SPRING 2017 A PETIT LITERARY JOURNAL VOLUME 2 ISSUE 1

The Origins of the John Fowles Center “The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.”

s the 20th Anniversary Over the years, we corresponded Aof the John Fowles Center but lost touch until 1996 when approaches, I thought it would be I was awarded a Leverhulme a good idea to talk about how it Fellowship to teach at the all began. I first started to write University of East Anglia in Fowles in 1978 when I was in a Norwich. The Creative Writing quandary about whether or not Department at UEA had always to pursue a literary career and/or been considered the premier a writing career. I wrote Fowles program in the UK and, at the for two reasons: 1) I was a fervid time, faculty such as Malcolm admirer of his work and 2) we Bradbury, Max Sebald, Andrew shared the same birthday: March Motion and Vic Sage, among 31. I knew he lived in Lyme Regis others, were alive and well and and wrote him a letter hoping that productive. At the time, Chris the postman would know exactly Bigsby was the director of the where Fowles lived and deliver it Arthur Miller Center for American which he did. He wrote me back Studies and he asked me if I’d and said: “I think the academy in be interested in a pilot project general does not make a proper that Fowles had initiated. It was distinction between the self- a project that involved turning critical faculty a novelist needs his Belmont estate into a writer’s and the public kind of critical retreat after his death. I was quick faculty required in the teacher to say yes even though I had no of literature. On the other hand I authority to do so and my family have not much faith in the garret and I traveled to Lyme Regis to theory of artistic creation. The meet Fowles and talk about the pressures there can be just as project. It was the first time in 18 bad, of course.” He recommended years since we last communicated finding an agent which is a story and meeting him was an anxious unto itself and finished by writing: honor. But, I thought, he was “I am sorry I can’t help more but at typically Fowlesian: flattering to least I can wish you well. At heart my ex-wife, teasing my son, and it’s everyone his own voyage, and I scolding me for not writing more; don’t think advice from outsiders and admonishing me to visit the can ever mean very much.” I Greek island of Spetses where he wrote him back thanking him wrote The Magus. Still haven’t for his thoughtful comments. done that. Exactly what I had

1 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University Contents

Rebecca Goodman...... 38 Introduction POETRY FICTION Forgotten Night (Excerpt) Angela Pradelli...... 43 The Origins of the John Margo Berdeshevsky...... 17 Linda Kalaj...... 8 Pronouncing the World Fowles Center...... 1 La Belle Hermaphrodite A Wooden Door with a Glass Frame Blason for W.S. Merwin (Excerpt) Pablo Baler...... 46 The Last Word Yuriy Tarnawsky...... 27 James Blaylock...... 10 (Psychological Comedy) Small Houses ESSAYS Roses are Red/Violets are Blue Steve Katz...... 48 Carlos Gamerro...... 4 Zulfikar Ghose...... 33 Carlos Franz...... 14 Meloon Cardenio No More Bohème, Please Spaniards Lost in America A Woman Bathing Ben Stoltzfus...... 19 Michael Abbott...... 6 Singing Birds Beirut BIOGRAPHIES Parlez-Moi D’amour Burgos A Need To Keep A Souvenir Prayer About the Writers...... 52 Do You Remember That Evening? David Matlin...... 23 Douglas Messerli...... 41 “The Still Hunt” (Excerpt) Pleat Lou Rowan...... 25 Mellow Drama Without A Twisted in Arrears (Excerpt) Proper Villain Refugee Tatiana Servin...... 29 Red Line Karen Tei Yamashita...... 31 Borges and I Pedro Mairal...... 36 Early This Morning

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge those who have helped make the publication of MANTISSA possible: President Daniele Struppa, Dean Patrick Fuery, Dr. Joanna Levin, and Dr. Eric Chimenti.

This Issue was created by Chapman University’s Ideation Lab. Special thanks to Renee Bulda.

Look for Volume 3, Issue 1 in the Spring of 2018

2 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I Introduction

anticipated. He gave us a tour of much he relished The Magus and spoke. But the line that stuck with he would have been enthusiastic his Belmont estate, naming just how brilliant he was. John smiled. me more than any other was the about the center named after him about every plant in the garden. Somehow the talk transitioned line he came up with in answer and what its intent has always We talked about his novels, the to Hemingway. John listened for to a question about his writing. been. Though the innovation adaptations of such (which about as long as he cared to listen I can’t remember the exact in his work remains, what I he was not keen on) and about to about Hemingway and finally question, but his exact response miss after these twenty years teaching. I didn’t know when said, “Never liked Hemingway.” was, “I love the word dissent.” is his wit, his bawdiness, the and if the Belmont project would Conversation over. The third rascalian scarf he wore, but ever come to fruition (eventually time came when he was being Our sporadic correspondence even more I miss his aura. taken over by the Landmark interviewed by Dianne Vipond, covered twenty years and we met Trust and the house refurbished), a professor from Cal State Long only twice over a period of maybe but recalling the Arthur Miller Beach, at the Los Angeles Public ten days, but it didn’t take me long Centre at UEA I asked him if I Library. During a question and to discover what a unique human were to start something similar answer session, Fowles started being he was. From the coffee cups at Chapman could I use his name. fielding questions about the FLW. he coveted to his encyclopedic His response was immediate: Someone asked him where Sarah knowledge of every plant in his “Anything to help writing came from. He immediately went garden, to tray upon tray of his students.” When I returned to into some rambling discourse Smithsonian fossil collections, Chapman in the summer of 1996 about how it was the name of a Fowles was always original, I immediately set out to start the skiff or something along those perceptive, inquisitive. He was John Fowles Center for Creative lines. I turned to Sarah and looked the consummate curmudgeon, Writing, the first invitee being at her quizzically. She just shook amicably contentious and, like the Argentine novelist, Luisa her head as if a silent confirmation the Existentialists he so admired, Valenzuela, who came in 1997. that he was writing fiction as he lived an “authentic life.” I think Before the 1997 graduation, Fowles was on tour with his wife, Sarah. Wormholes had just come out and he was promoting the book as best as he could given his state of health which, even then, was fragile. I remember meeting him at the airport and when he came off the plane I held up a sign that read: Miles Green. Miles Green being the protagonist in his novel, Mantissa. When he ignored the sign I went up to him and asked him if he were Miles Green, and he looked at me as if I were a character in one of his novels he’d rather forget. I recall that when I introduced myself to him he shook his head as if he’d just remembered that, in a manner of speaking, he was Miles Green. Fowles and Sarah spent a week or so in Southern California where we visited the Getty, had lunch in Malibu, and listened to him lecture at the Los Angeles Public Library. I remember three specific incidents that, for me, encapsulated who John Fowles was. The first one came at the graduation ceremonies at which point he was awarded an Honorary Degree. He spoke to the graduates for several moments and, at one point, he said, “Question your teachers,” then he turned, pointed at me and continued, “Especially Axelrod.” Obviously, he was prescient. The second time was when we invited him to dinner at our home. We also invited a few close friends and during the dinner someone came up to him and started talking about how 3 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University essay Cardenio Conversation between WS: Now they are free to JF: No. He goes off into a wild John Fletcher and William marry one another. wood, the same one mad by Carlos Gamerro Shakespeare, Blackfriars Cardenio would have Gatehouse, London, JF: I was ready for that. Perhaps wandered into did dead Cardenio is a novel about William November 1612. you’ll like this one better then: men retain the use of their Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s once Cardenio and Lucinda are legs, and there meets an old play of the same name, based on JF: When Don Fernando tries to fast married, she jumps to her religious man, and after Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In the slip the ring onto her finger, feet and reveals the bladder some question with him Cervantes original, Cardenio Lucinda closes her hand into of blood she had concealed is converted both from his is a noble youth befriended by a fist, and when he and her under her clothes, the only purpose and from the world. Don Fernando, a duke’s son. father struggle to unclasp it, portion about her that the Don Fernando falls in love with she starts to scratch and bite. dagger has grazed. Resolving WS: Is it just my fancy, Jack, or do Cardenio’s beloved Lucinda and In the midst of the scuffle, to take revenge, Don Fernando I note a touch of tetchiness sends him away on an errand in feeling herself overpowered, sets his hand to his sword, in your answers, together order to demand her in marriage she draws her dagger and but all those present compass with a shade of mockery? from her father. Warned by a starts hacking right and him, urging him to conquer letter from Lucinda, Cardenio left, keeping her offenders at his own will for, as the curate JF: You are a hard man to please, comes back on the wedding bay; then, crying O woe the says, only death can now sever Will. Very well then, listen day and hides behind a piece of day! I’m circled round with Lucinda from her Cardenio. to this: the same as before, tapestry to see whether Lucinda fire; no way for my escape but it is Cardenio who kills will fulfil her promise of stabbing but through the flames! she WS: The trick is not bad, though Don Fernando. Lucinda herself at the altar rather than sticks the dagger between her I must say I’ve seen it before. recovers from her wounds… marry Don Fernando. But she, at Did Cardenio have any part ribs. Her father falls to his WS: After being twice the crucial moment, gives her knees, her mother faints… in it? I suppose a clever girl consent, and Cardenio, feeling like Lucinda – your Lucinda run through? betrayed by both his beloved WS: I thought her mother – would prefer to leave him JF: I beg your pardon. This one and his friend, wanders off was dead. in the dark, lest he mar all by belongs not to the ‘Lucinda in madness to the woods. missing his cue. What else? JF: What on earth made twice run through’ but to My Cardenio was written you think that? JF: This one is a variation of the the ‘Lucinda stabs herself’ originally in English, then first two. Believing Lucinda club. She does not actually rewritten in Spanish. The WS: O. I know not. They always dead, Cardenio steps forth, stick it in, ‘tis but a scratch, Spanish version has been are, in these plays. Excuse draws upon Don Fernando, and to scare her parents… me. Pray proceed. published in Buenos Aires by they fight. Recovering from her WS: Her mother is alive then. Editorial Edhasa in April 2016. JF: At this, Cardenio bursts forth swoon, Lucinda steps between from behind the tapestry them and is twice run through. In this excerpt from chapter 2, JF: Yes, she is. Shakespeare and Fletcher play to catch her fall. She dies WS: Like Romeo, with worse luck. around with the original story, in his arms, pledging her WS: What about the other one? trying to make it their own. everlasting love, and bidding JF: At this, Cardenio and Don him forgive Don Fernando Fernando fall to their JF: The other what? There is no who, stricken with remorse, knees and vow to build a other mother in the story. has the priest marry them mausoleum and wash it instead, after which Lucinda with their tears till their WS: The other plot. The one where brings their hands together dying day – You like it not. Don Fernando kills Cardenio. and dies upon the clasping. Was she alive or dead? WS: I do not like all this Cardenio and Don Fernando JF: Who? embrace to signify their embracing and forgiving, Jack. acquiescence to her last will. We had quite a run of it lately. WS: The mother. JF: You mean in your plays. JF: What do I care? A pox on the WS: I was trying to follow mother! Dead, dead. Dead in your steps. of the pox! Will, could we forget about the mother for JF: If it’s blood you want, why the moment please? I’ve then, I’ll fit you. Same as enough on my mind as it is. before, but after making a carbonado of their beloved, the WS: Whatever you say, Jack. So. two men fight on, incensed, Don Fernando lies dead each one blaming the other at their feet. Her father is for what has chanced; nothing pleased, I’ll bet, Don Fernando’s superior but seeing he cannot well swordsmanship carries the day marry his daughter to a and Cardenio is impaled to the corpse, we might assume hilt. The lovers are reunited he goes for second best? in death. Don Fernando JF: Yes. Once he has the stiff decides to enter a monastery carted away he drags the and spend in penitence the shaken curate from behind the remainder of his days. altarpiece, and the wedding WS: We have repentance then. is concluded with the spare groom. Do not bother, Will, I JF: You said no embracing like it not myself. Wait, wait. or forgiving. Is penitence I’m sure I had another one… banned as well? WS: This is not writing, Jack, WS: Does he repent there but juggling. Furthermore, and then? in all of these your play would end in, what, act three? What will you fill the 4 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I essay

other two with? Jigs? Too trampled on. Arrogant he out amazing chunks upon himself of a double fee bad Will Kemp has danced is, of course, beautiful and request. A prodigy more of – is hiding in the shrubbery himself out of this world. vain, and permanently the fair than the cloister, if and hears Cardenio beg drunk on the nobility of his you ask me, but still… Now of Lucinda to let him in JF: Plays have five acts! I had blood. Allegiance, honour, what was his name? He had later, when all are asleep, to forgot! See why I need religion are but formal toys; this habit of never owning make the consummation of you, Will? Damn it, I must friendship, an occasion for above one book at a time, their love a bar against Don have left it at home. Last betrayals of great note; vows, and once he was perfect in Fernando’s intent? After night I stayed up… hooks to catch fools withal. A it, would sell it to buy the this it is as easy as lying WS: What I think you need is word’s but breath, not aught next. Fineaux! Of course! The for him to have Cardenio some rest. A few days in a man may keep. The ones Phoenix of Dover we used to seized, stripped and in his the country, perhaps. he hates to hear the most are call him! He would go out at garments enjoy the maid. “Such a thing you cannot do;” midnight into a wood, he’d JF: Ah, here it is. Lucinda swoons, or rather the ones he most confide after swearing us to JF: As you did with Dick. Cardenio stays behind his loves, for they are a spur to secrecy in a most solemn way, WS:  Ha! What, the story of the cloth, and when Don Fernando, overleap himself in feats even fall down upon his knees citizen’s wife you mean? after reading Lucinda’s letter, more daring and unheard of. and pray heartily that the So you’ve heard it as well? seizes her dagger to stab her Devil should come to him ‘William the Conqueror withal, Don Barnard, her JF: What feats are these? Is he a in Kit’s shape. For, his voice soldier? A conqueror maybe? came before Richard the father, in trying to hinder would dwindle to a whisper Third’. A memorable phrase! him, catches the blow. WS: Of wenches’ plackets, aye. to confess, “’twas no other than Master Marlowe made JF: Was it not true then? WS: He does? He mocks them of their maidenheads and their men an atheist of me.” God, what a boor! I wonder what’s become WS: Alas, no! Too good to be true. JF: And falls to the of their lives, if they but of him. Wait! Wait! Here he Such things only happen floor, stone dead. conceive of standing in his in plays. Whoever heard way. Nothing pleases him is! Master Fineaux has taken WS: Proceed… possession of me! He opes of a woman mistaking her more than a challenge hotly man in the dark? For one urged, and those foolish my lips, and out come more JF: Well, the wedding cannot very thing, my prick is bigger enough to indulge him have of Don Fernando’s words: well go on, can it now? The than his. That’s why he to choose betwixt repenting guests stand aghast, Cardenio Jove, viewing me in pride, became an actor I guess. their rashness or their sins; emerges from his hiding place looks pale and wan there is no time for both. and, kneeling beside Lucinda’s JF: You were an actor as well. Dorothea and Lucinda are far Fearing my shower should weeping figure, solemnly vows from being his first conquests. drown him in his throne. WS: Yes, but not that good. to avenge her. I picture him, like Alexander, before a map of the world, Yes, Kit would get him right. He will travel from country WS: Now she’s in real trouble. seeking territory uncharted to country leaving no flower But pray, Jack, tell about by his feats. And shall I die, uncut; no door will stand Don Fernando. What and this unconquered be? against the battering of his happens to him? Yes, by the Lord, I have it! An overfucker! A Tamburlaine ram, no window is high JF: I’ve not quite thought it of cunt! He’ll overtup every enough for the vaulting of through, but I suppose he is man in the world, present, his pole. So, once we have arrested, and taken to prison… past or in times to come! our hero, everything falls O, if only Kit Marlowe were into place. Now, for the WS: Jack? A Duke’s son? And alive. There was a man could story. Where to begin? a Spanish one’s at that? help us with this play. JF: Everything seems to revolve JF: Of course you are JF: How would he have gone around the wedding scene. right. What then? about it, think you? WS:  It does, it does. It is WS: Say his father is a most WS: About it? He would have our axle-tree. So how powerful man at court, one gone straight for it, as an do we make it turn? the king himself stands arrow to its mark. Such JF:  Wrong with what we have? in awe of. He makes it a words he would have put point of honour to have into his mouth! Sapphires WS:  Don Fernando is outwitted his son’s many misdeeds and rubies on streamers of by these fools. By Lucinda at countenanced and overlooked. silk! This is how his Don least. He’s in earnest about The boy knows he cannot be Fernando would speak: marrying her, stands amazed punished. This is one of the when he reads her letter, tries mainsprings of his courage. Nature, that fram’d us to kill her in a fit of rage and of four elements JF: And the other one? kills her father by mistake. Wills us to wear ourselves Kit’s Don Fernando would WS: The other what. and never rest, not even want to marry her in the first place. Remember JF: Mainspring. Of his courage. Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, you the last meeting between Cardenio and Lucinda, at WS: O. The absolute conviction That perfect bliss and sole felicity, that all the virtues of the their window, the night world, piled on top of one The sweet fruition of a maidenhead. before the wedding? another, are but a Tower JF: Was it the night before? of Babel to the highness JF: Do you know it all by heart? of his blood. Therefore, he WS: Nay, barely enough to work WS: It is now. What if Don will have none of them. upon. You’re getting me Fernando, advertised by Virtuous behaviour is but mixed up with, what was his somebody, who – o yes, the a trick of aspiring citizens name, this man from Dover, friendly neighbour who and peasant slaves, and as who claimed he knew all of delivered Lucinda’s letter such worthy only of being Kit by rote, and could trot and now bethinks to avail 5 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University essay

PAR L E Z-MOI superstar from the 1960s and Marcailloux and she was 23 years Marat, Maraval, Marbouty… and 1970s is now rarely mentioned. old. He describes her as a dark then stopped. There was only one D’AMOUR vivacious meridional beauty, Marcailloux. And it was Ginette. I was recently leafing through interesting, intelligent and quick- A NEED TO KEEP the first volume of the Journals witted. Soon he was confiding It took me a few days to summon and was drawn to Fowles’ to his journal: “I feel closer to up courage to pick up the phone. A SOUVENIR description of his relationship her than anyone else I have How do you speak to an elderly with a young French student at ever known.” There is endless lady of 87 about a love affair that DO YOU Poitiers University, where he sensual kissing and caressing, took place 64 years previously? I was a teaching assistant. It was dancing at the student centre, dialled the number and played it REMEMBER THAT his first academic post and he moonlit walks in the surrounding straight; I introduced myself and was 24 years old. The episode countryside. “The next stage is asked if she knew John Fowles in EVENING? opens in January 1951: bed. She is too virtuous for that.” Poitiers in the early 1950s. There Fowles devotes over 70 pages to was a long pause and I expected by Michael Abbott Sunday January 7th the detailed description of them the phone to go down. But then a growing ever more intimate faint voice said “Yes I knew John Copyright Michael Abbott. Sitting about in a café most of the through the spring. He even Fowles.” What went through her First published in The Guardian UK day. People bore me profoundly begins to contemplate marriage. mind at that point? A complete and desperately. There is one girl stranger interrupting her quiet John Fowles died ten years ago. who is beginning to interest me Then my eye was caught by a life with questions from a lifetime The two volumes of his Journals fractionally. She attacks me all the footnote saying that Limoges ago. We chatted a bit and she were published just before and time, and I attack her, and we’re was Ginette’s home town. I live seemed not to be too disturbed by after his death. At the time they not bored while we’re doing it. in Limoges. On a whim I picked my impertinence. We arranged stirred up coverage and debate up the phone book to see if there to meet the following week. because they were extraordinarily Thus began an intense six month were any Marcailloux listed, candid and indiscreet. However, romance that clearly made a major although I thought that her And so began a conversation in the past decade the dust has impact on the young author. It maiden name would have since that transported us back to 1951 settled and, as is the nature of was his first serious love affair. been changed by marriage. My with a description of a young things, the name of this literary The student was called Ginette finger ran down the small print… poet/novelist just starting his

6 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I essay

career. Ginette is now a neat but of prose and a poem. The prose But time was killed. So the five Written next to the final frail lady, hard of hearing but is a mixture of French and dice rolled stanza, presumably by with that sharp intelligence still English, which was how John Fowles, is ‘mauvais!’ Bad! intact. She became an English and Ginette spoke together. teacher and never married. She And only our masculine has no surviving family. She “Occasional verse. A souvenir. honour lay at stake; “If I die tomorrow described Fowles as a difficult Without value as verse. I am in person, confident but reserved, the process of typing my complete But fortune proved a no one will be ironic and proud. He was writing work. Boring work but necessary. careless mother. constantly, poetry and prose. It If I die tomorrow no one will be able to decode it. was obvious then, she said, that able to decode it. It’s the ransom We prayed for four aces he wanted to write novels that of likely glory, or the stupidity It’s the ransom of were challenging and different. of certainly being forgotten. Do And unblinking between you remember that evening? our covetous fingers likely glory, or the Sometimes I write a poem just “There is endless to remember something, a need Found only the vacant stupidity of certainly to keep a souvenir. Even if the faces of two low pairs. sensual kissing and poetry is bad, it still has a sort being forgotten.” of value as a point of reference.” So lied, and tried to caressing, dancing disguise our fears. Ginette is puzzled why anyone Then there was the poem, with would be interested in this story. at the student centre, no title but an inscription at the But she knew us both, as On the face of it, it is of minor bottom: Café de la Paix 14.1.51. if we were married, interest; a footnote to a footnote in moonlit walks in Ginette explained: “The Café literary history. But on the other de la Paix was where all the So we yawned and lit hand it is a chance encounter that the surrounding students used to gather together. another cigarette, has opened a door into a room full It’s a poem from John to me.” of memories. I am holding a fragile countryside.” Watched the players of piece of paper, an unpublished Back home I immediately cross cards at other tables poem that marks the beginning As summer approached in 1951 it check with the Journal. And of the first real love affair of a was clear from the Journals that there, as part of the same entry And what the waiters celebrated British writer. I have his love had begun to cool. Their for Sunday Jan 7th when he first fetched and carried. a picture of a French provincial relationship effectively ended at mentions his ‘fractional interest’ café full of noisy students in a the end of that academic year as in Ginette, is the following: Wine, coffee. Wished we fog of filterless Gitanes, drinking he was leaving Poitiers. It was a “Feel ill and spend the whole had heels of wind, coffee and cheap red wine and difficult parting and he reports evening playing dice with arguing about Jean-Paul Sartre. Ginette saying “I wish I had never Ginette and Phil. Ginette, dark, Till it came to our turn to lie again. And in the middle of it are John met you.” He describes a final vivacious in a not too gleaming and Ginette playing dice, falling meeting on August 22nd: “She way. With fine dark malicious in love. It’s a piece of paper that had never seemed prettier to me,” eyes. She treats with a certain almost disappeared, but which on September 5th a “just and mock respect our student-lecturer Cleopatra triumphant! survived. If I don’t write it down dignified letter” from Ginette, and relationship. I taught them liar’s now, it will be lost forever. on December 6th another letter: dice. We played till midnight.” Mark and Julius in retreat! “for her all is over, dry bones…end is inevitable.” On December 26th, This is the poem: But we can prove by on the eve of his departure for direct quotation Greece and a new teaching job, he looks over his shoulder briefly: “I (Un coup de dés n’abolira shall not find a Ginette again.” O tail of the rattlesnake, jamais le hasard) struck on sarcophagus! She noticed when he became That we didn’t deserve famous many years later and did The five dice roll, dry bones the situation. read his novels. I asked if she had on the marble table……. any letters or photographs from the Poitiers period. “He gave me a passport photo but I lost that ages Dark Ginette did all the winning ago. I had lots of letters from him We hid them in our but I had a clear out not so long ago hands, and pretended, And we, tall twins in and they’ve all gone.” She seemed short calamity, happy to talk but there remained Pretended that they were a formality and a reticence, and I what they were not, Reluctantly had to lose – didn’t want to impose any longer. We agreed to stay in touch. That ourselves, we were But consoled ourselves who we were not, that with women A few weeks later Ginette called me. “I think I’ve found something And not what we really And dice you only hope, that you might want to see. Come were to one another. round.” On her table was a thin And do not choose! piece of typed paper: a paragraph And where did it get us? Nowhere,

