singed to irregular shape
by a kitchen match held
in the tips of my once-flamed fingers.
Crisp edges smell of autumn
bonfires pluming smoke to the sky,
space blooms in the heart of the page.

Dotted along distant horizons
a phrase from an ancient map—
Here Be Dragons.

Patricia Wellingham-Jones has a longtime interest in ‘healing writing’ and the benefits people gain from writing and reading their work together. Widely published, her chapbooks include Don’t Turn Away: Poems About Breast Cancer, Voices on the Land, and End-Cycle, poems about caregiving.

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The twins she has left at home.

The wallpaper is floral pastel, like what one might expect in a suburban family’s powder room. Once she locked herself in Stephanie Quinn’s downstairs powder room. She was 16 and high on mushrooms but sitting here now she remembers how the petals wove and scintillated, that night, how she lay there on the floor, holding on to it all for a while before twisting the knob to show Stephanie Quinn: how beautiful.

There was no sex at 16 and while there were other things, she was considered a good girl for this reason. The room is filled with girls, slouched in chairs, their heads resting on the shoulders of mothers, aunts, older sisters. Girls sucking the strings of their hooded sweatshirts, sucking until the wet cotton squeaks in their mouths, hoods pulled tight, compressing their skulls. They are not like her and yet she is one of them.

“Hang on Sloopy” comes on the oldies station and two girls in full wigs spin heels straight from the club.

It is eleven o’clock in the morning. Her husband has taken off work. He is reading the newspaper on his handheld device. The radio plays. Heat spreads from her ears, stamping down her throat, like how she used to get while giving an oral presentation when no one was paying attention. She squeezes her husband’s arm but he has a call and stands up to take it outside. Lowering her eyes, she scans the waists in the waiting room: a tight peach t-shirt, a midriff baring a belly ring, a cheap blazer stretched over a bulge.

There are fathers here, too.

A vase rests on the windowsill full of cloudy water. Lilies. Their scent could nauseate her even when fresh, but these flowers have started to turn, stamens spilling rust along the ledge. Bile rises but then her name is called and she reports for the transaction, her credit card swiped through a machine. There are receipts and consent forms and handouts, poorly copied, detailing risks and side effects, a slip with prescriptions to fill.

She signs off on everything.

The office assistant asks if there is anything else.
She shakes her head. The doctor had ordered a twelve-hour fast and now she feels like she does on Yom Kippur. Her nose tingles. She fights it as she’s been fighting for weeks but she is failing. A nurse with a cross pendant appears at her side.
“Something wrong, sugar?”
“It’s only,” she says, halting. “I am a mother.”
The nurse tells her try not to think of it like that.
Her voice breaks, “you don’t understand,” but before she can whisper “already” there is her husband, kissing her forehead and saying, “What did I miss?” She looks at him through smeary eyes and he says, “Remember, this is your decision.” Just like that he’s excused himself as if to clarify: this is her problem. She could stop it but where would that leave them. The nurse with the crucifix balls up a wad of tissues and offers them up as a bouquet. Her husband invites her to blow.
“Isn’t that sweet,” the nurse speaks in that tone used on small children. Rubs her back and it is embarrassing. “You two are a breath of fresh air.”

A door opens and her husband turns. The nurse holds her hand like a crossing guard. “The girls in there are half-naked.” His protest is thin but at least there is a protest and at least he is here, she reminds herself, as her husband retreats to the waiting room and she follows the nurse down the corridor labeled “no men allowed.”

The changing area feels like the dressing room of a discount women’s department store. Vainly she’d fretted over what to wear this morning, not wanting to look too prim or too casual. Too much like a mommy. The twins had clomped around the closet in her shoes, draping rejected pieces around them like boas. Squealing: “look at me.” Once the disposable gown is tied, she gathers her belongings into a pile. It is freezing. There are paper bags on her feet. One girl – no, a woman – looks at her nipples begging through and indicates a row of lockers, their keys attached to springy neon rings.

“Girl,” the woman says. “Just wait for that tea.” The air conditioner grunts and she shivers, shuffling to her locker, sliding the key chain over her wrist.

A new waiting room. More girls. Fidgeting in their chairs, thumbing outdated issues of Prevention and Country Home. One speaks into a smuggled cell phone, loudly, so it is impossible to mishear the words “dilation” and “sticks.” Another picks a scab on her arm. It’s taking forever and the light screams down at her, unforgiving. The gown provides insufficient coverage. Tugging at it, she has begun to feel dizzy so when a girl asks, “what time is it?” she almost says, “naptime.”

