VOLUME ONE

The Staff T

Managing Editor Andrew Keating Fiction Editor Rafe Posey Nonfiction Editor Samantha Stanco Poetry Editor Tabitha Surface Special Thanks

Danielle Peterson Jill Williams Cynthia Schatoff Michelle Junot Kevin Walls Tiffany Teal

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No element of this volume may be reproduced without the written consent of Cobalt Review and/or the artist or author.

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For all inquiries, please email [email protected]. CONTENTS

Cobalt Fiction Prize

WINNER: Sandra Hunter Modern Jazz Parade 1

FINALIST: Eileen Kelley Pusser 36

FINALIST: Mark Wagstaff Ms. Smith 51 Cobalt Nonfiction Prize

WINNER: Chelsey Clammer I Have Been Thinking About... 13

FINALIST: Cindy Zelman Stuck in the Middle 28

FINALIST: Marissa Korbel Drawing Blood 70 Cobalt Poetry Prize

WINNER: Steven Leyva Rare in the East 11

FINALIST: Sandra Kolankiewicz Grief Game 18

FINALIST: Kevin McLellan About Our Beginning 80

Fiction

Dave K How to Adopt a Cat 19

Aubrey Hirsch Rachel Garrett 81 Nonfiction

Hayley Hughes Montreal 45

John FitzGerald Humans Learn Beliefs 64 Poetry

Brian Russell Preface 27

Panika MC Dillon if it was fate, we wanted it 60

Martin Willitts Earth-Creator 69 Interview Excerpts

Excerpts from the Cobalt Interview Series, running from September 2011 to July 2012, are included throughout this issue. We have selected some of the highlights of the first year of interviews, including Rick Moody, Steve Almond, Paul Lisicky, Patricia Smith, and others. Full interviews with each of these authors, as well as many others, are available at www.cobaltreview. com/interviews.

Volume One

Sandra Hunter

2012 Cobalt Fiction Prize Winner

Modern Jazz Parade

If you will it, it is no dream. —Theodore Herzl

In the dream Basem told himself: I am not dreaming. Boom-lack boom-lack boom-lacka boom-lack. This was the dancing in Noo-Allins, U.S.A. Dixie-music blaring over his shoulder, sousaphone scoring holes in the sacred air above them, people laughing, dancing on the sidewalk and showers of popcorn. Everyone he knew waving and clapping. His ears glory-loud with trumpets and saxophones and clarinets, long, silver-throats tilted up to the sky, where Allah received their music as a blessing. A strange noise curdled on, dragging at him, hauling him out of the US parade and into his bed: home, Hama, Syria. Phone. Stopped just as he grabbed it. 5:30am. Saturday. May 7th. Thirty-one days to the end of final exams. Forty- nine days to his eighteenth birthday when he could officially join up and march, side by side, with best friend, Ziad, in the glorious Syrian Army. Two steps to the window. Checked between the sagging blinds. To the right, in about three hours, one neighbor would dodder out of her back door to pick tomatoes. On the left, the other neighbor would stand under her fig tree, pre- tending to look for fruit but nosing over the fence. Imagined for a moment he was aiming a sniper, picking them off at 50 yards. He flattened the blinds with one long palm. Listened. Mama wasn’t up yet. His two sisters and Father would sleep until eight. Just a quick walk. Dressed, gently let himself out of the apart- ment. Ran downstairs and almost tripped over the small figure sitting on the last step near the door. “What are you doing up, Antoine? Does Chef know you’re here?” “Ai, Basem. No sleep anywhere. Chef is in the kitchen doing bread.” Head drooped against the stair railings. Five years back, Chef Seroob found Antoine, Allah-knew-where, and brought the four year-old back to the Hot ‘n Tasty Restaurant. The left side of the boy’s face drooped, two teeth missing on the upper left jaw, a squint in the left eye. The east-side Hama neighborhood sucked its narrow street, yellow-stone cheeks, probed its tongue along its rubbish tip alleyways, mumbled its cracked apart- ment building teeth. The fence-gazing widows, the rug-beating housewives, the chess-playing antiquities under the fig tree on the street corner. They found they agreed on something: the child had nerve damage, possibly trauma to the head.

1 Even if he’d wanted to Chef couldn’t have answered any questions about An- toine. His only expression was the trademark aaaaaoooo that ranged in pitch and volume, standing in for everything. And Antoine, now nine, had nothing to say, either. Basem fitted the MP3 earbuds into Antoine’s ears. American Idiot. Antoine’s face became empty, arms relaxed. He leaned against Basem’s shoulder. Basem checked his phone. Nothing. Best friend Ziad: Dropped out of high school at 16, lied about his age, and enlisted. Sudden shock of short hair and a startled-looking stare. The Ziad who forgot his books, his lunch, his keys, was gone. In his place was a man in a uniform with many pockets: knife, cigarettes, phone, phone card, hand warmers, and what-all. And Ziad knew exactly to which pocket each item belonged. The Army had also taught him how to tie his boots. Ziad and his shoe-laces: stuck in doors, caught in shop displays, jammed under someone’s briefcase. Basem and Ziad, scuffed-knees-scraped-elbows, fighting at the end of the street, racing across the back of someone’s house to grab apricots from the tree, stand- ing in front of the headmaster to receive six-of-the-best for banging their books on the desk in Science. Ziad’s arm over Basem’s shoulder, walking the evening streets, inhaling roast chicken and warm bread and sfouf, sweet almond cake. Antoine held out one earbud and Basem took it. Metallica. Where the Wild Things Are. Antoine sat up. “Basem? How much does it cost to go to Istanbul?” Basem removed his earbud. “A lot. Why?” “I’m going to live there.” Basem sighed. “Insha’Allah.” “But Allah doesn’t pay the ticket to Istanbul.” Antoine yawned. “Come, Basem, I will tell your fortune. The neighbor-with-the-half-foot showed me. Wait here.” Antoine disappeared through the restaurant’s side-door. Basem stood up and stretched, opened the front door to the building. Morning light filtering through the lifting fog. Rrrrup rrrrrup, metal shutters being rolled up, shop-owners calling greetings, shouting for coffee, small boys with small trays sliding past each other like eels. Ponderous procession of giant snails stopped, threw off their shells, and became kiosks for fried beans, green plums, corn on the cob. Two dueling cassette stalls on opposite sides of the street that sold virtually the same music. Each owner insisted that he, not that trickster over there, had the newest and best songs. You’re the one that I want, ooh, ooh, ooh, honey… Scooter zithering across the still-tepid traffic: father, mother, two kids and, tied on the back, grandmother holding a chicken. Antoine returned and stood at Basem’s elbow, looking up at the roof-top op- posite for the kite so often birthed from between the drying sheets. I wish I could fly that kite. They stepped back for the tall Senegalese pushing his grilled chestnut cart, and sat on the bottom step. Antoine handed him a small shaving mirror. “Now, look into the mirror. You are going to marry Sabeen.” “What are you talking about? How do you know Sabeen?” “The one with the glasses. I’ve seen you look at her when she comes by with her mother and the three short sisters.” “How do you know who I’m looking at? And what are you doing spying on me?” 2 Grabbed at Antoine. “It’s not my fault!” Antoine jumped back. “Don’t drop the mirror!” “It isn’t your fault you’re a spy?” “Eh. Basem. It’s the way you look.” Antoine did his moony-eyed impression of Basem looking at Sabeen. Basem swatted him on the shoulder. “I don’t look like that.” “You are a big man, seventeen and all, but still you do this way when she comes.” Antoine took the mirror and held it up. Basem’s face like his mother’s: dark eyes, long thin nose, wide mouth. “Look at the nice eyebrows. Big and bushy. Girls like eyebrows like that. And teeth also are nice. Girls look for good teeth.” He tilted his head to one side. “But why pick one with glasses? This one can’t see properly. How will she know she is with the right husband?” “You little-” Basem jumped off the step and caught Antoine. “Alright, alright. She’s going to marry you. She will. Ow, Basem. Let go.” Aaaoooo. Chef playing pan-lid cymbals. Basem ruffled the short hair. “See you later.” Sabeen, sitting behind his school on a low wall under the big tree. Black and white head-scarf. Black-rimmed glasses sliding down thin nose. Beneath the burquah, thick boots. Small, tough-looking hands. Didn’t even look up as he passed. Who was she anyway? Their family owned a bakery. Sighed. Time to go up these shaky stairs to the apartment above the restaurant. The warm scent of baking bread. In the distance, the sepulchral moaning of the Noria dragging up water from the Orontes River. Mama and the girls were in the kitchen. The living room door was open and Father beckoned him in. “I have received a call from my old friend the Chancellor at Cairo University. I emailed your grades and last report. He agrees to waive a formal application. You’ll report there for the summer term after your exams in May.” Father nod- ded. “That’s all.” Applied without telling him? But he was going to join up in June. He and Ziad were going to travel the world. They said that foreign girls were shameless. He wanted to see that for himself. And how would Sabeen fall in love with him if she didn’t see him in his uniform, didn’t cry at the train station, and promise to marry him? Sat at breakfast. Ate nothing. Mama looked at Father who asked for more leb- aneh, grumbled: These foolish demonstrations. Just lazy teenagers with nothing better to do. Basem: unable to open his mouth, not even when his little sister announced she’d won a school knitting contest. As everyone except him con- gratulated her, she reached under the table-cloth and squeezed his hand. Felt his eyes grow hot. Grabbed her hand and squeezed back. In his room, thought he’d be too angry to fall asleep but fell straight into the dream. Marching in the parade again, but the music was wrong. He didn’t have the sousaphone. He couldn’t walk in step with the others. He realized it wasn’t Noo-Allins, it wasn’t Dixie. People booed. He hated them all, screamed, You’re choking on a bad seed… Shook his head, long hair whipping, the crowds pressed against the barrier, arms raised, faces snarling. Woke up. Heart banging. Noon. I must talk to Father. Listened. Father’s voice sounding irritable. Dialed Ziad. 3 “Hallo?” “You’re there.” “Eh, rohi, I’m home. On leave, brother. A whole day.” “Meet me at Al-Hakkorah.” When Father went into his office, Basem slipped out. Just outside the building, he saw Antoine dragging the heavy trash-can. Basem took the can and hauled it around to the back door. “Eh, Basem. So strong and all. You should do like this when Sabeen comes past.” Big grin. “Can we go on the roof to watch the kites?” “Can’t today, Antoine. Tomorrow?” Lifted the small boy and twirled him around. Laughter. Basem waved. The east-side: food-stall owners chatting with customers, café tables filling up with the lunch-time crowd, traffic wrangling for space on both sides of the road, oranges caroming across the road from a dropped basket, three men crossing the road with a wardrobe, the door flapping open. Basem caught his swinging image in the oval mirror. Al-Hakkorah, a hookah shop on the east-side of the Old City. You sat cross- legged on the blue and red cushions and sucked in the soothing combination of tobacco and mint or wild berries or citrus, the water bubbling gently in the glass vase. Ziad was already waiting for him; jumped off the cushions and crushed him in a hug. Basem felt the muscle, the hard body. “I can’t believe you knew I was on leave, you son of a donkey,” Ziad held him at arm’s length to examine him. “I can’t believe you picked up. Usually my calls go to voice-mail” “You’re even skinnier than I remember.” Ziad’s uniform was tight across the shoulders, biceps outlined. “You look so big.” “That’s what the army does, my boy. You, too. In six months you won’t know yourself.” The waiter brought the hookah with two pipes. “This is special.” Ziad picked up his pipe. “Attar of Roses.” The dark perfume was overwhelming and for a moment Basem thought he was going to be sick. He was more cautious on his second try. “Good, yes? Strong.” Ziad was nodding, eyebrows raised. Basem cleared his throat. “You’re on leave?” “One day. Got some fucking classified campaign tomorrow. We’re probably all going to die.” He winked at Basem. “Aren’t you scared?” Ziad put the pipe down. “There’s worse things than dying. Watching your buddy die. Surviving so you’re left half a man and everyone pities you. Dying? Boom. All over.” Basem examined the pink and blue design on the pipe hose. “My father has arranged for me to go to Cairo University. Straight after exams in May.” Ziad stared at him. “I thought you had to apply.” “He knows the Chancellor. Our family’s been going there forever.” “So he greased someone’s palm.” Basem sat forward. “He just sent my grades and reports. They said I didn’t need 4 to apply.” “Is that so? Basem, You are such a child.” Ziad shook his head. “My father doesn’t bribe people.” Ziad put his hands up. “Okay, okay.” He took a drag from the pipe. “So, you’re joining up?” “How can I?” “Once you’ve joined, no one, not even your father, can do anything. You’re eigh- teen in, what, July?” “June 25th.” “So sign up after the exams in May. Get a fake birth certificate. No one’s going to check.” Ziad inhaled and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “My father tried to report me as underage. Said I was no longer his son, and I don’t know what. When he saw what the army did for me,” Ziad slapped his chest, “he changed his tune. Now he can’t stop bragging.” Basem looked down. “All year I’ve been waiting for this. To do it legally. I wanted to do it right so he can’t say I went behind his back. I never thought he’d apply to Cairo without telling me.” “I respect my father, too. But I also know that the army is where I want to be. Basem, there’s nothing like it.” Ziad’s black eyes shining. “You’re the best, the strongest, the fastest. And your army budldies take care of you. It’s like a whole new family. Come on, brother, we made a pact, remember?” The prospect of having a new family was exciting and repugnant. What would Father and Mama say? But then, he would be with Ziad, his brother. He would be strong, somehow taller, like Ziad, carry a Kalishnakov, save his unit buddies. They would joke about danger and nothing could touch them. “Listen, let’s get some beer tonight. Get really blasted.” Ziad settled back with the pipe. “So, tell me how everyone is.” Basem told him about the family, the neighbors, this argument, that marriage, this gossip, that feud. Petty, unimportant things. Ziad was doing real work. Ziad was doing army maneuvers, running with heavy objects and shooting targets. But soon he, too, would join up. And even if Father might be a bit disappointed at first, he’d understand in the end. Basem imagined Father’s eyes shining with pride to see Basem marching in his unit. “Hey, asshole. Come on. I’ve only got one night. Let’s go!” After an early dinner at Dream House (reliable for huge portions) they went to a few bars. Soon they were drinking and holding each other up because they were laughing so hard. And then they were in a taxi, arriving at the apartment. Basem opened the taxi door and threw up in the gutter. The driver watched. “I would have charged you extra if you’d done it in my cab.” Basem stood up and everything began to spin as Ziad helped him up the stairs. “Can’t go to bed. Gonna throw up.” “Shh. You’re making too much noise.” Ziad found the key in Basem’s pocket. “Let me open the door.” He got Basem inside. “Good-bye for now, rohi. See you soon, okay?” Basem’s heart blossomed with love for this, the friend of his childhood. Lifted both hands to bless Ziad, to speak of his undying friendship. And then ran for the bathroom. 5 Consciousness came with sticky fingers plastering his eyes shut, poking about in his mouth with old porridge. Nausea rising. A slow progress to sitting, stand- ing; slower progress to the bathroom. Rinsed out mouth. The urge to vomit passed. Stared at a face that looked completely untouched by the concrete blocks being thrown around inside his head. How could his eyes be clear, his skin look smooth? Surely something had run over him last night. Ziad. Too painful to think. Back to bed, then. He opened the bathroom door. Father. “Come into the living room.” Guts surging queasily, Basem followed and stood where he could lean against the wall. Maybe, the talk would be brief. He closed his eyes. A slap that rocked the head back, smacking against the wall. He fell to his hands and knees, shaking, the tears coming. “Are you going to be sick, here on your mother’s Anatolian kilim? Are you? You are no better than these dogs that eat their own vomit.” Basem retched. There was nothing left to come out. “Do it. Do it and I will kill you with my own hands.” Basem breathed through his mouth. Just get through this. “How dare you bring shame on my house? My family? The whole building knows about your disgusting behavior. I’ve already had Mrs. Doudan over, ask- ing if my dear son is all right.” Silence. “You have nothing to say? Drinking beer. With Ziad. And this is the fine army you want to join? Well, you can put that out of your head. You’re going to Cairo, although you don’t deserve it. I would throw you out if I didn’t think it would encourage you in this nonsense. Your mother is hysterical with grief. Hysterical.” Basem lifted his head. Through the tears he watched Father walking up and down. “Go to your room.” My mother. My sisters. Lay on the bed and cried until he had to turn the pillow over. Heard Father’s voice followed by the clump and shiver of the front door. The mattress dipped and a small weight arrived. His little sister stroked his hair. “Basem? Did you drink beer?” Groan into the pillow. “I love you, Basem.” Her small hand on his head. “But you stink all over. You must wash.” The pressure on the mattress released. From further away, “Mama’s making lunch. You can sit next to me.” She left. Sleep. Oh, to sleep. Pushed himself upright and went to the bathroom. Some- one (Mama?) had thoughtfully filled a tub of hot water. He sat in the water and felt sorry for himself, and guilty for hurting Mama. The warm water felt good and he soaped himself and washed his hair. Better. Yes, definitely better. Dressed and went to the kitchen. Just Mama. She avoided eye contact. He put his arms around her. She started to cry. “Basem, what is happening to you?” “Nothing, Omy.” The pet name from childhood. “Ziad had a short leave. I wanted to talk to him. We got carried away.” “Your father is so angry, Basem. Please. “She put one hand against his cheek. “Go to Cairo. Your father.” She hugged him and turned to the stove to ladle a 6 bowlful of makmoor, the eggplant and tomatoes fragrant with garlic and onion. Suddenly he was ravenous and sat at the table. Mama sat down, too. “Sometimes we have to make sacrifices for our family. Your family is most important.” She smoothed her palm over the red formica table top. “You remember Amid? Yesterday he died.” “Amid? Who plays chess?” A small man in an old blue jacket and white pants that pooled around his ankles. Juddered and poked his walking-stick way along Avicenna Street each evening to sit with the other chess-playing antiquities; delighted in the frequent, noisy-wheezy arguments over cheating. “It was on Hafez Street, near the city square. Those foolish protestors were blocking the street, waving their signs. The army came to send them away. But, oh, Basem, they used real ammunition.” “What? Why?” She shook her head. “Amid was just coming out of the tailor’s. Shot dead. Just like that.” She wiped her eyes with her apron. “But it was an accident, Mama. A stray bullet.” “Things are, I don’t know what’s happening. We’ve been hearing how the army fired on civilians in Homs. Women, too. Not accidental, Basem.” She cleared her throat. “And I cannot watch my son being ordered to shoot his own people.” Basem stood up and tried to ignore the tears in her eyes. “It’s lies, these reports about the army firing on civilians. It’s just foreigners spreading lies.” Pushed out of the kitchen before he began crying, too. Slammed the bedroom door. Texted Ziad. No reply. Amid was dead? Little Amid who always asked how he was doing at school, always asked after that rascal Ziad. Shot like a dog. Tom Petty. …under my feet bad grass is growing/It’s time to move on/It’s time to get going. Ripped the headphones off and left the apartment. Antoine, on the doorstep, didn’t look up. Considered stepping past him and then sat down. “Eh Basem, in the army you can travel around the world. Will you travel around the world? Maybe to Istanbul?” Chewing a plastic straw. Checked his phone again. Nothing. “Alright, Antoine. If I join up and if I go to Istanbul, I will send for you.” “Hi five!” Antoine craned his neck up, looking for the kite. “We’ll go up to the roof this evening. There are more kites.” Basem threw an arm around his shoulders. The usual question: “How big is the biggest one?” And answer: “Bigger than you.” “So big?” Antoine looked down at his skinny body; faded green shorts, Thriller t-shirt, brown sandals. Spread his arms. “I’m a kite!” And then: the blasphemous shock. An army tank and two trucks creaking along, shaking the buildings and pluming up the white dust. The tank could barely squeeze itself through. People hanging out of the three-story apartment buildings, crowding out from the stores. Some child waved a flag. Some parent snatched it away. Basem stood in the doorway with Antoine, watched the tank grinding over old vegetables, old cardboard, an old street sign fallen, rusted, and now splintered. Chef pushed himself out for one look and aaaooo’d back into the kitchen. 7 Voices bouncing from window to pavement, from hookah parlor to mezze kiosk: What are they doing here? I don’t know. Ask them Hey – what are you doing here? No one is protesting anything. They don’t say anything. Perhaps those uniforms make them deaf as well as stupid. Ai, don’t talk so loud. Those aren’t toy guns. What of Amid? Yes, what of Amid? Hush, don’t make them angry. We are angry, too. Look at the mess this tank has made. At least it didn’t knock down any buildings. I’d like to see them try to knock down my store. You think you could stop them? An old fool like you? Come here and watch this old fool show you what he thinks. Now, now. None of that. There are children here. Growling and shaking the street. Here they come. Here’s the parade: one tank, two trucks with sand-colored uniforms and guns bulging out of the back. Someone on a megaphone: Everyone go inside. No one will be hurt. No one moved. A few spat. And what of Amid? Did you tell him he wasn’t going to be hurt? No one knew who started throwing the stones from alleyways. Kids, probably. None hit any of the vehicles. Someone threw a huge chunk of concrete. A warn- ing shot came from the trucks. Women screamed and hustled kids inside. The men shouted, Stop, don’t shoot! There are women and children here! More stones from the alleyways. From the opposite roof-top, the kite carved a green and orange arc, swooped down and landed in the dust. Antoine, mouth open, darted out to snatch it up. Held it triumphantly above his head and shouted for joy as the bullet kicked him between the shoulder-blades. Silence. Turn him over. He should not lie in the dust. Behind, Chef Zeroob aaaooooo aaaaoooo. Hands like new bread lifting An- toine. Starfish on orange and green kite, arms-and-legs spread too small; he flies now. Can see the Sea of Marmara and the Blue Mosque reaching up minaret fingers? Don’t show his face. (Smiling over Istanbul. The blue cold sea). Is that Ziad in the second truck, Kalishnakov across the chest? Aaaooooo. Tank and trucks grunting gravel. Can’t be Ziad, is it? Vehicles round the corner; gone. Aaaaoooo. Chef rocking, arms like pillows. Antoine’s body flowers over Chef’s white apron. Chef covers himself in red flowers, deep centers. Antoine’s flowers do not fade. Basem picks up the ripped-bloody kite. Aaaooooo! Aaaaoooo! Aaaoooo! Chef swearing revenge. And the women with their hands over their mouths. And the men standing, arms stiff, hands clenched. Antoine, four feet three. Chef, mother- 8 and-father, tears bleeding into the red apron and Antoine’s red shirt as the am- bulance arrives. For five hours, people waited on the streets until Chef came back from the hospital. Ignored them all. Shuttered the restaurant. Basem finally crept downstairs at 3am. Chef heaped over the table, weeping into the wood, arms flung out. Basem went back upstairs and lay awake listening to the Noria faintly improvising around Chef’s mourning. Dry eyes open to the gray morning. Whatever-time-it-was, Basem zombie- walked to the bathroom and washed carefully. Combed back the thick black hair so like his mother’s. Avoided his eyes in the mirror. Shaved around the narrow chin. Not square like Ziad’s. A nice chin, Basem. Gripped the edge of the sink as Antoine’s face came back to him. How big is the biggest kite? If only he’d taken him up to the roof … Stepped out of the bathroom, slipped into loose pants and a clean, white t-shirt. Held out his hands and studied the backs and then the palms. Soft, unused hands Picked up a notebook and pencil. Went downstairs to the kitchen. The scent of baking bread. Chef sitting upright with a mug of coffee. Basem tied on an apron. Pots and pans scoured and gleam- ing on the racks above the stove. Countertops shining. Next to the back door, the morning delivery: boxes of eggplants, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, apricots, strawberries, and oranges. Basem sat down opposite. Pushed the notebook and pencil across to Chef. “Tell me what to do.” Chef stared at the notebook. Put out one large finger and touched the pencil. Looked at Basem. Slowly wrote, Sais-tu parler français? Oui. Moi, je n’ai jamais appris arabe. Coughed. Sais-tu comment cuire? I helped my mother cook dinner a few times. Tu peux m’aider? Of course I’ll help. If you write it down. Chef, blinking away tears, took Basem’s hand in both of his. Aaoo. Wrote: Mets les boἵtes dans le frigo. Added, S’il te plaἵt. Chef pointed at the three large fridges. One was for meat. The other two were for everything else, which is how they had been used. Oranges on top of let- tuce, tomatoes squashed between loaves of bread, slabs of butter next to an open container of syrup, a stack of egg-boxes leaning over towards a huge jar of olives. Basem shifted the boxes of new produce next to the fridges and began. Into one fridge: moved the dairy products, hummus, delicate salad ingredients, cooking oils and juices. Into the second fridge: vegetables, fruits, jams, honey, and con- diments. He checked for old or damaged food and brought it out to Chef who indicated what should be discarded or saved. He brought Chef over to the fridges to inspect them. Soft aaoo. Next, Basem washed, cored, peeled and sliced the saved fruits. Brought out sugar and flour and butter that Chef whisked into pastry shells, baking 20 at a time in the two large ovens. This part took longer. Every few minutes, someone would rap on the back door to buy one of the loaves of bread now cooling on the giant wire racks. Basem looked over at Chef who was busy with the pies, and told the bread-buyers they’d have to give the exact money. Some did have the 9 right money, some went home and came back, some cornered any passing small child, sending him around the corner, up the stairs, across the street for the right change. Many brought gifts: sesame cookies, pistachio sweets, a fruit cake, chocolates, baskets of flowers, vases of flowers, four flowers tied together with a dirty pink ribbon presented by two nervous small boys, friends of Antoine. From the roof-top apartment across the street, a huge blue and white kite. Basem accepted everything, thanking people, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. By the af- ternoon, the counter near the back door was piled high and completely unusable for kitchen purposes. Chef cooked throughout, occasionally aaooo-ing and waving a note for Basem to read: fetch this, take that. Chef hadn’t paused to look at anything, didn’t glance up when the door opened, didn’t appear to be listening to the gift-givers, the sniffing, the broken words of sorrow. When a group of angry-looking teens, call- ing themselves Freedom for Hama, came to promise revenge, Chef turned his back and brought his cleaver down emphatically on a slab of beef. The teens left. By the evening, the back-door visitors had thinned out. The last had been the chess-playing antiquities who stood quietly, held their caps in their hands, and gently patted Basem on the shoulder. They presented a chess-board with hand- carved pieces. You are a good boy, helping Chef. He will need help now. They nodded sadly, smiled with watery eyes, and shuffled away. At the end of the day Chef and Basem washed the utensils, wiped down the counters, swept and mopped the floor. Basem suddenly realized he hadn’t eaten all day. Chef brought out a dish of cauliflower, tomatoes, raisins, and pine nuts. He filled two plates and set them on the table. They ate in silence for a while. Basem arched his aching back and felt a new admiration for his mother. The sadness came back. How was it possible that Antoine would no longer stand at the door, gazing up at the opposite roof-top? My brother, my friend. These words meant something. You couldn’t take them back, you couldn’t build a maze around them, or bury them in the earth. The side-door opened. The world breaking in his little sister’s face. She ran to him. Basem scooped her up, feeling her small hiccupping breaths. “He was going to bring me a kite.” Chef brought plates, spoons and one of the warm, apricot pies. Basem held a spoonful to her mouth. At first, she didn’t respond. Then, the scent of the warm fruit and pastry must have reached her. She looked up at him. “Stay here, Basem.” He couldn’t even nod.