7 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction A Wooden Door stood over her. From the corner I turned around, looked up wrong that night. My mother used of my eye, I noticed an outline at Mr. Petrovic, wrapped my to sing to me before going to sleep with a Glass of a man’s figure standing in the arms around his legs, burying I said. The woman looked down front doorway with the faint my face into them, and wept. at me and smiled. I would never moon behind him. He stepped a mention my mother to her again. Frame (Excerpt) Mr. Petrovic led me toward the by Linda Kalaj few feet forward to make himself visible. With his bearded face front door and motioned for me A car with rounded metal over When I was a young boy my and long arms, our neighbor to wait. I waited at the doorframe, thin tires waited for us at the father was killed. It was during appeared more clearly. As they shaking, between two worlds, top of the road. A man stepped the First World War. They found often had, at dawn, he and my and watched as he bent down out from the driver’s seat and my father’s body not far from mother exchanged honey for eggs. and closed my mother’s eyes. He opened our doors. I climbed into his bicycle alongside the road. lifted her arm, placed her hand in the back seat, the doors closed, He had been shot, once, in the “The end of the rope his and removed a small ring. He and we drove off. I did not turn head. My mother was left to walked back toward me and placed around. As the tires sprang over raise me, alone, and I fear my was, twisted, around the ring in the palm of my hand. the pockets of the path, I could see presence was only a reminder of itself, no differently My mother’s hidden pain had the dust lifting from the dirt and come to life by revealing itself in graveled ground coming up from all she had lost and everything than a sleeping she could never again attain. the marks of her skin I left behind the sides of the car and imagined serpent. Where the as Mr. Petrovic and I walked leaving a trail behind us as we At the age of six, in the early hours outside, hand in hand, away moved into the clear air ahead. of one winter morning, I recall noose had loosened from my world, away from the dreaming, standing at the top of I could see bruises inside of my house, and into the “Upon entering the an apartment building’s marbled stillness of dawn that had been stairwell, looking down over on her skin.” awakened by the crow of roosters. house a large fireplace the railing at the endless center held a hanging Kneeling down, I sat on my knees, In the short coming days I would of floors below, and listening placing my face lower, closer, into cauldron with small to the echoes of the neighbors remain with Mr. Petrovic and his hers. Her face appeared dull in wife before a middle-aged woman directly beneath me. Filled with the glow of the fire’s light and flames that danced excitement at the sound of their arrived at their home. A small she gazed at me with open still valise, prepared for me, was sitting at different heights boisterous dog, I dashed down the eyes. They were beautiful. A rope stairs in order to obtain a better next to the door. Mr. Petrovic below and around the had been loosened from around said that I would be well cared view and one of my legs gave way. her neck and lead outward on cauldron’s base.” Falling directly onto my knees I for and he and his wife bid me the floor away from her body. farewell. I trusted the man who didn’t allow myself to cry aloud With great confusion, I looked We drove for the next handful of from the pain for fear that my held the wilted child I had become hours before stopping for food up at my neighbor and then back in the days following my mother’s mother would find me. I held onto down at my mother. I followed and drink. My eyes peered out my knees and muffled my cry by death, and the same man that from the car window attempting the rope’s length with my eyes. brought my mother eggs every hiding my face between them. A The end of the rope was, twisted, to look into the windows of a woman walked up the stairs to morning, to fill the delight of a small house made of stone as an around itself, no differently than child who soaked the center of his ask if I were alright as her dog a sleeping serpent. Where the old woman opened its weathered hurriedly followed behind. When mother’s morning bread into the wooden door and happily gestured noose had been loosened I could soft yellow yolk that warmed my I looked up, her lapdog leaped see bruises on her skin. My mouth toward us to come into her home. toward me, jumping onto my chest belly. The woman, who did not The driver opened my side of pulled me downward, where I introduce herself, picked up my and licking my face. Startled, I placed my lips, and kissed the the car door and I stepped out, awoke from my dream, filled belongings and together, we left following the middle-aged woman discolored parts of her neck. I the house. As we slowly walked with the unexplained joy a young then allowed my eyes to follow in black clothing. Upon entering boy feels in a glorified moment away I turned my head back once. the house a large fireplace held the shape of her slightly arched In the winter’s air, clouded waves between pain and pleasure to find eyebrows, the dark chestnut lining a hanging cauldron with small that my mother was not next to me. blurred the white uneven outline flames that danced at different of her hair along her forehead and of the chimney spout and the her individually spaced eyelashes. heights below and around the I climbed from under the covers tiled roof of our neighbor’s home cauldron’s base. The scent of and slid my feet into the small I looked at her lips, the small point that resembled a child’s plastic of her chin and thin nose. Then, warm bread and meat stew filled worn slippers my mother always toy abandoned on a vast dirt road me with hunger. The inside of placed at the side of our bed my eyes stopped. At the center where nothing else stood around it. of her neck, where the height the house was barren: a small and walked to the doorway. As wooden table with five chairs I stood looking out toward the of her defined collarbones met, I wondered how warm the there were no marks or bruises. I woman’s skin was under the stood at its center, a wooden cross center of the main room our hung on the wall near the table, wood burning oven remained: stared at this part of my mother’s layers of black clothing and skin. There, at the small hollow, her heavy unbuttoned coat. and there were slight pockets unlit. The oven’s iron legs were about the floor making the ground mounted on four green tiles and between her collarbones, she remained free from the visible A long chain necklace was loosely uneven. Warmly, I was motioned on top of the oven, a candlestick wrapped around her neck from to sit at the table. Apart from the held a spent white candle as the wounds of her pain. Suddenly, the mounting weight of our neighbor’s which a rather large and long old woman, everyone settled into light from the fireplace trembled metal cross hung and sat over their places. The old woman then on the walls. I could see my hand on my left shoulder triggered me to stand. From where I stood, the white fabric of her chest. The placed a basket at the center of the mother lying on the floor. Her woman continued to hold my hand table. The basket was abundantly legs were splayed, in front of her. I memorized the outline of my mother’s body, and in the fire’s but said little. I watched the cross filled with golden crusted bread Slowly, I approached her, until the weakening glow, the image lived swing from her left side, to her shaped by the indentations of sound from beneath the soles of in the dark spaces of my mind right. From her right side, back to her fingers in the dough. Pouring my slippers became silent. There, as a boy and in the shadow of her left. I looked up at her and told water into our small glasses from next to the warm of the fire I who I would become as a man. her that I knew something was a tall thin metal pitcher, she spoke

8 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction of the wonderful eggs she gathered and out of the magnified chewing Following our meal, the four of sky, filled the empty seat next to that morning and I sat with my sound between my temples. The us sat near the fireplace as the me. This is all I would remember hands in my lap staring at the echo coming from my throat as I driver methodically turned the from the time I left our neighbor’s bread as my mouth watered. The gulped my water was interrupted handle of a copper metaled coffee home in Belgrade to the time old woman momentarily sat at by the old woman’s gasp. Suddenly, grinder. The two women lowered I arrived at the Bay of Kotor. the table and the adults began to the sound that seemed to stand their voices as the scent of ground pray. I bowed my head pretending still in the small spaces of time coffee beans filled our senses and to listen to their words as I stared in my mind was replaced by blanketed the words that quietly into my palms on my lap. All her gasp followed by the words filled the room. Before darkness I wanted to do was eat. Before that she had forgotten to share would fall, we were on the road, putting my spoon into the bowl, the most important part of the once again. I turned around to I looked up, and the old woman meal with us. Embarrassed, she wave to the old woman who had who lived in the house smiled. speedily walked toward a wooden welcomed us into her home from I ate every single part of food cheese box before returning behind the rear window of the that was put in front of me and with a very small round dish car before turning to face forward. did little more than listen to the filled with Kajmak. Everyone My eyes began to fall heavy as the conversation of the adults. The screamed with delight and my chatter from the front of the car coherency of their words were eyes widened. We continued to eat. fell silent and the late afternoon muffled and seemed to fade in sun, peering slightly from the

9 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction Small Houses pipe in water and electricity and length, its width and depth, the rush of enthusiasm he had told her by James P. Blaylock to pipe out sewage, turning the arrangement of tools, the sliding about the “box,” as if she would treehouse into something more panels and cubbyholes. And in be placated by the euphemism. The windows in the tiny wooden livable. He had enclosed a cold that same instant he had picked She hadn’t even looked up: no house faced east and west so as to water shower, too, the kind of out what he would take: the shock of horror, no gasp of get the most out of the sunlight, thing that he couldn’t have done several books that he would surprise, certainly no notion that which was filtered by avocado when Myrt was alive, nor would want in the end, what he and his idea had any value. She had leaves the year around. And it have had any need to do, except Myrt liked to call their desert simply gone on with the dishes was in the west window that as an antidote for idle hands. island books, which, along with as if she hadn’t heard him. He Johnson now placed an empty a cribbage board, a deck of cards, laughingly mentioned the two He emptied bottled water into the fishbowl: sparkling clean, its a bottle of sherry, and a couple glasses and the sherry in order fishbowl now, filling it to within gravel rinsed, its glass walls wiped of glasses would very nearly do to work the rigor mortis joke on an inch of the top, and then, in clean of algae—not a bowl at all, the trick. A bowl of popcorn her and lighten the leaden silence, the bucket on the floor, he swirled strictly speaking, but a three suggested itself, but he couldn’t but it hadn’t helped, and her debris out of the waterweeds gallon lidless cube salvaged from see any way to make it work. wordless dismissal of the subject before wiggling them down into a chemistry laboratory. In the had lasted the rest of her life. the gravel in the bottom of the # height of the summer, which was bowl, burying the lead weight Afterward he had gone walking by now two months gone, the sun wrapped around the base of the The fish moved lazily around its by himself in the neighborhood, crossed the sky almost overhead, clump. Beside the greenery he kingdom now, going to the surface designing the fine points of the and the house was illuminated placed a porcelain castle with to gulp air, swimming awkwardly box in his head: the joinery and by leafy sunlight through a bank an arched tunnel. Even if a man in its obese way, peering the finish, how he would cleat of windows under the shallow couldn’t live in his castle, he myopically out at the world. the outside with cross members, eaves, but in the autumn the sun could at least pass through it “Why two glasses?” he asked the top and bottom both, to keep fell away again in the direction of from time to time. He bent over fish aloud, watching it wiggle its the planks from cupping over the ocean, and the interior grew the bucket again to net out the way through the arch of the castle. the years. He had some heavy dim, so that Johnson needed a fish, a Chinese telescope moor, “In case rigor mortis should brass screws that would make lamp to read by even at mid-day. uncommonly fat and with bulging set in,” he answered, laughing a nice pattern against the oiled shamelessly at the old joke. With the turning of the seasons eyes. It had been Myrt who had oak. Beyond the exposed screws, he shifted the fish bowl around named the fish Septimus, which however, and the finger-jointed the small room, because he took was a damned good name for a fish. “It was still faintly corners and the cleating, there a keen enjoyment in the rays of When he released it into the clean scented with sherry would be no ornamentation at sunlight that rippled in the clear water, the sunlight shone on the after the long years, all. When it came to the afterlife, water and shone through the gold stomach scales and glowed fancy gewgaws were like coals to translucent green leaves of the through the jet black translucent and had called Newcastle, or worse, shameless waterweeds. It occurred to him veiltail and fins, and the bowl up memories.” marks of vanity. The same could now that a competent engineer was transformed into the living be said about a toolbox, which might have designed the house ornament it was meant to be. Watching the fish swim through was meant to be functional to spin on a sort of lazy-susan the clear water, he noticed a rather than decorative. # platform, like a rotating stage gently moving reflection in On his walk he had gone some in a theatre, so that it could the glass itself now, although It had been forty years ago that distance beyond his usual haunts be moved on its axis to take when he tried to make it out it Johnson had been working in and could not recognize the name advantage of natural light. disappeared. When he looked his garage shop, stacking boards of the tree-shaded street that he beyond it again, focusing on the and drinking coffee, when he found himself on. He was on the But he was no engineer; he was now-hovering fish, the reflection had abruptly gotten the idea of point of turning around to retrace at best a carpenter, or had been reappeared, a shadowy bending building his own coffin, or better his steps when he saw an open before he retired. He had built the motion, as if someone reaching yet, casket, just like the tattooed garage door. In the dim interior house in the avocado tree forty down into a trunk or a box to cannibal in the story: a simple a sheet of plywood was set up years ago out of redwood fence retrieve something, and then wooden box, without the morbid across a couple of big cardboard lumber, setting it not on the tree standing and turning away. He shape of old fashioned wooden boxes. Odds and ends of old junk branches themselves, but within looked behind him, and through coffins, that would function lay on the floor, and although them, resting it on posts fixed in the window saw that a limb from during his life as a tool box. He there was no sign posted, and no concrete pilings. In the years since, the avocado tree was bowing in envisioned compartments for one visible inside, from the look the tree limbs had bent and bowed the afternoon breeze, but he could hammers and saws and planes, for of things it was pretty clearly a and draped around and over the see nothing in it that suggested squares and levels and a set of bits garage sale. He stepped in out rough-cut wooden walls and roof the reflection in the glass. When and augers; cubbyholes for nails of the sunlight, and right off he as if to embrace them. As time he turned back to the bowl, and screws and wood dough; slots found a half dozen things to buy: passed and the foliage thickened, Septimus was still hovering in and panels that could be arranged a keyhole saw, an old bottle jack, the natural light had dwindled, the water beyond the open arch and rearranged over the passing some heavy brass strap hinges for which was to be expected, since of the castle, looking back out at years until, when the sun was a nickel a throw that even back that was the way with everything. him, but the sun seemed to strike setting at last, metaphorically then were worth five bucks. They the glass from a slightly lower Johnson had made a few additions speaking, he could remove the were more showy than a piano angle, and the reflection was gone. and changes to the treehouse interior complications more or hinge, but they were solid enough less altogether, leaving only a nook in more recent years—in the # to work first rate on the casket lid. years, that is to say, following and a cranny for the few things, Myrtle’s death on the eve of their beside himself, that he wanted On that morning forty years ago At about the time he had these anniversary—enclosing the posts to take along to the afterlife. he had come into the kitchen for treasures collected, an old to make a garden shed of the space another cup of coffee, where he woman came out from inside He had instantly pictured the below, and, more recently, digging found Myrtle washing dishes at the house with a shoe box full finished box in his head: its a trench across the back yard to the sink. In an ill-thought-out of barware that had seen its day. 10 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction Among the muddlers and swizzle sticks and cork pullers was a single sherry glass, lead crystal etched with a likeness of Queen Isabella of Spain. The glass held perhaps three ounces, and had an octagonal base and a gold rim, the gold worn thin from long years of use. Johnson bought it at once, thinking about the afterlife again. Of course in time he would want two of them, one for himself and one for Myrt. If she made it to the next place before he did, then he would bring the glasses and the sherry and the rest of it along and catch up with her there. If he went on ahead first, then he would be ready for her when she arrived. And of course buying the single glass right now pretty much justified his building the casket—which, he would readily admit, tempted the hell out of fate—because the single glass answered that particular superstitious dread with a counter-element of superstition: you could safely tempt fate, he reasoned, by building your own coffin, if you challenged fate to find you a matching sherry glass. Fate wasn’t always dealt the high card; like anyone else, it had to wait for the aces to come around. Even the likeness of Queen Isabella was a kind of portent, or at least it was another piece that fit in with the growing puzzle of their lives: Myrt enjoyed a glass of sherry, a habit she had acquired years ago during their European travel, and Johnson had developed a taste for the stuff himself, at first out of deference to her. In Barcelona they had found a dusty old rectangular bottle in a market It was still faintly scented with treehouse in the renovated garden Septimus nosed the top of the off a narrow alley, estimating sherry after the long years and had shed. The key to the shop padlock, water, and he pinched some flakes from the layer of dust and from called up memories. Swept with along with his long disused house out of the canister of food and the price that the contents must nostalgia, Johnson had shown keys, also lay in a niche in the sprinkled them into the bowl. somehow be remarkable. At their her the garage sale sherry glass, casket, or more accurately in Someone had told him that a pension, Johnson had accidentally making up a stretcher about why the toolbox, since he was still goldfish’s stomach was only as big dropped it onto the stones of and when he had bought it. Having living and breathing. Over these as its eye, in contrast to people, the courtyard, and the wine only one of them, they had found last few years he had become a whose eyes were often bigger than had certainly smelled as good two other glasses to toast with, man who carried with him only their stomachs. Whether any as it must have tasted. Myrt had and early the next morning, while a single key —only the one key of this was true he didn’t know, soaked the label off the shards Myrtle was still sleeping, he had for the old Cadillac, which with but it was true that a well fed and pressed it in a big dictionary. retrieved the sherry glass from a certain artistic foresight he’d fish could easily live for a month Much later yet —Twenty years? where it still sat downstairs and had re-keyed a decade ago so that or more without food, and for Twenty five?—Johnson had returned it to its lonesome double the ignition key and the trunk that he was grateful, because he found an identical bottle on the niche among the tools in the key were the same. It was true wasn’t such a recluse as all that: shelf of a Vietnamese liquor box, sliding the little protective that he had a copy in a magnetic if he were to pass away—when, store in Little Saigon, entirely by panel door closed in front of it. Hide-a-Key box hidden beneath that is to say—the postman at the bumper, but a copy wasn’t least would find the mail piling chance, the squatty green bottle # catching his eye. He had brought the thing itself, and anyway the up in the box out front, and one the wine home and given it to Nowadays his shop was closed up, magnetic box might have lost its thing would lead to another. locked with a big padlock. The hold and fallen onto the roadway her with a bouquet of roses, and He picked up the empty bucket few tools he needed for routine years ago, as often happened. Myrt had dug the old label out and went out, hauling it down of the dictionary to compare it. maintenance he kept below the 11 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction the stairs that wrapped around shadowy movement in the glass He crossed to the car port, He had hand rubbed tung oil into the tree trunk and setting it in of the goldfish bowl again, and looking at the closed up house, the wood to finish it, renewing the shed below. Then he ascended again there was something about the clapboards layered with it every New Years Day through the stairs again, stopping for a the movement that didn’t look dust, and he swung open the all the years since, making up breather on the first landing. His like leaves and branches at all, little gate, heading out toward excuses for the hour or so he spent heart fluttered like a small and that had something of a human the front sidewalk, closing the in the shop while Myrt watched helpless bird, and he felt the shape and purpose, like successive gate behind him. He opened the Rose Parade. All in all it was a familiar faintness coming on, moving images of someone, or an the driver’s side door on the shame that a man’s coffin couldn’t profound enough so that he sat infinity of someones, returning Cadillac, leaned in, and slipped be left to later generations, like down hard on the plank stair and again and again to perform a the key into the ignition, then a well-built chair. But like the focused all of his energy simply small task, bending and reaching closed the car up. Out front, the man himself, it was a piece of on the moment, on his own being and straightening up like the neighborhood was going about its furniture that was meant to be and on the sun-dappled shadows staccato moving images in an usual Sunday afternoon business. buried. Time and dust, he thought, that moved roundabout him. He endlessly repeated film strip. He waved cheerfully at a neighbor, running his finger over the leaned his head against the railing who, after a seemingly puzzled Formica countertop and smiling post, breathing in the scent of Johnson’s heart had evened moment, waved back at him, and at his own joke, happen to us all. weathered redwood mingled with out again, although he still felt he stood for a moment to watch a the sharp bay leaf smell of dead weak. He stood up, getting his dozen crows hard at work in the “Dust motes swirled avocado leaves. After a time the sea legs under him, and clicked branches of a pecan tree across pain in his arm faded and he on the gooseneck lamp that lit the street, the broken husks of in the sun rays that stood up again, got his bearings, the fishbowl. At once the moving the pecans littering the sidewalk slanted between the shadows disappeared, the and climbed to the tiny veranda, below, staining the concrete with window curtains, where he entered the small house, illuminated glass harboring no brown streaks as they had done stepping onto the little piece of reflections. There were a couple every autumn without fail. and the clock ticked Turkish carpet and lying down of hours at most before dark, and away heavily, filling on the bed. He gazed again at he had some little distance to He turned to look at the front of the sunlit fishbowl, listening travel before he could sleep—not his house, taking it all in: the the house with its to the rustling of leaves in the miles to go, like the poet, but if broad front porch with its rusted solemn reminder.” afternoon wind. It occurred to he was any judge of the ocean, the porch lamp and swing with rusted him now that his existence had tide was making, and wouldn’t chains, the overgrown bushes He went into the living room now largely been that of a beachcomber wait for him any more than it in the flowerbeds, the big glass and sat down heavily on the couch on the lookout for seashells and would wait for the next man. He picture window with dusty and to rest. Dust motes swirled in the flotsam, finding lucky odds and descended the stairs and entered sun-faded curtains long ago drawn sun rays that slanted between the ends by chance up near the high the garden shed, where he lifted across it. He climbed up onto window curtains, and the clock tide line, as he had found the his carpenter’s tools out of the the porch and fitted the key into ticked away heavily, filling the first sherry glass or the second box, laying them carefully on the the door knob, pushed the door house with its solemn reminder. bottle in the market, and that several shelves lining the wall. open, and, after locking the door He looked around, recalling those although the swiftly passing days He found his house key at the behind him again, walked into the times when he had lived in this were slipping away from him at bottom and put it into his pocket kitchen, breathing in the dusty, room every day and evening, when last, they hadn’t failed to cast up along with the key to the Cadillac, closed up scent of the place. He he had come down the stairs their small bounty of souvenirs. then walked out onto the back half expected the kitchen clock before dawn and turned on the He closed his eyes finally and lawn, finding with unexpected to have stopped at some defining lamp, when he had gone to bed drifted off to sleep, the noise of happiness that the autumn sun moment, but it hadn’t, and the at night and turned the lamp off the wind dwindling in his ears. had a certain amount of warmth seconds ticked away as ever. The again. His eyes were drawn to in it. The fig tree was shedding clock was a white porcelain the narrow hallway that led back He awakened when the sun was enormous yellow leaves, one Delft affair with blue Dutch to Myrt’s sewing room. She had lower in the sky, and the small of which drifted to the ground children wearing wooden shoes long ago hung a framed mirror room had gotten dim. He lay beside him as if to illustrate standing in front of a blue Dutch on the hallway wall to give it the peacefully, watching the curious the passing of the season. windmill—something Myrt illusion of size, and from where had found in one of the antique he sat, looking at the mirror shops that she had frequented nearly edge-on, the glass was a downtown. The clock’s old thread- confusion of shadows, which, wrapped cord wasn’t in the least like the ghostly reflections in the frayed, a testimony to better days, glass of the fishbowl, seemed to when the things of man were him to be moving. He watched built to outlive their owners. curiously—seeing in it the same He had felt that way about the suggestive shape, the bowing and casket when he had built it, and he reaching and turning insistently still did. Despite its destination, repeated—and after a moment there was no reason that the he stood up and walked toward joinery shouldn’t be tight and the hallway, regarding the square and the materials first shadows until they faded from rate. He had driven into Los view and it was his own face he Angeles, to a big lumberyard was looking at in the mirror. that sold hardwoods, where he He opened the door to the sewing had picked out quarter-sawn oak room and walked in, seeing the planks without any checking cut-out pattern parts still lying on or splitting. They had cost him the long table—pieces of a shirt plenty, in time and money both. she had been sewing for him. The

12 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction old ironing board with its It was an anniversary card from board and the deck of cards were the way clear to him at last. He ivy-decorated cloth stood against Myrt, undelivered. Clearly she one of the travel sets they had removed the bottle and the two the wall in the corner. Nearby sat had hid the package in the sewing used early in their marriage, and glasses now and set them on the the silent sewing machine, and chest, waiting for the day of their he found that they were only closed bottom half of the lid. A next to that the sewing cabinet anniversary. He read the card twice barely familiar to him now. He clutching pain shot down his that he had built with wood left and put it into his pocket, and then took the plastic wrap off the first left arm, and he held his chest, over from the casket. He wondered slipped the ribbon off the box and of the books, Priestly’s The Good stopping dead still and closing suddenly if his building the pulled the paper loose, balling it up Companions, and riffled the pages, his eyes until it receded to a dull sewing cabinet had been inspired and tossing it into the trash. Inside finding an old postcard bookmark ache. He had to use his teeth to by guilt: probably it had—but the box was a tissue-wrapped gift with a picture of Yosemite Valley pull the cork from the bottle, good things sometimes resulted the size of his hand. He hesitated, on it. The sight of the card made and his right hand shook when from dubious motives, and in the stopping to catch his breath, to him think of the label on the first he poured the two glasses full. end it was all one. On the opposite listen once more to the now sherry bottle, still pressed in the wall the closet door stood part muted ticking of the clock. Slowly dictionary inside the house, and “Over the river,” he said, carrying way open, and he shut it now, he removed the tissue, finding for a moment he regretted the loss the first of the glasses to his lips admiring the door knob, which inside a sherry glass identical to of the house key. But the label and draining it. He winked at was made of old leaded glass that the first: the same etching, the wasn’t useful, really. It was mere Queen Isabella, and then threw had turned purple in the sun, gold rim, the octagonal base.... nostalgia, and there wasn’t a lot the glass against the wall of the another of Myrt’s antique store of room for nostalgia in a casket. shed, where it shattered and fell. purchases. It had always been the Carrying the glass he walked back The idea almost made him laugh, He picked up the second glass, loveliest door knob in the house, out into the hallway, across the but his heart began to skip and raised it in a silent toast, and and Johnson had never been the living room, and into the kitchen flutter, and abruptly he found drank it too, and then, using up type to despise a doorknob or again. He opened the cabinet himself sitting on the floor, looking what was left of his strength, he any other simple and unadorned that held the few bottles that he up at the tarnished brass screws hurled the glass after the first, thing. Taking out a handkerchief and Myrt had kept for company, in the wooden cleats that criss- the shards scattering among the now, he wiped the glass clean and took out the square bottle crossed the bottom of the box. others on the floor. A weight of dust and peered into its of sherry, put away at the rear as vast and as heavy as the sky transparent depths, where he saw of the shelf since that first toast He realized that he had passed out, and earth together seemed to be once again the familiar shadowy when he had brought it home and he sat there recovering for a crushing his chest as he fumbled movement. Knowing that the from the Vietnamese market. minute before he hauled himself the cork back into the bottle heavily to his feet and made his and put it back into the casket. room behind him was still, At the back door he hesitated for a the curtains drawn across the unsteady way back outside, looking moment, leaning his weight against up into the sky. There was still But now he was free to go, out at windows, he abandoned the idea the wall and looking back one last last into the waning sunlight. His that what he saw was a reflection. enough sunlight in the west to call time, before tossing the house key it dusk, and a scattering of fleecy breath came in shallow gasps as It was rather the presence of onto the kitchen floor and closing he tottered across the yard and something, or of someone. white clouds made the sky above the locked door forever behind him. the sunset look interminably deep. sat down hard in the open air among the fallen fig leaves, resting “Man in fact is just When he stepped into the sheltered He rested three times ascending the treehouse stairs and used both his back against the tree trunk, darkness of the garden shed, the the evening clouds and the first about to enter on a casket was a long shadow on the hands to turn the doorknob. He was tempted to lie down on the stars turning far far above him totally new phase of low sawhorses that supported it. in the sky, and the wind rustling He had always noticed that there bed for a breather, but he knew it his existence... I do was unlikely he would rise again. the foliage around his small was a time right at dusk when, even house, hidden now within that not like people who with the lights on, things were Septimus bumped around as leafy darkness. The glow of the I feel are blocking darker than they would be a half usual, looking for food, and fish bowl shone as ever through hour hence, when it was night, and Johnson fed him again, a healthy the shifting foliage, casting its the way through.” this was surely such a time. He pinch, deciding to leave the light dim light out into the night. set the bottle and glass down and He turned slowly, expecting he on over the bowl. He looked leaned against the casket itself, knew not what, and for a brief around him one last time, then catching his breath for a moment moment there appeared on the wall bent over to straighten the covers before going on, letting his eyes behind the sewing cabinet the same on the bed. “Well...” he said out adjust, wanting to get through this moving shadow, which dimmed loud, but he couldn’t find any in what was left of the light of day. and disappeared in the moment useful way to finish the thought. that his mind acknowledged Earlier he had emptied the tools Sentimental old fool, he thought. what it was—the shadow, or out of the box, and now he slowly Myrt had called him that more perhaps the shade, of a woman and carefully disassembled than once, and apparently she’d opening the lid of the sewing the various notched-together been just as right as rain. Closing cabinet and removing something panels that had defined its useful the door behind him, he went from inside—or else putting existence, laying the wooden back down the stairs, haltingly, something there. He stepped to dividers behind him until holding on tight to the rail and the box, put his own hand on the the casket contained only the planting his feet carefully. dusty wooden pull, and opened built-in compartments, most of In the shed he realized that his it. There, lying among bobbins which already held his afterlife mind was made up, and had been and spools of thread, lay a small accouterments. He slipped the since Myrt had shown him where package wrapped in white paper bottle down into its own narrow to find her anniversary gift. It had and a ribbon and bow. There was space and the sherry glass into its been a day of indecision, but the a card attached, the corner of its niche, and just like that the thing second sherry glass had finished envelope slid through the ribbon. was finished. He stood for another the forty year job of putting moment regarding it. The cribbage together the casket and had made

