Corvus Review
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CORVUS REVIEW ISSUE 8S 2017 2 TOC A. Mughal 3 S. Roberts 140 J. Schueler 235 C. Kosch 9 J. Hunter 142 M. Minassian 236 G. Jeffers 12 N. Kovacs 148 R. Flanagan 237 T. Elson 17 T. Rutkowski 151 Flash Fiction Competition Winners B. Iozzia 21 B. Diamond 153 Hon. Mention: A. Trodd 238 B. Stanwyck 23 F. Miller 157 2nd Place: C. Stanley 240 J. Manzano 25 K. Casey 166 1st Place: R. Reeves-Murray 242 E. Ferry 31 K. Hanson 168 S. Leet 32 J. Butler 171 Bio’s 244-E N. Orts 33 R. Massoud 173 T. Mihocik 41 C. Valentza 178 T. Frank 47 D. Vitucci 179 J, Serri 52 J. Hickey 183 B. Petersen 58 J. Bradley 188 M. Waldman 66 S. F. Greenstein 189 S. Slavin 75 J. Mulhern 195 C. Wellons 77 B. Varghese 201 R. Heby 78 K. Maruyama 208 A. O’Brien 80 Poetry P. Beckstrom 83 E. Smith Sleigh 216 J. Bristow 85 M. L. Johnson 217,218 D. Marsh 88 (NF) B. Abbott 219 C. Palmer (NF) M. Ehrlich 220 R. Hemmell 97 (SF) D. Hearne 221 K. Shields 99 R. Stout 222 J. Half-Pillow 101 D. Mager 223 M. Wren 109 K. Hemmings 224, 225 D. Clark 110 N. Rounds 226 P Kauffmann 112 K. Dronsfield 228 J. Hill 115 J. Zola 229 J.Gorman 117 P. Ilechko 230 B. Taylor 124 N. Crick 231 M. Ferro 131 I. Orpi 232 M. Laing 133 M. Danowsky 233,234 3 The Ear Alisha Mughal I left the house that morning because I felt trapped inside — stifled within those whitewashed walls, looming over me blank and silent and expectant. Intimidated by the boxes piled high that needed unpacking. I couldn’t get any window to open and I couldn’t breathe. There didn’t seem to be enough fresh air around me. It was stuffy, the house, full of only my own stale breath. Stuffy especially when compared to the day beyond those stuck windows. The clear blue sky, the sunlight like the tawny pages of an old book that flooded the lane winding away from the house and toward the town, the playful breeze that stirred and flirted with the skinny branches of the still-naked trees. It made me feel left out, overcome with a palling sadness that a part of me could not abide by, the part of me that saw the vibrant and open day, not the part of me that felt sorry for and lingered over my body trapped within the house. It was the part of me that wanted me to be active in the day, walking that warm lane and feeling the cool air carousing with my hair. It was the part of me that won because I stepped out. And I walked. I thought as I walked. About myself. I walked to the field that roamed a way before the entrance to the town, the field with the tall gnarled grass and the dilapidated church. The sky was so clear — a glazed blue that looked like a frozen lake at dusk, right before the sun leaves the lavender sky in a pink and orange blaze. The expansive field itself — seeming without end, meandering to meet the sky at the horizon, the grass lilting in the breeze like the softly-rippling waves of a calm sea, the only interruption the leaning church that with its overgrown pathways seemed a floating glacier — seemed to exude the yellow light for the day. It was the tall grass, baked beige and white, that seemed to glow. But, as I walked into the field, I noticed that near the ground the grass was budding green, as if secretly, like a face blushing pink beneath a mask. I made my way into the grass, parting it with my arms in front of me as I walked. It reached up to my waist. I had no aim, I just walked. Until I found myself in a small clearing in the grass, a little way away from the church. It was really just the tall grass flattened, as though someone had been lying there with the dry grass beneath them a scratchy mattress. In a little corner on the ground, on top of the flattened grass, was a small pile of rocks. Or pebbles rather. I looked up around me and then down at the pebbles again. I assumed that whoever was here had collected these pebbles and had been throwing them at the church, which more than anything now was a collection of beams lazing uselessly against still-standing beams, whatever was left of the framework, a useless and decaying skeleton. I don’t know why I assumed this — it just seemed like something I would do. And why should my thinking be any different from someone else’s? I picked up