Fairy Tale Review 9780814341773

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Fairy Tale R eview The Grey Issue

Founder & Editor Kate Bernheimer Guest Editor, The Grey Issue Alissa Nutting, John Carroll University Advisory Board Donald Haase, Wayne State University Maria Tatar, Harvard University Marina Warner, University of Essex, UK Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota Assistant & Contributing Editor Timothy Schaffert, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Assistant Editors Tara Goedjen, University of Wollongong Drew Krewer, University of Arizona Original Print Design J. Johnson, DesignFarm Cover Art (inside frame) Kiki Smith, “Born” courtesy of the artist

Layout Ameliah Tawlks, Tara Reeser English Department’s Publications Unit, Illinois State University A publication of Fairy Tale Review Press

Fairy Tale R eview www.fairytalereview.com Electronic edition © 2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. Originally © 2012 by Fairy Tale Review Press. The Grey Issue (2012) 978-0-8143-4177-3 Fairy Tale Review is devoted to contemporary literary fairy tales and hopes to provide an elegant and innovative venue for writers working with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales. How can fairy tales help us to go where it is we are going, like Jean Cocteau’s magical horse? We hope to discover. Please know that Fairy Tale Review is not devoted to any particular school of writing, but rather to original work that in its very own way is imbued with fairy tales.

“You see, I don’t know any stories. None of the lost boys knows any stories.” —Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

Fairy Tale R eview The Grey Issue

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS Alissa Nutting Guest Editor’s Note • 15 Getting lost is the price of admission for discoveries good and bad, and some lessons cost far more than others.

Seth Abramson Three Poems • 17 I smell in the deep of a sack an unfortunate boy but for the eyelashes

Matt Bell The Fingerling (an excerpt) • 21 Not an arm, but an arm bud. Not a leg, but a leg bud, a proto-knee.

Molly Bendall Two Poems • 29 Leaves evaporate kindly and don’t trouble our alphabet game.

Wyatt Bonikowski Little Man • 31 I could not find myself among the voices around me.

Brittany Cavallaro Girl-King (iv) • 33 The last fire took your tiny house and your ermine mother and the tassels

Maile Chapman Sanctuary • 35 I hear her laughing at the heart of the maze, and though I walk every path of every year, I can never find the center.

Mimi Chubb Tears • 43 In the corners of Tom’s eyes, where before there had only ever been dark strands of slime and dark bits of sand, there were two perfectly shaped teardrops of the purest gold.

Tara Goedjen (Because Children Are Still Brave) • 48 I protest and they kick my cage.

Sara Gong The Mask • 56 The children liked to speculate upon whether or not the blood was real.

Carol Guess & Daniela Olszewska How to Be and Look Like a Mean Girl While in Girl Scouts or How to Make a Bullet Belt • 57 Mash burnt marshmallows into bullet pellets; paste to your waist. Wait. Finger pricks = blood sisters or saints.

Aireanne Hjelle girl you won’t remember • 59 You bared your teeth in joy and slept while spinning.

Desiree Holman Three Images • 60 Ashley Elizabeth Hudson Elegy for a Child Trapped Underground • 63 didn’t they always say to stay put, shocked pale, in one place?

Shane Jones Remy and the Crystals • 65 Remy once believed each pet on the dog’s head produced one crystal inside.

Jessica Joslin Three Sculptures • 69 Krystal Languell Your Blood Like an Animal • 72 your seizure ghost your jaw clamp and tongue blood pouring from mouth ghost

Stacey Levine Illustration by David Lasky The Castaways (excerpt) • 73 Each day had a sameness, a soothing constancy parallel to the disinterest of the earth.

Oksana Marafioti Krivoye Lake • 81 What can a fisherman’s son do, Ivan thought, if not try and better his station?

Adam Mcomber History of a Saint • 88 Still and white, she looked much like the landscape seen through the icy window set high on the museum wall.

Christopher Merkner Tomtens • 100 His mother had died; his father was plainly alone and poor.

Benjamin Nadler The Upper Harz • 106 The underground people—that tiny race who dwell in the caves, who stuff beehives with manure that is really gold

Andi Olsen, Lance Olsen & Davis Schneiderman Three Pieces • 108 The teeth’s faith itself may become a vacuole of tiny screams.

David James Poissant Fox King • 111 The girls knew then that they must run.

Gretchen Steele Pratt Vertigo • 121 The man on the pillar has bare feet the color of a bruise.

Imad Rahman Petty • 123 “Children who look like you,” he said, this time softly and like someone on TV, “need all the luck they can get.”

Matthew Salesses A Korean Fairy Tale • 134 During the time when people were still being born from eggs, but after the time when animals could turn into people, there were born twins.

Kevin Sampsell Telephone Girl • 139 Sometimes she winced at the things I said.

J. A. Tyler [ the second house ] • 143 An opposite side where flowers are glaciers, where foxes are bears.

Lee Upton Escape from the Dark Forest • 146 The cat uttered a cry—mechanical sounding, like a tiny door opening, a tiny door on the other side of the earth.

Laura Van Den Berg Cannibals • 154 My brother and I never asked the cannibals where their meals came from.

Rob Walsh The Dog • 160 They hadn’t ever killed a dog as a favor before.

Jillian Weise Elegy for Zahra Baker • 168 It is weird that I have all these legs in the attic but they would not let me keep the real leg.

Kellie Wells Ever After • 172 When the child is father of the man, there are, if you ask me, two people too many in the room.

Elizabeth Clark Wessel Three Poems • 184 Ants have made a home in my chest.

Deborah Woodard Two Poems • 187 I will buy your eyes and give you a fine pair of glass ones for free.

John Dermot Woods Whistleblower • 189

Contributor Notes • 198

Guest Editor’s Note

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When we speak of grey as a location, placing a thing into a grey area, the color represents territory where the definite becomes lost. Grey lets us know that the truth is not always clear; even the most well-known paths can turn strange when a low grey cloud of fog rolls in. Grey is an act of subtraction, the loss of sun, joy, and color. Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs, said Dickens. Since grey is a symbol for the loss of youth, it seems a fitting issue for a theme about youth who are lost. Getting lost is one of the most widely used narrative vehicles of all time. Once characters become lost, they can stumble upon anything—it’s a lightspeed bullet train between credibility and suspension of disbelief. Falling down a rabbit hole or stepping off the trail in a labyrinthine wood can transport a character to another world entirely in a manner of seconds. When I’m reading and the protagonist starts to get lost, my fingers press against the pages a little more tightly; I know that, positive or negative, something exciting is about to happen. “Lost” has always been a central element in my life. I am a misplacer and a forgetter. A wrong-turner. A daydreamer. In school, teachers always marveled at how I could get lost without even leaving my desk. “Earth-to-Alissa,” they’d say. “Please come back and join us in reality.” I did not frequently accept their invitations. I preferred being lost in my head. I liked what I found in there. Not much has changed; if I’ve fallen deep into thought while looking at a building as I’m waiting to cross the street, it’s not uncommon for well-meaning people to tap me on the shoulder. “You look lost,” they’ll smile. “Do you need directions?” When I was very young, I was convinced that I didn’t forget where I’d put things—instead, if a possession went missing, it was because the world had taken it from me. I was okay with this thievery only because it seemed to be a barter system: if a small feather I’d picked up on a walk later disappeared

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from my pocket, when I went to search for it I’d come across a new treasure, like the dried carcass of a wasp. In the fairy tales I picked up as soon as I could read, I saw this trade-off echoed on a much deeper level. The lost children of fairy tales broach life’s most painful truths with great honesty—an honesty that felt respectful to me as a child reader, and attracted me to return to the tales again and again as I grew, and grew to understand. Alone, disoriented, vulnerable, we will encounter wonder and horror. Getting lost is the price of admission for discoveries good and bad, and some lessons cost far more than others. Thank you so much for finding this lost issue in your hands right now. It’s time for me to go. Please turn the page and lose me, lose yourself, lose track of time. You have important things to go find. —A.N.

Note to Readers: all visual art in The Grey Issue appears in greyscale, to honor the theme.

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Seth Abramson Three Poems

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Paracosmics They come from the woods three by three and I pass the time a world or two watching. The great brown foxes’ bulb-dark noses bob as they pass by on two legs in black masks, burlap sacks over their shoulders. Inside the children. I smell in the deep of a sack an unfortunate boy but for the eyelashes who’s dreaming he’s in his mother’s womb as she’s raped by her work in the laundries. Is this enough for you he calls and I see he means me. You just keep on, boy, three by three as before. With a clever little knife another one makes a hole and his eyes starpoke from the black. Stars are just endless knots says his fox and sews his sack up. But we were speaking of heaven and hard-ons, that’s clear. An unfortunate boy but for all those lashes, and yes I suppose that does it for me. I forget to get a name but I do shake the hand

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of every passing burglar but one. Him I roll because he’s took a girl and we don’t. We won’t. She worms pinkly onto the grass beside the track and asks me to stay with her and she means always. She’s asleep before I can answer her with the one word that makes this end and be like it never was.

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The Better Kids They cloudbank in the windows, single-armedly brought up from tiny hearts of meat to tiny raised fists, out of snowed-up ways where wolves in fantasies of histories are nursing boys, and where boys are pounding uphill with a killing speed. Up into themselves they launch themselves, up into monasteries black behind the capes of nightwatchmen, up into cymballic orgies of women and men, half-women half-men behind a seventh-story façade the boys will not be joining them behind. Growing lakes beneath their feet. Growing agonies into men, and meetings men will join like circled cinder-blocks— and unlike hunting parties, but like hunters’ foaming calico horses some men are the men who don’t survive it. And the girls are even worse at it than this— the sad sex of sad boys.

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Naughty Boys Well and Truly Punished Beneath the trunk of limbs he keeps a photograph of Adam and her in which the two stand jowl to jowl and they are naked but confused. Nothing fits. There is a second frame in an inset in the first in which he and she are bleeding in an interesting way. There’s a limb in the locked trunk that attaches to similar effect. I am at the beginning of things and my blood is well and truly concealed, he thinks. He would snap each limb, one by one, but it’s not Friday yet. Every boy’s blood is every boy’s, so I cannot hide long he thinks. But I also cannot bear her seeing me. That makes it hard. And so he turns away and every boy on the block turns away and Adam in his colorless garden turns away and every Friday up and down streets and streets off streets they bend their small willing bodies in interesting ways when she comes to the door and says it’s happening.

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Matt Bell The Fingerling (an excerpt)

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had finished building the house, or nearly so, but we moved in both too fast and too early, before I had completed the furnishings, even before I had right-hinged all the doors, and in response to my worries my wife said there was no trouble, that she would finish what I had mostly made. Always I had loved her singing, had been moved and changed by its sound, but now it became something else, stronger upon the dirt, made more capable where it was the only such voice: With some power never exhibited throughout the days of their courtship, she began to sing into being all that I had not yet fully crafted, and from her voice there came to be a sofa and chair, then a linen closet packed with linen, a cupboard full of clay dishes. Our marital bed was already made, hewn from hard boards I had cut from the woods, but it was my wife that weaved our mattress, not from feather down and cloth but from song, and though the object worked the same as one made still I knew there was some difference, and also that all this aggressed upon the realm of my dominion. Always I had planned to be the maker of things, steward of artifice, and yet here she was, able to call from within what I had to cull from without, and in my anger I tested my wife’s powers, asked her to make various objects which I desired for the house, certain tools and utensils harder to craft, and also something else, something just for me: Some amount of steel, fashioned into traps, with which I might perhaps venture into the woods, intent after the fur and the meat of the small animals I had seen living among the bush and the bramble. My wife frowned but did not deny me. In those days we refused each other nothing, or nearly so, certainly not the differences in our dreams of house, of home, of family, of husband and wife, father and mother, child and child, and of all the right occupations we would each take to occupy all of those roles, and so in the yard behind our house, she sang into existence the means of my trapping, a complement to my

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fishing tackle, the tools of my previous employment, which I had last worked when we lived on the other side of the lake, past the mountains beyond. With axe and saw, I built for myself a wagon into which to load my traps, but for a long time after I did not put them to work, because it was fishing I was best built for, and it was fish I wished most to eat, and so from the lake I at first took only such numbers as were necessary for our table, and while I fished my wife planted a garden behind the house, where she thought to grow some few tubers, some sparse assortment of herbs. From this simple existence sprouted the first days of our life together in that house, the first weeks and months, the first year, and at the end of that year we had much of what we needed for each other, for each other’s happiness. And yet still I was impatient, for it was a family I wanted most, that I wanted from her, my wife.

The earliest signs of my wife’s first pregnancy were attended with much joy and celebrating, and after some months had passed I put aside the implements of my fishing and with my hatchet returned to the woods to cut more lumber from its trees, so that I might craft both crib and bassinet, then a table for changing the diapers of our coming child, then all the other furnitures necessary for the rearing of that expected infant. As I completed each piece, my wife trailed after, supporting her belly with one hand as she raised and lowered her diaphragm, bellowed her lungs to sing a song over their recently-finished forms, taking the rude shapes I had made and adding to their function some ornate flourishes, prettifications: Now the bassinet was filigreed with ornate leaves, now the changing table was guarded on each corner not by a simple post but by a wooden bird carved as detailed as any ever born from egg. I marveled over the exactness of her touchless craft, the way that the syllables of her song-speech could produce such fine beauty from what I had already made, but when I was done marveling, I maddened, for who was she to change what I had created for our child? Everything I made she improved, but it was not improvement I craved, only title, control, mastery, and now there was my wife always

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there to take from me what was first mine, and as she presented what she had done, there I was sure I saw a smile upon the pale shape of her face, another bright song already held behind her lips’ redness.

The dirt’s wettest season swelled, and then its hottest burst the world to bloom, and with those seasons my wife swelled too, expanded in both belly and breast until the leaves fell, and afterward there was no more growth for my wife either, instead only some stalling of the flesh gathering within her. Even before it was obvious that there would be no baby for us, even then my wife began to cry, to sing sadder songs that dimmed the lights of our already fuel-poor gas-lamps, or else that broke some dishes stored safely in our cupboards. Her frustrations made melodic, they darkened my moods too, and soon there were the first cross words between us, and for many evenings I went out the back of the house and sat in her garden, staring out its dirt to my wagon full of traps, still unused as the day she first sung them. Their sharp secrets gleamed in the starlight, but I did not move to touch their shapes, not yet. I was not then a trapper, despite the availability of necessary tools, nor was I to be a father, despite the earlier hopes of my wife’s first tumid months. How I angered that we would have to start again, and how every delay of what I desired required some reconfiguring of the possible futures I counted already among my holdings. If my wife was not to birth some son for me, then I wished only for the speedy end of her pregnancy, so that her body might not suffer overlong, so that another child might be put in this one’s place. But still her body delayed, still it pretended that our failure might grow into some child, and so my wife pretended too, and when I could not stand her insistent tears I again went out back of the house, where in my frustration I plucked and pulled at some stand of nightshade grown healthy in her garden, and then another, and then another, until I had cleared one portion of her soil, until I had returned that living place to the dirt it had once been, and yes, there was shame that followed, and yes, anger at the shame, and yes, of course, denial, when in the morning I was confronted with what I had done.

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My wife could not believe I would ever destroy some thing of hers, not even then, not even after she had so recently done the same, changed my crib and bassinet and changing table into objects of her design, rather than what shapes I had intended, and all that day her still-embiggened body yelled and stomped, as if there was some plain difference between my mistake and hers, and when she had reddened all her face and chest with her anger then at last her labor was upon us.

What sad and sorry shape was born from her after those next days, that labor made long despite the lack of life within: Not an arm, but an arm bud. Not a leg, but a leg bud, a proto-knee. Not a heart but a heart bulge. Not an eye but an eye spot, half-covered by a translucent lid, uselessly clear. Not a baby, instead only this miscarriage, this finger’s length of intended and aborted future. And what was not born: No proper umbilical cord, snaked from mother to baby, from placenta to belly to intestines, so that once starved the child passed from my wife’s body into a clot of blood and bed sheet, then into my waiting hand, where I lifted it before my eyes to look upon its failure-shape, that terminus of my want. Then to my lips, as if for a single kiss, hello and goodbye. Then no kiss at all, but something else, some compulsion that even then I knew was wrong but yet could not help, so strong was my grief, so sudden my desire: into my body I partook what my wife’s had rejected, and as I swallowed it whole I imagined that perhaps I would succeed where she had failed, that my great want for family could again give our child some right home, some body within which to grow.

This then, some truest beginning of our family, come after all other starts: While my wife’s cries prevented her from seeing, while her face

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was buried in the red ruin of our blankets, it was then that in my grief and frustration I swallowed the slim length of our oldest son, unborn of us as all our sons would be. What else was there to be done with him, who I had waited so long to hold? Just passed from the failure of my wife’s womb, his ghost and his flesh were still small enough to hold in my fist like an extra finger, to fit into my mouth like an extra tongue, to allow to slide lower without the use of teeth, and what was there to say afterward, when my wife returned to her senses, when she asked to hold our dead child? What else but to refuse the truth, to lie, to tell her that child was gone, that while she screamed out her grief I had taken the body to the lake, that I had set it to float away, on waters safer than those red waves at drift within her own body?

Oh, how she wailed anew to hear it! How her face became unlike the face I had first loved, taking now some other shape, twisted and furrowed upon itself, and when her howls subsided, her voice was changed, made different than ever before: There was still some baby inside her, she said, still some better other that she might bring forth, and so she worried at the entrance to her body, first with her fingers and then, later, with tools made for other tasks, for digging, until all the bedding was mucked with her. I tried to take these implements from her hands, but with increasing ferocity she shoved me away, first with the balls of her freed fists and then with a song that slapped me back even harder, her voice climbing, hurling strange my name and the name we had meant for our child. In rising verses, she demanded I disappear, leave her behind, cast myself into the depths of the salt-soaked lake, cast my now-unwanted bones out after the supposed casting of our stillbirth, that failure-son. Drown yourself away, my wife sang, and then despite my want to stay I was outside the house, for against the fury of her song my horror held neither strength nor will nor strategy.

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Inside the house, my wife hurt herself, and outside, across the dirt, upon a dock I had built with my own hands, there I too stilled, and in the wind and the rain that fell upon my face and the face of the lake, I felt the first stirrings of the fingerling, as the swallowed son would come to be called, by me and me alone: A child or else the ghost of a child, clenched inside my chest, swimmed inside my stomach, nestled inside my ear. A minnow or a tadpole, a tapeworm or a leech. A listener. A whisperer. A voice, louder without vocal cords. A voice: father, father, father. father and father and father. father, over and over again, until despite my doubts I was convinced, until I began to believe that was what I was, thus transformed. No longer merely a husband, but something more, some shaped change everlasting. And still I hid this new self, so that to my wife I would not need to explain, and while I waited, sullen upon the dock, my wife limped outside, unwilling in her grief to wait for scabs and scars, her slender fingers pressing a rag bloody between her impatient legs. Down the hill then, and to my side, where she opened her mouth to speak, then shut it in silence, then opened it again: this time for a show of her teeth, her hesitant tongue, the animal of her grief. At last she made those shapes to move about the wording of her demand, asking that I take her out upon the lake, where she had never before wanted to go. Take me where you took him, she said, and what else was there to do but agree, and then to show her the place where my lie had drawn her thoughts, her sorrow’s desire?

The surface of the lake rippled with wind, was dashed by the oars in my hands, and every time I looked up there she was: my wife, estranged for the first time but still close to me, still facing me with her

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face. Her expression was a composition of strain, all the possible angles of her waiting for my right words appearing all at once, creased from behind her eyes to her nose to her lips to her ears, but with or without words what was there to say to that face, made strange with silence? I wondered: If I could have put my fingers into her creases, could I have bent and broken them to open the seams of her face, to reveal what shapes of thought and feeling waited behind, withheld? There was no malice in that vision, or so I believed. These were sights dreamed not in anger but in hope: A desire to see true what other her now lay beneath that pale slab, that face she wore on this, the first of the many trips out upon the cold lake that would follow that moment, when her wound still dribbled and piddled into the bottom of the boat, when she was changed by some new absence within, and I by some new addition, some fullness never before felt, growing again.

The grey lake was motioned only momentarily by our presence upon its sluggish waters, its surface headed always for another flatness, another deeper kind of floating quiet, stiller still, and there our boat atop it, as night fell, as the sky filled with moon and stars and the absence of nearer light. Only then did my wife stand in the rowboat, her movements sudden, unannounced, their precursors unseen despite my worried attention to her mood. I worked to steady the boat, and so did not notice her intent when she began to sing, for the first time using her voice not to create or cast up shapes, but now to take them down, and this initial act of destruction was such an impossible step that how could I have seen it coming, how could I have even hope to stop such a power, to prevent her from what doing she did? With song after song, with a song for each, my wife lured some number of the stars one by one from out the sky, knowing a song that matched their names, and those so named could not resist her call. Those stars dropped through the sky to crash, their danger lessened as they fell, but still they landed too hot, too bright for our smaller world. I had to shield my eyes against the flash of their collisions, then cover my

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ears against the booming that followed. Those that fell into the water splashed and steamed, their impacts temporary, but onshore their fire scorched soil to sand to glass, and then in the growing darkness and the diminished light the rain continued its drenching, until the fallen stars were extinguished, until their mirrored craters filled to overflowing with the same cold waters threatening to capsize the boat before I could steer it back to shore. Once there, I lifted my staggered wife from out the boat’s flooding bottom and onto the dock, then again from off its slats and into my arms. And how light she was then, as I cradled her exhausted limpness, as I held her to my chest as I had hoped to hold a child. We climbed up the path from the lake, across the burned and muddy and darkened dirt, then into the false refuge of the house, where our new future awaited, where it had always been waiting, ready to tempt us fools into trying again, for family we still hoped to make, for which desire my wife was at last scraped ready, her body made to possess some hungry space as full of want as my own hard gut had always been, and in the earth-burnt days that followed the fingerling did not vacate my body, as all other meat had. Instead he found new residencies, new homes different from the womb he had previously inhabited, when his trajectory was pathed toward a more ordinary existence, that series of more typical hatchings and moltings, egg to fetus to baby, boy to man. Now he was only this dead thing, this ghost living in my belly-hole, in my lungs and in my thigh, and still he grew, any which way but bigger: In his first years, he remained the pointer, so that he might one day notice my failings, and also the indexer, so that even from his earliest days he might catalogue my grief, and in both shapes he pointed out to me what my wife was often doing wrong. And so began the long road of my turn against her, a difference from the more recent past, where in my smaller angers I had only turned away.

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Molly Bendall Two Poems

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Brave the Path Her forest look numbs me. I wake long enough to feel a tug and soft panting. Only something leopard would rival the chill. If the windbending birds would find the tween, I’d read letters backwards. Certain, then, my tries would scatter into shining bits of woe. The roiling herd sways like grass. Antlers lilt and fall from the valley. Just a flick of a tail and I’d follow her, forfeit my den. Lamps glow in sea foam, and I lure them from gate to bow from shoulder to stern. Would it be better to hold still and sit by the picnic blaze? Better to wear the maps like skin and fur? Because I carry on here from where I want to be gone. She’s onto me and my foxing moves. Her step is a sleeping neighbor, a tremulous relative. Only she could crush the edges of a spring temple. I should saddle up now, coax along my dogs of winter, and launch into the fray. In her domain she’s not the vendetta, though she might be what lit up those sharp claws.

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Animal Splendor Be done but be the same. Tuck yourself in, your eyes reflect an aurora. You’re listing into the fallen zone. It’s not so green. Blindfold me but never take me away. What was wretched and what was fair stays then. I’m afraid I pawed it, then watched the horrible pulse. And lulled into a pitying, into a sleepdrenched day. My kibbitz monger, my squat moon, my tidal suitcase. Your gigantic wagon with its warped wheels can’t stay home. And bereft without the bared teeth. There’s still a self like your self on a dusty hill around the world. Leaves evaporate kindly and don’t trouble our alphabet game. And to the owl, slip inside my shoulders. Aware of it, aware of the flax, broom, and bluebells, the offshore breeze. Frost is new and rare, bougainvillea sidles up to the others. Have a nervous system accounting for it, but don’t buzz or keen. I think our tea time went west. A heft that’s all girth, skin is all surface. What’s left? Must have been bulldozed into a cradle. My skipper stout, my tank magnitude, my gray throb harp-case. You’ve gone peddling. Put a cheek to the cement. I’ll take my betters and shape them like that.

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Wyatt Bonikowski Little Man

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he voices of the grownups woke me. Little man, they said, follow us. So I gathered my sleeping bag around my legs and hobbled from the tent into the cold night. There was a line of boys and a man kneeling on the ground. The other grownups stood behind him, their faces lit by the campfire. One by one we knelt and the man painted our faces with strokes of mud. Silent Deer, he said. Quiet Mouse. I watched him apply the mud from the bowl he held in his hand, but I could not see the figures he drew. Frozen Duck, he said. Strange Frog. I was last. Unconscious Pig, he said. Then it was time for celebratory games in the dark morning. I couldn’t tell which game we were playing, or what the rules were. Stand here! one grownup called. A ball flew at me and I caught it between my knees. They were laughing. Shame burned my cheeks. What’s the matter with this pig? another said. The grownups raced around us, whooping. Which one’s the frog? they shouted. Are you the frog? I’m the duck, I heard. I could not find myself among the voices around me. And then a pair of arms circled me and lips touched my ear. I will protect you, a voice whispered. I recognized my kind friend, the one they named Quiet Mouse, older than me but not yet fully grown. We could hear the grownups in the dark chanting a rhyming song and hacking at the trees with their hatchets. We followed their sounds, but they kept losing us. So this was the game they were playing, I realized. I clung to my kind friend, but I needed him too much and he grew cold to me, his hand like lead. My feet dragged in the twigs and leaves, and eventually he beat me with a dead limb and spat on me. I was alone now. I called the names of the other boys as I wandered, collecting odd grasses and braiding them into garlands I hung around my neck and shoulders. Just before dawn I found a stream and followed it. I heard voices ahead of me, and I thought for a moment that

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the other boys had reunited and were waiting for me, my Quiet Mouse ready to offer me again his kind hand. Then I found myself at the edge of their camp. The grownups called to me, Here, little man, here. They were standing around a hole, and as I approached they stepped away to allow me a better look. I began to remove the wads of gauze that were bunched inside, and though I was repulsed by the smell and the damp, I kept my cool and examined the opening. It was a gap of some size, bloodless and raw. You should live down there, little man, one of them said. I shrugged. I didn’t want them to think I was taking the situation seriously. Yes, another said, you should crawl in to see what it’s like, little man. Then half of my body had slipped into the hole and the grownups were laughing. And he thought we were joking! one said. The little man has been defeated! shouted another. Bits of an old language dropped from my mouth into the hole like stones. I could be a new me now, I used to think. And it went that way for a while. But eventually I was accosted by a man I almost recognized, and he asked me, Weren’t you the Unconscious Pig? For weeks I went about with his words in my head, wondering if I would see him again on the bus and if he would tell me more of those days. There was something in them I couldn’t place, a me somewhere I couldn’t fix. Weren’t you the Quiet Mouse? I wanted to ask him. My name tags no longer work, and his don’t either, I assume. It reminded me of the day I returned, unbundling myself from the back of a truck heaped with sleepy boys. My mother said, Aren’t you going to roll up that sleeping bag? I did, I tried to mold it into a believable shape, but the inner folds spilled at my feet and then I picked it all up and carried it upstairs and laid it on my unmade bed.

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BRITTaNY CAVALLARO Girl-King (iv)

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The last fire took your tiny house and your ermine mother and the tassels from your last name. Anyway there was some pleasure in how the beams lit up like your mother’s spindle, and how you’d seen that too from somewhere inside a glass casket. And yes the hard sofa wasn’t the one from the nights you played bomb shelter in the dark room with yourself and you were good at losing your name or crawling toward it— the trick was to drag yourself away in the thorn forest and the man torching the trees who won’t spend his time cutting through. He wants you fast. He says I don’t know how you stand in that thick square in the middle of town

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like some common girl when you know what everyone does about where you really belong.

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MAILE CHAPMAN Sanctuary

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e are comfortable in this house together, the children blindfold themselves and spend the evenings hiding in the furniture, finding one another by feel, alive to the smell of scorched sugar floating like soot and the dark excitement of familiar rooms made strange. We take pleasure in our lives. We over-celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. We invent cozy habits, especially in the cold months: burnt apples dipped in brandy, potato and rabbit stew blackening a pot in the fireplace. The fire, a tearing sound, smoke against the ceiling, a billowing music. The children falling, laughing; as I remember, we were always merry beyond measure. But there was one person who brought grief into our home: the nanny. We trusted her, and now I can’t remember why. Maybe we thought she would bring an element of gentle order to the joyful chaos of the nursery, but if so it was a failed experiment. We sent her away when she made us all uneasy, and later she put together a fine life for herself; my wife says dismissively that the nanny was lucky in the man she eventually married. That she deserved worse than she got. Now we refer to the nanny as the missus—though of course we mean this with contempt. Now occasionally the missus still appears in our central hall, in a brown dress or a gray dress, always in some ugly sober color, some toofeminine shape. She goes up the front staircase. She always stops at the landing. My wife and I assume this is because in her house, wherever it may have been, the staircase was only half the height of ours. When the missus appears I turn away because although she can’t see me—so it seems—she will pause if I am nearby. When she looks for me with the blindness of a dreamer I feel a blaze of rage, I feel tempted, but I have learned over time that my hatred, if left unchecked, seems to bring her here more often. I try to think of her infrequently. But still she appears and still she waits, blinking and mute, obeying a summons that she

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doesn’t understand. My pleasure in her punishment is the very thing I’ll have to renounce and wish undone, if I ever hope to get what I desire most. I did want the nanny to suffer. But there is something I want more: Annabel. I want my eldest daughter back.

Ours is a large house, with five short corridors standing out from the central hall, each a cold point in the snow, studded with bedrooms, and in the dead of winter we sometimes had to close them off and the children slept with my wife and I in the big bed for warmth. Heating a house of this size by fire is impossible. Drafts and cracks take the heat, and the panes of glass were never strong. Now when we look out through the windows we sometimes see one another in other windows, waving, a continuation of the games, and the boys run in the hall and then down the corridors, over and over. But when I turn to look, the children are always gone already. And I think of Annabel. And then sometimes as if in response to these thoughts I hear the missus ascending, descending, looking for her husband, climbing to her own death, and the paradox of forgiving her feels like a bit made of iron, jerking my head around, because how, how can I forgive her? But there are many other, better days when the children shriek in the hall while I myself light the fire with fatty candles—honey burning into candy, and buttered walnuts smoking from the hearth. And sometimes when the flames are moving I see beyond them a perimeter of faces oddly lit, some smiling, some not. I always knew that we were not the first inhabitants of the house. But what these others might want or need from me, I can’t imagine. I see only what I choose, in my own home, my own time.

After we sent the nanny packing she moved to the city where later she married the religious man. Their house is fixed elsewhere, and when she looks out of her own windows she must see some other landscape,

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I don’t know what. She brings men to make repairs to her house. I can hear them faintly, at times, and they see some evidence of the fire here, a taint of smoke that doesn’t make sense, but which raises their hackles. Looking out of my door they would have seen, at the corner, the bronze fire-insurance plate bolted into the brick, because I paid the insurance and put up the plate to prove it. If I hadn’t done this then all of my household, myself and my wife and our children, the animals, the domestics, including the nanny in the time she was with us—we’d all be left to burn. The insurance gave us peace of mind, at least. But even help already purchased can be slow, on wooden wheels, on a poorly maintained road, in snow…that is one advantage of living in the city, I suppose. Help is much closer at hand. But we are easy with the house and its isolation, and the yard, the garden, the orchard, the pasture and pond and stables, and these complete our world. We have everything. Everything we could want, with the ever-present exception of Annabel.

To cut an apple crosswise reveals the five-pointed star, patterns of the old blossom in the seeds, the core. We would cut the apples at the horizontal and the children loved the secret inside, the treasure. The nanny objected; we had not realized that her humorlessness had such deep, didactic traction. The first I knew was when she said the fivepointed star in the apple was an evil symbol; she told the children, who repeated it to us, and I laughed, and so did my wife as she touched the children as if to caress the story away from their ears. We turned the children against the rote explanations offered by the nanny and they put the fear away, because who made the fruit? The clockmaker made the fruit, and the clockmaker made the tree, as well as making ourselves and everything else. It was harder to dispel the dour pictures she had put into their heads at bedtime. I almost believe she intended to give them nightmares of punishment, of separation, of the torture of isolation in the burning caves of a hell she took satisfaction in describing, like a good puritan. We worked to help them put the fear away and they did, all but

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one, all but Annabel. She believed what the nanny said because she was at the age when the imagination cannot be reined in. She was the only one of the children who cried when the nanny left, though I don’t know whether it was because she missed that woman—children are more forgiving—or from veiled feelings of relief. It came out eventually that the nanny had described ovens made of stone, each the size of a child’s coffin, into which bad children would be tucked away for an eternity. She told them there was a vast furnace under our feet, full of hot metal drops that would climb like intelligent rain into their ears, and mouths, and eyes, into all of their orifices until it filled their bodies with unbearable weight. Imagine telling these things to a child. If I had known everything the nanny said, and the effect it would have, I’d have choked the bitch and pushed her face firmly into the coals. Even now I want to put my hands around her throat, or put my foot against her back as she stands on the landing and push with all my strength. But it sickens me to think that she profits somehow from this, that my anger somehow might confirm her notions of spiritual superiority.

At every opportunity in the yard we built a blue and yellow bonfire falling into itself. Every year of my life there were fires, and in the autumns I made a corn maze for the children, blades chipping, the stalks tied back with rope to make a multitude of paths, and when the wind moved there was an agitating rattle through the hollow corn and I felt the tapping in my own bones. My maze is now merely a patch of lawn—the garden and the cornfield gone—but I can walk out among the stalks to the different patterns, where in this square they exist simultaneously, and I hear the movements of others, my loved ones, my wife and little ones within the years, calling each other by name. Calling me. Calling Annabel, too. I am here every day of every autumn, because this is the place where I can hear Annabel most clearly. I hear her laughing at the heart of the maze, and though I walk every path of every year, I can never find the center.

