeply, exhaling slowly. I sit down on the bench, next to GHST. We sit there for as long as I can remember.
Roberto Reyna is 18 years-old and a student at Haverford College. He grew up in Puerto Rico. He wrote this story between his high school graduation and his freshman year in college. Follow him on Twitter @antiderivada.
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Delilah’s Skull – Flash Fiction by Nan Wigington
When my dad died, I wanted to sell everything, but my brothers said no, take something, so I took Delilah’s Skull.
My dad kept cabinets. Mostly at the hospital. Patient parts, he said. For research. Some cabinets contained bones – the odd compressed spine, tibias, broken ulnas. He had organs, too, slices of cirrhotic livers, a cadre of cancerous lungs, eyes in jars of viscous liquid. They rolled upward when you shook them. The only part he didn’t keep locked away was Delilah’s skull. That stayed at the corner of his desk at home.
It was hardly a skull, though. No attached mandible, occipital. Just the hard cap of parietal and frontal bone. I used to like to run my finger along the coronal suture.
Until he stopped smoking, my dad used Delilah as an ashtray. Butterscotch candies lived there for awhile, too. But I remember it best empty. When you could see the trace of blood vessels. They ran down the yellow sides, dried tributaries of ancient rivers.
Delilah was my dad’s cadaver. He grew up in this profession when bodies were easy. No one donated, so you just took. Still the act of taking unhinges most of us a little. Even my dad.
My dad used to pretend he went a little crazy because of the formaldehyde and phenol, but he admitted later that it was the act of unzipping the bag and seeing her face – its walnut gleam, its perfect symmetry – half-lidded eyes, a crown of red hair.
Like all of us, he tried to justify his act, looked for proof of her bad life…tattoos, needle marks, wounds. But, over and over again, the only violence he could find were the strikes of his own scalpel. And his thievery. The hunger of it. Taking the heart and lungs first. Then the ovaries. My dad said his partner tore into her abdomen, cracked her pelvis like a hungry drunk, and ripped her perineum.
My dad hated most when he cut her throat, removed the larynx. Gone the curtain of speech and song. He said he touched the ossicles of her middle ear and whispered, “Sorry, sorry.”
What happened when they cut into Delilah’s skull? How many coils and folds did they find in her brain? What decisions and indecisions, what forgetting, what remembering? My dad said that back then, they were in the habit of throwing all that away.
I am my father’s daughter. I save what I have not destroyed. Delilah’s skull remains in plain sight on my desk at the hospital. Sometimes a patient picks her up and holds her in the palm of a hand.
Once a nurse put condoms in Delilah. Another time someone dumped in chocolate hearts. As if she were a stain to be covered. Both offerings were cast out. No one understands. Nothing can appease the long dead.
Nan Wigington‘s work has appeared in Gravel, The Airgonaut, Sicklitmagazine.com, and No Extra Words. She has worked as an unclaimed property clerk, an accounting analyst, an ensemble actress, and a paraprofessional in an K-2 Autism center classroom.
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Kingdoms – flash fiction by Christopher Woods
They had lived in the dark, in its midst, some fifteen years. Ever since the children left, fleeing the house of perfection. And, the house of boredom.
He considered all this, driving through the night to their mountain cabin. Oncoming headlights, though there were very few, illuminated the snow on either side of the road. The darkness that followed each passing car triggered his thoughts back to the curving black road.
The road doubled back, then surged ahead, always elusive. It was treacherous going, as if there might be something, maybe even evil, along that road that night, as if something might, at any second, hiss and spit at them.
She sat beside but away from him. Giddy in the dark, she hummed along with the big band music on the radio and rubbed her thighs. These years she was spent, the same as he. And they both knew it all too well.
Already, on this late night road, they were quite beyond the boredom that had seeped inside the doors of their marriage. Then, above the sound of the music and the heater, she spoke. Best slow down, she said. He turned up the radio and scanned channels, looking for something she would not like. Best slow down, she repeated, louder than before.
