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Volume 4, No. 3 Issue 12 Typehouse Literary Magazine Editor in Chief: Val Gryphin Prose Editor: Lily Blackburn Poetry Editor: David Midkiff Poetry Editor: Jackson Berkley Visual Art Editor: John Koch Intern: Sophia G. Denney Typehouse is a writer-run literary magazine based out of Portland, Oregon. We are always looking for well-crafted, previously unpublished writing and art that seeks to capture an awareness of the human predicament. If you are interested in submitting, visit our website at www.typehousemagazine.com. ©2017 Typehouse Literary Magazine. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced in any form without written permission. Typehouse Literary Magazine is published triannually. Established 2013. Cover Artist: Zola (see page 1) Table of Contents: Fiction: In Flawed Essence Serena Johe 2 Buried Bones Eric Gier 14 Villagers Douglas Cole 30 The Lernaean Dietrich Andriana Minou 39 The After Party Andrew Hamilton 50 The Bleeder Jim Naremore 54 Communicable Molly DiRago 80 A Time and a Place Rose Wunrow 89 Sun in the East, Sun in the West Philip Dean Brown 94 Heat from the Pavement Katy Mullins 106 The Climax Ashley N. Melucci 114 Where We Go From Here Julia Blake 124 How To Live On The Edge Hannah Suchor 131 The Blue Line Jay Vera Summer 145 Andrew Dreams of Fire Lucas Flatt 155 Poetry: Ian Kappos 10 James Croal Jackson 28 Mahdi Ahmadian 41 Olga Dugan 66 David Gilmore 104 Bridget McDonald 120 Elspeth Jensen 151 Visual Art: Zola Cover/1 Andrea Adams 25 J. Ray Paradiso 46 Filo Canseco 71 Amy Kotthaus 117 Alicia Buster 142 Daniel Ableev 163 Zola is a poet and photographer living in North Carolina. Issue 12 1 Serena Johe is an avid reader and writer with a particular interest in speculative fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Five on the Fifth, The Forge Literary Magazine, Waccamaw, Shoreline of Infinity, Chantwood Magazine, The Colored Lens, and FLAPPERHOUSE, amongst others . In Flawed Essence Serena Johe Ten years ago, Saki did a very stupid thing. Then she did another, and another, and another, as stupid things tend to beget more of the same when they’re left alone to proliferate like the tangles of clovers and bursts of dandelions in her neglected backyard. The first dumb thing she does is watch the girl in the courtyard get shoved against the wall of the schoolhouse, her eyes wide and blank with terror in the face of her sneering persecutors. Saki remembers the girl’s name is Cara. She spends her time in class drawing looped figurines, thorny silhouettes of ballet dancers, and matted irregular knots of some jungle vine Saki has never seen. Her drawings are carefully outlined in highlighters and gel pens that smear across the pages under the cautious guidance of her thumb, swirling licks of color to fill the emptiness between lines. The other thing Saki knows about Cara is what everyone else in their class knows about Cara, too: the birthmark on her face. The dumb thing comes in the lack of doing, this time. She watches Cara squirm with trepidation as her attackers push accusing fingers into her chest and flood her ears with biting words that Saki isn’t close enough to hear. Cara lets them. She does not push them away or swat at their fingers. She doesn’t even think to move, and Saki imagines that is the mark of a truly helpless animal, one that’s spent so long being prodded in its cage that it won’t run even when the door is left open. But she observes this and does nothing. If she tried, they would turn on her instead, and no matter how much she feels the loneliness that webs in the empty corners of her mind, housing that small discomfort is easier than having it filled with the hatred of others, and she knows it. So, Saki does nothing, at first. It’s only after the bullies leave Cara sobbing in a heap on the stone path to the playground that Saki takes action. “Hi.” She does not bother to forewarn the other girl of her presence. It wouldn’t matter to a creature so fragile and incurably petrified. Anything would have startled her. Instinctively, Cara brings her knees to her chest and bows her head, expecting a blow that doesn’t come. “I’m not going to hurt you,” Saki says quietly, and then to prove it, she extends a hand and gently unfolds the limbs drawn protectively around 2 Typehouse Literary Magazine Cara’s torso. Cara, too frightened to resist, lets her, though she still doesn’t speak. The birthmark coiled on one half of her face is like the spiral of a galaxy, a twisted contour of maroon and burgundy starting at a point by her left ear