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Forgive the nanny, says Annabel. Why not? Will you come back then? If you try, I’ll try, she says. I will try, I say. Because when I hear Annabel’s voice, I believe I can do anything she asks.

Forgiveness! What a handy blanket for those who have done damage. How can I forgive the nanny, when it’s her fault that Annabel ever thought of leaving us? I blame her for giving the child the belief to go somewhere beyond instead of staying. It’s not Annabel’s fault; who among us can resist what we’re told when we are children, when we are tired, alone in the dark, when we are vulnerable? Forgive me! is also what the nanny’s husband says, the only moment in his life when he may have felt a true humility appropriate to his religion—he repeats himself on days when there is a feeling that again someone has fallen down the stairs and been knocked to death against the flagstones—Forgive him! I’ve seen him half-releasing his wife’s elbow, and then acting much too slowly to catch her. I don’t say he killed the missus outright. But I do know he hesitated and I do know he deserved worse than just mortal remorse at seeing his missus falling. And somehow, she still has no foreknowledge. Over and over she does not expect what always happens. She is looking for him, he doesn’t want to be found, and this is why on occasion the atmosphere builds up insufferably—her misery and his expectation—and then he appears on the landing, and then down she goes. It is always the same sequence. The smooth soles of her shoes slide over the lip of the landing and she reaches for him. Of course she reaches for him: he is still her husband, and although she may be horrible it is nonetheless his responsibility to do what lies in his power to protect her. But when he is slow to respond she falls backward and then tumbles in agony down the stairs. By the time she comes to rest at the bottom her jaw will be broken, and her neck as well. The sound of her skull on the flagstones is like the concussion of porcelain dropped in a burlap wrapper.

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Whether it was really this bad I don’t know, but in our house, this is the way it happens. Afterwards I usually go to the foot of the steps and I kneel, and without looking at her, I say, You deserve to suffer more than this. Her face is turned away, but I know she hears me. She never answers. This makes me angry and I go into the fires, into the ashes of my own burning rooms.

For years after we fired her I never thought of the nanny again. Not until Annabel fell from her horse. Then, when Annabel was drowsing in the darkened bedroom, when the time came for giving her the opiate—she couldn’t sleep, we would have done anything—she rested her hands, palms down, carefully on top of the blankets to keep the bed from drifting up through the ceiling into the sky. When she slept, the bad dreams of her childhood came back, more vividly than before. She was delirious when she whispered the question we hadn’t heard in years: How do you know I won’t go to hell? You won’t, I said, You’ll stay with us, and a long time from now when you’re a very old woman you’ll be buried in the sanctuary. Your mother and I will be there already, dead a long time ahead of you. But how do you know? she said. About hell? We decided, together, to let her slip down deeper than the dreams when the relief of the drug was the only small help we could give. We kept the other children away. Her horse had slipped on the ice, she’d fallen hard, she lay alone for some time in the snow on the path before we found her, we never knew how long. It was already bad enough that her younger sisters and brothers had seen the bruises on her face, the blood in her long black hair when we carried her up the stairs. We waited, and we hoped. We even prayed, but Annabel died before the doctor ever arrived. We sat alone in the cold hall, my wife and I, together, paralyzed. We sat on the bottom step in silence. The cold stone. That feeling of having come to the end.

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It was not uncommon that tragedy would follow tragedy. One loss doesn’t protect against others, and we were not the only ones for whom it happened like this. The snow was heavy, and just as the doctor had been delayed, the men whose business it was to come in times of death were equally slow to arrive. My wife wouldn’t leave Annabel in the dark, especially after the dreams. We stayed awake that night and into the next, and we kept the candles burning, sitting up while the other children slept in our bed in the next room. And so, it was an accident. The candles burnt down into the bedding as we sat, and by the time we all woke up, it was done.

Now there’s the sound of missus going up the stairs, again. Her old shoes, too smooth to be safe. When she is alive I move away, because whenever she climbs she smells of wet wool and the ferment of cheese. Later, when she is dying again, I’ll probably go kneel at her side and say the same things I have been saying to her for such a very long time. My wife is at the window, her hand at her throat. Autumn again, she says. She looks over to me, and then she turns away. I know she would prefer to forgive the nanny, not for ourselves, and not for the sake of peace, but as a means to the end we need. Another autumn. More versions of the maze will grow and fall as I pace through them. How many more winters? she says. What she means is, How many more winters will pass, without Annabel? And so this time I follow missus up the steps. She stops at the landing. She feels me there, and puts her hand on the banister. She bows her head, looking down and to the side as if listening for something. I have not been this close to her in a long time. I lean a good deal nearer to her flesh than I like, and I try to think of her as just another human soul, imperfect, and nothing worse. I try not to be angry, but the effort makes me dizzy. I can’t see her face, but the hairpins are tight and unappealing, and to control myself I close my teeth over the soft hair at her nape, and I hold her tightly, like a cat by the scruff. Her eyes are open wide, but she doesn’t really feel this.

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I say, Did you at least believe you were telling my children the truth? I want her to nod. I shake her by the nape until she does. I do this for my family, a small first step in the direction of Annabel.

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MIMI CHUBB Tears

o

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nce there was a girl who married her sweetheart. The two of them were very happy, until one day the girl’s sweetheart was stricken with fever. The girl fed him spoonfuls of broth and milk. She summoned a doctor, who told her to give him tea made with a lemon rind and a pinch of salt. She brewed the tea and put the rim of the teacup to her sweetheart’s lips. She covered him with a thick quilt and sat beside him night and day. But soon enough he died and was buried. The girl went into her bedroom. She wept and she wept. She wept until her tears filled the tin pan left on the floor to catch the water that leaked from the roof. Then when the pan was full she wept until her tears flooded the house. When the house was as watery as it could be, she wept until the yard was full of salty puddles. She wept on until her tears made a river high enough to flow through the barn window and fill the trough where the old horse drank. For a week’s time, the old horse, Tom, made do with tears for breakfast, tears for supper and tears in between. Then at last the girl dried her eyes and thought, “I must bring some hay to old Tom, lest he starve and die, too!” But when she went into the barn, she could hardly believe what she saw. In the corners of Tom’s eyes, where before there had only ever been dark strands of slime and dark bits of sand, there were two perfectly shaped teardrops of the purest gold. Gently, the girl rubbed the gold teardrops free from Tom’s eyes and held them. She rolled them between her palms and peered at them as closely as she could. They each had the rippling sheen of real water, and they each had two tiny holes bored into them, with a tiny tunnel in between. When she’d marveled at the pair of gold teardrops for some time, Tom opened his mouth and showed her his teeth, as large as piano keys but quite a bit yellower. He had a funny crow-bright gleam in his eye. He spoke.

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“Don’t be afraid! You can have your sweetheart back again if you do just what I say. You must weep enough tears to fill my trough for another forty days and forty nights. Every morning you must gather my tears of gold and add them to the little gold chain your grandmother gave you. When the forty days and forty nights have passed and you have a necklace of golden tears, you must take me down the road and have me killed and skinned. Then you must wrap yourself up in my hide, put on your necklace of golden tears and go to bed. When you wake up in the morning, you’ll wake with your husband beside you.” The girl was overjoyed. She flung her arms around Tom’s neck and buried her face in his fur until he had to shake his head to be free of her. The girl took the little gold chain her grandmother had given her out of the little velvet box where she kept it. Carefully, carefully, she threaded the chain through the first two gold tears. Then she put the little gold chain back in the little velvet box. She tucked the little velvet box under her pillow for safekeeping. The girl was now so cheerful that she stopped her weeping and cooked herself a big breakfast. She gulped down cup after cup of tea. Then she bathed. At last, she went back outside to the barn. She brought a wooden stool with her and sat down on it by the trough, with her face tilted downward so not a single tear would go to waste. While the girl was eating and washing, Tom had licked the trough dry. When she sat on her stool he came and stood in front of her, so that he and she were eye to eye. He smacked his lips greedily, eager for more tears to drink up. The girl scrunched her forehead and blinked, waiting for more tears to start falling. But all of a sudden they would no longer come. She was too happy, you see, knowing that if she only did what the old horse bid her then just like that she’d have her husband back. Tom watched her, snuffling impatiently. When he was young his fur had had the bright glow of a coin; now it was dull and curly, full of dust, and the girl realized that she dreaded the day when she would have to take his faded hide into bed with her. Luckily, that dread was enough to draw out a few tears, and once a few tears had come it was easy enough to keep at it for a good long cry. As she wept, Tom slurped. When the trough was full enough, he dipped his nose into the girl’s tears and splashed about in them like a colt.

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By the end of the first day, the girl was drained from all her weeping. And yet she must keep at it for another thirty-nine days! How would she ever manage it? She felt so happy thinking of her husband’s return that she danced with joy all through the house before suppertime. And yet the next day, and the next day after that, and the next day after that, she must cry and cry and cry an ocean of tears. On the second day, the girl woke and collected the gold teardrops from Tom’s eyes. She made herself think of how it had been when her sweetheart was sick, and in that way she was able to satisfy Tom’s thirst for tears. On the third day, the girl made herself think of how it had been when her sweetheart had died, and in that way she was able to satisfy Tom’s thirst for tears. On the fourth day, the girl thought of her grandmother, who was also gone, and forever, and in that way she was able to satisfy Tom’s thirst for tears. On the fifth day, the girl thought of how it must be for a fly when it has trapped itself in a spider’s web, and in that way she was able to satisfy Tom’s thirst for tears. On the sixth day, the girl pricked herself over and over again with a sewing needle, and in that way she was able to satisfy Tom’s thirst for tears. On the morning of the seventh day, the girl woke up and found that there wasn’t a drop of water left in her. Her eyes burned. Her tongue was so swollen that it hurt to speak; the skin of her lips was peeling away like old wallpaper. Even her bones pained her; perhaps all her weeping had squeezed out their marrow. Dutifully, she went and sat on her wooden stool by Tom’s trough. But she couldn’t cry a single tear. When it got to be noon, and still the trough was dry, Tom said, “What are you doing, you dear stupid thing? Why so dry-eyed? Do you not love your husband? Do you not want him back? What kind of girl cares so little for her sweetheart?” These words terrified the girl, but even in her terror she couldn’t bring herself to cry. She rushed out of the barn in a panic and prowled through the rooms of the house, clutching the necklace of golden teardrops. At last, in the attic, she found two large buckets and then she

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walked to the sea. She filled the buckets with saltwater, carried them back to the barn and poured them into Tom’s trough. “I went into the meadow where he and I used to gather flowers, and there I was able to cry,” she told Tom. “I gathered my tears in these two buckets.” Tom gulped down the saltwater and he seemed to be satisfied. On the eighth day, and every day thereafter, the girl went back to the sea and filled up the buckets with saltwater. “I went to the forest where we used to walk,” or “I went into the city where we spent the night dancing,” the girl would tell Tom. And every day he drank his seawater and it seemed to satisfy him well enough. Every morning the girl found two more gold teardrops in his eyes and added them to the little gold chain. On the fortieth day, Tom said, “Now you must take me down the road and have me killed and skinned.” And so the girl took him away down the road. He pranced stiffly beside her as they went; he neighed in the direction of home. His eye had lost its crow-bright gleam, so that he seemed to be a horse again—an ordinary horse, I mean—as he’d been before the girl’s sweetheart had died and before the first golden tears had appeared in his eyes. But how could that be? When the girl had brought Tom down the road, a man came out of a shed and took Tom’s rope from the girl’s hand into his own. The man led Tom into the shed. The girl walked away, but not far or quickly enough that she didn’t hear a loud sharp sound. When she came back the man gave her Tom’s hide. Foolishly, the girl had imagined that it would be dry; it was wet, instead. When she reached home she put off going to bed as long as she could. At last she clasped the necklace of golden tears around her throat, crawled into bed and swaddled herself in the old horse’s bloody skin. When she woke, before sunrise, she was still wearing the necklace, but she was no longer wrapped in Tom’s hide. She felt clean and smooth. She sat up in bed and called out to her sweetheart. “Here I am,” he answered. “I love you more than anything,” It was her sweetheart’s voice! The girl choked on her heart. She blinked in the fuzzy dark.

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“Here I am,” her sweetheart said again. But when the girl could make him out, she saw that he didn’t look like himself. He looked like Tom—he was Tom, or Tom’s hide, that is. The hide had been draped and stuffed into the shape of an enormous seahorse. The seahorse’s head was Tom’s old head, with the large teeth and the dusty dun fur. The straggling ends of the hide made the seahorse’s curling tail, which was tied off at the very bottom with a crude bow of tendon and ligament. The seahorse was mounted atop a stand made of driftwood. “Dearest, will you have and hold this seawater me?” sighed the girl’s husband, the seahorse. He lisped on the esses, as if his mouth and throat were parched. He sounded full of hope.

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TARA GOEDJEN (Because Children Are Still Brave)

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ucky it couldn’t do what it wanted, they say. Easy to get rid of, now that it’s locked up. Three days, they say. Three days and it’s gone. From my cage in the dark basement, I hear them whispering. They call me the dark-eyed child. They say they’re lucky they found me, lucky they found me before I could go and do it ——. What the others like me did. They say I’m just like the ones before. Just like the ones who took their daughter and sons and drank the blood of the stray cats. I protest and they kick my cage. I want to sketch my thoughts for them, I want to say, we aren’t all the same. Does the river exist in the same way as the sea? And what makes up a beach? To them, one grain of sand is like any other. It takes holding up a tiny piece in the sunlight to notice any difference. Please. I try to reason with them. My thoughts a pebble skipping. Listen, listen. The pebble sinks into my stomach. Shut up, the men say. Dave and Jimmy are their names. They throw a blanket over the metal wire. The blanket is made of horsehair and muffles their voices, but I can still hear them talking. They say they’re gonna kill me when three days are up, because it’s the only decent thing to do. The world is better off without it, they say. Maybe best to kill it now, they say. When I plead they hit the cage, slam it with their fists, and then I cry out as someone—the younger man, Dave—picks up the cage and throws it against the wall and !!! I hit the side and !!! and !!! and I try to go still, to hold back, to calm down. I think of soothing things, of white petals, white petals, white petals with yellow hearts but the blanket falls off and !!! my dark eyes shriek wide in the throbbing light, and my head explodes it hurts so much, whitepetalswhitepetalswhitepetalsyellowhearts.

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The women gasp—is it having a seizure?—and they toss the blanket over the cage again. I hear one of them, Wanda, tell her husband Jimmy he better stop, she knows I’m dark-eyed but it don’t seem right. She’s just a little one, Wanda says. That’s exactly what it wants you to think, Jimmy says. In the darkness under the horsehair blanket, I feel the gash on my head and squeeze my skull shut. Then the one called Wanda lights up a joint in the rocking chair while David and Jimmy eat on the overturned crates. I hear their teeth chomping, their molars mashing their food. I hear their tongues slurping against the roofs of their mouths when they swallow. Then I think of cutlery, of the shine of lamplight on silver. I remember pressing my forehead up to the window of a house to watch a family eating dinner. The scraping sounds that forks and knives make against a ceramic plate with a ribbon round its rim, the family round the table. Laughter. Goblets filled with milk. After they finish eating, the men start talking about what happened the last time the ones like me came. They tell the story about the little girl Daisy Jane who went down the road and never came home, even though she was only supposed to be gone a few minutes to say hello to the neighbor. Just a few minutes and my baby never came home again, Daisy’s mother sobs. Under the edge of the blanket, I see Daisy Jane’s picture on the floor. Her eyes are the color of the cement. Daisy Jane! I hear the woman cry. She swoops up the picture. In my head I braid flowers together in a crown. Daisy Jane, I whisper. Outside my cage her mother moans. She is lost in the dark sky of memories and not yet sure how to get back. I don’t tell the parents, I could find them for you. I don’t tell them because they are cruel and don’t deserve to know. But then, maybe Wanda deserves to know. Maybe Wanda, because she slips me scraps of bread when the others aren’t looking. You can tell a lot about a person when you’re locked in a cage of their design. It’s only Wanda who shows kindness, Wanda who feeds me. I know it’s her, because I see the color of her fingernails through the folded edge of the horsehair blanket. Her fingernails are painted the color of the dress I’m wearing. The color of

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cat claws. The color of clouds before a hailstorm. I don’t tell Wanda to please pass me some more bread, because I can think better on a full stomach. I can smell the missing better if I’m not so hungry. Daisy Jane, Daisy Jane, daisy chain. When it’s very late, Wanda and the other parents leave and I hear the door opening and closing and opening and closing. The draft is forceful enough to blow away the shadows of all their children. I am left alone in my cage with only my thoughts for company in Jimmy’s basement. Jimmy got to keep the cage because he’s the one who found me sleeping under the overpass and if he wants to, he has the first go at killing me, they just haven’t decided how yet. They haven’t made certain that no one will find out. Three days, they said before they went to bed. We’ll give it three days, and if there aren’t any reports, then… By no reports they mean that no parents will post a missing sign with a photo of my face, my dark eyes; that no parents will go on the news to say that I’ve disappeared. “Child Gone Missing”—this is what they’re afraid to see tacked to a light post, the same way they pinned up pictures of their own missing children around town. They don’t want to see a sign with my picture on it, because then the authorities would get involved. Then there might be consequences. But there weren’t consequences when our own disappeared! Daisy’s mother shrieked. Honey, I call her. I don’t know her real name because no one ever calls her anything but Honey, as if she needs to be constantly lulled with sweetness after what happened to her daughter. When they say “Honey” my mouth waters because a couple days with only a few scraps of bread starts to pull at the stomach and twist it into knotted circles. That’s why yesterday, the day of my capture, I went in the corner and let out all the pain. I went in the corner and dropped out the runny pain through the wire squares—because it’s true I hadn’t been eating right, even before they caught me—and for that mess they put my cage in the basement. Also, because no one wants to be around me at night. They say at night is when our powers are the strongest, they say night is when my kind takes the most children. But I say to them, what kind of parents are you, Wanda Honey Jimmy Dave? Letting your children go out after dark in a world like this?

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The next morning they surround me. They kick the cage until I quiet. It’s Dave’s muddy boot I see, his muddy boot that stomped all over the forest looking for his daughter. All over and all over and all over. He insists it was dark-eyed children like me that snatched her. He saw them himself. Consider the damn evidence, Dave says. Two dark-eyed children were lingering around his house like thieves before it happened. The kids asked him if they could come inside, and he almost let them in. Just two poor kids, he thought, but then he noticed they didn’t have any whites in their eyes. They didn’t have any whites in their eyes, he says, and when their skin went all shivery that’s how I knew to shut the door. That’s why he shut the screen door and locked it and slammed shut the wooden door and bolted it against their pounding fists. Even then those dark-eyed children kept staring at him. Damndest thing, he says. Their black eyes were eating through the door. All while he’s talking, I think of white mice and white socks and seesaws. Crushed ice cubes and worms in gardenbeds. The blood I taste when I bite my tongue. And then I let her go, Honey wails. My baby, she just wanted to play in the yard! Honey’s crying is thick in my ears so I start making shadowless puppets under the horsehair blanket. I hate it, she says. I hate that thing in there! Amber earrings on a mannequin in the antique shop. The way fog turns to water in the early morning. A mattress of leaves and the tiny yellow blanket from the homeless shelter. Fuck, it’s lucky it ain’t dead yet, Dave says. He kicks my cage and every time he kicks it Honey shrieks even though it’s me who bangs my head against the metal, it’s me who gets sticky hair. And then Wanda in her quiet voice says, Dave, please, and everyone calms. Dave says he jammed his ankle, and there’s only one day left anyhow. So we better get to deciding what needs to be done, he says.

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I feel my heart start to skid. It’s hard to think. Waterfalls. Salty potato chips. Candle wax. Rosary beads. Paper dolls. Crayons on white paper. Rocket lettuce. Marbles. Globes that spin and spin and spin so that I can see every ocean and every continent and every mountain and every valley. And sky. And sky. And sky. I hope they’ll let me go. Not what, but how, Jimmy says. How do we kill it? Jimmy is the award-winning hunter with the awful trophies to prove it. He thinks that under this horsehair blanket I can’t see all of the animals he slaughtered. But at night when the parents go upstairs to sleep, all the animals crawl toward me—the poached wildcat and lions from the exotic farm up the road where Jimmy paid good money to hunt, and the stuffed pet dog with the collar that says “Buddy” and even the deer heads hanging from their hooks float toward my cage. Through the blanket I see them, because in the dark I see all. Jimmy’s fat sons liked to hunt, too. I know because this is what Wanda said before swinging the door shut at the top of the stairs that night. My sons liked to hunt with their daddy, she said. I imagined a handful of sunlight, two handfuls of sunlight, but she was already gone away to bed. Instead of sleeping she stares at the walls.

On the third morning, Jimmy’s crying. He insists that if only he’d had his rifle, if only he’d had it with him, he would have shot those two dark-eyed kids at the mailbox. He would have shot them the moment they walked up the brick footpath to his house, the moment they plucked a flower from Wanda’s garden, a gladiola, a funeral flower, she says. He would have shot them the moment they rang the doorbell and asked, Can we please come in? We’re cold and hungry, we just need to come in and call our parents, please, can we come in? And thank God Jimmy answered the door, Honey says, because we all know how nice Wanda is, and maybe she would’ve…maybe she’d be…and then Honey bursts into tears and Jimmy picks up the story again. I answered the door fixing to eat dinner, he says, and if I hadn’t just cleaned my guns and put them away for the night, I’d of probably had my finger on the trigger when I

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opened the door. After looking at those dark eyes, he would have shot them kids dead then and there. He says he had the sense to tell Wanda to phone the twins, tell them not to come home until those dark-eyed kids were good and gone, but the twins had already left because they were just at the neighbor’s. Just down the street, just a few minutes down the street, Wanda says, but they never came home, even though…and her voice stops short. And then we found the clumps, Honey says. She points at the horsehair blanket and starts to sob. I hate it! I hate it! A fistful of sunlight a fistful of sunlight a fistful of sunlight a fist full of sun light a fist full a sun a light a fist a sun a sun a sun. Dave kicks my cage twice and then they talk about how. How to kill the dark-eyed child. Because three days is up tomorrow, Dave reminds everyone. I feel for the bread that Wanda has wedged between the metal, under the blanket’s edge, under the horsehair stitching that forms the red square. Since the blanket has covered my cage for three days, I should know every inch of what it looks like, but instead I prefer to study the parents through the holes in the stitching. I was surprised when I saw Wanda’s silver fingernails leaving me bread at the same place. Every day at the same red threaded square like a little red house that I could go inside to keep warm, that I could go inside to explore. I’m the darkeyed child and I see everything and I see through these sorrowful people gathered around my cage. These people looking for someone to blame. I am the scapegoat that Jimmy will kill and they will mount my head on the wall, they’re sure of it, but first they’ll pop out my eyeballs so I can no longer stare, and I’ll crush ’em with my fist, Dave says. But I don’t need eyes to see. Alligator teeth, I think. The way ink smells. Hot water from a stove on a cold day. Branches with young green leaves. The buzz of a wasp. A bird’s nest. A clap of thunder. A rope swing over water. It just don’t feel right, Wanda says. Let’s just drive her out somewhere and drop her off where she won’t hurt no one. And then Honey says, But it’ll find us, Wanda, it’s crafty, we don’t have a choice, and then she sets to crying again and then Dave kicks my cage and says, I can’t think, Hon, stop crying. And this only

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makes Honey cry harder. You should have told me not to let her outside. And Dave says don’t fucking start. And then Wanda whispers, we thought the boys would be okay, because they could stick together. And then Jimmy says, oh, I suppose you’re saying it’s my fault? Then Honey says through her sobs, well, maybe we should just keep it here in the cage for a while longer, you know like we did Buddy when he went rabid, and then Dave says that’s a stupid idea, and then Jimmy says, we’ll handle it. But how? White petal. White petal. Because they remembered reading in the papers about how other sons and daughters had gone missing in places close to here and how one town had taken matters into their own hands, praise God, and tried to drown one of those dark-eyed children responsible but the dark-eyed child wouldn’t drown. Please, I say, and Dave kicks my cage. Whitepetalwhitepetalwhitepetalwhitepetalyellowheart. And then they remember a gunshot won’t do it because that one town had taken that dark-eyed child that wouldn’t drown and shot it and it still hadn’t died. Then Dave asks Jimmy if he has a sharp knife, or whatever he uses to clean his fish. Goldfish. Goldfish in ponds full of lilies. Cattails. Walking with my eyes shut across a fallen log. Mushrooms and moss and licking honeysuckle. Fireflies cupped in my hands. Sucking on pebbles. Everything. Every thing. It’s been three days and fuck if I won’t do it right now, Dave says. Wanda and Honey are sent from the house so they won’t be here when it happens. As if killing me is what would snap everything back into place. As if my blood is a path to yesterdays. I’m gonna chop it up, Dave says. Sunshine by the handfuls. Sunshine by the handfuls. The moon in daytime. Stars like holes to somewhere bright. Jimmy fetches his bowie knife and Dave unsheathes it and I hear the singsong sound of the blade against the leather. Now I know just what they’re capable of, now I know for sure. Still, I try once more to reason with them. I try to show them that I feel, same as them.

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Please, I say, thinking of the pink smear of a sunset and the white bone of the moon and the grit of the stars and then the blanket’s kicked loose and the light sears my eyes and my head boils, about to explode, and I can feel the knife near my neck, I can feel the metal piercing my skin, cutting, cutting, and then I can’t hold back, I can’t think of anything but blood, and Dave screams oh, fuck, what’s it doing? and then !!! and !!! and !!! and Jimmy screams, a high shriek louder than even Honey’s as my head opens up and through the dark stream of the blackest light they both disappear with the rush of it and then at last I am free inside the house to do my exploring like the others want me to do and I know that one day, when Honey and Wanda are weeping about their men, they’ll say, if only they hadn’t tried to… and then they’ll say, we should have dealt with it ourselves… and then they’ll say, at least we know we didn’t lock up a little girl for three days, at least we know for sure now that it wasn’t a little girl… that it was a… and I’ll listen from the corner of the room but they won’t be able to speak my name. They’ll flinch and cower when they glimpse my eyes, those tiny pebbles of blackness that remind them of the ones they’ve lost, those selfsame memories they suck on again and again, instead of moving on. That’s the way it goes with these sorrowful people. Once they’re grown, they get so scared of things they’ve never seen before, of things they don’t want to understand, or know. (That’s why we take their children.)

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SARA GONG The Mask

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t hung in the window of the costume shop down the street from the school. Every afternoon, after the school bell had chimed five times, the schoolboys and girls would come running down the road, laughing and jostling each other, until they had reached the shop’s window. There they would stare, marveling at the face behind the glass. This was no ordinary face: it was a mask, a horrifying one. The bulging yellow eyes seemed to glare at the children, the nose was offset and hooked, and the mouth was grisly with fangs crusted over with blood. The children liked to speculate upon whether or not the blood was real. The shopkeeper himself did not know. Only the mask’s creator knew, and his identity was a mystery. On the days leading up to Halloween, the schoolchildren wondered who would buy the mask, though they dared not ask the price. A week before Halloween, the mask disappeared from the shop window. And at school, a boy named James boasted that his parents had bought the mask for him. The other children anxiously waited for Halloween to see if this was true. Days later, Halloween came around. James quickly ran home after school to try his mask on. In his room, he lifted the mask gently from its box—and its eyes seemed to move. James nearly dropped the mask. No, he thought to himself, that must have been my imagination. He lifted the mask over his face and fastened the strap—and all his senses started to numb. The next few days were filled with whispered rumors. James had simply disappeared after school. The police had found nothing—not a thing. As the months passed, though, James was forgotten. But exactly one year from his disappearance, on Halloween night, a mask was found in the river. It had bulging yellow eyes, a hooked nose, and a fresh bloodstain around its gruesome mouth.

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CAROL GUESS & DANIELA OLSZEWSKA How to Be and Look Like a Mean Girl While in Girl Scouts or How to Make a Bullet Belt

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titch a counterfeit sash suffused with bilked badges. Sashay in real time into woods. Don’t waste your youth—make fire with matches, or, better yet, flamethrowers. Mash burnt marshmallows into bullet pellets; paste to your waist. Wait. Finger pricks = blood sisters or saints. Code name: Cookie Code name: Ricochet Bubble roots and boil stones. Gargle downriver. Show merit with onehand scout-knotted behind troop leader’s back. Pop pseudoephedrine and Vitamin B. Flash concerned forest rangers. Prevalent cure for the common STD involves fleshing out backs with training bra straps. Code name: Poppy Code name: Feral Pitch hissyfit inside of tent. Pitch hissyfit instead of tent. Flick poison ivy prods for progress. Swear unto others there’s a bear hiding around campsite. Promote sitting pretty in the face of bestiality and/or danger. Give each other bear hugs. Code name: Impromptu Code name: Stacy Carve loyalty oath into oak trunk. Blindfold potential pledges; spin. Wake numb to pine needles and bird noise nesting. Craft netting from kudzu and flip-flops from bark. Remember to stretch leg and brain muscles, even if you don’t think you are going to be hiking all that far. Code name: Landline 57

Code name: Merit Truth-or-dare your troop. What happens in Girl Scouts stays in Girl Scouts. Make new best friend and dump the old. The bear ended up going over the mountain, but you stayed put. Scold sky for grayline. Skim treeline for planes; take aim. Squirt guns work as well as mace. If you find an empty plane, do not run to the nearest adult. Code name: Quark Code name: Lariat

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AIREANNE HJELLE girl you won’t remember

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nce upon a time you came upon a house in the forest, filled with Christmas lights and dancing bears. You watched from the window as the bears twirled around each other, spinning on callused padded black toes. A rousing tune rose up from a gramophone and a couple wearing woolen sweaters started a Charleston. How graceful they were! Who knew such lumbering beasts could canter so? You never heard in that once upon time the bracken underbrush breaking behind you; never smelled the musky odor of an ursine omnivore; and so you screamed when that bear growled, “The price for watching is dancing.” He roughly hooked you by the arm (you had forgotten a bear’s claws but your skin remembered) and sternly took you inside. “Meet the Bearfoot Dancers,” your captor chuffed hotly in your ear. “Dancers, meet our newest member.” They spun you round for waltzes and quadrilles—days and nights, weeks on end, your feet bleeding through the leather of your shoes. At first you cried in your partners’ furry limbs, tears wicked away in sweaters, but before you knew it you forgot that you weren’t a bear and hadn’t been much of a dancer. You bared your teeth in joy and slept while spinning. Then once upon another time you woke up. There was no house, not a single bear, only an empty forest. You wandered out of the forest and found your family who bought you new shoes and stuffed you full of sweets, begging you to never leave again. In your dreams, you spun and smiled, growling your pleasure. In the mornings, you’d wake up on your father’s bearskin rug, roughly clutching its paws in your thin fingers. This time, you know better. You’ll knock on the door and wear sensible shoes. You know now that an acquired taste shows patience and perseverance, higher virtues of which you cannot dream.

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DESIREE HOLMAN Three Images

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from Heterotopias, 3 Channel HD Video, 13 minutes, 2001 Production still by Allen Greenberg

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from Heterotopias, 3 Channel HD Video, 13 minutes, 2001

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from Heterotopias, 3 Channel HD Video, 13 minutes, 2001

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ASHLEY ELIZABETH HUDSON Elegy for a Child Trapped Underground

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After the failed attempt to crawl up and out the long neck of the well, I tried telling forty seven tarnished pennies about you, about how with you my arms were two long hallways, my chest a lit-up crawl space. How without you cobwebs spelled their miserable messages and no amount of breathing could push all the dust from this hollow haunted room. Lincoln turned his mossy face away. What does loose change know about wishes anyway, though some coins are rubbed so lovingly they grow faceless and smooth? I crawled through ten wet tunnels trying to get back to you. I’ve been trying to tell you this, how I didn’t make it through that hole blown in the boulder to where it seems that the expanse of the sun’s light must make the sky feel just like a huge empty room. But tell me, is that where you are waiting? Holding a white flag on the other side? I wonder why not just wait here—

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didn’t they always say to stay put, shocked pale, in one place? Before that hole closed I couldn’t deduce the vulnerability of night versus day. I revisit the belly of the well, the pelting of that wishful rain. Why not stay here where there’s hope without promise, just the echo throwing back every embarrassing word I say?

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SHANE JONES Remy and the Crystals

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1. The Dying Dog The bloated dog lost hair in the breeze of Remy’s movements. Each time he breathed his stomach ballooned pink skin. The tongue hung loose over a row of mold-speckled teeth. Remy circled the table in wind-tunnels, petting the dog in new dying places, the one eye up dripped the white stain of fleeing crystals. In the corner of the room, a slanted pile of corncobs he once fetched burned with the downing evening sun. Remy’s fingers combed and soothed until she touched a single hair longer than the rest. A knotted spiral buried in the flesh. When Remy pulled the hair like a miniature sea-rope attached to tiny anchor, fingers over fingers instead of hand over hand, the result was a dry patch and small opening on the hindquarters. The dog buckled. Remy looked in the hole but didn’t see crystals. She placed her hands on the rising and falling stomach and thought: please, calm. Remy spun the hair into a black wreath she placed around her neck. She wore it like a queen. From the doorway, the wreath would appear as a thick scarf. She put her hands back on the dog. Outside Ellsworth city lights warmed white for evening and looked like oily pearls in the waves of heat. A high-pitched wheeze came from the dog’s throat as if the lungs inside tried to reach out. Remy pet the dog’s head with a cupped hand. Beneath the table, between her legs, was a wooden bucket filled with meat. Remy dipped her hand in and pinched together a small ball. With her other hand, in an opposite motion of pinching meat, she pried open the dog’s mouth. Her fingers slipped on wet teeth and her thumb pressed against the skeletal bars which lined the roof of the mouth. Remy forced the ball of meat down his throat as the night unfolded to 65

a starless sky. The city lights strengthened to pulsating orbs that pushed and fingered their way through the window and across the table. She closed the curtain. The hair wreath itched. Remy had long blonde hair that swept the dogs face. She mumbled goodbye. She wore a headband of green crystals. With one hand she massaged the dog’s neck. He reached out with a paw and covered her other hand flat on the table. Two long gasps separated by Dad yelling dinner was ready. The paw on Remy’s hand twitched. In the stiffening of the dog’s body his blood cooled and a dozen fleas jumped from the remaining fur. She grabbed a blue sheet, covered the dog, and placed the hair wreath on top. He had lost crystals in various ways. One afternoon in the crystal mine the dog slipped, kind of toppled forward over its own front legs and fell down an extremely sharp incline, his jaw bulldozing black sand, the spine struggling to right itself with twists. An evening when Remy hit the dog with her bike, and the sound of a lightning-cracked tree made Remy look to the woods and not back at her dog with the broken leg. And what about the farm-wide panic about the city moving in? The city growing toward them? Everyone boarded their homes and slept for days in tents, a makeshift village deep within the mines. They forgot the dog and it was deemed by elders too dangerous to go back. When they came home the dog was pressed against a window where it had waited for an approaching shadow, no food or water for a week. Other punishments: slapped for leaping on a table. Put in a room for barking it couldn’t control because he was scared of a thunderstorm. Screamed at for running in the house with Remy. Remy cried at the shape of the blue blanket and pulled herself through each memory, every negative moment resulting in decreased internal crystals. Remy thought, but what about moments when the dog ran the outer crest of the mines in tongue-out happiness?