10 Steven Leyva 2012 Cobalt Poetry Prize Winner

Rare in the East

Here is a sermon believed! The land is tuning up: cabinets cut from cedar shake like a Pentecostal woman, the HVAC, aged and unfiltered, heaves a last cough collapsed in a fist of dust, and mauve bricks, slip-shod, thud amen in the yard. My son nods awake and adds his tremble— through me, through the buckling pre-war joists—to the bedrock. Shucked out of the building, bewildered in late morning sun, a woman shrieks into a cell phone unable to raise a dial tone, her daughter, or the school. Strange introductions in the streets begin. Newly met neighbors glad-handing, each starts with, “ I live…”

All birdsong still stuck in the South begets a vigorish paid in smashed glass, blank stares, and then this caesura. Hallelujah.

11 A good poem should hit you like a ton of bricks.

And you should never know it’s coming.

Emotionally, being a poet means that there’s no sacred space. There’s no moment I can’t bring to a poem. Writing is not a recreational activity, it’s the way I process my life, how I move from day to day. It’s breath.

Patricia Smith Author, Blood Dazzler Cobalt Interview Series, December 2011

12 Chelsey Clammer 2012 Cobalt Nonfiction Prize Winner

I Have Been Thinking About. . .

I have been thinking about sleeping with a man.

• In that I pull my arms close to my chest, because he is not here. As where he has yet to be here. And I have yet to have sex with a man. • I am almost twenty-nine years old and all of my lovers have possessed vagi- nas, have kept their smell deep within their bodies until I was able to bring it out of them. Until they seeped with want and nothing was hard between us. • Courtney was my first girlfriend. We met in high school. Or rather, we were both in high school, and wanting women. She posted a personal on Gay.com, I perused the personal ads one afternoon when, at sixteen years old, I decided it would be easier to come out to my friends and mother if I had a girlfriend, if I could simply say, I just happened to fall in love with this woman. I needed a girlfriend. I do not know what she needed. I remember in her ad she specified how she needed the respondent to not email her, as she shared her email with her mother and her mother did not know she was a lesbian (or, like me, wanting to be a lesbian), and thus the reply had to be sent via mail. I wrote a letter. I do not remember what it said. I put my phone number below my signature. She called me a few days later. We met at her house in south Austin. We went to the mall. We talked. Much later, her dildo would slip out of me and I would pretend it was still inside, pretend to come to that feeling of penetration. I was not enjoying myself. • I am intrigued by the penis, by what it looks like and how it functions. I despise the fact that I am curious, as so much of the world is driven by men and their penises. I have never wanted to give them that sort of attention, and in fact have resisted the government, resisted capitalism, resisted societal notions of femininity by rejecting the penis, and these men from my life, my body. • The average price of a dildo is $50. The average price of a harness is $75. • As where I wonder about how it must feel, that movement that moves inside of him. As where I wonder about how the movement inside of me will feel. As where even though he will satisfy me, I know I will want more of him. I will always want more. • How I will continue to be queer. How my identity is a fluid thing, a thing that 13 cannot be contained, named. • “She stood before him without nouns” -Jorie Graham • Does the longing in the chest ever go away? • I have always wanted my lovers to be closer to me. I have always hated how quote, unquote real sex between women is defined in our society solely by the act of cunnilingus, and that is barely granted the status of “sex” at all. And how this is true. And how I hate that I am unable to grab hold of my lover’s body, to kiss her mouth while we are making love. I have always wanted all of her body on top of all of me as we have sex. But by this definition of “sex” between women, her body on top of mine during sex is impossible. As where by society’s definition I am still a virgin. And so I break boundaries, break definitions. Her hand on my clit, her thigh against my pulsating cunt is sex to me because I am wet, because there is a want that collects in my underwear, seeps through to the inside of my jeans. She continues to kiss me, her body on top of mine. • I feel as if I have already had sex with this new man in my life. But he lives 1,174 miles away. This does not stop us from wanting, from fucking in our own boundary-breaking way, one hand on my phone as he sends his titillating and tan- talizing texts, one hand on me. I kiss the pillow, my body on top of it. • I met my second girlfriend at a bar. I fell for her because she had on a cute hat— a red, blue, white and green striped knit hat. I approached her. I do not know what we said. Perhaps we danced. My friend and I were invited to her house, followed her home from the bar that night in my truck. We were drunk. We got high together in her apartment, large tapestries of blue and black covering the white walls. I noted there were no bean bags on the floor, though plenty of pillows. We thought about kissing. She gave my friend and I directions on how to get home, charted for us in pencil a map drawn on a piece of paper torn from the pages of her journal. Much later, she would come home from the bar one night and rape me. Would perform that act of lesbian sex as I did not want it, as where for once I was glad her body was not on top of mine. Society’s response to this action: If women do not have sex, per se, then women cannot have unwanted sex. • Jen and I were on my bed, grasping backs, licking backs, helping each other get back into ourselves. • Her hands melted on my skin like snow. • Marie pressed against me, pressed me up against the couch before we headed out the door to class. Her pelvic bone pressed in between my legs, my back bent over the large brown arm rest, soft, not slippery like leather, but kept me in place like suede. A small orgasm shivered through my body at surprising speed. This as- tonishing pulse, this moment in which an orgasm can happen without sex—with- out the body being de-clothed—highlighted for me the possibilities of my desire, of what I could want, of what could be done to me. • He will stand before me, clothed. And I will pull at his belt, feel his bulge, and tell him to “show me the goods.” I will flirt and demand in my own queer way, the oddities of his flesh becoming real, known. • For twenty-eight years, I have worn the gold star of desire, the term that says I am 14 a lesbian who has never slept with a man. I am soon to be stripped of my medallion. • The man texts me about his hard cock, and I nearly orgasm at the sight of his words. I wonder at my body, at this body as where it has always claimed itself as a lesbian body. How is it that my body has become a sight for heterosexual desire? As where I will remain queer even with him inside of me. How this is true as I fol- low my sense of want, the places I want to feel touched. As where my body is the setting, the place in which this narrative is rooted, the space and setting of this body, this life. Because while this landscape has been a changing thing—a body moving more into itself—it has finally settled into its skin. And this grounded place of my body allows for the character of my desire to change, to shiver at words. Text imprinted on the skin. • Question: What happens when we see our bodies as a place, our skin as the landscape of our stories? • Answer: The characters can grow, and we live fully inside of them. • We live in these bodies, these texts of ourselves. We have stories written in our skin, our blood pushing language through our bones. As a reader of these texts, we finger through the leaves of our skin, breathe into the sheaves of our flesh. • My legs spread open when I think of my past female lovers. The landscape of my skin, my body continues to spread, to open in order to accommodate this new sense of desire, to make room for my sexual identity. • He will tell me to put him inside of me. And I will feel safe. And I will feel more settled in this setting, my body. • I have previously felt unsettled in my brain, have questioned if my mental illness is a part of my desire. If I want him when I’m manic. If I just want to be fucked, hard, when my body feels on top of the world. But this is not mania, even though I am crazy for this feeling. For once, the bipolar disorder does not feel like a part of this situation. The body is aligned with the brain. And I am sick with want for him. • I tuck my cell phone into my bra. Its cool plastic weighs lightly against the hot heaviness of my chest. I feel him call me. My skin vibrates as my phone alerts me of this. A steady series of vibrations that follow the palpitations of my heart un- derneath my wanting skin. This is how I have come to know him, as the constant buzzing under this skin. I prickle, pucker at where my imagination takes me. • Thoughts of sex nestle in my steady brain, sussurrate down my spine. • I licked her back when her girlfriend would not allow us to fuck, yet. I took fucking into a new meaning. The taste of her still lingers on my tongue. • The taste of what I imagine him to be lingers in my swishing blood. • Which is to say he is not here. He has never been here, though that is soon to change. And when it does, I do not know how my skin will be able to stay at- tached, how it is I will not melt and dissolve into his flesh. It is snowing sideways now, which is how I want him to fuck me. I want to be filled, but will never feel full of him. There is too much want in me, too much that will always want more.

15 • How I will still continue to want the she’s of this world. • As where my desire is unbound. As where my body unhinges from the con- cept of what I have prescribed myself as wanting. As where surging for desire is the queerest act I can accomplish. • There is the prospect that this might not be as I imagined it to be. And if so, I will just laugh, hug, continue on with him as we have always known one another to be—somewhere inside, and deep. • There is no other way for me to know this, to explain this. There is a constant coming, a craving. • I crash into the thoughts of the summer I spent kissing women. When kisses were full of female lips. When I just couldn’t get enough of more. • “My pussy is a tractor and this is a tractor pull.” - Ani Difranco • I pushed my legs around Jen’s hips. Her hand glided along my cunt. As where I thought about how I could be, wanted to be penetrated by her energy. As where I wanted more. • Always more. • I do not know if this is what I want, yet. • Jen and I snuck kisses in alleys painted yellow, kissed under the haze of distant streetlights, kissed until we could no longer stand just the kiss. • She said we were just becoming friends. • He is my friend. We say we are becoming more than friends, something deeper. • The snow has started again. It’s early in the morning, an early spring Minne- sota snow, the white descending onto the sidewalks that were just clear yesterday. He is a southern boy considering moving north. 1,174 miles. If he does, the snow will catch on his brown-orange beard, melt on the fuzz of his upper lip. When he comes north, I will melt on the fuzz of his upper lip. We sigh midnight conversa- tions into each other’s ears over the phone. My furry pillow an abstract version of how I imagine his chest will be. His body will lie on top of mine. I have fallen for his thick Texas accent, his low, slow drawl of words. The way in which his tongue considers each syllable. His speech is like my gaze. Long, contemplative, a deep thing struck with wanting in each second. I’m waiting for the full effect of my thoughts to take place, of my want to settle into my skin. The nesting of sentences as they collect, waiting to be swept by the wind of his, of my breath. Of our breaths as they merge together. I nudge my skin into meaning. • My scars tingle under his flesh, now.

16 Story works the same for queers and straights. Love is love, after all. Sex is sex. Frustration and grief are frustration and grief. It feels the same inside. What’s different is how we act in throes of those feelings; it depends on our individual–our particular, our specific–history, situation, and understanding of the world. That’s what I write about.

Nicola Griffith Author, The Blue Place and Slow River Cobalt, September 2011

17 Sandra Kolankiewicz Poetry Finalist

Grief Game

I thought it up, replaced the lost toddler on his way toward the open pond, with a shiny Lincoln penny, series L, minted in 1957, and tossed onto hopscotch square number two, a small Buster Brown ankle- strapped shoe, a little foot inside, white sock trimmed with lace flouncing as it jumps number one to number three, sails over the coin gleaming in the sun, the bronze circle against the white chalk on the asphalt like the eye of the kestral high up and gliding, waiting for movement, the lone soul blindly making his way from burrow into light, unaware of who or what is watching.

18 Dave K from June 2012

How to Adopt a Cat

There must be two, maybe three hundred people on the train. I’m one of them, in a sack suit that fit the last time I’d worn it. That was years ago. I look like a child in his father’s clothes now. They’d kept the suit the entire time I’d been there, all four years, and had re- turned it to me after discharge. I have no kin to collect me, so they put me on a train at their own expense and sent me to the closest OutPatient Resocialization Office available. It’s gray, the suit. I’d remembered it being brown, the color of a watch fob. The other passengers in my car are businessmen, it looks like, and idle vaca- tioners coming home after a week in the countryside. Many of them sleep, some read the paper. I watch their reflections in the window, my chin in my hand, as the rain-slick landscape carousels by. Rain had turned the dying trees black and bent the wild grass under them, and we pass through patches of mild rain that tap the windows, but don’t linger. I missed the smell of rain, the endless sky, the justified sense of smallness. I’d felt small where I’d been, but that had been artificial at best. When the conductor passes by and tells me my stop is next, I can only nod. My speech had slurred during the years, and I’m hesitant to converse above my station. When he leaves, I pat myself down to make sure I still have my papers, that none of them had fallen out of my pocket, that I am real and solid and free of that wretched place. The train stops, jerking to a halt that upsets the balance of anyone who’d stood prematurely. I follow the other passengers out, but since I have no luggage, I am guided to the back of the line. By the time I descend onto the platform, it’s rain- ing again. I stand in it for a second, my eyes closed, until one of the guards shoves me and tells me to be on my way. Other passengers are trying to board. More professional men, I guess from a glance, probably clerks from uptown who lived outside the city. Their suits are fitted and their whiskers are cut close. It makes me think of hot lather on my skin, the smell of soap instead of hose water and delousing powder, and as I walk into the station I try very hard not to smell anyone. Or at least, not to make myself obvious about it. Just inside the station there is a kiosk of maps and newspapers, and the short dark man inside keeps yelling “ten cents ten cents a newspaper five for a city map

19 ten cents ten cents” and I start to panic because ten cents is all it costs to push through the turnstiles and look down into the atrium at us all, thrashing in our jackets, foam and spit flecking out from the holes in our muzzles. Another five cents gets you a stick to poke us with or a bag of rocks to throw at the ones in cages. “Damn sad business these lunatics,” the men say, with their children tug- ging on their sleeves yelling “look look there’s one beating his head on the wall,” cheering the orderlies and their crisp white uniforms. I smack the newspapers out of the man’s hand and run outside, not stopping un- til the station’s grand Roman entrance is well enough behind me. As I lean against a gaslight post to catch my breath, a few passers-by stare and walk faster, making a wide berth around me. A woman in a dirty cotton dress and straw bonnet is selling fruit on the sidewalk. I don’t leave until she turns her head to spit. I’m on edge for a while after the episode in the train station. As I walk, I take my papers from my pocket with shaking hands and look at them, making sure the address is right. I feel the rain plaster my hair down and ignore the other pedestrians shouldering past me. Most of them have umbrellas that do or don’t match their suits and dresses, and anyone less prepared holds a newspaper over his head, or gathers with others under awnings and coach gates. “You’ll catch cold!” I hear someone yell, maybe at me, but I’m enjoying the weather. I turn onto a cross-street and find myself in front of a church with chipped marble steps, set back off the corner behind a wrought-iron fence. It reminds me of a church near where I grew up. The priests there would pay us a few coins each for help weeding the cemetery and cleaning out the organ pipes. They’d all got- ten too fat for their chores, and too pale; they wore straw hats outdoors regardless of weather. I think as I walk by that most of them are dead by now, The neighborhood is home to a lot of degraded people, I notice. Many of them had probably been injured in factories and evicted from company housing, left to rot away in tenements while stronger backs and straighter shoulders took their places. My old neighborhood had its fair share of them, too. I’d see some of the women lying drunk on the sidewalk under the trees in the park, sometimes cra- dling children in their laps. The Blind-Deaf School is where I was headed, and the crude map they’d in- cluded with my papers placed it just a few blocks down from the church. The clerks there will help me find housing and set me up disability pension, I was told. It had all been arranged. I imagine having to wait in a dim gray box of an office, shackled to a chair while some nervous bureaucrat stamps forms I’m not allowed to read and asks questions I have to answer. He might see one hundred other outpatients like me that day, one hundred sets of fingernails bitten down to the quick, one hundred weird skin rashes and scars and amoebic bruises, one hundred pairs of eyes that had forgotten the sun.

My apartment is one of many on the second floor of an old brick building that sat on the corner of a residential street and a commercial one. The only window is in the bedroom. It faces the wall of the neighboring building and overlooks a bare pavement lot, parts of which have been dug up to plant flowers. The holes are ragged and uneven, leaving cracks that are slowly filling with moss. I sit in front of the window for hours after moving in, just staring outside for as 20 long as I want. The first time I open it, after seeing trash ride a breeze across the lot, I back away and seize up, waiting to be grabbed and buckled into a jacket and sedated. I don’t how long it will take for that feeling to go away. The apartment’s furnishings are meager, but they are mine, and that’s an odd feeling too. I walk around touching everything, running my hands along the edge of the table, over the back of the chair, along the counter and over the gas- range stove in the tiny kitchen. I sleep on top of my blanket at night, afraid of getting too comfortable. Time rolls and rushes over you when you’re inside. I’d seen one steam-engine car before I was committed, but now they’re as plentiful as horses, motoring along under a sky black with progress. I make sure to step behind something or someone whenever I see one of those cars pass, just in case it stops and people in white uniforms step out, asking for me. My building has other people in it who share my situation, and I randomly hear them screaming, punching and kicking the walls, snoring and wheezing after coming back from the chemist with laudanum or heroin to coat their raw nerves. Their fear is mine: that we won’t be able to reenter the world that built walls around us, that we’re being monitored, that one day we will answer a knock at the door and get shipped right back to the asylum. Our forms would be stamped Insane: Incurable and then it’s jackets and cages and watery porridge and ran- dom injections in the dark why are their rooms so dark why is his apron so white never any blood the fluid barking out from the syringe the vomit the spit when it touches my spine where are his eyes does he even have eyes or did they wash away, and then I come back to reality and I’m in my necessary, crying. Some- times I don’t realize it until I’m halfway done, and by then I’m sweating so much it’s hard to tell the two apart. When it rains, sometimes I leave my apartment and just stand in it, letting it pelt my face and run down the bridge of my nose into my mouth. I tilt my head back and imagine the water seeping into my brain and just drowning everything there. Sometimes I want it to rain forever.