a pebble. It was smooth and round and looked more as though it belonged at the bottom of a raging river than in this field. I threw it toward the church. It struck a beam, I could tell not which, and about me exploded a flat sound, like a car 4 backfiring. I picked up another, and again threw it without aim at the church. The flat sound splintered through the air and fell away just as flatly without an echo. A frail beam fell over and down from its leaning position, down with a tedious thud, sending up a cloud of dust like a trapped ghost whose hem had been caught for the longest time beneath an edge of the beam. It was satisfying — the throwing, the inevitable flat sound that at the same time felt substantial because it was so loud. I threw another pebble, and then another, thinking, as I carried out my novel but inefficient demolition method, about oranges. I remembered a day when I was a kid, like this one, filled with the same soft yellow light. I remembered white linen curtains billowing in a warm breeze like the one that now played with my hair. I was eating oranges and wondering how whoever made them filled the tiny pulp packets with juice. I remembered my mother laughing and then telling me that it was God who did that, all by himself, and that no task was too outrageous for God. I remembered imagining myself carrying out the task but then, growing impatient, giving it up, deciding it impossible that God wouldn’t have given up. My eyes still on the church’s framework, I reached my hand down again and found myself holding something warm and soft, not cool and hard and smooth as the pebbles had been. Not absolutely malleable either. I looked in my hand and found myself holding an ear, a human ear. Reflexively, my hand jerked away from under it and it fell to the bed of flattened grass. I wiped my hand on my shirt with my eyes still on the thing. I looked around. There was nothing there in the wide yellow field but the leaning dead church. Nothing there but the clear sky above. I kneeled down to get a closer look at the ear. I half expected it to move, to get up and walk away, but it didn’t. It lay there, looking beige and pink and alive. I poked the lobe with my finger and it was still warm and soft, gave slightly under my touch, not at all as I’d expected a dead body part to be — tough and waxen. There was no blood on it. Where it had been severed — if it had been severed — from whatever head it belonged to there was a pink demarcation line, no gore. Just an inoffensive pink, like a still-healing wound before it becomes dense and dry scar tissue. I pulled out an unused tissue from my jeans pocket — because I always carry tissue because you never know when you’ll need tissue — and scooped up the ear with it. I wrapped it up in the tissue and made my way out of the field. I kept the small parcel in my hand, feeling that putting it in my pocket wouldn’t be right. I walked the dusty lane away from the field and the dead church and into town, to the Sheriff’s Department. Away from the golden field under the gauzy sky, the town was grey, simmering under a thunderhead that seemed to have snuffed all the yellow out from the day. The Sheriff and his buddy Roy Palmer, each apparently without a care, were rocking sleepily on the porch of the Sheriff’s Department in their rockers, their black straw panama hats nudged to the far nether regions of their heads, each reclining deeply. Roy was chewing on the nubile green base of a long blade of glass that ended frayed and far away from his mouth — he’d probably plucked it from the yellow field. The Sheriff was chewing on tobacco, a silver metal spittoon near his legs, which I kept my distance from. 5 “Howdy, Katie,” the Sheriff said from his rocker, turning his tan, weather-beaten face up toward me and brushing his grey hair, still speckled with some stubborn black, out of his eyes. Roy nodded in my direction and the blade of grass quivered, waving a nervous hello. “Hello Sheriff Truman. Hello Roy.” “I hope you and your husband are settling into our little village nicely,” the Sheriff said. I told him that we were. I didn’t tell him that after two weeks I still hadn’t unpacked anything but the barest of essentials.