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She asked Mom and Dad before if crystals could be added, life extended. Dad said no like a bodily function, the word tucked inside a short breath or cough over his fork of potato. “Remy McDonovan…time for dinner.” She remembered the dog kicking up clouds, dark dust spread out behind in an infinite black net dimming the sun. In the memory his smile seemed even more human, city-cartoonish. He ran until exhausted. Remy once believed each pet on the dog’s head produced one crystal inside. Downstairs she entered the kitchen crying and walked into Mom’s open arms saying her dog was dead.

2. Remy As Dog-Child Remy mourns her pet’s death by running like a dog in the crystal mines. Two hugging arms are roads that spiral down to an open field where piles of sand sit like black pyramids. Remy as dog-child figures out how to increase speed running on all fours by clawing the ground. Her lips are coated in glittering sand. For farm residents, it’s a night of sweat-covered sleep. The beginnings of the heat wave. Tongue out, dressed in only red shorts with white trim, Remy darts around the piles of sand barking, her feet and hands sinking hard into the sand for traction as she turns. The work trucks in their old green metal paneling appear two-dimensional in the moonlight. Remy’s left hand is wet with blood. Pebbles, like little crooked teeth, eat the palm. Remy believes she is losing internal crystals at a high rate for her age. She was five, lying in bed on top of the covers naked with blonde hair pooling around her shoulders, when she first asked Mom to place a hand on her bare chest and say how many crystal were inside. Remy puffed her chest when Mom’s hand touched her skin. Mom’s mouth smiled. You will always have one hundred. Girls like you never lose crystals.

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At age seven she asked Dad who was in the garage fixing the truck, his head buried under the hood, if she’d reach a day when her crystal count would be zero. Dad pulled himself from the engine. He held a wrench the size of most men’s forearms. He crouched and said You? No way. You’ll always have at least one crystal remaining as long as I’m around. Stop worrying. You should be worrying about playing with that dog of yours who is looking pretty sad sitting on the porch. After the death of her dog, Remy has become interested again in internal crystal count. She’s spoken to kids in the farm who have witnessed their parents vomiting speckled light, whispering to their spouse standing in the doorway I’m down to two, maybe even one. And Remy has noticed the slowed movements of Mom, the cough vibrating deep from within, the increased time taking her to cross a room. Remy rolls in the sand until her skin is covered in what looks like ash. She runs on all fours toward one of the mine tunnels. The only color on Remy in the moonlight is the white of her eyes and several streaks of blonde hair the sand didn’t cover. She stands and barks into the tunnel until the echo comes back.

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Jessica Joslin Three Sculptures

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“Violet & Cordula” Antique hardware, findings, and silver cutwork, brass, bone, painted wood, cast pewter, glove leather, glass eyes. 9”x6”x4”

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“Cooper” Antique hardware, chandelier parts and silver cutwork, brass, cast pewter, cast plastic, glove leather, glass eyes. 14”x23”x20”

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“Ludwig” Antique hardware, brass, beads, standoffs, bone, velvet, glove leather, steel, glass eyes. 24”x10”x15”

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KRYSTAL LANGUELL Your Blood Like an Animal

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leep alone every night for three months then share room with sister panic just like summer she rolls over unconscious I call are you ok? She doesn’t know why I spoke no memory of it but certainly was your seizure ghost your jaw clamp and tongue blood pouring from mouth ghost that still wakes me up gives me night sweats suppressed images of coma watch: conditions always favorable for sudden sleepdeath. Now you do what you like with your teeth.

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STACEY LEVINE Illustration by David Lasky

The Castaways (excerpt)

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The stories in books are real. Mel Listden, age 6

1. There was a group of people known as the Castaways because that was what they were. They were more or less a loose group of five who stayed together in an enormous grassy field near Llewelyn Lane. They never had strayed from this field, which lay between two grassy slopes. Atop the slopes stood two gigantic electrical towers like high, watchful giants with hands on hips, runs of wires sloping between them, and though the towers were part of the land, no one ever noticed or spoke of them. The five Castaways looked like other people. They were neither old nor young. They usually lay in the soft, tamped-down field, examining the root-tops of weeds or individual crumbs of dirt that had been wrested from the ground by ants. Each day had a sameness, a soothing constancy to parallel the disinterest of the earth. Summer was easiest for the Castaways, but they stayed in the grassy field all year, even through the brutality of spring. In the mornings, sometimes children from the nearby homes, passing on the way to the school bus stop, pointed and asked their mothers, “Those people sitting in the grass over there all day—how do they live?” “They are castaways. They just live,” the childrens’ mothers always said. The Castaways were not kin to each other, but they were nearly all the same. They had thin, wheaten hair. Across the dry grass, they often

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waved tiredly at one another, pale faced, faces empty; they were not inclined to finish their sentences. Never had they spoken to the neighbors who lived in the homes on Llewelyn Lane. No one knew their origins or how they had grown, and their names were: Mobley, Maready, Snuflin, Ma Bean, and Susan Wright. The Castaways were not determiners. Hardy, they were rarely sick, though Ma Bean usually wore a bandage made of flesh sewn to her stomach due to a sore that was simply ongoing. In the spring, two neighborhood women, each bustling deep inside her respective home, glimpsed each other through their bathroom windows—for all homes in this neighborhood had the same layout, and all bathroom windows faced the grassy field. Stopping their work, the women called out an exchange. “Don’t the Castaways have any responsibilities?” the first neighbor said.

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“None that I know of,” called back the other. “Well, don’t you think they should have some?” the first asked crossly. “What could they be responsible for? They are not connected to anything!” said the other. “You know, maybe it’s just some people’s role in life to do nothing.” Eyes glowing with anger through the window screen, the first woman said: “Everyone in life must work! Horses work, don’t they? Chickens work. So why shouldn’t these people who are part of our neighborhood—work, goddammit?” She flung an open hand downward. “Do you think there’s some mental retardation there?” said the second. “Shut up!” said the first, slamming her window, though her words carried through the glass: “Stop making excuses for them!” Upon overhearing this conversation, the Castaways, lying at a distance in the grass, dropped their heads and dozed. For many neighbors, the group of five raised an unspoken question that ran as if a weak current below the streets’ roughened cement: Do some people arrive into this world lost, unknowing, or incomplete? At the far edge of the field, a creek slithered. Nothing happened for many years. But in March, a woman with a suitcase stepped off the interstate bus at dusk. Wearing an all-weather coat, she stood in Llewelyn Lane’s plum-colored shadows. Oak branches bore down. Over the tall, dry grass blades, the Castaways peeked at this stranger warily, for no one ever had roamed the neighborhood so freely, or in such a blunt fashion. The woman paced along a curb, setting down her suitcase rather close the hiding Castaways; they glimpsed its fluttering handle-tag with the name darkly inked: “Carol F.” Early the next morning, Carol F. ambled through the neighborhood still, surveying the yards and stamping out cigarette-ends with her shoe. She crossed to the far side of the field near the creek, the Castaways observed, and, kneeling there, she sipped water from her hand and otherwise refreshed herself. “I don’t like her,” Ma Bean whispered.

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“Me neither,” said Mobley. “Why is she here?” “She might be some type of authority,” said Snuflin. “Why would an authority carry a suitcase?” said Maready. Carol F.’s sudden appearance forced the Castaways to speak more candidly than usual. “Maybe she grew up in these parts, and has returned to revisit memories and see how things have changed,” said Susan Wright. “Baloney,” said Ma Bean. “Look, she’s facing our way now.” Toward the far hills and rising sun, Carol F., at a short distance, squinted. “I say we leave the slope for a while,” Ma Bean continued. “Go elsewhere. You know the old saying—‘Don’t give a new face a thing to judge.’” “I’ve never heard of that saying,” said Snuflin. “Then I know more than you,” answered Ma Bean. “Let’s go, everyone.” “Sure,” said Maready. “We don’t know what consequences could happen tomorrow or even a year from now—all because of this horrible woman walking around today!” “That’s right!” they all said variously. “I go where you go,” said Susan Wright, gazing vaguely at the ground. So the five moved off in a line, each holding a hand upon the shoulder of the next. “Faster!” said Maready, and the others, anxious to move far from Carol F.’s sight, obeyed. Mosquitoes clung to the bend of the stream, and as they crossed, the cold water ached their ankles. The Castaways reached the base of the butte, winding around it, their presence so familiar in this place that clouds of iridescent-green dragonflies saw no point in avoiding them. The hiking path led them to the butte’s highest ridge, which was plentifully strewn with flint that glittered as if silver; yet this was a trick of the sun, for the mineral was actually black with a high luster. Last in line, Snuflin and Mobley kicked at the flint, which scattered and hung like a net off the butte, then dropped. “Ah,” said Susan Wright with edgy terror, for heights upset her.

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The Castaways had long known of Susan Wright’s many fears, including snakes and of being the worst person on earth, and occasionally, the group had chuckled lightly over these. Yet they knew Susan Wright’s fears would never recede or diminish, for they were simply part of her personality. “Ah,” Susan Wright said again, louder, but the Castaways did not respond, because it just wasn’t worth it. The group made a good pace. A few hours later, arriving at a little concavity in the sheer, pink-hued rock face, they all sat on a ledge to rest, swinging their legs, except for Susan Wright, who clung to a small bush growing from a crack in the rock. “It’s a viewing spot,” Mobley quietly declared of the place, gazing out to the fields and neighborhoods below. “I think I’ve even heard of this place.” “You’ve never heard of it,” said Ma Bean. “It’s too high up for trees to grow here,” observed Maready. “We must be two thousand feet above the field.” Quietly, Susan Wright moaned. “I’d say we were about—” then Maready stopped. “Look, everyone! See that door in the rock over there?” They all did. Just off the path, a large door was neatly fitted right into the rock face. “That’s a jail,” said Ma Bean. “It sure is,” explained Mobley. “Town sheriffs blew the rock out to build a butte jail—it was a few years back. I heard all about it in the air, coming from somebody’s radio.” “They took the rock out with dynamite,” Ma Bean added, “because they needed a satellite jailhouse in these parts. The charge went off stronger than expected, so they got much more space than they bargained for. They built the jail, all right, but there was enough room to add a little office besides!” The group trooped across the path to view the jail. It had been good for the entire neighborhood and town, Mobley continued, that the jail cell had been built, just in case trouble ever brewed on or near the butte, or if bad people needed to be contained.

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Snuflin asked uncomfortably, “Are you saying that we might need to be contained?” “That’s it,” said Susan Wight, tears streaming down the sides of her face. “They made a plan in town to put us away, and soon enough, they’re going to, because we deserve it!” No one replied to this. The group edged forward, peering through the jailhouse door. The cell was empty. Face wet, Susan Wright reached tentatively to tap the powerfully barred door, which whined open; as it did, she held and examined the inner workings of its latch. “My, it’s so clean and nice in here!” Ma Bean cried, pushing into the jail past Susan Wright, her voice echoing upon the mud walls. The others crowded in, too, running their hands over the walls’ coolness. A granite shelf formed the ceiling. The jail cell and office were connected by a large, barred window. The Castaways glanced into the office, which was empty except for a metal desk. On the desk, a squirrel stood on its hind legs, whiskers and nose trembling. “Eh!” said Snuflin. “That must be one of the sheriffs!” They all laughed. The Castaways then moved outside, lounging on a large boulder. In the silence, Maready gazed at Snuflin, who had always been like a sister to her. The peculiarness of the day—the appearance of Carol F., and the sudden, long hike up the ridge—conspired to stir Maready. She went close to Snuflin, who stood near the jail door. Maready loved her sister so much, and hugged her so much, that she accidentally pushed Snuflin into the jail. The cell door fell shut with a magnificent clang. It locked. Snuflin’s piteous cries were hard to take. The Castaways stared at one another, motionless. “It’s your fault!” Snuflin screamed at Susan Wright through the jail door’s bars. “You pushed the door open in the first place! Why in the hell of earth did you do that?” Even before Snuflin had finished the question, Susan Wright crumpled to the ground, ashen, quiet, accepting the blame fully. “She’s never been careful,” Ma Bean said, glaring at Susan Wright. “Never in her life!” added Maready.

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Snuflin continued her panicked screams. She clawed the jailhouse bars. Mobley hollered atop the commotion, “Everyone, we must gain control! We must not let this thing take us over!” Snuflin yelled from the cell, “Why shouldn’t we let it take us over? It already has taken us over!” “Nothing’s taken me over,” Ma Bean called, “and nothing will. I’m doing just fine!” “Snuflin,” Mobley directed, “Listen. We have a job to do now. Do you see that? Some of us will stay here. The others will go back to get help.” “Help?” Snuflin screamed anew from the cell. Her parched, piercing voice rang off the rock face. “Who will help us? No one knows us!” “They know us a little,” mused Ma Bean. “Let us out!” cried Snuflin. “Oh, how did our lives come to be so?” She reached a miserable hand through the bars. “Why did she say ‘Let us out,’ instead of ‘Let me out?’” said Susan Wright, raising her face from the ground. “Why don’t you die, you ape?!” screamed Snuflin at Susan Wright, who collapsed back to the ground, breathing dust. The Castaways sensed themselves on a precipitous edge, enclosed, somehow, by unpleasant orbs that were, for some reason, indefinable. There was nothing to do but continue. So Maready, Mobley, and Ma Bean formed a line, preparing a return hike down the butte and to the field below. “Won’t I go too?” asked Susan Wright from her position on the ground. “No,” said Mobley, and Susan Wright cried. Maready was first in the line as the three descended. “I wonder if every word Snuflin says for the rest of her life will be screamed?” she wondered aloud. Just as the sun’s magenta tones pooled upon the lower horizon, the group came upon the grassy slope with its familiar, dry, shurring sound, that of grass parting in wind. “Can you imagine…” Mobley said to the others slowly as they walked. “I admit I’ve sometimes tried—can you imagine if our lives were

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all different? That is, supposing we lived differently than we do now. Supposing we knew others besides ourselves…or if every day we had something big and good to do, and if our lives were different, would the words we said be different, too?” They moved toward the slope, the group especially quiet now, for it now became clear that they must go directly to Carol F. to ask for her help with the situation high on the butte. For, strangely, Carol F.’s was the face they best knew, and so Carol F. was familiar, the imagined sight of her nearly a comfort, though it was hard to say why; now the three walked more quickly, grasping toward Carol F. in their minds and shuffling limbs, for Carol F. would help them—she might. There was no doubt: the three of them, and possibly the other Castaways on the butte, had become latched to Carol F.; the sight of the woman meant something. She was the one on whom they must try to rely, because there was no one else.

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OKSANA MARAFIOTI Krivoye Lake

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here once lived a young man plagued by a love for two women. Every morning he would rise and think, Today I will choose. The beautiful Darya or the industrious Marina. And every night, sated by Darya’s love and Marina’s cooking, he would go to bed undecided. Soon the maidens insisted he accept one of them for his wife. The villagers were beginning to talk, and gossip could not be afforded in a place where the difference between happiness and exile rested in one’s reputation. Ivan had little choice but to let one love go. The night he carried his mother’s old betrothal ring to his bride’s door, the moon shepherded him with vigilant glow, and in the distance the wind picked at the surface of the lake Ivan fished every day. Along with Ivan, the moon and the wind seemed to fret. Could he truly commit his heart where it had split in two for so very long? To the left, on the other side of the lake lay Darya’s hut, carved into an ancient oak rumored to hold the mystical powers of her sorcerer ancestors. Marina’s log house stood in the square to the right. Built by her merchant father out of the sturdiest of pines, its grand design and an iron ridgepole, topped with the family’s insignia, indentified the dwelling as the fanciest in the countryside. What can a fisherman’s son do, Ivan thought, if not try and better his station?

The wedding was a grand affair as such things go. Marina’s father loosened his pockets until the tables groaned under the mouth-watering dishes his wife and daughter created for the occasion. Drink was plentiful and company boisterous. Music sprung from balalaika strings while the bards entertained the crowd with tales of devils and fairies.

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Marina made the perfect hostess. With the grace of a swan she glided across the room, poured Medovukha into goblets and attended to every guest as if they were royalty. Upon seeing this, pride bloomed in Ivan’s chest, for he knew he had made the right choice. That night joy abounded and all believed it would stay for a while. But the very next day the church bells rang the frantic rhythm of tragedy. Darya had gone missing. A party searched the woods, but three days later the men returned to work and Darya, being a witch’s daughter, was quickly forgotten. The very next day Ivan too resumed his duties, leaving Marina to tend the house. When he began to prepare his boat he discovered his lucky net was gone, and his mood, already sour, blackened. Bad luck for a fisherman, the other men said. But Ivan dismissed their superstitions, borrowed a spare and pushed on. In the middle of the lake, as Ivan minded the net, murky thoughts pulled him under. Where had Darya gone? Could she not see why he had to choose Marina? If she loved him why would she run away? He was mad at her for acting childish, but he also missed her fiercely. Behind the Earth the sun had fallen by the time Ivan tugged his boat up the banks of the lake. The moonless night reeked of algae, the calls of frogs and crickets piercing through the fog. A shadow separated from a nearby willow tree and Ivan strained to see it approach. “Darya? Darya. Is it really you?” The woman stepped closer, her outline black for the lack of a moon. She raised a hand as if to touch Ivan’s face, but stilled. “Ivanushka. My love. How could you marry another?” she asked. He frowned, resolute not to show any indication of self-pity he had suffered moments earlier. “Is that why you ran like the devil was after you? Leave it up to you to act so foolish.” “But I had to get away from the sounds of your wedding, far enough to not hear anything.” Ivan gave her a stern look. She wore a dress with long wide sleeves and a hem stitched in gold thread. It made him smile. The dress was a gift he had brought her from a fair a year ago. Her hair fell down her back

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in a thick braid so heavy even the wind strained to pick at it, and though Ivan could not discern her features, his fingers begged to touch her delicate skin. Once his thoughts drifted Ivan reminded himself that he was a married man now and his mind was a stone bridge, unmovable even by the strongest of urges. “We can be no more, Darya. Go home. My wife is waiting.” He began to walk up the bank toward the village and for a moment it seemed she would heed. But then he heard soft footsteps and halfturned to see her, head bowed like that of an obedient child. “I said go,” he grumbled. “But there is nothing for me without you.” And Darya followed Ivan until he climbed the steps of his house. She stood at the bottom and did not move, not even when he disappeared inside. For two days not a moment clean of doubt escaped Ivan. Had he wed the right girl? Meanwhile, Marina bustled around the kitchen and tossed furtive glances and smiles at him as she kneaded the dough for the Apple Baba pie. Whenever Ivan caught her looking, she blushed, taking him back to the last few nights, when she had proven her talents did not end at the ovens. But no sooner did Ivan close his mind to Darya than she appeared again. The lake was a miser that day. Ever since the net had vanished he had no luck catching fish, and after ten hours of breaking surface Ivan’s barrel held but four puny carp. Darya wrung her hands and waited for him to leave the boat. Her dress was muddy at the bottom, and strands of hair escaped her braid. “Why haven’t you gone home?” Ivan asked. “There is no home without you.” Her voice trembled as did her body. She hugged herself and gestured at the water. “My love for you would overflow this lake. My tears fill it even as I confess, and they will break its banks one day.” Mesmerized, Ivan met Darya’s sorrowful gaze, and even in the dark the sheen in her eyes was unmistakable. An urge to comfort her nearly flew him to her side. Instead, Ivan heaved the fish barrel over one shoulder to distract himself. “What is this witchery, woman? You must let me be.”

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Darya dipped one hand into the lake, and rising held it out to him. “You can taste the salt if you wish.” Only then did Ivan’s senses return. “It’s a fresh water lake, little fool.” “No longer.” “Why can’t you understand?” He muttered through his teeth. “I am with Marina now.” The shudder was gone from her body, and she lifted her face like a queen before her subject. “Look past the false bliss you’ve wrapped yourself in. I’m here because you want me still.” And no matter how Ivan searched for denial none came forth. “Marina’s waiting,” he finally managed, and strode away. “And so am I,” the wind carried to Ivan’s ears before he disappeared around the corner. He rushed home to find solace, but even in bed, next to Marina, the night offered little peace. Outside the wind bellowed and whipped the roofs of the houses. And inside, each time poor Ivan closed his eyes, Darya beckoned. The woman had climbed his walls like ivy, clasped unto his newly hatched contentment with her merciless vines. He wanted nothing more than to feel satisfied with his life. Yet beneath Ivan’s rebellion against Darya’s persistence, his weakness for both, her and Marina, unexpectedly overwhelmed him. Sitting up on the edge of the bed Ivan brooded like the wind chasing absolution down the empty road. And with Darya back it had become clear only one thing would bring it about. To possess both women.

Ivan set out for the lake, his feet not his own, his heart aflame. It took but a moment to locate Darya waiting, as he predicted, near the boat. She rushed to him. “Ivanushka!” “I was a foolish man,” he exclaimed, clasping her hands in his.

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To this she smiled and kissed his knuckles and he noticed how cold she felt to his touch. “You need a fire.” “And now you’re here, my dear Ivan,” she said. “Let us go home.” “You mean you will stay?” When Ivan nodded, Darya threw her arms around him pressing her cheek to his chest. The dampness of her dress seeped through his shirt. Pulling her after him, Ivan untied the rope that tethered his boat to the shore. “You need warmth before you catch your death. Come. We will celebrate our reunion in your soft feather bed,” he said, marveling at his own idiocy. Why had he ever thought this would be difficult? Obediently, Darya entered the boat and sat across from Ivan who began to row with great long strokes fortified with pride. Darya traced her fingers in the water giggling whenever their eyes met. But the closer they approached the lake’s heart the more wicked Darya’s laughter grew until it resembled her voice not at all. At first Ivan assumed she had caught a cold and was now in fits of a fever. If he touched her forehead it would surely be burning. “Calm yourself, angel heart,” he said, rowing faster. No one has ever found the bottom of Krivoye Lake, and it was rumored to be teeming with giant fish, monsters that could swallow a grown man. Though not a fool for old wives’ tales Ivan had no desire to find out for himself. She splashed him with a playful wink. “Darya. Enough.” Again she splashed. Ivan yanked the paddles inside the boat and stood, but she never ceased her games, taken by some kind of a spell. “Don’t be afraid of a little water Ivanushka. It is not as cold as it seems.” “Why should I be afraid?” At that Darya rose in one fluid motion. “Then take off your clothes,” she said with an unsettling urgency, “and swim with me.” Ivan stole a glance at the lake he had fished since childhood, but hastily turned away. It yawned like the maw of a sinkhole.

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“What is with you?” he asked. “I am to blame for making you wait, I know this much. But I’m here now, and my only wish is to take you home and keep you safe.” An eerie silence descended. No trace of the wind, no song of the night creatures. Only water licking at the boat’s ribs. A long, silvery tear slid down Darya’s cheek, and finally, after three days, the moon reappeared from behind the clouds. Ivan beheld Darya’s face and staggered back to the boat’s edge. More tears escaped her. Only now, with the moonlight bright, Ivan glimpsed the truth. Not tears but tiny fish wriggled out of the corners of Darya’s milky eyes. One by one, they plopped to the deck at her bare feet. She cocked her head at the lake, her once beautiful face bloated and tinged blue. “This is my home now. This is my bed.” Darya stripped off her dress and there, wrapped around her throat, stretched against her skin, was Ivan’s lucky net. Right below, a wicked gash claimed the expanse of Darya’s abdomen. From it beasts of all kind slithered and crawled: crabs pinching their claws, newts scurrying faster than a blink, and water bugs swarming out in such numbers that the deck began to breath around Ivan. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “Nobody saw you on the lake that day. You, you, your body would’ve floated up.” He covered his face. “What am I saying? This is mad.” “All it took was a few large rocks to drag me under. I hardly felt it. But I heard your voice calling, begging me to come and take you away.” Darya advanced and the smell of algae intensified threefold. “You promised you would come home with me, Ivan,” she said, inches away, her breath stale and rusty. Before Ivan’s very eyes her skin began to wither. “I’m sorry,” he said. The only escape was to jump, yet a conviction that his own death lurked kept Ivan fixed in place. “For what I’ve done. To you. I am so sorry.” “Let me take you home.” When Darya’s lips touched Ivan’s he shivered to his toes, then, before he could defeat his panic, the maiden dragged him overboard. They

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were gone with nary a splash and the lake shut the world out of its tomb forever. At sunup the locals found Ivan’s boat drifting on the current, but no one ever saw the young man again. Months after his disappearance, Marina married another. This one acquired more catch than the entire village folk combined, and Marina’s cupboards were never short of jars stuffed with pickled herring and pots of fish stew. Quickly she grew famous. People traveled long distances across the countryside to marvel at the dishes rumored to invoke such overwhelming emotion that even the most stoic of characters were known to weep, and there were those among them who claimed that Marina’s tears for Ivan made her food taste so extraordinary. And this is how Ivan’s wish was granted, though we shall never know if it made him truly happy.

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ADAM MCOMBER History of a Saint

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he body of the saint, dressed in a gold painted shroud, was displayed under glass in Herr Magnus Engstrom’s cabinet of scientific wonders. Still and white, she looked much like the landscape seen through the icy window set high on the museum wall. Her hands were folded, her eyes were lightly closed, and a filament of silver was braided in her hair. Those who came to view her could not believe they looked at death. But it was death. She’d been gone some two hundred years. Nothing was known of her mother or father or what good deeds she did in life. She was a product of erasure—an unremarkable girl who might have been lost to time, but for the fact that her body had not decomposed. The saint was surrounded by a coterie of glittering African beetles with jewel encrusted carapaces. Bright coral and fossilized mollusks fanned in a sunburst across the wall behind her, and a stuffed yellow crocodile of the East Indies crouched nearby. The silent crocodile seemed to keep watch over the beautiful saint with solemn glass eyes. “It does not matter how many fascinations Magnus Engstrom collects in his strange museum at the snowbound Chateau Rougment,” writes the Vicomte de Barras in a letter to his wife. “All of it amounts to nothing when compared to the startling presence of what is known as the Fribourg Saint. I could not take my eyes from her. I thought, at any moment, the girl would turn and ask me to lift the latch and release her from her prison.” Documents from a vault at Saint Nicholas’ Cathedral report that the saint’s body was unearthed in the excavation of a mass peasant grave during the plague year. Grave diggers were shaken by what they uncovered, as it appeared they’d found a “sleeping girl” buried in the earth. Bishop Schiner of the cathedral was summoned, and after examination, declared the body to be in a rare state of miraculous incorruption. He ordered the remains transported to the cathedral’s reliquary where

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he would begin a petition for canonization. “Some children of God are so pure that they are not meant for dust,” writes the bishop in a letter to Rome. “Though we do not know her name or station in life, we can see clearly she is held in our Lord’s highest esteem.” It appears, however, that the girl’s presence—esteemed or not— began to trouble the monks who lived in the adjoining monastery. Her body was said to manifest a number of disquieting phenomena, seemingly of supernatural origin. Bishop Schiner dutifully reported these to the high council, wondering if they bore the mark of Christian miracle. The council’s answer was clear. Not more than a year later, an abrupt and unceremonious sale of the relic was made to Magnus Engstrom. In his journal of inquiry, Engstrom records the events which transpired upon the saint’s arrival at Chateau Rougemont: “I found myself particularly intrigued by stories of the so-called miracles produced by the incorrupt body,” he writes, “and I was eager to begin my experiments. An emissary of the church used a pry bar to open the crate, and I must admit that my immediate reaction was one of dismay. I thought, surely, I’d suffered a fool’s sale. The girl, nestled in the straw-filled box, was alive—cheeks rouged, eyes barely shut. The emissary understood my reservations and bid me to place my hand on her neck. I found that the Fribourg Saint had no pulse, and although her skin was supple to the touch, it was cold. I took the snood from her head; her hair was soft and pliant. Even her fingernails had not turned brittle during her years in the corrosive earth. She seemed entirely unmarred. Though upon closer examination, I discovered that catgut had been used to sew the insides of the girl’s lips together. It seemed even the Saint of Fribourg had not escaped the ancient and superstitious practice of sealing the mouth, ensuring the dead could not speak from the grave. When I made mention of the catgut to the emissary, he looked grim and said it was oft best not to question old beliefs.” Ensuing pages in Engstrom’s journal are devoted to a defense of his investigation into the nature of the saint. At the age of thirty-five, he had everything to prove and hoped the saint could help him finally make his name. The youngest son of prosperous Baron de Steiger, Engstrom had suffered a series of illnesses during childhood which put him in a state

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of extreme melancholy and nervous exhaustion. For most of his adolescence, he could tolerate neither light nor sound and kept himself in dark and silent rooms, warmed only by a small fire, the light of which was muted by a heavy iron grate. It was within the confines of these rooms that he began his study of scientific aberrations—from the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (said to be a mammal which sprouted from the vines of a rare fern) to documented occurrences of human resurrection that occurred long after that of Christ. These early predilections led to a series of failed efforts at becoming a man of the Renaissance. He attempted to pen a work entitled The Cyclopedia of All Human Knowledge. The writing was abandoned after the completion of only one volume which was concerned with describing, in obsessive detail, the nervous system of a specific variety of fish found in a small lake near Strasburg. There was also the strange episode in which Engstrom secured a portion of his father’s wealth to purchase a rural village near Berne that had been abandoned during the plague. Engstrom announced he would use the village to create a replica of the Heavenly Domain as described by the Englishman, John Styron. Styron had famously suffered a blow to the head while on a sailing vessel, which resulted in an ecstatic vision. The project was abandoned after the Mansion of God (said to be a series of houses within houses—each decreasing in size) was set afire by local vandals. Magnus Engstrom’s family generally disapproved of his curious obsessions, and it was well known that his inheritance was left in a precarious state if he could not appease his father and become a gentleman of substance. The cabinet of wonders was Herr Engstrom’s desperate attempt at claiming legitimate status and repairing his name. He modeled his cabinet on the wunderkammer of Rudolph II, endeavoring to present the world in its entirety in the space of a single room. Engstrom wished to take his cabinet to a level of extremity never before seen. “I shall soon be turning visitors away,” Engstrom writes. “The aristocracy will clamor to have a look at my saint and to hear of the experiments I’ve performed on her. I will be able to charge even my own father special alms for admittance.” Despite his grand intentions, the cabinet was considered another miscalculation by Engstrom’s countrymen. His most serious failure—the

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one for which he was so often judged—was of a social, not scientific, nature. It seemed even the wondrous Saint of Fribourg could not help him in this respect. Herr Engstrom had married seventeen-year-old Lady Margaret of Wisberg in a further attempt to please his wealthy father. Lady Margaret was a child of the age—intelligent and serene—and though her mother was against the marriage, her own misguided father saw fit to agree. After a somber and candlelit wedding beneath a canopy of pale lilies and Edelweiss, Herr Engstrom brought Lady Margaret to the cold environs of Chateau Rougemont at the foot of the Bernes Alps, and there he perpetrated what appeared to outsiders as a systematic neglect of her needs and wishes. He withheld his affections, thinking only of his museum, leaving the chateau often to pursue and purchase rarities. It became clear that his sensibilities were not suited to the comforts and traditions of marriage, and his abandonment of Lady Margaret left her in a state of misery. Isolated from her family and the beautiful fields of Wisberg, she found little to occupy her heart. She wore a dark mantle over her dresses and a gable hood to cover her hair. She was often seen walking the lonely mountain paths above the chateau, gazing down at the road which led to the city of Berne—perhaps dreaming of worlds not encased in ice. When she was overcome by the tedium of her existence, Lady Margaret was known to take a lantern from the house and explore a system of caves in the mountain pass above the chateau. Children of the village took to calling her the gestpenst, meaning “specter,” and warned each other to stay clear of her cold lantern’s light. In a letter to her mother, Lady Margaret herself writes, “If I cannot find peace in my own house, at least there is the house of the Earth to soothe me. Children watch for me in the caves, thinking I am to be feared, and perhaps they should fear me. I will become an illustration for them—so they might not suffer a fate similar to my own.” Lady Margaret was ordered by her husband not to enter the cabinet of wonders, as such scientific endeavors were seen unfit for women. But on one icy winter’s day when Herr Engstrom was absent from Chateau Rougemont, Lady Margaret forced a weak-willed servant to open the door to the wonder room. She’d heard rumors about a dead girl in

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a glass box and wanted to see for herself if such rumors were true. In her personal journal, Lady Margaret describes the scene: “Among all the awful glass-eyed chicanery and the various depictions of the physically deformed, I found her. Though I expected the girl’s presence to be frightening or grotesque, it was quite the opposite. A blessed calm came over me, and my first thought was that she looked like my own mother. The girl in the box had a clean and healthy peasant’s face, as though she was familiar with country work. It’s strange to say, but I was pleased to see such a face, even if it was under glass. I’d been surrounded for so long by the ill and jaundiced visages of wealth. I dismissed the servant, and opened the lid of the box, so I could touch the gentle girl within. And it was when I put my hand on her own folded hands that chords of strange music drifted toward me—as if the girl was singing, not with a voice but with her own heart. I drew my hand back, waiting for her eyes to open, wondering if I might faint were she to do so. But she remained still. I touched her again and listened to the music that emanated from her body—a heavenly song. I wondered if the girl might be filled up with angels. Finally, I grew drowsy from listening. I said a prayer and kissed her on the cheek before taking my leave of the cabinet. I hope kissing her was not too bold a thing, for hers was indeed a holy presence. Even writing of the kiss now, I feel the heat of a blush rising in my cheeks.”