A cat has been sleeping in front of my door for the past couple of days now. He’s skinny and unkempt, and charcoal black except for little white patches on his chest and one of his feet. The last time I saw him, I’d come home from the chemist. A rolling prescrip- tion for laudanum had been left at his office, so I’d walked down to pick some up once I felt comfortable leaving my apartment. It was bright outside and my eyes stung, so I shaded them with my hand and walked facing the ground, which must have been quite a sight. The chemist’s office is on the ground floor of a dreary brownstone not far from where I live. A steam-engine car was idling outside, but I didn’t pay much at- tention to it because of the smell that rushed out like a pickpocket the second I opened the door. It was a musk of old laundry, mold, and spoiling fruit, which reminded me of how one of my early bunkmates made liquor by hiding the limes and oranges we were given under the radiator until they fermented. There was a man in front of me wearing a blue jacket with brass cufflinks and matching trousers. At first I thought he was a military man, but then I saw the 21 truncheon at his hip and my stomach cinched up. I turned back to look at the car. The police seal on its door was facing the chemist’s window. I must have been breathing hard, because the cop turned around and looked at me. His nose wrinkled. He was clean-shaven and smelled of mint and chewing tobacco, an earthy combination that would have been pleasant under different circumstances. One of the men in my exercise group used to say, between seizures that made him rip out his own hair and eat it, that a cop’s badge was pinned straight into his heart to make sure all the goodness drained out. “Here it is!” said the chemist, craning his long neck up from under the counter, and the cop turned back around. I saw him take a paper bag and then avoided eye contact, focusing on the shelves lining both sides of the shop, scanning the boxes and tins and murky old bottles until I knew he was gone. When the chemist peered over his sweat-fogged spectacles at me, I started to speak, but realized (too late to spare myself some embarrassment) that I didn’t know exactly what to say. I’d never ordered my own medicine before. He asked my name, then thumbed through a fat ledger until he found it. He nodded, then walked out from behind the counter and took one of the bottles I’d been staring at earlier, a short fat one. He put it in a bag and took my money without another word. The police vehicle was still parked out front when I left, and I felt a sudden urge to bang on the door and tell them I was free, that I didn’t have to go back. When I got back to my apartment, I was trembling so hard that I almost couldn’t get the key in the lock, and then there’s this cat at the door, whisking his tail at my shins. I shooed him away with a kick and slammed the door behind me. I bet he came back within the hour.

A woman who lives down the hall from me reminds me of someone from the asylum. The first time I saw her was in her apartment; her door was open and she was sitting in her chair with her skirt drawn up over her knees, displaying her petticoat. The room was a shambles; clothes and papers strewn all over, a tangible greasiness coating everything she owned. She didn’t seem to mind. She had the relaxed eyelids of a dope eater and was repeating the same word over and over again. Like she couldn’t help herself. I’d seen a man like that once. They were delousing the beds, so the patients were all milling around in the exercise yard, all hard dirt and tramped-down grass, under the supervision of orderlies who looked and acted more like prison guards. One of them close to where I was standing nudged his friend and said “look, Duncan’s got the faucets again,” referring to an overweight man who stood by himself wringing his hands saying faucet faucet faucet faucet faucet faucet.

I’m crying again. One of those police whistles sounded in the night and I was bolt-upright in bed remembering whistles and every light in the place turns on at once guards stripping us we yell out our numbers over and over no more whistles no more lights guards gone quiet now but whose chair will be empty in the mess tomor- row whose sheets will they take to the furnace whose blood on the razor wire. I decide to go out to a coffeehouse. The laudanum has been working, and I feel ready. 22 I trip over the cat as I leave my apartment and startle him, but he doesn’t run far. I turn back to look just before I take the stairs down, and he’s back in front of my door. The walk to the coffeehouse is bright and pleasant. There are more people -out doors than usual, chatting from porches as they hang their laundry while their children run off the sidewalk and into the street. Even the rough men sitting on the sidewalk look comfortable. There’s a man walking around with a wooden bucket selling ears of corn. I don’t stop for him, but other people call him over to buy from him. Closer to my destination, the cobblestones are slimy and water-stained, and many of the trash barrels are tipped over or dilapidated from neglect. Still, with the sun on them they’re almost cheerful. The coffeehouse is busy, and I stand around for a while before a chair opens up. I sit next to an older gentleman hunched over a book, his arms folded over his stomach. His whiskers are longer on one side than the other, and I don’t think he’s noticed. When his coffee arrives, he smells it, then tilts his long face up and shuts his eyes for a moment. The server leaves without acknowledging me. I smell the coffee and look around. Everyone else here has a cup; the sound of spoons against porcelain is unmistakable, even amid the hum of conversation. My fingers tremble. I’ve never ordered coffee before. How do I do it? How did they do it? They just seem to know – there’s a social contract here that I arrived too late to sign. I stiffen in my chair, trying to control my breathing, looking around as sweat blooms in my palms. There’s a fat man dressed in pale blue, pulling his beard out of the way as he sips from his cup. He’s telling two women about “the islands,” and how their public transport is terrible, untouched by steam power, but indi- vidual natives will take you anywhere you wish to go. “They have these rafts,” he’s saying to them, “of bamboo or something, lashed together with string, and they push them through the water with long poles.” He laughs. So do the women, taking care to cover their mouths and blush. I want to tell him to shut up. I can feel sweat rolling down my back now and I shift in my chair, furious at this man’s inane conversation. I look at his coffee cup in his soft fat hand. I hate it and him and everyone else here for building those thick stone walls around me while they decided how things work. My knee catches the table as I stand up and it topples over, sending everything on it clattering to the floor. Someone from the shop – the owner, maybe – follows me down the street, yelling, but that’s all he does and he gives up after a block. I’m so lightheaded by the time I get home that it takes me a full minute to unlock the door. When I finally open it, I don’t walk in. The cat is rubbing up against my leg, his sharp ribcage vibrating with a steady purr. I close the door and rest my forehead against it.

I don’t know what cats eat. I’m tempted to ask the chemist when I pick up my week’s laudanum, but he’s so unpleasant that I decide against it. I stop into a dry-goods shop on the way home and ask the shopkeeper what cats eat. He first answers my question with a look, for which I want to punch him as hard as I can, and then picks out a tin of fish and a tin of commodity meat for 23 me, saying that cats like one or the other. He also gets a bottle of milk from the icebox behind the counter. The cat turns his nose up at the meat, but likes the fish and the milk. I feed him out in the hallway, but can’t close the door fast enough to keep him from running into my apartment. When I try to grab him, he runs into the kitchen area and wedges himself between the stove and the wall. My arm is too thick to pull him out. When I was inside, some of us had to wear special harnesses to curb immoral thoughts and “self-abuse,” and the thighs of their uniforms were always tracked with blood. There were ways to avoid that. Laudanum was one, or an experimen- tal treatment where they injected you with something that took away your libido and sent flashes of numbness through your arms and legs. Or they didn’t give you anything, but sometimes a few guards would show up at your bedside in the night and take you off somewhere, then drag you back a few hours later. Laudanum usually worked for me, but I’m out. My whole body is throbbing. The knothole in a sheet of plywood would look inviting right about now. I leave my apartment without thinking, without scratching the cat behind his ears, and run down the stairs and into the street. I know there are some working girls out here. I’ve seen them before. They make themselves obvious in neighbor- hoods like mine, especially at night. I find her sitting on a bench in a small park a few blocks north of my building. I don’t know how to ask for what I want, so I follow the stones arranged in paths around the park’s small garden, trying to get her attention. I find an old gnarly tree close to her and stare up into its canopy. I hear her clear her throat, and the noise yanks my neck on a chain. She’s smil- ing at me. “You look like you need to calm down,” she said. Before answering, I study her. Her face is heavier than it should be, and pudgy at the nose, and she is wrapped in a shawl meant for someone larger. “Yes,” I said, stumbling over the word. “I need…” I trail off. The words turn to dust in my throat. She crosses her legs, exposing a pale ankle in the process. “You need to relax,” she says. “I can help with that.” I smile back, trying to ignore the bruises on her arms. “For a price, of course,” she says. I dig into my pocket and find a handful of coins, which I hold out for her. “This is all I have,” I say She takes the coins from me and holds them under a gaslight, squinting at them. “A $3 piece? Haven’t seen one of those in ages.” She looked at me. “D’you mind hosting?” I say no, and try to keep pace with her as we head back to my building, past rows of houses whose broken windows are patched with rags and paper. Streams of dirty water fall from linens hanging over the street. It must have rained earlier. “My aunt used to live there,” she says, pointing to a rowhouse so indistinguish- able from the others that I was surprised she could pick it out. “And my uncle used to live down the street somewhere. He was an odd one.” I nod and try to act interested as I watch her hips lilt from side to side with each 24 step. She seems to know the way as well as I do. She waits until we’re in my apartment to kiss me, then pulls away and says “help me get out of this.” She unwinds her shawl to reveal a bottle of cheap cham- pagne, which she sets on my bed before letting the shawl drop. As it makes a puddle on my coarse wooden floor, I help her out of her red jacket, her striped petticoat, her crinoline. They are wrinkled and matted with dirt, but she wears them well on her heavy hips and shoulders. “Wait here,” she says, rubbing the tip of my forefinger with her thumb. I sit on the bed and remove my brogans, then my pants, listening to her putter around in my kitchen. She returns with champagne in two cups, one of which used to be a jar. She toasts me and we drink and and and and and and I wake up with a stinging ache in my head. The woman is going through my jacket pockets. She freezes when my eyes open. She looks the way things do on hot days, greasy and indistinct. “Thought you were dead,” she says. She looks more confused than caught. I sit up and she takes off running, my coat flagging behind her. My apartment has been ransacked. Every drawer and cabinet, not that there are many, is wide open, and my empty laudanum bottles have been strewn ev- erywhere. The necessary has also been thoroughly searched, and soiled. Whatever she slipped into my drink eventually wears off, but not before mak- ing me throw up and collapse. I stay where I fall, staring up at the ceiling. I feel like I’m full of sand, heavy and numb, and that anything or anyone I touch would puncture me and it will all come pouring out. My heart throbs in my wrists and heels, in every part of me that touches the floor. I stay there for an hour, waiting for sleep to come. When it doesn’t, I think about the city harbor, the long gloomy docks where stevedores unload cargo and repair holes in hulls. I think about the stone slope separating the shoreline from the water, about how smooth and heavy the stones are. I wonder how many will fit in my empty pockets. The cat fits the curve of his back against the instep of my right foot, and I feel him purring. He’s hungry. He rubs his head against my toes and I feel lighter, as though stones are falling out of my pockets.

25 There’s a chemical women secrete during childbirth that dulls memory. They forget the pain and the species continues. I’m convinced the same chemical is secreted in the last phases of novel revision.

Jane Delury 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Winner Cobalt Interview Series, January 2012

26 Brian Russell from September 2011

Preface

I can’t seem to help It I preface the conversations I don’t want to have With you with the phrase The book says As if I’m simply the messenger Of bad news the book says We should talk About what you want to wear

I can’t finish the sentence

I don’t want to think About it about going through The closet through all the clothes I told you you didn’t need I’ll Inevitably find the black and blue Dress you wore just once I never Understood why you kept it I still remember it That new year’s eve In Chicago my god Do you remember how Cold it was that year Standing outside the bar with Everyone we knew we weren’t ready For the night to end you Couldn’t stop shaking I couldn’t Get a cab but we were still filled To capacity with warm happiness Remember your tears froze in black Streaks on your face no I’m Sorry how can I possibly choose The last thing I’ll see you in.

27 Cindy Zelman Nonfiction Finalist

Stuck in the Middle

The cashier and the bag boy look at me as if I’m insane, and they have a point. I toss items out of my shopping cart onto the conveyor belt at mental-case warp speed. The Oscar Mayer bologna package bounces off the belt and onto the floor twice. The meat is pink and the supermarket lights are bright yellow. It smells good in here, like fresh fruit and deli roast beef. I try to focus on the aromas but the florescent lights glare in my eyes and make me look away. I am having a panic attack. The conveyor belt is black, starting to fade after years of rota- tion and thousands of grocery orders. It squeaks on every other turn. My fingers are shake. The cashier is young, high school, long brown hair, pretty, someday beautiful. The bag boy is no more than sixteen, and will grow to be handsome and strong. I think. Maybe I’m fantasizing. My bologna is on the floor. That’s no fantasy. I’m in my forties. Another reality. Sweat screams out from the pores in my chest and underarms. I bend over and throw the bologna package back on the belt, and it bounces to the floor again. Who knew a package of bologna had so much elasticity? I used to be as young as these kids. I was that cashier in 1978: Roxies Supermar- ket, home of the fifty-nine cent “rubber” chicken which the boys used to toss and slide across the meat room floor before packaging the skinny yellow carcasses in plastic and putting them on display. When I was that age, we still had to ring in each item. We did not have bar code scanners. This was before my problems with panic disorder. This was before I realized I was a lesbian. I’m not making a cause-effect connection between panic disorder and lesbianism, just explaining all I was unaware of at age sixteen, all I was “in for” you might say. At Roxies, we used our fingers to type numbers on a keypad and counted out change by doing math in our heads. And if we had same-sex desires, we kept quiet about them. The cashier is silent as she slowly scans my items, eyeing me. The bag boy has a thoughtful expression as if he’s wondering how he can get me into an ambulance. I can barely breathe from the anxiety attack. A hot flash runs through me and the heat implodes, spreads inside out, then outside in, from guts to limbs. I’m not sure I’ve ever been this hot in my life, like I’ve just hiked up a mountain under a furious sun. I manage to throw most of the grocery items from the cart onto the belt, but I must get out of the building. The heat in my body will not relent and my mind cannot process rationally. I’ll fall down and faint. The walls are getting fuzzy. I’ll pass out! I must leave. Get out!

28 “I’ll be right back when you’re done,” I say to the cashier, “I need to get some air.” My voice still works like a sane person’s, small, quiet, and strangely normal as panic roils inside of me. “You all right ma’am?” says the nice bag boy. “I’m just hot, a little crazy.” I give a choppy laugh for his benefit. I look directly at the cashier. “I’ll leave my credit card with you in case you’re ready to put it through before I return.” My hands vibrate and the palms sweat. I keep moving my right hand behind my back, pressing into the small of it, a gesture I make only when in the throes of panic. It’s nearly an involuntary movement. Always my right hand. I don’t know why I do this. I don’t have panic attacks too often anymore, but for most of my life I’ve suf- fered from panic disorder with the complication of agoraphobia. When I was a child, the condition manifested itself as a series of undiagnosed stomach prob- lems, despite the attempts to make a diagnosis with pink barium drinks and upper GI Series tests. “Nervous stomach,” the doctors told my mother. “It’s all in her head.” There I was, tagged with a psychological problem before I was ten years old. I suppose one could argue the doctors were right, since I would feel my phan- tom tummy aches most acutely when I had to spend undue time away from my mother and too much time with my overwrought and emotionally erratic father. Eventually psychologists learned of rogue brain synapses and the amazing dam- age they could do, pushing their victims off the cerebral tightrope. But in 1971, the information about the Flying Wallendas of my brain was unavailable. The stomach aches disappeared by the time I was twelve. Panic disorder can go into remission like other illnesses. I was able to enjoy life for a few years. I did well at school, always a good student. I had many friends. I did not have a social phobia. I read books I loved. I played outdoors. I played the guitar, a well-rounded child. I ate whatever I wanted, and my stomach felt fine. I no longer feared my father’s joke-y threats to “steal” my brother and me away from our mom who had full custody, and I didn’t miss my mom so much anymore (she who raised us but was rarely home). When I was thirteen, I met Lynne, a girl who would become my first bona fide female best friend. We spent a lovely year bond- ing together before we entered high school and the 1970s drug scene entered our lives. She would go the way of heavy drug use, falling just short of drug addict status. I would go a different way, one that no one understood, huddling in a self-contained, tiny world of terror. I agreed, at the end of our freshmen year in high school, to try marijuana. Lynne and I were fifteen. She enjoyed smoking pot. She thought it was her right that I should smoke with her. “What are best friends for? I want you to get high with me. That’s what best friends do together.” She was a white girl with a reddish-blonde afro, a hairstyle popular in the 1970s. When she smiled at me, all other reality collapsed. I was in love with her, but didn’t know it. I was a lesbian but didn’t know it. I wouldn’t discover my love for other women until the 1980s when I was in my twenties. I remained silent in a homophobic society. I equated silence with survival. I had done a little drinking in high school, but I never got drunk. I hated the taste of booze, truly, and thought of my mother every time I felt even a little tipsy. My mother was a big nighttime drunk. As a child, I’d suffered through her episodic inebriated jags, always as she came home from a night out partying, 29 fumbling with her house key, noisy and incompetent. I was afraid of the idea of pot—the potential loss of control—but I did not know how to articulate such a fear to Lynne or to myself. I wanted to keep up with Lynne. I wanted her to love me. I agreed to get high. Somewhere in the woods on a Saturday afternoon in 1977, Lynne, I, and Mary- ellen (our mutual friend and supplier of marijuana) got stoned. Lynne and Mary- ellen laughed and sang as we walked out of the woods and into the parking lot of the apartments that bordered our condominium community. I’d walked this parking lot so many times, getting off the bus, weaving through the cars with the sun glistening off their hoods, past the green shrubbery, and waiting for late af- ternoon to arrive when I would meet up with Lynne at a condo where she babysat two young boys. I’d met Lynne in this parking lot a few years back, before drugs, when we were thirteen and innocent, like ducklings in a clean pond. I didn’t laugh with Lynne and Maryellen as we departed the woods. I stumbled down a three-foot embankment and blacked out during the stumble. Stumbling like my drunken mother. I could not remember climbing down the embankment. I was at the top of it, and then I was staggering at the bottom of it. I couldn’t remember the two seconds in between. A terror ignited inside me, extinguished, lit again and extinguished, like brush fires ravage through the woods on a windy day. I held myself together until we reached Maryellen’s patio, which served as an open and pretty backyard to the condo she lived in with her mother and sister. Maryellen had laid out a feast for the stoned: potato chips, onion dip, little meatballs on a stick, chili, Doritos, candy, cake, and Diet Coke. My getting high for the first time signified an occasion. We were to have a celebration. I sat down in a patio chair. Maryellen turned on music. We were seventies rockers and pop- music fans. We listened to The Who, Rod Stewart, and Queen. One of my favor- ite songs of the era was “Stuck in the Middle with You,” featuring Jerry Rafferty as lead singer for a now obscure band called Stealers Wheel. The song played out of Maryellen’s stereo speakers soon after I sat down. Maryellen and Lynne were giggling ecstatically over nothing in the way that dope heads do, but I sat with a mortified expression on my face, feeling stiff and paralyzed and other worldly and not in control of my body. “Are you having fun?” one of them asked. “I don’t know,” I managed to say. “What’s the matter?” Giggles. “Nothing. Just let me feel the music.” “Just let me feel the music!” They mocked with more uncontrollable giggles. That was a line I never lived down with those two girls. Yet how appropriate some of the lines of the song: Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight/I got the feeling that something ain’t right/I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair/and I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs/Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right/Here I am, stuck in the middle with you. I was stuck in the middle with my terror. I was in a state of marijuana hal- lucination. I stared at the red brick wall of the back of Maryellen’s condo. The brick wall existed and did not exist. I viewed everything through a warped visual haze that apparently my friends either did not experience or did not experience as terrifying. I saw a hand crumbling Ruffles Potato Chips to my lower right, -un derstanding that this was my hand, but this wasn’t my hand. I had no reference 30 point for reality, and my perceptions floated untethered and petrified, as a hand, mine, not mine, crumbled Ruffles. I was thirsty, parched. The table with the refreshments was just feet away, but it seemed miles. There is a table but there is no table. I couldn’t imagine how I would get out of my seat to pour a drink, and I could no longer speak out loud to ask for one. I could see my friends laughing and munching Doritos, and I couldn’t figure out if they were there or not. Lynne, Maryellen? There, not there. I would die from thirst. My tongue was huge and leathery in my mouth. I was pouring myself a Coke over ice cubes. How did I get to the table? I did not remember rising from my chair. How will I get back to my chair? I am paralyzed. I will fall and die. I am back at my chair. The hand continued to crumble potato chips. It’s my hand. It’s not my hand. I couldn’t lift the glass to my lips to relieve my enormous tongue that no longer fit in my mouth. It is my tongue. It is not my tongue. I was downing Diet Coke and trying to un-parch my tongue. Drink or die. I felt myself swallowing liquid. Drink or die. I swallow. I cannot swallow. I swallow. I could not turn in any direction; everything I saw was there but was not. I looked up to the sky (which exists and does not exist) and prayed to God (who exists and does not exist) to get me out of this: Dear God, if you get me out of this, I promise I will never again take another drug. I saw my father, difficult and frightful, walking toward Maryellen’s patio, -al though he did not know where Maryellen lived. I imagined him, with his dark skin and wounded eyes, demanding that I get up and go with him. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t walk. He will have a tantrum. I can’t get up. My father is not here but he’s coming. No he’s not. Yes he is. My prayers worked, eventually, because I started, after what seemed like hours or nanoseconds (I had no conception of time) to come down. Reality slowly started to look real again: the brick wall, the table, the glass in my hand. Potato chips were just potato chips. I ate some. I thanked God in my head, and I expe- rienced a deep physical calm and acceptance of all things. I wondered if this was how people felt right before they resigned themselves to drowning at sea. I felt I had drowned, had lost something in silvery waves of fear, yet I felt as if God had saved me. I got up out of my chair as if I were at a religious revival overcoming my paralysis through the miracle of prayer. I could have held my arms above my head to thank the Lord, except I’d never been a Jesus freak. Just the daughter of a drinker mom and a mental case dad, and now, I would come to find out, a teenager with a wrecked adolescence. “I’m going home,” I said to my friends. Giggle, giggle, from my friends, still high. Lynne said she’d call later. I walked across the condo development to my own house and slept a deep and grateful sleep. I did not know that day my life had changed forever. I didn’t realize that I’d had my very first panic attack. The terrors of my childhood had moved out of my stomach and into my brain. Years later, in my thirties, I would read in a footnote to a book about panic disorder that an overwhelming number of those with the condition cited smoking marijuana or doing cocaine as the trigger event 31 to their panic attacks and agoraphobia. The footnote warned that people like me, susceptible to panic attacks, must stay away from narcotics whenever possible. It’s as if we are allergic. While everyone else is laughing and happily munching on Doritos, those of us of panic-propensity are feeling our psychic throats swell and believing we will die from a marijuana cigarette or from panic itself. It was an amazing footnote to have read, after years of thinking I was just messed up psychologically. Instead, the Flying Wallendas were falling off the tightropes in my brain as errant synapses shot at them like bullets. Following the marijuana experience, I developed phobias over the next year, a common psychological reaction to a very physiologically based mental condi- tion. I became obsessively afraid of any kind of drug that would take me out of my own clear and controlled consciousness. I extended that fear to items as benign as aspirin and as unknown as injections. A measles injection, required by my high school at the end of 1978, set off my panic disorder for good. I was not frightened by the needle; I was frightened that something foreign was be- ing injected into my veins. My greatest fear was a repeat of the hallucinatory experience from the pot smoking a year before. I nearly fainted after the measles vaccine as a white hot panic seethed through my body and the walls around the high school gymnasium disappeared into a gray-fuzzy and prickly light. A nurse stood over me waving smelling salts under my nose. By the time I was seventeen, I was drowning in a sea of panic. The panic attacks took the breath out of me, pulled my life away from me. I quit high school and my part-time job at the local supermarket, and battened down the hatches of my life. I panicked everywhere, so I didn’t want to go anywhere. Nobody wants to go back to a place that scares them shitless. No one wants to jump into a sea of sharks. I developed agoraphobia. My mother and I had moved to the third-floor of a two bedroom apartment by the time my panic reached its apex. For a year, in 1979, I did not leave that apart- ment, except to see a psychologist, Dr. Rudin. His office was just one mile from my home, but each week my mother had to coax me into the car. I would walk toward it jelly-legged and terrified. I had become housebound. I could not sit on the stoop of the apartment building without panic shooting through me like war missiles. I did not understand my condition then. My mother called me a coward once because she didn’t understand it either. “Why don’t you get off that couch and live your life?” she said. All I could do was look at her and say, “I don’t know why.” My mother can be self-centered but not usually mean, so maybe she was trying a little tough love. Maybe I’m giving her too much credit. I try to see her side: She’d watched a very successful daughter who had been entirely independent at a young age become completely debilitated and needy. I imagine she was scared, too. It wouldn’t be until I was in my twenties that I discovered myself to be a lesbian, and that, too, was something I knew she would not be able to understand. By that time, I’d be- come artful in keeping my intimate feelings away from her. I’d embraced an un- conscious vow of silence about my panic disorder and lesbianism. I understood that society, as well as my mother, preferred not to hear about these conditions. In the 1970s, there weren’t many good drugs for panic attacks —there was imipramine, which had been the gold standard of antidepressants since the 1950s and until Prozac became available. But imipramine wasn’t geared toward 32 the treatment of panic. Still, a morose and unfriendly psychiatrist named Dr. Jaffe prescribed it to me. I continued to pray to my new-found god every night when I tried to down an imipramine tablet: Please don’t let me have a drug trip. I began to perform strange obsessive-compulsive rituals surrounding the inges- tion of the imipramine tablet that included reading the milligram printed on the pill ten times, licking the outside coating to ensure that the pill inside the orange coating looked exactly like the one I’d taken the night before. Then I did a lot of praying. I wasn’t exactly finding religion; I was plummeting into desperation. The pill didn’t do much for me. There was Valium (and assorted tranquilizers) that mainly put me into a state of out-of-mind-experience that reminded me too much of getting high on pot, so I didn’t take to such pills for long. There were MAOI inhibitors, another form of antidepressant that predated Prozac and had lethal side effects if you ate, say, the wrong thing and took the pills. Maybe a piece of grapefruit would put me in my grave. I would have had nothing to do with such drugs. The anti-panic drugs of the benzodiazopene family such as Klonopin and Xanax existed in the 1970s, but neither the silent Dr. Jaffe nor other doctors felt comfortable prescribing them for me until the 1990s, after controversies over drug “dependency” subsided. When a psychiatrist finally put me on Xanax and Klonopin in my thirties, my life changed again. With all the physical panic sub- siding, falling into the background of my life, I was I was able to work on the cognitive-behavioral issues surrounding the many phobias I’d developed. It was freedom like I’d never known. For the first time in twenty years, I was not debili- tated. This was the closest to a miracle I had ever experienced in my lifetime: the ability to take an elevator, drive a car in heavy traffic, meet a friend for lunch, or stand on the 18th green, without panicking. Two decades would pass before I experienced this simple miracle of living my life. As a teenager and in my twenties, I controlled my existence by creating little compartments and lists of goals: walk down to the stoop and sit there for ten minutes, practice driving to the next town, spend an hour thinking of something other than how scared I am. I was able to take very small steps toward overcom- ing agoraphobia and panic. I widened my world a mile at a time. I finished high school by being tutored. I overcame enough of the panic problem to commute to a local college for my undergraduate studies, although it was not the school I would have chosen if I’d been free of this problem. In college I came close to understanding myself as a lesbian as I fell in love with a young woman named Barbara, but she, like Lynne, was straight. I remained silent, especially after my therapist told me I was “normal” and therefore hetero- sexual. Even in 1980, after the Gay Rights Movement became a full-swing pen- dulum in society, my therapist’s attitude was prevalent. I am normal; therefore, I am straight; therefore I am not a lesbian. I was overcoming my panic attacks and agoraphobia; therefore, I was not mentally ill. By 1988, I was able to travel (albeit nervously) ninety miles to the University of New Hampshire to work on a graduate degree in English. But always, anticipatory anxiety lingered, making me afraid to do much more than what was required. Going out with friends, dating, and finding someone to love were near impossible with my limitations of where I could go, when, and under what circumstances. In the mid-1980s, in my twenties, I discovered finally that I was a lesbian, and I 33 began to say the word out loud but only to a select few in my life, those I thought I could trust. Perhaps I told a total of ten people. One good friend, who imag- ined herself quite hip and liberal, once asked, “Ooooh, why do they have to use the word ‘lesbian?’ It’s such an ugly word.” Apparently, she had no knowledge of Sappho or the Isle of Lesbos. She did a political back flip and an emotional reversal when I told her I’d fallen in love with her oldest daughter. Other friends wanted to know why I liked women, how come, what made me a lesbian, what is the name of this disease? An old boyfriend asked, “Did you turn lesbian because of me?” Such inquiries reminded me of the questions I was continually trying to answer about panic disorder. I had tried and failed so often in relationships. It’s hard to find other gay wom- en when you can barely get out of your house. It’s hard to date someone who is panicking or who is afraid to go more than ten miles from home. I did not have a normal “dating” life until I was well into my forties and had been on Klonopin for several years. Until I forgot to even tell people I’d had a panic condition be- cause it fell so into the background of my life. Still, some people want me to talk about my panic attacks, people who still believe that a mental condition is all in one’s head or those who are merely unin- formed. They want me to talk about my panic disorder and agoraphobia and how they came about, how they grew, how my alcoholic mother and neurotic father contributed to the conditions, similar to the way they wanted me to talk about my lesbianism in the 1980s, my other apparently fucked up mental condition. To this I say: My panic disorder is a physical curse and my lesbianism is God’s blessing. You should see me twirl a woman on the dance floor. You should see me control a package of bologna, most days.