13 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction Spaniards Lost to hang himself had overcome table in the center of the dining pesos in those days, and mostly him while he was scrubbing its room and leaving there a big tin in pennies and nickels. Alms in America frayed cuffs. On the nightstand jar that looked like a container of insufficient to pay for a round of by Carlos Franz was the unpaid hotel bill, inflated powdered milk. The pharmacist beer in that very dining room, let by the price of two bottles of Del had covered the tin with alone enough to pay for a burial. Trans. By Jonathon Blitzer Mono anisette and a telegram stationery from the consulate’s But it sufficed to communicate the Imagine that bus, a coffin on its sent overseas. After checking office which announced, in bad blood of the tipsy association roof. Its long shadow crossing with the company, it was revealed all capital letters, “Collecting members, of their hefty wives, and the desert without witnesses, that the telegram had read: “I donations to bury an unknown of their blustery and furunculous Pan-American Highway due south, have gone too far.” The intended Spaniard with due dignity.” offspring, who all entertained destination must have been still themselves by passing from coming from the Peruvian border. You have to imagine him there, And here, in Pampa Hundida, more cryptic than the message table to table the alms cup that because it had been returned the honorary consul and socialist that insolent Barrales junior we were waiting for it—with a city counselor—flushed, scowling, mixture of fascination and morbid from the central post office in had had the audacity to leave the Cibeles Plaza of Madrid with haughty—waiting alongside for them on the carving board, impatience to see how the whole the carved-up Serrano ham, thing would end. Still, sometimes, the message “address unknown.” filling it to the brim with the without even a gesture, until small change reserved for tips. on glaring sunlit afternoons like “And imagine finally, the hall fell completely silent. A this one, when the wind gusts silence broken, finally, when The rest will have gone like this, and the dust of the pampas swirls before it gets dark and he deigned to talk, although or else some other, similar way. up, I imagine that bus, and I still the worst of Sunday without looking at anybody, and But what is for sure is that the lose myself thinking about it on despising everyone. He apologized next day, Monday and at midday the highway, the coffin on the has passed, and before for interrupting the digestion so that no one could fail to notice, roof rack, as though it would the two of us go our of the wafer swallowed at the the pharmacist strode across the never turn off toward our oasis, noon mass and later the suckling Matriz Square with the heavy never reveal to us its irony. separate ways...” pig devoured during the Sunday collections cup on conspicuous Imagine the honorary Spanish In the absence of a passport, this lunch. He was sorry, but it was display in his hands. He went consul in Pampa Hundida, Pío paper was enough for Barrales his duty to communicate to the to the windows of the Belloni Barrales junior; the pharmacist junior to deduce that the suicide community that a compatriot had funeral parlor, pausing so his who, along with his father’s victim was Spanish. A Spaniard just been found hanging in his reflection could linger in the glass, pharmacy, on the westward lost in America. Like Barrales room at the Hotel del Peregrino. a long moment no one would ever sidewalk off the Matriz Square, junior and his father, who had He could have spared them the forget... And then, he was inside also inherited those blue eyes, the also gone, and lived, too far details, but he preferred to share for a couple of hours trying to circumflex frown, and the chronic away and—maybe—too late. them: the long purple tongue,the buy a casket, haggling for better sunburn of an exile who fled the stiff, dripping erection, the holes prices, calculating the price and deluges of Asturias only to die While Judge Larsson ordered in his shoes, the empty pockets... size of coffins “in the name of the in the desert of Atacama. Shortly the corpse transferred to the He was convinced, certain, sure Spanish residents.” He started after being named honorary hospital morgue for autopsy, the that these miseries would move with one of light mahogany, consul by a socialist government pharmacist made an appearance the members as much as they had on which Belloni had placed in far away Moncloa, Barrales at the dining room of the Spanish moved him. Barrales concluded, the perpetual sign “reserved” junior insisted on burying an Residents’ Association. Let’s say trusting in the proverbial charity (perhaps for himself). And he then alleged fellow countryman. that it was a Sunday and that the of the association, that they could proceeded to rule it out along with members were finishing their save their countryman a final all the others, one at a time, for He was an unknown man, gaunt long family lunches, amidst indignity—“The burial shroud being too expensive. He cast them and dressed in black, who arrived thick clouds of cigar smoke and and the trowelful of lime, the aside only after exploring the in the city having first crossed expensive brandies. Barrales unmarked grave. At least you, most abject possible discounts— through the desert; he stayed crossed the dining room Spaniards, will see to it that “how much for this one, but what in the Hotel del Peregrino. It without looking at anyone. He he is buried like a Spaniard.” about without the cushion and the isn’t clear for how long, maybe a avoided especially the exiles or silk lining?”—not even leaving week. Yes, it was probably a week descendants of Republican exiles, And then the honorary consul aside the plainest and the smallest while he visited local businesses, like his father or like himself. But stuffed a bill into the improvised ones, those white coffins made for carrying a plastic briefcase, these people, unlike he and his alms cup before leaving without children, in which case he asked if polishing his scuffed-up shoes by father, had forgotten their pasts, even a good-bye. You would have it could fit a grown man if he were wiping the toe of each one against had been assimilated, and they to imagine all that to suspect folded over. He finished by pulling the back of the opposite pant leg, had long since associated with that Pío Barrales junior—son of out and counting the change from lisping out his introductions, that the economic émigrés who had the “commie Barrales,” as they the collections cup on the lid of he represented I-don’t-know-what gotten rich running mines. They called his father there—had made the cheapest casket, one made company that manufactured had grown so chummy with these a bid to collect donations in the of resinous pine, on which he scales; although he never sorts that after the military coup Spanish Residents’ Association, erected little turrets of copper managed to sell any. He did this they tolerated, and even celebrated, there of all places, because he pennies. He lost count and started until, on one of those afternoons the portrait of the General that was already counting on their over, taking his time, making that extinguish all hope—a the others hung in the meeting greed. And on his revenge. sure he could be seen through gusting, shimmering Saturday room. After that Barrales senior All seemed to be going as planned the windows of the Belloni afternoon—the unknown man made his family promise that when, by the day’s end, the mortuary, where he and the hanged himself in room 22. The they would never again set foot consulate’s seal on the alms mortician, inaudible but in plain next morning, when the door on the premises of the Residents’ cup was broken—before the sight, bargained over a casket. was eventually broken down, a Association, as long as they lived. tiresome formality of the notary damp shirt was found twirling Belloni—he told me this himself, So that afternoon few could Martínez—and a measly pile later on—was on the verge of on a clothing hanger over the of change clankingly spilled sink, as though his anxiousness believe it when they saw Barrales giving it to him for free, if only junior walking toward the carving out. Something like a thousand so that he could lower the blinds 14 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction

and head off to lunch. But he man’s coffin” out there, where argue that Montañé, sarcastic jutting out like a rabbit’s; the changed his mind when Barrales the perks of the exchange rate, and bored as he was, and a keen waxy nakedness, stitched up from junior inquired if it would be from Chilean pesos to Peruvian connoisseur of human trifles, the Adam´s apple to the pelvis; the possible to carry the coffin soles, would mean that what was was simply amusing himself. neck, which was violet from the to the cemetery upright in a already cheap would turn out to Whatever it was, the pharmacist rope, the pharmacist invited us wheelbarrow since there wasn’t be almost free. And he also told got his authorization. And so to touch with a finger. And as we enough money for a proper funeral him to send it over, to charter its Tuesday afternoon no one could did, he murmured: “here I have car. The mortician later assured passage right away; but not by fail to see the gurney wheeled my poor countryman, waiting for me that the notion, in addition hearse, because “here compassion out of the hospital with its the arrival of his Peruvian casket.” to expending his patience, also does not provide for that sort of funereal heap lying beneath a stung his professional pride. thing,” rather, let’s see, send the green sheet. No one could ignore How we all waited for it. Because, coffin by bus, like a package, on that V of the stark white feet unsurprisingly, the image of the Without the casket, but the Morales Moralitos bus line; that came out first, with the coffin traveling atop the roof rack with the alms cup displayed certainly, on account of the sad tag that had the unconfirmed of the bus, its oblong prow cutting more prominently than a circumstances, they’ll agree to name of the unknown Spaniard through the dry desert air, became paten, Barrales junior left for bring the casket free of charge. tied to a big toe and dangling a town wide obsession. There the cemetery. In the dusty Because there they may be poorer, as though this were (and it may was also the daily humiliation administrative office of the Barrales howled into the receiver well have been) a body on sale. of the Spanish Association, which necropolis—besieged by nameless at his counterpart, but they would understood bit by bit the plan that mausoleums, crooked crucifixes, always have space on the roof rack. “Imagine a long the socialist pharmacist, esteemed washed-out tombstones—he was “And in their hearts!” he concluded son of that father the “commie,” taking account of plots and holes with a bellow. (It was then that week without news, had laid out for them. They in the ground. Visiting them and the journey began, the bus with dramatized further understood, as well, the perfidy of testing them out, he asked after bringing the coffin on the Morales a coffin on its roof, which, in by the delightful the minimum dimensions for a a way, hasn’t reached us yet.) Moralitos line, notorious for its man’s corpse, checking to see if rumor that the bus slowness, lack of punctuality, and the cheapest available ditch, one In the meantime, and so that they gruesome accidents. The delay, reserved for a five-year stint, could wouldn’t toss the countryman has broken down...” drawing out the wait, would only be rented for six months, since into an unmarked grave nor have In his pharmacy Barrales junior accentuate the infamy of their his compatriots’ donations could to pay for more time at the morgue, prepared a bed of dry ice for the stinginess and would confirm that only cover that long. This last part, Barrales made arrangements body, which, after the autopsy, they were “tight like cunts,” in though, he didn’t say (he didn’t with the director of the town was disemboweled and injected the sordid double meaning that have to since at this point half the hospital, doctor Montañé, and got with formaldehyde. And he kept the nickname coño takes on when city was saying as much anyway). his permission to bring the rigid it under the counter, right where uttered behind someone’s back. corpse to the pharmacy. We will he stored his medicinal herbs, The next maneuver he carried out never know, and this is another Imagine a long week without right here, from a public telephone something we all knew because, news, dramatized further by mystery of the story I’m telling with or without pretext, Barrales in the bar of this very hotel. you, why Montañé authorized the delightful rumor that the With the door to the booth wide invited each of his clients (and bus had broken down, as was this. They say that Barrales he had many in those days) to open—so that we would all hear junior offered to discount certain its custom, in a deep ravine in and so that those of us playing have a look below the table at Camarones, and that there it was opiate drugs for the treatment of the remains of the unknown cards could enjoy it—he called terminally ill patients, making awaiting the rounds of another the consul of the Kingdom of Spaniard. Who among those who bus that was to bring the needed a reality one of the doctor’s saw the body couldn’t remember Spain in Tacna, Peru. He shouted philanthropic dreams. Others crankshaft or coil spring. And at his colleague to buy a “poor- that? The tobacco-stained teeth Barrales junior, in the meantime, 15 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction dispensing medical treatments print curtains fluttering in the screeched through the square. corpse of the unknown man had over the counter, under which windows, making its triumphant barely been laid in its luxurious lay the suicide victim, as if there entrance into Pampa Hundida, Try to listen, finally, for plot, from where it continues to were nothing to it. He only asked coming to the square to leave that suppressed guffaw, the reproach our Spanish community, now and again if we didn’t smell, us its tardy cargo in front of the continuous and snide gloating when Barrales junior left for the perhaps, a “strange faint odor.” Barrales pharmacy. Think about with which we saw, and now Residents’ Association and handed While he pretended to sniff—with those morbid, crafty, vacant remember, the big fish they pulled an envelope over to the doorman. the mischievous twitch of his people offering to help lower from out of the coffin. A dried-out It contained the check from a nose and that white mustache— the roof—with ropes—the coffin swordfish, smoked, the crusty bar and a note commemorating something unnameable wafted of patchy and faded wood, bent gold of its scales, the marble, wide- the fact that the tips gathered by up from behind the aroma by the withering rays endured on open eye, together with the chili the charity of our Spaniards had of sage and common rue. the journey. The poor-man’s coffin peppers and seaweed garnish. All managed, although just barely, weighed so much it seemed already that was needed to prepare a cured to cover the cost of a round of There was nothing the discreet to be carrying a dead man inside. jerky ceviche, of fish, the delight beers for the gravediggers. protests of the Spanish of the Tacnian coast; to cut it up Association could do to prevail “They say, but and marinate it with lemons from upon the health authorities or our oasis, to organize a banquet even Mayor Mamani (who had this might just be a for the public benefit in the middle his own score to settle with legend, that the sun of the square, where Barrales them). Nor did their regret junior sold plates of ceviche and suffice to improve the situation; was rising the next little cups of pisco sour by the their delayed offer to put the morning when certain hundreds. More than enough to unknown man in the Spanish pay for him, that Spaniard lost Association’s section of the drunken women were in America, and for what the cemetery, “even though he may still laughing...” charity of his countrymen had not not have been Spanish,” was permitted: a proper hearse and a in vain. Barrales junior, son of Try to imagine, as well, the permanent plot at the cemetery. that harsh father, indulging his malicious humor of the rest of And even a strident little band, spite, let it be known that the us, the most dignified and yet no still drunk from the night before, Association could rest assured, less curious, in our small crowd that accompanied the retinue that he, as honorary consul, gathered on the terrace of the of revelers to the cemetery. would ensure that the unknown Hotel Nacional, where we made Spaniard received “a dignified sure, ever so discreetly, not to They say, but this might just burial befitting of your charity.” miss the spectacle of Barrales be a legend, that the sun was junior directing the lowering of rising the next morning when And imagine finally, before it gets the coffin, calling for the utmost certain drunken women were dark and the worst of Sunday carefulness. Only later for his still laughing and shouting at the has passed, and before the two gray hair to drip with sweat and pharmacy, poking at the rigidity of of us go our separate ways, you for his face to flush in the sun like the corpse; although these ladies, along on your journey and I to a tomato, while he loosened with for their part, disagree and swear my house, imagine the final a hammer the gnarled cover that not to remember a thing. But what affront. The motley bus from the splintered with a terrible groan— we all do remember is the elegant Morales Moralitos line, with its long and dry—that reverberated brooch with which Barrales corroded chrome and its flower- in the nerves of our teeth as it junior confected his revenge. The

16 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I poetry La Belle Hermaphrodite By Margo Berdeshevsky

ii. You rest in the dim here as the sculpted winter sun sets. Sleeping hermaph- rodite, head on your pillows from Greece to the Borghese to Paris to me— un-tongued, but tongue-wagged by all, yes, including me.

Could I curl beside her/him/me?— Draw seed from the eye of that quiet penis, staring softly as any morning’s angel dreamed? Nesting in my desire even if only on a mattress of marble, even if only a myth’s hermafrodita — who would I be, under x’s and y’s? Is design of a body a gift or an invite— to terrify an open body at her side?

One leg akimbo, its toe pointing to heaven’s eye as bravely as the same body’s circumcised organ of someone—someone’s delight. The other foot hidden in its Carrera marble sheet as though “discreet” were a word only used for feet, not for a body that breaks all breaths of who am I and who, and who is and why. Such an eloquent repose of God’s confusion. Such “There dwelt a Nymph, not skilled for the chase, or used to flexing the bow, or polished elegance of line my hand wants to stroke to some passion I’ve not the effort of running, the only Naiad not known by swift-footed Diana. / Often known yet, museum lover of mystery and strange orgasm though I might her sisters would say: “Pick up a javelin, or / bristling quiver, interrupt your be— leisure for the chase!” / But she would not pick up a javelin or arrows, / nor trade her leisure for the hunt. / Instead she would bathe her beautiful limbs Then am I a woman or am I another, man or some god’s naked brother? Am and tend to her hair, / with her waters as a mirror.” I man or say demon’s mother, or wife, or improvised lover—Hermafrodita: — Ovid, Metamorphoses. Book IV, 306-312. stretched in stone for me—say: enter, be you, and be me, or be me—

• But here—monster or lover, a man, or femme unspoken—Where is the Hermaphroditus: Two-sexed child of Hermes and Aphrodite, according to he of you who is the she of you, carved love-monster, silk marble mounds, Ovid, he was born a remarkably handsome boy, he was transformed into an veined as a breathing stone. Carved he or carved she, or who would I be? androgynous being by union with the vain water nymph Salmacis. It is said Head soft on your pillow, hearing sky or your maker’s hard sex-breaths, you that she raped him. sleep for any to love without touching, for any to pass in late, stark dark. Where is the he of you who is the she of you, resting in your marble ambi- i. guity? Phallus and breasts, the twist of a hip and the breath that says wom- . . . In another land, I’d seen the kapok tree, nature’s devil’s castle, dervish an or not a man, says Sybil or Lilith, or haunter of sleeps, dear hermaphro- skirts spread in wide layers like an open vulva, buttresses like giant dite—sphinx with no other riddle: whisper at least one truth—to me. buttocks—who wouldn’t stroke those, until sunrise. I lusted, and loved, ~ with my haunted woman’s eye. . . . The moon is in doubt • over whether to be . . . Is it true that Queen Elizabeth was a hermaphrodite? As was a man or a woman. indicated by diary notations from her personal physician that suggest that -—Rita Dove ‘she was not an ordinary woman’ and by her finger length which is one symptom of the genetic disorder? footnote: Be yourself, everyone else is already taken. —Oscar Wilde • But skin a human and we are bone and blood. Period. Small exclamation. Cut off our genitals or paste them on, and we are a mere human, still, who . . . I don’t know. How could I know? But here, you are an angel . . . may have paid a purse of gold to some surgeon. Or ... was simply a child of love. And ... there was or will be one who belongs to no single body or genre, or hybrid ... la belle hermaphrodite ...

17 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University poetry Blason for W.S. Merwin By Margo Berdeshevsky

If I’d known you when the island first scraped at my foot soles its sheer thumbs, hungry fishes—known you when its thin stones first fell to my hands under waterfalls and the wide winged black frigate’s flight watched if I was learning—if I knew you then knew how to listen it was as syllables of a road I hadn’t pronounced yet but I would fell—it has taken small houses, roads you lived beyond one one noon while winter fell in your garden you sent me on to this one this rim of a water that knows there are islands in the long-clouds that know the herds of lost poets their harsh songs of desire and how it hurts to not sing them

In the silence of rooms you built with syllables, and fires, and vixens, and nights, my steps listen to winds and the bats guiding light to your garden’s wet growing, even without eyes—in such a quiet, elder,—celadon roads that have no names I can learn except a scent of hawk, a carol of orioles bows—I bow to one who has parted weeds for me even at a distance, parted hours, let me walk slowly hands open behind you

18 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction Beirut is wearing a light blue shirt. He be under Bulgarian jurisdiction My mother offers Carl more tea by Ben Stoltzfus loosens his tie. My mother serves until after the war. That meant and he stands up to stretch his tea on the veranda. A slight breeze that the Jews of these lands, more legs. She pours. My father has a July and August in Beirut. Hot, is blowing in from the sea. Carl than eleven thousand of them, pained look on his face. Carl sits muggy nights. Tennis in the and my parents reminisce about were still citizens of Greece down and says: But Nazi pressure morning. After lunch, a swim in the good old days at the Sofia and Yugoslavia. And the quota on the King never abated. In the turquoise waters of Pigeon College and the people we know. called for the deportation of March, Hitler invited him to Rocks. BBC news before supper My father asks how he was able all of them. Plus another eight Germany, ostensibly for a visit. and a book before bed. Every to leave the country and he says thousand from Bulgaria proper. What he wanted, however, was the morning from his tall minaret on Jews are being allowed to do All remaining Bulgarian Jews, deportation of the Jews. So, after Marie Curie Street the muezzin so if they pay heavy bribes. My some forty-two thousand, would returning to Bulgaria, the king wakes us up, the goats eat the father inquires about the alleged be deported later. My mother ordered all able-bodied Jewish leftover food and the boy milks deportations, and Carl says that says: Then what happened? Carl men to join hard labor units. his animals for the residents of King Boris intervened to stop says: Roundups were to begin in They were assigned the task of the quarter. My mother is happy them. My mother says: Do you March and, in Kyustendil, the building roads and it was widely to have a house and a kitchen. We mean to say that Bulgarian Jews boxcars were already lined up rumored that it was the King’s visit the souq downtown and she are not being sent to concentration and waiting. But when news of effort to thwart deportation. buys three carved ebony elephants camps? Carl says: Yes, that’s the deportations leaked, protests Nonetheless, in May, Belev and from an Indian merchant. true...My parents express relief spread throughout Bulgaria. A Dannecker drafted another plan My father buys three carved and pump our guest for more delegation from Kyustendil met for the deportation of all fifty olivewood camels. The elephants details. He says: You remember with Interior Minister Petur thousand Bulgarian Jews. King are now on the windowsill the anti-Jewish law, the zacon Gabroski and, under pressure, Boris opposed them saying he overlooking the sea, and the that was passed in December he relented, canceling the needed these men to build roads camels are on the sideboard in the 1940, the so-called law for the deportations. My mother says: and railway lines. Nazi officials, dining room. The two Kazaks and protection of the nation?...My That was brave of him. Carl however, wanted them deported the Shiraz are on the floor in the parents nod their heads...Carl says: True enough, but what immediately to German-occupied living room where we like to sit continues: The law that restricted is not generally known is that Poland. Again, the King refused, when we read. My parents read, I Jewish rights, imposed new taxes Gabrowski’s orders came directly this time with the backing of read, time passes and no loose tile and established a quota for Jews from King Boris. It was a close call Dimitar Peshev, the parliamentary has fallen on my head. I’m alive in the professions?...Again my because the cancellation order vice-chair, and Archbishop Stefan, and Mireille is in the mountains. parents nod...Carl says: What came only four hours before the head of the Orthodox Church in There is a war on, the Allies and you may not know is that in early deadline. My father says: That was Bulgaria. Their help was crucial. Axis powers are fighting and each 1943, Theodor Dannecker, one a close call. Carl says: Although My father says: The King is a brave week some pins on the map move of Eichmann’s associates, the the King saved all fifty thousand man. Carl says: Yes, but it may to new locations in Sicily and one who guided the campaign Bulgarian Jews, he couldn’t save have cost him his life. Last month, Ukraine. It’s early September. My for the deportation of French the ones from Vardar Macedonia just before I left Bulgaria, Hitler father gets a call from a former Jews to death camps, arrived in and Thrace because they were summoned him to Rastenburg, Sofia College student. He says: I’m Bulgaria. In February he met with still under Hitler’s direct East Prussia. Once again, despite in Beirut, at Saint George’s Hotel. Alexander Belev, the Commissar jurisdiction. They were deported Hitler’s insistence, Boris refused On my way to Jerusalem. Are for Jewish Affairs. At that meeting to the death camps of Treblinka to send Bulgarian Jews to death you free this afternoon? Could I they signed an agreement for the and Majdanek. My mother says: camps. Not only that, he also see you? Carl Misrahi is a man in deportation of twenty thousand How awful. What a tragic turn refused to declare war on the his mid twenties, medium build, Jews from Aegean Thrace and of events. I say: I heard rumors Soviet Union or send Bulgarian dark brown hair, and in his eyes Vardar Macedonia. My father says: about the deportation of Gypsies. troops to the Eastern Front. It is a somewhat furtive look. He is Yes, these were the territories Carl says: As far as I know, none said that Hitler had a fit. My father wearing a suit and tie, despite the Hitler promised Boris if he joined have been deported. Unless some says: I can believe it. Carl says: heat. My father suggests he take the Axis powers. Carl Says: That’s were rounded up in Macedonia. Shortly after returning to Sofia, his jacket off, and he does so. He right. But legally, they would not King Boris died of apparent heart failure. On August 28th. But it was rumored that Hitler had him poisoned. I left the country two days later. My father says: Who would have thought it would end like this? I remember his wedding day as though it were yesterday. It was the promise of a new beginning. And I can see him walking down the steps of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral with his bride, Princess Giuliana of Italy. She all in white, and he in black. My mother says: Despite everything, we are so relieved you could get out...She looks at her watch saying: It’s almost suppertime. Can you stay? Carl says: Thank you but I’m meeting a friend at the hotel. My father says: It’s so good to see you again,