Documents regarding the sale make it clear that the body’s sainthood was never officially decreed. According to papal law, incorruption could have a variety of possible causes, not all of them wholesome. Remarks were even made regarding the will of demons. Offices of the Cannon in Rome believed Bishop Schiner had been hasty in his petition, and the bishop himself eventually agreed. He includes in his tract a list of priests who abandoned the monastery due to the presence of the dead girl, all of them men of good standing. In an addendum, he also discusses the phenomena surrounding the body. These occurrences appear in two distinct categories. In the first are her curative properties. The Fribourg Saint was said to possess the power to reinvigorate spoiled fruit, meat

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and plant life. If given a sufficient amount of time, her presence could restore organic matter to its original vitality. Her second power was more ambiguous and, according to the bishop, more troubling. Apparently, she was known to cause visions. “The brothers have experienced every sort of poisonous dream since the coming of the incorrupt body,” writes Bishop Schiner. “They have described nights full of talking wolves and dancing women. They have seen an absence in the starlit sky where God should be. One of our most stalwart brethren even described a dream in which he rose from his bed, went to the reliquary and held the dead girl against his own body. He says the warmth of his flesh awakened her, and she attempted to speak to him though her mouth appeared sealed shut. He is glad the girl could not speak, as he believes she aimed to enchant him.”

Magnus Engstrom did not fear the saint’s purported abilities, and he began his experiments almost immediately upon taking possession. He writes: “I was skeptical to say the least regarding the phenomena surrounding the Fribourg Saint. Men of the cloth often exaggerate such happenings due to their solitude and religious fascination. I set out to test the girl myself, using scientific principles of observation. On our first evening together, I placed a shriveled plum on the saint’s breast. It was said that spoiled fruit becomes revived in her presence if left overnight. I invited several persons to the cabinet the next morning to examine the plum along with me—these included the esteemed Alaric Glaus and Lucillius of Ghent. I was astonished to see that the plum had regained some of its color and did, in fact, seem less desiccated than on the previous evening. My comrades were incredulous, claiming I might have switched the plum during the night, so I invited them to repeat the experiment and stand guard. We placed the same plum on the breast of the saint for a second night, and the next morning, my near exhausted friends found that the plum had regained a full state of freshness. When we cut the fruit open—its flesh was unmarred by decay, and when we tasted it, it was sweet.”

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Engstrom records a number of other such experiments. The saint revived a dying fern and was also able to cure a sick stable hound. The dog was locked in the cabinet overnight, and a terrible howling came from the room. None of the servants dared open the door. They expected to find the dog dead the next morning for all the awful noise it made, but instead they found it rejuvenated and twice as fast at catching rats. Though Herr Engstrom was pleased by these findings, he was not entirely satisfied. Bishop Schiner had already documented similar occurrences. In order to make a name for himself and to be seen as a true man of the Renaissance, Engstrom needed to discover something new and definitive regarding the saint. “I shall endeavor to take my experimentation a step further than the bishop’s own,” he writes. “I will determine whether the saint can also heal herself. In doing so, I believe I may well begin to discern the very nature of the saint’s incorruption.”

No record indicates how solitary Lady Margaret became aware of her husband’s experiments. Perhaps it was from household gossip which was prevalent at the house of Engstrom. In her diary, Lady Margaret writes, “I care not a thing for hounds or plums. I know only how the blessed girl makes my own body feel. She raises my spirits, fills me with a joy I have never before experienced at Chateau Rougemont. I find I cannot stay away from my lady. I sit with her when Magnus is gone, and she sings for me. The music nurtures, and I find my thoughts drifting. I wonder what color her eyes would be if she were to open them. I like to think they would be not a single shade, but rather a complicated mix of watery blues and earthy greens.” The joyful tone of Lady Margaret’s journal darkens when she discovers the nature of Herr Engstrom’s future experiments. Her handwriting grows even more florid with the rise of her anger. “I have learned that Magnus wishes to cut open my poor lady’s foot,” writes Lady Margaret. “He tells his awful companions (Glaus and Lucillious) that he will make a small incision between her toes. He wants to see if she can heal herself. The thought of him testing my lady in this manner is abhorrent.

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Let him do what he will to me, but he mustn’t disturb her. She cannot leave this house even to walk the mountain paths. Her songs have grown mournful, for she too seems to know of his intentions. I must come to her aid, even if such action presents personal danger. When Magnus left this evening to meet with his men at a tavern, I went directly to the cabinet. I’ve stolen the key from a servant so that I may come and go as I please. The servant is too frightened of Magnus to tell him the key is missing. I sat with my lady and listened to her weeping song, attempting to console her. I confessed that I could not physically thwart my husband, but I would do whatever else was in my power to stop him. “I do not know when her lament became a lullaby, but soon enough, I could not hold my own eyes open and fell asleep there, lying next to the bier where the glass box rests. In a dream, I saw my lady slip from her glass case like some lovely white shadow, and she came to rest next to me on the stone floor. Her eyes were still closed. She ran her cool fingers through my hair and touched my cheeks, as I have seen the blind do when they wish to experience a loved one’s face. And then my lady made a magnificent gesture. She gave me the gift I’d hoped for since the moment I first saw her exquisite form—she opened her eyes. Their color was not the bluish-green I expected. No, they were stark white—like the eyes of a marble statue—with a hard black pupil cut from the center of each. Still, I was not afraid. As she held me, she began to weep. Her tears were white as milk. I kissed those white tears from her cheeks, and they turned my tongue and throat and stomach cold. From those tears a new resolve rose up in me. I pray that my poor and inelegant soul proves strong enough to do what I must.”

Lady Margaret’s journal grows silent for a period of three days after her experience in the cabinet. When her narrative resumes, it appears she is forcing the rigid script onto the page. “Despite my best intentions, I could not stop him. I could not stay my husband’s hand. Magnus locked me in our bed chamber for hours because I would not cease my berating of him and his awful experiments. He said the saint

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was no business of mine. He’d purchased her from the bishop and would do with her as he pleased. There was a look in his eyes that made me wonder if he might harm me. He is a fool, of course, but perhaps a dangerous one, for he believes strongly in his convictions. That evening, he made the incision in the saint’s foot, between her first and second toe, while Alaric Glaus and Lucillious looked on. My lady’s music turned to a howl as he cut her, and I could hear her voice beating against every stone in the house. I hoped she might bring the whole of the castle down on our heads to punish us all for Magnus’s desecration. I feel ashamed to be his wife. I know I must take a more extreme course of action, and certainly I must be quick about it. There is talk that Magnus intends to perform a further surgery. I can barely write this—he wants to examine my poor lady’s vital organs. Her heart and her liver. For whatever mad reason, he wishes to see if they too remain incorrupt.”

The incision between the toes of the saint did not heal as Magnus Engstrom expected. Nor did it bleed or fester. His writings become frustrated, as he wonders how the saint cannot heal herself if she can heal so much else. It is this frustration which precipitates his need to view the body’s internal organs. He wishes to learn the extent of the incorruption—is the Fribourg Saint merely a shell, and if not, what inhabits her interior? Is her still heart as perfect as her flesh? Engstrom notes Lady Margaret’s unnatural attachment to the body as well: “I fear that the presence of the saint in our household is causing my wife to have nervous attacks, as I myself was once known to have. I refuse to remove the body from the cabinet; it is possible that my wife shall simply be removed from the house instead. While drunk last evening at the tavern, Alaric Glaus suggested poisoning. The comment was meant to be humorous, of course. But I have begun to wonder if there is a substance which will not kill Lady Margaret but render her ill enough that she will be forced into some warmer climate where she can convalesce. In any case, I will not let her ruin my opportunities with the Fribourg Saint.”

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What occurs next is beyond the full comprehension of this record. The final events surrounding the body of the Fribourg Saint caused Magnus Engstrom to impose exile upon himself, not unlike the one he’d wished for his wife. He lived out his days far from his home, on an island off the coast of Italy. The house on the island was utterly bare, washed clean by salt from the sea. It was so unlike his decorated cabinet at Chateau Rougemont. He sat in a wooden chair and looked toward the water for the rest of his days. When asked if he felt remorse over what had happened to his young and pretty wife, Engstrom merely shook his head, and said, “I do not know what happened to Margaret. No one can know.” Lady Margaret’s last journal entry is fragmented, written in haste, perhaps in the cave above the mountain pass. The journal itself, chewed by the teeth of an animal, was discovered by a shepherd in a field beyond Chateau Rougment. The pages were wet with snow and ice though most of the words remained legible—“When Magnus took his leave, I had to act. A new song filled Chateau Rougemont, a cacophonous symphony. It might have driven me mad had I allowed it. How was it was possible that only I could hear her songs? I went to the cabinet, bringing with me the milk cart that the servants use to carry milk between the barn and the main house. My lady was heavy, her joints stiff. I overturned the awful glass coffin and scattered the scarab beetles while trying to free her. Glass panes broke when the coffin’s corner struck the floor. I put my lady in the milk cart, careful as I could be. I kissed her, asking forgiveness. “No servant attempted to stop me as I left the chateau. They understood something had gone wrong when Magnus cut my lady’s foot. They feared the woman in the box. Some of them who attend services at the cathedral have encountered rumors that the Fribourg Saint’s body is inhabited by a demon. Only God and the Devil can ignore the arrow of time, they say. Such thoughts are foolish, of course, and peasantlike. I put on a pair of Magnus’s fur boots and my own mantle for warmth. I pulled the milk cart through the snow toward the cave where I sometimes went to escape the confines of the house. It was my intention to keep my lady

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there until a carriage passed by on the road below. I would signal to the carriage with my lantern, and my lady and I would go together to the walled city of Bern. Perhaps I’d make a place there where she could be celebrated by all—not a stale museum as Magnus created, but a shrine. Yet no carriages appeared. The sun began to sink lower in the western sky, and I felt the bite of winter’s cold there in the cave. No one would travel the road during the night, and I would have to suffer until morning. “My lady sang to me in thankful, warming chords. I pressed my body to hers and fell in and out of restless sleep. In a dream, I put my lips against her own soft lips and discovered the reason she could not sing through her mouth. Her delicate lips had been sealed with some form of strong black string. I pulled at the string, breaking the fibers loose, stitch by stitch. When her mouth was free, my lady’s jaw fell open and she released such a glorious song, finally able to use her own voice once again. “I was so pleased to hear the vibrant music fill the cave. She told me her history in song—how she’d been born in Fribourg to a good mother and a good father. She’d been careful with her life, never acting foolishly, never eliciting her parents’ concern or scorn. Then one day, she met a man in her father’s field beyond the village. She and the man walked together in the green wheat, and she did not fear him. His eyes were gentle, and his words were kind. When the two of them sat together by a stream, the man revealed to her that he was not a man at all. He was an incarnation of the Holy Ghost. Being a girl of some intelligence, she did not believe him immediately and asked that he prove himself by giving her a blessing. He dipped his hand in the stream and let her drink cool water from his palm. As she drank, he put his hand over her mouth and then over her nose. He pressed his hand firmly upon her, stopping her breath, and despite her struggling, he would not release her. He said she had been good for all her days, and she would be good for all of time. As I pictured this, I could not help but think of Magnus touching her with his terrible hands. I thought of all the cruelties he perpetrated in his prison of a house. My lady said she died there by the stream, left to wonder if she was full of the Spirit or simply full of water from a murderer’s palm. Following this passage, there is an omission in the journal, though it is not clear if the omission is due to damage from weather or because Lady

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Margaret became physically unable to write. The ink grows splotched and eventually an excess of it runs in dark lines down the page. How long she was in the cave remains unknown. Temperatures in the region certainly become life-threatening on winter nights. Yet, at least for a time, Lady Margaret survived. The final words in the journal are written in what appears to be a new style of handwriting, plainer and more decisive than Margaret’s previous script. “I wonder now—am I sleeping or am I awake? Did I leave the dream of death where my lady died by the stream, or have I discovered some state between consciousness and reverie? The cave is dark. The oil is nearly gone from my lantern. When last I reached for my lady’s hand, I felt only loose bones. Yet I do not despair, for she isn’t gone. I can still hear her song. It echoes magnificently off the cave walls, so loudly that I wonder, at times, if I might be singing it myself. In any case, I know what I must do. I will gather her bones inside the folds of my mantle and leave the cave under night’s cover. Magnus will not see. I’ll make my way past the walls of the castle, through the snow. And eventually I’ll find a good place for burying. I won’t be leaving her in the ground though. She’ll never be in the ground again, for when next I approach a looking-glass, I will not see my own eyes, plain and blue, reflected back. Instead, they are sure to be a revelation. So cold and lovely white.”

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CHRISTOPHER MERKNER Tomtens

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Nils looked behind the mirror to see if a tomten was hiding behind it, but there was no one there. He began to shake with terror. He was thoroughly convinced that the tomten had bewitched him. The tiny creature whose image he saw in the mirror was himself. —From Selma Lagerlöf ’s The Wonderful Adventure of Nils

he boy’s father massaged badly: he used only his fingertips and fingernails when stroking his customers. He worked in short, sharp bursts. He pinched. Frequently his fingers would slip, come up off the muscle as he was lifting or twisting, and his nails would scrape or gouge a lobe or temple. God fuck it, he would say. Then he would pause. He would take a long, sound breath. He was a minister. He knew better. The boy would watch his father dab the wounds with cotton balls and return his hands to the body, resume the pinching. The boy’s father had set up his massage chair and station in the front entrance of the local grocery store. The grocery store had let him the space as a kindness, for the man was a local minister. Times were tough. They knew he could use the money. They could not see the harm in having a man of god with his son posted in the entryway. They knew him to be a quiet sort of person. They expected he would remain a quiet person. Indeed, the boy’s father spoke quietly throughout his massages. He talked to every customer. Primarily, he shared the names of people from his parish and his professional knowledge of their personal lives. His best lector had credit card debt into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He worried that this man might be stealing from the church offering on Sunday mornings. He was unsure if this man could be trusted. But he was going to give him a little rope, he would say. The Pedersens,

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on the other hand, were more likely stupid than sterile. They would not make love in the missionary position because Lena was a control freak and Jorge milquetoast. I mean I love my parish, the boy would hear his father say, but at a certain point physics and chemistry tell us semen has to stay inside the woman. You cannot give rope to people like this. In point of fact, the boy’s father seldom had customers. Customers were unexpected. Thousands walked right on by, waving at the minister and his son as they passed. As such, his son was made to fill the hours. The boy really at first had no say in this involvement. He was quite young. His mother had died; his father was plainly alone and poor. When no customers stopped for a massage, and most did not, the father called his son over. If he protested, the boy was seized and dragged and made to put his face into the chair’s padded pillow. He held his breath while his father practiced his techniques on him. The father’s techniques were brutal. The man had no training. He had no touch. And he seemed to know this. He often asked for his son’s feedback. Stop crying, his father would whisper into his ear, and tell me how the hell to do this. The one time the boy told him (Maybe use more palm?), his father thanked him sharply. The boy was then chopped across the spine in one fantastic blow. Those who were purchasing their groceries at the front of the store heard this. They turned to look at the minister and the boy facedown in the massage chair. The father smiled at them. He waved. Tapotement, he explained. Just the tapotement technique. Very big in China! The boy would not offer his feedback again. He stopped speaking to his father. He could be found in the father’s chair for six or seven hours a day, listening to his father comment on the lives of people from his church, yet never speaking a word. The father pressed and stroked and pummeled and pinched his son’s body. He could feel the child’s body give beneath his hands. Whenever the boy’s body had tried to grow, the father could feel it, so well had he come to know the boy’s body, and he pressed and pinched those developments away. As such, the boy stopped growing. He began, instead, to shrink. By the age of sixteen, the boy was as big as he’d been at four years old. He required a booster for the massage chair.

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Those who walked past the two of them over the years became concerned. They asked the father, sometimes, if he had more than one son. The father only laughed and nodded vaguely. But they were moved. It would have been difficult to ignore: the once-large boy was now a helpless imp. It was clear to everyone what the minister had been doing. So they began asking for and offering money for massages, and when they pulled the little boy out of his father’s massage chair, they handed the boy to another person who took the tiny child away to be fed. They slipped the boy food right from their grocery bags, just out of the sight of the minister. The boy ate frozen fish sticks, chocolate cereal, fruits and vegetables, candy, eggs, tea bags, entire loaves of bread, bags of cornmeal—anything at all they showed him, anything he could grab right from out of their bags. They laughed about it. They were pleased. They did not mind his gluttony. They watched as he snapped up anything he could find. The only thing that stopped him was a can of foie gras. The boy just looked at it. He smelled the can. He shook it. He looked up at the man who had offered the boy his bag of groceries. The man nodded. Goose liver, he said. The man took out his pocket knife and cut open the can. He handed it down to the boy. The boy smelled it and fell backward. His vision blurred. He had to sit up. He swiped his fingers through the foie gras and shoved his finger in his mouth. He was suddenly in the air. He was out of doors, soaring over the grocery store. He took the wind into his eyes and cried. He yelled out and swept over large spells of forested land, deer herds and white-tipped lakes. Then he returned to the grocery store. The man was slapping him in the face. Are you there, little man? He was shouting. Are you there? The boy went after the foie gras and was flying again. When he returned to the store, he was laughing. He smiled and was red with pleasure. The man laughed and told others to buy the boy goose liver, because it seemed to make the boy happy. And they did. They shoved it at him. He ate as much goose as they would give him. They shook their heads (What sort of child likes foie gras?), but they brought it to him just the same. And the boy began growing rapidly until his father noticed. One day the boy was called over. He was told to sit in the chair. The boy situated himself. The father felt the boy’s size beneath his hands.

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You’re a fat Herod, he whispered his son’s ear. You will be crushed, he said. I doubt it, the boy said. But his father worked against his son’s body. He pressed and pinched him. The boy cried out. He squeezed and twisted the boy’s flesh. He punched and hacked at it. He pulled a metal bar from the handle of a broken grocery cart and throttled his son’s shoulders. But when he returned his hands to the boy’s flesh again, he could see that it was not giving way. Still, he went back at the child, punching and kneading and grinding and tearing at him. Hearing the boy cry out, an older woman came over and demanded the masseuse. Not now, the father hissed. I am at work on my son. I will pay you well, pastor, the woman said. The boy’s father paused for just an instant, and the boy slipped from beneath his father’s hands. He leapt up and offered the woman the chair. Get in that seat, the boy’s father said to his son. But the boy laughed and, though the father lunged to grab him, moved swiftly and sprinted into the depths of the store. There, he was given as much foie gras as the butcher had on hand. He ate it so quickly that it filled his mouth, fell out of his mouth and tumbled to the floor. He bent down and licked the floor clean. The butcher shook his head. I’ll order more, he said. When the boy returned to his father at the front of the store, the massage chair was empty. His father was slumped against it. The boy put his hand on the father’s head. His father looked up. You think you have outdone me, he said. The boy nodded. His father tried one last time to grab his son, but he had no chance: The boy was too smooth, too quick, and this was the last day of the father’s strength, the last day the boy would sit in his father’s massage chair. Each day the father and son returned to the store. They sat and stared at the empty massage chair. They waved or nodded at the people walking past. Often these people greeted the son warmly and asked if

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he might massage them. The boy’s father winced, but he said nothing. The boy would agree. He would ask his father to sit on the stool where he once sat, and he would be begin massaging these people. They would pay him well. The boy was quite good. He knew how to touch the body, how not. This went on for years. The father simply watched his son’s massaging, slumped and silent. Customers would greet the old minister, and he would not reply. They would look at the son, and the boy would smile and shrug. Then one evening the old minister suddenly fell off the stool. The boy let him lie there until he’d finished his massage. When the customer stood up out of the chair, the boy was asked if he’d like help lifting his father back off the floor. The boy thanked the customer, but said he had it under control. When the customer left, the boy went to his father. Touch me, the father said. Rub me, please. The boy said he would not do that, no. But the father was lying on the tile flooring and could not seem to lift himself. He tried to reach for the boy. But the man did not have enough strength. The boy could not ignore it. He was not quite the same person his father had been. He took his father’s hand and lifted him to the massage chair. There, he felt his father’s body, the shrunken muscle, the thin flesh. The boy tended these gently. He rubbed his father’s body with soft supplication, tender rubbing. The father asked him to work harder, push and pinch him. But the boy would not. Hit me, the father begged. I cannot even feel your hands. But the boy would not. He would only touch the father more lightly. Sometimes he just let his hands rest on the father’s back. He would not move his hands at all, only leave them to rest there on his father’s body. At first this made the father writhe. But in these final days the father began to grow softer and smaller. The boy took no other customers. He carried him from their home to the store, and from the store back to their home. The father breathed shallowly. His final request was something the boy could not hear. When the boy came closer, he asked that the boy speak to him. He asked that the boy to shut off the rolling wave

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soundtrack and tell him what news he’d been hearing from the church. The boy knew everyone’s story at the church, having also taken over for his father there, and yet he withheld.

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BENJAMIN NADLER The Upper Harz

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The Lord Jesus came to the house of a woman who had five beautiful and five ugly children. The beautiful ones she had with her in the house; the others she kept locked down in the cellar. Jesus asked the woman where those other five were, she said, “I have no more children than this.” The lord Jesus cursed the ugly children: “That which is beneath shall remain beneath that which is above shall remain above.” The underground people—that tiny race who dwell in the caves, who stuff beehives with manure that is really gold, who help good folk with tasks and bits of labor but whose women may seduce sly counts, who fear the hard pounding of hammers, who live under the tyranny of a violent ghost that is their ruler and punishes them harshly— these are the descendants of those ugly children. Such tales—told around the fire, over a bit of watery lager—were all I ever heard or knew of the world and, well, I always was an ugly boy my mother told me so and struck me with her broom, so I was not surprised when she said we needed money and I would be going down into the mines. 106

The water wheel turns, but we stay in the same place. I do not know if it is the Lord Jesus or the violent ghost that rules us, or if they are maybe one and the same. I do know it’s the monks that give us orders. I do fear the sound of the hammer, though it is I who am swinging it. Yes, I, a dwarf like any other, working in the caverns when I must, snatching a bit of joy when I can, from a full stein of winter brew or a dance at a wedding, moving until the day I err, and anger the invisible Lord, who will then turn me into stone.

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Andi Olsen, Lance Olsen, & Davis Schneiderman Three Pieces

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4.01 Lost Children Syndrome, or The Saint Denis Also referred to as The Aphasia Festival. A general sense of manifolding, also known as clouding, usually followed by the development of a small replica of Saint Denis molded out of soft chunks of time in the larynx, constitute the primary symptoms of this disorder. Secondary include odd roping, sensitivity to the use of the first-person pronoun, wearing behavior glasses, and/or a belief that one is traveling against one’s will into French Voidages and Hard Palate Forecasts. Left untreated, sufferers eventually part with their distinctiveness and Accountant Heads, coming to believe in the end that they are their own siblings, but sadder, less present and Davis, more Swedish, unable to use the lip locations in themselves or others. Not infrequently, the tongue rubs against the teeth’s faith and is found lacking. The teeth’s faith itself may become a vacuole of tiny screams. Treatment consists of aging against one’s will. Often this occurs naturally. Sometimes the local wind must be killed with sorrow in areas where many Clever Marias and Jacks reside. Listen to them leaning forward. 108

4.02 Loft Chilling Syndrome, or Thus Aunt Denis Also referred to as The Half-Asia Festival. A general sense of manunfolding, also No One’s Clown Ring (usually fallowed by the development of a small replica of Saint Denise molded out of soft chucks of time in the larynx), constitute the primary symptoms of this disorder. Second airy in-clues add roping, sensitivity to The Yusef (The First-Person Pronoun), waring behavior glasses, and/or a belief that one is traveling against Once Will into French Void Ages and Heart Palate Forecasts. Left untreated, sufferers eventually part with their distinctive Nissan’s Account Aunt Heads, coming to believe in the end that they are their won siblings, but shattered, less prescient and dangerous, more sweetish, unable to ewes the lip locations in themselves or udders. Not infrequently, the tung rubs against the leaf’s fate and is found laxing. The leaf’s fate itself may be coma vacuoles of tiny screens. Treatment consists of aiding against one’s wilt. Often this ochers naturally. Sometimes the local wend must be kilt with sorrow in areas where many clefs for Marias and Jacks resize. Listen to them lean in forewords.

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4.03 Lough Chillings End Rome, or Thus Ant Dentist All so reefered Two, as The Half-A-Shove Festive All. A general since a man unfoaling, also No Once Clout Rink usually fail-owed by The Develop Mento facemail replica of Saint De Knees molted out of soft shucks of thyme in The Larry, Inc. (Sconce De Tooth). The prime airy sim-Toms of this dis-odor second airy in-clews (“Add Rouping”), sensitivity to The You, Seph (The Faust-Persian Pronoun), waring Behave, Your Glass Ez, and/or a Bee Leaf. That one’s travel inks against one’s will into French Void ages Ant Art Palette. Four casts left untreated suffer seven-jewel Lee-part with There (Dee Stinkt Eveniss and Account Antt, eds.), coming to believe in the end that the yar Therons isling, but shorter, less precious and dimerous, more sweatish, unable to you’s the leap locations in themselves or others. Knot in frequently the tongue, rub, sag, ens the lief’s faint aunt’s found lacting. The lief’s faint Itself may become vacuum holes of Tiny’s Creams. Treat mint cons instead of aiding against one swilled often this oak errs naturally. Sometimes the low-cal Win must be kelled with sorrow in arias where many clefts for merry ah’s and Jacks re-sigh. Listen to them lien in four words.

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DAVID JAMES POISSANT Fox King

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ne morning, the girls went into the woods and by lunchtime were lost. The girls, whose names were Isabelle and Ellie, had long, blonde hair and eyes like movie swimming pools. The girls were friends and not twins, though people mistook them often for sisters. The girls were fine with this. Already, they’d done the hard work of gouging their fingers, pressing flesh to flesh, Isabelle crying at the cut, Ellie laughing, sucking her finger for hours when it was done for the tang like a tongue touched to a 9-volt battery. The girls lived in white houses with blue shutters on a tree-lined street in a small county at the north end of a southern state. They lived in the mountains, took their water from wells, and in winter stacked logs on the porch for their fires. Sure, there was electricity, but electric was expensive and in winter went out often. These girls, they knew their mothers by their aprons and their fathers by the black boots at the doorstep, the black clothes left in black piles on the porch, the tin helmets and the small lights that shone when the black was rubbed away. All around the girls were woods, and, summers, they wandered the woods often. It should be noted that the woods here had a habit of eating people. Given this, you may be tempted to site the girls’ mothers with negligence. But, you who are not of the woods, you who buckle your babies into cars that will crash, who climb into elevators that will drop and planes that will fall from the sky, you who buy food you haven’t prepared, food wrapped in plastic and paper and bagged, you of the suburbs, the cities, you more than anyone should understand that when you’re of the woods, you trust the woods, even when you know what the woods can do. And so you let your children into them, just as you let your husbands tunnel into the belly of a mountain that might, any moment, close its mouth. To live is to walk a rope of risk, and so we let our children into

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the woods. Knowing what could happen, knowing full well, we let our children into the woods again and again. Often, Isabelle and Ellie had traveled deep into the woods. They knew by the sun and the heat of the day when it was time to turn back, and always, it seemed, they emerged from the thicket just as one mother or another stepped through the door to call for them. The girls would sip tomato soup, eat sandwiches cut longways like wings, and with a nod were dismissed into the woods again, only to return for supper. This particular morning, however, the girls had walked very deep into the woods, deeper than ever before. Twice, Isabelle had begged Ellie to turn back, but then a squirrel had leapt between trees, a bird had lifted from a branch, and home had been forgotten. They followed the animals until their bellies twisted beneath their shirts and hunger urged them home. But where was home? They looked around. The woods were unrecognizable. Every tree, each rotted log and bend of root, was new. Moss furred the forest floor, and toadstools hiccupped from the moss, velvety and unbroken, as though no animal or man had passed through this part of the woods before. Isabelle cried, and Ellie hit her. There were, after all, many things to eat in the woods. The woods would sustain them. So they found raspberries and ate them. They found a stream and drank from it. And, following the stream, they came upon a clearing.

The clearing was not wide, its reach that of two, three girls laid on their backs, heel to head. It was a circle of trampled grass littered by black twigs, a clearing unremarkable in every respect, save one. What was interesting about this clearing was what it held, and what it held was a red fox. Never before, except in picture books, had the girls seen a red fox. They had seen the sly, orange variety. Those popped up often in their county. More than once, an orange fox had slithered from Isabelle’s mother’s hen house, its face a fireworks of wings. And, once, Ellie’s father

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had shot an orange fox dancing in the street, its mouth busy with suds like an overworked horse. But a red fox was a new and marvelous thing. Its coat was thin, the hair brittle looking, and its tail was black-ringed, the tip thick, white as unskimmed milk. The fox lay on its back. Its legs, three of them, hung stiff in the air, paws bent like the curled tongues of coat hangers. It was, to the girls, as though the fox had been pedaling an upside-down bicycle when someone had paused the movie and pulled the bicycle away. The fourth leg was the crooked leg. It did not hang in the air but hugged the grass. A metallic half-moon gripped the leg like an enormous pair of silver dentures. Up the leg a ways, a band of white marked where the fox’s fur and skin appeared to have been whittled away, whittled to the bone. Here was a curious situation. Why a fox should sleep on its back, should let someone tattoo its leg in this way, why it should lie with its leg between teeth? But, of course, the girls’ fathers hunted. Springs, trees bent with the weight of bucks tethered and spinning, necks open over buckets. And so the girls recognized death for what it was, that other kind of sleep. In the clearing, the girls approached the red fox. They stroked its head, its black whiskers and the white stripe of its muzzle. Ellie followed the stripe down the neck of the fox to where it widened into the white of the animal’s belly. There, a surprise. The skin of the fox rippled. It was, to Ellie, as when her father would lift the blue, hole-punched lid from a plastic tub before fishing, the feeling the pink things made on her palm tunneling through the soil inside. It was just that way. Through the stiff fur, through the cool, taut skin, she felt life, the tumble of little ones warm inside. She pressed Isabelle’s hand to the spot, watched her eyes widen, and then all four hands were on the body, feeling and rubbing, then falling still. The girls were not old, but they knew enough. They knew body parts by their names, both vulgar and proper, and they knew, when bodies came together, just where those parts went. And though they had yet to feel the first, hot stirrings in their abdomens, they had seen horses, seen chickens, had known, in the seeing, what was happening and what, done

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right, could come of the coupling. Thus, they knew the ripple for what it was, knew that, one way or another, the little foxes must come out.

In their play, the girls often imagined themselves princesses. The woods were where one went to become royalty, to care for the denizens of the kingdom, while home was the place to which one returned when one wished to be cared for. The girls would not have thought to express the situation in such terms. Nevertheless, these were the terms of the situation. In the woods, then, the girls were no longer Isabelle and Ellie, but Princess Isabella and Princess Ella. In dreams, in games, in the woods, the girls were accompanied by a staff of friendly animals, rabbit and deer and squirrel and quail, all of whom spoke and allowed themselves to be ordered around by the princesses. Often, the animals were naughty and needed to be spanked. The girls were also accompanied by a prince, Prince Samuel, a boy with red lips and bright eyes, a boy shared by the girls in the way that the girls shared all things—toys, clothes, the last cookie pulled from the cookie jar and halved. Never had it occurred to the girls that there might be a prince apiece. One prince was sufficient. Like the animals, he took orders, and, as with the animals, a spanking was sometimes required. Never before had the girls seen a red fox, and never before had the boy-prince appeared to them in the woods. Or, to say that never before had he appeared would be wrong. Certainly, the prince had appeared. Today, though, the prince appeared. His movements were not hazy, imagined. The woods moved to admit him, and then he stood before them. He was the prince of their imaginations, but real, really real. Though the boy had the prince’s eyes, his lips, he was not dressed as the girls had pictured him dressed. The boy-prince wore blue overalls with copper-colored buttons. His shirt was that shade of tan that indicated the material had once been white. His hair was cut close to his head and his eyebrows had been sheared. The girls knew this meant lice. Both had had lice, but both found it rather distasteful that a prince should

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allow himself to become the victim of such a common, un-princely pest. In the clearing, the prince stood very still. He breathed in and he breathed out and he watched the girls. His mouth worked as though to say something very important, but the first word was swallowed up by the crash of the King. Limbs snapped. Bramble flattened, and then the King was among them in the clearing. The King was impossibly tall. He was long of beard and prodigious of gut and his eyes shone like buckshot. Dressed in white and red, he might have been mistaken for Santa Claus, except that his beard was red and his eyes were not the kind eyes of Saint Nick. They were the eyes of a man forced to lop off many a head in order to maintain the peace of his kingdom. Never before, in play, had the girls imagined a king. Had they, the king they imagined would have been adorned in robes, a crown for his head, a scepter for his hand. This king carried no scepter. He wore red pants and boots of animal skin. The boots reached his knees and laces coiled the boots like snakes. The tops of the boots were fox-furred. His shirt was red and white and black. It was pink where the red and white met, and gray where the white and black met, and blood-colored where the black and red met. The word for the pattern was plaid, the word for the shirt f lannel, but these were not the girls’ words, and so the girls thought of the shirt as a checkerboard, pretty and precise and not a little hypnotizing. The man’s face hung in folds, as though fishhooks bit into his chin and tugged, and fitted to the man’s head was a covering like a coonskin cap, only the skin was the skin of a fox and the tail that hung between the man’s shoulders was a fox’s tail. The King surveyed his surroundings, and then his eyes fell upon the girls. His eyes met the girls’ eyes and burrowed into them like grubs, and here the girls felt a bob in their heads, a smoldering in their chests. The prince was their prince, but this king was not their king. He was a king, surely, but not theirs, for, had he been theirs, they would not have wanted to run. No, he was some other king, a king rare as the red creature asleep at their feet—a king of foxes. For a long time, nobody moved, and then the Fox King asked the girls where were their parents. The girls said nothing.