34 I do best when I’m writing about my obsessions. I’ve been an annoyingly devout music fan for years, always lobbying my friends to get on board my latest band crush. And I’ve also always felt that music is the one artistic medium that allows us to reach the feelings inside that we need to reach, but can’t by other means. I do a lot of crying and unreasonable dancing when I’m listening to music. So all I wanted to do was write a book that described this set of feelings — what it’s like to be an obsessed fan. After all, very few of us actually get to be rock stars.

Steve Almond Author, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life and Candyfreak Cobalt Interview Series, October 2011

35 Eileen Kelley Fiction Finalist

Pusser

I’d rather go to Berlin or Amsterdam. The wall just came down and I’ve always wanted to check out the hashish bars. The musician I’m going to stay with is on tour and the best time for me to meet up with him is when he’s in Denmark. That way I can combine my two remaining vacation days with Thanksgiving. A week before I’m supposed to leave, he calls to tell me he’s sleeping with one of the actresses in the show and they’re sharing a room. We only slept together once before he left. I was psyched when I got his postcard saying we could hang out in Copenhagen. Now I’ve got to pay for a room and I don’t have much money. I’ve already paid for the ticket and it’s non-refundable. Pisser. I’ve never taken a trip alone either. My friend Chris talks me into it. She tells me to cruise some girls for her. She should be going instead of me. She’s better at it. I tend to freak them out by saying odd things and walking away. “Weird ‘em and run.” Chris calls it. I buy a Danish travel book and learn about the land of The Little Mermaid and modern furniture. It says that practically everyone speaks English and it’ll be easy to get a cheap room since its mid-November. I change my 200 dollars for 1,200 crowns at the BayBank in Harvard Square. I’m rich! You have to go downstairs to the foreign money exchange window. Danish paper money is baby blue and pink with pictures of swans on it and the coins have hearts on them. How blond of them. I’m going as a courier for World Package Express, which is cheap and a pain in the ass. After a five-hour train ride, I have to take the subway out to a sketchy neighborhood in Queens to deal with courier shit for two hours. They use your suitcase space to ship things. The guy said it was computer parts. For 150 bucks round trip, I didn’t care what they put on the plane as long as I don’t get arrested. An older woman in a beige pant suit sits next to me on the plane. She smiles at me and I’m so excited to be on my first transatlantic flight I blurt out that I’m going to Copenhagen. “Oh, how nice. They have a pretty coast. I used to go there in the summer when I was a child in Germany. The Danes are very sweet but they’re a messy people. They take the ferries to Germany to buy duty free beer and clothes and they leave their old clothes in the streets.” She smoothes out her perfectly creased polyester slacks. Everything I’ve read said that Denmark’s really clean and orderly. “Where are you going?” I ask. “Frankfurt, where I’m from,” which makes me snicker. She’s from hot dog. “I

36 live in Idaho and my husband owns a factory that processes frozen foods.” “I’ve never been there. What’s it like?” “There are a lot of farms and it’s very pretty. The factory does well, but the Indians that work for my husband will only work until they have enough money to drink for a few days. Then they expect their jobs back.” She looks expectantly at me. Whoa. My French Canadian grandmother is a Métis, part First Nations. Besides, I wanted to hear about Germany, not friggin’ Idaho. Maybe because of my motorcycle jacket, rolled up Levi’s and Doc Martens she thought I was a skinhead. I got hair. “Native Americans never had an industrial revolution, so you can’t expect them to conform to a Western work ethic. I think they have the right idea personally. Besides, this is their country anyway. We stole it and owe them.” Her smile fades by the time I’m finished. She starts reading her Reader’s Digest and doesn’t talk to me anymore. Chris says I scare away the right people. You can’t really sleep on a transatlantic flight. They keep waking you up to offer you drinks and snacks and hot towels. I get to Copenhagen at five in the morn- ing, my time. I can’t even stay awake on the bus from the airport to look out the window. At the Youth Center, the kid at the “Use It” travel desk helps me find a room. It’s only 20 bucks a night but he promises it’ll be clean. I sleepwalk to the address. It’s a cool old grey stone building off the canal. The name of the woman who’s renting the room is Karen, pronounced like the Star Trek movie, Wrath of Kahn. She’s an earth mother type with a lot of clunky jewelry. I look at the fluffy white down comforter on the bed and practically drool. Fuck all the shit I’ve read about what you’re supposed to do to keep from getting jetlag, I’m crashing.

When I wake up, it’s night. I can’t wait to wander around Copenhagen. I circle where the gay bar is on the map that I tear out of my Denmark book. Karen isn’t home and I take a long shower. The floor of the shower is the floor of the bath- room. There’s a little squeegee thing against the wall and I squeegee the water down the drain after I’m done, like she showed me. I’m not in Boston anymore. Getting dressed, I feel like a kid on the first day at a new school. I hope I don’t fuck up and make an ass of myself. My room’s near Christiania, the “free city” where squatters live. You can buy hash there. I read you don’t want to go there alone at night though. It’s drizzling but it’s not that cold for late fall. I walk along the boat-lined canals. Some are houseboats with lights on inside. I can see people sitting at tables or moving around. It’s quiet except for the sailboats’ ropes clanging against their masts and the water hitting the rocks. This place is old and people have been walking on these cobblestones forever. I’m not New Age-y, but I swear I can feel ghosts walk- ing all around me, whispering as they go by. Vikings wearing skins and women in lace-up dresses that push their boobs up. On the canal bridge an old couple rides by on their creaking bikes. Wow, they cycle around at night and in the rain. I could live here. I don’t have a car and ride my bike everywhere. I love it even if I do nearly get killed every day. There’s hardly any cars here and all the bigger streets have bike lanes. On the other side of the canal I see Wilde’s Café. Maybe it’s gay. Through the steamy window I see it’s mostly straight couples inside. Oh well. It’s a funky place with an old wood bar and marble top round tables. It looks warm. I get a cappuccino, a croissant 37 and a beer. It’s all I can read on the chalkboard. I get another beer and smoke a cigarette. Everyone smokes. Nobody complains they have asthma and asks you to put it out and Tuborg’s actually a good beer here. I’m buzzed. That wasn’t much of a supper. It makes me brave enough to pull out my map and plot my way to the club called Pan though. I head towards the parliament building with the green copper twisted dragons’ tails on top. The bar’s beyond it, off the walking street, next to the headquarters of their national gay organization, Landsforeningn for Bosser og Lesbiske. There’s a café and a bookstore too, for all your gay needs. I walk through an iron gate in a stone wall and I’m in a courtyard surrounded by old buildings. I hear thumping bass off to the left. There’s a club in this place? Gnomes should be dancing around the fountain. The entire city looks like the Enchanted Village they used to have in Jordan Marsh at Christmas. I pretend to look in the window of the bookstore and scope it out. It’s mostly men going in. They’re not rough trade and a few even smile at me. If I don’t go in Chris will kill me, so I reroll my jean cuffs nice and tight and walk through the door. You flash back to the seventies inside. A big mirrored ball hangs over a lighted dance floor. Saturday Night Fever lives on in Denmark. I get a Tuborg, my new favorite beer, and stand by the dance floor. On the other side of the room there’s stairs. I ask the guy next to me what’s upstairs. He smiles and says he’ll show me. He says his name is Knud. I ask him if it’s “canoe” like the boat and make like I’m paddling. He laughs and pretends to paddle us across the dance floor and up the stairs. It’s a smaller dance floor that’s only open on Thursdays and Saturdays. It’s Friday and women’s night was last night. Figures. Back downstairs, Knud introduces me to his friends. They’re friendly and ask me if I dye my hair to get it so black. It’s actually brown. I put goop in it and that makes it look darker. I tell them in the States the big thing is to dye your hair blond. They find that amusing. Knud asks me if I want to smoke some hash. So me and Knud go to alley behind the club. They mix the hash with tobacco. I’ve never smoked it like that before. It’s kind of gross. I must’ve made a face because Knud makes a face at me. He mimics everything I do so I do it right back at him. It gets a little ridiculous on the dance floor and we can’t stop laughing. One of his friends sitting at the bar is cute and I start talking it up with her. It’s going pretty good until Knud pulls me aside and tells me to be careful. Her girlfriend is the cop who works the door and she’s very jealous. I look over and she’s this huge mean looking butch. Back to the dance floor. The music’s not half bad. Gay boy house. After a while, Knud asks me if I want to go to another bar. I ask him if there’s dancing at this bar. He smiles and says no, not really. They’re talking among themselves a lot in Danish and I don’t trust it. I think they’re trying to fix me up with the chick with the jealous cop girlfriend. That’s more drama than I was looking for. I tell them I’d rather stay here and dance. My beak’s been broken a couple of times already and it’s crooked enough. Maybe I should’ve gone with them. There’s not that many women here. A tall girl by herself is leaning against a pole, looking out at the dance floor. She has long, curly hair and she’s wearing Levi’s, a men’s white shirt and men’s black shoes. She’s built strong and looks just like a Viking. All she needs is the friggin’ horns. It takes me five minutes to get up the guts to walk over to her. This one’s 38 for you Chris. I ask her if she’d like to dance. She says “Sure” and proceeds to dance me off the edge of the floor. She’s a good dancer and we’re smiling at each other. I love dancing with women. Being a dyke for me is a way to never stop dancing with my sisters in the living room. She tells me her name is Margrethe, which kind of sounds like Margret with “edtler” at the end. I ask her if she’d like something to drink. “Are you English?” she asks. “I’m from New England but I’m mostly French and Irish.” She looks confused so I say, “I’m American.” “Oh, I thought you were Spanish when I first saw you.” I try to think of some- thing not strange to say to her but I’m numb. I’ve never gotten a chick this cute to talk to me before. Keep her laughing. “Are you Swedish?” I ask. That works. She starts going off. “It is stupid Americans think Copenhagen is the capital of Sweden. You do not look American.” She says in her slow, halting way that sounds like she’s tasted something she’s not sure she likes. “What do you expect an American to look like?” I ask. “Like the women on Dallas with long hair and makeup.” That kills me. Does anyone even watch Dallas anymore? “I’m pretty weird for an American.” “How long have you been in Denmark?” she asks. “This is my first night in Denmark and Europe for that matter.” “And you found Pan so quick?” I don’t want to admit that it’s pretty much why I came. A song comes on she recognizes and she asks me if I want to dance again. I hold out my arm and say, “Twist it.” and get another one of those puzzled looks I want more of. “Would you like to go to another bar?” Margrethe asks me. “The other guys I was talking to were going to Sporte. What’s that place like?” Margrethe laughs. “It is mostly men. They say if you cannot find what you look for at Pan, you can find it at Sporte. It is dark and dirty inside.” “Are you hungry? How about getting something to eat?” Besides the croissant, I last ate on the plane and I think that was yesterday by now. We take a cab to a late night pizza place and she insists on paying since I’m a visitor to her country. Not only is she cute, she’s got money. People are eating pizza with peas and corn and all other sorts of unrecognizable things on it. The menu lists “tunfisk” as a topping and I decide to play it safe with a plain pizza. Margrethe didn’t understand what plain pizza is and gets one with little pink squiggles on it. I ask her, “What are those?” and she says, “Meat from a pig.” “They look like worms.” Margrethe laughs and starts to eat it with her knife and fork. I show her how to fold a slice in half and eat it with your hands. I’m starving and eat three slices. Pig worm pizza’s ok. I go to light a cigarette outside and I’ve left them at the bar. Margrethe smokes menthols. She asks me what I want to do and I tell her I’d like to see the red light district, which takes a little explaining. She says I can buy cigarettes there. It’s not far and we can walk to it. Down the street, Margrethe takes my hand and asks, “Is this ok?” She’s got big, warm hands and I take my glove off to get the full effect. She’s an engineering student and her English isn’t that great. It doesn’t matter. We’re laughing a lot. 39 She thinks I’m kidding when I tell her I work in the sewers and got a degree in gym. I explain to her my degree’s in exercise science that I basically majored in to meet girls. I don’t actually go in the sewers either. I lower bottles into them to take samples. I do get to fuck up traffic with orange cones and pop open manhole covers which I demonstrate for her. That cracks her up. Margrethe likes American slang and hooks into the expression “big time” and starts saying it after nearly every sentence as we walk down the empty street lined with sex shops and brick apartments on top. Since I can’t pronounce her name right, I ask her what the Danish word for sweetie is. She says, “Pusser.” Margrethe asks for my Export A’s at the tobacco store. They’re Canadian and they don’t have them. I tell the guy they’re strong and he sells me Danish ciga- rettes called Queens. I think this is hilarious and have to explain to Margrethe what a queen is. Outside an old drunk asks me something in Danish. He grabs my hand and Margrethe gets right between us. She towers over the poor little guy and talks to him sternly. He points at my cigarette and I give him one. He says, “Tak” and weaves away. If this is the roughest part of town, I’m not too worried. Plus I have my very own Viking to save me from all the little old drunks running amok. I ask her if she’s like to do something with me tomorrow. I want to get her number but neither of us has a pen. I ask her if she has one at her house. In the cab on the way to her place she starts apologizing that her place is a mess. I tell her I don’t care and I’m a slob too. Her apartment is a one room basement apartment. It’s nice in a modern Scandinavian kind of way. There’s mirrored wardrobe doors and white walls. We sit on her futon cover with a black cover and white pillows. There’s a magazine open on a plain, white chest she uses as a coffee table. It’s the only thing that looks like any kind of mess. This is the part of going home with someone for the first time I find the most nerve wracking. Before I can start worrying about what to do, Margrethe starts making out with me. She’s passionate. Not in an icky fake way. It’s hot to kiss a girl again. It’s been a while. We unfold the futon and really get down to business. Our bodies are totally opposite. She’s strong and blond and I’m boney and dark. It’s nice in a modern Scandinavian kind of way. We mess around until it gets light. I wake up to the palest blue eyes I’ve ever seen. Margrethe smiles and says, “Good morning Pusser.” And I crawl back to my Viking. We take turns using her bathroom and go upstairs to the kitchen she says she shares with Sven. I say, “Sven’s a friggin’ number, not a name.” and she pushes me up the stairs. I turn around, cross my arms over my chest and say, “Hey, you and what fucking army?” She replies, “The Danish army of course.” “I’m shaking. The Germans kicked your asses.” Sven’s apartment is a 60’s hippie pad with lots of plants and simple wood furni- ture. Margrethe thinks it’s a dump and keeps apologizing for him. He’s a scientist and he’s never home. They’re from the same island so he’s helping her out while she’s in school. If she thinks this is bad, she’d think I live in a pit. I ask her how old she was when she figured out she was gay. Your normal les- bian morning-after breakfast conversation. “I have always known. I am eighteen years and you are the first woman I sleep with.” I almost blow coffee out my nose. Oh shit. She’s a fucking teenager which means I just fucked a teenager. I’m almost ten years older than her though you’d never know it looking at us. I try to 40 act casual and say “Oh really.” Why didn’t I go off with the chick with the jealous cop girlfriend? At least she looked like she was in her twenties. I’d rather get beat up than deal with a hoodsie. But she seems so much older. She’s more mature than I am and she has her shit way more together. I’d never date her in Boston. She couldn’t even get into the bars. That’s just great she’s never been with a woman before either. You tend to fall hard for your first and I’m leaving in three days. I don’t want to make her cry. I look towards the door and try to come up with an excuse to leave. I never should’ve listened to Chris. But then I notice her nose. I put my little finger in the crease at the tip. “The end of your nose looks like a little bum. What’s Danish for butt nose?” I ask her. “Numser nayser.” She says and laughs. “I like your nose because I feel it on my face when you kiss me.” That’s the nicest thing anybody has ever said about my nose. I’ve been made fun of all my life for it. I let her feel it again. Love my nose, love me. It’s dark by the time we get up and we’re dizzy with hunger. It’s stopped raining and everything is still wet and shiny. It doesn’t look real. More like a movie set. There’s big rectangular reservoirs up the street. We stop on the bridge and there’s an old white building with white lights all around it. Margrethe says it’s a fancy restaurant. She leans me against a stone pillar and kisses me hard holding my head. She catches on quick. It’s too fucking cool. If it wasn’t happening to me, I’d puke hearing about it. Margrethe asks me why I came to Copenhagen. I’ve been avoiding telling her about Billy. I don’t want to bum her out. She surprises me after I tell her about him. She says she’d like to meet him so she can shake his hand and say thank you. We eat at a pasta place. Margrethe discovers she doesn’t like goat cheese. I didn’t think there was any disgusting food she wouldn’t eat. We walk around after. No one in Copenhagen goes out on Sunday nights it seems. We end up along the canal near my room. Last night was a different Denmark than the one I’m in now. I don’t feel like a tourist anymore. I have Margrethe. Since she’s from here, I belong. We sit on the end of a dock that faces the harbor and lean against each other. A dog barks a way off and Margrethe answers, “Vow, Vow.” “What did you say?” I ask. “Vow, vow. That is what the dog say” “In America dogs go ‘Bow wow.’” Margrethe giggles. “And what do Danish ducks say?” I ask her. She says, “Grabble, grabble.” and smiles at me. Her pale blue eyes glow white in the dark and I forget what I was talking about. She blinks at me with both of her eyes like I saw her do with Sven’s cat, Bo. “What does a cat say?” I ask. “Kattekilling says, ‘Meow.” “See Pusser, kitties are the same all over the world.” We go up to my room when we get cold. Margrethe warms up my bed in no time. She asks me if I want to stay with her for the rest of the time I’m in Copen- hagen. Even if I wasn’t broke I would. Margrethe gets up early to go home before she goes to school. I feel bad for her when she leaves. We were up late again. I’m psyched to go back to sleep though. 41 When I get up, Karen asks me if I had someone over last night. She says she heard laughing. I’m embarrassed and say, “Umm, yeah. I met someone.” She doesn’t seem mad. She’s not too thrilled when I tell her I’m not staying for the rest of the week. She wants me to pay for tonight since it’s after 11. I don’t have enough Danish money and have to give her some American money. Now she’s pissed. I pack up fast and leave. I head to the train station to stow my stuff in a locker. When I try to call Billy, I can’t get the phone to work. I watch a lady make a call. You don’t put the coins in the slot. You let roll them down the little chute beside it and they drop in as you talk. He’s going to lunch with people from the show. He’ll meet me in front of the station at two. He has the rest of the day free so I suggest we take the train to the medieval city, Koge. I’m hoping I can borrow some money from him. I’m run- ning out and Margrethe’s been paying for too much. I think she’s from money but she’s still just a student. I got a couple of hours to kill so I put my bag in a locker and head to check out Christiania and buy some hash. It’s called the free city because they don’t pay taxes. It was an old army barracks before it was taken over by the squatters. It’s surrounded by a wood fence that’s covered with trippy graffiti. It’s another country inside the gate. What a freak show. There’s tables of head shop stuff and scraggily hashish dealers set up with scales and squares of dark brown hash on top of tall barrels. Stray cats and dogs and children are all run- ning around the dirt roads. I start looking at one guy’s pipes. His name is Joe. He’s from Barbados but he grew up in Philly so his English is good. He’s happy when I pick out a better pipe than the cheap throw-aways most tourists buy. I ask him about the hash and he says he’ll buy some for me if I’ll mind his table. It’s 30 kroner a gram which is only about eight bucks. Wicked cheap. I pack a bowl for me and Joe. When I get up to walk around, it’s like I stumbled into Middle- earth. A lot of the shops and houses were built by artists and are quirky shapes with crazy colors. Yeah, high Hobbits would feel right at home here. I get juice and a pastry at the yellow Sunshine Bakery on the way out. The restaurants are supposed to be good in here. The pastry isn’t as sweet and way better than what we call Danish. I hope Margrethe likes Christiania. I’d like to come back here with her. I watch Billy as he walks into the train station. I was looking forward to seeing him but he doesn’t look as good as I remembered. He’s got a good sense of humor though. The trains make a ray gun noise when the doors open and close and he pretends to shoot me. “I met a girl the other night. She’s cool and we’ve been hanging out.” I tell him. “Good for you. That’s great.” He says and sighs in relief. “Ann will be happy to hear that. She wasn’t too thrilled when she heard you were coming.” “Tell her that she has nothing to worry about. “ Ann must have been giving him a feast of shit about me. He gives me a hundred more kroner than I ask to borrow. We walk through the cobblestone streets lined with half-timbered houses to the church where they hung pirates off a beam sticking out over the front. I want to go to the waterfront. Billy’s cold and says he’ll meet me in the museum. I walk through the dune grass to the beach and smoke some hash. The Baltic Sea is beautiful but stark. There’s no line between the water and the sky. It’s all gray. 42 It’d be more fun if I came here with Margrethe. She wouldn’t complain about the cold. She’d race me to keep warm. She’d point out things like the snail shell there, tell me the Danish word for it and ask if we have those in Boston. Then we’d tease each other about our words for them and argue over which one is better. I haven’t fallen for anybody like I’m falling for her since my first girlfriend eight years ago. Just my luck she’s lives in friggin’ Denmark. It’s going to suck when I have to leave on Thursday. At least we have three more days. Margrethe said last night that she wants to visit me after Christmas. I told her I’d take her to New York. She wants to see the Statue of Liberty. She also said Denmark is the first country to pass a partnership law. Gays can marry foreign- ers so they can get residency permits. I never thought I’d be thinking about mov- ing to Europe. It’s not something you think about when you’re from Somerville. I asked her how you say, “I love you” in Danish. It sounded like “Yigh elsker die.” which doesn’t sound particularly romantic. It was how quiet and soft she looked when she said it. It’s nearly dark and I turn back. The clouds over the water are big and deep. I understand why you’d think you could conquer the New World looking at this sky.