19 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction how Aleppo is, and she says it’s hot. I ask Pasty how Amman is, and she says it’s hot. I ask Sylvia how Diyarbekir is, and she says it’s hot. I call Mireille and ask how the mountains were, and she says: Nice and cool. When can I see you? I say: How about Saturday? She says: Oui. Samedi ees good for me too. I say: Do you have a bicycle? She says: Oui. I say: Let’s go to the olive grove. I’ll ride my bike to your house and we’ll start there. Two o’clock? She says: Benny, all summer I meessed you. I say: Mireille, I missed you too. À Samedi. At supper my father says he received a cable from his brother, Will, saying that he’s on his way to Beirut, despite the war, because the Girls’ College needs its president. My mother says: How will he travel? My father says: The roundabout way: from Los Angeles by tanker down the west coast of South America to Lima, Peru, then to Valparaiso, Chile, then overland Carl. Good luck on your ventures Will the Jews go to heaven if they and soothe it. My soul hurts and to Buenos Aires, Argentina and in Palestine...We shake hands, say suffer? That’s what the Bible I wish I could find a balm to rub another boat up the east coast of goodbye and our guest leaves. We says. The meek shall inherit the over it. Or a healing potion to South America to Rio de Janeiro, look at each other dumbfounded. earth. Meanwhile they’re herded restore its original innocence. It Brazil. From Rio he goes by into cattle cars and sent north. was once pure. At least I thought tanker to Durban, South Africa My mother prepares supper How can Hitler believe these so, despite Brother Ignatius and up the east coast of Africa to while my father and I listen to people are vermin when friends who says we all bear the taint of Zanzibar, Tanzania. After that, the BBC. The announcer says: of mine are Jews? Maybe I’m Adam’s fall. What happened? You Mombasa, Kenia, then Djibouti Today, September 3, 1943, after part of the infection. Archangel know what happened. Questions and finally Cairo. By train from the successful occupation of seems to think so. Why else and answers pop in and out of my Cairo to Beirut. My mother says: Sicily, the Allies have invaded would he pursue me? He tells me head. I don’t even need Archangel That is roundabout. When will he Italy. The North-African campaign I’m in a state of mortal sin. Are or Satan any more. The dialogue arrive? My father says: Sometime is over, and the fight for Europe all Jews in a state of mortal sin? is incessant, even without them. next year, if he’s lucky. Depends has begun. The announcer talks Original sin? Is that why Hitler, Then there’s the war. I want the on the connections. He expects about Harold Alexander’s 15th Himmler and their gang are after Allies to win. So why do I feel like delays in many ports. Crossing the Army Group, Lieutenant General them? It’s an absurd notion. the Germans? Losing. I know what North Atlantic is too dangerous, Mark Clark’s U.S. 5th Army and I have to do to start winning. Get and civilians aren’t doing it...I General Bernard Montgomery’s “Mireille greets me baptized or go to confession. But go over my uncle’s itinerary and British 8th Army. My father says: I’m Protestant, not Catholic. And compare it to my trips around Less than a year ago Churchill with a peck on each baptism can wait. Here too I go the world. Mirka and I took the said Italy was the soft underbelly cheek and I do the around in circles, knowing yet northern and equatorial routes, of the Axis, and he wanted to not knowing what is best for me. whereas he is following the open the Mediterranean to Allied same. I say: Fresh, southern one. I like ours better traffic. Now that Mussolini has mountain air agrees The Fall Semester at The but I understand that his trip been deposed, if Italy surrenders, Community School has begun. is business whereas ours were maybe next year we’ll be able to with you. You are Eleventh grade, and I sign up pleasure. Although, on second book passage back to America. looking very beautiful.” for courses: American History, thought, cities with names such as My mother says: I hope so...On Biology, English and Geometry. Lima, Valparaiso, Buenos Aires— the map, my father moves a red The Jews think of themselves I’m glad to be out of Algebra and Lime Tree, Paradise, Fresh Air— pin from Sicily to the toe of Italy. as the chosen people, yet Hitler Latin. I’m also glad not to be a have a certain appeal. I also like has chosen to exterminate them. boarder. I buy a used road bike Meanwhile I have been thinking the ring of Zanzibar, Mombasa What irony. He seems to think so that I can zoom down the and Djibouti, and hope some day about Mirka. Wondering what that their disappearance will hill from the Girls’ College to might have happened to the to incorporate all of them into enhance the glory of Germany. The Community School in less my travels. I know already what Gypsies of Gorna Djumaya or He says: All power to the Aryans. than five minutes. All the other those of Macedonia. Suppose she Satan and Archangel will say, Now there’s another absurd American kids are back. Jack but I’m beginning not to care. was visiting family and found notion...My reasoning goes round Miller and Fuzzy Wuzzy have herself caught in a roundup. That and round and answers elude me. also returned. I ask him if they Mireille greets me with a peck on would be hell. Far worse than I worry about Mirka and wish captured the escapee. He says: each cheek and I do the same. I what I endure. Going to a death I could see Mireille. But more They did. Saladin is once again in say: Fresh, mountain air agrees camp would truly be hell on than anything, I wish I could his high-security cell. I ask Muriel with you. You are looking very earth. Not hell in the afterlife. find my soul, touch it, caress it beautiful. She says: T’est gentil... 20 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction

She is wearing a green blouse, a title is suh name of a woman wis right. But it ‘elps my English. I say: say: Yes, very much. She says: I white skirt and white sneakers. uncanny premonitions, and she I’m also here to help. She says: Yes knew you would like Baudelaire. She puts a book into the basket on becomes Breton’s meestress. Did you are. I say: I was intrigued by I say: What venom is he talking the handlebars, places a bottle of Mirka ‘ave mysterious powers? I the poem’s first line, and listening about? She says: It’s not as bad as water on top of it and folds a light say: Only over me. She says: Of to you read it, I imagined you you might sink. Some people said blanket over them. We mount course. Sat’s ‘ow eet should be... writing it and saying my child, it was syphilis. But Baudelaire our bicycles and pedal through Mireille opens the book and says: my brother. That way, you would ‘imself explained to suh court back streets, around lush gardens Ah! Un Voyage à Cythère. You be my sister. And it would be sat it referred to ‘ees splenetic and up a long incline toward the know Cythère? I say: Yes, Cythera incest. She says: I suppose so. I say: temperament. ‘Ee ‘as many spleen suburbs. I take the lead. She passes is a Greek island. She says: Yes, Whichever it is, it’s pretty daring. poems. I say: How do you know all me, turns her head and laughs, but it’s more san sat. It’s suh She says: Ah,oui, sat’s ‘wy suh this? She says: Luc told me. You blond hair trailing. Sweet smell legendary island of love. Love is book was banned. If you sink sis know. Luc, my professor at suh of honeysuckle and no traffic. everysing, and sis is ‘ow I learn poem is daring, listen to suh next Lycée. The one who died. We read Around a bend in the road we see English. I read Baudelaire. First one...She leafs through the pages, Baudelaire in class. I say: You read the olive trees, pale green, almost in French, sen in English...She finds À Celle qui est trop gaie—To this poem in class? She says: Non. gray in the noonday light. High reads four stanzas, hands the book One Who Is Too Cheerful, and It was after. Remember? ‘Ee taught sand dunes rise on the far side of to me, and I read the English. She reads. When finished, she says: me everysing I know. If you sink the grove. Light and shadow define says: Enough. It’s a long poem ‘Wat do you sink? I say: I see why sis is daring, you should read Le their crests and sloping surfaces. and I don’t like its ending. I prefer the book was banned. Let’s see if Marquis de Sade. He takes evil to a We pedal over dry grass and L’Invitation au voyage. Let’s read the sensors will ban it in English. new dimension. I say: Really? She bumpy ground toward the dunes. sat one...Again, she reads the I read the last three stanzas: says: Really...then suddenly raises The tree trunks have been gnarled French, hands the book to me her arm and points to a branch on by time, blackened by age, pocked and says: Your turn...I read: So, some night, when an adjoining olive tree...Look, over and hollowed by the elements. The sensuous hour strikes, sere. Un caméléon...Sure enough, The crowns tremble, casting My child, my sister, I would crawl stealthily toward a green chameleon, maybe ten umbrellas of shade. We set our Imagine the sweetness The treasures of your body inches long, is advancing, clinging bicycles aside and Mireille unfolds Of living there together! to a branch. He sways back and the blanket next to a perforated And loving as we like it To mortify your joyful flesh forth, slowly extending one foot trunk. We sit down and lean Loving and dying To bruise your pardoned breast forward to clasp the thin branch against the bark. I open the water In a land that resembles you! And place on your astonished side with a pincer paw. One eye next to bottle and hand it to her. She takes ...... An injury both deep and wide the horns on his head swivels, and a drink and gives the bottle to me. the tail curls around itself into a I drink and wipe my lips with the There, all is order and beauty, Ah, such dizzy sweetness! neat spiral. We watch fascinated back of my hand. We look at each Luxury, leisure and pleasure. In these new lips that are so by the interminably slow Shiny and so new, to instill other. Mireille says: ‘Eere we are. Mireille says: I love sees poem, swaying motion of this animal. I say: I wish we were at Pigeon My venom into you, my sister! especially the refrain. Luxe, calme I say: The other day I met your Rocks. She says: Don’t say sat. Sees et volupté. But suh word volupté I say: Yes, they will also ban ees a lovely place...She picks up friend Jaffar. She says: Ah, in French is so much more san it. Besides, English sensors are oui, Jaffar. He’s a classmate at the book, Les Fleurs du mal...Do pleasure in English. Volupté ‘as much stricter than French ones, you know Baudelaire? I say: No. the Lycée. I continue: He says a sensuous quality in sound and particularly when it comes to he’s going to marry you. She She says: You weel like ‘eem. I say: connotation. Don’t you sink? I say: sex. In some quarters, even How do you know I will like him? says: Quoi? Marry me! Sat’s Yes it does. She says: Suh trouble the word sex is taboo...Mireille nonsense. No respectable French She says: You loved a gitanne. wees translation, it never gets it laughs: Did you like suh poem? I Non? You weel like Baudelaire... girl would marry an Arab. I say: I look at the book. It’s a bilingual edition of The Flowers of Evil. The cover illustration is Ingres’ Odalisque. I am dumbstruck. Mirka, my Gypsy, on the cover of Les Fleurs du mal? I can’t believe it. I show it to Mireille: This is a picture of my gitanne. She says: Non, eet cannot be. I say: Yes it is. This is her...Mireille is equally incredulous: I might have known your gitanne would be on suh cover of Les Fleurs du mal. Eet ees more san coincidence. Eet ees objective chance! You know ‘wat sat ees? Le hasard objectif? I say: No, I don’t...Mireille explains how the surrealists coined the expression. How, when unusual encounters occur, defying logic, a mysterious process is working its magic. She says: You, your gitanne and me. We were meant to be. It’s een suh stars...She leans over and kisses me on the cheek: You must read André Breton’s Nadja. Suh 21 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction Perhaps you’re not a respectable Oh, then what’s slang for BB? She book should have been burned. I to. I have no problem with that. girl. She says: You are trying to says: Bite. Ta bite. ‘Ow you say eet say: Now you sound like the Nazis. You’re a free man. Well, almost a provoke me. I say: Are you also in English? I say: Cock. She says: Burning books...Satan appears. I man. All I ask is that you keep an too cheerful?...She looks at me Cock? As in rooster. I say: Yes. see his heart beating in his chest open mind. That you remain an sideways: Now you are provoking She says happily: We ‘ave ‘ad two and red blood coursing through inquisitive soul, ready to explore me. I say: Maybe so. She says: If good lessons today. Poetry and veins and arteries. A lacework the world, question dogma and you must know, I am ‘appy. But language. Don’t you sink? I say: of tiny capillaries shapes his challenge authority. No one has a cheerful? Non. Only sometimes. Indubitably, but it’s not over. She folded wings, and their intricate monopoly on the truth, not even I say: I have no venom to infuse says: ‘Ow’s sat? I say: You gave me tissues define his body outline. God. Archangel says: Blasphemy. in you. She says: I know. You the generic word chatte. We need I had no idea his scales were That’s why you fell from grace, are not suh splenetic type. I like a private epithet. Suppose we were transparent. He says: They are the and now you’re paying the you just as you are. And you may in public and I said I love chatte. Nazis, and it’s time somebody said price. And you’re trying to lead kiss me if you wish...Her playful, People might wonder, don’t you so. Hell and Auschwitz are the impressionable souls astray. I flirty manner is enticing, and I think? She says: I see ‘wat you same. I should know. And don’t say: No one led me astray. Mirka need no further encouragement mean. We need to find a name for let Archangel tell you what you offered me love and you said it was to put my arms around her. ‘er. ‘Ave you ideas? I say: I haven’t can and cannot think. You can a sin. And, what I find strange, is seen her yet, but I’m sure she’s think anything you want to. It’s that you, the Catechism, Brother We kiss, and the chaste promise marvelous. I know. We’ll call her a free universe and everything is Ignatius and my father all think of her lips at Pigeon Rocks fulfills Merveille, and she can rhyme possible. Archangel says: Don’t alike. Nonetheless, I’ll go along, itself. Mireille darts a quick with Mireille. She says: Okay. you believe him. That’s the venom play it safe and get baptized. tongue between my teeth and I One day you may visit Merveille. Baudelaire infuses in his readers. Archangel says: Smart move. Are taste the dizzying sweetness of I say: Why not now? She says: I The venom of free thought. The you familiar with Pascal’s bet? I her mouth. Aroused, I explore the can’t now. I weesh I could, but court was barking up the wrong say: No. He says: You wager on treasures of her body and squeeze I’m not ready. Luc is still too tree when it accused him of God because you have nothing to her ever-tender breast. She puts much wis me... While pedaling transmitting syphilis. Disease lose. Whereas, if you don’t wager her arms around my neck and back into town by walls and of the flesh is nothing. It is weak on Him and die, and there is a runs warm hands up and down gardens of purple bougainvillea to begin with. What matters is hell, you lose the beatitude of my back. I press her joyful flesh and red hibiscus, Mireille sidles the soul, and Baudelaire was eternal life. I say: Makes sense to and feel her sensuous fingers her bicycle up to mine and says tampering with eternal life. He me. I’ll get baptized. Archangel running up my eager spine. We sweetly: Your rooster makes infused poetry with evil, and says: Now you’re thinking. Satan play lovingly, mouth to mouth, me want to sing. Like a bird...I that’s why he entitled his book says: You know what Pascal body to body, legs entwined. I marvel at her spontaneity The Flowers of Evil. For that, he also said? I say: No...The eternal unbutton her shirt, undo her and hope she gets over Luc. deserves to burn. I say: I’m glad silence of these infinite spaces bra and mortify the nipple of you mentioned the soul. I’ve been frightens me...I say: Why was he one breast. Her astonished gasp “They (the Jews) were thinking about it a lot lately, and afraid of the cosmos? Satan says: whips my ardor and I bite her I can’t seem to find it. Can you tell Good question. But my guess is side. Not hard. Enough to draw assigned the task me where it is? He says: The soul that he wanted to scare you. So a grateful cry. I run my tongue of building roads is the presence of God in all men you would believe in God. I say: around the spot. The injury is and it was widely and women. It is the Holy Spirit. Does it work? He says: You tell me. neither deep nor wide. I press It is the flame of life eternal. I I say: It’s not the infinite spaces my lips to hers. She sighs, sits rumored that it was say: Yes, but I would like to I’m afraid of. It’s going to hell. up, undoes my belt and zips my the King’s effort to touch my soul. I know I can feel fly. I pull down my undershorts. it because I’m afraid of going to She looks at my member and thwart deportation.” hell, but I wish I could identify says: ‘Ow you say sat in English? it better. It’s so elusive. He says: That night, once again, Archangel I say: A hard on. And in French? It’s meant to be elusive. That’s visits me. I’m accustomed to the She says: Tu bandes. You ‘ave why heaven and hell exist. So you glow of his wings but they seem to a lovely ‘ardon. I will call him can choose. Each act of yours is be gleaming more than usual. He Big Ben. Like suh clock tower in a step closer to one or the other. says: You are playing a dangerous Londres. I say: You mean, London? And lately, actually for some time game, my boy? Up to now you She says: Oui, Londres. Big Ben! now, you have been moving in were destined for one of hell’s But maybe just BB for short, mon hell’s direction. I say: You may outer circles, but with incest, frère--my broser. You like sat? I say so, but it doesn’t feel like it to you are moving closer to the say: Oui, ma soeur. Now we are me. The more I explore the ideas fiery center. Where the damned siblings. Brother and sister and, of writers like Goethe, Milton, endure even greater suffering. I whenever you need me, all you Molière and Baudelaire, the freer say: I have not committed incest. have to do is call BB. Brother will I feel. After your first visits, and He says: No, but you will. You come. She says: BB I need you... thanks to Brother Ignatius, I was and Mireille are getting awfully She leans down and kisses him, truly fearful, but now I’m less close? I say: She’s not my sister. opens her mouth and runs her so. Somehow your certainties This is only a game we play when tongue round and round, pausing seem less certain than they once reading Baudelaire. He says: every now and then for another were. I’ll still get baptized, just Even thinking about incest is a kiss. I run my fingers through to be on the safe side, but I no sin. I say: How can that be a sin? her blond curls. The skin on her longer see the world in black and Baudelaire is a great writer. He neck is silken. I utter a soft cry. white. There are so many colors to says: That’s what you think. In choose from, and your vision feels I say: BB is fine for me, but what any case, he’s already in hell. And like a straitjacket, like the ones about your hidden treasure. What the courts were right to condemn they use at the mental hospital shall we call her? She says: Ma Les Fleurs du mal. But they didn’t on Mount Sannine. Satan says: chatte. I say: Your cat? She says: go far enough. All copies of the Oui, sa’s ‘wat we call ‘er. I say: Sure, get baptized if you want 22 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction The Still Hunt “Didn’t know a Jew could do that. vapors home, and who envying Tony Horn asked Wesley if he You say where. California is it. no one, had a kind of wind shear wanted to go to the wedding. (excerpt) And Miwok. What’re them?” about them Wesley loved. Wesley said he hoped someday by David Matlin to return the beautiful favor. Wesley used his good manners Tony Horn, turned out had walked The millwright listened, asked to answer their questions and down Elvis’s “Lonely Street” so Wesley’s last note before arriving if anything was wrong, and if one woman, raised in those coal often that “Heart Break Hotel” in New York; an iron worker there was he’d “front the bail.” bearing mountains and hollows had as many seasons as Uranus picked him up outside Akron, called her younger sister; yes, “where you can get burned, turned “Running to something, not headed to a wedding in Bayonne, the one trying to start a bakery to shit, froze, turned to shit’s away,” Wesley told him. New Jersey. Took two days to get who drove twenty miles with younger cousin, get your ears over the Appalachians and their a fresh baked black cap pie and squished real pretty by Jesus’s “Let me drop you off at a distant small valleys. Tony Horn, home-made ice-cream, to ask third girlfriend. Uranus got it place I saw for the first time millwright by trade, union man by about California and Jews who all, Wesley.” Time and whatever last year, if that’s OK?” instinct, and a second generation farmed roses. It was as if they and dimensions Time possessed, began Hungarian who yearned for a “Anything. Anything Wesley were tasting beautiful, that day when he heard the “45” herd of horses. Had to stop every you’d like, Tony.” never known before water. between Akron and Youngstown seventy miles for a pre-celebration after finding out he’d knocked shot. His sister’s daughter, he said, “He thought the hill He thought the hill country up his original girl friend whose was soon to be “fuckin trothed” to of eastern New Jersey and the father, a long-haul trucker who’d country of eastern the son of a Polish butcher with mists rising from its forests and hit the beach at Anzio, went a perfumed college degree in New Jersey and meadows, its glaciated valleys directly with his daughter to Tony engineering. The niece, she was and quick running streams, Horn’s parents, told them he was the mists rising 5’10”, had the grace of his sister, the way the canopy held the ready to set up a duplicate beach and though he tried his damnedest from its forests and mysterious smell of wild flowers landing on their front porch for a not to notice, a pair of legs to subtlety weighing a breeze, held year if necessary. The girl, she was meadows, its glaciated set a man to the dance lessons depths of emptiness he could a delicious child of Croatia and he’d always dreaded and a set of valleys and quick not explain whether of mid-day he’d taken her for a country ride in tits gave him nearly the deeper light beams, a deer whistling a 32’ Deuce he was transforming running streams...” shakes than the new special order its warning, a hawk’s shadow and hoped ardently to get on the The streets with their bakeries, Caddy convertible he’d won over slicing a jack in the pulpit—the cover of Hot Rod Magazine. “Just men’s clubs, beauty parlors, bars, a bad hand of poker. “Got my ass dark soft footed stirrings were dropped a big Chrysler into it restaurants, hardware stores, outta there before them Arab iron blood whet, full of endurances when the girl come along, already and cars blaring out stuff from workers dumped my foreskin belonging to flocks of shade sanded the roadster, heard Elvis the Ronettes, Leslie Gore and into some pancake batter.” and fragile drippings of slanted at the same time I knew I’d lose her “Jonny’s” arrival at a party twilight that close instantly into One of the craziest people, Wesley the car and so took it out for a of bewilderments and misery, concealments, multi-legged as said, he ever met; walked into a last ride thinkin about them Aretha Franklin telling all the a spider weaving her night web. bar, started reciting Hungarian “bellhops” and “desk clerks” the males who ever have been, who And at the other end of it, the poetry, the coal miners and their “room” I’d have to pay for and eat are, and who lie beyond known New Jersey of semi-abandoned wives leaned back, laughed and every pebble of “Lonely Street” jurisdictions of the wronged, factories leaking mercury, cyanide fed the jukebox, knowing this was without benefit of salt, pepper, the cheated, the sweet talked to enough to feast on the eggs of probably the wandering visitor pig’s ears and beer. Goddamned, smoldering love fatigues they every woman born and unborn, they’d heard about who broke couldn’t figure out which tasted better “think think think.” The estuaries spewing their dioxins, a grandmother’s heart in either better, the car or the girl.” stink of beer and grease, dreams and a people who called their raw Ursina, over the border from West Virginia, and if Slashi, over the border from Czechoslovakia, then, for the dust gathered over a girl’s wounds, even such dust as that holding the matter-of-fact promises of a shaded roadside, a drink and an afternoon’s swirl of Appalachian polka can force the dullness to abandon its kill. As to Wesley, they asked him, confused over his long, sun- bleached hair, faded levis and rough outs; didn’t know what a body surfer was, but the son of a Jewish Farmer and mixed Miwok/ Mexican mother? “Jewish Farmer, hell,” they said good naturedly, “never knew it even existed.” They called cousins watching Sunday afternoon football to come over, take a look at what wandered in a Caddy convertible. “Two of ‘em just off the flying saucer” and here they Jesus Christ were.

23 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction and anguish piled thick and alive, Tony Horn sat in his leather The place in its huge solitariness, way it possessed worlds, the agitated and as easily brought Cadillac seat, twisted a fancy starved the sounds around it. It ones in her mind, the truest, no to violence as shallow rooted dash board knob, watched in was the remnant hulks of World longer in hibernation under the tolerance, no one sure exactly delight as the convertible top War II Navy fleets—battered mounds of Etowa, Cahokia, a about the tides as they drove down rose like the wing of “sexy destroyers, aircraft carriers purer squander than what he was a hill toward the Bayonne Bay. Hungarian bat” and advised, as suffocating in motionless rot, seeing here, prisons and their he drove away laughing, to “learn LSTs splattered with machine gas chambers, the missions with “Suppose it’ll take four, five hours how to swim by drowning.” gun holes, troop ships with their regimentations of cruelty to get from here to New York, hanging ladders still reeking of and sorrow—the calculable Wesley. Gonna leave you my Wesley watched the Caddy do the Marines who climbed down collapse of this most pustulant address. Bay’s about ten blocks three circles in an intersection them, submarines so peculiar in of the war riches empires and away. Let me know. Some day before disappearing in to the the fracturing hostility of their their “nourishments”—her word you might hear me yelling one adjacent neighborhoods. He silhouettes, a couple of frigates in reference to the murder and of Atilla Jozsef’s poems at a rose stood for a second wondering twisted by artillery hits (was it imprisonment of her People, her field. Tony Horn then sang the if he should head back, pulled the Coral Sea, Omaha Beach?), husband’s People. He remembered first passages of his favorite poem: out a fifty cent piece and left it heavy cruisers partially melted a childhood night, his mother up to the change. “Heads” the from battle holocaust, guarding nearly stabbing his father in an If you start out in this world coin said. “Didn’t guess it’d Better be born seven times. the fogs peeling them to nothing enraged anguish and here he be that simple,” he muttered in a thousand years. He knew was, standing on the shore of Once in a house on fire to himself walking the ten Once in a freezing flood immediately it was what his this sea full of its gobbling stalks blocks as Tony Horn suggested, mother most feared, talked about to go to prison himself. Once in a wild mad house toward the Bayonne Bay. Once in a field of ripe wheat of rarely. Her feelings about a Once in an empty cloister The afternoon was hot, and what Mexican/Miwok heritage, the And once, among pigs in a sty … he thought to be a strange haze refusal of certain California stuck over the water became tribes “to embrace the riches of “Won’t do the seventh, increasingly a speechless noise. war” as she fearfully mentioned Wesley. Keep it a secret.” it, the horrible vice and the

24 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction Twisted in Arrears socializing and postgraduate Her broadcast tolerance, her the reeking impervious addicted success. Her high forehead, her serenity afforded her mentors psyches repelling her every sally. uneven teeth, her long neck, in The School of Social Work no (excerpt) Her pallor, her beaked face, her narrow shoulders and small opening to create dependency in by Lou Rowan anything-but-voluptuous body breasts, not to mention the mole her, and they assigned her the (though he marveled at the with the two hairs above her supposed dregs of field-work: An intelligent woman is a passion they could generate) lip: she found them to be good. hospices, senior centers, and lock- provocation few men can seemed an unjust deprivation Was her physical being a joke ups for psychotic criminals whose surmount. Alina was a therapist, when exhaustion, hunger and a specialist in addiction whose she’d not yet learned to crack? officials delighted in relegating awareness of his stature cried violent Armenian family loomed to our diminutive heroine cases out for the perfumed fruits of It was difficult for the boys they would not touch unprotected behind her like the Turks of 1915. whose monotonous advances sympathy amid the comforts A family that sold tires in the San by straitjackets, mega-sedatives, of affluence he provided. It was she deflected to appreciate the and muscular orderlies. Her star— Joaquin Valley, the proud round humor she found in the situation, stressful to be a therapeutic sign “Ace is the Place” dominating she could find no other word star, honored by biomedical and the meticulously turned-out for her—was a fat woman who the entry to Fresno’s car gulch. heir to a shipping fortune who grants from entrepreneurial seduced dogs, beheading any who foundations generating lucrative I met her at a reception for sought to rape her next to the failed to meet her requirements: Lake Washington Canal, only intellectual capital. His stature patrons of the Henry Gallery and she worked for the Merry Maids, propelled them to banquets, to have his testicles crushed afterwards went to dinner with which allowed her to case homes where he had been proud to show against his pelvis, sobbed and her and her handsome, athletic for the most attractive prey. off the young, articulate Alina- blamed her lack of seriousness companion in the University -until her work-load caused her about his needs or anything for District. She appreciated the “What her brothers to nod off during after-dinner his conduct. He could not know opportunity, as she was kind presentations, especially his. enough to put it, of talking with how mundane his violence and did to each other, her a writer. After learning that I self-pity felt compared to that of father to her mother, Alina observed the resentments had prepared for business by her brothers attacking each other Jason nursed, and after a mirror- studying history and English, with tire-irons, her father hitting her mother to her, session whose brevity amused for writing by avoiding writing her mother with rubber-blackened and what the young her, dropped him. He affected programs, she plunged gaily fists, her mother beating her. calm, and professed the hope into what she’d learned at the Years later she noticed the rich heir attempted on her that she’d get over whatever was University of Washington: that rapist leaning from his prominent was unforgivable.” troubling her. She reminded sororities eschew Armenians, box at Benaroya Hall next to his herself to read further into the But her reports on these cases were literature on emotional maturity. partly because they don’t know well-turned-out wife, and when written with such acute factual what they are. That college boys she passed the couple in the long observation, with such elaborate And now Alina began to break pursue Armenian girls because hall adorned with portraits of through to what she called and creative reference to the they think they are Jewish and the biggest donors, including his affectionately her stinking crew literature, that it was impossible therefore passionate lovers. That mother and father, he blushed of clients. She became sharp and for professors itching to bring her literature carried her to places and cut into the men’s room directive, swatting their lies down a peg to avoid decorating her imagination had longed for, while she chuckled her way to the and issuing ultimata. 40% of her work with the highest honors. compensating for the vacuum of ladies’. He’d whined that unless her clients left Harborview for She was the valedictorian on her upbringing, the ineptitudes of she gave it to him he’d develop extended rehab and twelve-step graduation-day, giving the shortest her classmates. From Shakespeare “blue balls”—and stomped off recovery, a number unique in that speech in the history of the school: and Dostoyevsky she learned when she giggled imagining his bureaucratic institution’s history. penis flashing a color-spectrum. that villains she observed first- Thank you President Oldstein, and She was the most-requested therapist for outpatient follow-up. hand and in the media—this was What her brothers did to each thank you to all the professionals during the foreplay to the Iraq other, her father to her mother, at the Graduate School of Social -3- invasion—should be considered her mother to her, and what the Work who have made this day the carefully. Villains—she relished young heir attempted on her was cherished goal of a challenging and She was crossing Death Valley in the word—must be considered unforgivable. She was not God, creative course of work. Thanks her small sedan. It was unclear human, whatever that word whose presumed responsibility it to my fellow-graduates, whose why she was crossing Death Valley; meant; and as a headstrong is to forgive his presumed creation. dedication to a field that, though its maybe she was driving from Seattle undergrad she decided to treat She could hold scars, like the lines financial rewards are but a fraction to Fresno to visit her parents and the symptoms that vague word on her neck where her mother’s of the rewards offered graduates of call on her younger brother in the privatized prison near Lemoore. She suggested. Vagueness was a nails found blood, and a shuffling lesser fields, offers many multiples seldom used the AC, but there was a mystery she longed to penetrate. deck of inner scars, but the scars of theirs in human fulfillment: sandstorm and hot blasts threatened never seemed to constrict her the prospect of changing lives ****** her eyesight. Her head throbbed and emotions, to clog the rill of her and even whole areas of society her eyes were sore from overwork, so In college we dream, and then we amusement. What fascinated her for the better. Let’s get to work! why had she decided to do something wake up to whatever we need to about these musings was as much -2- so stressful, so galling to her inner do to make ends meet—a phrase her mixed metaphors as their scars on her very first week of with which she played while substance. Was she postmodern? Professor Jason Stern dreamed vacation? Why had she taken this making love with the celebrated Mornings in the bathroom she’d Alina would cook and greet him roundabout road through Nevada, therapist-professor who occupied address her reversed bust: “What’s winsomely with a sprightly local wasted time with the insane noise, her last graduate school year it to be today, postmodern bitch?” vintage. Late evenings as she the carved, gel-crammed bodies of and who seldom appreciated her asked him quietly about his day, Instinctively she called her male Las Vegas, the ghost towns whose joking during those moments. he fastened his dark eyes on her colleagues in college and graduate service stations sold food so pumped mole. Her work allowed her little Looking at herself in the bathroom school boys, and was relieved with additives and artificial colors occasion to feed herself much less it reminded her of a barium enema? mirror she contemplated the beak when attached to the talented cook—she nibbled something of a nose her female classmates therapist finally to be with a man. as she studied paperwork on The flywheel scraped and clanked; deemed a barrier to undergraduate the engine shook and bucked and quit 25 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction

“Aren’t you supposed to And she decided she needed to be encouraging me?” know more about herself before she got involved with another man. “Ronnie, you’re violating your parole. You tell me you’re -4- smart. You are. But what you’re telling me about hardly Being single allowed Alina to do qualifies as smart. Now we’ve the things for which she never had got 5 minutes left, and let’s not time with a partner, and made her waste it. Are you drinking?” wonder about that word, partner. “No way. You think I’m stupid?” She moved to the University District, despite the corruptions “Is that the truth?” associated with youth colonizing real estate—the drugs and petty “I swear that’s the truth. I crime, the drunken swagger of drink diet coke, even if it’s the frat-boys spoiling some of the that shit from a pump.” most handsome boulevards, the Something was burning. It was 6:00 “Ronnie, haven’t all your counselors “OK, tell me about your litter and graffiti, the traffic jams PM, and already the sun was forming in the corrections facility and in schedule for the next week. converging on football polluting streaks like molten rainbows over all the rehabs told you to stay away fragile wetlands. She could bike the shadowy mountains. Tarantulas from bars and to avoid personal You’ve got at least 5 AA meetings and what else?” the Burke-Gilman Trail, use her and scorpions scuttled along the relationships for at least a year?” beloved libraries, trade books highway, disappearing under her “Hey, we never got to what I with Magus, and visit the campus car. She remembered the mice that “Yeah, but what do they know. came here to talk about.” galleries. She spent quiet hours had nested in her rear seat-pocket They don’t go through what I do.” with a notebook in James Turrell’s and ingested her air-hoses back in “Call me for an extra session. “But you know I agree with them. “Light Reign” installation at the the cool of Seattle. She wondered Tell me about your schedule. It’s too early in your parole for Henry. She tried to capture the if poisonous insects could smell I want you to stay sober and anything more than superficial, effect of Turrell’s work on her: the perspiration dripping from her friendly contact with women, and stay out of trouble. What forehead and down her T-shirt, on I know you need to avoid bars.” does your week look like?” You leave the gallery and cross which phrases from her valedictory a gangplank to enter a vertical “It looks like shit. No were printed in mirror-letters. “You know. What do you know? cylinder housing horizontal ellipses. Do you have a boyfriend?” bars, no babes.” The sun through the grimy Stained hardwood slats running window of her office was hot “We’re not talking about me here.” “Tell me what you’re up from the floor, across the seat, on her face as her next client’s doing next week.” and up the back to the height of the “That means you don’t have knock on the glass startled her entrance compose a bench that runs a boyfriend. Have you ever “I’m not doing dick.” awake. She reminded herself to the unbroken smooth white elliptical gotten it on with a client?” learn more about automobile “Ronnie, you know about walls. Vertical grooves between mechanics and western geography. “Ronnie, if you say or do anything self-pity. Tell me what you’re the slats imply a spin, a benign leading in that direction with conveyor belt. The back leans into The client, the hulking Ronnie, doing. I’m thinking you’ve been me, I’ll have you restrained.” released from rehab too soon.” the wall, tilting and impelling you proved the merit of her decision to look up. A central ellipse opens to wear baggy trousers and loose- “Hold on, don’t you have “OK, OK, I have a job the white ceiling to the sky. There fitting tops at work. Like many of a sense of humor?” interview on Monday with is no heating or cooling. (CHECK the borderline helpless, he paraded “Tell me why you were in a the fucking Big Nurse at….” THAT) When you sit at one end of his canny insights, convinced the ellipse, the ceiling appears to that his cunning maneuvers bar, and why you felt you could “Be clear, Ronnie. You have initiate contact with a woman?” tilt towards you from the other end. would pay off big time. Alcohol an interview where?” The sky shadows the ceiling, a soft directed him to fight the police “Because bars are where it’s at.” aperture to the sky’s brightness, intervening when he plunged “With the woman who runs food even on dark days. Surrounded by behind bars to swig from bottles “Where what’s at, Ronnie?” services here to clean up nights.” the white of the wall continuing bartenders withheld, and he Ronnie was 6’4”, the kind of soft behind you, the sky puncturing the viewed any restraint upon his “You know, action, life.” large man whose ugliness and faint shadow of the ceiling seems at impulses as fascism. He leaned “Ronnie, my impression of ungainliness she found poignant, first surreal, a Magritte sky minus forward, eyes searching for her bars is they’re pretty much all even winning. It was as if his breasts, throughout their work. the objects, and becomes the art- alike and half the customers baby fat had never departed his object you imagine to be the spirit “…I’m too sharp, see, that’s don’t know what they’re doing. body or his consciousness, as if of paintings that draw you. The why this babe was scared And as for action, unless you his obnoxious behavior required black marble floor is flecked with of me, she knew I knew mean yelling, falling down a loving, directive mother to white and gray like a night sky. where she lived. And…” or fighting, I don’t know that accompany him through his bars are particularly active.” ineffectual encounters with “Hold on, Ronnie, you the economy and society. But “Oh come on, bars are cool.” knew where she lived?” he had the loving, directive “Yeah, I knew what made her “Bars are full of people mother, and a kind father to tick, I knew right where she regurgitating the same stupid boot. She reminded herself to lived, what turned her on.” things and thinking they’re learn more about genetics as the interesting because they’re next client tapped on the frosted “And what was that?” inebriated. Tell me one real glass through which she could “That was me, Alina, what else?” friend you’ve made in a bar.” see her name in mirror-letters.

26 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I poetry Roses are Red / Violets are Blue By yuriy tarnawsky

ROSE ONE ROSE FOUR spring’s warm words filling in s penetrate to your heart quares color r and waves of sadness o rose ed odor a spread through your body greeable shape ye s compo and a grief you don’t understand nent parts pe grabs you by your throat tals stamens pist and you start writhing from it il leaves stem and whisper you’re tired of living s branches r foaming blood then comes gushing oots a decon out of your thorny veins structed ro and on the swollen stigmata of buds se is a sta it congeals in fragrant scabs tistic not a tra gedy ROSE TWO a love ROSE FIVE letter crump incomprehensible rose led up in a cramp mona lisa of flowers ed hand a your fragrance— bloody little the mysterious smile rag stink on her impassive face ing of the gasoline flow ROSE SIX ers run o blood sister n a tempo of slender renaissance ladies rary name th draped in fine silks at ultimate how gracefully you don’t move ly turns to in your still dance! fell like a ll that ris ROSE SEVEN es in the e nd it f that shape color all scent can s co-exist have a meaning matter

ROSE THREE a theorem christ of pl forever busy ants sacrifi proving itself ced on the pl ane gol gothas of gard ens nailed to th e cross of it s shape crow n of t horns over a ll of its bo dy your frag rance eli e li la ma sabach than i

27 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University poetry

VIOLET ONE VIOLETS ONE poor little barefoot on pitch-dark orphan flower stormy nights the faded blue vicious dragons worn dress of lightning flashes crooked hunt all over on its naked the landscape skin and bones for violets white body to reflect themselves lost in their pure in the woods white heels goes looking for a way out VIOLETS TWO to where tiny it doesn’t know blue crosses needing things VIOLET TWO to be put in the middle on both sides of them of a stormy night to create in dark dark woods something bigger lightning flashes sporadically illuminate VIOLETS THREE its bare violets also white heels have a life a name VIOLET THREE for a passport nearly filled with an abyss toppled over stomachs its beautiful white that digest skeleton what’s left over already from souls showing through guts whose form fingers VIOLET FOUR copy poor little nerves criminal that love condemned to death to dig themselves deep for its peaceful into the flesh violence violets also put up the tallest buildings so that it’d be harder for bodies to live they love with their teeth clenched tight they dream about violet seas they go to war under violet flags and they die on violet bayonets

28 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction Red Line a new self. Her exposed skin, Innocence now tip-toes to peek mind. Even the buzzing sounds the chill, the rough ground, the out at constellations. What of telephones wires swinging over by Tatiana Servin darkness, all in transient space, she wants is to float a string of her head conjured up parallels to The streetlights tapped on as swirled around her each time retrospections to a surface older the curbed wires of her mind to Ino walked past her driveway. the act repeated. Another few than herself. She questions her heart to her feet and hands. Concrete sediment scraped years would pass before she’d use whether any time has passed at that escape to climb down and all when she looks at that sky as Ino supposed each house underneath the rough balls of represented a thought or a group of her feet. This texture and the sneak out though it never felt like if she’s been watching herself sneaking out since she had no all along. To step any further thoughts connected to ideas that lack of warmth on her skin could light up should someone sanctioned her initial feelings place to go. She only wanted to into this kind of thinking she be away, and found it enough of knows will make her mind decide to walk up to the door and of freedom. Outside, without ask for an invitation inside. She the gaze of others, she watched an excuse to combat accusations race, but it’s too late for that of sneaking out should it come now. Perhaps, the cold pinched wondered if her mind thought like the neighborhood, and maybe this like an awaited party with the neighborhood watched her down to excuse-making time. the balls of her cheeks when she got off the train that night; guests nearby. Most of all, she too. She was only five or six the Claiming spaces that were her felt comfortable in a space where first time she felt that grainy perhaps her rough hands had own by virtue of no one else skimmed her wool jacket when she was in mutual submission texture skim the small of her being there when she occupied with her surroundings with soft arches, not knowing then she reached for her coat; perhaps them fascinated Ino. She might she noticed the dark night a little only intentions of being near that she delighted in the bit of have easily walked out the front one another and never for the defiance she exercised by not more than she normally had in door without anyone noticing quite some time. Iterations of act of entire consumption. putting on shoes, even now. but she refused to exist in the those nights unraveled as if on Ino situates her bony fingers, ones At only ten or eleven, Ino way that others had entered. She spool with each push of sensation sought her own threshold. just like her mother’s, behind her would casually slip out of the gone consciously unnoticed. back before hoisting herself up house to sit in the middle of Ino’s mom had named her after in standing position. She steps the stairway in order to forget the word “innocence,” and no one “She travels down the underneath the streetlight, and the noise awaiting her inside. knew exactly whose innocence pipes collecting soot, looks at her forearms in absolute Audible or not, it mattered it was. People whispered about familiarity. The water falling none. The mix of frustration in her mother and by default about gooey-goo, grime, dirt.” down her cheeks seems to take the lack of developed patience herself, but no one asked if Ino some of the heaviness away. She and forgiveness for one’s own Ino sat on the stairs staring at the perceived her name as an idea adjacent street, which illuminated drains and melts into a puddle shortcomings billowed along that she could change with the that slips down the curb into a the countertops and in between more of the fog billowing in narrative of her life. People the street than the street itself. gutter, and the gutter is a cemetery wooden floorboards. She was didn’t ask questions worth for other lost liquid selves who fourteen the first time she The lights in the houses were asking anymore. Instead they turned off, not even a porch light often thought about what they climbed onto her roof from her stared or half-smirked the way had always been afraid to face, bedroom window claiming a flickered on. She thought about people do when they don’t say how perfectly the cul-de-sac now wishing for madness they space: watching and waiting for what they are really thinking. so feared would burn them up time to pass, for her to pass into matched the interior space of her

29 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction

into ashes. A liquid lines the the bus driver about her kids, signals that he’s safe, that she’s ignorance, reflection, hot belly streets of future drifters who fishing. She tells the driver she not going to get mugged or robbed, breath, and exhale. She notices the are slipping down the rusty will email her some information and she hates this world for the trash in the grass and wonders if fixtures themselves. And what on FAFSA for her son getting way it has ridiculously taught cynicism has programmed her to to make of beautiful, promising ready to go to college, and she her to scan and code, to use this see only trash. Until, she doesn’t. Ino who is now but a globule does before the next stop. No one faulty barometer of discernment She eyes a man on a lawn mower possessing reflection? She sits next to nor acknowledges the dependent on mixed signals. cart trimming what is left of a travels down the pipes collecting red, slurpy vomit, but the smell lawn while his son sits on his soot, gooey-goo, grime, dirt. wafts through the air into her She’s cornered in her seat or lap holding tightly and laughing. nostrils and on the faces of the so she thinks. Two friends: Water drips from his chin. They’re He sweeps the dirt from other patrons. The conversation one by the door and the other happy. It is not a show. It is underneath his fingernails before she left work has trailed sits behind her. She imagines not based on any props but the pinching it into piles. He blares with her since she first stepped their plotting and then she buzzing of a motor beneath them music in ear buds as a line of onto the platform. Half-finished settles but not without feeling and the movement in purpose and defense against chatty passengers. sentences about “those people” shame and guilt for jumping to task. She connects this course Passages of lives he wants to avoid. or “this neighborhood” take conclusions. She changes this line of events like a constellation Instead, he stares. Styrofoam place in whispers, and yet of thinking but wonders if the that gives way to what is pieces from a Dunkin Donuts nothing is quiet about what is two boys already feel the energy larger than individual stars. cup fall from his mouth while perceived and acknowledged protruding from her anyway. The sediments stir deep in his belly. or blasted from car windows. skeleton of her fragile thoughts She sees a man pushing the brown Within the same song, a woman breaks down in front of them. paper bag down away from his with eyes like humidity and hair She considers the now trending bottle as he sits on the steps of the color of the sun rises with her phrase “gang violence” when a “He sweeps the dirt a boarded up building. His feet protruding bones while waving black and yellow car approaches stick out from his shoes onto the a tube of toothpaste and a bottle the entrance of the stop. She from underneath his steps. She hears the conversation of dove soap in the air like she’s wonders how we claim colors fingernails pinching it of earlier and washes it down chasing someone. She exits at cementing dominant meanings into piles. He blares with the image of that father and the KFC nearby, calmly, as if the onto our memories. Now the son plowing through the weeds, person on the bus and the person nuances involved in a culture she music in ear buds as a or was it a pair of brothers, or an off the bus are two separate people. knows is rooted in a problem more line of defense against uncle and nephew, or none of these Maybe they are, but she or they are nuanced than “born gangbangers” at all because it’s not that simple gone, and more people who look at and “inherit evil” troubles her. the chatty passengers.” and she’s wondering whatever is. each other as if they have nothing It just doesn’t happen that way The man bites off the “D” from in common enter onto the bus. and she feels the air in her belly the Dunkin Donuts cup and it travel to her chest. Teenagers walk may as well be pieces of her. Her She finds a corner in the front of past her and she’s not yet sure bones ache and she vomits her old the bus because red slurpy vomit how to feel around them. The self, because she dies with every is on her regular seat. She asks soccer tattoo on the boy’s calf new bout of awareness, keenness, 30 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction Borges & I memory along with the gaffes of Sei Shonagon lifted her head eating and hygiene that annoy the from her pillow and spoke in by Karen Tei Yamashita sighted and plague the sightless. perfect Spanish: A la otra, a The other one, the one called This was companionship that Amelia Nagamine, es a quien le María Kodama, is the one things must fully anticipate the needs ocurren las cosas. In the book happen to. Over the years, I of Borges. The work of any of things that occur to young have watched her through our companionship cannot be known women, there might have been, looking glass, her dark straight fully by others. Amanuensis, had Amelia kept such a notebook, hair—cut precisely at shoulder scribe, secretary, nurse, cook, a notation about a Mexicano in the length—turn white, her youthful guide, mother, daughter, uniform of the American army, features mature. And yet I believe caretaker, muse, wife, lover, but a journalist for the Stars and her to contain the same dewy principally, gardener. Gardener Stripes, who covered the Tokyo innocence and singularity of in the labyrinthine landscape war crimes trials. Instead it was elegant strangeness in a sea of belonging only to Borges. Thus the journalist and writer Américo sameness as on the day she first was my invisibility transposed Paredes, who kept his notebook, met, in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis upon a mirror, reluctantly musing over the beautiful Borges in the musty confines watchful, envious though safely features of a japonesa born in of the university. For María, at the wavering distance of the Uruguay who also spoke the perhaps that was a moment of interpreting eye to its story. educated Spanish of a diplomat. Who among the Puerto Rican complete clarity, the center of disabled and handicapped, the GIs treated by the Red Cross, in the infinite garden, at which she “We met María with difficult and nearly impossible those years of Japan’s occupation, made a choice or the beginning of terrain of access to independent Borges at the Café du followed by a war in Korea, had a choice. I am not sure how one living and quality of life. I not fallen in love with Amelia? at the young age of sixteen, as Monde, sipping café followed but could never fully But it was to Américo, an older sure of ourselves as we felt, can and chicory, teeth imagine Amelia’s meticulous though still young man of charm make such choices. For myself, I caretaking, her persistent and tearing the doughy and resolve, to whom Amelia cannot say it was the attraction obsessive advocacy, the meaning tied her future. And from that of youth to age, but rather youth skin of sweet beignets, of her life becoming the body moment, I might catch glimpses to knowledge, a hunger planted and the brains of a child who lips and chins dusted of Amelia, for the next fifty years and fed by the same garden. could not do for herself. But always at the side of Américo. How I wanted to remain with in powdered sugar.” if not the mother, then who? María in that garden dedicated And what of the postwars that But one day our forking paths The world of Américo was not a and extending to our deepest Amelia had also witnessed, the would meet at the divine forking garden but a contested ancestors, but she managed to amputated and disfigured lives birthplace of Nihon, our feet borderland experienced in wide escape down another path or at of veterans and civilians, and crunching in unison over the swatches: the Tex-Mex border; least she thought she had left me if Americans, joined to plead pebbled gravel before the great the American occupation of a behind. Perhaps she had paused the justice of the Fourteenth temples of Izumo. Borges marked war-torn Japan; a Greater Mexico, to notice my bewilderment, I Amendment: the Rehabilitation this mythic center calling upon later perhaps the mythic atlas cannot say. I saw her confident Act of 1973, the Education of the gods in a swirl of cherry named Aztlán. The world known resolve, the flounce of her skirt All Handicapped Children’s blossoms, their petals falling to Américo was a rebellious and hair, toss away from me. Act of 1975, the Civil Rights of about him in Basho’s seventeen world of men in endless war, Institutionalized Persons Act From that moment, I might catch syllables. What is the garden’s crimes committed by enemy of 1980, the Americans with glimpses of María, always with atlas to the blind? A geography and ally, survival by cunning Disabilities Act of 1990. I saw Borges, in newsprint, her image without vistas, perspective and happenstance. It would her there at every turn, whether recalled on the stage of some determined by time travel, a seem that Amelia remained as commissioned community international honorary degree folded and reversible map. Yet fixed at the center of Américo’s member or spokesperson or or prestigious award or in a even the colorblind crave to see borderland in Austin, Texas, letter-writer or petitioner at the photograph. Though invisible, I the color of a body’s journey, to where she raised her children grassroots. But I guess that Amelia was at times not far away. As I divine meaning from fascination, and kept a modest household was too busy to keep any lists. have said, the garden was infinite, even if translated again and and supported her husband’s scholarly ambitions. No doubt her mapped across the atlas, and so again over centuries and multiple So Amelia and Américo shared gracious ways domesticated this we traveled. In Venice, I saw the languages, becoming if only a lives across separate though Chicano, compressing Américo’s swoop of pigeons swirl around her whisper, an ideogram splashed overlapping borderlands, and passionate anger beneath a passage across the vast piazza of across skin. The skin may be perhaps over the long years, each genteel veneer. But by the time San Marco. I watched her rise in accusatory, but like paper, it chaffed at the obsession of the Américo Paredes was discovered a hot air balloon over California receives and reflects its text, other, the understood refusal to be the godfather of Chicano vineyards. In the Louvre, I too memory and knowing to be of either to become completely Studies, Amelia had discovered shed tears on the Daru steps at interpreted by the reader. So Sei converted to the concerns of the a borderland of her own. the sight of the Winged Victory Shonagon’s deft brush thrust other. I knew this sentiment of Samothrace. I saw her pet the from a silken sleeve through Perhaps her borderland began in of pride of partnership, public tremendous bodies of striped eight centuries to lick the ear of the four walking blocks between standing side-by-side, private tigers. Of course, these events Borges. Thus he would pronounce the university and the Lone Star guilt and jealousy, but finally were meant for Borges, and the the name of María, how many state capitol, its dome looming death silences the frailties of meaning of being there at his side mornings and seas, how many over the Austin landscape, where illness, blesses loyalty, forgets. must be personal to María. She oriental and occidental gardens, Amelia beat a mother’s fury at Some believe that Américo was to know the shape of constant his Shonagon, her Genji, his the doors of political power. And Paredes, desperately lonely in companionship, the day-to-day Beatrice, her Virgil, his little over time, Amelia occupied the the borderlands of death, called routine and needs of a blind man, stone on a board of chess. borderland radiating around his beloved wife Amelia from the acute precision of his oral the Austin State School for the his grave and that she obediently 31 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction followed him only two months face of a young girl, yet a child New York embassy in the Dakota, I accompanied Yoko daily from later. But the border’s paths are of twelve years, following her claiming diplomatic immunity. the Dakota to work, to run the mysterious, and Amelia and I belongings in a wheelbarrow, the I lived inside the looking glass business of being John Lennon took the bus out of Austin, headed precarious future to be forged ballad of John and Yoko for there and Yoko Ono, unknowingly down the obligatory border, and out of rubble and defeat. Twenty was nothing about the intimacy preparing for the burden of tossed cherry blossoms into years— prestigious schooling, of their lives that was not made legacy, money and memory. the Rio Grande all the way to two marriages, and an artistic public. Two virgins displayed in Brownsville, pursued by corridos, career attached variously to John full frontal nudity. Honeymoon And in opposing seasons in Buenos haunted by Américo’s serenade, Cage and Andy Warhol—later, I bed in a sea of white sheets to Aires, María finally opened fierce and tender. Japonesa, stood with her at the foot of a give peace a chance. Among the Borges’s library to Las Madres Japonesa, the song crooned after ladder in a gallery in London, guests: Timothy Leary, Tommy de Plaza de Mayo, but having us. Que sonriés tu dolor, en tus watching a wealthy Beatle Smothers, Hari Krishnas, a embraced order for so many brazos orientales mitigaré mi from Liverpool climb its rungs, delegation of the blind. West met years, perhaps it was too late. destierro. And from Brownsville, awkwardly balanced at the top to East in the Plastic Ono Band, the With his pistol in my hand, I we caught a boat to New Orleans. decipher a message through our oriental riff chasing the revelatory pulled the trigger. I do not know On a dappled spring morning magnifying glass: YES. I suppose experience of first sight: oh my if the man who fell was an elderly several Wednesdays after the that privilege comes back from love, everything is clearer in man in his eighties or a younger turmoil of Mardi Gras, we met war with fierce defiance, grabs a our world. Thus John Lennon man half that age. I do not know María with Borges at the Café du fistful of burnt earth, an act of would call her name, Oh Yoko, oh if he was a learned sinologist or Monde, sipping café and chicory, reclamation, but in Yoko’s fist, a Yoko, my love will turn you on. a Mexican folklorist or a lyricist teeth tearing the doughy skin of declaration of freedom. Still, that In the public’s mania recycling of Jabberwocky. I do not know if sweet beignets, lips and chins earth could be churned back eight he could finally see me through dusted in powdered sugar. Not centuries; thus a grapefruit could their every movement, Lennon’s attachment to Yoko would seem his blindness, through the until that moment was Américo’s have the acidic taste and shape borders, the utopia of his mind. Tokio guitar replaced by the of a pillow book of instructions. an obsessive submission to his oriental soul mate, his continuing It was his pistol and his pop. The insistent sax interlude of King The conceptual MAP PIECE read, myopic splinter of spectacles. Curtis, John Lennon driving his Draw a map to get lost. And so pursuit of answers, fascinations eventually abandoned at the foot My primal scream caged and lyrics, you gotta live, you gotta we did. And then, WALK PIECE: yellowed by a judgmental media. love, you gotta be somebody, you Stir inside your brains with a of Sergeant Pepper, Maharishi, gotta shove, it’s really hard. penis until things are mixed and primal screaming. And I do not know which of us well. Take a walk. And so we did. perhaps it was true that he had has written this page. Amelia’s tender eyes then turned met his match, the knowledge to me, smiled old pain. A la otra, I followed Yoko into her world of fatherhood and feminism she began, la otra called Yoko made famous by John Lennon, in which he re-created himself Ono, is the one things happen to. their conceptual country of as househusband, bread- Our minds wander back to Tokyo, peace: Nutopia, without land, maker, caretaker. This was his precisely firebombed; we emerged boundaries, or passports, and if enlightenment, his peaceful from shelter and rural escape laws, only cosmic. I hung around revolution. Who then had and remember the bewildered like one more groupie in their submitted to whom? Meanwhile,

32 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I poetry Poems By Zulfikar Ghose

NO MORE BOHÈME, PLEASE A WOMAN BATHING Let’s not have La Bohème again Renoir, Degas, Bonnard, all painted for another two hundred years. her—an arm raised, a towel in her hand, Ditto for the Eroica symphony an uplifted breast glowing abundant, and ditto for Swan Lake her flesh radiant as if flush with desire: and ditto, ditto, ditto for Holst’s her image, observed from an adjoining Planets and Handel’s Messiah. bedroom, a recurring fantasy in the male eye, I really, really, don’t want to hear the mistress of elaborate charms about Mimi’s candle going out again. serenely meditative in that still

Let collective amnesia and seemingly vulnerable moment, overtake humanity her newly cleansed body lustrous and work with satellites as if she performed a ritual ablution to jam the tunes still held prior to a ceremonious surrender; dear by diehard fanatics but her pensive, coldly self-absorbed look from reaching the earth, holds in fierce tension nature’s determined design: it’s the least digital let the male dream of conquest, she will fill technology can do. the washed womb of creation with his blood. I really, really, don’t want to hear about Mimi dropping her key again.