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The Fox King asked the girls when they had last eaten, and the girls shrugged. Their mouths, they knew from looking at one another, were berry-stained, their shirtfronts wet from the churn of the stream. The Fox King asked whether the girls were hungry. They were, but Isabelle would not say it, so, at last, Ellie whispered, “Yes.” The Fox King then fitted his boot over the half-moon of bright teeth. The mouth unclamped, and the teeth, those perfect triangles, let go the leg. The boy hefted the fox by its armpits and slid the animal free from the teeth. Lifted, the fox’s head did not loll. It was suspended, stiff as the end of an ironing board. Only the tail sashayed in the breeze. (And, here, you’ve caught me once again. Sashay would no more be the girls’ word than conciliatory or riboflavin. Nevertheless, for our purposes, the tail sashayed.) The Fox King knelt to receive the fox from the boyprince. He frowned, turning the animal in his hands, then he held the fox’s stomach to his face. He closed his eyes and pressed his cheek, then his ear, hard, very hard to the belly of the animal. He smiled and his teeth were green. “Follow me,” he said. “We will find your parents. But, first, we shall eat.” The girls, being girls, were trusting of adults—parents especially— and, though they did not trust this man, they considered the boy who stood, hands in pockets, looking up at the man, this prince looking up at his king, and each girl worked hard to imagine what bad could possibly befall her when nothing bad, it seemed, had befallen the boy. And, coming up with nothing, both followed man and boy across the clearing and into the woods.

They walked and walked. In one place, the woods grew thick, very thick, as though made up not of trees but of a single tree with many, many trunks. Times, limb and leaf blotted out the sun. More than once, the girls dropped to their stomachs and followed the Fox King through brambles and beneath low-hanging branches tangled by vines. By the time they reached the second clearing, the girls were very tired, arms and

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legs aching from the burrs and thorns, their skins calligraphies. The house in the clearing was a small one. It was not brick and wood, like the girls’ houses. No, this house was built of mud and stone. It looked the way the girls imagined the house of the third little pig must have looked, only less sturdy. Had the third little pig lived in this house of stone, the wolf no doubt would have huffed and puffed and eaten them all. The house—the stones were long and gray, river stones, and not stacked like hands, but piled, crowded together. Without mud to keep them up, surely the stones would have tumbled, as though the mud were magic and magic held the house up. A stone chimney rose crooked like the fourth leg of the fox from the house, and smoke twisted crooked from the chimney. Into the house they went, the Fox King first followed by the boy followed by Ellie followed by Isabelle. Inside, the house was all one room and very small. There was a large pit for the fireplace. Settled into the pit was a black cauldron and beneath the cauldron white coals that ringed the cauldron red. One half of the room was a table and cupboards and many pots and pans and knifes in wooden blocks. The other half was a dresser and a bed, the headboard carved into the shape of two foxes wrestling, a bird between them, a pheasant. Stretched on the floor, at the foot of the bed, was the skin of a fox—all of it—the paws, the face, the thick tail, all but the eyes. Brown stones fitted the holes where the eyes belonged. The bed itself was piled with orange skins, the pelts of a hundred foxes stitched together, though with no real care, so that a snout peeked out here, a paw clawed there, the quilt an almost-quivering puddle of foxes freed of meat and bone. The girls watched the bed and it did not move. But, when they looked away, from the corners of their eyes, they could have sworn they saw the quilt squirming. There was no bed for the boy. The Fox King moved quickly now, pulling a long knife from a butcher block. He rested the fox on the table. “A red fox,” he said. “A very special fox for our very special guests.” Then, with the tip of his knife, The Fox King unzippered the belly of the fox. The insides did not spill out. The belly opened like a purse,

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and the king reached in. What he pulled out were six sacs, smooth and wet. Dropped to the table, some of the sacs wriggled like fat worms. Others were still. The still ones looked to the girls like cocoons—gossamer, velvet—like what they’d found hung from the porch railing and torn open to find the black and yellow inside. They’d unfurled the antennae, unfolded the soft, damp wings, but the butterfly had never taken flight, and the next day, on the railing where they’d left it, they’d found only a shimmery, golden dust. The Fox King moved to the cauldron, pulled a rag from a hook on the wall, and lifted the pot’s lid. He stood beside the fire, and soon the room had filled with the scent of clover and thyme, of wildflowers and of honeysuckle and fresh earth. There was a smell like rot, like leaves raked into piles, and there was a buttery smell like cornbread crumbled into cold milk. The smell that was all of the smells was wonderful, and the girls’ hunger doubled. Now the boy, without instruction, carried the first of the six pouches to the cauldron and dropped it in. He repeated the ceremony twice, then he returned to the table. The three that remained were the three that wriggled. It had not escaped the comprehension of the girls that what moved inside each pouch, what pushed to get out, was the body of a young fox, nor had it escaped their imaginations what might happen should these bodies be dropped into the bubbling cauldron. What they were coming to understand, the girls, was an idea faraway-seeming as the most distant star, but it moved toward them, the star, racing their way and zeroing in at the speed of thought, which, after all, is a speed so many times faster than the speed of light. Blood-slick on the table, the foxes pawed at their bags to be free, and it struck the girls that the Fox King was also the King of Death. The girls thought, then—thought back to two summers past when each had lost her Grandpappy to a heart attack—and the girls wondered, if there was a King of Foxes who was also the King of Death, whether there wasn’t a King of Grandpappys. They considered last month, when the ground had puckered like a kissing mouth, and their fathers’ friends, ten of them, had been lost. Was there, then, a King of Coal Miners? And, if there was, then certainly there must be a King of Coal Miners’ Canaries, in

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which case there would have been a King of Dogs Who Chased Cars and a King of Butterflies Too Soon Un-cocooned and a King of Little Girls Lost in the Woods. The King of Death, then, went by many names and many faces, and who could say whether one king was not also another? If he could unzipper the belly of a fox, then who was to say that this king, this very king, could not unzipper their own? The girls knew then that they must run. But running meant leaving the foxes, meant leaving the boy who was not a prince at all, but a servant of Death, perhaps Death-in-Training. The boy’s hands hovered over the table, trembled, and the King called to him, sweetly. “Bring them to me,” he said. The boy’s hands shook hard, and the King growled. “Bring me the ones that move!” The boy leaned into table and a pouch slithered into his cupped hands. It turned and would not be still. But the boy was still. The King roared. “Bring me my dinner!” His mouth twisted beneath his beard, but the boy would not move. He held the unstill thing close to him, cradled it in the crook of his arm. The girls moved forward, Ellie first, for in all things she was bold, and Isabelle second, for in all things she was timid. Each took a fox into her hands and marveled at the way it slithered, jellylike, in its warm, diaphanous bag. “I will have my way!” the King bellowed, but by now his mouth was pulling in many directions at once. The lips tugged, and the mouth opened, and the face unfolded until the mouth had swallowed the face and the head had turned inside out. The fox-skin cap slipped to the floor. The body shuddered and collapsed like dropped clothes. And, from the pile, from the tangle of boots and pants, flannel and flesh, from the hole in the neck where the head had sunk like a deflated balloon, from the midst of all of this leapt a fox, crimson and sleek, the most beautiful fox the children had ever seen. This new fox—its fur glowed like chrome and its breast shone like white sand. The fox curled before the fire and, following some instinct the children couldn’t have put into words but trusted the way they trusted

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their mothers—the way you trust love when it enters a room—the children set what was in their arms before the fox who licked each bag open and licked clean what sprang free. The red fox licked and nuzzled and cleaned, and then she fell to her side, and the little ones took to her and drank until they were full, and, when they were full, the four foxes curled together and slept. By now, the girls were very tired and very, very hungry, and so was the boy. He had been a servant of Death for almost as long as he could remember. But there had been another time, a time before this, distant but real, when he, like the girls, had had a mother and a father of his own. The girls spoke of their homes, and the boy nodded, for he’d had one of those too, a home and a bedroom and a bed all his own. He’d been in the woods a long time, but not so long he didn’t remember his way out. He would lead them home, the girls first, into the arms of fathers who would leave their faces black with kisses, into the arms of mothers who would know that the girls were too old to be rocked and who would rock them still. And the girls would be given big dinners and be drawn bright, warm baths, would be kissed more and rocked more and tucked into bed. And then the boy would find his way home. The house would be darker than he remembered, the man and woman at the door older and looking sadder, sad because they had waited a long time, so long that they hoped now not for the return of a boy but for the return of a shirt, a shoe, evidence any that once a boy, their boy, had passed through this world. They would look on him sadly, would look and then watch him, until, unbelievingly, he would speak and in a word become their boy. He would be the answer to an already forgotten prayer.

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GRETCHEN STEELE PRATT Vertigo

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“The buildings that were behind me started to look like big animal heads” —David Blaine, about his stunt “Vertigo.” On May 22, 2002, Blaine was lifted onto a pillar 100 ft tall and 22 inches wide at Bryant Park in New York City, where he stood for 35 hours.

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hen Teacher leads us into New York City, the buildings are already big animal heads. They purr, and lower their heads at the man on the pillar who did it to them. He stands on a giantly tall pillar like one of my chess pieces. He’s got his sweatshirt hood on and we can’t see his face. His feet barely fit on the pillar. Is he afraid to look into the lion’s velvet face? Is he afraid the giraffe’s black marble eyes will knock him over? I can only hold my balance on the banister for so long as Sister stands below tying my shoelaces together. I would like to run to the man on the pillar and tie his shoelaces together but the streets are deeper blacker water than I remember. The man on the pillar has bare feet the color of a bruise. The whole world is streaming toward him across the bridges attached to this place. It’s like the man on the pillar is a magnet I can’t get away from. The animal heads purr a deep slow purr—I think they are falling asleep. The man on the pillar cannot fall asleep. Sister says she can stay awake longer than anyone. She can do it by holding a spoon. When it drops it means she was just about to fall asleep and then she is wide awake again. If the man on the pillar dropped a spoon he would not hear it splash into the deep black water street. Teacher says in her slow way of talking I’m afraid y’all are going to be awash in the sea tonight. The man on the pillar is so still like the caterpillar cocoon I am not supposed to touch inside the dry aquarium. I don’t remember how we are right under the man on the pillar. It is very loud here with the sound

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of spotlights. Teacher has grown very old and she does not move. Her mouth is open and so are her eyes. Sister says Teacher is D-E-A-D— Dead. There are big spotlights carving holes in the clouds. The world of people are very heavy behind me. I plant my feet and lean back against them. I must not move any closer to the pillar. I cannot touch the pillar the man stands on. Long, long ago, Teacher told us that if we touched the pillar the man on the pillar holding us here would turn all to powder like the moon. I cannot remember anything else Teacher told us about the man on the pillar but there is a place in my brain that used to know more about him. Did we know each other? Is he some sort of prince? I cannot see his face to remember. Teacher and Sister have sunk into the black water of the street—I can see the tops of their heads far down. How long have we been here? How long has the man been on the pillar? I used to know more about him, but that part of my brain has been filled by new navy blue blood. Teacher once said that blood doesn’t turn red until it touches the air, like magic, she said. Why just look at the map of little blue rivers in your wrist! Someone behind me says we are all sleeping and that we can’t wake up until the man on the pillar jumps. I drop a spoon and watch it as it sinks down so far I can’t see it anymore. I say, see I am not sleeping. The man on the pillar pushes his sweatshirt hood off his head. He lets his toes hang off the edge of the pillar, opens his arms, then just lets himself fall. He falls like a feather, drifting from side to side in the little wind. He doesn’t even seem to get any closer to us in the streets. We are all holding out our hands to catch him. Are these my hands? They look very old and it scares me. What big blue veins I have. A little boy tugs on my jacket. He looks very familiar to me. I am supposed to know him. He says How long has the man been falling from his pillar? When can we catch him? I tell the little boy the man has been falling since the long, long ago, like a feather.

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IMAD RAHMAN Petty

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Act One I was born larcenous. Got a lengthy postcard from the parents once. The note spilled over onto an attached sheet of hotel stationery and the whole thing was stuck in an envelope and mailed. Three days after you came out of your mother’s womb, it went, you peed directly onto your grandmother’s face. She journeyed all the way from the old country to be there when you were born. You do not remember her because she is dead now. But back then she laughed, and said, That child is blessed and has aim. This is the life we predict for you. You can pee on the world and it will only laugh back. You are charmed, son, and although we abandon you with heavy hearts, we leave with the certainty that this world is yours to shape. Venture forth and prosper, and know that your stock is good. In this world, our lot was not to parent, but we do not regret you as you will surely come to regret us. Perhaps we will meet at some point in another reality, another dimension, where karma is love. With love, Us. P.S. The first time we took you shopping you took a packet of Kool-Aid off the shelf and slipped it into your mother’s handbag. We found it when we got home and had to ask the universe if we were meant to keep it or return it to the shelf. What were you thinking? You knew that you were not allowed to drink Kool-Aid! But it made us love you more. This is what we are talking about.

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Act Two When I was eight we lived in a doughnut city in a flyover state. The respectable people had all fled to the suburbs, leaving people like us, new and permanent immigrants, to the downtown streets. Our neighborhood was crumpled apartment buildings and boarded-up storefronts. At night, hooded men with glittering knives roamed the alleyways, but they left us alone because they had come to regard me as a good luck charm. I was the boy allowed to play outside because it was good for my prepubescent development as an adult-in-training in this hard, hard world. There was an Ethiopian restaurant on the block and a seven-eleven and a comic book store. The man who owned the store was a friend of my father’s, another member of the down-and-outers, and he ran the joint like a library for the neighborhood kids, had a system where you could borrow up to five comics at a time for a low monthly rate. He had hairy knuckles and fat hairy forearms. I took this to mean he was a chronic masturbator. Of course I abused the system. He never checked, just nodded and smiled through a snarl as I left, so I would take six or seven and return five and keep my favorites at home under the mattress. I was stockpiling, because I was afraid the Russians would attack soon and there was no guarantee they would not pillage the national comic book inventory. They were Russians! And the world had chosen to place me in a system that was guaranteed to enable me to thwart them in my own small yet significant way. It was my responsibility! But one day as I was walking out with an extra book, Hairy Knuckles placed his hairy knuckles on my shoulder. “I’ve got your number, kid,” he said. I looked up at him. His nose was hairy too from the inside. I thought he meant something else. “You want to call me on the telephone?” I said. “I think our number’s been disconnected.” I understood crime, not punishment. I had never been caught. I often stole money from my father’s wallet and my mother’s purse, not a lot, just enough to stockpile and occasionally eat spicy dorowot at the Ethiopian restaurant where I had become something of a mascot.

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Hairy Knuckles grabbed the comics from me, licked his hairy fingers, and counted out loud. “You only took one extra this time,” he said. “I’m failing math,” I said, although that was untrue. I was in fact best in class! “You think the world is your personal playground?” he said. His voice was deep but now it was shrieky. He sounded like my mother. “You think the world was put there for your personal amusement? For us to give and give and give and for you to take and take and take?” This sent me instantly into a state of ecstasy. “Yes!” I said. “Yes!” Finally, a kindred spirit! He understood me! This was sublime. Hairy Knuckles slapped me on the back of the head and said, back in a deep voice now, “I’m going to have a talk with your father.” I considered this. “What good will that do?” I said. “He just doesn’t understand. He meditates. He keeps singing, what’s so funny about peace, love and understanding. He’s not like you and me.” Hairy Knuckles rubbed his nose. He scratched his head. He stepped back and wiggled his torso and adjusted his groin. He sneered, scowled, simmered. He looked like a puppet and a mafia kingpin at the same time. “Children who look like you,” he said, this time softly and like someone on TV, “need all the luck they can get.” I never returned to the store, never saw him again, although one week later I heard he was stabbed on the street and then his store was boarded up. I never returned his comics, the ones I’d pilfered.

Act Three I was bleeding. I was twelve, this was the old country, where we had been living for two years after my father had to return with his tail tucked between his thighs to lick his wounds and regenerate. I had since grown up around walls. My house, all my friends’ houses, my school, the suburb where everyone I knew lived, a large tract of reclaimed land sprawling out from the ocean, everything I could see was bound in by walls. When I was

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inside I couldn’t see outside the walls, so my favorite memories were of being outside the walls. This day we had been playing hide and seek at some birthday party, where we had been allowed onto the street without adult supervision, which was a thrill, and which I had been allowed to do when we were in the doughnut city in the flyover state where we were poor and working class, and which I was not allowed to do now that we were poor (although my dead grandparents, whose house we lived in, were not) and upper class, and although you were supposed to pair up with someone, I wandered around by myself. People had servants and the servants looked out over the gates, the walls naked in some places, covered with barbed wire and broken glass in others, and the servants, they were looking at me, a child not of the streets but out in the streets. Then I was lost and found a large empty walled-in courtyard with a hole in the wall and I went through the hole and found a wide open grassless dirt field and there was a tomb-like thing in the center and I headed towards it and there were large birds circling and the stench of something awful, mud and shit and decay all around and that’s where I hid, in the shade of the tomb. And I knew I was alone, completely alone, and I was digging that, not realizing of course that where I was had once been and maybe still was a Parsi cemetery, a place where the dead were brought to be picked clean by vultures, an old-school recycling mechanism, nothing wasted, everything reborn. The last time I had been this alone had not been quite so pleasant. Earlier that week, while I was at school, there was a riot. Class was interrupted and everyone hid under their desks. A president, democratically elected but perhaps with an escalating agenda of behaving badly, had been deposed by a military general who had yet to develop an escalating agenda of behaving badly but soon would, and now that president was being hanged by the general and some people were unhappy. What I was unhappy about, though, was what happened after the riot was over and class resumed and ended and school was over and everyone filed out to the large walled-in school yard to wait for someone to come pick them up and then everyone was picked up by drivers or mothers but there was no mother there for me although she had never

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in the past been late and then it was just me and the chowkidar, and the gatekeeper looked at me with such sympathy that I was convinced the mother was dead and that was why the people were rioting in the streets. I wanted to riot myself but the knot of dread in my stomach became a stone and I could not move, could only wait. Then I was bleeding in the cemetery because I had stumbled, fallen. There was broken glass. The cut on my knee was jagged and the pain was fierce and real and true. I put my hand on it and then tasted the blood, which was coppery and warm. I picked up a brick and wanted to do something with it. The tomb-like thing beside me was a mausoleum with a locked door and a stained glass window. The brick was a bomb and the bomb went boom when I threw it at the window. When it shattered a vulture flew out towards me and then for a second held suspended in the open window, its wings, its claws, its beak locked between shards of broken, jagged glass. Inside on the ground was something glistening and leathery, surrounded by what appeared to be bones. I imagined I was surrounded by human flesh, strips of it scattered in the dirt, although I did not at the time know why. When I came closer, I saw a wallet. It looked fat. The vulture had flown away and it was just me and the fat wallet and the bones and the flesh and the dirt. I stepped inside through the broken window. The smell was a slaughterhouse, only good, like what happens when fire makes ash at a barbeque and there is the threat of rain in the sky. I took the fat wallet and ran. I never looked up. It started to rain.

Act Four Six years later, after my parents took off for a cowboyland commune and were never really heard from again, I was back in the States for college, and lost my virginity to Charliene, an older woman who picked me up outside a bar that would not accept my fake ID. “I like

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big boys,” she said. We went back to her place. Tie-dyed pots and wireedged silhouettes were strewn with abandon across the apartment, the bedroom filled with steel pipes welded studiously into figures of indeterminable species. She was half-Lebanese half-French, a still-grieving widow with a journalist husband who’d been killed in Cambodia by an exploding latrine somewhere up-country twenty years back. Charliene was doomed to spend the rest of her life closing her eyes and imagining him, her twenty-two-year-old husband, more boy than man, splattering across the filthy walls of some filthy barroom bathroom every time that she made love. And what scared her most was not the recurring image or that she might never be able to love again, but that her apparition husband aged as she did. He started getting fat, first a beer belly, then bulkier spare-tire padding, growing larger night by night before her closed eyes. Yet she could not resist the bedroom parade of strangers because he would, she knew, become a fat exploding slob who she would never be rid of, and be forced to love in some perverse way. And as much as she hated to admit it, she needed to see him explode over and over again, and thus accepted me, as she had accepted all the other big boys, as a necessary component of the imaginary covenant she had formed with her dead husband, the only means of seeing him again. I knew all this about Charliene after one weekend, and then I never saw her again. But before I left, as she was sleeping with her arm crossed over her eyes and her breasts sliding out from under the sheets, her body cutting an almost perfect diagonal across the mattress, I grabbed two tie-dyed pots and ran out into the night. I would use them as ashtrays. It was a decision that will haunt me forever.

Act Five Now I live in the same flyover city in the same flyover state. I work in a suburban comic book store, only now we call them graphic novels, that has recently been converted into a comic book warehouse because

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our customers are all online and what we do now is check the computer and box and ship. I live in the same neighborhood, in a converted speakeasy and eat in the same Ethiopian restaurant. I take the bus to work although I have a car that sometimes starts. Sometimes at night there are still hooded men in the alleyways, only sometimes they have guns, and they no longer see me as a good luck charm. I carry my credit cards and my drivers license in my socks, I no longer own a wallet, and I keep forty dollars in my pockets at all times for ransom if it is needed. I have a love life, or to be more precise, a sex life, but not much of a social life. When I am not having sex I work on a graphic novel. This happens most of the time on weekdays. The novel is about the typical things, crime and punishment, only in my book the criminal is also the punishment. He wears a hoodie, lives in an abandoned storefront that he has purchased with the money that he makes by kidnapping other criminals and punishing them by never setting them free, even though their minions always pay the ransom. There is a dungeon in the catacombs beneath the storefront. In the dungeon there are vultures. The rest I leave to shadows and imagination. My sex life is with a woman I know only as Natasha, although that is of course not her real name. I could find out her real name if I wanted to, but there is no fun in that. She teaches under her real name at the university in the better part of downtown, the part that is not really a doughnut, in the English department. But when we meet she is Natasha, a high-end callgirl, and I am Boris, a mysterious importer-exporter type of dubious ethnic origin. Sometimes Boris tells people he is from Cyprus, sometimes Turkey, sometimes Greece. I have enough swarthy in me to pull this off. At first I was only Boris with Natasha, but now I find myself being Boris even when I am by myself. We do not kiss, we tongue. We do not caress, we grope. We do not make love, we fuck. We do much of this standing up, or sitting on a chair, a couch, a bathtub, hardly ever a bed. We go to hotels, bed and breakfasts, abandoned buildings. We do not know where we live. We met through an online dating site, and although I have since cancelled my membership, I know that she has not. In life, we have decided that there is too

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much talking and not enough fucking, and we have decided to not be the kind of people who talk. Recently, Natasha, or a version of Natasha called The Foxx, has started to show up on the pages of my graphic novel, and this both pleases me considerably and unnerves me completely. My hero, The Hood, shares my sentiments. They screw in the ruins of an abandoned city, sometimes in a hollowed-out clothing store where naked mannequins watch from the sidelines. Mice scurry underfoot. Purple lightning flashes outside the windows. This is as close as The Hood ever gets to love, but he lacks the vocabulary for me to put the word on the page. Now our relationship is at a turning point because Natasha has taken me to an earnestly ironic department party. I am meeting her colleagues for the first time, and she is not to be called Natasha at this party, but Candace, which I assume is her real name. I am still Boris and I am wearing a sharp suit. The neighborhood is hip suburb. There are bars nearby that serve pommes frites. Across the street from the apartment building, which is very something-deco, we make out against a tree. Natasha smells like lavender, rosemary and honey. There is a hint of eucalyptus in her hair. Whenever I cup her ass she moans. When I do this I feel something that might almost be love. “I am yours, Boris,” she says, “and your cock is mine.” She is still in character and our passion, as she likes to say, is plebian. Then she ties her hair back in a bun and I can tell that she is becoming someone else, because when she is with me she keeps her hair free. At the party they are celebrating a tenure file, which is due to be handed in tomorrow for promotion review. It sits on a chair in the center of the living room, surrounded by incense and candles, but the apartment still smells like a hospital. Everyone there teaches in the English department except for the husbands, wives, dates. The crowd is thirtysomething, forty-something. The old guard, who are all men who happen to be white, have not been invited because their generation has no appreciation of irony. When you walk into the party you have to walk up to the tenure file with your head bowed and leave your offering, beer or wine or whatever,

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at its feet, and then back away with your head still bowed. “Boris does not bow,” I say to Candace, and it is very hard for me to think of her as a Candace, my Natasha, but it is something I am adjusting to. “He does now,” she says, “if he wants to be with NatashaCandace,” and she is right. When it comes to her, whoever she is, I am very flexible. For a while, we mingle. This involves Candace talking to people and my staying close behind, but not within earshot. I make sure to keep a beer in my hand at all times. My word for the day is laconic. A wellgroomed dude with deliberately messy hair and a perfectly symmetrical goatee engages me in casual banter. “What do you do?” he says. I could tell him many things, but my name is Boris. “I import,” I say. I strike a pose that is half puppet, half warlord. This involves keeping the shoulders loose but the body tense. “Oh,” he says, “what do you import?” I look at him and then look away into the distance, which is really not all that distant since this is not a very large apartment. “Things,” I say, and give him that look. Later, while we are still mingling, the host makes his way to me. He looks like a twelve year old with a beer belly and a beard. “And what do you think of our contribution?” he says, waving a hand at what could either be the tenure file or his bookshelf, which is stocked better than the wet bar. “You know,” I say, “if some people really want to make a contribution they would start by shutting the fuck up, don’t you think?” I give it a pause, and then say, “Present company excluded, of course.” The host takes a big gulp of his wine and says, “So what do you do?” I say, “I export.” This seems to delight him. “What do you export?” he says. He can barely contain his excitement. “Things,” I say. It is this kind of talk that makes Boris the talk of the party. Soon, if Candace wants to mingle, she has to stand next to me and occasionally put a possessive hand over mine. Boris is a big hit. A poet, positively spilling out of her dress, leans in a little too close, and stage whispers, “Come on, you can tell us, Boris. What are these things?” My accent is all over the place, but no one seems to notice. “Excuse me,” I say, “I must go to the bathroom.” I pull Candace along with me and the bathroom is upstairs and Candace says, “You talk too much,” and when we get inside we lock the door and grope and tongue and fuck.

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Downstairs, the poet is waiting. “You’re not getting off that easy,” she says, waving her wine glass at me. Candace’s arm is tight on mine. And perhaps it’s the beer, but then I feel the way I felt at the cemetery all those years ago, the way the vulture poised over shattered glass in a broken window could in one moment have become three things—a bird flying innocently out of a mausoleum having picked bones clean of flesh, a bird flying maliciously right at the child right in front of it, a bird losing its poise and dropping right into glass to become dead flesh, dead bone. “In a just world,” I say, “you import what you need and export what you want.” The poet considers, discards. Her head tilts as she considers, squares as she discards. “Define things,” she says. Candace leans in close and says, “I think it’s time you told me your real name. It’s time for you to be Boris in public and yourself in private. I’m ready.” And I’m ready too, only what for, what for, what for? “Excuse me,” I say, “but I fear I must return to the bathroom.” But this time I go by myself and I lock the door and I take off my suit, my shirt, my shoes, my socks, and I sink down into the bathtub and turn the water on. And I’m thinking about Candace, and how loving and fucking are such different burdens and how I am nothing but that which I can take. These are my thoughts: These are my dreams: This is my life: This is how it ends for The Hood: they bomb the city and the last frame shows a postcard fluttering in the breeze next to a mangled hand jutting out of the rubble. There is an ending now, but the rest of it still needs to be written. Then there is knocking on the door and it all makes perfect sense and it comes to me in a wave, like when you pee in a swimming pool and only you know, and I grab a towel and I open the door and I fly down the steps and there are suits and beards and dresses in my way and here I am past all of them and there is the tenure file and here is the tenure file in my hands and there I am out the front door and into this hip suburban neighborhood and here I am past a parking lot and there I am on a street and here is some glass plastered to my foot and there I am on a

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park but I haven’t made it very far because the apartment is right across the street and here is something ripping through my thigh and there I am naked sinking down down down into the grass and here is this tenure file spilling out on all sides but I’ve kept it safe, I’ve been careful because it is everything I am not, a life documented, a life precise. And now here is Candace happy to see me and now there is Candace not happy to be happy to see me. “You’re bleeding,” she says, and I am. She is holding the towel and it is splattered with flecks of blood. I look at her. She looks at me. There is happiness, here is unhappiness, there we are, here is us. “You’re bleeding,” she says again. I know exactly what she means. “No I’m not,” I say.

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MATTHEW SALESSES A Korean Fairy Tale

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uring the time when people were still being born from eggs, but after the time when animals could turn into people, there were born twins, one of whom was unable to sense his brother’s presence. The twins grew up fatefully; by age five they were already the strongest men in their village, often called upon to perform some impossible task, and always the one twin, Jiwon, believing he acted alone, resented his brother, Jimin. The people loved them, and called them by a single name, Ji, and appointed them to succeed the current magistrate, who would leave no heir. But Jiwon couldn’t see the brother who helped him, he couldn’t hear his brother’s voice, or feel his fingers, though they often walked hand in hand, Jimin not expecting any answer, Jiwon watching others to judge the distance between the two of them. When the twins were nine, their mother reported to Jiwon that his brother was leaving home, the blame creeping into her voice. Jiwon felt relieved, but for his mother’s sake, he tried to talk Jimin into staying. That night, he spoke into the dark, where they supposedly lay side by side, as every night—though Jiwon had long gotten used to rolling over whenever he wanted, for he did not feel Jimin’s body beneath him, or hear his brother’s pleading. He bit down his resentment and asked his brother to stay, with no hope for a reply. He tried to picture Jimin beside him, their same face; sometimes he found himself staring into the flat of a sword. And he felt his fraternal love rising and crashing inside him like a wave. He began to shout his brother’s name, then even swing out with his fists, though he felt no impact, and kick out with his feet, and when his father came in to discipline his children, Jimin was gone. As the years passed, Jiwon became a happy child, doing alone what he and his brother might have done together. He stopped a sick bear from rampaging through the rice fields, fashioning a cape from its fur. He rolled a boulder over the hills for a statue to the four winds. He wrestled

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the river dragon and diverted the water to a better route for the farms. The magistrate put him in charge of the village’s meager defenses, and soon their village became an important outpost at the edge of the Koguryo kingdom, fending off attacks from Silla. Jiwon listened constantly for news of his brother, but maybe by the same magic that hid his brother’s voice, he heard nothing of the feats of his twin, and he was content. He began to notice girls, and girls noticed him, twining themselves under his big arms. And in Pyongyang, when the king died suddenly, the young queen called Jiwon to her court. It was the very morning he meant to leave that he awoke to find his father dead. Two snakes lay coiled together at his father’s feet. The royal fortune teller was called, and when he arrived days later, he told Jiwon that he could not take such a poisonous aura with him to the palace. He must find his brother first, the fortune teller said, if he wanted to see the queen. So Jiwon was again tied to his twin. He left before the end of the mourning period, his mother asking him to bring Jimin home. Jiwon set off across Koguryo with the old confusion itching in his chest; now he would hear word of Jimin. But he wouldn’t worry that his brother’s deeds had surpassed his own; he himself had been invited to the palace. He wouldn’t worry about his father’s death, either, or what the sign seemed to suggest the twins had to do with it. After Jimin left, their parents hadn’t looked at Jiwon the same. They’d seemed to look with only half-eyes. Jiwon wouldn’t worry that the gods had disapproved of the twins’ separation, as his father had warned. He tried to imagine the queen. He almost ran into an ajashi balancing a water jug on his head and vegetables under each arm. Jiwon bowed deeply and took the jug and vegetables. The ajashi glanced up at the bear cape. “Jimin,” he said, “it is lucky you are here.” Out of old habit, Jiwon looked beside him; he felt a vulnerability he wished he didn’t remember. “I am Jiwon,” he said, when he recovered from the surprise. “Jimin is my brother. I have to find him before I meet the queen.” “You are Jimin,” the ajashi said. “You even wear his cape?” But then he looked Jiwon over and suddenly clapped his hands. “No. You are without your wife, Jimin’s wife I mean. Jimin never strays far from his wife.”