43 I read my work aloud often as part of the process, with the belief that even if a reader never hears the fiction aloud—if the only place the words sound is in their head—then the power of those acoustic events set in the prose still occurs, creating some bodily effect on the reader. That’s too great a tool not to take advantage of at every opportunity.

Matt Bell Author Cataclysm Baby Cobalt Interview Series, April 2012

44 Hayley Hughes from December 2011

Montreal

A statement as bold as, “The best tomatoes in Québec,” deserves validation, even at breakfast. Market day at Marché Jean-Talon came especially early that July Tuesday, a chilly morning almost a month into the rhythm of the road trip, and a sharp nudge in my stomach reminded me that I had not yet eaten. My eyes caught those of the tomato vendor, who wore a charcoal beret, and he extended a slice of his famously sweet wares. It sat perilously on an emerald-plumed cock- tail toothpick and I popped the piece of sunshine in my mouth, giving the man a smile full of seeds and saying an awkward, Merci. The anthropomorphized tomato from the sign above the stall grinned down, plump and serene-looking, and bade me, “Venez y goûter,” or “Come and taste,” watching as scarlet juice dripped down my chin. It was only a short walk through the red, white, and green awnings of Mon- tréal’s Little Italy to get to the market, but as usual, I’d managed to get lost. For a woman traveling on her own after a self-imposed exodus from love, I had an especially lousy sense of direction, and still do. In true Blanche DuBois style, during my trip, I often came to depend on the kindness of strangers, but on that particular day, I asked a less than helpful old woman for directions while she waited for the subway. She sneered when she heard me speak the pidgin French I’d self-consciously constructed, turning away with an exasperated sigh at my panicked hand gestures. It wasn’t until almost an hour of wandering later that I discovered I’d been only about a block away. In the days leading up to my culinary tour of the Marché, when I wasn’t alone with a map and a foreign language dictionary, my newfound friend Dénis took me to his favorite breakfast spot in the neighborhood, Caffé Italia, for toast and Nutella, and espresso. On the morning I went to the market, though, he went to the gym early, telling me that if I got to the Marché Jean-Talon before the crowds, I could dine like royalty on samples. I sat at his kitchen table drinking coffee and half-listening to Quebéc’s morning news, and watched as he left with a duffel bag in hand. “Don’t worry,” he told me as he closed the door, “you can’t go wrong at the market.” Hoping for the best, I put on my jacket, one that had never seen July outside the confines of my coat closet. I remember that as I locked the deadbolt behind me, I couldn’t help thinking that even the news sounded better in French. I had Dénis to thank for discovering the market, and the neighborhood, in the first place. I’d turned to Couchsurfing, an internet community of travelers, when

45 I needed somewhere to stay. While searching for a place to crash in Montréal, I found a picture of a friendly-looking man helping to free a Galapagos sea turtle that was entangled in a fisherman’s net somewhere near the Equator, far from blustery Québec. As it turned out, Dénis was the website’s official ambassador for Montréal, and I learned that he’d hosted people from as far as Italy, Australia, and Russia. Despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews I’d read that spoke of “the best host ever,” there was a nervous tingling in my gut as I followed the concise directions Dénis had given me to find his apartment. The anxiety I felt was not so much one related to the fact that I was a woman traveling solo—and perhaps it should have been—as it was a fear of the vast gaps between languages, a barrier so seemingly difficult to move beyond. When I finally arrived at the apartment I parked on the street, trying to shake the feeling that I was about to have a pop quiz in a French class I’d never taken. Propped against the stairs, though, I saw a pristine and unapologetically red Vespa and somehow I knew then that we’d get along just fine, playing with the strange idea that maybe some commonalities don’t need words to be expressed. I got to Dénis’ at that time of day when mothers begin calling their kids inside for dinner. When I knocked on the door, a man of about forty, slightly shorter than me, with blue eyes and designer glasses, smiled. “I’m Dénis,” he said, shak- ing my hand in a light, European way. I immediately felt at ease with his sincer- ity, his polite way of helping me with my bags. Looking to the modern lines of his monochromatic living room, we eventually sat, and in hesitant English, Dénis told me about leaving his corporate job of over twenty years just a few months before despite obscene amounts of money, cars, and vacation time. Like me, he was obsessed with travel, the urge to move, and filled hopelessly with wanderlust. His dream was to teach in China, having just fallen hopelessly for a Chinese girl—ain’t it always the way?—but he was having a hard time getting a work visa approved. I found out about his childhood in Québec City, and he told me I had to go there if for no other reason than to see Parliament. On the kitchen counter, he spread a Montréal map wide, and taught me the tangled history of his city; likewise, I discussed my tangled love affairs. “What are you running from?” I recall him asking, “What is it that scares you?” “Never falling in love again,” I think I said, or perhaps it was, “Never being whole.” Looking back I realize that the two aren’t at all the same thing.

As I walked down the crowded alleyways of the Marché on market day, past women in sun dresses and men in blazers, there were stores of every kind. A poissonnerie held glistening whole fish with clear, bright eyes, and sold fried smelt by the dozen. In the street, a man deftly worked a rotisserie that spun skew- ers smelling of slow-cooked meat and rosemary. Further down the way, a cheese shop caught my attention. It was called, interestingly, “Qui lait cru!?!” or “That raw milk!?!” My fondness for the Food Network allowed me to appreciate the statement being made by the shop’s name: in France, there’s a huge controversy about whether or not to continue using unpasteurized milk in the making of their beloved brie and camembert. It’s an issue of such importance to the French people that the responsibility of making the decision of safety versus tradition has fallen to the government. In Montréal, that little cheese shop had cracked 46 a joke at what they see as pretentiousness, and their window full of culinary contraband advertises rebellion. On the narrow streets, in a mist of rain, people stood in a line that spilled out the door of a tiny boulangerie in hopes of buying fresh, artisanal bread. While they waited, they smoked elegantly or flirted with each other; some talked on cell phones. Occasionally, two friends would find each other through the crowd, hugging and kissing cheeks in that continental way—French Canadians are far friendlier than people give them credit for. Conspicuously absent was the rush and stress I was used to as a displaced American, where no one would ever deign to wait so long for something as simple as bread or cheese. Cooking and enjoy- ing food was, in those days, and still is, a way for me to appreciate life, to live it through my senses, and beginning in Montréal, I began to use it as a bandage, a means of healing. I felt like I was in on some kind of secret there, one that I carry with me even now, but I wonder if the world might collapse if everyone knew that the simplest things are sometimes the most worthwhile, especially where food is concerned.

I began to pay particular attention, that morning, to the produce stalls and their free samples, which were my reason for coming to the market in the first place. The vegetables were random, flawless statues, with asparagus soldiers stacked in neat rows and shining, sensual-looking eggplants. Eggplants were not eggplants there, they were aubergines, and the vegetables in front of me were like a living, breathing representation of purple. Small flimsy, green, plastic baskets of strawberries and raspberries were each grouped with a single, pink orchid which seemed to serve no other purpose than to make the fruit look even more like an edible Impressionist painting. The air was heavy with the smell of sum- mer fruits, and I was persuaded, wordlessly, to buy a plum, its juice sweet, acidic, earthy. Much like subsequent visits I’ve made to the Marché, all around, the vendors shouted above the heads of customers to their neighbor. Every bushel of apples and bunch of grapes sold was a competition, and housewives tasted handpicked local blueberries that have no equivalent name in Parisian French, the Québecois instead adopting the word bluets, maybe considering a tart to come. One of them spoke to me, and as I remembered that I was and am useless in their language, I smiled politely and walked away. The women’s delicate expressions and bargain- ing were strange to me, because although they’re in Canada, they are still French; clearly, those berries were serious business. I, on the other hand, ate greedily for no reason besides my own pleasure, trying everything from mangoes to smoked salmon to dripping, amber honey. As the market was alive with conversation and the sound of passing traffic, my palate was alive with the spoils of the morn- ing. Dénis was right; I came, I saw, I ate. As is the danger in any bustling, breathing place, my wandering through the market was interrupted, before I’d learned pardon or excusez-moi, by a near col- lision with an important-looking shopper carrying a baguette. I apologized un- der my breath in my most sincere attempt at French, which was, as the woman’s condescending glare reminded me, woefully inadequate. It’s times like those that make me feel out of place the most, but like Dénis told me, Montréal itself is a somewhat precarious marriage between Francophones and Anglophones, as the 47 city is divided in half by the boulevard Saint-Laurent. On one side of the street, everything is in English: street names, universities, churches. The homes there are large and utilitarian-looking, and even with their sprawling lawns and climb- ing roses, seem to be missing something. Once you cross Saint-Laurent, though, French is everywhere—familiar stop signs say arrêt, flags with the Québec fleur de lis fly, and, as Dénis said, things are “interesting.” Nevertheless, I occasionally caught a whiff of English at the Marché Jean-Talon, hidden among the smell of baking croissants, and I’d smile to myself.

I’d like to, at this point, say a few words about my inexplicable love affair with French that began perhaps a decade ago, or maybe earlier. Sometime during the summer before middle school began, a humid July spent with my father in New- ark, Ohio, a city that for some reason opted to have Kmart as an anchor store in the local mall, I decided that French was for me. I’ll be the first to point out that I’d never met a French person, and had barely heard a word of the language at all except for the select phrases thrown around in cartoons like Madeleine or uttered by Pepe LePew. Unlike schools these days, where kids count forwards and backwards and say, “The weather’s cold today,” in Spanish at age four, I wasn’t allowed to take a for- eign language — apparently a prospect that could only be entrusted to awkward, angsty twelve-year-olds — until I’d reached the seventh grade. I regret that, now, having only begun to learn the syntax, grammar, and soul of a second language long after the window of opportunity had all but closed. Nevertheless, I’d gotten more and more excited as September grew closer, if for no other reason than, in my young mind, I expected to be speaking impeccable, charming French no later than November, saying, “Joyeux Noel,” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Like so many things, my expectations were dashed in a phone call. I used my dad’s cordless, an enormous device, then, while he was at the office, to call my mother. After talking for a while about the unfortunate things my dog, Daisy, was doing while I was gone, she eventually said pragmatically, “Hayley, we have to sign you up for your foreign language. You’re taking Spanish.” “What? No, Mom, sign me up for French. I want to take French.” My mother sighed. “Honey, think about it. You’ll never use French, let’s be practical—” “—but it’s so beautiful!” I argued, cutting her off, thinking of the songs in French my best friend got to sing in her music classes for the gifted, perhaps remembering snippets of lines I’d heard in movies: bon voyage, c’est la vie, au revoir. “You’ll love Spanish,” my mother said. “And you’ll probably actually have a reason to learn it.” That’s that, her tone implied, and the phone call ended with a reluctant, “I love you,” on my end. In the fall, I was enrolled in first period Span- ish class at Verity Middle School with Señora Womack. That period of time was when my love of French truly came alive—it was al- most like a secret, a transgression, a need to be fulfilled in private. I enjoyed Spanish, and did quite well with the language throughout the years I spent with it, during a church mission trip to Mexico, into college, and while I fondly barked orders at my job to Hispanic cooks. Still, though, the twelve-year-old me asked every friend who took French with Mrs.—er, Madame—Clark to start saving 48 all of their notes and spare handouts for me, which I poured over, learning to pronounce the words horrendously, and even developing a habit of reading aloud the French labels on toothpaste tubes and shampoo bottles. “Rinse! Repeat!” I imagine myself saying in the shower as a teenager, in badly butchered French. Soon after, as I pursued my dream of being an opera singer, I learned to sing in French, becoming more convincing with every hour in the practice room. When I auditioned into the chorus of a professional production of Carmen at fifteen, I listened to the French pronunciation tape until it broke—while I got dressed, while I studied, while I slept, the words filling my mouth like balloons. I asked my first boyfriend—who took French at the Catholic high school, of course—to write to me in French, and when we broke up after our two-month- long relationship that felt to my young heart like two years, I repeated the words like a mantra, or the rosary: Je m’appelle Troy. J’ai quinze ans et j’adore une fille. Elle s’appelle Hayley. But once I found myself in Québec and began to fear that I’d be longing for it afterward, I couldn’t help but seriously wonder—what was my real reason for loving French? Why did I care so much about a language I’d barely even heard? Perhaps it’s out of a need to connect—to stare in wonderment at a life that isn’t mine, but one that can be accessed through communication, whether it be by way of conversation, food, or giving a smile to a stranger. Some things, after all, are universally understood, aren’t they?

I walked back to Dénis’ house that summer day on weary feet, thinking over the new words I’d learned in the market: boulangerie, poisonnerie, aubergine. Saying the phrases aloud made me feel like a young Brigitte Bardot, albeit less convincing. Children played ball in the street and yelled things to each other that I didn’t understand. Their laughter echoed off the buildings while the sun warmed the laundry that hung to dry above. In front of me, a man who was older and good-looking paused at the wrought-iron railing at his steps. He spoke and I could hardly manage my, “Je ne parle pas Français,” before he asked me in a thickly accented, “Are you lost?” I looked around. There was the Caffé Italia, surrounded by animated, mus- tached Italians, talking about something in grand gestures. The Jean-Talon sub- way stop was across the street, where the woman from that morning dismissed my French. I remembered the note Dénis left me the morning after I arrived—in thoughtful cursive, it wished me a good day and thanked me for what he de- scribed as, “a conversation that changes someone.” “No,” I shook my head, “I’m not lost. Merci beaucoup.” He smiled and went inside, closing the heavy wooden door behind him. I reached down to feel the outline of the folded map inside my jeans pocket, but around the next corner, I saw that red Vespa, waiting.

49 At some point as a teenager, I must have sensed that I was interested in the poetry of building rather than in dealing with planning boards, contractors, mobsters, payoffs. I probably would have been an abysmal businessman. I would have cared much more about the names I gave to my streets and model houses than the bottom line. I would have cared too much about making space for trees and animals and creeks. I would have gone bankrupt in six months, but I would have left behind some vacant streets with friendly, peculiar names.