Let’s pray to God that he blows his breath upon fundamentalists everywhere and in one miraculous moment converts them all to sheep—let them, Lord, be shepherded to where they are their own and only audience with no one to listen to their bleating.

I really, really, don’t want to hear about Mimi’s frozen hands again.

33 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University poetry

SINGING BIRDS BURGOS I’ve never seen a bird struck by lightning, Down from Bordeaux and past Biarritz, crossing into northern Spain to proceed to those nor a sparrow hit on the head by hail, customary destinations— nor an eagle tumbling in a flash flood, Córdoba, Granada—I stopped in Burgos never seen a kestrel or a hawk buffeted by a wind of such damaging force it much as migratory birds break their flight uproots flourishing sycamores and elms. for a night among sycamores and oaks But then in some unknown forest or in the back yards of suburban homes. I’ve seen pelicans and seagulls half-drowned in the obsidian colored sea of an oil spill, There was a cathedral in Burgos, of course, the pulse at their throat an imperceptible throb, but what else that’s erased from memory? their glazed eyes petrified like those of starved Even the cathedral that I remember children who’ve witnessed the murder of their is a generic form, a structure that appears parents in a genocide, staring in silent programmed with default settings to sustain accusation at all their blue world turned black, a sure ecclesiastical illusion caught in the net of a wide-angle lens. like a vague idea of God retained by an unbelieving But then God mind from its earlier credulous years. knows what other afflictions birds endure But what else? and yet all day long they whistle and sing. O there must have been parks there, flowering gardens and apple orchards where lovers met and in the anguish of desire drank sweet innocence from one another’s eyes.

Yes, of course, but what else?

No use mentioning schools with their bullies and prize days, no use mentioning the hospitals famous for pulmonary care or where some eminent oncologist or cardiologist worked,

attracting patients like pilgrims to a shrine, no use mentioning the secret abortion clinics or the local football team that almost once beat Real Madrid, no use mentioning the poor

state of the roads and the broken social services, conditions common to countless cities that must have prevailed in Burgos as well; and there must have been in Burgos gorgeous

women equal to any in a California beauty pageant and statues in public squares that honoured the city’s famous native sons, among them a general and a poet.

Yes, yes, but what else?

Ah, Burgos! I once arrived in Burgos after a long and exhausting drive across France through vineyards and small towns where men played boules under pollarded chestnut trees in the squares,

a long sunlit day in a convertible car across France, in a former century, I came at night to the cathedral in Burgos and can never forget my arrival there.

34 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I poetry

PRAYER O Lord, let me just once in my life fuck a fat woman, one so large that when she lies in bed the gap between her breasts is like a hammock in which I can curl up for a snooze when exhausted; let her pick me up by my toes, delicately, and hold me dangling before her mouth like asparagus, my thin body buttered with sweat and lately spent, let her swallow me whole into the juices of her mouth, roll my head on her tongue like a little lozenge, snap her teeth on my thighs playfully with tiny bites, and suddenly probing the parting with the tip of her tongue let her prise open my buttocks like two cloves on a garlic head; let a bubble of her spit bathe my cock, then let her ease me out of her mouth and sit me on the wide cushion of her lip and dry me with the warm breeze of her breath, O Lord, the divine breath you created within her inexhaustible body; thus washed and dried let her insert me into her cunt so I’m penetrated wholly, O Lord, from head to toe, disappeared completely from your world of light, though from time to time I could pop out from a sweaty pore on her inner thigh, take a quick look, and go right back inside, and, amen, stay there for evermore.

35 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction Early This General Paz Avenue we take turns cheat. Or we improvise a game of drawing pad to scribble plans sticking our heads out the window paddleball with a wad of paper and invent schemes for spying on Morning while wearing Vicky’s goggles so and a couple of swim fins. We Vicky’s friends when they change the wind doesn’t make our eyes wait so long that Tania begins to clothes. Miguel begins to come by Pedro Mairal water. Mom and Dad don’t say bark, because she can no longer less often, and I have the whole We leave early. Dad has a recently anything, except when we pass stand being shut up in the back back seat to sleep in. Mom stops purchased maroon Peugeot 404. by the police, and then we have to of the Falcon Rural we have after and wakes me up to put water I climb up into the space next to sit up straight and be quiet. When the Reanult. Mom reappears with in the radiator, which leaks and the rear windshield and lie down we’ve moved on to the Renault plants or flowerpots or some piece overheats the engine. We buy lengthwise. I’m comfortable there. 12, a bunch of Miguel’s figures of of furniture that has to be tied a watermelon along the way. I like to be up against the back professional wrestlers flies out to the roof, and we drive on. the window and Dad stops on the There used to be just one or two window since I can sleep. I’m street vendors at the train crossing always happy when we spend the shoulder of the road to pick them “The car is faster and up because Miguel is screaming gates; now there are amputees week-end at the villa, because at it always seems like and disabled people begging and the apartment in town, all I do all like a maniac. I see two soldiers suddenly approach, pointing we are just about to other people selling magazines, week is kick a tennis ball around balls, pens, tools and dolls. People the patio in the light well on top their machine guns at us and arrive, especially when saying that we are in a military also ask for spare change or sell of the garage, a patio set between flowers and cans of soft drinks at four very high party walls stained zone. They ask Dad questions, I start to drive...” pat him down for weapons, the stoplights in the town we pass with soot from the incinerators. Miguel invites along a succession check his papers and make us through. Dad’s Ford Sierra is a When I look up, the patio feels like of friends. I watch with go on, leaving the scattered company car that has power locks, it’s inside a chimney; when I yell, astonishment and a perverse figures behind, including the one and since Miguel was robbed not the noise barely rises and does not anxiety because I know that when signed by Martín Karadagián. long ago, Mom makes me lock the touch the square of sky. The trip to we arrive, they will fall into the doors and close the windows at the villa takes me out of that well. Dad looks for classical music traps that Miguel always prepares: the stoplights since she is afraid the dead rat in the guest’s rubber There is little traffic on the road, on the radio and sometimes he of the vendors. She says they press boots, the ghost in the shed, the perhaps because it is Saturday, or manages to tune in the Sodre in on her, and besides, Duque fake killer pigs, the pit hidden by perhaps because there are still station. We are kicking each other might bite them. Later on, air leaves and branches next to the not many cars in Buenos Aires. in the back seat when suddenly conditioning gives us an excuse to row of palm trees visible from I bring along a Matchbox car, a Dad turns up the volume and travel with the windows closed. the house. Inside the car stuck jar for catching insects, as well says, “Listen to this,” and we The car becomes a safety capsule in mid-morning traffic, I look as some crayons that I arrange have to be quiet and stop in the with its own microclimate. at Miguel’s friends and I savor by size and that I mustn’t leave middle of a judo hold to listen Outside, there is more and more evil for the first time. I prefer in the sun because they will to part of an aria or an adagio. trash, more and more political the arrogant and conceited ones, melt. No one seems to think it is When cars come equipped with graffiti. Inside, the music sounds because I know they will be even dangerous for me to lie down next tape players, Mozart rules the cleanly in the new stereo and more humiliated by the traps in to the rear windshield. I like the trip to the villa. We watch the Mom patiently puts up with my which, in a vague and sideways protective corner formed by the long road unfurl behind us as we tapes of Soda Stereo or The Police. fashion, I help to make them fall. rear window, next to the sporting see the pruned trees with white- painted trunks, and we listen The car is faster and it always goods store decal. Along the way, When they finish the first stretch to string quintets, symphonies, seems like we are just about to I look at the front ends of cars of the highway and start to charge piano concertos and operas. arrive, especially when I start to because they look like faces; the tolls, traffic improves. Vicky drive, since I step up the speed headlights are eyes, the fenders Vicky leads the revolt, using our travels on her own with friends without Mom realizing it; she sits are mustaches and the grills are favorite chant to drown out the who have cars. Dad rarely comes calmly in the passenger seat using mouths and teeth. Some cars have sopranos singing the Wedding anymore. While Mom drives the the mirror to study her latest kind faces, others have evil ones. of Figaro or Don Giovanni: “We rattletrap Rural, Miguel uses my facelift, which has pulled the skin My brother and sister like me to wanna eat, we wanna eat, dried ride up near the rear window since blood and rotten meat…” But this leaves more room for them. later Vicky begins to bring books I don’t ride in the seat until on the trip and she reads them further along the way, when in silence, paying no attention it is too hot or later when I’ve to anyone. She gets angrier and grown a little and don’t fit in angrier about having to come. In the rear window anymore. We the end, she gets permission to drive down a long avenue. I don’t stay in town on the weekends to know if it’s because of the many go to the movies with her friends, stoplights, but we go slowly. After who already go out with boys. some years of use, the Peugeot Miguel and I are each guaranteed a is a little rickety; the exhaust window even if we invite a friend. pipe hangs loose and you have to It seems like we will never arrive. shout to be heard; also, one of the There are long waits along the way rear doors sags and Mom tied it while Mom buys garden furniture with string from Miguel’s kite. or plants, taking advantage of The trip is really long, especially the fact that Dad stayed home to since the stoplights are not work. In the back seat, Miguel synchronized. We fight over and I play at seeing who can hold the window; no one of us three his breath the longest. We take wants to go in the middle. Along turns covering the opening of each other’s snorkel so no one can 36 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction backward as if it was an effect of Gabriela’s belly begins to swell Gabriela asks me to slow down, bottom of the pool for me to dive the acceleration. After Dad’s death, and we travel together seeking a then she stops coming; she takes for later. I feel the fear of seeing Mom prefers Miguel to drive; he semblance of family life. We take Violeta to her mother’s on the the snake that emerged when has returned like the prodigal the Volkswagen her brother lends weekends. I drive by myself and we turned over a piece of metal. son because Vicky is living in us. Nowadays we use seat belts. We listen to Mozart piano concertos I feel the rainy night when we Boston. The route fades as I drive begin to fear for death–there are on CDs with perfect sound. The tried to aim a ball through the the yellow Taurus belonging only a few more miles to go. The engine of the 4x4 makes no noise. only broken pane of the window to Chino’s father. We close the years race by even faster. There The highway is finished and there in order to force ourselves windows, not because we’re afraid are many more cars on the road are wire fences along the sides to to search for it by flashlight of being robbed, but so as not to and more tolls. They are finishing prevent people from crossing. among the toads and puddles. dilute the marijuana smoke. the high way. We stop at a service station, and we argue. Gabriela I drive in the fast lane. I look at Now there is only the incessant We listen to “Wild Horses” and cries in the bathroom. I have to the speedometer: 100 miles an roar of cars passing over the ghost there are moments that achieve ask her to come out. Afterwards, hour. Soon I will come to the of the house. It is exactly twelve an almost spiritual quality when we buy a car seat for Violeta, and exact spot. From the distance, I noon and the sun glitters on the the fast road slows into serenity tiny and sleepy, she rides in the see the three palm trees and I wait asphalt. I am a divorced man, a across the vast, flat landscape. back seat, also wearing a seat until they line up. They come publicist going for the first time Later, I drive Gabriela’s mother’s belt. The three of us tied down. closer and I come closer, closer, to his brother’s house in a gated car, which luckily runs on diesel, until the first palm tree hides community, a man who doesn’t so the outings we take during “They come closer and the other two and I say “here.” I know how to stop and continues the week to be alone for a while feel like I’m shouting, but I’m traveling in a car that left early don’t cost too much. There is I come closer, closer, actually speaking softly. I say it at this morning, a long time ago, already talk of expropriation, until the first palm tree the exact point where the house when he was small enough to but it is just a hint. Two more stood before the expropriation, lie down in the back window. governments will come and go. hides the other two...” before it was demolished and Gabriela wears short dresses that they built the highway over it. I step on the gas because I want to make me drive with one hand make it in time for lunch. Gabriela and caress her thighs with the For a millisecond, I feel like I’m says it doesn’t matter; we can other, running my hand slowly up inside the rooms, on the bed stop at a McDonald’s. We argue. from her knees. I leave the engine where Miguel and I played at pro Gabriela sneers at me. I put on my in high gear. Gabriela whispers wrestling. I pass by the graves of dark glasses and accelerate. I use in my ear to take it easy, we can Tania and Duque among Mom’s the trip to listen to demos of radio wait until we arrive. The trip plants; I pass through a damp and jingles. I grip the steering has never seemed so long. The metallic smell, through a taste wheel of the Escort. Almost there. villa is far away, out of reach. of green plums tossed in the

37 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction Forgotten its absence leaves me without didn’t understand that language— He said he could accompany me defense. I pull the blanket over my the poem left an impression. there. Ines would be busy all day. shoulders, over my chin. He is no Night (Excerpt) He spoke about the food of the Yet I wanted him to leave my side. by Rebecca Goodman longer next to me. Lights flicker. Radiating—rhythmic. Reminding region. The specialty bakeries. For he would not reveal what And the dinner they would happened—even as I was certain What happened last night? me of the persistence of time which prevents the present. have in the hotel tonight. he knew. The uncertain look on Accidents and meanderings led his face. The certainty with which me to the point of refusal. When you forget, do you The light was bright in the crisp he described the surroundings. air. Shoppers filled the streets. In this room. In the dark. The enter the past or the present. The way he led me down the night filters images—faint— Do you leave behind you How did our words articulate street—walking, turned half- phosphorescent. The dark rejects the memory of existence. the space around us? The toward me, anxious to hold me blackness—something absolute. I boundaries of presence—of what near him. He asked me to come to need to piece together moments— “She drinks from the is seen—of what is not. Place as his studio. To see his birds—to perhaps hours. All thoughts have river. She holds her the coherence of being. Where see his sculptures. He persisted. disappeared. The dark light plays we are—where we could be. The He continued to talk about the tricks. My eyes do not focus. It is hands cupped together. sense that the space we inhabit village, about its traditions, the not so much a question of what The river flows from is only part of the experience. rituals of the day. How he would I can see—but what I cannot. Had my grandfather walked this show me the woods outside the the mountaintop to path, perhaps. Most likely he village. The streams we could What happened: what this juncture—” did. He must have. Slowly, the hike along. The wildflowers I’ve forgotten, what I lost day fills the fullness of night. that were in full bloom. as I experienced it—is a She drinks from the river. The movement towards evening It occurred to me that perhaps question I cannot escape. She holds her hands cupped is the recognition of sounds— together. The river flows he could not leave my side. That Why, he asked, do you need blatant in the view of morning. from the mountaintop to this what I could not remember, to know? Are you afraid juncture—a small break where You cannot remember held power over him. of what you’ve done? the water ripples. The icy everything. As the mistake of Feast day brings us out, he I couldn’t answer. sting that reddens her skin. time regenerates the touch of says. It’s a religious village. He your hand. The register changes pulled me to a bakery towards She said, but you remember when I’m walking on the path when key as the movement towards the sweet yeasty smell. Two, we sat at the table and spoke. he joins me. We had met earlier landlocked water. Canals which he motioned to the case. in the day at the café along the sound the flow of water. My The question follows me. I lie on riverfront. We pass the timber grandfather—he’d left in his These are the specialty here, he the bed. The rough blanket. The houses lined with flowerpots and diary obscure notes. Poems he’d handed me a pastry. My mother sounds which drift through me ivy wreathes. Carved wooden copied from an anonymous poet. used to bake these for us when throughout the night. Doors slam figures adorn the facades. we were children. It’s an odd shut. Laughter in the hallway. Red banners and bright flags altarpiece, he said. You’ll be Women who sound like girls. He says, will you dine strung from the buildings and shocked by its beauty and its with us tonight. light posts invigorate the streets With what has been forgotten horror. Painted to heal the sick. with color, reflect the movement comes the sense that what I’ve We walk past a shop window of the river. Feast day. The colors Groups of children rode past us. lost can’t be replaced. For I can’t displaying leather goods. I of spring. Yellow. Green. Bridge Laughing, ringing bells, wearing remember what I felt. You are stop. He follows. The village tone, fusing into summer. yellow shirts and red scarves. not cleansed of the past; rather, has a history of the craft of you are compelled by the empty leather making, he says. He - He said, Do you remember street. Feeling is anesthetized. If points to the jacket in when we were young—when you forget yourself you forget all the window— We found ourselves drifting, we did those things. that reminds you of the distance unaware of the world around us. I turn away, our reflections between the language and the Lost in the moment. Yellow color in the window in the water “We found ourselves moment of desire that ceases the absent of sound. Soundless. We of the river behind us. moment you speak. The memories hadn’t noticed the square filling drifting, unaware of that elude you will disappear. He smiles, putting his hand on my with strollers and shoppers the world around us. and groups of cyclists. Their And what replaces them. shoulder. He says, beautiful, isn’t Lost in the moment. it? One of the few villages saved forward momentum. Chaos The next morning I discovered a during the war. Ines loves it here. that enables the day to begin. Yellow color absent of red satin box at the foot of my bed. She asked about you. She hoped we Did he know something about sound. Soundless.” The room felt dark. Obscured might see you again this evening. last night? Details, perhaps? by darkness. The inconceivable He spoke about his life—and his I told him that I was on my About that which I’ve lost, that sense that life would have been childhood, reminiscing about way to the museum— which I can’t remember. Where lived without feeling without I‘d gone, where I had been. He weekends in the country, rides experience. The room exists. It We followed the path through the seemed to hold something back, in the park. How he had met had to exist. I became aware of village. He spoke about an oval to know something that he didn’t Ines when he was seventeen. each molecule in my body. And disk he’d seen in a gallery—made want to reveal. I felt it in his Yet, the more he spoke, the less the sense that I had not been of clay—broken in half. On it presence in the way he smiled, I seemed to know him. Words aware of each molecule in my were the words of what seemed as though he held the secret further concealed his being. His body. How could you forget? to be a poem—he couldn’t quite that would bind me to him. intentions obscured. Endless recall—the language similar to chatter— that couldn’t be broken. I ask myself to ignore the sounds Latin—a Latin alphabet—and I told him that I planned to Yet when ambient cries broke our that penetrate the space which the words faintly familiar—the spend the day at the museum, isolation, we had to consider how surrounds me. But the collision sounds—familiar—but he to see the altarpiece. we had abandoned ourselves to of memory and the weight of couldn’t place them. Though he the motives that took us over. 38 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction So lost it seemed —had we heard focused on sounds beyond, on we stop here. The city now flooded Why did I dream that after the the crying, yet didn’t turn around. the forward movement. Why with water as it did every winter. quake we felt the end of the Perhaps we had, yet couldn’t does he fail to hear his son? The concert only a memory. Were world. That I sat by the phone integrate those sounds into the Forgetting his place. Waves of we there last night. Did I imagine and, as each caller asked me for sounds we desired to hear. We light that generate blue and red. it. Did I watch as the conductor help, I shouted back at them ignored them, I believe. We entered the stage, knocking on without using words. I could continued to walk and talk until The image persists. The the door then laughing at his know something that I need to at some point the crying which child’s foot. Crushed by the arrival. The string broke. The know? Or don’t need to know at grew stronger finally distracted spokes of the wheel violinist tore the loose end. Did all? Why my grandfather had sat us. We both turned back—only - I sit with him, with them. With on a pile of manure and wrote to to see a father and son riding the woman who painted her eyes his mother. Because the President together on a bicycle. The son If all is forgotten then all is and lips and told me that you need asked him to. That I dream in crying. The father pedaling. possible. The memories that to have some distance from the words but can’t speak them. hinder you are replaced by the music, or you can’t see or hear. That when I speak I can’t dream. We ran to them. The father mask that guides you. The red Dampness permeates the city, it That he watches me as I sleep, stopped. His child’s foot had satin box is the box that contains lingers. Canals risk the image wondering if I am dreaming. That become caught in the spokes the history that proves to carry of symbolism. Fraught with a I can’t remember. Dates, birthdays, of the bicycle wheel. with it both truths and falsehoods, meaning rife with dilemma. As phone numbers, history, names so that the box contains the eye if…if I knew what happened then of flowers and trees, birds and “They had never the I that contains all the history what? You could understand the insects, the stages of man, the had a plum taste so that the I who is lost tries to Schubert after the Mendelssohn. stages of dinosaurs, animal remember. So that perhaps to You could follow the ruts in the breeds and dictators, poems and flavorful—so dense— lose yourself is to benefit all. street, imagine the carriages. people. The difference between The Jews taken to the city’s gems and minerals. Conquering picking up the scents - of the countryside— gates. The dilemma of being here. nations shifting borders. Ancient What led me to this place—this The concert hall as a venue for temples, the wonders of the anise and thyme.” village. Accident or dilemma. A dilemma. The question of the world. Constellations. City crack in the earth. Plucked on music. The silence that followed streets. The teachings of the Vilna Frozen to what was happening. the string. Each moment braced the crack in the music that time Gaon. The music of Schubert The father looked behind him, for danger and the earshot sound when the water covered the city and Mendelssohn. That if you watching the child scream, of music that you watch in the streets. Flooding the shops and brought me to know the history blood bleeding through the concert hall. Sitting there you houses and the belongings that of my people—if I searched for sock on his son’s twisted foot. see the fingers pluck the sound could be thrown out beyond them in this village along these He said to the father, the that breaks in the earth below the city gates. Would I could canals, if I looked for them boy’s hurt. He’s hurt badly. you. And you think that the music change things. If I could know on these cobblestone streets, I Constraint of images. Wordless. is the dilemma. That the earth what it had really meant to be would search for them without The vase on the table. The old covered in vast stretches of water there—in the village square—as remembering their names. I woman in the square. The father sounds blurry—indistinguishable it had happened—that knowing could wander this village, this and son on the bicycle. The from those sounds meant to an impossibility—the sallow city, this country. How could boy in a seat behind the father. be clear. That water that flows persistence of the dream that I find them. Taken from their The boy screaming. The father through the city streets. Why did fades as I attempt to revive it. homes, vanished. Burned beyond

39 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction the city gates. Poems copied closed eyes, the high cackles recluse. And at that very moment plums. Climbing the branches in a diary. Why am I here? that tore through the quiet, the that recluse was peering out the of the tree. Acting out the part tears that were running down dusty window at them. Watching of their childhood they dreamed The boy will be fine, he his face—his face that grew red them as they picked cherry after they had lost. So that for every said. He had spoken to the with laughter. He couldn’t speak. cherry off of the old tree. And fruit they ate, they believed they medic, who took him away. they couldn’t tell if it was a cherry were saving something that had - Under the low grey sky the tree or a plum tree. But plums once been stored in the cedar policeman directed traffic at the Walking by the side of the aren’t that small are they? They chest that was now locked. village’s largest intersection. Not orange grove they each picked an had never had a plum taste so flavorful—so dense—picking up He said, You might be having noticed the clouds. White orange, peeled it and ate it right disappointed once you see the pollen. Dampness. A sudden there. They said that if they were the scents of the countryside— anise and thyme. And the dry altar. It’s taken out of context. spring storm. This happened homeless they would live by this What remains is a museum piece. often, he said. We stood on the orange grove and wait until the southern air that surrounded corner, not knowing where to turn. owners had left. And feast on them. As they had driven through The child’s foot. The stunned oranges. The way they had feasted the countryside. She behind father. The birds at 5 am. A tall man in a hunter’s when they had gone to the south him—on that moped he had jacket stopped in front of me, and found the cherry tree. The rented for the summer. The scents interrupting us. He said, Are two of them. And the tree was full that seemed to flavor their every you a clown or an actor? of cherries and no one around to action so that every action they took seemed somehow unreal I didn’t answer. enjoy them. Picking each cherry from the abandoned tree at the seemed somehow as if someone It’s a tough question, isn’t seemingly abandoned house they else—had committed it. So that it, he said, before he turned had found in the hills. Each of even this—standing under the around, then walked away, them—separate—and together plum tree—they came to believe moving down the street, began to eat. So delicious, they that characters they had created disappearing into the crowd. said. What is it—I’ve never had were eating the plums that they anything so sweet. They had picked. And even the recluse My face grew warm. Conscious rummaged around outside the who had stood crouching by the of his stare, I looked over. He house. Who had lived there? Had window watching them was a laughed uncontrollably. His someone died there? Perhaps character they had invented. But laughter accentuated by his someone still lived there—a they grew dizzy eating those

40 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I poetry Poems By Douglas Messerli MELLOW DRAMA WITHOUT A PROPER VILLIAN REFUGEE The slow bore after Arseny Tarkovsky into a least poet’s It’s finished, a hound hanging, thinking worms now a jab, a rifle, a fall upon the side with horns, to run the wager a blade stuck, the legs close to the bind. made to open up exclusively the string of moderated hisses. Flying from some shadow, he is light. He swears to keep the word never on his tongue, A sermon can if properly only two counts behind the alphabet of knowing, curtailed of emphasizing the mirror from which some invisible moth slip the turk back into curry. keeps fluttering away from.