Instead, he pressed his foot on the accelerator, hard. In his mind, he was going to rise above their shell of a family. To him, they would rise up from that twisting, viperlike road. They would glide through the dark sky where stars crisscrossed the blackness. He imagined himself going beyond all this. He didn’t know for how long, or even when he would return. He had bourbon singing in his blood.
She sighed, forgetting the song she had been humming. Looking away from him, she saw her sad reflection in the window. She imagined a snake was in their cabin. It was a snake that waited patiently in the night. She hoped that it was a very poisonous one, and that it was coiled on his side of the bed. Waiting.
He too was dreaming of a snake. His snake, also patient, had lived in the world long enough to know that waiting counted for much, maybe for everything. His snake was along this very road, this very night. It was coiled on the side of the road where he planned to push her out.
And though they both knew this was the dead of winter and snakes would be hibernating, it didn’t matter. For them, snakes would come out this night. These snakes could be commanded.
These snakes were a necessity.
It happened quickly, both of them silent and lost in thought. In an instant he passed out and his hands loosened from the steering wheel. Panicked, she looked out the window and once again came face to face with her reflection. Her eyes were frozen. When at last she broke her gaze and tried to take the wheel herself, it was too late.
The car seemed to fly, as he had wanted it to do. But it flew to the side, into the air, finally falling hundreds of feet to the snowbound trees below.
Beneath the roots of those trees, snakes huddled in balls, sleeping, awaiting the thaw. They dreamed of possibilities. Of warm beds in mountain cabins, where the people, for one reason or another, had gone away.
And, in their dreams, the people never returned. The sleeping snakes knew how waiting could count for much. How, if they waited long enough, even kingdoms could change hands.
Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in Houston and Chappell Hill, Texas. He has published a novel, THE DREAM PATCH, a prose collection, UNDER A RIVERBED SKY, and a book of stage monologues for actors, HEART SPEAK. His work has appeared in THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW, NEW ORLEANS REVIEW, COLUMBIA and GLIMMER TRAIN, among others. His photographs can be seen in his gallery –http://christopherwoods.zenfolio.com/
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Day 21: And Now, The Outline (of sorts)
“All human happiness and misery take the form of action,” Aristotle wrote.
If you’ve gotten this far, you know I have a thing about not outlining your novel too early. I think an outline before you begin can stifle the process and force you in the wrong direction.
Now, however, three weeks in, is a good time to get a kind of outline down on the page. This is about the shape of your story.
Write this down:
- Your inciting action: the first thing that happens in your book, the even that sets off everything else
- Background: List three events that happened before the action of your novel, three events that explain how your protagonist came to be in this situation
- Development: Take the scenes that you’ve already written, and put them in order an order that makes sense.
- End: Write how you think your novel should end (this can change, but get something down).
- Now: what’s missing? Make a list of scenes that still need to be written to get your protagonist from the inciting action to the end of the book.
That’s quite a bit of work for today, but if you made quick work of it and your writing window hasn’t closed, choose one scene from the “What’s missing?” list and write it.
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Day 20: Theme
In addition to identifying certain subjects in your work, when you look back over what you have already written, you will notice certain themes emerging. Theme is important in a novel because it ties the various elements of plot and character together. If a plot is the sequence of events, the theme is the big idea of the book.
Theme is at heart of that all-important truth about fiction: we get to the universal by means of the particular. While your theme can be expressed in broad, universal terms, it must be revealed through your specific characters in their very specific and particular situation.
Maybe you novel actually began with the big idea: you wanted to write a book about how we hurt those we love, or a book about good triumphing over evil, or a book about how the truth is so much different from what it appears to be on the surface.
If you already know your big idea, write it here. If you have more than one, that’s okay. Write down as many as you have. You can narrow it down later.
The big idea behind the book is:
Additional themes worth exploring are:
Now, take the BIG IDEA and write a scene that bears that theme out.
For example, if the theme is, “We never really know the ones love,” and your protagonist is a married man, you might write a scene in which a man discovers something about his wife that makes him realize that he never really knew her. Whoever your characters are, they are the vehicle through which you will reveal your theme.