Paul Lisicky Author, Lawnboy and Unbuilt Projects Cobalt Interview Series, July 2012

50 Mark Wagstaff Fiction Finalist

Ms. Smith

I don’t say I’m deep in the hole. The shop wasn’t so discreet. A window-height poster had a startled amateur model dripping bling, her mouth fixed wide at the headline: Turn Your Gold Into Cash. Another poster showed a jolly fat guy waving fake-size notes, gurning against the splash: Make Anyday Payday. That was my anyday. A beep - sick-sounding, its battery wet - a reluctant click: I pushed into the lobby. The street door had to relock before the inner door would open - a sweet spot to get rectified. Stains on the unpolished inner door resembled spatter. An- other beep. I was through. This time. The slim counter - a five inch ledge cut through by toughened plate, iced with spikes - got three teller desks rigged for biometrics. Though the place was often busy I only ever saw one desk work. When I first signed there that far-end desk got flown by a cheery Chinese, his bag of sympathy busting seams on how times got so tight, all the while he took my arrangement fee plus eight percent. Prime to remake his acquaintance, I double-took how a shaggy blonde in glasses claimed his chair. Her mid-West vowels fell numb-sounding into her phone. “Hey. You awake? You wanted a call. You wanna wake up dumbass.” I hung back from the counter. “Well you already gonna be late.” She slurped coffee. “Fine. I won’t. I just let you miss the whole day.” She clicked off the phone, took another drink - seeming to find something not to like. I slid plastic onto the ledge. “Need a thousand.” Something to the quiet, the spikes, the bullet glass made it begging. Without seeing me she scooped the cards, ran the ID through a reader. “When you last here?” A sunrise of acne broke the mists of her skin. Up close, her hair not-so stylishly neglected, her sweater the shapeless coverall familiar from a hundred bathroom floors in a dozen bedsit towns. It seemed implausible she came from the States to skim cards. “Dunno.” “You not on the system.” “Maybe a while back.” “You would be on the system. You come in since we change the system?” “I got ID.” “Old ID. This your address?” “Old address.” 51 “You gotsta re-register.” I planned to be at the station by then, a cushion of cash in my pocket. “But I come here years. I got ID.” “You want cash you a newbie.” We went through it all: what I did, what I earned, total fines and charges, what strain I caught paying out kids’ mothers. All pushed with a lazy finger into the system. “It doesn’t change. It’s the same as when...” “Hey. I don’t care what habit you feeding. But I feed scrilla through this gizmo and your plastic turns up bogus then I get a claw in my spine and I don’t need that. Gimme the juice, I make it data - that’s how we roll. You don’t want it you leave, I get coffee. Okay?” She captured my eye-print, burned photo ID - a shot of me looking late for the bathroom. She fed me to the system. “You can make a thousand in one haul? Looks a bite out your disposable.” “You’ll get it payday.” “With these deductions? What’s your mother’s address?” With fees, counter charge and mandatory insurance, less than eight hundred airlocked with me in the lobby. As the inner door closed she flicked her phone. “Hey. You still asleep?” London has stations for different days. Euston, Kings Cross, Liverpool Street saw me a paid-for ticket: deals to make and a grudging shine to my manners. Charing Cross a peculiar heartache - a reliquary of southside frustrations. But Victoria station was my cautious hope of sea views and Ms. Smith. From Victoria to Selhurst stories curled around the railway. In glimpsed bedrooms, on roof ter- races and rusted fire stairs; deferred behind stubbed trees, shingle yards and the galleried windows of slow moving trains. Stories in a gesture caught then gone; a baby’s cry; a wisp of smoke. A lost balloon pioneering into the blue. In someone’s glance downstairs; how they look to their neighbor; the shoes they don’t wear; the zip loose on a patched denim. An heirloom, a corner, a cherished message. Smoke on the south London air. Dazzled by stories I watched the streets get thin to detached estates; kids playing ball in cul-de-sacs; strips of green teasing a ragged margin from the city. A kid by the sea: times so past they were sepia whispers from when the certain world could be bounded in one small town. My town clung to its stony beach, to memories of pleasure boats and trippers, grand hotels and colored flags snapping against the restless North Sea air. My mother never meant to stay, surprised how trains left for London without her. A shifting shoreline where villages melted into coasts, cliffs became beaches, and farms on library maps were brittle outcrops or drowned, so the town crumbled from high days to dank seasonal half-life, so my mother sank, lost from whatever young woman’s future she’d once imagined herself. In self-made sickness to save me from bullies and lazy, vicious teachers, my at- tic room’s angles and corners shaped my education. Big enough for a double bed and proper train set it was all the world I needed - and through the tunneled window I caught a sliver of sea in the hard wintry light that drenches the east coast. A light like no other. When mum had time - and money, I realized years after - we’d go to the big chrome cafe on the front with smart formica counters, a jukebox, a machine 52 where plastic oranges bounced and huddled in a constant drizzle of juice, and the stainless tubes of a gleaming engine pumped smooth white ice cream. The certain style that town wouldn’t see again as its season shortened each late spring, turning autumn before September. I couldn’t know but felt a town didn’t ought to be so dead: a corpse the sea, endlessly restive, battered with life. The sea chewed edges the town neglected, rusted the frames and polished the lungs of people with no choice but to get pushed back. Winter days on some hidden scar of the shore I’d sit, algae staining my legs, to watch rough weather shine black rocks deep emerald; hear the lullaby of shingle; venture a touch on night-green alien wracks cast from deep water. In waste where the town failed, deaf from wind and waves, I shivered with thoughts of the Doctor’s monsters: Sea Devils rising wet and vengeful through the quiet after dark. I felt the town consumed by tide, by horrors from out at sea. On its eastern heights where rubbled cliffs crushed a village, a Roman fort, a graveyard to salt-sand, only forlorn church towers remained, broken open, wait- ing the fall that year by year chewed across the headland to let in the hungry sea. I’d go up there on the bus - itself a relic of when Cockney trippers packed long- vanished chalets for a week’s bottled brown and how’s-your-father. There was nothing but climb the old towers or follow the dirt road behind the lobster farm, a road I guessed led somehow to the bright lights at Margate. I never walked that far; perhaps the lane withered in the rough chalk and ancient beacons of an unused, abraded scrap of country. I would always just miss the bus back, to stand a thirsty hour in the wind- burn. A few dozen miles, a lifetime away, the train shot through Gatwick - I still ducked as landing gear trailed over the line. I messaged Ms. Smith I was on my way. Messaged I wished she was with me. A reply could take hours. That was okay. I messaged first sight of the sea. My ritual. She might respond sometime with one word - Cool! or Yeah! - or some non sequitur from her business day. I didn’t care. I was in her broad field of vision. In the town I was from the sea ran jubilant. Murky gray, it picked off the land- scape in passing. The blue-green Brighton sea was restrained, its yachting tides defined with flags, it lapped the toes of a city it couldn’t diminish. A genteel dis- dainful sea, smugly picturesque. Stumbling from the station, too tight for a cab, I hauled too many changes of clothes down to that tidy water. I always booked a sea view. I never saw a view that pleased me: the sea too flat, too empty; the wrong land in the way. Along the coast so many things not to like about the view. I said try a different coast but Ms. Smith was south-facing. Without the right Hello, without smiling, the receptionist wanted my card. Already punching in details, oblivious to the printout I unfolded on the desk. “I prefer to pay cash.” “I need a card. To pre-authorize extras.” “It says on the website guests can pay cash.” “Foreign guests. From places card use isn’t common.” “It doesn’t say that.” “It’s not usual. We’ll need two forms of ID.” “The website said passport.” “You must have other ID.” I had my payday loan card. 53 “What’s this?” She stared at the picture. “This isn’t ID.” “It’s got me on it.” “We don’t accept memberships. Driving license. Credit or debit card. And pass- port.” I gave her my passport. “This you?” “It’s an old picture.” “And another ID.” All I had was my debit card. She snatched it, locked it into her reader. “Be easier if I pre-authorize this.” “I want to pay cash.” “You got this.” “There’s nothing there. It’s empty.” Hotels don’t roster enough reception. Queues build quick. Things take too long. Everyone’s impatient because no one thought things would take too long. She tried to flush me twice and I still bobbed around the bowl. “This is a four star hotel.” My back prickled with muttered insults. “I know. I booked. The card’s bare just now.” I unpeeled the loan store envelope. “Two nights. Pay on arrival. Cash with passport. Okay?” Outside of a payday loan I never saw money counted down so slow. I didn’t like the view. The pier too close, its banked-up gravel turned the Channel to seepage on a construction site. Seafront buildings stretched dully uphill. But - my ritual - I mes- saged a photo to Ms. Smith captioned: The Sea! There was nothing else till morning. The Lanes and up to the station got sushi counters, all-you-could-eat noodle shacks; bolognaise dens, whitebait parlors; everywhere got fish and chips. Girls and boys in friendly gangs stoked for a night’s drinking. I could have hit the main drag, infiltrated skin better than mine. Maybe I should have caught that tan off the bright lights. Turned right instead of left. Lives have turned on less. Smokers in the hotel car park didn’t give me a glance. Kids throwing stones on the beach didn’t look my way. Hands set deep in my pockets, a steady walk; no one to think anything of me at all. Alone and like I had somewhere to go, no one knew they hadn’t seen me before. A figure moving towards an arrangement. No need of ID. I don’t know where in Brighton. The road curved away from the coast, rising to a kind of suburbia: large old wrecks split into flats, new townhouses; a tower block looking left behind on its way somewhere else. Crowning a grass embank- ment a timbered pub spilled marginal light from shuttered windows, its bare signpost keeping quiet about itself. The road ran darker and deeper: outskirts country headed for early nights. There’d be nowhere else. I moved around to the side of the pub. In the dark I couldn’t quite tell what I thought I saw. A stockade wall ran around back, maybe seven feet high; beyond it I thought were shapes, figures, raised in the air. Laughter, distant music drifted above the slats, diffusing where there was no other sound. Tracking across I felt grass shift to gravel; under a solid sky I rode shadows up to the wall. The planks lapped tight, no sliver of view, but easing along to the cor- ner by a black, buzzing substation I found a door. The latch rasped; with a rattle of dead leaves swept aside I slipped into the yard. Dim light seeped onto raised 54 decking, tables and benches sculpted from out the floor. Platforms, stepped balconies, the smooth half-pipes of a skate park; terraces, corkscrew stairs - a cartilage of planed and varnished levels spiking maybe fifteen feet. People stood on plinths, sat on steps, lay spread along sweeping curves of wood. Structures cut up every view: edging around a tower of interlocking blocks, disturbed how everyone shared such easy friendship, I heard my anonymity drain away. “Most people come in the bar.” The deep stained hoops and towers, raised stands heavy with darkness beneath: a low angle where it got hard to tell wood from shadow; shadow from watching; stillness from a waiting knife. Only her words like cracked shells on the slow air. “I came in back.” “I saw.” “Is this some private place?” She moved sideways, a fixed distance from me. I swung to follow the line of shadow. “Just pay, get your drink. Don’t act smart.” Scallop lights raised reflections from pale wood but the bar was so many en- capsulations and compartments, as I tracked through hatches and doorways there was barely light to see. The pub seemed not to have furniture but in every section a circle of drinkers murmured together, inaudible though the music was far away. The drinkers were young, their earnestness repulsed and unnerved me. I saw one go to the bar and slid behind him, cautiously following his transaction with the old man. They spoke the arm’s length way of wary strangers. The old man noticed me. “Cranberry and lemonade. Guava crush.” I meant to sound neutral: safer than sounding polite. Close-to the naked pine walls were soft, honey texture - smooth, not warm. “Nice place.” Just smalltalk. I peeled a note, he took it, leaving the drinks gutter side of the bar. As I leaned through he gripped my arm harder than skinny old fingers should. “Don’t act smart.” He tipped my change in the cancer box. She called herself Shelley, all in black and, like me, a resting alcoholic. Said her teeth were rotting with guava. She’d gone to the pub with friends that wouldn’t miss her. She kept arrangements loose. In stray points of light I saw people climb towers, stroll ramps between high platforms, dodge down steep backless stairs. “This...” “We like this.” I had to talk so she would talk, but without the ground giving way. She clinked ice round her glass. “I was never a mean drunk. I wasn’t careful. Off my tits telling random stories. Work said cut the booze or leave. I left.” “I lost too many days.” Revelatory - not much. “They stay someplace. Search, you find ‘em. I woke up bleeding in too many beds. Relied on too many strangers. I been down to the spikes of my heels.” “Then...?” “What straightened me? Jail. Beaten shitless night on night. Never set foot in Holloway long as I live. How’d you kick it?” The truth maybe would have been cheaper. “Car crash.” “You crashed your car?” “A drunk knocked me down. On a zebra crossing.” Shelley didn’t - couldn’t - laugh. But convulsion flickered through the dark. 55 “Angels travel dirty ways.” “I was a lodger. This woman. Nice. I mean kind. She thought angels guarded the place. Never locked her doors.” “She get killed by a burglar?” “She died in an ambulance. Gastric flu. They hooked in the wrong drip.” “So you had to move?” “Eventually.” She scowled in her glass, seeming to find something not to like. I got flash-bulb memories. When I was drunk the million mile city hurtled no- name places ricocheting lives and loves and meant everything in that second, the second of collision, lost between empty bottles and sick sunrise. When I try to think back, bring it back in physicality there’s scratched and beaten skin, bruised bones, concussion; wet mattresses and nausea; doorstep archaeology black with English rain. Its beat, its dope: tarmac under rubber, buying cigarettes at two a.m. left in a bathroom miles later, smoked by the girl with red hair. There was no past when I was a kid. Doped on starch in a quiet town the es- planade the bandstand the open top bus rolling by the pier the milk bar and up to the cliffs, it was all forever. A forever season of disappointing weather. The wrecked church, the bird-streaked map where the Romans used to be, kept from the town by chalk hills, by woods that creaked and echoed to deceiving sunlight. The arcade stashed in an undercliff where mum didn’t like me to go: its racing games, its tumbling lights a nutritious chance to lose money. Between hills and arcade the town with its banks that always seemed shut, its shops run by odd old men with no manners, its frugal gentility hankering on shipwreck. Beautifully scared each Saturday night with the corded fears of the Doctor, wondering why those monsters couldn’t blow my town to shit. I got no biography. I got graffiti. Shelley crashed in the tower block. I got snapshots: tinned-up doors, rubble, rats, that punctured ball I seen on every block stairs everywhere. She didn’t speak. We didn’t have much to say. She traded furniture for a strong smell of weed - her inbetweener from quitting the bottle to ordinary boredom. I lay on the damp floor, braced against the wall. Everyone I knew as a kid, everyone I knew drunk maybe thought I was dead. Shelley was my clean slate; I was anyone. She didn’t do manners; I didn’t do the joint she offered. We lay on the floor talking fragmentary life by the sea. I wouldn’t bet a payday loan what we told each other was true but the words said what they said, miles beyond the last stop. “That stuff kills,” I told her. “Yeah. Dead with your lungs in a jar.” “I got asthma. Before it was fashionable. I’d lay fighting each breath.” “What’s the catch?” She watched her shirt grow pinhole burns. “My sister’s an- orexic.” “She pretty?” “Way pretty.” “Stop eating.” “Teeth rotting out anyway.” “They feed through a tube,” I told her. “Slip a tube past the gag reflex to pump you with crap.” “I’m always pumped crap.” She blew a rich cloud. “You’re a liar.” 56 “You seen the Doctor?” “I seen heads broken.” Smoke layered our easy rancor. “I wanted my town killed by monsters.” She shook her head. “Typical man: ‘why can’t someone else do it?’” One time I walked very late from a woman. Some town I hadn’t been before. It didn’t exist til I went there. The road rolled wide and empty: harsh lights off gleaming blacktop hardening the dark all around. I’d no messages. Ms. Smith knew where I’d be. As I walked I created more road, more hill, more view with each step. I gave rise to a large bright building, a country club I decided: its car park full, laughter buzzing the walls, smart-casual lads - white shirts, blond streaks - smoking out front with the bouncers. A toy in a plastic dome, sealed from the morning after. Inside: the make, the score; maybe the straight story. I kept walking. Whatever might kill or save me left behind. I woke to tide flowing. I used to ask where the tide went, what decided it to come back, what happened in the half-life of sand and gleaming rocks. Mum never knew, never trusted the sea. A city child, seaside must have been her treat once. But her off-season life was the miserable jobs she did to get by. When we sat in the milk bar on the front she avoided the sea. I flicked the costly-looking, useless curtains. Tide ran fast up the stones drag- ging its weight to shore. There was no one on the beach. A few wax jackets speck- led the concrete promenade, watching big dogs race waves. On the pier leather coats set up rides. Old boys from poky tackle shops beneath the parade ambled with coffee, their flat caps and lumpy jackets an East End inheritance. I wanted to message Ms. Smith but too risky outside usual hours. If someone else picked up I’d be to blame. The hotel was shaking off night. Maids stripped stained beds, polished cracked mirrors. The rustling thud of newspapers loosely delivered. A neighbor coughed, harsh yet distant. Water churned old pipes. I scrolled back Ms. Smith’s messages - almost wholly factual. She expected to reach the hotel by eleven. I had four hours. I shaved and showered, wanting to look my best; Ms. Smith looked effortless always. I watched TV, flicked channels, impatient of what I couldn’t find: the shows flat and too-newly painted. I switched in local news, the startled-looking young anchor so excited she couldn’t breathe, her rising tone pumping urgency into her sliver of primetime. “A large area of east Brighton was sealed off early this morning after police discovered a body in the wreckage of an exploded car. Police have not named the victim but sources suggest the incident may be connected to the evacuation of a block of flats in the early hours. Several people who left the building say police took them to get decontaminated.” Breakfast was tables laid linen and silver, food from takeaway bins. I never went to the big hotels of my seafront childhood but through mum’s duty calls on make-believe aunties heard enough to pick up the color: silver service and cordon bleu. I avoided ever finding out what that meant: my childhood myster- ies too thin to waste. The seafront seemed a lair of approval and grandeur that - though a few streets away - touched no part of our rent book life. Aunties would be awestruck at pate and Mary Rose sauce. I wasn’t sure our town was so rich. I never saw Alan Whicker on The Downs. I’ve had better breakfast in Holloway caffs. I’ve had better breakfast with truck- 57 ers, hitching north to get out the Smoke for a bit. Jazz played, TVs muted - their breakfast show monkeys mouthing at early risers. When local news rolled round again a trad soundtrack scored a bug-eyed cop’s patter, his top lip red and rough- shaved. A shot of a tower block, what might have been chassis under tarpaulin. Some psyched-looking wigga gesturing down his body. A message from Ms. Smith. She said sorry - she always said sorry. A row with her husband, one of her children got sick. I’d understand. We had the day booked for weeks. I’d understand. No one could know about us. Her children came first. They’re still little. She would tell me that. Holding out hope if I could wait that long. Ms. Smith made me powerless. I couldn’t call her, couldn’t order her onto the train. Couldn’t tell anyone her real name. I did the only thing she let me do: messaged back, said that was fine, I understood, we’d fix a date real soon. I wouldn’t hear from her the rest of the day. But I’d message her, send snaps of the sea. Be patient of her situation. I had so many bad breakfasts. The sea was full, smacking onto the parade, silver spray tagging the concrete. The pier lights were up: low cloud made melancholy seaside fun. But kids like me knew the season fell short each year. Make-believe grown-ups would ask what I wanted to be. I didn’t know, didn’t understand growing up. Parachuting dreams through the years, gliding on wishes no bigger than an attic room in a dead town by the sea. I never planned on being anyone, never worked at being anyone. Never expected to outwit erosion. The months I’d seen Ms. Smith we spent maybe two days in bed. All in all. A short two days. Always a sea view in a four star, in an arc of towns from Hast- ings to Portsmouth. She’d arrive, make love, worry, cry and go. Sometimes shout instead of cry. Sometimes cancel. She taught me the true sex smell of a woman is warm doughnuts. She taught me how you got to respect that people have com- mitments. I wanted to message soft words but it was too soon. The front got busy - everyone in waxed waterproofs looking like wet rocks. Sky so gray and the pier lights’ dismal twinkle I lost for a second my needletip sense for the disconnect, the fracture where toxic eruption completes without sound. The man who asked me to step back in the lobby was no big score. Short, his sandy hair so fine his scalp glowed eggshell beneath its brittle cobweb. His face - reddened with onshore southerlies, sticky with rosacea - peeled around his nose and ears, eroding layer by layer. Muddy shoes, weather-stained linen: he was victim of some small disaster. I wasn’t sure at first he was talking to me. I’d no intention of stepping inside. “If I’m the law does that help?” Dumb and assiduous are cause and effect: DCI Harker was dumbly assiduous. The receptionist - pure slapstick - told her manager my cash was hooky. Fearful for his bonus he told the cops. The cash was straight, though formidably stained with cocaine. No surprise the file got inked. When the siren blew, loved-up soul- boys at the country club swore the ghost of Elvis strolled by in the night. Harker pulled disks from speed cameras down the sea road, and the asshole drunk night porter recalled I didn’t tip when he let me in. I sat chewing Brighton plod’s ginger snaps with a baby-kissing smile. What they had was a fairground of banjo music that came as close to evidence as a kosher trip to Kabul. The more he talked the less sense he made: I told him he should sell tickets. He said they asked London filth for my priors. I said they got 58 the wrong man. I asked was I under arrest. Harker got shifty. His mate got shifty. The hot uniform by the door wriggled. No, course not: I was a guest, voluntary, helping enquiries. If I wanted to tell them anything without inconvenient paper- work so much the better. I told them their town needed a chemical douche. They didn’t want me to leave but didn’t offer accommodation. They asked for an address in London. I gave them an address in London. As I walked out through the visitor suite where anxious tarts fretted at the TV while their pretty kids played gangsters, I caught the mumbling blues and browns of an old clip of the Doctor giving hell on the tincan Nazis while his beautiful reporter assistant pulled smart sabotage. The girls were too young; their kids didn’t recognize it was the Doctor. But for me it was Saturday teatime, my mother’s hard green arm- chair scratching skin off my legs, my banana sandwich uneaten as excitement at life-or-death for the planet slyly melded to a new, unformed excitement. A feeling without a name: a taste, a sensation of need that - through years - would bring me there under the striplights. I laid extravagant matiness on the receptionist: said I was deeply, devastat- ingly sorry. I had to go. Business in London. I always tell provincials: business in London. “It’s gone midday. There’s no refund.” I packed listening out to the news - checking no details shook loose from the interview room. I stopped. Hit the sound. Another old clip: a young woman in one of those cold, glamorous palaces that on chilly worlds in every time house creatures alight with death and domination. Perversely human obsessions only a Time Lord can erase. I watched how she moved, how she stood. The look on her face as she found that clue taking me back a lifetime, making me what I was then. The still of a smarter, older, more beautiful woman. A tide within me that ran, flood high. Death is mundane, grubby. For Saturday’s boy in a quiet town death is the fail- ure to escape. I heard the door slam, the shouts, that sound: so clearly. Cancer’s a gutter word, no match for dreams and angels. Looking back from separate seas, you caught the faster tide. In your unreliable timeship, bravely to save other worlds.

59 Panika MC Dillon from June 2012

if it was fate, we wanted it: one spins the yarn

as long as we tear up the love (letters, we will not be) without kindling—their voices: spit & spark / & then there’s your jack rabbit smile, & then there’s your foot thumping at my chest, & then there’s the flick to the forehead / I will be the hasp: harrow (run hawk

to) heart / give me some juice, give me battery / the oil & asphalt think acid, think acrid / we want to knit songs into the air, to linger in petticoats of gun (smoke)

one spins the yarn (artifact)

hawk we will not be run to smoke the letters

60 if it was fate, we wanted it: one weaves the tapestry

come stumbling, come—pitch fork for crutch, rifle for hip replacement / the land bleeds

into what it does (not recognize as home)—our warren / our warrant: so thick we could drink it, tip ourselves into fists

of air, shift the seams of this orb / your peal shimmers long enough for me to name it—pull it (from your mouth) like a ribbon

of highway / is it nigh if bells go off at the throat? is it undone? / we own the needle, the bobbin, the shears: you could just change your hair, there is no (impossibility we cannot) wear

one weaves the tapestry (artifact)

recount cannot, fork over the rifle at the crutch of home, impossibly for us: your mouth

61 if it was fate, we wanted it: one cuts the thread

reason (to breathe, to) embroider our wrists—effort / you quit

& I went on / my fists, prunes; your palm, the pan / fry

nail & slice callus / you could slip it into (your sleeve, say) I’ve been

up to this forever / breaking my foot through a drum

skin makes everything (clean) / godly: bend those women into legacy, rob their yarn baskets blind

one cuts the thread (artifact)

clean your sleeves,

your gut says

to breathe,

too 62 When I was in Mississippi this past summer, I learned that my book had ended up on the pages of PEOPLE. I was driving to my then-boyfriend’s gig in Tupelo that night, and on the way to the show I dashed into a WAL-MART, found a copy (poor Amy Winehouse was on the cover; she’d just died), and made the woman working the register turn to the page and look with me. That doesn’t happen with poetry.