Adore crumbles some when Before the war—which it opens to let out Elijah. one I wonder—he was killed for peace. I mean if only we could leave Let them dig the trenches! I am a prisoner the captain’s address in its of their comfort, swallowing the mica bourse. upon a silver spoon with which I was always fed. Give me my tongue, please, the green mask We were about to of the lichen trees! move before it sailed off without Even snow eventually melts! a proper mourning, leaving us ashore to wash our ankles in. Your hands are not yet bound, so give me those eyes through which you have cast your sound. Even Be like Buddha, perfume my window, psychology occasionally needs thrust your trust into my open door, a blue rinse. that zone of estrangement from which I dream about the sleepless cities every night. In the cellar there’s always a buyer willing One hears, only hazily, a train traveling to exchange the message for its along its tracks. The iron smells so sweet, bearing. drop by drop, as the wolf howls across the bullet of its trajectory. My neck is My mother stretched against the birch of its bending, lives in a blouse full of crow’s my mind blessed by the silent miracle feet, insisting all along she would of its gone. Run along, child, never dye, although her hair to echo the dry joy of its passage. has been golden for a century almost.

Boo says pistol, shooting up with methadone.

Help cries for a smaller house or a horse in a voice without a rasp.

And in the end the princess is still tied up to a track.

41 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University poetry

PLEAT for Bernadette Mayer

To alternates and averages let us put in the actual space of how, entering with awe into what the fantasy excludes. An abstraction in the end is an owl to put holes in leather, like arms at the shore, waving back and forth into the paradise of foam that leaves the course of intention like a dictionary buried in goal. Actually it’s a catalogue to make new silence, eaten away by the works that executed that little oak, or an egg without its intention, proving that we left the horse all night out of the cart. But we’re hungry so we need the quadrants to canvass their borders, edging into questions that come forward from the untold.

To alternates and averages leave a permission to build a too erect stature, running toward the wrest with a current of events. Repeatedly, some feast upon questioning, others respecting the redress with neglect. As for the joke, it’s turned too yellow to square off the qualms of our hands. Heavenly form opens what color binds to compound eyes. The encyclopedia is not nearly as edible as it might seem. An owl screeches into the night, beating us up in a series of numbers that continue to suffocate the staves of our faith. The strings carry the chords away with the boat, traveling towards the end of their stroke. The voyager stumbles into starvation, turning into a mass of untold unanimous folds.

42 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction Pronouncing the warm room. The whisper language runs along a dual track. teaching also means rejecting of prayers grew and grew. The It penetrates the innermost part the logic of forgetting and the the World muted sound of those dry prayers of our humanity while traveling mechanisms that cause us to deny by Ángela Pradelli didn’t allow for interruptions. My outside us to meet others, to the past. This also implies valuing grandmother closed her eyelids search in the depths of its disquiet teachers as the subject of the trans. by Daniela Gutierrez while whispering her prayers for a listening God. That is history of teaching and learning. and only sometimes did her what I learned on those nights Per vendetta, Ferdinando Camon There is an art to teaching and replied in a 1985 interview huge eyes stare at me, though when I heard my grandmother never interrupting the litany. praying. Pronunciation was learning that sometimes is buried published in a special issue of the under the weight of pedagogy Parisian newspaper, Libération, Although she always prayed at for her a journey into her own night, sometimes she suspended depths and at the same time, an and impersonal handbooks. To in which four hundred writers ask ourselves about poiesis in responded to the same question: her activities in the kitchen in offering of words to the highest mid-morning and locked herself heavens, where there would our classes is a way to begin Pourquoi écrivez-vous? Scrivo this inquiry and to become per vendetta, non per giustizia, in to pray. I can still hear her. Air always be someone listening. came out of her mouth, becoming involved, body and soul, in the non per santità, non per gloria, art of constructing a class. ma per vendetta, answered the words that buzzed around me. My “On those warm nights, Italian writer born in Padua grandmother’s voice dangling in both of us locked in her On those warm nights, both in 1935, whose work has been whispered textures that tightened of us locked in her room, there translated into 21 languages. I the threads as it moved on. I will room, there were times were times when I confused my write to take revenge. Not for always hear that sound. I have had when I confused my grandmother’s prayers with her justice, or for holiness, or for the the weight of that buzzing of hers breathing. Those were moments glory, but for revenge. Still, deep nested in my ear ever since, and grandmother’s prayers of uncertainty when, in the down I feel this revenge is fair, I always will. My grandmother’s with her breathing.” heaviness of that atmosphere, I holy, glorious. My mother knew prayers filled the room, and once could not recognize if what was how to write only her name, my embodied, they traveled in their Perhaps teachers who transmit being heard and was floating father, hardly more than that. In own sounds. Her words were never language to secondary school around our bodies were her the village where I was born, the clearly understood but they had an students are moving, consciously prayers or the air entering and illiterate peasants signed their unmistakable music in which my or not, towards an encounter with exiting her mouth. Was that a names with a cross. Whenever grandmother had placed enormous those first sounds. It is likely that gasp or a letter? Was it a syllable they received a letter from the faith. I was a little child but could we model our language classes on or an exhalation? Those were government, the army or the see this: in each bead of the rosary our own biographies, our traumas, instants in which words and police (no one else ever wrote to my grandmother offered her soul failures and mistakes. Thus, air merged, and separating them), they became frightened and recovered it in the following we retrace our path to recover them was impossible. Were they and flocked to the priest so that bead. She stuck one word to the something that we never lost. The just one? Or did they become he could explain the letter. I saw next without beginning or end present moment in the classroom one from that moment on? them pass by many times, I was and gave them a music so precise should be observed. We should It is recognized that the activity a boy. Since then I’ve thought of that it left that murmur in my look at our specific activities of the unconscious does not cease; writing as an instrument of power. ears forever. The ferment of these in order to observe ourselves in it is intricate and complex, and I always dreamed of crossing words had the urgency of someone those scenes from our origins and at times so indecipherable that borders and taking possession escaping, fleeing from some dark recognize how the branches of we find it difficult to understand of writing to use it to help those place. That language was pure those experiences have become it or understand ourselves. But who do not have that knowledge: intimacy and also a dialogue that entangled in our daily teaching there are some scenes from to take revenge in their name. rose to the greatest heights. My practices. Understanding this grandmother, with her urgent doesn’t simply mean combining our lives that spark a light that My grandmother, who did not prayers, rhythmic and lonely, poetics and pedagogy in the can be seen in our present. The attend mass on Sundays, prayed taught me at an early age that classroom. Linking poetics and Uruguayan poet Circe Maia the rosary with a devotion I have never seen, even among members of religious orders. She always prayed at night in her room, in a semi-darkness that barely dispelled the dim light of her night table lamp. She sat on the bed and prayed in a very soft voice. She did it with such intense and swift concentration that the words stuck to one another and it was impossible to recognize a beginning or an end. I can hear her now: my grandmother’s thick lips moving fast with short movements that regulated the air in her mouth. I know that I will hear her forever. In every bead of the rosary she put the kind of fervor that is professed only by people with an enormous faith in words. I remember myself beside her, listening to the murmur coming alive in

43 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction may be talking about this in her She was anguished because she perfect. The future, tomorrow: me to the stream. After midday poem “The bridge:” “[…] here knew she would not see them these dwell only in words. There we went walking down a dirt road and now and while I am alive I again...I return to that scene and is a net knitted by the threads of beneath the shade of trees that extend word-bridges to others. try to listen. However, the voice language and time. It is a mesh bordered it on either side. It wasn’t Toward others they go and they of those prayers does not have that, when its threads tighten, only because of the coolness of are not mine. Not mine alone: I the litany of religious rites. It is a can hold us and allow us to be the water that I liked go to the have drunk them as I have drunk voice that seeks salvation, yes, but launched into the future. The stream. On those afternoons, the water. As I drank milk from it is very close to the excitement future is a verb tense that calls sound of the wind on the water or someone else’s breast. They came of desire. A voice committed for hope, and through it we can between the highest branches of from other mouths and learning to moving forward and leaving traverse illusion and faith with the poplars sounded exactly like them was a way of learning pain behind. But why didn’t my confidence. If we didn’t have the murmur of the words exhaled to walk, to stand by myself.” Italian grandmother pray in her words, we wouldn’t have a future, from my grandmother’s mouth. Or perhaps the poem talks mother tongue? Why did she either. Without language there fundamentally about the way in choose a new language for her is no possibility of an ever-after. Every past is a wound. And every which language plants us in the prayers and therefore a different Dreams and futurity become wound is a text whose inscriptions universe and keeps us upright. voice? She always switched to her concrete in our speech. But why drain out toward new meanings. mother tongue for talking about did my grandmother abandon her Its bleeding tells us that there are “As vulnerable people important issues, but she never mother tongue for Spanish when external tissues in the body that prayed in Italian. I have returned she prayed; why did she need decompose to a certain degree. we sink, light and to that scene many times, and I a new language to speak of the Any wound is also, and above fragile, into swamps always ponder the issue of the two future and the uncertainty of days all, internal, and like writing itself, protects against loneliness of gloom. At times languages and her choice of one or to come as she recited her prayers the other, according to the nature in an unknown land? When that and preserves the tracery of lines uneasiness becomes of the conversation. Why did my Italian woman prayed, she prayed and indices. Reading should flesh in us and we walk grandmother, who used Italian, for the future in a language that take place in the light of these “her” language, for the most was not her own. Curses were wounds. The ridges should be around restlessly.” important speech of everyday life, uttered in Italian and prayers in touched; fingers should pierce the pray in the language of a country Spanish. Perhaps she was looking sutures to delve into the shores In what way do the events we have where she was an immigrant? for new discourses in her speech of the wound until the marks are lived link our pedagogies with our My grandmother got angry in her and probably by doing so she was legible. Yes, that tactile reading students’ learning processes? In mother tongue, and Italian was getting away from the words that always involves a rewriting. their explorations, those personal also the language in which I heard had documented a past of absence And in the act of rereading and experiences, lies a bridge from the her fighting, cursing, laughing, and loss. New accents for a life rewriting the wound we are also past to the present and from this and telling secrets. That was that my grandmother wished recognizing its other nature: the present to our students. There the language for expressing her would be better? Did she hope wound is always a palimpsest. is always energy from the past anguish and sadness. But doesn’t that by using a new grammar for that produces gusts of wind. It’s Why don’t we read our first prayer, our dialogue with God, the first time, the new syntax true, the lapping of the waves is verbal encounters as signs of our document the most important would open up a panorama of new uninterrupted and the tide carries teaching in the classroom? Those aspect of the words we speak? It horizons? Maybe she thought us back and forth. But there are experiences that cannot be is true that language, which gives that a different vocabulary would are always starting points, and denied. They have to be exhumed value to experience, rebuilds the finally augur happiness. Perhaps walking with our students toward from the passage of time and past and invests it with meaning. my grandmother felt that praying the future might be nothing more censorship and bought to life But beyond the interpretations in Spanish meant existing in than going toward the future and in today’s language, examined that we may attribute to the facts, the language of others and being building meanings that bring under a new light, given meaning. it’s undeniable that these facts recognized by them. Perhaps that some light and comprehension This might also be a task of actually happened and the events was the path to becoming less of to the shadows in which we reading and writing. After all, in we are talking about occurred at a a foreigner. Perhaps that would move about. Native cultures the foundation of our verba lie given time and in a given place. Of allow her to forget—at least in claim that we carry the future our own stimuli; and perhaps course it is thanks to a linguistic those heartfelt discourses—the on our backs. With that creative we can also find there, in the operation that we can bring the fish-out-of-water existence to energy and not with the didactic initiation, the serenity of the past forward into our present, which she was confined. I can’t guidelines of handbooks we build soul that can be at peace only but that verbal reconstruction is help associating that childhood the most genuine essence of our when it can pronounce itself something akin to archaeology scene with two fundamental classes. Therefore, in those verbal at last, mark its accents, and and the discovery of ancient axes of my life: writing and beginnings also lie our promises. tell its truth. Language makes artefacts. The future, on the teaching. Because, in fact—and In the scenes of our own initiation us understand the intensity of other hand (and prayer almost I am prepared to defend this into language we may well find the our feelings and allows us to always involves talking about our emphatically—what more symptoms and signs that direct investigate our own humanity. future), does not exist except in important role can secondary our actions in the classroom. Without words this would be language. It is only in words that school language classes possibly impossible, precisely because I often return to the scene of what has not yet happened comes have than the construction of a language is also a revelation of my grandmother praying. And alive. Speech gives corporeality different future? A school that is the self, an awakening in which every time I do, I enter into the and thus existence to what does open to various discourses, which we are revealed unto ourselves. whisper of a language that is not yet exist. Language possesses can offer new meaning to words also mine but still not entirely the wonderful ability to express and give fresh air to the words My grandmother was not a writer, understood. Language can partly various verb tenses, and its that define us, would achieve but as a person who prayed, she allay anguish. I could not see inflections can bring to life that the most important goal of all: constructed her prayers with it then but I see it today, that which does not exist anywhere the pronunciation of a world. new words, with her own music woman who had left her parents, except in words.. Speech is the and a unique voice that sought On certain summer afternoons, her village and her friends in a one and only space in which the emphasis in enunciation while when it was too hot to stay inside country at war, was anguished. future is born and can live. Simple avoiding stridency. Without future, future continuous, future the room, my grandmother took knowing it, she introduced 44 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction We used to spend our summers “What’s the matter?” she asked in Rio Negro, in my grandparents’ when I opened the door. house. On Sundays I went to the river with my grandmother. On other nights I found her Grandpa never wanted to go, but sitting on the bed. It was such a sometimes when the afternoon high bed that her legs were left was almost over and the sun dangling and she wiggled her feet already down behind the sierras, in a nearly undetectable rocking he came to pick us up. No sooner motion. My grandfather slept did he get there, he perched on on his back, hugging the pillow, a tree trunk, but he couldn’t while my grandmother rummaged tolerate it for too long and wanted through a shoebox full of papers to return home with us. My mostly written in Italian. She grandmother, on the other hand, unfolded the letters and read wanted to stay longer at the river. them to me in a thick whisper so She loved being there, listening we wouldn’t wake my grandfather. to the sound the wind made on She showed me some photographs the water or between the high that had a dedication on the back branches of the poplars. As soon and Holy Communion cards from as we arrived, my grandmother relatives in Italy. She read to me that music to my ears and left it we are immigrants, begging for took off her shoes, knotted the and a murmur grew in the heavy playing there forever. Because of something that has no name hem of her dress above her knees heat of the room. Afterwards, she my grandmother, words became because it does not yet exist. In and waded into the river. put everything back in the box for me a rite of domestic liturgies. each one of us there are elements and hid it under the wardrobe. Because of her I understood that that by challenging us, increase the sacred nature of words could our tensions and throw us into “Although I never Grandpa doesn’t know about be found in the intimacy of the conflict. Our history, our past, found out everything this, she said to me. rooms in the house. That woman’s our education, desires, dreams And although I never found out deepest faith was placed in about those secrets, and reality. To protect us from everything about those secrets, I language. Several years later ourselves, to address our most I kept them forever. kept them forever. And sometimes I read a poem by Alejandra fearsome monsters, we also when I’m writing I feel all this Pizarnik; it began by saying And sometimes when have language. Our existence is coming back. The whisper of a “waiting for a world to be conditioned by the possibility I’m writing I feel all language I half understood in an unearthed by language, someone of developing within a language. this coming back.” overheated room; just a handful sings the place where silence Gertrude Stein said that reading of words to tell of what is hidden. is shaped...” I felt certain that She had very white skin and I and writing are synonyms of Voices of people I don’t know, but each one of them in her own loved to stroke the dampness of existing. Our life, determined who speak there, locked in a shoe way, my grandmother and her naked arms. Every now and as it is by the sounds and signs box concealed under the wardrobe. Pizarnik, were standing at the then, she cupped her hands and of language, hangs from these And a light that on certain nights center of the same truth. poured some water over her head. threads of language. I know that filters under the door and lights my grandmother also understood As vulnerable people we sink, light Freshwater drops ran down the up the darkness as I walk along. that our existence depends on and fragile, into swamps of gloom. smooth, white skin of her face the possibility of recognizing the At times uneasiness becomes and trickled down her neck. She energy in words, and that was why flesh in us and we walk around spent almost all afternoon in she sometimes was so determined restlessly. But always, around us, the river, with the water above to teach me how to pray. She was near and far, we have the words to her knees, and she didn’t mind the first to believe that words give us air whenever the swamps if she had to go back home with would be my salvation. In that seem to suffocate us. When my her wet dress stuck to her legs. message she also bequeathed to grandmother was almost 80 years me the mystery concealed in old, the doctor recommended that At night, when everyone was language and silence. Was that she see a psychologist and begin asleep, I crossed the wide hallway phrasing or an inhalation? Was therapy. At that moment I thought that led to the bedrooms and that the cadence or the heavy air that the “talking cure” proposed entered my grandmother’s that my grandmother breathed? by psychoanalysis would do her room. The hallway was dark, That lesson was a legacy and a good. I had seen her so many times but I walked confidently, guided heritage whose worth increases locked in her room, seeking relief by the light that filtered from today in my own breathing, in in prayers. But she left analysis beneath the door of her room. My my desire to teach and to write. a few months later. “It’s much grandmother slept so little that sometimes she was still awake better to pray the rosary,” she told After all, what are we talking at dawn, but I never heard her me when I asked her why she had about? About the way in complain about that. During decided not to return to therapy. which the entire universe and the summer she left the window And then once more the murmur the deepest, darkest layers open all night and sometimes, of her prayers spread like a sea of of our subjectivity can join when entering her room, I could words emerging from her mouth together. After all, this is see her with her arms on the to soothe that agitated heart. what we are talking about, varnished wooden windowsill. pronouncing the world. Like my grandmother, sometimes She wore a petticoat with delicate we all wage a battle against Many times readers ask me straps, which, on warm nights ourselves. There are days when, why I write; they often ask and because of her perspiration, escaping from some past, we come where my writing comes from adhered to her breasts and belly. to shore in a strange land where and when I got started. 45 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction The Last Word and bony toes with their polished swing her toes as if trying to him, at four in the morning, a nails aroused him. She went give him a long distance caress. twenty-second news item gave (Psychological straight toward him and opened In his little room at Villa Tesei, him hope for his whole life. the door. Ochoa was paralyzed, Ochoa spent sleepless nights, but Using archived images from comedy) with a dripping hairball in his now his insomnia was burdened municipal construction projects, by Pablo Baler hand, enchanted by those lightly with erotic hallucinations in the announcer stated: “A study varicose legs that disappeared which Marina Aguinaga de by the department of acoustics The librarian Marina Aguinaga under the shadow of her skirt. Humboldt invariably played at the University of Buenos de Humboldt still preserved the She studied him thoroughly as the eponymous heroine. Aires demonstrated today that well, enjoying every centimeter pneumatic drills are our worst curves of her youth, although There was no place in the library her flaccid flesh also showed the of the scene. Without saying enemies. Identified as the source a word, she moved toward the where he hadn’t rehearsed one of the most harmful noise in deteriorated bones that held it up. of his fantasies: in the toilet, on She had devoted thirty-two years mirrors, retouched her makeup, the city, these machines go up and sang an exaggeratedly the stairs, against the boiler, to 140 decibels. Such levels can to the library and boasted of the on the desk, under the desk, tranquility she had managed to gesticulated version of La produce severe lesions in the ears Marseilleise that accompanied even in the glassed in room of the workers and bystanders, create for the benefit of readers. where they kept Dr. Guillermo Hence, whenever Ochoa appeared, her for the remainder of the day: stated Fabián Libedievich, who Rawson’s original manuscripts was responsible for the survey.” dragging ladders, tools, and wires, Allooons enfants de la patriiiie, and a copy of a daguerreotype she felt as if she were suffocating. Le jour de gloire eeeest arrivé! of Sarmiento, which stared “Ochoa went on Her hands, covered with spots and Contre nous de la tyranniiiie at them with a puzzled suffering from an incipient tremor, L’étendard sanglant est levéee… frown. Hence, on the day she throwing one after could do nothing but readjust approached him, he didn’t know another, and in each the little sign: “Silence! Please!” The next morning, she arrived what time it was nor in which covered with a fur coat so reality his life was unfolding. of those detonations, In any case, Ochoa didn’t know natural that she appeared to how to read, and she didn’t be under assault by a herd of The building had already closed. the librarian was hesitate to describe his noises nutrias. She spread the coat She waited for him to come experiencing nuances as malicious affronts. To get over her chair, and anticipating down in the elevator and blocked even, she made him feel the any noise the workman might his exit. The powdered part in of despair that full weight of her concentrated make, put on some earphones, Ochoa’s powdered tufts barely she hadn’t even ancestry or tried to humiliate him inserted a cassette on which reached the librarian’s artificial with the vestiges of her expired she had recorded 60 minutes of breasts. Digging the long nail of known existed.” sensuality. Ochoa, of course, was silence, and turned the volume her index finger into his chest, she When the next day he turned up not immune to those provocations up to maximum. Thus amplified, pushed him against the mirror: in front of the librarian, holding and very soon felt himself both the silence began to reveal the on to the pneumatic drill with seduced and despised. Out of pure “I think, Ochoa, that deep down creaking of its most secret fibers, both hands, she didn’t even have resentment, he made his shoes you’d like to make love to me.” the strident reverberation of the time to react. Ochoa turned on squeak on the parquet floor and vacuum, even the resounding of the machine, and the racket banged his hammer unnecessarily A single wave of heat charred some anonymous footsteps in the made the walls vibrate and shook from invisible corridors, a all the resentment that had distance. The librarian thought the books on the shelves. The conduct which, as was to be been gnawing at Ochoa’s guts. she would be able to avoid the librarian’s jaw dropped, and out expected, wounded the librarian’s She went on lowering her hand imminent reprisal, but not five of her open mouth popped a half- sensibility even more. And that’s to search between his legs. He minutes went by before the first chewed liquor-filled chocolate. how they lived, between suffering could hardly stand up and light bulb exploded. Ochoa was The few people scattered around from their respective grievances surrendered to the movement of standing on a ladder on the gallery the room stole glimpses of the and constantly renewing those fingers. When she got to of the first floor and had dropped movements of that last battle. promises of mutual revenge. the bulge of his crouching penis, it on the desk. Like a bombardier, she sized it up clinically and Without lifting their heads, they But the week when Marina Ochoa went on throwing one twisted it a little, indifferently: glanced up over their eyeglass Aguinaga de Humboldt decided after another, and in each of frames and tried to return to their to completely ignore Ochoa, those detonations, the librarian “Oh, but what a tiny one you reading with a minimal gesture even the tacit pacts of urbanity was experiencing nuances of have, you lousy little nigger!” of resignation. In just an instant, despair that she hadn’t even were broken. Fed up with being And without waiting for him to the drill created a hole in the known existed. With her muscles invisible in the librarian’s reply, she put on her coat, turned parquet floor, and, emancipated strangled with rage, she stood eyes, Ochoa decided to bang the off all the lights, and went out from Ochoa, advanced toward still, pretending to ignore the elevator doors open and shut through the central vestibule, the librarian’s desk. Stunned, attack until Ochoa disappeared. while she, startled by every marking with her stiletto heels as if she were the victim of an Right then, she started picking slamming, felt obliged to conceive the rapid beat of her agitation. uncontrollable allergic reaction, up all the scattered shards as if more sophisticated snubs than Still trembling, she walked she felt her eyelids becoming they were archival references. disdain. That’s how she came fifteen blocks before stopping increasingly inflamed and her heart choking in her throat. To up with the idea of stopping up Marina Aguinaga’s composure a taxi at the corner of Teodoro keep hold of the vanishing world, a toilet in the ladies’ room and confused Ochoa. Was she finally García and 3 de Febrero. she tried to read the titles of the going in just in time to catch the conceding victory, or was she More humiliated than ever, books they were reading: Reptiles repairman on his knees among perhaps sneakily dreaming up Ochoa spent the night lying and Amphibians in Guerrero, the pipes. Through the space her next act of revenge? What numbly on his cot, watching Mexico, Manual for the Defense below the door of the stall, Ochoa was certain was that as the days television. Convinced that he of the Freedom of Unions, Lolita, saw the librarian’s feet stuffed went by, she seemed more and wouldn’t manage to recover Mapuche Migration. But her into those abysmally high heels. more seductive. She would bend from that degradation, he kept vision quickly clouded over, and over theatrically to the lower Although he wouldn’t have reconstructing that last fiasco she saw only a black spot that shelves, cross and uncross her admitted it, those veiny insteps from all angles. Luckily for grew and filled the whole space. legs whenever he went by, and 46 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction Her eardrums, already sclerotic, were perforated to a precipice of absolute silence. Her convulsions lasted a few seconds more until, as a result of the shaking, the chair leg broke and she fell to the floor, paralyzed. After two years, the municipality could no longer cover the costs of the breathing machine that was keeping her alive, and they had to pull the plug. At first Ochoa was accused of first- degree murder, but over the course of two years, the indictment changed several times until finally a soft-hearted prosecutor reduced the charge to manslaughter, which only condemned the repairman to thirteen years in jail, later reduced to seven for good conduct. The building, meanwhile, was kept closed by order of the judge, and by the time the sentence was handed down, the library’s budget had been assigned to repaving Crisólogo Larralde. The whole corner remained boarded up till during the years of the military junta, they turned it into a medical insurance office. During the nineties, they demolished the building to build a bingo parlor, but the project never got beyond the vacant lot stage. Finally, a company built a little multiscreen movie theater which also failed, and it was used for a while as a meeting place for an experimental theater group. Today, recycled as a punk discotheque, it seems to attract all the young people from the suburbs. On Friday nights, above all, the corner fills up with those kids whose style seems to have been inspired by tropical insects with black eye makeup, green and red hair, tight clothing and belts studded with brass tacks. They pile up at the entrance waiting to be let in while they go crazy with the syncopated, raucous music that echoes off the walls and in the air of the street. The neighbors complain; they say it’s nothing but noise; the kids, however, insist that it’s not, it is music.