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Jiwon’s curiosity came on so strong and fast it was like anger; he almost didn’t realize what the man had said about the cape. It wasn’t usual to wear bear fur—Jiwon remembered the rake of claws and how his mother had poulticed his cheek for weeks to prevent a scar, which might have distinguished him from his brother now. “You must know of her,” the ajashi said. “Her beauty is famous throughout Koguryo.” Then he said the woman’s name, and Jiwon felt as if he had heard of her, though he was nearly sure he hadn’t. An image came to him, even, of a woman in a pink and white hanbok, with wide shining eyes and full lips, whom he had never seen before. He couldn’t keep his feelings together. “Can you tell me where to find my brother and his wife?” he asked. The ajashi pointed him over the hills. By the time Jiwon realized he had left the man without help, it was too late: he couldn’t find the ajashi again. And somehow he felt as if his help had been refused. The ajashi should have reminded him instead of talking about Jimin’s pretty wife. Not as pretty as the queen. In his bitterness, a woman ran out of the trees, as if she was the wife, summoned. She flapped like a bird and fell at his feet; he heard the crash of pursuers behind her. “Save me, Jimin,” she said. He stepped over her. Then, “Jimin,” one of the men echoed, and Jiwon was consumed by the recognition of his jealousy, like something in the fog he wished he didn’t know. He might have forgotten to save the woman had the men not turned and run. He heard one of them say, “I heard he wrestled a river dragon.” When the woman looked up, he nearly shook her. “How do you know Jimin?” he asked. “Where is Jimin?” The woman bowed several times and crawled backwards. Jiwon wished to feel sympathy, as she said the men had killed her brother and when he had nothing to take, had chased after her, but he could see how she saw him, a crazed Jimin in a bear cape, denying himself. He tried to convince her he was not his twin even as it made him seem even crazier. “Your wife is not with you?” the woman said, not listening. She touched his leg. “Tell me where she is” he said, burning with shame, trying to focus on the queen. “I do not know where she is.” He would find his brother,

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bring his brother home, and then go on to the palace. The woman sat down again with her legs under her and wept. Jiwon looked over the hills to where he had abandoned the ajashi and started in the opposite direction, wondering again how his brother had come to marry. The woman would be fine, he thought, if the men were so afraid. How they had run from “Jimin.” Jimin had wrestled a river dragon, they said. Impossible. He remembered how hard it had been to hold the slippery dragon, to save the village’s crops. His brother shouldn’t claim Jiwon’s accomplishments as his. Jiwon walked with his head down through Koguryo for several days. He didn’t eat, or even stop to drink from the streams, so filled with thought. He kicked a boulder down a hill and it rolled into the forest, leveling trees. He walked straight and followed the stars at night, using his strength to keep going constantly, until by the Silla border, he found a village that felt somehow familiar, though he knew it was not. It was only in his heart that the village seemed as if, were the world tipped slightly, it would return to how he remembered. People touched his fur and welcomed him back, parting so that their bodies lined a path toward where he knew he would find Jimin’s home, the biggest on the hill. It all seemed a dream, of course. The people touched his cape as if for luck, as if that was what people did here, got close to his twin so that some of Jimin’s strength rubbed off on them, and Jiwon let them because it felt good to be idolized in such a way. “We have been looking for you,” a man in a fine hanbok said. “Preparing for another attack.” So Jimin, Jiwon thought, was the commander of this village’s defenses. “I am going home,” Jiwon said, not bothering to dispel the man’s notions, just wanting to find his brother and resolve everything as soon as possible. The queen, he kept telling himself through his confusion, waited. His brother had married and he had not. He was beginning to feel as if Jimin, too, might have been called by the queen. He walked up the street until he reached the big house at last. A servant met him at the door, and the few stragglers still following fell away, giving their Jimin his privacy. The servant, though, seemed to see that Jiwon was not his master. “You do not recognize me,” Jiwon

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said, the dream finally starting to dissipate. The servant hesitated, perhaps afraid to bring trouble upon herself. “You do not recognize me,” Jiwon said again, more forcefully. The servant shuddered, then stared down at her feet and let him in. She took his shoes. He sighed. He let the bear cape fall to the floor and walked through the wood hall. It was a fine home, large enough for separate women’s quarters. Suddenly, he knew the entire layout. He looked toward where his brother’s rooms would be, like a king’s. But instead he turned and headed for where his brother’s wife must stay when they were not together. He felt nervous, as if he had wronged someone and was seeking forgiveness—he did not know why. His feet pounded in his eardrums. Then he heard other footsteps ahead of him, and a panel slid open, and he saw a beautiful woman with long flowing hair, as if she had just been brushing it and had rushed out before her servant could put it up again. She tilted a cheek to her husband, and he stepped into her arms.

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KEVIN SAMPSELL Telephone Girl

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he comes over at six every night, hands me a cordless phone, and then sits across from me, smiling. I start dialing someone. I’ve called my mother, my ex-girlfriend, and sometimes the new woman at work. If I call one of my male friends, the girl will pout and look like she is about to cry. I do not know who she is, but I will try to describe her. She is tall and awkwardly thin, as if she is still growing into her frame. I think she is maybe high school age, judging from the way she dresses, though sometimes she wears nice business-lady suits, buttoned up tight at her throat. Her eyes are big and dark blue and a little bit far apart. She has perfectly smooth cheeks. Her brown hair has a boyish swoop, slightly interrupted by a cowlick at her right temple. My mom is getting tired of me calling her. At first she was worried that something was wrong, but now she must think I’m playing some kind of game. I used to only call her once a year. The girl does not care what my mom says to me. She just listens to my side of it all. “I just wanted to see how your day was… No, I’m doing okay… What show are you watching?… Maybe I should come visit you sometime…” Sometimes I try to steer the conversation in certain directions to see if it pleases the girl. She will nod her head if it does. Sometimes her smile goes away but she sits there and nods enthusiastically. When I reminisce with my ex-girlfriend about a ski trip we took ten years ago, the girl is nodding so much that I’m afraid she’s going to hurt her neck. One night I asked her if she was hungry and told her I could make tacos. I had bought taco shells that day at the store. I usually don’t make tacos at home because I live alone and nothing is sadder than a bachelor making tacos by himself. She shakes her head and points at the phone.

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Another night I made fancy drinks for us—a combination of various juices and alcohol—to see if that would make her more personable, but she ignored them and handed me the phone. I sat there a minute, almost staring her down, but I lost my nerve and looked at the phone in my lap instead. I pushed its buttons and waited. “Hello, is Sandy working?” I said into the mouthpiece. Sandy works with me at a container store. It is called Containers. The girl stood up and went to the bathroom as I waited for Sandy to get on the phone. It was the first time the girl had used my bathroom. I got up too and quietly moved to the door to listen. I wasn’t sure what I was listening for though. “This is Sandy, may I help you?” I heard a trickling sound and a heavy breathing sound from inside the bathroom. The sound of the toilet seat being closed. The quick burst of faucet water on the girl’s hands. “Hello. This is Sandy.” I made my way back to the chair in my living room just as the bathroom door opened. “Oh, hi, Sandy. Can you check my schedule for this weekend, please?” “Who is this?” Sandy asked. I was embarrassed that Sandy still didn’t recognize my voice, but I kept talking like we were old friends. “I’m going to a friend’s house for a barbecue and I just want to make sure I get off in time.” I could hear Sandy’s confused stammering on the other end of the line and then she said flatly, “Oh, it’s you. Yeah, you work the same as usual. Ten to three, no lunch.” The girl sat across from me again, leaning in, listening closely. I tried to make the conversation last longer, so I wouldn’t have to call my mom or ex-girlfriend. “Do you like barbecues?” I asked Sandy. I could hear Sandy sigh and then she said she was helping a customer and had to go. “Okay, sure,” I said, and after she hung up I pretended that I was still talking to her. “Would you want to go with me?” I said to the dial tone. I probably sounded too confident, too fake, like an actor reciting a line. “Great! That’s great,” I continued. I could hear my own dumb voice bouncing back at me.

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This strategy proved useful and I used it on most nights when the girl came over. I played out cheery conversations with my mom that concluded with me saying, “I love you, too.” I pretended to have heart-toheart talks with my ex, sometimes ending with a cracking voice and fake tears. The woman I worked with would talk to me (or so I imagined) about movies and basketball. I was becoming a real conversationalist. The girl sat there, staring, and sometimes I wondered if she was catching on. Sometimes she winced at the things I said.

One night, she didn’t show up and I felt a huge sense of relief. I was able to actually turn on the local news and watch the beautiful anchor lady report on all the day’s bad news. It seemed to float right over my head and I found myself laughing. At the news of political scandals, car crashes, the weather, and the commercials. I laughed as much as I could because the air in the room was all mine. Thirty minutes later, I turned off the television and looked at the door, expecting still to see the telephone girl, but she was not there. I started to get a stomachache and realized it was worry that I was feeling. I opened the door and saw the sky getting darker. I didn’t know the girl’s name, so I just coughed into the air and got no response. I stepped out onto the front porch and coughed louder and louder and it almost sounded like a bark. I wanted to shout Hey! but couldn’t make my throat do it. I went back inside but kept the door open. I wondered if I should call the police but I wasn’t sure what I would say. I looked at the phone cradle and my phone wasn’t there. I ran through the house and couldn’t find it anywhere. I was panicking and felt the air getting sucked out of me as I shrank to the floor. I pressed my forehead into the carpet and tried to breathe deeply to regain my equilibrium. I rolled over on my back and couldn’t move for a while. I watched the room grow as dark as the sky outside. “Hey!” I finally got out, and the sound of it pierced the

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silence like a gun. And then the sound of ringing. I bolted upright and scrambled to my feet. The ringing was coming from where the cradle was. I turned on a light and the phone sat there, softly calling out like it had always been there. Each ring sounded louder and more urgent until I finally picked it up and answered. It was my mom. She wanted to tell me about her day and she wanted to tell me that she loved me. And then my ex-girlfriend called and she was crying and she said she couldn’t stop thinking of me. She said that she would always love me no matter what. And then Sally from work called and she asked me if I wanted to take the weekend off with her. She said she wanted me to go with her to that place on the coast I was telling her about. When I finally hung up, a couple of hours later, my whole body felt like it was ringing. While brushing my teeth before bed, I started silently weeping. I locked my doors, turned off the lights, and crawled into bed. That’s when the phone rang again. I answered it and waited for someone to say something. There was silence and I wondered if it was the telephone girl. I listened for any clue of her—any word or breath. I held the phone in the darkness like I was holding her hand. I imagined she was holding her phone the same way. My hand felt the warmth of her. She waited patiently for me to talk and then to say goodbye.

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J. A. TYLER [ the second house ]

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built a second house over the mountains, in an other meadow, away from the first where the sun shone and foxes came. Away from where I burned down. An opposite side where flowers are glaciers, where foxes are bears. With an axe and a saw and trees cut down to make four walls, I built a doorstep. I built a chimney for the snowfall and gutters for rain and honey scavenged from knotted holes to coat my nakedness, to feed the bears my body with. The second house was more a dreamscape than a life, bears knowing what it means to pretend children. Bears understanding that we are never to become these children again, and that the first house is already burnt to the grass beneath it. Underneath one answer is another, always bear after bear. Inside of my second fox’s skin I watched the glaciers melt towards me, in my second house, thinking always of dying, what it means to end, my arms covered their length in fox fur, my head peaked with the second fox’s body, my fox-brother’s worn-out crown. In the second house I learned card tricks. I learned to memorize what it looked like in the bear’s eyes when he pulled the queen of hearts or the ace of spades or the two of diamonds. I learned what it smelled like when he exhaled the six of clubs or the four of spades or the jack of hearts. The bear was astonished when I would say Is this your card? and it was. I memorized them all, fifty-two expressions on his bear face, fifty-two senses, fifty-two ways of knowing how it is to look inward. My way with tricks kept the bear coming back, the perfect memorization of his breathing. Glaciers were slanting towards this second house. The bear back day after day. My tricks soothing what was stuck-pollen on his bear tongue.

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Him saying to me Brother? and my cards coming up king of diamonds. The bear believed I was either magician or fox, cards shuffled in hand and the second-fox’s fur hanging about my body. I only wanted to believe that I wasn’t dead. My brother, on the edge of these woods, before I had built the first or the second house, before I had skinned the first or the second fox, he was a messenger, handing me a single black dot on a slip of paper. My brother the deer, handing out a dying. I built the second house with a chimney, and even with its burning logs and the second-fox’s fur, I was never beyond the feeling of deathly cold. That second house was more coffin than living. For the bear I played at other magic too, the sawing in half, the disappearing, the levitations, but he would rather I call his cards. Until I bored of card tricks and he bored of magic, and we became two posts on opposite ends of a line, drying a quilt between us, the wind coming off of a forested mountain, shale walls and frost. There was honey in my fists, in the bear’s paws, and we sat together eating, not speaking. Until the bear took to carving pictures on my wooden walls, and his pictures were so grand that I let him. They were masterpieces, Renoir by sharpening claws. The bear only looking up at me when I said Is this your card? and our glaciers were melting. I shared my honey with the bear, and the bear shared his claws with me, playing so rough sometimes that I was days bleeding and crushed. He was a bear, not a brother, and even brothers with deer hooves can snap these bones. This second house was more a hollow than a home, and the bear was growing restless, my second-fox’s skin only a covering now, no longer a scepter or a victory.

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I let him finish the work, the bear his mural, what he had been making through the decades, a forest-scape that looked like where my brother was, in his deer-kingdom, roofed in evergreen branches, drinking rivers, antlers and sky. I let him finish and then asked the bear to show me where my deer-brother had gone. He pointed with a thick paw at a dark space in the middle of the wall, where nothing had been carved, a blank space left open. I asked him Is that a river or a lake? but he only exhaled a nine of diamonds and flew out through my open door. Underneath one bear is always another, but each bear believes the same bear-beliefs. Each bear understands how to pretend children, how to paint with paws, to eat honey, to die. I pretended living. My deer-brother caught under my disbelief. But each new bear left a carving on the wall, and each new bear left a space in the carving, a blank opening where my brother had gone, and each bear asked Brother? but could not understand what it meant to be deathly. And each bear left. And the second house I had built, the trees cut down to make walls carved into pictures, it was all for a want of living. The glaciers were pooling. It was summer. I lit a fire as I had done with my first house. I arranged grass and sticks in the shape of a monument, in the center of this second house. I told the bears to come see my next trick. I told them I was born anew. I pulled cards from my fox-fur sleeve and held them up to the ceiling. Then I tortured fire out of rocks and smelled what is fire inside of fading summer snow, the feint of possibilities. I tricked the bears into believing that death was only magic. I rejected what the bears had shown me, that my brother was not a second fox’s lining up on my head but a dead boy in a black river or a gone-deer in an endless forest or a messenger bringing me death on folded paper. I rejected bear after bear by burning them all inside my second house, impatiently waiting for new magic. I ate of honey, and there was a rawness in my belly that I couldn’t put out.

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LEE UPTON Escape from the Dark Forest

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hara’s car lurched, shuddered, gasped, died, and then started again, grindingly, only to die entirely by the time she steered off the road. She wasn’t as panicked as she might have been, for far ahead beamed a pole light, something a farmer must have set up. She retrieved her purse and set off, full stride, almost enjoying the night air. Her brother, if he could see her, would be proud of how her heart wasn’t in her throat. She could never be as daring as he was—the way he left with hardly anything more than a camera to all sorts of countries: Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other places she had never traveled. She hadn’t walked more than forty yards before the darkness changed. Beside the road the gully roared with snowmelt. If a car came barreling she would have nowhere to escape but into that howling channel. The road curved and she could make out what sounded under her feet like gravel. She stared into the darkness, into black and gray swaths, as if the dark was shedding. The feathery edges waved and bulked before gradually, like the finest spray of chalk, the fog rose. Soon the fog disappeared as if she had broken through a fine net. When she was a child she would wake to find her brother asleep on the floor of her room. He was afraid of the dark. Otherwise he terrified her in broad daylight—like a reverse vampire. Once he took her with him to a friend’s house. They stepped through a window and clambered to a lower roof. Leading the way, her brother pushed through another window and into a bedroom where his friend and a girl slept together in one bed. The sight had surprised even her brother. Dhara had never witnessed anything quite like it: the two sleeping bodies on the white sheet, beautiful and unreal. She had been a fanciful girl at twelve and thought of those two teenagers as if they floated on a cloud in the morning light. The girl’s hair spread across the boy’s shoulder in a way that made her think of a clock on the wall at home, gold colored with squiggly rays jutting

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around the edges. She stood transfixed until her brother took her hand and together they slipped noiselessly out through the window, and back onto the roof. The clouds drew away from the moon. A farmhouse, its windows lit, rose into view. Dhara was on the driveway leading up to the farmhouse when a dog began howling. She realized her mistake. It wasn’t a dog’s howl but a human’s. The howl was terrible—like someone being burned to death. Clouds swept over the moon. She waited for the clouds to pass so she could get her bearings in the moon’s light. She put her face in her hands. Her skin felt cold and smooth and artificial. When she took her hands away, a woman was standing over her. Dhara explained what had happened with her car. The woman, taking Dhara’s elbow, said, “You’re trespassing.” She held tight and didn’t let go even when Dhara tried again to explain her situation. The moon cast stripes on the farmhouse lawn. Zebra night, zebra life, Dhara was thinking, repeating the phrase in her mind the way people will when they’re terrorized. The kitchen was bright under a florescent light, and a young man in a chair at the table looked up when Dhara entered with the woman. As if time had altered in some magical way, Dhara realized it was her brother, who had been missing for nearly a year—almost a full year to the day. He was her brother—but something was wrong. Her fear stunned her into silence. Next to her brother the chair was empty. Dhara sat, unable to catch her breath. She couldn’t look again at her brother. If it was her brother, shouldn’t he be the one to recognize her—to apologize for disappearing on his adventures and destroying their family? The smell of iron mixed with the smell of burning hair. Something could be heard snapping and shriveling on the stove burners. Dhara made herself look at her brother. His chest was thin, concave. He was younger by at least five years than she was. How could he possibly be her older brother? Her brother: people still were looking for him. Dhara met one of them only two weeks ago at a reception—a woman with hair as orange as a Cheeto. “He doesn’t love any of you,” the woman said to Dhara. “He

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isn’t capable of love.” Uh oh. One of the fallen. Her brother had a terrible track record with women. But why would the woman think he didn’t love his family? Only a week before her brother disappeared he sent Dhara— from Seattle of all places, with all its coffee bars and conveniences—a digital image of orchids, suspended, like beautiful, shadowy, unreal faces, heart-stoppingly beautiful. Underneath the spitting sound—Dhara realized it was eggs frying—she detected a scrabbling, like cockroaches in a drawer lined with loose paper. “She doesn’t look like a crack head,” the boy said. “They don’t all look like what they are,” the woman said. “My car broke down,” Dhara said again, wondering if maybe the woman couldn’t hear well. “I was trying to find somewhere where I could call. I left my cell phone at home.” “You all say that. You want the syringes. You think you can find anything you want here.” The boy laughed. It was the oddest laugh she had ever heard, odder than her brother’s but almost an amplification of her brother’s. A laugh with grit in it, like kernels of grain rattling in a throat. She tried to describe it in her mind, to keep herself calm. A cat jumped on her lap and instantly jumped off. For the first time she noticed that there were several cats in the kitchen. Three of them were as entwined as baby snakes inside a cardboard box. On a stool across the room a gray cat hunched, its ears swiveling. “My car,” Dhara said. She explained yet again that her car had broken down and that she would like to make a phone call. She didn’t mean to make any trouble for them, she just needed to make a call. That was all, then she could leave. She didn’t want to be any trouble. “Do you remember that baby doll I bought you?” the boy said. He was her brother again. Because, yes, her brother had bought her a doll. The doll’s eyes blinked and clicked. The head was as large as her own, or nearly, and its hair rose in tight wires with yellow sparks. In the spring the doll turned up in the weeping cherry tree, lodged between branches, its legs dangling. “You’re Bluey Cluff’s daughter,” the boy said. “Mom, that’s Bluey’s daughter. I gave her a doll years ago. She remembered. I saw it in her eyes.”

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“No. No.” Dhara took out her driver’s license to show proof. “Those can be faked,” the boy said. “Plenty have faked them,” the woman said. She and the boy stared at Dhara, their eyes wobbling with what must have been memories. Near a box of newspapers a calico cat stretched its legs, drawing its tail over its head like a question mark. “She can’t get enough cats,” the boy said. He jerked his head toward the woman. “She hates cats. But they come here anyway.” The boy smiled, a smile so much like her brother’s that Dhara felt dizzy. She had wanted a signal for months. Possibly this boy was a sign that her brother was still alive. Otherwise, what could she think—that an entire life, her brother’s life—could be a fleck of ash, and there would be no mark in the universe, no message, no clue left about what happened to him? Amnesia—that was what her mother had said. Dhara and her father couldn’t help but groan at the word. Or he was ill. Or he didn’t want to be found. Her mother and father couldn’t believe their son was dead, only that he was temporarily unwilling to appear. All of them were held in suspension because of it—as if his absence kept them from contact with the rest of the world. Dhara thought of the depth of her love for her brother, how it kept deepening, as if inside her a canyon opened because of his beautiful strange wildness and there at the base of a canyon ran the river of her love for her brother. But there was no way to control what happened with her love and there was always the possibility that she would grow numb after time. That would be natural—a means of self-preservation. And that would be horrible. How could she reach her love for him and keep it strong? It would be like reaching between her ribs and touching her own heart. The woman was swaying at the stove on her thick shoes—a nurse’s shoes, cracked, yellowed. She lifted the pan and turned it over onto a plate and carried the plate to the table. For a bewildered moment Dhara thought the woman wanted her to eat. But then the woman sat down and began to slide the eggs into her mouth. A cat leapt on the table. With her forearm the woman knocked the cat off.

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“I’ll just be heading out now,” Dhara said. She felt as if her feet weren’t on the linoleum but sliding over a cushion of air. “It’s cold,” the woman said, “but do what you like. I’ll tell you what. You wait on the porch a minute if you feel more comfortable out there and I’ll make a call for you to the service station.” “I can make the call.” “Now you just let me handle this.” Paint cans, a step ladder, clay pots rimmed with dirt—she could see all this surrounding her on the porch, visible from the pole lamp’s blue light. When the boy stepped out onto the porch Dhara told him, “You look like my brother. ” Something about his eyes, too, made her think of what happened years ago when she and her brother were in the backseat of a rental car their father was driving. Above the passenger’s seat rose the back of their mother’s head, newly permanented. Her head appeared inflated, like Ronald McDonald’s head. Dhara and her brother were looking for bears. They were each peering out one side of the car and into the forest. “Oooh, dark forest,” her brother chanted. It was broad daylight, but the deeper in they looked, the darker the forest grew. “I see one!” her brother cried. Only later at the hotel when the clerk at the desk overheard them did the family learn that South Dakota’s bears had been destroyed years ago, but—consolation prize!—a bear park was only a half hour away. The next afternoon they drove to the park. The man who took their money warned them: “Keep your windows up. Don’t let the bears get ahold of you.” They had driven only yards into the park when a bear bumbled past their car and sat down on the side of the roadway, its fur shrugging over its body after the rest of the bear stopped. Outside the car’s back window another bear yawned. In the reflected image Dhara’s brother looked like he was inside the bear’s mouth. As they drove past the bear, her brother rolled down the window and stuck his hand out and stroked the tail end of the bear. Their parents hadn’t seen what he did. Dhara would never forget it. The way he took a swipe at that bear’s fur, cuffed it. The way he turned to her afterwards, eyes wide, making fun of her fear. “Come on back in,” the boy said. “My mom said to get you out of the cold.”

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At the doorway Dhara stepped over what at first looked like a wad of rags. “How many cats do you have?” she asked. “We don’t count. She—” the boy nodded toward his mother who was scraping out a pan over the sink, “hates them, but they come anyway. There are too many cats in the world.” The house was growing warmer. The boy bent next to his mother over the sink. They whispered and Dhara heard “Cluff, Cluff.” “The doctor told you that you can have another baby someday,” the woman said. Who was she talking to? Then Dhara realized that the woman was addressing her. “But you have to be careful. You’re not repaired. You should thank those people. Maybe it was good you weren’t allowed to hold the baby. They didn’t want you to look at it. It was a girl. You should know that. Although I suspect you know that. They didn’t blindfold you.” “I’m not the person you think I am,” Dhara said. “That girl. She must look like me, that’s all.” “She doesn’t look like anybody but you because that’s who you are,” the boy said. Dhara knew it then: the man named Bluey Cluff would arrive, not someone from a service station. The woman had phoned Cluff, believing Dhara was his daughter. Dhara watched her own hand reach out and push at the screen door. As she was running across the yard she heard shrieks. Then she was on the road, running next to a ditch where water churned and roared. She wasn’t sure if the boy was chasing her or if it was her own heart she heard. When she couldn’t run any longer she stopped, vomiting into the road. A silvery streak illuminated the edges of a block of darkness. After she unlocked the car door her hands slipped. She dropped her keys on the car mat. She felt around and found the keys, and then, as if nothing had been wrong, as if the car only needed to cool down and had sufficiently recovered, as if it only required rest—like something made of flesh—the engine started. She managed to turn around on the narrow road without a wheel dropping into the gully. When she pulled into the parking lot of her apartment building Dhara was so relieved she let herself cry. She told herself it was a real

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sign—an unmistakable near miracle. Why else would the motor have turned over unless she was receiving a message that everything was fine, not only for herself but for her brother? As she drew out the car key, she saw the animal. In the light from the dashboard the fur looked wormily gray, like a raccoon’s markings. Dhara opened the car door before she was struck with the realization that if the cat ran away it might starve or be run over in traffic. She reached out and, with an intake of breath, picked up the cat. Like something wounded, the animal rested its full weight in her arms. After she turned the light on inside her apartment the animal sprang away, its paws meeting the floor with a thud. The cat followed her to the coat closest, and into the kitchen. It stared up at her knowingly until she found a can of tuna and a bowl of water. Its coat looked thicker in the light. When she let the cat outside it disappeared. She waited for a rustling in the bushes. If the cat came back, it could be another sign that her brother was alive. She had overreacted earlier, she told herself. That boy and his mother meant to do what was right. They only confused her with someone else, someone missing. The problem would have been cleared up. Or maybe—and this was the oddest thought of all—maybe they had been playing a trick on her. Maybe it was a game they played together? Maybe they liked scaring her? When the cat didn’t appear, Dhara made meowing noises. After what seemed like a very long time she felt a wash of dampness against her ankle. The cat’s fur sparkled in the beam from the street lamp. She was tired but had a hard time falling asleep. The cat kept bumping its head against her cheek. Finally the animal settled on her chest, curling its front paws, another sign of the new peace that Dhara was demanding from life. Only in the full morning light did she see that under the cat’s fluffy mane ran a ring of pus where someone had tried to hang it. Even then she couldn’t believe it was a sign that her brother was never coming home—despite every indication that the actual world offered. His silence foremost among those signs. Instead, as she worked

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through the phone book looking for a veterinarian, she thought of Bluey Cluff’s daughter and that girl’s baby. Would that girl and the baby she wasn’t allowed to hold ever find one another? What must it have been like for that girl, to lose her baby like that? At least, Dhara told herself, her own awful adventure meant she had rescued a vulnerable little creature, even if the cat’s chances of surviving seemed slight. The cat uttered a cry—mechanical sounding, like a tiny door opening, a tiny door on the other side of the earth. The poor thing’s neck was oozing. The cat’s cries rose louder. Dhara returned from the vet with the cat’s neck shaved and two ointments as well as an antibiotic she was supposed to shoot into the cat’s mouth. The cat didn’t mind having the top of its head petted. Such a sign of hope, so endearing—the cat’s affection! She kept her new happiness close and secret. Why was she now flooded—flooded!—with the conviction that her brother was alive and would make his way back? He must be teasing them. She was sure of it. Although her certainty was beyond logic. Nevertheless it was a conviction as real to her as the cat was real. The river of love in her heart—she couldn’t touch it. But it was real. Her brother was real and would come back to her and her mother and father—who were dying from the loss of him and the uncertainty. When he returned she was going to make sure he knew she was lost without him. And she was going to touch his heart. They all were.

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LAURA VAN DEN BERG Cannibals

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he cannibals loved music. They’d found their instruments—a ukulele, an oboe, and a French horn—at a Salvation Army and paid for them with a dozen human teeth. They kept these teeth in leather pouches, like change purses, that hung from the khaki shorts my father had given them. The Salvation Army cashier had stared down at the teeth spread across the counter and started to cry. The cannibals had cradled the instruments in their long arms and grunted. What’s the problem here? their expressions seemed to say. There were three of them; they all had the same stringy hair and bulbous cheekbones. They looked at my brother and I like they wanted us to explain, but we didn’t know where to begin. They cannibals didn’t understand why our neighbors complained so much about the music. Or at least why they complained about it more than the occasional femur on the front lawn or the stench of burnt skin that wafted over the backyard fence. Of course, the cannibals didn’t think it was a stench. They thought it was one of the most pleasing smells in all the world, but they were not ignorant to other perceptions. Mrs. Hamilton, who lived next door, would sometimes stand on a stepladder and peer over the fence and say “What are you cooking over there? Wild yak?” She had a speech disorder that made her talk with a German accent. But the thing Mrs. Hamilton and those like her hated the most was the music. Once the cannibals held a concert in the backyard. My brother and I were the only attendees. I wore a dress patterned with sunflowers, and he put on penny loafers and a bow tie. I arranged two lawn chairs in the yard. I found an olive-colored umbrella in a hall closet and pretended it was a parasol. It was summer and the sky was a perfect shade of blue. The cannibal’s songs didn’t have lyrics; they were a clash of string and wind, punctuated with blasts of French horn. During the concert,

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Mrs. Hamilton rounded up a gang of neighbors and they all called the police, who slapped the cannibals with a noise citation. The cannibals offered human teeth to the police and were threatened with handcuffs. When everyone was gone, they closed the front door and handed me the citation. They had the same look in their eyes as they did in the Salvation Army, desperate for someone to explain. I was only twelve, but the citation seemed clear enough “This costs money,” I said. “Real money. Two hundred and six dollars. You can’t pay with those stupid teeth.” I passed the citation to my brother, who was ten. “The neighbors have a point about the music,” he said.

Our parents brought the cannibals back from a trip to Papua New Guinea. They had been bored in the jungle, our parents explained. They wanted to learn about modern civilization. Our parents were ornithologists and had gone to New Guinea to study the Alpine Pipit. My father gave the cannibals the old, paint-speckled shorts and T-shirts he wore during home repair projects. He taught the cannibals to barbeque, which thrilled them, and it was my mother’s Stravinsky records that got them excited about music. When they heard The Rites of Spring for the first time, they kneeled on the living room floor and started speaking to each other in their strange, babbling language. My brother and I watched from the doorway. We were still a little frightened of the cannibals, even though our parents had assured us there was nothing to worry about, but in that moment they had looked serene and reverent. A month later our parents departed for the Peruvian Amazon. They left an envelope of cash and an emergency phone number. We weren’t sure if my brother and I were supposed to be in charge of the cannibals, or if the cannibals were in charge of us. My brother and I never asked the cannibals where their meals came from. They were usually happy enough to eat human food, but sometimes they would get this faraway look in their eyes and disappear for a while and later there would be some strange-smelling thing cooking on

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the grill. Every now and then one of the cannibals would ruffle my brother’s hair or pat me on the shoulder. I took these gestures to mean they had no plans to eat us. I imagined they’d made a pact with our parents. The day after the noise citation, Mrs. Hamilton knocked on our door and asked to speak with our parents. Her accent reminded me of a villain in a bad movie, the way her syllables were long and sharp. My brother stood next to me. The cannibals loomed behind us. “They’re out of town,” I said. “Then who’s watching you?” “They are.” I nodded toward the cannibals. “Are they relatives?” Mrs. Hamilton asked. “Uncles,” I said. Mrs. Hamilton frowned. I told her to have a nice day, which was how my mother said to end conversations with people you didn’t like, and closed the door. After she was gone, I counted the money our parents had left. We were down to seventy-five dollars. We had spent too much on pizza and rolls of chocolate chip cookie dough and movie rentals—oh, how the cannibals loved Vin Diesel!—and now we didn’t have enough to pay the fine. The citation said that if we didn’t pay the fine, we had to go to court. I wasn’t sure what would happen if the cannibals went to court, but I didn’t think it would be good. Later, I called the number my parents had left. It belonged to a riverhouse in Iquitos, where they had been staying. But now, according to the innkeeper, they were out in the jungle and there was no way to reach them. My parents were very capable people. They could start a fire with a single twig. They could tie a perfect sailor’s knot. They could spear fish. They could speak indigenous languages. They knew Morse code. It was easy for them to forget that not everyone was so well-equipped. In the middle of the night, I was awoken by the sound of the French horn. When I looked out my bedroom window, I saw one of the cannibals playing in the backyard. The other two were lounging in the branches of my mother’s pear tree. My parents had said that the cannibals had much to teach us, but I was still waiting for their lessons.

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We took a taxi to the courthouse, a white building with pillars and a domed roof. Inside the air conditioning was broken and everyone was sweating. I had called Uncle Marty—who was also not really our uncle, just a friend of the family and, more importantly, a lawyer—to help with the case. Unfortunately Uncle Marty was a drinker and since it was the afternoon, he was already what our mother would call “a half-seas-over.” He stood with the cannibals at the defense table, flushed and swaying. The judge peered at us over the top of his glasses. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all.” At the start of the trial, the police officers who came to our house testified. Of course, they had to make mention of the human teeth. Next was Mrs. Hamilton, with her dumb German accent. She wore a pink pantsuit that made her look like an Easter egg. She said she was speaking on behalf of all our neighbors. “Stravinsky!” Uncle Marty said when it was his turn to question Mrs. Hamilton. He rocked back and snapped his suspenders. “Is it a crime to love Stravinsky?” My brother and I sat on the wood benches in the audience section. We watched Mrs. Hamilton pucker her lips and Uncle Marty sway as the cannibals looked on, more confused than ever. My brother pinched the side of my thigh. “What a shit show.” I elbowed him. I thought he was too young to know swear words. When it was time for the cannibals to testify, they of course had nothing to say, or at least nothing to say in English. One cannibal made a drawing on the back of a court document. He used Uncle Marty’s ballpoint pen. After he finished, he handed it to the bailiff, who gave it to the judge. “What is the meaning of this?” The judge flipped the drawing around and shook the paper. I thought it looked like a giant bird wearing the sun for a hat. “Or a spaceship,” my brother said. “Silence!” The judge pounded his gavel. He said he was ready to rule and the defendants weren’t going to like it. There was to be no more music of any kind. Not in the house or in the backyard or in the basement or on the rooftop. He asked the cannibals if they understood.

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The cannibals didn’t reply. They just leapt into the audience section and loped up the aisle. My brother and I followed. The judge shouted for the bailiff and soon we were being chased. We fled the courthouse. Outside a taxi was idling by the curb. We leapt inside and told the driver to haul ass. When he asked where we wanted to go, we told him we didn’t care. We had seventy-five dollars and just wanted to be far away from the courthouse and the judge and Mrs. Hamilton and drunk Uncle Marty. I was squished between two cannibals. My brother was sitting on my lap. Through the windshield I could see the glowing sun and thought of the cannibal’s drawing and what it meant to be evolved. The driver took us to a park with rose bushes and hydrangeas and red-faced children hanging from monkey bars. We found the highest oak tree and climbed it. In the treetops the cannibals chewed on leaves and stroked our hair. When they offered us leaves, we nibbled the edges. It was bitter at first, but a taste I could get used to. A big white plane passed overheard. We all looked up. The cannibals pointed at the plane and sighed. I wondered if they were remembering something. Something from home. The sound of the engines echoed in my ears. It was like listening to the ocean through a conch shell. I imagined my parents were on that plane. I imagined they were looking for us.