Sandra Beasley Author, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl Cobalt Interview Series, February 2012

63 John FitzGerald from September 2011

Humans Learn Beliefs

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson

At the time of this writing, humans are not aware, except by rumor, of any other species capable of making sense of these symbols, or whatever light they shed upon human thinking. Many humans believe that there presently exist other organisms or entities comparable or even superior to humans on other planets in other solar systems. Indeed, many well-respected scientists opine that the odds overwhelmingly favor the existence of other life in the universe. Since 1985, the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has combed the skies with its, “telescope array,” waiting for a, “man-made,” signal from space. Its website boasts employment of over 150 scientists, educators and support staff who agree with the statement: We believe we are conducting the most profound search in human history — to know our beginnings and our place among the stars. In 1977, I graduated from high school. That same year, NASA launched the Voyager 1 spacecraft on an interstellar mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Thirty-three years later it is still out there, at the edge of our solar system, farther away from the Sun than is Pluto. It is, in fact, the farthest human-made object from earth, at 17.4 billion ki- lometers (10.8 billion miles) from the Sun. It is estimated the craft will reach interstellar space around 2015, and it will be forty thousand more years before it approaches the next planetary system. Who knows if humans will still be here at that time. From the ground, NASA scientists signal the craft at the speed of light.1 The signal takes 16 hours, one way, to arrive. On board is a golden record, a phono-

1 Light travels at 300,000 kilometers, or 186,000 miles per second. It takes about 8.3 minutes for the light of the nearest star, our Sun, to reach Earth. Other stars are so much farther away that the distance is expressed in the amount of time it takes light to travel in one year (as measured on earth – about 10 trillion kilometers or 6 trillion miles). This unit is deemed a light year. The next nearest star to the Sun is a red dwarf in the constellation Centaurus, called Proxima Centauri (from the Latin word proxima, meaning nearest to). Light from that star takes 4.3 years to reach Earth. Our Milky Way Galaxy spans about 100, 000 light years. The light from some of the stars in our galaxy can therefore take tens of thousands of years to reach us. Light from stars in nearby galaxies can take millions of years to reach us. The light from quasars, the farthest objects we can see, left their sources billions of years ago, and is just reaching us now. We are therefore looking back in time when we look at the stars. 64 graphic sampler of our culture, including natural sounds, music, images, and spoken greetings in 55 languages. Carl Sagan, who selected the contents of the phonograph, said, “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.” Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking suggests that intelligent alien life almost cer- tainly exists, but unlike Sagan, thinks it is a mistake for us to try to contact them. In his view, the outcome of an alien visit, “would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans. We only have to look at ourselves,” he says, “to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.” In May of 2008, the Pope’s astronomer José Gabriel Funes, a Jesuit priest, told L’Osservatore Romano that there would be nothing surprising about the exis- tence of intelligent extraterrestrials. He also said that he believed in the Big Bang theory as the most likely explanation for the origin of the universe, and that evo- lution is a given. On November 1, 1992, nearly 400 years after the fact, the same Catholic Church finally acknowledged its error in trying Galileo as a heretic in 1633, and sentencing him to life imprisonment for confirming the Copernican theory that the earth circled the sun.2 That same year, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican Secretary of State, de- fended the church for burning Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600, saying that though it was a, “sad episode,” the Inquisition was, “motivated by the desire to serve the truth and promote the common good.” Bruno had asserted that the earth was not the center of the universe, but that the center was relative to the observer. The handbook for inquisitors (1578) stated that the purpose of its pen- alties was not, “for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit.” In all likelihood though, an announcement by SETI that a non-organic signal has been received from outer space would profoundly affect human conscious- ness. We would not even need to be “visited.” The mere knowledge of the exis- tence of others in the universe intelligent enough to emit a signal we can detect would be life-changing. Not only would our privileged image in the universe be shattered, but we would literally become earthlings. Everyone on earth would be part of the “home team,” united across national boundaries. It is almost as if the church is preparing for this eventuality, or is it, inevitability? By definition, a belief cannot be known, you either know a thing, or you be- lieve it, but once a thing is known, it is no longer a belief. No one ever knew the

2 In 1543 CE Nicolaus Copernicus published his treatise On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, dem- onstrating that the motions of the planets we witness from earth could be explained by earth circling the sun, beginning a scientific revolution that would ultimately undermine the geocentric worldview. But Coperni- cus could not prove his theory, and continued to believe in the celestial spheres first posed in the 6th century BCE by Anaximander, as expounded upon by Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy. Beginning in 1610, Galileo used his telescope to discover the rings of Saturn, and provided support for the heliocentric view through his observations of the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus. In 1632, he wrote his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which led to his arrest by the Inquisition. It would take another 200 years for the heliocentric model to gain popular acceptance. 65 earth was flat, they were only told it, and believed. I don’t believe in “royal blood,” yet there are kings, and while I can see why the kings would favor this concept, I see no reason for others to go along with it. I also don’t believe one needs to acknowledge non-belief in God in relation to the beliefs of those who do. I am not an infidel or kaffir compared to a Muslim, nor a goyim or gentile compared to a Jew. For the same reason I am not an athe- ist compared to a Christian, any more than I am amythical for not believing in Zeus, awiccan for not believing in witches, or aspectral for lack of belief in ghosts. One either chooses to accept unsubstantiated beliefs or one does not. To the extent one does not, we already have a word for it: reasonable. To the extent one does, we have a word too: superstitious. All belief is instilled. And the reason you believe anything is because you trust in or fail to question the source of instillation. No human is born with any particular belief. Even identical twins raised by the same parents do not, upon reaching the age of personal reflection, necessarily share all the same beliefs. The definitive source of belief is perception, and though we know mirage and illusion exist, belief in our own senses goes mostly unquestioned. One of the goals of scientific experimentation is to guard against the errors of perception. Memory is the accumulated experience of our senses. Another preeminent source of belief is reliance on the word of others, which to a certain extent must be trusted if language and social cooperation are to have any utility. Such testimony gains strength according to the fidelity and number of those who support it. Non-evidentiary sources include inferences and coincidences mistaken for causation, such as form the basis for belief in magic; and of course, desire, which focuses attention on what is favorable to it at the exclusion of what is not. Humans speak about things unseen, including their own internal dialog. And we know humans lie. We know because we lie, and have been lied to. But even so-called knowledge is subject to revision. If human experience proves anything, it is that nearly all of what we once took for knowledge proved wrong, and was therefore only belief. Yet, in its time, there was no doubt of its infallibility. For thousands of years, the theory of “spontaneous generation” provided the answer to the question of how life sprung where none had been before. By the time Aristotle wrote History of Animals, he considered it common knowledge that. “some plants self generated,” and some animals sprung, “from parent animals according to their kind, whilst others grow spontaneously and not from kindred stock; and of these instances of spontaneous generation some come from putrefying earth or vegetable matter, as is the case with a number of insects, while others are spontaneously generated in the inside of animals out of the secretions of their several organs.” Even such thinkers as Newton and Descartes ascribed to this theory. By 1665 Robert Hooke discovered the cell. In 1668 Francesco Redi demonstrated that maggots do not appear in meat when flies are prevented from laying eggs, proving the theory of spontaneous generation false. The alternative hypothesis was biogenesis –the idea that every living thing comes from a pre-existing thing, or egg. In 1675, van Leeuwenhoek discovered microorganisms, ending the theory that small creatures (like maggots) arose 66 from inanimate matter. In 1861, Louis Pasteur, upon proving that organisms do not spontaneously appear in sterile material was quoted as saying, “Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment.” In 1871, Darwin addressed the vacuum left by refutation of the theory, sug- gesting that life may have begun in a, “warm little pond, with all sorts of am- monia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, so that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes,” which is to say, by spontaneous generation. In 1924, Russian biochemist Alex- ander Oparin in, The Origin of Life, proposed that the spontaneous generation of life theory “disproven” by Pasteur, did in fact occur once, but had since been rendered impossible because earth’s living organisms would now immediately consume any organism spontaneously generated. He suggested a “primeval soup” of organic molecules could be the source of life. Working independently, British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane arrived at the same conclusion. In 1952 Stanley Miller and Harold Urey conducted their now famous experiment testing the Oparin/Haldane primordial soup theory on the chemical origins of life. Using a mixture of methane, hydrogen, and ammonia to represent earth’s early atmosphere, boiling water to represent the ocean, and simulated lightning from an electrical spark, they successfully synthesized organic compounds from inorganic materials. Miller reported the soup produced five amino acids, essential molecules to all life, and the building blocks of proteins. In 2007, scientists revisited the findings using modern techniques, and found more than twenty-five amino acids. All life on earth is produced by combining just twenty amino acids. Still, the question of abiogenesis, or how living things originally arose from non-living material, remains relevant to this day. Today, for instance, of more than six billion humans on earth,[3]3 over half believe in the God of Abraham. A third believes in Christ, and a sixth in Allah. Since each of the three religions condemns all but its own adherents, all humans must therefore be doomed. Humans realize others pray against them, the way two siblings run to a parent each to tattle on the other. So before a battle, opposing factions might pray. And if both pray, the prayers of one must be better than the other, for the request of one is granted only at the others’ expense. Stripped of their niceties, all such petitions beg that their enemies be disfavored: Let them go extinct, for we are your people, the true believers. Let our prayers be answered rather than the prayers of those who compete against us. Let us be your favorite people. Thus arises sacrifice. The notion we can do or give something to the object of worship to make our prayer superior. Because when two competitors vie, and both pray and sacrifice and dance, and some have success at the expense of others, it is taken by the devout to mean one of two things: either the prayer of the successful was more deserving – leading to ritual and repetition; or, the successful prayed to the stronger god, leading to conversion of the unsuccessful. Adherents to such beliefs cannot possibly be questioning their underpinning.

3 I believe, though I have never counted them. Indeed, I believe in the number centillion, though there is nothing in my experience to verify it. And I only believe in the Big Bang, because I cannot know it to be true. 67 Of course, they associate the beliefs with ancient texts they accept as sacred, but the authority of those texts is never examined, though they can be traced back to a culture that adopted them to explain and reinforce what at that time had only recently come into existence – a patriarchal, agricultural economy controlled by a god-appointed elite. Proof may exist, for example, that supposed favoritism of a sacrifice of meat over vegetables is an indictment by pastoralists against agriculturalists, at a time when agriculturists – the current culture of ninety-nine percent of earth – were expanding their fields into the shepherds’ grazing pastures, represented biblically by Cain killing Abel. The evidence may show that a Semitic people in Iraq invented our way of life many thousands of years ago. And whatever minor changes we’ve made to the structure remain, superficial as a coat of paint. We may have decorated our own house, but those Semitic people built it. A long line of extinct humans before us demonstrates that it is the ultimate vanity for Homo sapiens to believe its species represents the pinnacle of success, and that evolution stops with them, or that no other way of life could have existed for the millions of years before one particular culture came to equate its invention with the creation of humanity itself, and a God-given right to rule the earth. There may be proof that a cooperative way of life existed for hundreds of thousands of years before males came to subjugate females, rendering half the human population subservient to the other. Evidence may establish that human lineage was once traced through females, who built their own homes, tilled and owned all arable land, invented pottery, weaving, and planting, and were the main providers for their offspring with little or no input from the father. Surely, there was a time before any human understood the connection between sex and the procreation of offspring, so women were revered as magic, and absent the knowledge of paternity, humans seemed to be born of goddesses. The fact is that humans co-evolve with environment, the Selector of natural selection, but have, to a great extent, selected themselves, and it is the traits and qualities that females favored which presently exist in males, and vice versa. It may be that humans are not innate sinners, born flawed, with a built in need to be punished, but are instead born predatory animals with an overriding desire to get their own way, and that desire, sometimes interferes with the absolute right of nature. All organisms go extinct, and a long history demonstrates that Homo sapiens may be a dead end. The end of every warrior, philosopher, genius, prophet, savior, or king, no matter how holy, wise, rich, or powerful reveals, that life here is life and death is death from which no human ever returned, and that one’s time on earth need not be intentionally suffered through in favor of reward in an afterlife. Zealots and politicians have argued since their invention over whose ideas are purer, and it’s time to stop. Our history is one of a continuous people, and the only difference among them is their beliefs, none of which are more human than any other. And perhaps anyone could accept these possibilities if they were other than offended, angry and defensive at so much as the mere suggestion that their sacred beliefs be scrutinized by even themselves. 68 Martin Willitts from December 2011

Earth-Creator

woman who speaks rolling-thunder, gentle as sparrow, where she walked made moccasins of lakes, her laughter made the mountains so many colors somehow we no longer mention you by name you descended from a spider thread, hairs of diamondback snakes, blowing into us the fire of knowledge we have forgotten your name you planted your feet as the tree of life, you brought waters, blue as grapes, and in the afterbirth there was blood becoming the moon to remind us why all women are the makers of things men took away your name they tamed your name out of wild appaloosas, they hunted you down into ravines, they spoke ill of you with words of thorn bushes, they cut back your hair as if it was kudzu your name was grounded-up, parceled into surveyed acres, and all that remains of you is an empty cliff-dwelling pot, the air folding into itself, into surrender we cannot lift up what is held down

69 Marissa Korbel Nonfiction Finalist

Drawing Blood

You aren’t crying because you’re afraid, really. Or if it’s fear, it isn’t the kind people think; you know what’s happening to you. You know you’re not dying. You’ve read Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret at least ten times by now. And Mom has been telling you about periods, demonstrating how to use a pad and showing you her own period since like, forever. It’s just that you thought you had more time; Margaret hadn’t gotten it until the end of sixth grade. You huff, and the sound of air reverberates against the wallpapered bathroom. You’re afraid to tell Mom; that’s why you are crying. You know that you’re sup- posed to tell her. It’s just that she’s going to make it a thing. The thought of which makes your tummy knot even more. You look down at the brown stain in your white, printed undies. You close your eyes and wish for one-second that it will go away, but when you open your eyes it’s still there. There is no magic. You prop your head against your hand and decide, right then, that you’re not telling. You take some toilet paper and wind it around your hand so it approximates a pad. A real pad would have sticky stuff to keep it in place, but you don’t have another option at the moment, and you need to get out of the bathroom. You need to think, and you can’t around that stupid stain. You need to get away. You tuck the folded toilet paper into your underwear and pull them up tightly. You adjust your jeans, and walk a few steps in a circle around the bathroom: the wad feels sort of secure, anyway. Flushing the toilet, then washing your hands, and thinking and thinking, trying to be organized. You need supplies. But a box of pads is a more than a whole week’s allowance, and you don’t have enough right now to buy anything. This toilet paper thing was OK for the moment, but you don’t trust it. You know you need real pads. Where were you supposed to get real pads? Mom and Dad’s bathroom? She has a whole package of them. You could prob- ably get a few of them without her noticing. But how many would you need? How long would this last? It was risky. You decide to take two pads from Mom. You cross your fingers and your toes and your hair and your ears and worry worry worry that she’s going to know. But she doesn’t. Maybe magic.

70 At 22, I stop getting my period. For months. At first I don’t worry, and then, after the second month, I start to believe that I have cancer. I finally scare myself bad enough that I make an appointment to see the doctor. The nurse practitioner asks me matter of factly if I’ve taken a pregnancy test, and I shake my head. I’m sure it’s cancer; I’m on the pill. She looks at me like an idiot, and hands me a cup to pee in.

Dave Wolf works with Dad in the meat department at the supermarket. When you were little, he used to give you as many stickers as you wanted. Of course, the meat department only had meat stickers: labels for meaty things like, Rump Roast or Baby Back Ribs. He had offers you a Tenderloin sticker, but you turn it down. “You’re growing up,” Dave comments, sighing the way old people do when they say old people things like that. You smile weakly, roll your eyes and look at the floor. You babysat for Dave and his wife, Julie. He knew you were too old for stickers if he paid you to watch his kid, didn’t he? Then you hoped wildly you didn’t look too guilty. You had just watched baby Davey the other night, and had been planning to use the money according to plan. But then, you’d uncovered Julie’s pads in the bathroom. And you’d taken plenty. You were washing your hands in Julie and Dave’s bathroom, when it dawned on you. You were so excited that you wiped your hands down your jeans and pulled the cabinets under the sink open with droplets still clinging to your skin. Julie had a box of tampons, and a plastic package of pads. The tampons were open, but the pads weren’t. You wondered if she’d remember that she hadn’t opened them, and decided that even if she did, it wasn’t likely she’d notice tonight, immediately after you left. You carefully pulled the plastic apart and took three pads. Then, just to be safe, you folded the plastic back as neatly as you could. You took a couple of the tampons, too. Couldn’t hurt to have them around, you figured, in case of an emergency. You couldn’t believe you hadn’t thought of this before. You wouldn’t have to buy supplies like, ever. Everyone’s mom had her period, you figured. And that meant that somewhere at everyone’s house, there was a supplies stash. If you just took a couple here and there, you should be able to stock up enough. Plus, you woudn’t have to spend all your babysitting money. You grinned, and buried the pads under your books before Dave and Julie got home. Nobody would ever have to know. Except now every time you saw Dave in the Lucky’s, you were going to feel guilty.

I pee in the cup, which is awkward the way peeing in a cup is. I have to bend the plastic and then I have to make sure not to pee too much, and then I have to be careful to draw the cup out from between my thighs without tipping it. I suffer a few moments of penis envy - if only for ease of piss testing! I screw the lid on the cup, and place it on the ledge of the bathroom where she told me to leave it. I am sure it is cancer. When she tells me I’m pregnant, I’m stunned. 71 “But, I’m on the pill,” I stammer. “Wouldn’t I just show up as pregnant either way?” She looks at me again like I’m slow. “I always thought that was how the pill worked.” I can’t shut up. “I thought it told your body you were already pregnant so you couldn’t get pregnant.” She looks utterly disappointed in me. She tells me about my options. “We don’t perform medical terminations here,” she says. “We can refer you to someone if you’d like.” Medical termination. I know that’s logical. I am nothing if not logical. So I nod, and I take the slip of paper and I go.

For a while, it works. Every time you use the bathroom at someone’s house, you look under the sink, or in the bottom drawers of the built-in vanity. It’s so consistent, it’s almost like the women of the world have made a promise to store their period supplies in the same place. When you find a stash, you help yourself. Never to very much at a time because you worry most about getting caught. So often, you sneak out of the bathroom with pink, plastic-wrapped pads in the pockets of your overalls -- and you can only fit so many in the pockets without creating obvious bulges, or the plastic wrapping crinkling in your pockets mak- ing too much noise. You’re handling the whole thing well until summer. You love swimming so much, but this summer, you have to contend with how to go swimming if you have your period. You know you’re supposed to use a tampon, you even have a couple that you took in preparation. But you’re still unsure about how they’re supposed to work. You avoid this problem in June and for most of July. But at the end of July, your neighborhood bestie Leslie insists that you come up to the pool in her condo complex, and you can’t figure out how to say no. You aren’t about to tell why you don’t want to go. Plus, she says John Willis is going to be there. John Willis with his dark skin and his easy laugh. You’re pretty sure he doesn’t know who you are, and yet you stare at him til your eyes hurt. You’re suddenly willing to try the tampon thing. You pull your two tampons out of the back of your closet, and lay them on the carpet while you think. You only want to use one because it’s only July; there is a big chance that you’ll have this problem again. You look at them: one pink and slender and labled “light days.” The other larger and green and called “Super.” Not wanting to take any chances, you decide to go with Super. You try not to imagine what happens if your period starts leaking in the pool, and everyone sees you surrounded by blood like shark bait. So just to be extra cautious, you’ll wait ‘til just before you’re about to jump in the water to put it in. There’s a bath- room and a changing room at the pool. In the meantime, you need to get ready. You pull out your swimsuit: a tiger stripe pattern, on a tie-dyed pastel background. You hadn’t picked it out; it came from a garage sale where Mom bought a whole bunch of clothes she couldn’t fit into. (Yet! She insisted.) In the meantime, she put them in your closet, and your dressers, filling your room with what you called old lady clothes. You want a florescent pink one piece Body Glove bathing suit with a black zip- 72 per down the front, like Leslie’s. Mom said that the zipper wasn’t age-appropriate, whatever that meant. It was a once piece bathing suit. You can’t see how it’s any less appropriate than a bikini. You stare at yourself in the full length mirror: you don’t like how you look any- more. You know you’ll probably be noticed. Still, you’ve come to the conclusion that if you can’t stop people from noticing your body, and you can’t control what they notice about you, you’ll try to develop a taste for it. Like coffee. You make the best of your old lady wardrobe the same way you make the best of having boobs now. You hate them. As far as you’re concerned, they’re embar- rassing little nubbins of horror. You don’t have too many girl friends, but the ones you have can’t wait til they develop. And all you think is that developing isn’t what they think it will be. Boobs make it hurt to sleep on your stomach, and they become the only thing anyone notices about you anymore. Boobs, in your opinion, are stupid. You toss your hair, and brush it up into a ponytail. You tell yourself you don’t care about stupid boobs, and then correct yourself: no, you like them. You prac- tice listing the plusses of having them. For one thing, they might make John Willis notice you. Pulling your ponytail tight, you pack your sunscreen and your towel into your backpack -- black with hot pink piping on the seams. You pull on some shorts and a t-shirt, shove your feet into flip flops, and head out, yelling to Mom on your way out the door the way you can when it’s summer and you’re wild til the sun goes down. You meet Leslie at the end of the block, and walk with her up to the Glen Pool. She talks about John Willis the whole way. She knows you stare him, but she’s only telling you how much he likes her. Your ears turn red, but you can’t talk to Leslie about that. She’ll make fun of you for liking him, or make it worse. So instead, you act happy that John was trying to “get in her pants.” You know kinda what she means by that, but you aren’t sure if she’s talking about s-e-x or something less than. Relief comes in the form of the cement and the chlorine and the smell of the wet chemical wet. Leslie has to shut up about John Willis because he’s already there. “I gotta use the bathroom first,” you tell her, throwing your towel on a lounge chair. You snatch your bag and march into the locker room. Locked safely in the stall, you rummage until you feel the paper-wrapped tampon. You tear the paper off and look at it, unsure exactly how it is supposed to work, but too nervous to take much time. You do your best to push it in right, but it hurts. A lot. It feels like you’ve pushed a dry cotton pillow inside between your legs, and it burns in a muscular way. It isn’t like, searing unbearable or anything. But it does kinda suck. You pad your way out to the cement deck around the pool and lay on your back on the plastic chair next to Leslie’s. She’s already in the water in her Body Glove swimsuit, splashing John and trying to get him to play chicken fights with her on his shoulders. You feel something shaking, trembly and hot, almost like crying but also like mad, watching her wrap her legs around his shoulders. Watching the easy way she swims around him so thin and pale and confident. You think about swimming, but decide to wait until you get too hot, or the burning feeling goes away. Or both. 73 He looks like George Costanza. That’s all I can think when I meet the new doctor. He puts me on his table, legs in his stirrups. He presses on my uterus, through my stomach. He tells me he thinks I’m around 7 weeks. I nod, numbly. I don’t know what that even means. “We’ll need to get you in here sooner rather than later.” That’s what it means. He writes me a prescription that I’m supposed to take before I come in for my procedure. I think it’s funny that nobody says abortion. But I don’t say this. I take the prescription and the little appointment card, and I put it in my calendar like that: procedure.