Inside she does as she’s told: dangles her ass off the table, presses her feet into stirrups. The doctor enters. His nose and mouth are masked but she recognizes his eyes from his website. This man could sell her a bridge. He stands at her feet, waving a wand, and says with an accent: “First we need to confirm what is there.”

She is grateful for the nurse anesthetist. It will not take much. Only yesterday the twins had crashed toy carriages, dolls expunged in a lifeless heap, and begged her for a real baby brother. They are not quite three, her girls, but she’s settled on a tea set and pair of wings for them each as consolation. The anesthetist rolls out his questions of consciousness. Her teeth clatter.
“Relax,” the anesthetist says.

The gas hisses and she breathes; “that a girl,” she hears as the cup closes down on her face.

Again with the flowers, faded border. Drop ceiling. A room lined like a convent with beds; still, more are needed. The nurse rushes to move her. To accommodate the ones who must wait. The girl beside her is sobbing; the girl across rises and spills. Now that it is over she is ravenous – sucked and pink and scraped clean – and the only thing she can think is what to eat.

The girls spoke of abortion tea for good reason. Blend of Lipton, chamomile flower, peppermint; whatever bags are left over. Brewed in a samovar and served thick with honey in a Styrofoam cup. The nurse brings it to her chair in recovery, along with two pills to help out the cramping. Her crucifix winks and here comes a pad used for housebreaking puppies. The nurse coos: “slide this under your bum.” She is so hungry the hot tea is heaven going down, fills her right up, as if it were all she could want.

Sara Lippmann has an MFA from the New School. Her work has appeared recently in Nanoism, Word Riot, Fiction Circus, Slice, Fourth Genre and others. She lives in Brooklyn.

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Blasted with furious questions

Again as I thought
falling into paranoia

Holding my arm
Reopened my honour

The curse seems diferent today
As the congested hours take over my smile.

Sarah Ahmad lives in Pakistan. She considers herself a struggling poet and artist. She believes that in her world where life is so fragile, not knowing if you will return alive every time you step out of the house, getting someone to acknowledge your art is a real struggle.

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I wanted somebody to love it, so that was love. Big as a grapefruit, big as my foot, big as a lamb.

The girls at the florists brought me doughnuts, covered for me while I put my feet up, wouldn’t let me do the baby flower arrangements. Didn’t treat me like a walking funeral either though. Made fun of my shape.

The case worker said she wished I’d called sooner.

I chose a married couple. Susan and Jeff. An art teacher and a lawyer.
We met up but Elias stayed home. We sat in institutional chairs across from each other and asked a few questions. I asked them how they would feel if it wasn’t as smart as them. Susan said that was a pretty smart question, and I said that was a pretty smart answer and we both laughed. All warm brown eyes.

We discussed twice yearly visits.

I asked her what names she’d thought of. I expected her to say Hope or Faith or something but she said Daisy. I liked that. Woke up with that song in my head. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do.

Susan had asked to be there for the birth. I agreed, but I was embarrassed. After a few hours though I couldn’t have cared if the Pope was in there.

Near the end all hell took over. Rapid speech, rapid response. I saw Susan put her hand over her mouth. I saw the hope evaporate from her eyes, pain take its place.
It was born still. Stillborn. Cord around its neck.

They wheeled me out of there and into a private room. They brought it to me, all clean and wrapped up. I held it. So perfectly still. Still perfect. I asked for Susan so she could hold it too. They said they didn’t normally allow it. I told them she was its goddammed mother.

Susan held it and when they took it away she held my hand, wiped her tears and mine too. I told her I needed to sleep, that I was sorry and wished her luck. She said she’d stay in touch. I said she didn’t need to.

She thanked me and left me alone until Elias came in carrying a bunch of pink daisies. I turned away from him and put my arms around a pillow.

Daisy, Daisy.

Born and raised in London, she has lived in the Washington, D.C. area since the mid 1970s.Visit her blog at http://fourshadesofindigo.blogspot.com/

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While those who are married tutors us
on the manner of being respectful obedient daughters;
we have yet to engage the depths of this endeavor
we so blithely seek. We have our ways
in which to prepare us.
But no plan I follow
can teach me how to love a man
who, like me, is flawed from birth.

The need for love is effortless as morning’s rise;
though in spite of this, marriages I know are not well.
Adultery, deceit has defiled them.
Then again, who but God can teach us how to love?
And I, care not to repeat the mistakes
my sisters made before me.