Or was that just a dream I had? Did the judge discover the cannibals were here illegally and have them taken into custody? Did my brother and I go home alone? Did we see Mrs. Hamilton smirking at us as we wandered into our empty, silent house? Did my brother threaten to “cut that bitch,” which led me to worry he’d been watching too many violent movies? Did it take another week for our parents to return? Did they find my brother and I wearing clothes? Did they know there had been no word from the cannibals? Did they know that we missed them? That we’d been surviving on Snickers bars and court TV? That we’d been falling asleep on the couch at midnight and waking at dawn? Did we still know how to use beds? Did they find instruments and toilet paper and smashed Stravinsky records and candy wrappers and drawings

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of giant birds and spaceships and human teeth scattered throughout the house? Could we still speak English? Did they noticed the marks on our arms and legs from where we had bitten into ourselves, ever so gently? Did they try to console themselves with that old line about children being resilient? Did they notice that when they walked through the front door and dropped their suitcases and called for us, we raised our heads from the couch and looked at them like strangers? Did they realize that they were?

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ROB WALSH The Dog

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he boys didn’t want the dog. They said that the dog wasn’t theirs, when anyone asked, though it clearly was. At first, it came forward and suddenly was touching them. A wet nose. Wetter than a snail up their legs. The boys kicked the dog, reflexively, they tried to explain, since nothing was less natural than to be covered with the film it left behind. One day, which was otherwise normal, their dog left. Then it came back, like it always did. This time it was mangier than before. The boys had even less use for it. For they had a friend now. The boys liked the friend. Irregularly—and when they least expected it—the friend would punch them, for no reason, but not very hard. The boys were always surprised by it. Did it make them angry, they wondered, when the friend punched them? Maybe a little, at first, but they were inexperienced in the rites of affection. The friend’s breathing often kept the boys awake. He breathed very loudly at night. First thing in the morning he was doing push-ups, then pull-ups on tree branches. Without notice the dog returned. The dog was probably contaminated, the friend said. The friend wondered if the dog’s stomach and heavy eyes were contaminated, since its teeth definitely were. The dog barked or coughed. One was not much different from the other. It looked sick. It had always looked like a dog that had recently taken sick but still had a long stretch of misery before its death. It would spread misery onto others, surely, if indeed contaminated, the friend argued; he floated the idea of killing it as a favor.

They hadn’t ever killed a dog as a favor before. Neither had their friend, he added quickly; he had no idea how long a dog’s final breath would drag on for or how many preliminary breaths it would take. Stay,

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the boys said. The boys left the dog there and ran along the steep path where berries could be found. At an overpass, they needed to catch their breath, but the friend didn’t. The friend began to do pull-ups, and when he was finished, to recline in the sun and oil his chest again. Over the friend’s shoulder, insects were surrounding a tree; above it, distantly, a store was visible. They came upon the convenience store. Near the convenience store were posters of meat products with ketchup already inside of them. Inside, a woman in uniform was talking on the phone. When they brought a number of small pies to her counter, she continued talking on the phone. Then she noticed the dog struggling to open the door and she smiled and hung up. The woman used to have one just like it. She emerged from behind the counter with her hand outstretched. The friend grabbed it. The friend told her to think straight. The dog was likely contaminated. She pushed the friend aside. This woman told him not to touch her, and she sat on the friend’s chest, beating his face with both hands locked together in the manner that a doctor, as the last resort, will beat a stopped heart, and the boys found themselves as frozen as the cold pies in their hands. When the woman finished, she stared at the boys until they retreated. Then she turned to the dog, which had managed to open the door and crawl inside and under a strip of cardboard. She was petting the dog while the boys were whispering. Suddenly they ran out of the store without paying for the pies in their arms. The boys went on and turned a number of corners until reaching a knotted yellow tape and a locked gate and a fence, all of it at once, which overwhelmed them. They scratched their chins. That didn’t help them think at all. The boys peeled the wrapping off a pie and handed it to the friend. When the friend had eaten that pie, he struck the boys in their shoulders, harder than he normally did. Guns, the friend said. Let’s see her try that again when they had some guns. The friend told the boys that he had shot out a window once. They weren’t sure that they believed him. He described what it felt like to kill the window. Sometimes, when remembering it, his friend pictured a man fresh out of the shower and walking by in a towel when the glass sprays and the bullet sinks into his stomach, and at first, the man’s so confused, the dolt, he’s some dolt who’s never been so confused and

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mistakes it for an insect bite or another nipple or something but then it dawns on him, like a wrecking ball dawns on a building! The boys heard what sounded like a dog climbing a fence. They turned and saw the dog climbing the fence. Its hair was now organized from the woman’s petting. It still looked ready to die, or worse, like something recently dead and dressed up in fancy clothes, as a joke, and the dog dropped from the top rung and began to limp toward them. They told the friend to come on. They jumped off the carousel and it groaned and exhaled, like all the painted horses and elephants had been holding their breath. Inside the crate, still, was the note written in a language they couldn’t understand. The characters were common shapes, stuck with uncommon lines or severed and misshapen, and the friend, each time they pried the crate open, would sit staring at the note. They could hear it panting. It sat at a measured distance apart, partway under a strip of cardboard. Today the dog’s eyes looked dumb yet calculating. The boys wondered why the friend was so interested in the crate. Below the note was a dusty cape. Moldy. They weren’t sure if clothes could mold. The dust, when they traced the cape’s stitching with their fingers or ventured to try it on, was unlike any dust they had been exposed to. A good place to find guns, the friend said suddenly, was a war. The boys didn’t know where any were. They could wage one. On the dog, the friend said, and after a while he began to laugh—not quite laugh exactly—but what he usually did following a joke or prank of some kind. It was almost morning. Still dark, but flecks of light were appearing spylike, signaling each other. The boys staggered away to find sleep. The boys rolled over. They blindly felt after the friend’s hair. Found it. Next they buried their faces into the friend’s long hair. When they registered a smell, and a texture, unlike the friend they opened their eyes and registered the dog wedged between them in bed. They began to yell and wave their arms around. Soon they had thrown it overboard. The water turned browner as the dog paddled, not the least bit frantically, the friend said, disappointed, and soon it emerged at the far shore and disappeared past the treeline. The friend rubbed sleep out of his eyes and loosened his pants to scratch his crotch and yawned all at the same time. Then all at the same

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time he stopped. He told the boys not to look at him like that. They went outside and washed in the river. Suddenly something broke inside the boat. Then some things like it could be heard breaking. His friend appeared in one of the boat’s porthole windows and could be seen raising both hands up to the light, examining blood running from his cuts with the pleasant, curious expression of a collector with his latest specimen, and the boys went back to washing themselves. The moon came and floated above the porthole windows and the stars followed behind like a litter of starvelings. It was time, almost time to get up, the boys thought. But they were already up. Later, distantly, they watched the dog emerge from a ruin and stay well ahead, trotting awkwardly, always within sight. As if teaching us how to limp, his friend joked, as if trying to force us to learn something. They ran but they couldn’t catch up to the dog. The friend kneed one of the boys, hard in the stomach, and the other boy pushed the friend and he stumbled backward and cried in horror as he toppled over the ravine and slid down it. When he had finished climbing back up the ravine he appeared to be covered in coffee grounds. He was not very talkative. He said only that the dog was coming between them. A girl wearing a cap with numbers on it and a jersey with numbers on it walked up to them. She had her own bat. She told them that already this morning she had hit a home run and a screamer past the infielder. The girl was petting and parting its hair, in spite of the contagion, the friend whispered. The dog could barely catch, the friend told the girl. That should make her lose interest in it completely. The friend was very disappointed when she didn’t. A few girls, who were blind, moved by slowly and everyone bowed their heads and waited for the blinds to disappear past the treeline. The dog will contaminate us all, the friend whispered. He looked at his fingernails and wondered if they had stopped growing. He started talking about the gun again, when the girl was out of earshot. They went looking for it. The search for a gun led them to a reserve of canned corn and beans. The friend kept on whispering. The boys could feel the friend’s lips against their ears, even when he was not whispering. Don’t ever feed it. Feed it once, it comes back twice for more. It begins hallucinating things

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to live for and then its tail is moving. Soon the dog is thinking with its tail. Following its tail around, jumping in our laps if the tail says to. The girl had braided some of the dog’s nape. The boys climbed a small mountain, which used to be much larger, and came upon an officer in the valley she was patrolling. The officer was looking into a hole. Overhead, ragged black clouds were passing over and disguising the moon, ringing the stars with fake beards, and the friend kept on muttering in a language the boys could not understand. It was the language written on the note, he claimed. The boys knew this was false. The friend didn’t know what was on the note. As the boys got closer, they expected the officer to hear their footfalls, turn, and acknowledge them. She continued to look into the hole. The boys got closer. They were right behind the officer. When the boys tapped her on the shoulder they expected her to spin wildly, bent into a defensive stance, then recognize them as boys and restrain herself from hitting them with the club, which would have instantly been drawn. She turned around slowly, though, and only halfway, looking at them sidelong. What did they want? For crying out loud! the officer said, interrupting them, when the dog, having approached from her other side, began to sniff her. She told the dog to stop it. Soon the officer made motions with the club, like she might strike the dog, but she couldn’t bring herself to strike it; her extensions were very slow and controlled and stopped just before reaching the dog, almost like a caress, the club gently making contact with its snout or its matted flank. Whose dog was it? she asked. The friend reddened. It was some while before he said: Just what are you accusing us of? Look, she told the boys. Just get out of here. Something was in the hole and it needed her. She removed her pistol, pointed it in the hole, set her jaw, frowned, looked away in displeasure, her face scrunched up, and began to squeeze the trigger. The friend reached up to take the gun from the officer. She spun wildly, like they had expected her to before, and threw him to the ground. She put the gun in its holster and began to pummel him with the club. She filled his mouth with dirt so that he was unable to scream. Meanwhile, the dog, sitting with its genitals exposed, struggled up, found its bearings and went to take a look in the

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hole. When it was all over she lit a cigarette. She said she hoped the friend had learned something from all this. Her face was wracked with guilt. Was there one thing the friend had learned? The blood on her hands transferred to her cigarette and began to mix with ash and the smoke changed color. As soon as this happened the dog went crazy. They could only attribute this to the strange smoke. It attacked her and they both went spinning into the hole. The friend held the gun now. It was pinched between all of his fingers and he kept glancing at it, sweating a little. When they returned to the boat it had been set on fire. The rest of the boats in the harbor had been set on fire also. It looked celebratory, to the boys, as if something were being commemorated. They were unable to mourn their shelter or possessions without enjoying the warmth, the red reflections and the theatric cries of those apparently still aboard. With uncertainty, the friend raised his hands, slowly, and thought to clap them together; but not wanting to be the first, he hesitated. The dog drudged itself from a briar into view. The boys ran along a path that had once been paved, hurdling over trees that grew laterally. High above perched small owls that never seemed to move. Soon it was going to be day. The boys needed a place to sleep, such as the hut, thatched together with vinyl and cardboard; the boys found the hut neighboring a convenience store with bars in the window and signs threatening not to serve those without shoes or shirts. Two huge twins were behind the counter. They were dressed in tight yellow frocks that matched their lipstick. The boys thought about stealing frozen pies from the convenience store, for they liked to eat these pies more than anything else, and emboldened by the gun, the friend began to creep in that direction. But as soon as the twins opened their mouths to ask if they could help and they heard what the twins sounded like, worse than anything they could ever have imagined, they ran back to the hut. An old mother was knitting something inside the hut using long, sharp needles, and wire. She was knitting a little mask. She held it up to her face to model. The wire mask, still incomplete, looked perfect for concealing a grotesque burn or other disfigurement. But the mother’s face was not grotesquely burned. Or at least not yet, she said, knocking

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on a wooden end table. There were candles and jars of colorful oil lining the hut’s many narrow mantels but the hut smelled more like straw and damp concrete. She moved closer. It was not her deep wrinkles, nearly scars, or her quick way of walking, that alarmed the boys, but her dimples. Dimples of a child. Those dimples should have gone away by now. People only used their dimples like that when they wanted something. She motioned to all the possessions stacked in the hut, the possessions piled in corners, the possessions in boxes, which themselves counted as possessions; the wet boxes, the boxes spilling smaller boxes; she had so many boxes that the boys could take a few home with them if they wanted. She hobbled closer to the boys, moving crabwise—then jerked suddenly back, as if chained to something, as if she could go no farther. The mother’s eyes were the size and color of freckles, the friend whispered. She began to look at him as though she had heard him. She, a mother, the woman said, was going to heat something for them all to drink, which was nutritious. The mother was now staring more intently at the friend. She extended a hand in an attempt to touch the friend but her hand stopped halfway, and jerked sideways, as if shackled to something they could not see. Instead of making this drink she bent to pet the dog. She scratched his dog’s balding chin with one hand while using the other to point at the friend. This one, the mother said, still pointing, was not a good influence. He was not setting a good example. She picked up the mask she had almost finished knitting and began to strap it onto her face. She pointed at him again and asked how long he had been contaminated? Then she waved her hand to suggest that she didn’t really care about that. A song had come into her head suddenly, as songs will, an inappropriate song, which her husband used to sing. The song always made her uncomfortable and full of something, she explained, not unlike pee, except it couldn’t be urinated. When her husband sang it he would always throw his head back, like a wolf. She was fingering her sewing needles and staring at a picture on the mantel. It had an annoying chorus, she said, flying at the friend and squeaking like a tiny banshee, a banshee that haunted the kingdom of insects behind the hut’s pulpy walls, or maybe it was just her shoes squeaking, and already she had folded him over her knee and begun to scold his legs and buttocks. When it was all over, she

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said: You need to tell me where you’re going. You need to do a better job of everything, across all categories, particularly washing. I’m still your mother. The dog’s mother, too, she said. She ordered the dog to tell her everything the older brother had been up to. She was still wearing the mask, so the words were muffled, and the boys could not be sure of them.

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JILLIAN WEISE Elegy for Zahra Baker

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Zahra Baker is missing. “I don’t know. You all know more than I know,” says her father. The news on five web sites tells the story the same clausal way. A girl, who wears hearing aids and a prosthetic leg, went missing. Why bring Lacan into it? I dated this guy who liked to make unannounced visits. “Whaddya know,” he would say. “I was just in the area.” When we broke up, he said, “You must have had childhood trauma.” I called my mom. “Did I have childhood trauma?” Where is Zahra Baker’s mom? Zahra Baker was born in 2000. Her parents divorced in 2001. No one can find her mom. They are both missing. Wednesday. Poetry Workshop. Here I am again talking without thinking. “I have a fake leg and I saw this clip on the news about Zahra Baker who may be dead with a fake leg and it didn’t make me cry. It’s very hard to make someone cry in poems or on the news.” After I said the words fake leg, everyone in the class looked at my feet. I do not have bone cancer or anything that easy. People know what bone cancer means. She was ten years old. And, if she is still alive, she is still ten years old.

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“Zahra was last seen in her bed at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday morning according to her stepmother.” —Fox News “I am gothic and proud.” —Stepmother’s MySpace page. “Mr. Coffey, you like being in control now who is in control we have your daughter no cops.” —Ransom Note Her leg was found in the woods. They matched the serial number from leg to medical records. This is how it begins. Serial numbers on our parts. Only our doctors can tell you who we are. What am I doing with my life? The commercial starts with a celebrity. The celebrity turns into a potbellied man with a missing leg surrounded by empty beer bottles. “Be thee amputated, drunk and alone? Play Rock Star.” In the Spring 2010 issue of New Ohio Review, Courtney Queeney has a poem titled “Love Poem (Lame).” Mark sent the issue. What am I going to do about it? Tell Mark the word lame is offensive? Do I actually care or is this another of my baseless campaigns? “You used the word lame on the phone the other day,” Josh says. “Sometimes I use it just to see how it makes me feel.” In regards to the song “Pretty Boy Swag” by Soulja Boy: It is about a lame boy who goes to the club and because of his limp, which is called “swag,” all the women want him. I am watching Pawn Stars. It is about how much something is worth. How much would you pay me to say the name of the condition I have? Would I just need to say the name or would you require an examination? How much for the box of legs in the attic?

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I start calling myself a cyborg. I find a website called Gimps Gone Wild. “I could make a lot of money selling photo sets,” I tell Josh. “Probably a hundred dollars for a set.” “Don’t do that,” he says. “I would never do that,” I say even though I’m not sure if I would do it or not. “Have you seen the Suicide Girls?” I ask Josh. He says, “No. What’s that?” It seems impossible that he has not seen the Suicide Girls. “It’s porn but the girls are really different with tattoos, librarian glasses, emo, indie, that kind of thing. If the girls on Gimps Gone Wild were pretty like the Suicide Girls then maybe.” What is pretty? I read the novel Fay by Larry Brown. I read it fast and pretend Fay has a fake leg. This is a recurring approach I take. Zahra Baker’s stepmother has been arrested for 1) assault with a deadly weapon 2) failure to return rental property 3) writing worthless checks and 4) some other charges not reported. Her father has been released after posting bond. In the Netherlands, if you are disabled, the government gives you 12 free sessions with a prostitute each year. “For women too?” Josh asks. A man at a coffee shop. I thought he had a condition that caused him to shake uncontrollably. Later, the emails roll in. “I got turned-on seeing you walk to the stage. I bought your book. Do you like making love?” The emails got so bad I had to forward them to my professor. He would read them and let me know if I needed a restraining order. Or a gun. If I enrolled on Gimps Gone Wild, I would wear a wig. I would dress up in a ball gown. Employ various speakers. Is it any different than poetry?

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Zahra: Here’s the drill. There have been so many laws against us. Laws that say we can’t go out in public and we can’t marry. Laws that mandate the splicing of our wombs and parts of our brains. I was going to lay it out for you in poetry, all the laws against us, but there were just too many. On the cover of the book Josh is reading: BEST BLACK WRITER. Josh says, “Bet that pisses him off.” Zahra Baker is still missing. I better write some more notes to her before she’s dead. It is weird that I have all these legs in the attic but they would not let me keep the real leg. The real leg they cut off and I guess it went somewhere like to a shelf or an incinerator. Sometimes I wish it had a proper burial. “Probably has to do with medical waste,” Josh says. “There must be laws.” Yesterday was fine. I was straightforward with them. I told them why I wrote the things I wrote. I read with a Native American poet. Someone asked, “Do you feel the burden of your identities?” I said yeah, I feel it. The Native American said he doesn’t think of it as a burden. His first language was Cherokee. He doesn’t speak it anymore. I am writing my acceptance speech for the Best Disabled Writer Award. The speech begins: I need some new words. Tell us. How is it getting around? It’s awful. You have to negotiate with so many people on the sidewalks and you can hear their thoughts, like “Hurry up” and “Why are you walking so slow?” and “Move out of my way.” Zahra: You will get better at passing. It’s a pain in the ass, but you’ll learn. I promise. Just make it out of the woods.

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KELLIE WELLS Ever After

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THE BOOK OF PREDETERMINED NOSTALGIA It seems like forever and a day, Adam, since we last looked upon one another’s transient skins, our final and only parting, your face creased with the exhaustion of a mortality decreed then forestalled, mine blue with a coming demolition. I was then only seconds away from the blessed inanimation of a new eternity, which I welcomed like the mutineer I was, murderess, you said (piqued by a sudden bursitis), of all future humanity, sentenced to hard labor in the penal colony of passing time. Were we not to die, to give up those inaugural ghosts, surely we would have wearied of one another in time. Was it really such a terrible thing to have eaten, Knowledge? A girl gets peckish in a garden. Such ado, it was only a nibble, hardly enough to sustain a sparrow— I came to know a very few things and one I’ve never regretted knowing is the body. Nor shame, which lends a body a decisive circumference. 929 years is, after all, a life long enough to develop regret that it’s not shorter, long enough to bury renegade flesh in the hobbling sepulcher of memory. Memory, what we happily lack until it’s too late. Imagine, Adam, if we’d had only seventy springs to make good on God’s promise. Imagine if the Garden’s blooming had had such a clock. Our experience of time might have been delicious. Life is long, we said. Spend as much of it as you can in sleep, we said. (It is, after all, only sleep that prepares a person not to exist.) The hay will be there for the making tomorrow, we said. But the boys didn’t listen, insomniac creatures, tapers always burning. Stubborn, like their Grandfather. The first thousand years are the hardest, said God dryly when his wrath had dwindled to a nuclear sizzle, the old sobersides. What does He know of a thousand winters of involuntary grief? 929 years, nearly a millennium of atonement, and still He bears a grudge, and so we die and die and die. Forgiveness He leaves to His 172

firstborn (that other firstborn, more thirdborn if you ask me), a Johnnycome-lately whose reanimating martyrdom we can only hope is retroactive. A boy whose bloodless birth will be unsullied by fleshly conception. He’ll slip quietly from his mother’s immaculate loins like a lima bean from a spoon. Or so I’ve heard. We thought for a time it might be best never to multiply, remember? Such a vexed mathematics reproduction, thought it best not to bear children only to have them fall from the tree and rot, but one thing a God can ill afford to suffer is fruitlessness (an irony of course in my case). Before the coining of humans, God could barely rouse his weary omnipotent amplitude from bed of a morning, but the possibility of being disobeyed fills a moping muleteer with purpose. This makeshift heaven (something of a celestial inglenook until God can conjure His marsupial sin swallower, sagging pouch hulking enough to house all iniquity, the beloved Son with his indecisive genes, part stratosphere, part platypus—and who shall bear the sins of the Father? I’ve always wondered. I confess my liver aches and the bile rises in my throat when I think of it), heaven’s steerage really, is, I must tell you, Adam, not as blue and unbound as you might imagine. There is something resembling the sky that droops above one’s head like a tabernacle of blue hair, a mishkan made of the hides of blue goats, and there are walls in the distance but no finitude of course; they are not walls you could ever reach on two human legs or even by the locomotion of divinity (though the gauziest recollection of divining will whisk you away toward a body of water and God’s drenching murlimews, so if you wish to remain dry you must forever think desert thoughts. Ack, there I go, sodden again. Being blessed by God is a flounder’s game. Also the sunshine is cold as river water in winter, winter itself the fruit of my hunger, and it’s easy to catch a chill, though you can never catch your death here. It is part of God’s Plan that we feel, like Him, nostalgic for the possibility of perishing. Despite the body’s ambivalence at this altitude, there is infirmity here, grippe and ague, chilblains and boils: there is no earthly ailment that compares with the sublime sickness of Paradise.) (It’s worth recognizing, though you cannot while yet draped in flesh, that those things that happen parenthetically, those things, dear

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mortal man, dear husband, are Life. The waiting for life that occurs in the main, that is of course annihilation dissembling). Sometimes I miss being disappointed.

THE BOOK OF PARTHENOGENESIS Remember, Adam, the day I leapt from that beautiful wound that blossomed suddenly in your flank, lovelier than any conciliatory animal God had tossed into Eden (dromedary, pygarg, cankerworm, cockatrice)? God, the old alchemist, always trying out some new alkahest, dripping it on those failed four-bellied inventions of Eden. But me, I was finally gold, transformed, while you were under the anesthesia of God’s narcotic breath, from the base metal of manly rib. Adam excerpted. (What They do not tell you is that it was that same rib, the ur-bone, rib of preprimordial Eve, that stirred the mud of you into being, darling, making me bone of your bone of my bone, but who’s counting? Your provenance is safe with me. She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man, etc., but even you, in your willful complacence, can see this is a shell game of the slipperiest sort since the amputation of man from woman leaves wo, seed of woe, seed of womb, seed of wombat, world, worn, wound, wonder, which self-fertilizes, returning us to the handsome parthenogenesis of woman, O! Whereas the subtraction of man from man leaves, as you can see: O, a dusty void in the lap of bupkis, and that delivers us not from temptation but back where we started, all dressed in tzimtzum with nowhere to go). And you, so excruciatingly fetching, the chin of a man who knew how to make the sun set so that he could sleep at the end of an industrious day, hands strong and forever grazing like the husbandry of a bountiful continent, thighs, oh! so ravishing, like the fruitful lands from which our descendents would be banished, tender feet, those of the original nomad blistered with myth and aching with long-fallen arches. Selah! You had the most poignant lips. You are Adam, the morning of man, man who comes from all directions, acrostic of God, Arktos Dusis Anatole Mesembria (or North

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East West South, the first News ever to touch down on Earth), creature conjured of a froth of blood, dust, and gall, elixir of life, a word that meant next to nothing, you understand, without the possibility of extinction. (One could reason, therefore, it is actually restive Eve who giveth and taketh life.) God, all-knowing, knew I’d never be satisfied not knowing, and so it was that he planted me in the Garden, alongside the most innocent stalk of odoriferous rue, knowing knowledge was a tempter He had Himself succumbed to Back in the Day. He was lonely for a fellow criminal, God the loneliest scofflaw this side of Paradise, and me, the original fatal femme, midwife of sin, I hailed from the wrong side of Eden, perfect patsy. I was just the first fatling, Adam. Having the second body on earth, a body built to betray, means you are made for sacrifice and slaughter. I too grew lonely with the onus of having no predecessor, no scarring childhood, no history to scapegoat, and I fingered your ribs at night, counted those noiseless bones, siblings postponed, and longed to find one missing, a sister seeded somewhere in this stumbling world. Push, I whispered furiously into the flesh. Each time I see God, who always appears to me as the armored tail of an indeterminate animal disappearing beneath a hummock of stones, He tells me a different story about where matter comes from. They sometimes contradict one another, these accounts, and He says they are all true, and then there is the sound of laughter, which I only realize later, my lips reverberant with recollection, fell from my own mouth. He says one morning He woke to find that the burning sun of His belly had begun to contract and whirl and He stirred the vortex and fingered the molten ylem stewing in His gut, and in the vacuum of light He founded an empty space into which He spat an absence and that absence is us. This made me feel vague, my feet began to vanish, and I had to lie down. I wish you were here, Adam. It is such a chore to exist. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. Except sin, made by me, Death’s helpmeet. Another day He tells me something kicked inside him and He lassoed an empty space nestling in His infinitude and carved it a contour

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and called it human. It made me think of the ostrich that kicked you halfheartedly when you tried to corral it, the world so fallen at that moment we could barely stand. And then He tells me that time convulsed and the planet was born of a walloping explosion, the beginning of anything a matter of strategic violence, and we began as tadpoles who one day left the sanctuary of water, developed sturdy legs and shed our gills, and braved the land, and over time we stood upright and began to scheme.

THE BOOK OF ZOOLOGOS Oh, and remember the naming of the animals? God brought to you the beasts of the field and the fowl of the air and said call them what you will and so you took me around on that first day and schooled me in your zoology. Stroking their muzzles and tapping their bills, you said, carburetor, Millard Fillmore, ham on rye, Armageddon, ode to joy, pinochle, bonespurs, fumaroles, milk teeth, catastrophe, and I offered this revision: cormorant, mountain goat, horse leech, goldencalf, ossifrage, palmer worm, basilisk, fallow-deer, turtle dove, chameleon, moo moo moo! God had a fondness for your lexicon, though, and kept a would-be meme or two for Himself. Such power we had then to affect the future of history, the outcome of all things, when the very atmosphere was young and impetuous. How little we knew, but that was precisely the rub, wasn’t it? Had we known perhaps we might not have longed to know. I know, I should speak for myself. You were content to be the Garden’s starveling, innocence your meat and drink. If God does not regret inventing a creature He knew would doom humanity, how can I regret being that creature, mere villainess in a drama foretold, necessary anarchist? I am only the radicle of mortality. Mortification does not come naturally to a girl set down among the lilies, in a garden smelling, seductively, of bdellium (adulterant of myrrh), botany of love. If God did not make me do it, does that mean my will superceded His? How I long to be remorseful! Would that theology did not forbid it.

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On the subject of the so-called serpent: Serpent is what you first called that cunning budmash and later, before our expulsion, I suggested turtle, a word that sounds like rain when you sing it. It was a snapping turtle that turned my head, that slow-moving provocateur. A turtle is a good deal more subtle than what we eventually christened serpent, a sibilant name whose hiss you became attached to, a name that has hitched its wagon to our infamy while turtles of every stripe have burrowed in the mud and escaped scrutiny entirely. So the turtle clacked his beak and said to me, —Do you not long to be God? And I said I hadn’t given it much thought, having existed only a short while and never having had a father who dandled me on his knee. —I haven’t any ambitions, I said. The turtle scratched the ground and sniffed. —History will never speak of the burden of being a paragon. —I suppose not, I said. —History? I said. Then he urged me only to pluck from that tree the unauthorized fruit that glistened like early evening, and split it open, —Only that, he said. I did as he asked and heard no thunderclap and felt slighted. He said, —The burden of history will never be as onerous as the burden of no history. Unlike you and Adam, he said retracting his bald bobbling noggin, taking cover, God is all childhood. I said, —I know. I said, —History? He said to shake the halves and when I did the seeds leapt to the ground. —You cannot sow seeds in a garden that never withers, he said. He said, —A thoughtful death is a grander destiny than a life lived in unripening ignorance, and you know, Adam, how susceptible I always was when the subject of fate arose. When the turtle’s reptilian eye slowly blinked, it looked like a waxing moon, and I ate the fruit, which was sweeter than the comeliest cherry, sweeter than the green blood of the heart that never stops beating, sweeter by far than immortality.

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We did not cover ourselves. That is the invention of a timid amanuensis who found his own shriveled fig so homely he feared even the most robust woman who gazed upon it would die instantly of fright. There would be so many other things to be ashamed of.

THE BOOK OF POSTPRANDIAL EXPULSION And God’s voice walked on two hairy legs through the garden, whistling, and when you saw it, you blurted, —We did not eat the forbidden fruit! Whereupon God’s two-legged voice scuffled to and fro, kicking so much debris into the air that the sun was dimmed and I was struck deaf as driftwood. Your legs shook and you pointed at me. Suddenly all the flowers and trees and animals flew into the air and churned above us, tornado of a nullified bliss, and I heard the fevered lowing of cows, who are made so easily dizzy. You shall eat dirt! bellowed God. You shall gorge on unending sorrow! And God’s notorious temper at that moment set the young sky ablaze and caused all living creatures, save you and me, to granulate particle by particle and return to the flinders of pre-being. And with one well-wound sidewinder from the voice of God, out of Paradise we bounced.

THE BOOK OF DISABLED LAMENTATIONS The garden knocked out of me, I began to bleed and you feared I’d lose all color and turn to water and you swabbed me in a poultice of turmeric and carotene. Years later we would come to know that I’d miscarried, the tissue of unfallen humanity spilling from me in clots. My belly ached, but it was not a terrible feeling. Every month I asked the blood to revisit me, and it did. But then one day it stopped, and during those months when I could not summon it, I ate sugar beets and drank

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molasses and waited for emptiness to return. My belly bowed like the throat of a bullfrog at midnight. When the boys appeared, I tried not to hold it against them that they’d taken my blood and thickened it, turned it to flesh. The beauty of blood is that it sleeps through the night and never asks to be fed. Because we’d had no childhoods ourselves, we did not know what it was we were to do with these puzzling mannikins that seemed more mollusk than human, too short and clumsy to be of any use during a harvest, and we stored them like potatoes in a dark place. It was Abel who was inconsolable as a boy. His cheeks flushed and damp, he reminded me of a bowl of radishes, toward which I’ve always felt sentimental. We are all alone in the universe, we are all alone, he lamented day after day after interminable day. He held the bantams in his lap and cried before he broke their necks. He was the only one of us who understood what it meant to be irremediably mortal. Chickens are not indifferent to their plight (on its last day the rooster waves its caruncle in surrender). They know when their lives have come to an end and curl like the fists of infants just before they are slaughtered. Cain was a happy child, the spitting image of you as a boy, had you ever been a boy, which was more than God could bear. He would never again look at your aboriginal face nor forgive you for listening to the legless voice of a woman. I, being the very shape and girth of innocence, listened to a crafty reptile I had no reason to distrust (God had said nothing instructive about turtles), but you listened to the lesser sex, a shadow of doubt forever after darkening the supremacy of he who harbors no eggs. That was the test we failed. Since then the mere mention of woman makes God dyspeptic. God is a man’s thing. How to survive God’s love, a woman’s. I have seen our Abel here walking dreamily in the distance, always amidst the sheep, of which there is a strange bounty in this floating interim. Cain I have seen neither hide nor hair of, and this troubles me. How many times did we warn that headstrong whelp that God was a being nourished on blood sausage and sweetbreads? With no health to fret the loss of, He happily consumed the fat of the fattest fatted calf, we told him, and still Cain stubbornly insisted a well-tended parsnip would

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woo God just as readily as a shank of mutton. But God does not bother with bloodless victuals. He has, after all, a fallen world to fuel, and the guilty are infinitely famished. When we were yet childless, I dug up a pale tuber that was plump like a little man, and I kept it in my pocket, where I supposed all children spent their early lives so that they would not broil in the sun or be washed away in a deluge and could expand into proper Eves and proper Adams, but then it went soft and I feared the same would happen to Cain when he finally appeared (I know I bellowed at a pitch that caused the color to drain from your cheeks so that your face looked like dusk approaching, but the pain of childbirth is, as promised, wonderfully agonizing, a reminder of the anesthetic bliss a fatally curious girl forfeits when she steps foot outside the safe haven of Paradise, that place where torment is never allowed to mature, and when Cain clawed his way free of me, I thought of all the snakes I’d watched skinning themselves new). So I buried him in the ground up to his startled mouth, out of which an intermittent storm flew, and when he grew quiet as a yam, you dug him up, Adam, and laid him in my arms, a hungry bundle of kindling. Abel mourned every death, even that of the fallen leaves, trampled clover, the mayflies he saw drop from the air after a day of life, the sky that bled to death each night. It was all Abel thought about, perishing, and then he began to long for his own end, so tired was he of anticipating it, son of my sin, but he did not long to displease God and could never bring his hand to his own throat. And on that day when God informed Cain that his offering and faith were paltry, Abel came to Cain and boasted that his tender veal had left God well-pleased. It was unlike Abel to spit poison in the face of his brother (who had indeed been his keeper when they were children, Abel so willfully feeble and prone to earache, Cain stout as a tree stump), and Cain knew this, but he’d inherited a certain hotheaded bluster and worked himself into a ferment easy as breathing and so he drew his knife of chalcedony, recently sharpened, and just then I happened upon them and watched as Abel launched himself at Cain and ran himself through, the knife receiving a glad reception from those organs that yearned to be perforated. Abel died in Cain’s arms and his face shone with gratitude. When God investigated Abel’s disappearance,

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Cain fled His scrutiny as long as he could but eventually confessed to having committed the world’s first homicide (or was it to spare his brother’s memory from the ignominy of the high treason of self-extinction? Abel the first to preempt God in that way), and God roared with an incinerating fury, scorching that season’s crops to cinder. And thus evil was born on the earth.