It is spring of your fifth grade year when you decide to tell Mom. You wake up to that heavy feeling in your low low belly. You’ve gone through this enough times to know what that feeling means. You dig through your stash in the back of your closet, under the pink nylon sleeping bag that you use for sleepovers, under the puffy, cold weather sleeping bag that you use for camping. Under the pile of clothes and pajamas that you threw in when Mom forced you to spend Saturday cleaning your room, and you cheated by stuffing your clothes into the sleeping bags. You only find one pad, and you feel grumpy. You are tired of sneaking around the house with period supplies like you’re carrying some illegal thing. You stumble to the bathroom, and sure enough, bleeding. You wipe yourself off, attach the pad to your underwear and go out to the kitchen. Mom is there, cooking scrambled eggs. You are so worried that Mom takes one look at your face and asks what’s wrong, and that’s the end of it. “I got my period, Mom.” You don’t say when. Just state the fact, which is true. Mom puts the wooden spatula down and pulls the eggs off the burner. She opens her arms to hug you, and you step into her, crying against her belly, wish- ing you were smaller still. Somehow this makes it feel official: you aren’t a kid anymore. “Don’t cry, Bee,” Mom says, smoothing her hands over your morning curls. “This is a natural process! It’s wonderful. It’s sacred!” You hear it in the tone of her voice. You hear it in the word sacred. You cry harder and squeeze your eyes shut and hope you heard wrong. “I’m going to take you out to breakfast,” Mom announces. “To celebrate.” You really don’t want to celebrate anything, but you can’t say that without hurt- ing her feelings. So you don’t say anything while she serves the eggs to Jeremy, and throws the portions she made for you and her in the garbage can. “Why aren’t you eating, Bee?” Jeremy wants to know. “Marissa and Mommy are going to special breakfast this morning,” Mom explains. You stare at the table top. “Why can’t I go?” “Because it’s a womyns thing,” Mom intones in Sacred Voice. Jeremy looks confused, but knows better than to ask when Mom uses Sacred Voice. It means she is going to start the Ceremonial stuff and neither one of you wants to hear it. So Jeremy eats his eggs, and the three of you pile into the Sub- 74 urban and drive the few blocks to school. But when Jeremy gets out and kisses Mom goodbye, you stay in the car. You have never been so unhappy about miss- ing a day of school. Mom drives into town, talking about womyn, and sacred this and that. You don’t listen, try not to listen but stare out the windshield with your listening face, letting the words go in and out. You follow her into Hobie’s Restaurant and stand in line, and let her hug you close, and smile at you with her knowing smile. You order a bagel and cream cheese and a hot chocolate, and you eat it without tasting. “So, how about after breakfast, you and I do Ceremony?” You swallow the dry bits of bagel sticking to your throat. “It will be fun,” Mom goes on, “and I think it’s very important to mark this Sacred Transition in some way. We’ll do it after breakfast. I can stop and get what I need before we go home.” You nod, assent, and fake a small smile. “Oh, Bee, don’t be afraid. This is a wonderful, natural thing!” You nod again and push the rest of your bagel away. Mom stops at the fabric store on the way home. You used to like the fabric store because you’d make Barbie clothes out of the remnants bin. But Mom shuffles you past the remnants, to the ribbons wall. You like the ribbons wall. She tells you to pick out four ribbons, and you eyeball them, shiny ropey bow-tieing goodness. “They’re to represent the Four Directions,” Mom says. “So choose what you think will be best.” You know what the Four Directions are: always in the opening part of any Ceremony you’d been dragged to, Mom or one of your aunts would call on the energies of each direction, and name its element, and what it represented. North was Air, East was Earth, South was Fire and West was Water. You liked West the best, and when they made you call a direction, you always asked to do that one because Water was dramatic, which you liked. You pick out the ribbons. North gets white, east gets purple, because that’s Mom’s favorite color and Earth’s her favorite element. South gets a red one; that was obvious. And west gets a brilliant blue. Mom takes the ribbons, and a small piece of white silk to the counter. Pays. Drives you home. Probably talks. You don’t hear a word. She says to change into something pretty. “I called Wendy to let her know you’d be there after lunch. I told her you might be a little less than yourself, too. Just in case you’re feeling crampy.” “You didn’t tell her, did you?” Mom looks guilty. “Well, no. Not exactly. But...” You cross your arms. “Let’s do this thing,” you mumble. “Are you ready?” Mom has a Lucky’s handled paper bag in her hand, and she throws her house keys in. They jangle as she slams the front door behind you, and you start walk- ing toward the meadow. You live at the end of a cul-de-sac, and where the street ends, the meadow be- gins. The meadow is framed on all sides by pavement, but it’s big. There is a little stand of trees directly in front of your house, and to the left, a wide, flat plane 75 that others would probably call ‘the meadow part’ of the meadow. To you, it’s all meadow, even the trees. Mom heads to the trees, and searches for a flat-ish clearing still far enough in to be sheltered. Finding a spot that suits her, she begins to unpack. First she spreads a white tablecloth across the pine needles. In the center goes the big white candle, and under the candle, she runs the ribbons, each one stick- ing out like a spoke of a compass. They are anchored under the candle in the center, but at the end of each ribbon, she places a Sacred Object representative of that direction. A bird feather. A pinecone. A ceramic dragon, breathing fire. And a glass bowl which she fills with a little glug of water out of her water bottle. She lights the sage bundle. You’ve been through this before. You stand with your eyes closed as she fans the sage smoke around you. Smudging. Supposed to clear your aura or your energy -- you are never quite sure. It smells woodsy and sharp, but not like the trees. Like dried herbs and fire and the feelings in the bot- tom of your stomach. She smudges herself, and then the edges of the tablecloth. The smoke swirls up from the bundle, free. Hangs out only long enough to feel the redness of your ears and the grossness inside you. Whisks off on the air on the breeze on its own volition. “I call on the spirits of the North,” Mom begins, breaking the woods open with words, “Goddeses of the air, womyn of breath, come to our Ceremony today.” She faces the northern direction as she says this, and then smudges the area of the tablecloth representing the North. “I call on the spirits of the East, the Goddeses of the earth, the womyn of the sand, come to our ceremony today.” Fans the pinecone with the sage smoke, speaking in that sing song-y, ceremonial voice that makes you cringe. “I call on the spirits of the South. Mothers of fire, womyn of spark, come to our ceremony today.” Mom stops. Looks at you. “Do you want to call the West, honey?” You shake your head. She smiles, and calls the west, and the waters and the womyn of whatever. Sits on the eastern side of the tablecloth, with you across from her on the western side. She is earth, and you are water. Opposites. Obviously. Mom continues in Sacred Voice. About mysteries of womyn, and the sacred blood of elders and the tree of life and the smoke of the sage and the meaning of the ribbons and the totems and the circle and the Moon. She says moon with reverence. She says firsts and blossoms and things you try not to hear, and that I won’t remember. On purpose. Volition. I can’t stop her chanting, but I don’t have to dive into memory to bring her words up from the bottom. You stare at the fire-breathing dragon to your right, wondering how they made a ceramic that looked so muscular. Mom keeps him on her altar, and you’ve seen him plenty of times. But right now, you are fascinated by him, and his ripples and his fearless, fiery eyes. She’s stopped. She’s looking at you. “Are you ready?” 76 Having no idea what she means, you nod. You hope that after this part you can go home. Mom hands you a crystal and unfolds the piece of the white fabric she bought, now cut into the shape of a heart. “Use the crystal to gather some of your blood,” Mom says. You stare. Lift out of your chest a little. Fall into water. Think she’s not talking about what you think. Think she’s not serious. Think you can’t you can you can’t you can’t all the way up to the tops of the trees. All the way out on the dirt path you rode your bike down, and across the road and to the baseball field and the soccer field and the boat launch and the swimming swimming water lake lake blue go cold splash. You leave your hot face behind. “From your yoni, Marissa.” She is serious. Your hand takes the crystal. Legs push on feet, push on earth, push up, walk toward the treeline. Head in the water, swimming, swimming cold so cold it takes your breath and your ears ache with it. Numbness. “No, not outside the sacred space,” Mom breaks. “Just do it here. I’m your mother. I’ve seen everything anyway.” Hands hold the heaviness of the crystal. It is almost as big as your whole hand. Mouth sighs quietly, and hand slips up thigh, under the waistband of underwear. The pad is sticky with blood; hands run the crystal over that. Hands come out stained and sticky and brown. Fingers. The crystal. All of it. Stomach sick. Heart like a war drum, like a skin pulled tight across a wooden frame. Like something heavy is inside you, and getting heavier. Mom holds out the heart-shaped fabric. “Here,” Hands place the crystal in the center of the heart and sticky brown fingers wipe across it. Blood won’t come off, blood clings in the cracks of your flesh in the whorls of your fingers. Hands grip and release, making little moons in palms, making little bites of pain, pulling you back, back back into body. Head back. Head home.

The night before my procedure, I ache. Everywhere at first, and then sharper, lower. It feels like the worst period of my life. I go to the bathroom, and I’m right. Blood, bright. Cramps like I’ve never felt. I call the doctor’s office, and ask the answering service to call him. I tell her it’s an emergency. “I’m supposed to have my procedure in the morning.” I have no idea if she knows what that means. He calls me back fast. Asks me a few questions about the color of blood. About pain. “Well, my dear, I believe you are miscarrying.” For some reason this makes me cry. Or maybe it’s the pain of these cramps. Either way, I’m snuffling on the phone, embarrassed. Crying. Afraid and relieved. “At some point you’re going to pass a large clump,” George Costanza says. “If you can bring it in with you tomorrow, we can test it and make sure.” I agree to do this thing. 77 He tells me he’ll see me in the morning. I hang up the phone and cry. It hurts like nothing I have ever felt before. I don’t move for a very long time, just sweat and cry and drip red tissue. In two hours, I never see or feel a clump. I decide I don’t care. I flush, and crawl my way into bed, pulling a towel under me just in case.

In the bathroom you wash your hands over and over again, wishing it would all wash away wash away wash away. Two weeks later, you come home to a package on your bed. Inside, a rounded triangular-ish piece of dark red suede with objects sewn into the top, bottom, right and left. You open the card. It’s from your crazy aunt who is even more into Ceremony than Mom. Who lives in a commune with other people with animal names. She congratulates you on your womynhood, and welcomes you to the circle. She explains this medicine sheild, and how the “totem” Mom sent her was sewn into the back. You flip it over. Sure enough, there was a tiny red suede pouch swen on the back. You lift the flap; recognize that white fabric. You close the flap again.

Costanza says I miscarried. He doesn’t ask about the clump. He tells me I’m lucky, that the natural process is a better process. I nod my head I nod my head I nod my head.

78 My characters are all me. Except when they are not.

Rick Moody Author, The Four Fingers of Death Cobalt Interview Series, December 2011

79 Kevin McLellan Poetry Finalist

About Our Beginning

A kind gardener for the beekeeping suit. without a garden You ask why? I no longer know. Perhaps because

I no longer know bees have complex how to differentiate tongues and they’re between a cone indebted to delicate

and a circle things and the process so I spendthrift of long division the crisp $50 bill but I can tell you

at the thrift store that I didn’t on the lace curtain buy the sequins and the bone china for the watering

plate with a yellow can and hose quince pattern — since I’m not certain materials to break about the sparkle.

80 Aubrey Hirsch from March 2012

Rachel Garrett

It’s a Saturday in 2321. Rachel is on Earth in her wedding dress. She’s twenty- two and freshly graduated from Starfleet Academy. Her mother doesn’t want her to marry Ven. It’s too soon, she says. They’ve only known each other a few months, but Rachel doesn’t care. She’s in love. When the music starts, she smiles so big that the pain in her cheeks makes her eyes water. Then, without warning, she’s on a starship somewhere in the Gamma quadrant. It takes a moment for her to recognize her surroundings. She looks at her uni- form. She touches a chair. The upholstery is red and gold. It’s the USS Argo and she’s a Lieutenant, junior grade. Her life comes into focus: they are patrolling the Romulan border, she had a salad for lunch, she has failed to become pregnant for thirty-nine months in a row. Ever since her ship went through the temporal rift in 2344, she’s been jumping back and forth in time. One moment, she’s seven years old eating pancakes with her mother, then she’s burying her first officer after a Klingon attack. Sometimes she stays in one place for an hour, sometimes only minutes, sometimes years. Every time she jumps, it’s like waking up from a dream. The new time becomes her reality and the past and present become solid. She forgets the future. Then the record skips again and for a moment, she remembers. It’s 2341 and Rachel is captain of the Enterprise, the Federation’s prize starship. Ven has left her and taken Jason with him, to raise him off the ship. She speaks to him occasionally, when she isn’t busy negotiating treaties, facilitating scientific research, and wondering why she’s so lonely when she can never get a moment alone. She sneaks into her ready room and calls Jason on the video phone. It rings and rings, displaying a series of flashing lights. The sounds and pattern have begun to remind her of her son. She watches them for a long time. It almost feels like seeing him. A boy in her fourth grade class is telling her that girls can’t captain starships. The memory of the flashing lights in her ready room is already beginning to fade. Before it’s completely gone she tries to tell him that she will stand on the bridge of the Enterprise someday and tell a hundred men what to do. But when she opens her mouth, the sound of her voice surprises her. It’s so small and weak that she completely forgets what she was going to say. Ven is Betazoid, so he looks human, like everyone she has ever loved. But he can read her thoughts. It starts with bar tricks on the Argo. He tells her her

81 favorite color. He knows that the noodles she’s eating are too salty. He knows other things too, like the perfect moment to lean in and kiss her, when she feels like being quiet, what kinds of movies she only pretends to like. He shows up at her door with violets, her favorite flowers. He never says the wrong thing. He never makes her cry. At seventeen years old, Rachel is the youngest person to ever be admitted to Starfleet Academy. She aces all her classes, but especially enjoys her courses on anthropology and ancient cultures. Her class takes a field trip to the Delta star systems. She visits a temple scarred black from a distant supernova. When her feet touch Earth again, everything looks different. Rachel puts Jason to bed and meets Ven in the kitchen. They’ve been arguing. Ven circles her with his arms. You don’t like that, he says. You wish I would go. Rachel tells him she doesn’t know what she wants. I do, he says. She wishes he didn’t. She wishes he would get out of her head. Sometimes she wants to be alone. I can hear you thinking that, he says. I have wants, too, you know. But she doesn’t know. How can she know if he never tells her? Sometimes he doesn’t speak for days, communicating telepathically with their half-Betazoid son. Rachel has to remind him to talk just so she can hear his voice. She is nine years old in Indiana. Her mother brings home her new sister from the hospital. Rachel doesn’t like it. She tries to hug her mother and her father pushes her away. The baby, he says. It’s all they say: the baby, the baby, the baby. She is still in Indiana, but the year is different. Her body feels different—tired, sore. In her lap is a baby. Not her sister, but her son. Ven comes into the room and her confusion subsides. You seem distant, he says. Is your mind still in the stars? His voice makes everything solid for her. She was dreaming a moment ago, she is sure, dreaming of her childhood. Ven takes her hand and she rubs it against her cheek. Oh, he says, you’re so happy. He’s right, of course. Then a fear she can’t explain settles into her guts—that everything she has will be gone in the blink of an eye. She’ll be somewhere else. She’ll be lonely or at war. She’ll be older or younger. Why she feels this way, she can’t be sure. Ven can sense the change. He holds her close. It calms her right away. What could there ever be to fear? What could possibly happen with Ven right here at her side, her lovely Jason in her arms. Her life is here. She isn’t going anywhere.

82 Contributors

Chelsey Clammer received her MA in Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago. Her essays have been published in THIS, Sleet, Spittoon, Atticus, Make/shift and The Coachella Review among others. Her essay “BodyHome” won the Editor’s Pick Award 2012 from Revolution House. She is currently finishing up a collection of essays about finding the concept of home in the body.

Steven Leyva is the co-creator of the poetry reading series Kick Assonance, which was named a “critic’s pick” by Time Out New York in 2011. His poems have appeared in Welter, The Light Ekphrastic, and The Cobalt Review, and his first collection of poems, Low Parish, was published earlier this year. He holds a MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he teaches in the undergraduate writing program.

Sandra Hunter’s fiction has appeared in a number of literary magazines and received 2010 and 2011 Pushcart Prize fiction nominations. Her novel Losing Touch will be out in 2013 (OneWorld Publications).

Panika M. C. Dillon is from Fairbanks, AK, and Austin, TX. She received her MFA in creative-writing poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Breakwater Review, Oranges&Sardines, Copper Nickel, Borderlands and Permafrost. She works as a political organizer in Central Texas.

John FitzGerald is a writer and attorney in Santa Monica, California. He was Editor of the Law Review, and has won several writing awards. His three books of poetry are Spring Water (Turning Point, 2005) Telling Time by the Shadows (Turning Point, 2008), and The Mind (Salmon Poetry, 2011). Aubrey Hirsch’s work has appeared widely in journals like Third Coast, American Short Fiction, PANK and Hobart. Her first book, Why We Never Talk About Sugar, will be released in the spring from Big Wonderful Press.

Hayley Hughes writes and teaches from the suburbs of southwestern Ohio. “Montréal” is a chapter from the travel memoir Hayley is writing about a recent solo road trip to Québec. A classically-trained singer, Hayley has an abiding love of language and music of all kinds, themes that frequently pervade her work. Hayley has participated, on scholarship, in workshops with Paul Lisicky and Joyce Dyer, and spends every possible moment drinking coffee and honing her craft. In addition to Cobalt, Hayley has been published in The Eunoia Review.

Dave K. is a writer, artist, and A/V tech who lives in Baltimore. His work has been published in Front Porch Journal, Battered Suitcase, LOOP, Artichoke Haircut, and Welter, and self-publishes through Banners of Death Press. When he’s not writing, Dave K. is a chemical compound in which the atoms are bonded by covalent bonds in a continuous network.

Eileen Kelley, a.k.a., DJ Mix Mistress, is from Somerville, MA and now lives on Cape Cod via Boston and Copenhagen. She won second place for novel excerpts in contests held by the National League of Pen Women and the Houston Writers Guild. Her short stories have been chosen as contest finalists by Glimmer Train. She was also a recipient of a Summer Literary Seminar fellowship in Vilnius, Lithuania. This is her first published story.

Most recently, Sandra Kolankiewicz’s work has appeared in or been accepted by Gargoyle, Monkeybicyle, Percontra, The Cortland Review, Chaffey Review, SNReview, Rhino, New Plains Review, Monkeybicycle, Common Ground Review, Noctua, Psychic Meatloaf, Bellingham Review, Anomalous Press, Atticus, and Solo Novo. Turning Inside Out won the Fall Black River Competition at Black Lawrence Press. Blue Eyes Don’t Cry won the Hackney Award for the Novel. She teaches Developmental English at West Virginia University at Parkersburg.

Marissa Korbel is a college instructor, attorney, and fifth generation San Franciscan. She studied theater at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, and at New York University’s Tisch College before obtaining her BA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College, and her JD from Lewis and Clark Law School. Marissa has published poetry in the collection From the Camera Obscura, and in the anthology, Things I Have to Tell You. She creates her best writing in the neon gray fog that is the hallmark of the Outer Sunset. She is currently working on her first book, a memoir.

Kevin McLellan is the author of the chapbook Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent or forthcoming poems in journals including: Barrow Street, Colorado Review, failbetter, Horse Less Review, Kenyon Review Online, Sixth Finch, Western Humanities Review, Witness and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge MA, and sometimes teaches poetry workshops at the University of Rhode Island in Providence.

Brian Russell’s poems have appeared in Bat City Review, Epoch, LIT, Mid-American Review, and Quarterly West. He holds a BA from Miami University (Ohio) and an MFA from the University of Houston, where he served as poetry editor for Gulf Coast. Brian is the 2012 recipient of Bread Loaf Bakeless Literary Publications Prize. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two dogs.

Mark Wagstaff was born on the south coast of England and lives in London. Since 1999 Mark has had stories published across a range of journals and online in the US and UK. He has also published four novels and a novella. Mark’s most recent novel, In Sparta, a story of radicalism, conformity and terror, is available in print and ebook. Mark’s first collection of short stories appeared in 2002 and his second collection will be published in 2012 by InkTears. He is also working on an ebook project with Folded Word.

Martin Willitts, Jr., was recently nominated for two Best of The Net awards and his 5th Pushcart award. He had eight poetry chapbooks accepted for publication in 2011, including “True Simplicity” (Poets Wear Prada Press,), “My Heart Is Seven Wild Swans Lifting” (Slow Trains), “Why Women Are A Ribbon Around A Bomb” (Last Automat), and “Art Is Always an Impression of What an Artist Sees” (Muse Café), among others.

Cindy Zelman lives near Boston and has published creative work in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, The Whistling Fire, Feminist Studies, Sinister Wisdom, The Huffington Post and other journals. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from The Solstice MFA program of Pine Manor College.