47 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction Vacant is better than empty, I tell Meloon: Mel. New Zealand might be a good place to enjoy some suffering. I am an anti allegory lucky to have no such girlfriend.

by Steve Katz I walk down to Big Cheeks the coffee house at the bottom of the Illustrations by Jim Johnson hill, on the southwest corner. Transcribed and Translated from Everyone out here murmurs about the English by Mohaned Mrabet Massacre (call me Massa, call me Cur, I don’t give a fuck.) Diversity Something drips onto my face and (call me Dave), the manager, nods wakes me up. Eyes fly open as it at me as I enter, and Asia, (call me splashes into my mouth. I snap up Asia) my favorite barista, bounces in bed. These are my only clothes, over, sexy in her tight jeans, her and I have no pajamas, so I wear black sweater, her soft burgundy these to sleep. I don’t want to soil scarf wound around a slender Great! But before we go anywhere I He has never before inquired them. Some day soon I’ll go to a neck. She lays my nonfat mocha need to walk around here a little. about my condition, nor have I laundromat and undress, but not on the counter even before I order. ever heard him inquire about now. This stuff drips from a rusty Walk, Tenderness, but don’t forget anyone else. I suddenly recall that stain widening on the ceiling, the What if I want something else this your mocha. I made it with a his girlfriend Mandy lives in the color of anyone’s fluids, like blood time, like a cappuccino? special plump thing in it, just apartment just above where I was for instance. The stain spreads for you. sitting house. Could it be that...? slowly pink then thickens to red That would be unacceptable. I’ll concentrating into a viscous red leave forever. I’ll run to Kabul and Here’s the predicament. I need I’m terrific, and how are you, drop that spot after spot falls at an hide Afghanistan. someone to watch over me. We all and how is Mandolin, your interval of forty-three seconds give have this need. And I’m willing excellent girlfriend, and or take. Maybe something terrible Or Detroit the same. They mix the to assume my watch over another. very intelligent too? has happened above me. hash with the O. But I know I will frequently resent anyone spooking my particulars. Perhaps I always say one thing too much. Asia, your eyes are deep green today, oceany and beautiful, but I killed her. He grins like a chimp. why so bloodshot? Slit her throat is what I did.

It’s coming on Xmas. That information crawls up my spine and lies on my shoulders I admire that about Asia, her like a seventy pound backpack. answers oblique and relevant. Heaven, really. Heaven? Did you I sit at my favorite table. stay with her, at her place, last night? Massacre steps out of the door swinging an invisible scythe and I was staying with Uncle Dibs thus he sings:Ich höre Engel (they call me Mr. Dibs) down in schreien Ihre flugel stinken nach Hudder Hollow. I go once a year to BenzinIhr Blut wir Regenfällt help him gig for frogs. At Xmas he likes the legs breaded and sautéed. Vom Narbenhimmel auf mein He’s an amateur Frenchman. The bowl I set on the bed is glazed Have you tried it? Gesicht. Heaven comes into Big Mandolin’s roommate, Meniscus with flowers and sketched with Cheeks followed by imaginary (Emma, really), is back from rabbits. Slowly the drips will fill Tenderness, I’m drug free forever. blue toads. The air fills with Guyana. You should eat those this bowl. Life is tedious, one I never liked drugs anyway, I just real warts. pills, Tenderness. Great to be rid of thing I know. took ‘em. her. She chain smokes and vomits They call his nail polish cliches. These pills will make I house sit here for my friend, I ask her to call me Ten, but she Blood Ruby. you feel great. Melancholy (call me Mel). Not likes to say my full name. It’s exactly a friend, but a strong okay. My name has a sweaty ring Heaven’s been dancing at a club Big Cheeks crowds with well acquaintance, strong enough so I to it. And this is something I love called Buttermilk. Asia always groomed businessmen cut loose can house sit for him. He says he about Asia. Something vague and warns me to stay away from him. from jobs and women stuck won’t ever come back from New gorgeous. He is not a nice person, likes to without offices. They settle in to Zealand. Not unless, Mandolin hurt people, physically, the wireless nest. And students (call me Mandy), his ex,wants him If I go I want you to come with me. emotionally, financially. Heaven here research for papers with their back. He still loves her but can’t sets his iced mocha down and sits phones and tablets. They play let go of his anger. She left him for Of course. at my table. He drops a couple of games. Some read online about Professor Crandall (call me Prof pills onto my saucer. Massacre. Wifi flows like the Tao or call me Cran) a mutual friend. I also love this about Asia, she’s around these guys and gals. They I feel emotionally vacant, Mel pushy, but gentle. And she You good? work to make Xmas dreary, and says as he prepares to leave for wants me. Hanukah communally blank. New Zealand. Without wifi, a friendlier world.

48 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction Heaven chugs his mocha. Blue What does she mean by last looked like she’d been sucked glass bottles. Today the bottles toads stretch and yawn in the chance, and what do I mean through a woodchipper. She are plastic, softer, might not have mind. Their wish is to fly. by my life? enjoyed to gift me underwear and killed her so much. The blow I wear some occasionally now, was never investigated. I mean, We should go somewhere, fool Asia stabs me gently in my mind, tattered but nostalgically correct. who would want to kill my poor around. Get high. a soft penetration. I run after devastated Delicious mom? Heaven, having thoughts. I don’t Asia and the others warn me away I don’t get high any more, Heaven. want to be a barista, not ever, not from Heaven. Why? He seems Dad was more attached to her I’ve got too much to do. even in the afterlife. Perhaps I mild by comparison to themselves. than he admitted. We buried insulted her with my attitude, Even sane. I don’t feel threatened. Delia in the pauper’s cemetery in You don’t have anything to do, unspoken but always apparent. His story has some kick and Pokah Springs and went back to Tenderness. But it’s sad to hear. Running through the red haze surprise. He tells it slowly though. Horsetail where Integrity sank around the traffic lights I need Imagine a story slowly. into a long funk. I missed her too. several blocks to catch up For some weeks he wouldn’t leave with Heaven. Grits was a fuck-up himself and the house. I had to feed him ravioli As they leave the toads tug all the often left me for days to survive from the can. Then one day he blue out of the room. Heaven eats We sit on a benchstone near the on my own. I learned first to open started taking walks, every day my two pills. I suddenly want the sandspit that stretches into the one of the cans that filled the longer and longer walks, singing dose back, but what can I do now, river. He hands me two pills cupboard. Ravioli. I ate it cold, and songs of nonsense on the way, like swallow Heaven? I stand up to which I gulp down. I know he is then I learned to boil the whole Mairezeedoats and So Long Oolong follow him. It’s risky. Asia stops thinking about Massacre. I don’t me at the corner of the counter. need to think. She has a damp rag in one hand and a long knife in the other. She These are river pills. blocks me with her knife arm pressed against my chest and Thank you, Heaven. Perhaps river wipes my face with the rag. pills will be the end of me.

Heaven is poison. Be careful Ten. Not likely. Relax here. Now I’ll tell you my story. Her bloodshot eyes take on the flint of compassion. In a loud Setting sun drips a dim orange whisper she says, Think first, glow onto the icy water. The few Tenderness. Go home. Talk to your leaves rattle in the wind through Mom and Dad. Find a job. Even the willows. here we have an opening.

can, and then I splashed it onto and Bibbedy Bobbedy Boo. He a skillet with some powdered worried me, so I followed. I liked onion or garlic, and then I baked to hear him sing, but he was only a it right in the can. Each tastes small man mumbling down a long a little different. Those are my road with nonsense spilling from recipes. My mouth waters when I his mouth. One time, the last time, think about those days. Himself, he seemed very jolly, and turned he liked to drink, and scavenged because he sensed I was there, and among young boys homeless on he motioned me to catch up with the streets. He was my father. him. He threw an arm around my Grits often brought one back to shoulder and sang “If the words feed it. Orphans, runaways. Some sound queer, and funny to your he let live with us for a while. I ear...etc.” He tugged me down to fed them from the cans. He never this very spot by the river and let I can’t go home again. Pokah Springs was where touched me, however. Blood is go of my hand. He walked out onto Delicious (call me Delia), my Mom, blood, I heard him say. Thicker the sand still singing “...A little Search within the seeds of your moved after the separation, where than boy juice. And he always bit jumbled and jivy...” I called contemplation. This is my life, she tried to cozy in with her dark knew a few days before Family out to him, “Dad ...Dad,” That was we say, though it could be boyfriend, Pontifex (call me Pons). Services came on one of their when a whip of current tumbled another’s world. That didn’t work for her. She was inspections, so we tidied up and him into the muscled turbulence an alcoholic, a friendly sappy arranged our life that instantly carried him away. Don’t be stupid. This could be drunk, a freebaser, occasional you to look neat as Chiclets in I watched him go under once ... your last chance. know what, call it smack maybe, the package. twice... didn’t try to swim ... a though she never was that kind of third time under and Integrity The knife slips from her hand and junkie. Delia was a simple spirit I did fine like this for more than was gone. There must have been sinks into the boards between in a cloud of demons. Integrity a year, until my mom died of a something a man could have done. her feet. (call me Grits), my dad, had smash to the skull with a full custody, but we frequently visited quart bottle of canola oil and an To this day I feel guilty. They mom. She was always loving, OD on one of her happy drugs. found his body later, a couple affectionate, though sad. She Back then Canola Oil came in of days, at the Blesswater, a few

49 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University fiction yards from Pewter Falls. His right Business poor. Too much life with I could mistake for the great jazz His ex’s name is Mandrake, an arm had been snapped off, people kids. Johns be tired. Mr. Do-You- diva herself, except for the slight unlikely name for a woman (call imagined, by Henry, the ancient Wrong shrinks in the socket. parakeet rasp. MY NAME me Mandy). She lives usually in catfish, the legend of Big Celery IS PEACHES! the apartment above. There is a Pond a half mile from the falls, She is a street acquaintance, not little confusion here. that catfish often seen, never for business. Sometimes I wonder We settle down to the tea, a tea hooked, eats everything, huge and what I’m doing in this story. I’ve brewed from nettles I don’t think I ever used it, Mel. dangerous. The fish grabs hold. never been to her lair before. It is and chamomile. I never grate. With one twist of tail and spine, not what I expected, but scrubbed snap, dad’s arm goodbye. Did down clean, everything in its You know that Massacre is white? I can’t find her anywhere. this fish cross the quarter mile of place, great African masks and She stirs buckwheat honey into swamp grass over land to claim votive carvings. I forget she her tea.Many colors. Buckwheat I’ll replace it. I never bought a my dad’s left arm? escaped from Rwanda. Is she Honey is too pharmacological grater before...but I ... Hutu or Tutsi. I can’t tell, and for me. Maybe it was Massacre, herself. I’m too timid to ask. When she I look to the ceiling at the blotch She likes to practice. was thirteen she decided to walk Saphronia looks hard into my that has coagulated there and away from Africa and head north face and asks, What is it? hangs like a rusty chandelier. That arm was just a nibble for into Spain. She was alone and Something wrong. Henry, damned catfish scavenger. raped pregnant. She got some Melancholy doesn’t look at the rides but did plenty on foot.Lost I take a deep breath and exhale stain. He lifts the cushion of the How gory this world can be, the baby rowing to Gibraltar, softly with my words. easy chair as if hoping to find his then hitchhiked from Gibraltar grater between cushions and Heaven... through Spain to stow away on I never thought death could brushes out some crumbs. a ferry to Dover. How did she be so tiny. I’ll get you a new one if... Heaven rises. Easy world, easeful eat? She sometimes mentions a death, not over yet. wealthy and kind Mr. Eloquence The door to the apartment is No need. I’ve lost track of my (call me Al). Did he feed her? O open. I never leave it open. Mandolin. When I use her she cuts He pulls me to my feet, a Saphronia, where are you now Melancholy sits on the easy my fingertips. Now I don’t know salamandrine smile on his face. that I tell your story? Could Mr. chair. I immediately organize in where she is. His lips almost brush mine and for Eloquence finally have carried my mind my exit from the place. a moment I think Heaven is going you away to an easier world? He doesn’t look like he’s going Melancholy turns abruptly to kiss me, but no. He turns away anywhere, not New Zealand, not and leaves as if propelled. and steps onto the sandspit. I feel I pause at the door, reluctant to Cincinnati. This is his place, not the river’s appetite. The water smirch her pristine space with mine. If anyone has to leave, I do. Melancholy, Melancholy, I soaking through his vintage green my blemishing presence. When I Everything in myself is as fragile whisper. He slams the door. Keds seems to drench my Hush enter and cross the living room to the wings of mayflies. Puppies. A thought crosses my join her in the kitchen for tea, her I come to rest here and stare at the mind and I open my mouth to say parakeet blocks my entrance, tiny Melancholy, I thought at least wall for a few days, cannot move something but no words come. He chest thrust out as if he were a until the fifteenth. I thought I’d except for water, water in, water looks back at me. bouncer in a strip club. I can crush be here. I planned till the fifteenth out. him with the sole of my shoe. at least. Death is a river, Tenderness. Two cans of sardines open on the Wait a minute, the budgie says. Please, Mel is my name. I’m not counter, small fish complete with I have just one pair of shoes. Wait just a minute. back. I can never come back. eyes. One day I shower them Help me, Heaven. with lemon. Wee critter talks. But are you...? Should I sleep on These are the last words. A whip the couch? Maybe best I disappear. Finally I gather energy to go down of current tumbles him into the It flies up to land on my nose. This to Big Cheeks. Asia greets me with muscled turbulence that instantly bird can blind a man, extract an - a hug, one of those clinches. You carries him away. I watch him go eye as if it were a nut in its shell. feel your molecules entangle. The under once ... twice ... He doesn’t Don’t trouble. I’m leaving. Did embrace is as luscious as it try to swim ... a third time and I am the grim reaper, says the you see my grater, my mandolin is confusing. Heaven is gone. There must be tiny bird. grater? I can’t find her. something someone can do. The bird has trouble with r’s, On my way back to the apartment makes them sound like w’s. I see Saphronia (call me Sappho), Gwim weaper. vending her body on the street. This is our so-called Street Of An image flashes for a moment Emanations. She’s come from of Heaven playing chess with a Philadelphia to escape an abusive budgie. pimp. She waves at me, and stumbles a little in her six That’s my budgie buddy, says inch spikes. Saphronia. Easefuldeath his name, but you can call him E.D.

Hey Tenderskins, I’m about to close up shop. You want to come When he hears his name the home with me? Cup of tea? parakeet sings out in a voice that

50 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I fiction Did you hear about Heaven? If we get married I will take care Are you the person formerly she asks. of you, you betcha. I’ll wait for known as Tenderness who now you to come home from war. Like has the name of Meloon? The name pierces, an arrow the wives of yore. I’ll wash your through my spleen. What clothes and keep them neat. I can Now I think how sad that I have about Heaven? sew, you betcha. And if we are totally missed Xmas. Yes I am. married I won’t have to work the His body washed up at Passwater, streets.What streets? What work? just before Pewter Falls. The left arm was snapped off they say by Yes. That... Henry. You know Henry? Asia, you mean? Of course. I love him; in fact, I hate him. That cruel catfish. Sometimes I’m .... Could be a hundred years old, and never even hooked. The creature As I often do when I spend too ate a whole John Smith, the much time realming with Death, curling champion. hitched to Confusion (and I don’t mean those surfing twins - from Pinkney Shoals) I go to the farmer’s market and buy a Heaven is dead. He drowned. melon. Nothing comforts like the Asia wiped a tear. giant melon. Heavy as a bomb. Bigger. Bends the tabletop in I know. So sad to lose Heaven. the apartment. This melon will drown my face in its flesh. I understood him. He wasn’t really gay, didn’t pursue those Asia walks right in to the adventures, no bathhouses, no apartment. She has never done tough clubs like Sledge or The that before, come right in. She is Anvil, no Harleys. He enjoyed the on the marriage trail. She carries pretty boy children of diplomats a bouquet of asphodel, a greeny and torturers. He just liked to flower. These are flowers she fondle young brings for me. male hominids. Wow, what a huge melon. It’s Who can blame him? Particularly a meloon. the young, fuzz bearded boys who wanted to bed with Heaven. The She thumps the enormous fruit. young and the curious. Heaven So have you thought of a date? appreciated their little wickies. As do I. Date? For what?

The son falls, not so different The date for our wedding. from the dad. From that day on everyone calls How vast your empathy, Asia. Like me Meloon. Hello. My name the Mexico Gulf. is Meloon.

I sit down at my table. The The door swings open and two beautiful woman perched on a women step in. They wear tight stool behind me talks into her cell knit dresses, one of them black, phone. Her long neck curves like the other teal. The room is green. the close of a parenthesis. The In the center of the room an voice is nasal and unpleasant. Asia enormous melon sits intact on brings my latte, four shots, and a the table. These slim women with peanut butter cookie. long faces stare into the fruit. The one on the right has a blue Tenderness, don’t you think we tear tattooed under her right eye. should get married? I think we The left woman has something, should get married. perhaps a hummingbird, inked behind her left ear. Both of them The words married, marriage, are missing their incisors and etc. lie in my mind like an idling their eyeteeth, perhaps once, but locomotive. Marriage? With Asia? not vampires now. They stand Though I find her an attractive, shoulder to shoulder and look at even sexy woman, and I love her me, four eyes looking at me. Their company. But marriage. That name is Pebble. locomotive won’t move. The rails are gone.

51 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University authors

About the writers

Ben Stoltzfus Ángela Pradelli Ben Stoltzfus is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Ángela Pradelli is a writer (poet, novelist, essayist) and literature Creative Writing and French at the University of California, professor. She has participated in many lectures and has directed Riverside. He is an internationally recognized inter-arts scholar workshops in Argentina, Switzerland, Cuba, Venezuela, and the who has published monographs on Robbe-Grillet, Chennevère, United States. Her poetry and fiction have earned many awards. Gide, Hemingway, Jasper Johns, Magritte and Lacan. He has Her non-fiction book In Search of the Language was recognized published four novels and one collection of short stories: The Eye by La Fundación El Libro/Buenos Aires as the best book on of the Needle, Black Lazarus, Red White and Blue, Valley of Roses education published between 2010 and 2011. Her last book is and Cat O’Nine Tails. Romoland, a pictonovel collaboration with El sol detrás del limonero (The sun behind the lemon tree). the artist Judith Palmer, is being published in the fall of 2016. Linda Kalaj Carlos Franz Linda Kalaj holds an MFA from Chapman University in southern Carlos Franz is the author of four prize-winning and internationally California and a BA from St. John’s University in New York. She is the celebrated novels. In 2001 his novel Where Paradise Once Was, set recipient of Chapman University’s Department of English Terri Brint in the Amazon jungle, was made into a film in Spain. In 2005, The Joseph Award for Outstanding MFA student and her short stories have Absent Sea was unanimously awarded the prestigious International been awarded 1st place by Simply Shorts Review and appeared in Sequoya Novel Prize of La Nación / Sudamericana. He has been awarded Literary Magazine. In addition, her translations and essays have appeared fellowships to Germany and two universities in England and has with Aldus, a Journal of Translation and The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review. served as a cultural attaché of Chile. Most recently he has won the prestigious “Premio Bienal de Novela Mario Vargas Llosa”. Steve Katz Margo Berdeshevksy Steve Katz is a distinguished American novelist. He is considered an early post-modern or avant-garde writer for works such as The Margo Berdeshevksy’s poetry collections are Between Soul & Stone Exaggerations of Peter Prince (1968), and Saw (1972). His collection of and But a Passage in Wilderness (Sheep Meadow Press.) Her illustrated stories, Creamy & Delicious (1970), was mentioned in Larry McCaffery’s stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, received FC2’s Innovative Fiction list of the 100 greatest books of the 20th century where it was named Award, (University of Alabama Press.) Her newest manuscript was a “The most extreme and perfectly executed fictional work to emerge from finalist for the National Poetry Series, 2015. Other honors include the Pop Art scene of the late 60s.” He has written no fewer than 15 the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. novels and has been the recipient of both National Endowment for the Arts Grants and Guggenheim Foundation Grants.

52 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I authors

Tatiana Servin Douglas Messerli Tatiana Servin is the recipient of the Tom Massey Award for Douglas Messerli was the publisher of Sun & Moon Press and Outstanding Dual Degree Student. Her MFA thesis Burdens & Green Integer Press. He is the author of several books of poetry, Babel won “Best Poetry Manuscript” for the John Fowles Arts most recently, Dark and, forthcoming, Stay; a book of fiction, Award at Chapman University. She currently teaches a writer’s written under the pseudonym Joshua Haigh, Letters from Hanusse; workshop in Gage Park, a South Side neighborhood in the and of several dramas, written under the pseudonym of Kier city of Chicago. Her work has been published in Calliope. Peters, most notably, The Confirmation, which was performed in New York and Los Angeles. His play, Past Present and Future Tense James P. Blaylock was transformed into an opera Still in Love performed in New York. His multi-volume My Year volumes (dating from 2000 to James P. Blaylock, twice winner of the World Fantasy Award, is the present) have annually represented his cultural memoirs. the author of 25 novels and collections of stories. His short story “Unidentified Objects” was published in Prize Stories, 1990, the O. Pedro Mairal Henry Awards. His work has been published in translation around the world. Mr. Blaylock is a Professor at Chapman University in Pedro Mairal was born in Buenos Aires in 1970. His first novel, Orange, California, where he has lived for the past 45 years. One Night With Sabrina Love, was awarded the Clarín Prize in 1998 with a panel of judges comprising Roa Bastos, Bioy Casares and Pablo Baler Cabrera Infante, and was adapted to the screen in the year 2000. His work has been translated and published in USA, France, Italy, Pablo Baler is a fiction writer, cultural critic, and Associate Professor Spain, Portugal, Poland and Germany. The Bogotá39 jury selected of Latin-American literature and Visual Arts at California State him among the 39 most notorious young Latin-American authors. University, Los Angeles. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Baler His latest novels include: Salvatierra (The Missing Year of Juan is the author of the award-winning novel Circa (Galerna, 1999) and Salvatierra), 2008 and La uruguaya (The Uruguayan girl), 2016. the collection of short stories La burocracia mandarina (Lumme, 2013). Baler is also the editor of The Next Thing: Art in the Twenty-First Century (FDU Press, 2013). His essay on baroque/neo-baroque aesthetics (originally published in Spanish in 2009) recently came out as The Latin American Neo-baroque: Senses of Distortion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

53 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University authors

About the writers

Lou Rowan Rebecca Goodman Lou Rowan’s books include A Mystery’s No Problem, novel, 2016; Love’s, Rebecca Goodman is the author of The Surface of Motion poetry, 2016; The Alphabet of Love Serial, stories, 2015; My Last Days, (Green Integer) and Aftersight (Spuyten Duyvil). She is the Superman’s autobiography, 2007; Sweet Potatoes, stories, 2008. He is co-author of The Assignment (Fountainhead Press). Her writing eternally grateful to the English Department at Harvard University hasappeared in such places as the Denver Quarterly, Western for making the academic study of literature repugnant to him. Humanities Review, Madhatters’ Review, and American Book Review. She teaches creative writing at Chapman University. Carlos Gamerro Zulfikar Ghose Carlos Gamerro was born in Buenos Aires. He has published, amongst others, the novels Las Islas (1998), El secreto y las voces (2002) and Zulfikar Ghose has published 6 volumes of poems, 11 novels, 6 books La aventura de los bustos de Eva (2004), all three translated into of criticism, and an autobiography. The Review of Contemporary English, and most recently Cardenio (2106). In 2007 he was Visiting Fiction featured him in its Summer 1989 issue. He lives in Fellow at Cambridge University and in 2008 he participated in Austin, TX, where he taught literature and creative writing at the the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. University of Texas of which he is now Professor Emeritus. Jim Johnson David Matlin Jim Johnson, Professor Emeritus, taught Painting and Drawing in the David Matlin is the author of novels, as well as collections of poetry Department of Art & Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder and essays. He is presently working on the last novel of a trilogy. from 1970-2005. He developed the department’s Integrated Media and The first two novels are How the Night is Divided and A Half Man Computer Imaging programs and taught Principles of Color as well as Dreaming—the third is The Still Hunt. His collections of poetry seminars in contemporary art. He was instrumental in developing the and prose include the books China Beach, Dressed In Protective Center for Arts, Media and Performance for the ATLAS Institute and Fashion, and Fontana’s Mirror. His first novel, How the Night is served as its first Director. A graphic artist in the broadest sense of the Divided, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award word, Johnson makes paintings, drawings, constructions and prints, as in 1993. He’s a professor of English at San Diego State University. well as artist’s books, typefaces, bumper stickers and T-shirts. Working in digital media, he has produced numerous animations, installations and interactive programs. He has a long-held interest in the relationship of words and images. His book/installation, A Thousand Words, is in the Denver Art Museum’s Permanent Collection. Other books are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Library and Archive, London, the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles and the archives of the Chicago, San Francisco and Otis Art Institutes.

54 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I authors

Michael Abbott Karen Tei Yamashita Michael Abbott has worked in publishing in various international Karen Tei Yamashita is a Japanese American writer. Her works, roles for thirty years, primarily for Carcanet, Macmillan, several of which contain elements of magic realism, include novels Random House and Baker & Taylor. In his spare time, he I Hotel (2010), Circle K Cycles (2001), Tropic of Orange (1997), Brazil- writes articles on travel and literature and is a translator from Maru (1992), and Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). She has French to English, specialising in contemporary art and co-written My Postwar Life: New Writings from Japan and Okinawa culture. He has lived in France for twenty-five years. with Elizabeth McKenzie. Tei Yamashita’s novels emphasize the necessity of polyglot, multicultural communities in an increasingly Yuriy Tarnawsky globalized age, even as they destabilize orthodox notions of borders and national/ethnic identity. Yamashita was a Finalist for the 2010 Yuriy Tarnawsky is one of the founding members of the New York National Book Award. She has also written a number of plays, including Group, a Ukrainian émigré avant-garde group of writers, and co- Hannah Kusoh, Noh Bozos and O-Men which was produced by the founder and co-editor of the journal Novi Poeziyi (New Poetry; 1959– Asian American theatre group, East West Players. She is an Associate 1972). He writes fiction, poetry, plays, translations, and criticism Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in both Ukrainian and English. His works have been translated into where she teaches creative writing and Asian American literature. French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Russian. His best known works include: Like Blood in Water (2007) Short Tails (2011) Kvity Xvoromu (Flowers for the Patient, 2012) and his recent Claim to Oblivion selected essays and interviews (2016).

55 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University Submit your writing to the Spring 2018 Issue of Mantissa!

The next Issue is devoted to

Hunger

The Deadline for Submissions is September 1st, 2017

56 Mantissa Journal Volume II Issue I 57 John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, Chapman University