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Category: 2014
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The Exile
memoir by Soul Vang
MY WIFE AND I drove slowly down a plumeria-lined road, passing through a neighborhood of sixties and seventies bungalows. The road was narrow, edged by emerald grass shoulders and hedged by tall bushes.
As we reached the end of the lane, there was a large mango tree to our left. A gravel drive cut through the hedge next to the mango tree. The address on the mailbox by the gravel drive told us we had reached our destination.
At the end of the gravel drive, shadowed by trees and almost hidden by tall bushes, was a little bungalow.
“How does a Hmong man live here, hidden in this landscape, among strangers?” I asked my wife.
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Persephone
Flash fiction by Elizabeth Varadan
My mother returned to her parents in L. A. whenever things didn’t go well in her life. To sort things out, she would explain to me. In time, I grew used to these trips and thought of L. A. as the one home that never changed. There were the applesauce turnovers on the day of our welcome, followed, days later, by excited scenes that left my mother in tears, followed by our departure that left my grandmother in tears, until the next welcome home with turnovers.
My grandmother bought an abundance of pomegranates when they were in season, and through successive visits, I developed a taste for their tart sweetness.
The November I was fourteen, I was into Greek myths, particularly the story of Persephone. Carefully peeling away the pomegranates’ russet husks, I couldn’t help thinking about the deal Ceres worked out with the God of the Underworld—six months in each location; almost as bad as my mother’s yo-yo-ing life.
After I peeled off the thin membrane in each section, I’d spill the seeds into a little dish, where they glistened, like the tiny garnets in my grandmother’s earrings. And I wondered: did Ceres welcome her daughter home each time, only to make scenes that would chase her off again? Or did she cry hard enough each time Persephone departed with her husband to make sure she’d return?
And if I ran away from home, as I was considering, would my mother be able to find me? Ceres knew where Persephone was, but in my fantasy, I would bleach my hair, wear high heels, slather on lots of make-up, get a job in some city we hadn’t been, and then I would stay there. If I could sort out my life, maybe my mother could sort out hers.
I saw garnet earrings last week at a flea market. I almost bought them. Instead, I bought a pomegranate from the farmer’s market at the far end of the grounds, past all the junk stalls.
At home, eating the tangy seeds, I thought of Persephone and the weeping Ceres. I thought of my grandmother who never could let go of her children after the loss of her first two sons. I thought of my mother, the rebel daughter, who had caused my grandmother so much grief and then kept spoiling her own life so she had to come home again.
And I thought, too, of myself—my mother’s own wayward daughter whom she thought lost to her for so many years, until the long winter was over.
Elizabeth Varadan’s work has appeared in The Rockford Review, Word Riot, Art Times, Long Story Short, Flash Me Magazine, Epiphany, Melic Review, Whim’s Place, Laughter Loaf, Banyan Review, C-Oasis, and Notes Magazine.
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On the Nightwalk
by Mark Sheerin
He was on the road when they picked him up and it was night. There he was, large as life, in outsize Day-Glo, a coat like they used working on the motorways, except he worked for a fashion magazine.
The coat was bought second-hand.
“Can I ask you where you’re going?”
The police had the car window down. From all the vehicular markings and the lights he could tell this was a serious business..
“To the station,” he said.
He did not say he was leaving the country. That was surely understood.
“At this time?”
There was no mirth in the car, no flexibility, no grounds for argument.
“I was heading down there on the off-chance.”
“You’ve missed the last train now.”
The police said so with a kind of omniscient clarity.
“There’s always tomorrow’s first train.”
Said with a shrug, but they did not take kindly to him waiting for dawn, even though there had been a lot of that recently, a lot of nights spent vigilant against an enemy. It got so he was happy only on the move, remaining one step ahead of police, doctors, parents, special agents, white slave traders. Which is where this coat might really have helped, a high-visibility anti-kidnap strategy, in theory if not in fact.
“Where d’you live?”
He was not in the habit of fighting or lying. His strain of delinquency wasn’t up to it.
“You’d better get in, son.”
Son, he thought, Sonny Jim, Sunbeam. So let the re-oedipalisation process begin, he thought, then opened the passenger door like a lamb. The rear seat smelled of leather and he thought once again of the minotaur and his labyrinth and the darkness with which he was locked in combat. The radio crackled as the police upfront called in their report.
“Caucasian male. Aged around 20”
By god though, he was alive. While parents and peers slept he was under arrest, the subject of a radio report.
“Inappropriately dressed,” came the voice.
And he could never understand that final comment. There he was, on his way to Europe, where the jacket would make him famous. Tell me officer, he wanted to say, is that really such a crime?
Mark Sheerin is a journalist from Brighton, UK. He covers art for, among others, Culture24, Hyperallergic and his own blog criticismism. His fiction has appeared in Litro, Metazen and Pages Of magazine. He also runs a spoken word event in local gallery CAC.