THE BOOK OF GENETIC REVELATION I gave up children for a time, and when Seth stanched the blood in my belly, I was already a centenarian. I pretended he was a girl, eyes like garnets, and we stayed in the zenana, just two girls in exile (one in the diaspora of exile), and hummed like the nearby freshet, the sound it sang when thawing. Eventually I ransomed my happiness to his boyhood, but he continued to smile bashfully and stare at his delicate feet, even after hair sprouted on his chest and made him itch. Our children paired off and bore their own squalling potatoes, and that was the beginning of the world. We were uncle son sister cousin mother to one another, though I would never be anyone’s daughter. When you are related to every upright creature on earth, there is precious little opportunity to escape your own blood, which trails you like a lost cur, tail down, nose to the ground. One day the world will be a great garboil of iniquity and God will feel penitent unto Himself for having seeded it (Forgive me, Father, He will whisper to Himself on calloused knee; You are pardoned, my Son, He will respond, but He will consider asphyxiating Himself with his own omniscience, which does on occasion provoke pulmonary complaint. When the child is father of the man, there are, if you ask me, two people too many in the room, and a twinned psyche that capacious naturally unspools when forced to stare itself in the limitless mug), for having germinated this bipedal race born of the sons of God and the daughters of men, born in blood after pecking free of the shell of woman’s soft-boiled belly. Men will see stones shaped like the end of the world and they will

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stop to worship them prophylactically and giants will roam the earth and eat the hearts of trees, pollard their tender crowns to leafless splinters and leave the rest, and trees everywhere will begin to wither and the air in the world will grow thin and unnourishing. And all our children and children’s children, born with the birth defect of being human, born to fallen guardians, will live in violence, sensing there once had been a life of unending splendor and ease and amity, where the notion of suffering pricked no living creature’s imagination (except of course that of the turtle), and then earthly brutality will couple with the ferocity of a disappointed sovereign and beget the diluvian purge—And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually—and He will vomit water everywhere upon the land so that when the earth gasps, water will fill its lungs and drown it in the rising sea. But. A tiny vessel of salvaged life will weather His wet wrath. (As will of course the turtle, crack swimmer, master of rapids.)

THE BOOK OF MENDED OBLIVION I tell you this, Adam, because you are in your final year and will soon join me and once you arrive here among the first and newly dead, awaiting a retroactive salvation, you are powerless to right any earthly wrong, but there is yet time to antidote our expulsion, if only you can find the Tree of Ignorance. I’ve heard tell it is a gnarled and sickly thing, its fruit most bitter, but you must eat of it only once and our race will be struck witless once again, knowledge trickling out of our ears, falling from our wrists, and evaporating in the insensible ether of a rehabilitated Paradise! The trees all around you will spring so quickly into bloom they will appear at first to be blighted with growth, hideously lush, that pestilent abundance we can scarcely recall, the tarnished sky will silver then grow unthinkably blue once again, and my life, our lives, will be reversed, that rotten apple returned to its glistening limb, original sin unspun, whereupon I will climb back into the garden’s uncorrupted womb, hermetic and snug, and wait, Adam, to be summoned from your bones

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for the making of a benighted breed, wait for a refurbished eternity to ripen on the vine, and wait, dear Adam dear Adam dear Adam, and wait, dear Adam, and wait.

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ELIZABETH CLARK WESSEL Three Poems

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The Reservoir There was a town under that lake. Lake, we said, but it was a reservoir. No one lived there anymore. After the flood the water pressed in so much more insistent than air. But you know that. In the summer we went there. To the empty houses of the lake. Don’t go near that water, our mothers said, but they were too late. Already we lived in the rooms of the lake.

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fragment One night I went with my father to the shed where a sow had given birth, I watched him shoo her from the carcass of the child she had crushed the smell of that blood drove the boar outside wild and he threw his body against the aged wood to get to the thing that smelled so good

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La Belle au Bois dormant And if you were listening you could not hear, to save is to kill one thousand times. Cursed and envined without thought or breath or sight. To save is to kill one thousand times. Entombed, entwined, with this insistent voice, to save is to kill one thousand times. Ants have made a home in my chest. Deer wandered off with my hands. A cougar hunts in the cave of my mind. To save is to kill one thousand times.

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DEBORAH WOODARD Two Poems

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McGuffey: Henry’s Eyes Uncle Brice, said Henry, Johnny has money in both his coat pockets, and it is as bright and new-looking as diamonds. He has a big popgun, and a watch, and a hobbyhorse! Before he died, Henry added, my father yellowed to the same color as the sunflower. Yes, resumed his uncle quietly. Sunflowers wither, but if you want to know where the diamonds are kept, I will buy your eyes and give you a fine pair of glass ones for free. Henry gazed up at him defiantly, his irises like miniscule violet hills. Uncle Brice promptly offered him two thousand dollars. Why, when you are asleep, Henry, you will still glimpse birds darting in and out of the bare bushes. And I will take them out as quick as I can. Henry was startled. But I wouldn’t see Mother at her sewing, or the baby, or her doll whose head was once a hazelnut. Uncle Brice was jotting something down in a notebook as part of his labors. I do think we are very poor, exclaimed Henry, and I need things to eat and wear. But he shook his head, his eyes flashing the bruised color of the clouds.

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McGuffey: Henry’s Ears Well, make me deaf, shouted Henry, it is a better bet. Very well, said Uncle Brice. I will empty the drops from this bottle into your ears. But I can’t afford to give you more than a hat with earmuffs and twenty dollars for the pair. Uncle, will you take them far away? In the blink of the morning, will they be temptingly displayed in a store window? And if I were deaf, could I hear Mother call me? Shorn of her rustling, Uncle Brice replied, she would have to catch your eye. In a moment, my beautiful bird, I will be ready for you. I have a theory that we aren’t designed right. I have spoken out against the way ears are shaped. Ears are homely toadstools, so let me tell you what I plan to do, Henry. I will keep your ears in this envelope of poppy seeds. Poppy seedlings are wild and earlike. Now, I will raise a young boy’s ears alongside the poppies. Splash, splash, ah, too many drops may come out of my bottle. Oh Uncle Brice, said Henry, I want to hear the church bells! I don’t want to be put in a garden. Tinkle, tinkle, drop, drop, hummed Uncle. Very well, I will pay you a thousand dollars, he amended. But what about the cut spots on my head? asked Henry. I hope that you are not offended with me, said Uncle Brice. You would have the harsh hollow cry of the owlet flying over the field, he concluded, as he clinked the coins back into the pocket of his satin vest. Henry folded his dimpled arms. I want to see the man who can pay for any part of me, then.

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John Dermot Woods Whistleblower

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Contributor Notes

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SETH ABRAMSON is the author of two collections of poetry, Northerners (Western Michigan University Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Poetry & Prose, and The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009). In 2008 he was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize by Poetry. His poems have appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Best New Poets 2008, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Boston Review, and Harvard Review, and he is a regular contributor to Poets & Writers Magazine and The Huffington Post. A graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I’m not sure I feel any less lost in the world now than I did when I was a boy, but my childhood definitely offered up countless opportunities to believe myself attached to some kind of grand preternatural adventure or another. I grew up in a village in the middle of a forest in New England—literally, my childhood home was and is called The Village of Nagog Woods, with its own post office, zip code and everything— and a stone’s throw in either direction from the house I was raised in was a dark, abandoned road through the woods even adults would hesitate to travel after dark. I saw a wolf not a hundred yards from that house not four weeks ago, when I was back in Massachusetts visiting family. In any case, I feel like a lost boy still, but back in the 1980s I think I might properly have been, along with about ten or twelve other boys my age who lived in the Village, a true Lost Boy: Running through the woods at all hours, certain there were monsters ahead and behind, and equally certain that the only way to defeat fear was to imagine a possible world so vast it had room for bravery and honor as much as murder and mayhem. When I write poetry, I write from the middle of those woods—each time, every time. MATT BELL is the author of Cataclysm Baby, a novella, and How They Were Found, a collection of fiction. http://www.mdbell.com/howtheywerefound/

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His stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and have been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Fantasy, and 30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Writing by Younger Writers. He can be found online at www. mdbell.com. Once, when I was younger, I had a series of arguments with my family that forced me out of the house, into a wet winter night. We lived outside of town in a rural part of Michigan, and behind our house there was a wood and several farm fields, all separated by those deep drainage ditches you see in the country, these features well-known by that age. As I walked through the snow and the rain, I remember thinking I wish I could just go away, go anywhere else. And for a while, I did find some new place: In the darkness and the cold, I saw a new river rushing fast with water and ice, climbed a hill with a great tree atop it I’d never seen before, and some other sights I no longer know, that in the next weeks I would seek again and never find. When at last I was shivered to the bone, I walked to the edge of the fields, across one of those ditches, and onto a road I could not recognize, entering it from that point, its middle. Confused, I turned the wrong way from home, and as I got colder and more tired I got scared, until finally I reversed my wish: Now I wanted nothing more than to go home, regardless of what waited there. A minute later a friend of mine from school—the first one with a car—saw me walking on the road, picked me up, and took me home. He didn’t ask me any questions, and we’ve never spoken about it since. This week, fifteen years later, I had dinner with him and his wife and my wife, and somehow it almost came up—and I can’t explain the weight of my terror at the idea that it might, or the relief that the conversation turned instead. I didn’t want him or our wives to know where I went that night; maybe I didn’t want them to know that there was a place I might still disappear, if ever that horrible need returns. MOLLY BENDALL is the author of four collections of poetry, After Estrangement, Dark Summer, Ariadne’s Island, and most recently Under the Quick (from Parlor Press, 2009). She teaches at the University of Southern California.

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A few weeks ago I went to the San Diego zoo and explored the “polar rim” area where I saw a small herd of reindeer. I was reminded of Gerda in The Snow Queen who is given a ride on the back of a reindeer to Lapland. I remembered loving the risk and allure of that cold journey, and I remembered other girls in tales who are transported on the backs of hares or white bears and travel to unknown, and perhaps forbidden, places. WYATT BONIKOWSKI’s stories have appeared in Action, Yes, Denver Quarterly, elimae, LIT, SmokeLong Quarterly, Word Riot, and others. One of them was listed in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2010. He teaches at Suffolk University and lives in the Boston area with his wife and two children. I’ve always loved tales about getting lost in the woods. “Hansel and Gretel” was probably the first I heard. I was two or three and living in Winston–Salem, NC, playing outside with a younger friend, when I wandered into the woods with him in tow. Our parents, of course, were terrified, but they soon found us by a small creek, having fun, nothing wrong. Were we lost? To our parents we were. My mom told me this story—I don’t remember doing this—and I could hear it all in her voice. I think it’s significant that when I wanted to wander away, I decided to take someone with me. BRITTaNY CAVALLARO’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2011, Gettysburg Review, Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She is a finalist for the 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and her awards include a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Chancellor’s Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she will begin her PhD this fall. MAILE CHAPMAN is the author of the novel Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, and her stories have appeared in A Public Space, the Literary Review, the Boston Review, and Best American Fantasy Writing. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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As a kid I loved fairy tales for cathartic reasons, for being full of things children aren’t supposed to enjoy hearing about, but obviously do: frightening creatures, cruel adults, capricious punishments, illogical rules, and tasks you can’t possibly complete. Failure, disappearance, death, and other terrible fates were always lurking around the edges of my imagination, and fairy tales were one of the few places I could find those fears made comfortingly explicit. MIMI CHUBB is currently a James A. Michener Fellow in fiction at the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. She grew up in California, and is at work on a novel. Oddly enough, a family friend has home video footage of me taken just after I’d been lost—and found—as a small child. As the camera pans over me, my arms are wrapped around my mother’s neck; I’m sobbing; my dress is pulled askew. Each time I’ve seen the film, it’s brought me right back to that strange, abject terror of being lost—the feeling that every part of me has dissolved and vanished forever, except for my fear, my need and my love. For me, grief has been the only adult state to approximate that childhood agony of being lost. TARA GOEDJEN’s fiction has appeared in journals such as AGNI, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Prism, and Quarterly West, and most recently in New England Review. She is the recipient of an international scholarship from the University of Wollongong in Australia, where she is at work on a novel. In my dreams I fly with lost children and restore heartbeats of dying animals. SARA GONG enjoys writing in different styles and reading different genres; her favorite authors include O. Henry, J. K. Rowling, and William Shakespeare. She has also been published in the Henderson Libraries Teen Literary Magazine for the past two years as a winner of the Teen Literacy Writing Contest. Sara lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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CAROL GUESS is the author of seven books of poetry and prose. Forthcoming books include Darling Endangered (Brooklyn Arts Press), Doll Studies: Forensics (Black Lawrence Press), and My Father In Water (Shearsman Books). Find her here: www.carolguess.blogspot.com Growing up, I stumbled on a copy of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment. I read it in secret, fascinated by the idea that fairy tales were really about sex and violence at the intersection of childhood games and adult decision-making. I was also freaked out by Bettelheim’s confidence in metaphors he alone seemed to see. For years after, I struggled with questions about interpretation and authority, both seeking out and resisting “proper” readings of my favorite tales. AIREANNE HJELLE has spent the last few years trying to condense her life story so that non-native speakers of English can understand it. Some of the nouns that she has claimed to describe herself (with various inflections of pride): cyclist, knitter, musicophile, DJ, scuba diver, world traveler, native Californian, Philadelphian, Denverite, standup comedienne, alcoholic, foreigner, office hack, surfer, kindergarten teacher, runner, and cook. She currently teaches English conversation in South Korea and desperately wishes to skip winter—like some migratory birds she knows—for the next ten years. As a shy, bookish person, I took to travel as self-flagellation. Wondering how far I could push myself into the unknown, I pulled taut my ties to home till they snapped, flying and attaching themselves to different places. In fairy tales, stolen children pine for their home; those of us who steal away from them find home a troubling question, answered in mumbles and guilty shrugs. DESIREE HOLMAN is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Oakland, California; she received her MFA from UC Berkeley. Her research-intensive projects encompass sculpture, performance, video, digital processing, and drawing. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art Sao Paulo, Brazil; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary

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Art, and BnD Studios in Milan. In 2007 she was honored with SFMOMA’s biannual SECA Award and also a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She recently released her first self-titled catalogue. Her work is part of numerous museum permanent collections including the Berkeley Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hammer Museum. For more than a decade, I was a children’s entertainer. I would become characters, many of them well-known fairy-tale characters, and create the world surrounding the characters for the children to enter and play. Part of me remains happily lost in those fantasyscapes. ASHLEY ELIZABETH HUDSON is from Athens, Alabama. She was awarded the Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art poetry prize. Her poems appear in Six Little Things and the Southeast Review, among others. She teaches a fairy-tale course for the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a child, I especially loved fairy-tale films starring real people, Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre being my favorites. I longed for Tatum O’Neal’s dirt bunker from Goldilocks. To have a hole in the ground seemed a special privilege, and growing up in tornado-periled Alabama, the allure of the storm shelter was inextricably linked to this fantasy. My Granny Jane would offer my sister and I brief and rare glimpses into her below ground bunker, given our good fortune those years of more sunshine than ominous funnels. Oh the jars of buttons I lined those walls with in my imagination. It was a hole I would often hide inside in my mind, and I now find that often my writing explores the idea of similar holes in the ground, the perils and possibilities down there in the dark. SHANE JONES is the author of several books. His newest novel, Daniel Fights a Hurricane, will be published by Penguin in the summer of 2012. Shane lives in upstate New York. What I like most about fairy tales is they don’t necessarily subscribe to any one type of logic or physics. As a writer, you get to recreate it all. The surprises for writer and reader are endless.

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JESSICA JOSLIN spent her early years wandering through the halls of natural history museums, enchanted with the exquisite Victorian era taxidermy and osteological displays, with their brass fittings and gleaming wood. Inspired by these visits, she began to slowly acquire a collection of natural objects: shells, seedpods, feathers, bones, and assorted oddities. In 1992, she began building the first beasts of this menagerie, using objects from her collection. To see more of Jessica’s work, please visit www.jessicajoslin.com KRYSTAL LANGUELL is the author of Call the Catastrophists, which is forthcoming in 2012 from BlazeVOX Books. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Roger, No Tell Motel and elsewhere. She is an editor for Noemi Press and Bone Bouquet, and is a member of the collaborative board for Belladonna* Series as well as co-curator, with Emily Skillings, of the Brooklyn reading series HOT TEXTS. Sibling relationships have always seemed magical to me. My one sister is ten years younger, and so I spent many years as an only child when suddenly this new person arrived. I’m still surprised (and probably always will be) when she says something I would say, or notices something about my behavior that no one else has pointed out. It’s a fairytale-esque echo, a torqued repetition. DAVID LASKY is a Seattle-based graphic novelist and cartoonist who has been nominated numerous times for the Ignatz comics awards. Lasky’s latest project is Don’t Forget This Song, a graphic novel biography of the Carter Family, written with Frank Young, to be published by Abrams Books in 2012. STACEY LEVINE is the author of The Girl with Brown Fur: Tales and Stories, My Horse and Other Stories, and the novels Frances Johnson and Dra— (recently reissued by Verse Chorus Press). A Puschcart Prize nominee, her fiction has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Fence, Tin House, Yeti, and other venues. She has contributed to American Book Review, Bookforum, The Stranger, The Chicago Reader, and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

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As a child, I spent much time sneak-reading the grownups’ paperbacks. I was too young to catch the references and resonances. There was a crappy, lurid novel about a manly film director a mostly naked starlet. The director asked the starlet about her life before she came to Hollywood. Alluding to a miscarriage, she told him that she had “lost a little boy.” I couldn’t figure out what it meant. How could she have lost a boy somewhere, and then have moved to Hollywood to be an actress? I pictured the lost little boy in a striped shirt and shorts like Charlie Brown, wandering the streets, forever separated from his movie-star momma. OKSANA MARAFIOTI moved from the Soviet Union when she was fifteen years old. Trained as a classical pianist, Marafioti has also worked as a cinematographer. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ve always thought of fairy tales as the ultimate study of character. Where other genres attempt to define human nature in ways that appeal to the majority, fairy tales are visceral and unapologetic, a mirror of extraordinary clarity. ADAM MCOMBER’s debut novel Empyrean is forthcoming from Touchstone/ Simon and Schuster in August 2012. His collection of short stories, This New and Poisonous Air (BOA Editions 2011), is currently available. He teaches literature and creative writing at Columbia College Chicago where he is also the associate editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika. His fiction has recently appeared in Conjunctions, Third Coast, StoryQuarterly and A cappella Zoo. When lost, we are initially a child—small and fragile. The menacing woods are vast. But then something happens. Boundaries begin to dissolve, and flesh no longer means what it once did. We extend, and we see the soul was a landscape all along. We realize that there are trees in us and then, of course, there is a path.

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CHRISTOPHER MERKNER teachers creative writing at the University of Colorado Denver. He’s recently had work in Gulf Coast, Cutbank, New Orleans Review, Cincinnati Review and New South. My parents are religious/spiritual Lutherans and alcoholics, so I’m not really sure I was properly raised to articulate the difference between fairy tale and objective reality. I came to the amazing writing of Selma Lagerlof late in my life, and I only wish she’d shown up sooner. Her little Nils and his goose friends could have been instrumental in fomenting a vital escape from my growing-up house. And reading her now only seems to bring me back, which weirdly I enjoy. BENJAMIN NADLER lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is currently pursuing his MFA at The City College of New York. His writing is forthcoming in publications such as Harpur Palate and Jewish Fiction. His first novel, Harvitz, As To War, is forthcoming from Iron Diesel Press. When I was child, I was fascinated with the stories in my father’s multi-volume set of Louis Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews. I now understand that Rabbi Ginzberg was drawing on established midrashic, aggadic and folkloric sources in a very methodical way. As a ten year old, though, all I knew was that I stumbled upon a treasure trove of tales in which the moralistic and dogmatic stories I was presented with at Sunday school were blown open into something much more bizarre and fantastical, and at the same time, more real. The tone of these tales continues to influence my approach to both religion and storytelling. ANDI OLSEN is a collage/assemblage/video artist who has exhibited and published around the country and abroad. Her short film Where the Smiling Ends is currently on exhibit at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. The homolinguistic collage-text in this issue was co-created with Lance Olsen and Davis Schneiderman. As a child, I made little distinction between fairy tales and reality. Fairy tales taught me some valuable life lessons: that one’s family shouldn’t be trusted; that people are not what they seem; that one

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should always plan an escape route while waiting for one’s prince... which is why, when my hair hadn’t grown as long as Rapunzel’s by my eighth or ninth birthday, I asked my parents not for the most fashionable doll, but for a twenty-five-foot steel fireladder. LANCE OLSEN is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including his most recent novel Calendar of Regrets. He currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah and serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two. DANIELA OLSZEWSKA is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Citizen J (Artifice Books, forthcoming) and cloudfang : : cakedirt (Horse Less Press, forthcoming). She sits on Switchback Books’ Board of Directors and serves as Associate Poetry Editor of H_NGM_N. Daniela is pursuing her MFA at the University of Alabama, where she teaches creative writing in conjunction with the The Alabama Prison Arts & Education Project. During the summer between second and third grade, my best friend Becky Menzenski and I loved to play a game called “Green Witch, White Witch.” The game consisted of dressing up Becky’s Dollar Store “Barbies” in green or white ensembles and “drowning” the green witches in her wading pool. The drowning was always preceeded by the white witches listing the green witches’ transgressions. Looking back, I’m ashamed that we never allowed the green witches to talk (they could only cackle or bark like a dog); I’d like to think that the writing I’ve done as an adult is, in some small way, an attempt to rectify this wrong. DAVID JAMES POISSANT’s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Playboy, One Story, The Southern Review, Mississippi Review, New Stories from the South, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere. He is a winner of the Playboy College Fiction Contest, the George Garrett Fiction Award, the Matt Clark Prize, the Alice White Reeves Memorial Award from the National Society of Arts & Letters, and Second and Third Prizes in the

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Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida. His chapbook Lizard Man, winner of the RopeWalk Press Editor’s Fiction Chapbook Prize, will be published later this year. I’ve never been lost in the woods, but I was once lost in Rome. I was twenty, there on vacation with my parents and brother, and one night I walked alone to the Trevi Fountain. I watched the fountain a while, ate some gelato, spoke to some kids, then headed back. It was a straight shot to the hotel, but the streets, I swear, took strange turns in the night, and I became hopelessly lost. I wandered Rome for an hour. What’s worse, I couldn’t remember the name of where I was staying or the cross streets to even catch a cab back. And then, somehow, I was standing before the hotel doors. The next morning, I attempted to retrace my steps, but I couldn’t find where I’d lost my way or where I’d been. It’s a lost hour of my life, and, to this day, I can’t explain it or imagine how I got back. GRETCHEN STEELE PRATT is the author of one book of poems, One Island, chosen by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the 2009 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2011, Iowa Review, Southern Review, and The Gettysburg Review, among others. She lives in Matthews, NC, and teaches at UNC Charlotte. One of the most memorable and frightening fairy tales from my childhood is the story of “The Babes in the Wood” in which a brother and sister are left in the woods by an uncle to die. I can still picture very clearly the macabre illustration in my children’s book of the children huddled together beneath a big tree, the birds of the forest covering their dead bodies with leaves. IMAD RAHMAN is the author of I Dream of Microwaves, a collection of connected stories, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His stories have appeared in One Story, Chelsea, Gulf Coast, The Sonora Review and Willow Springs, among others. He teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University, where he also directs the annual Imagination Writers Workshop & Conference.

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I could soliloquize on the typical but true: existentialism, dispossession, the immigrant experience, etc., but I won’t. Instead, picture someone on a Greyhound at 3 in the morning, which, given someone’s present set of circumstances, you take only because of a woman, & there someone is, listening to Lenny, the ex-con one seat over, who solitary confinement has turned garrulous, telling the bus about how you couldn’t pay him enough, no fucking way, to live in that city like a sardine, not with rats that big running the park benches, & the world outside is night, & everything smells like cigarette smoke but the nicotine patch is burning a hole through someone’s arm because he has sensitive skin & what someone might be wondering is why this moment, of all his moments, is the one that captures everything: what is home, what is love, what is art, what is true, what has been gained, what is about to be lost. Lost is loss, & in every story any significant gain should be accompanied by a far more significant loss. MATTHEW SALESSES was born in Korea. He is the author of a novella, The Last Repatriate (Nouvella Books), and two prose chapbooks. His stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, and others. He edits fiction and writes a column about his wife, his new baby, and himself for the Good Men Project. It seems to me we all have a lost version of ourselves, someone we maybe know better than the parts of us that remain. Often this involves childhood. I was adopted when I was two. I have no baby pictures. Now that I have a child of my own, it’s hard to see how she will go from there to here. I wonder if she will have an imaginary friend. I never had one, other than myself, and the people I met in books. But sometimes I tried to make one appear. KEVIN SAMPSELL is the publisher of the micropress Future Tense Books and the author of the memoir A Common Pornography. He lives with his wife and son in Portland, Oregon. I work at Powell’s, the biggest bookstore in the country, and it’s often full of people, including a lot of excited kids who like to test the patience of their parents by running around the aisles and hiding from

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them. This is definitely not encouraged by our staff. If a small child gets lost or separated from their folks, we have a system in place to ensure their safety. First off, we make an announcement over the intercom: “Peter Pan to the exits. Peter Pan to the exits.” And all employees are required to make sure all the exits in the store are guarded until the kid is found. A description of the kid is circulated as quickly as possible and we aren’t supposed to let children leave the store if they match that description in any way. There is usually a few nervous minutes that pass before the lost child is found. I always wonder what kids think when they hear that announcement. I wonder if they get excited and maybe want to rush to the store’s exits to see if there really is a Peter Pan. When the child is found and reunited with the parents, there is an announcement that lets employees know that they don’t have to guard the exits anymore. The words blare out: “Cancel Peter Pan. Cancel Peter Pan.” I also contemplate what a kid thinks when they hear those words. “Poor Peter Pan,” I quietly say to myself. DAVIS SCHNEIDERMAN is a multimedia artist and co-author of the innovative novel Abecedarium (Chiasmus Press, 2007), and author of DIS (BlazeVox, 2008) and Multifesto: A Henri d’Mescan Reader (Spuyten Duyvil, limited ed 2006). He is co-editor of Retaking the Universe: Williams S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto, 2004) and the forthcoming The Exquisite Corpse Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game (U. Of Nebraska), and co-creator of the audiocollage record Memorials to Future Catastrophes (Jaded Ibis, 2008). His creative work has been accepted by numerous publications including Fiction International, The Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, and Exquisite Corpse. He has recently been named Director of Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books. He can be found, virtually, at davisschneiderman.com/. The best fairy tales are those thick with fluttering words, with horned, grotesque syllables. The myriad languages of the adult world are the nightmares of children writ large in BOOKS too dark to endure, too obscure to be made sensible, and too sad to be read without spelling T-E-A-R-S to oneself in the most quiet of quiet moments. Without lights. Without noise. Without self.

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J. A. TYLER the author of three novels: Inconceivable Wilson, A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed, and A Shiny, Unused Heart. His work has appeared with Caketrain, Diagram, Black Warrior Review, Redivider, Fourteen Hills, Sleepingfish, and New York Tyrant. He is also founding editor of Mud Luscious Press. For more, visit: www.chokeonthesewords.com. Lost is only relative to found. If no one finds you, you were never lost. LEE UPTON’s twelfth book, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition, Boredom, Purity, and Secrecy, will appear from Tupelo Press in 2012. Her most recent book is the novella The Guide to the Flying Island. Her poetry and fiction appear widely. She is a professor of English and writer-in-residence at Lafayette College. Years ago I wound up talking on the telephone to a couple who believed I was their run-away daughter. I can’t remember exactly how this happened. I might have mis-dialed a number and afterwards the couple might have called my number back. What I do remember is the pain in the voices of the man and the woman on the other end of the line. There was also such hope in their voices, such panic too. I can’t remember their exact words but a paraphrase might be: We know it’s you. Come back. Everything’s all right. Don’t hang up. We love you. Just come back. And then—a voice in the background—It’s her. She’s on the phone. Every time I tried to convince the couple I wasn’t their daughter they sounded more alarmed and pained—and angry—and yet afraid to reveal their anger in case the person they assumed I was might hang up. I knew that I couldn’t put the phone down. If I did they might believe they had made contact with their daughter who had rejected them yet again, and I would only increase their suffering. Convincing them of the truth was agonizing, for it meant destroying their hope. At last a friend of mine got on the phone and talked to the couple. They told my friend that he was lying. I took the phone again and this time they listened to my voice more closely. They had me repeat myself. It’s you, they said. Don’t say it’s not you. Then they listened harder and knew. They were crying even more by then. At last they hung up.

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In some subterranean way that experience influenced “Escape from the Dark Forest.” The story itself has been revised so often that it has led many lives. In the story, Dhara’s desire to read signs of her brother’s return in nearly every action and encounter may be seen as a form of naïveté or denial—or as heroic. She survives her strange adventure but not without taking with her—unwittingly—a portion of a nightmarish world where she is repeatedly assumed to be someone she is not, and where the shadows of a lost girl and that girl’s lost baby daughter must begin to swarm in her imagination. Fairy tales, like myths, keep happening, releasing their mystifying clues. But often their structures assert themselves in our lives in changed forms. Children are lost and remain lost. A sister longs for a charismatic brother to return and lives in terrifying uncertainty. A magical-seeming animal attaches itself to us, but in daylight we discover the poor creature’s raw and seeping wound. Whatever we believe, we persist in looking for signs. LAURA VAN DEN BERG’s debut collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, longlisted for The Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Award. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Conjunctions, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV. She lives in Baltimore, where she is completing a novel. While “getting lost” often occurs in a new or foreign place, I’ve long been preoccupied with how we can become lost in our own worlds and how what should feel familiar can, at times, feel as strange as anything from outerspace. In my story, I like to think of the children as being just as lost, just as confused by the world, as the cannibals are. ROB WALSH’s fiction has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Columbia, Conjunctions, NOON, and elsewhere. He lives in Seoul, where he works at Yonsei University.

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In Korea there is a mythological beast called Haechi. It appears to be part dog, part demon, and part little boy. Found throughout Seoul are stone statues of Haechi, always sitting watchfully at the base or entryway of a tall building, for Haechi protects against fire; it serves as a constant reminder of a real and vibrant threat. Only when we have mastered fire will Haechi no longer be needed. When we have mastered the rest of the threats that lurk, we will no longer need fairy tales. JILLIAN WEISE is the author of the poetry collection The Amputee’s Guide to Sex and the novel The Colony. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House and the film series Poetry Everywhere. My favorite poet, Juan Ruiz, author of the Book of Good Love, and Archpriest of Hita, supplies this thought: “If you seek what you haven’t lost, you’ll lose what you have.” KELLIE WELLS is the author of a collection of short fiction, Compression Scars, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award in 2001, and a novel, Skin. She is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama. ELIZABETH CLARK WESSEL has poems and translations published or forthcoming in A Public Space; No, Dear; Sixth Finch; Asymptote; Lana Turner Journal; and Fawlt Magazine; among others. She lives in Brooklyn and is an editor at Argos Books. I grew up in a very small town, and I loved the mythic quality of the stories around me. Each family had their own sorry tale. Outside of the town, the seemingly endless uninhabited land seemed primal and chaotic. Fairy tales made sense to me because they were so often about children in danger, and like so many of the children in fairy tales I was attracted to wild and dangerous things, even if only in my fantasy world.

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DEBORAH WOODARD’s first full-length collection of poetry, Plato’s Bad Horse, was published in 2006 (Bear Star Press). She has recent work in Lillien Waller’s anthology: American Ghost: Poets on Life After Industry (Stockport Flats, 2011). Her new collection, Borrowed Tales, is forthcoming from Stockport Flats in 2012. In collaboration with Giuseppe Leporace, she has translated the poetry of Amelia Rosselli: The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems, 1953-1981.(Chelsea Editions, 2009). Woodard teaches at the Richard Hugo House, a community literary center in Seattle, where she is offering a class on William Blake this fall. When I was a child in Vermont, there was a woods behind our house, and I was never a lost child. However, I became a lost child in New York City, after the death of my mother—when I had no woods, or, of course, mother. I read Hans Christian Anderson, including “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” and sitting down with that tale again, I’m struck by how it travels across time and space, from a Viking kingdom to the Egyptian pyramids, and down into a bog (where a mother remains wrapped in sleep) and up to a star. I remember a fantasy I had at the time in which my mother wasn’t really dead, but, instead, was safely tunneling under the earth toward the North Pole. Now I wonder if my fantasy was inspired by that fairy tale. JOHN DERMOT WOODS writes and draws in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of The Complete Collection of people, places & things, and has a collection of comics forthcoming from Awesome Machine Press. He edits arts quarterly Action, Yes! and is a professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College. As a child (and still now), I was gripped by fear when I saw a face that I couldn’t recognize, or, worse yet, could not recognize me. I felt as if I lost my bearings; my world could not be defined. Masks were bad, and painted faces that could not be easily removed were worse. Whiteface the worst of all.

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The End