and expanding outward in circuitous tendrils. It’s a shape more fitting for something bigger or smaller than a person, Saki thinks, like what someone might find under a magnifying glass or peering through the lens of a telescope pointed into the recesses of the sky. One curl crosses the bridge of Cara’s nose and ends in a sharp hook on her nostril. The whole design is flat to her skin, imprinted like a tattoo and peppered with tiny freckles like burning embers. Although she clearly wants to, Cara resists covering her face, and Saki turns away from the mark and meets her apprehensive eyes. She’s calmed somewhat, but it’s nothing close to being at ease. Saki doesn’t know how to make it that way. She’s never had friends before, doesn’t know how to talk to people, though she understands many things about them. Enough, she hopes, to pretend. “Confidence is all about faking it, you know,” Saki says with a bravado she doesn’t feel and experience she doesn’t have. “If you pretend it doesn’t bother you, they’ll get bored and give up after a while.” “But it does bother me,” she whispers hoarsely. “Only because people make fun of it, right? So if you pretend it doesn’t bother you, and they stop, then it really won’t.” Saki is trying to be helpful, but she doesn’t know exactly why. Perhaps it’s that they’re both always alone. Maybe it’s the strange and wondrous drawings Cara keeps hidden in her notebook, images that are both foreign and familiar in their abstruseness, like the memory of a vivid dream. Or maybe it’s the aching absence in Saki’s own mind. She wonders if she’s only here to satisfy the constant longing that someone might do this for her. Either way, she wants to help even though she’s not sure that someone like her ever could. The advice only confuses Cara, though, and she pushes her birthmark into the knee drawn up to her chest. She doesn’t look at Saki when she says, “I can’t.” She can, though – Saki is sure about that, at least. Any garden can flourish with the right tools. “Meet me here again tomorrow,” she replies in as mollifying a tone as she can manage. “I have something for you that might help.” Cara does not promise to be there, but the curiosity leaving her lips parted and her eyes wide is enough of a promise anyway. # Saki spends that night wandering the landscape of her mind. She knows this is an odd thing, the sort of strangeness that can’t be justified and which only grows convoluted the more one tries, so, Saki simply Issue 12 3 doesn’t. The separation occurred at a time in her life that she can’t recall with any degree of detail or surety. Memories perforate like the papers in her notebooks, tiny fissures creating fragile seams in her recollection, creasing images, distorting voices until each one undulates as if spoken through a fan. All she’s left with is raw sensation, and that, at least, she recalls vividly. It began when a nightmare forced her from sleep in a sweat of asphyxiating terror. Her mother had not woken, as she didn’t many days. Saki sought relief elsewhere. She faced the pooling stars and the white puffs of dandelions in the backyard, their clusters of seeds deformed by the wind as if someone had come and taken a bite out of their feathery heads. She felt so sad for them, a blood-seizing, miserable anguish that pushed her away from herself until she no longer was. She imagines some smarter, wiser part of her had taken over to vanquish the darkness festering like a rotted wound in her heart, and that part retreated to the most inner sanctum of her mind. Saki walked through the valley of her consciousness as if she’d been put there, a body in a physical place. That’s when the restoration began. She understood the parched earth beneath her feet and the wilting grass belonged to her and her alone, and secured in that privacy, nobody else could touch it. Saki took the seeds of the few living plants and buried them in mounds of crumbling red dirt. She wandered to the anemic river between two bare branched trees and watered them, cultivating the life in her mind until its surface bore the weight of a thousand colorful wildflowers. It didn’t make her any less lonely, but it did provide her the means to accept it. As she mapped the topography of her soul, trimmed the unruly branches of vines that threatened to strangle the life from the red-leafed maples and the marbled bark of sycamores, and grew familiar with the shoots of each plant and every slick rock in the network of streams, she learned she could manipulate her mind with thoughtful inflorescence.

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