Nadia Brown is an American poet, freelance writer, and author of the award-winning book, Unscrambled Eggs. Her poetry and articles have appeared in national and international magazines, and literary journals. She is also the founder of Author-Promotion.com.http://www.nadiabrown.com

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“So are you going to take the job? You’ll be away on tour for months.” Carl had kissed her and run his hand through her hair. It made a shiver run down her spine.

“I don’t want to leave you, but it really is a fantastic opportunity. It won’t come again.”

“I know, I know, but how can we survive as a couple if we’re never together?”

Jo had stepped away from his caresses. “I just need a little thinking time. I’ve worked hard for so many years and this has been my dream to dance in a real production. I can’t just give it up like that.”

“Well I’m an opportunity that won’t come again too. Just remember that when you’re making your decision.” Carl had jumped onto his bike and roared noisily out of Delamere Forest car park leaving her standing in silence by her old battered mini.

Jo stretched her tall slender body slowly and then wandered round the small flat in bare feet. The cold of the floor was comforting. Like others who had grown up in the children’s home, her family was the group of friends that had shared so many years of childhood. Physically they had not always been together but had kept in touch by mobile and e-mail. Of her six close friends Emily had always been there for her. She would phone her tomorrow and ask her advice. Having made a decision, however small, Jo trundled off back to bed in the hope of sleep.

The following day she downed a cup of coffee and made her way to the college practice room that was booked for 8.30 a.m. Two hours of hard work left her sweating and tired, but happy. Ballet made her feel so alive. The music transformed her into a paintbrush, weaving pictures across the room, sometimes quick sharp strokes and other times, languid long lines of pure grace.

As soon as she had showered and changed into the student uniform of
jeans and tee shirt she found a quiet place on the grass to sit down and
call Em.

“Part of me knows I have to take this opportunity, but what if I lose him? It’s so wonderful to have someone who is mine. I couldn’t bare it if we split.”

“O.K. let’s try it the other way around. Suppose he was offered a job in America teaching at a top school, perhaps with a promotion; would you tell him to take it or stay where he is and be with you?” said Emily.

“Well I’d want him to stay, but I’d have to encourage him to do what was best for him, or he’d hate me later on.”

“I think you’ve just answered your own question then, haven’t you? If you don’t take this chance, you’ll come to resent him. If he loves you, you’ll find ways to see each other.”

“Thanks for talking it through Em. I’ll let you know what happens. Speak soon.”

Carl came round that evening and Jo cooked him a simple pasta meal. He
said nothing about the job throughout the evening and although Jo knew
she had to tell him her decision, she didn’t want to spoil the evening.

Later he drew her towards him but she didn’t feel like making love.
Pulling away she said, “I’ve thought long and hard about the dancing
contract and …”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to take it. Please don’t. It will be the biggest mistake of your life.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean if you’re taking it, that’s us done. I’m not hanging around waiting for you.”

“We’ll still be able to meet up. I’ll travel back when I get a day off and you can come and visit at weekends.”

Carl stood up and picked up his leather jacket from the back of a chair.
“Nope, that’s not my scene. If you’re going away that’s it. Good luck with your dancing. You’ll need it because you’re going to be a sad lonely old biddy.” The front door slammed and he was gone.

Jo left the washing up piled in the sink and went to climb under her duvet. She felt like a knife had cut her in half. Effectively she had just got rid of the first man she’d ever loved and for all she knew the last. The tears fell freely and she knew she’d made the wrong decision. It must be. The pain was so bad but strangely she was asleep within minutes.

The next day she was up at six. She had another early practice and she knew she had to clear up before she went out. Years in care had taught her that you kept the daily routines going when your world was falling apart. It was a coping strategy.

In the solitude of the studio the music took over and Jo gave herself to the practice and routines she had to learn. Inside her body felt stiff and awkward. She knew she was just rubbish. ‘Why had she sent Carl away?’ But as she danced she caught sight for a brief second the graceful ballerina that pirouetted in the mirror. It was a shock to realize that it was her dancing. She was good. She continued the routine but as she did so occasionally she looked in the mirror and each time she was pleased with the skilful graceful image that was performing in front of her.

She drew herself up to her full height as the dance ended and knew she had made the right decision. She would never be a sad lonely old biddy while she had the ability to dance.

As the music ended Jo heard someone clapping.

“I just had a feeling you might be needing a friend,” said Em.
Jo ran towards her and gave her a hug. “Who could have a better family?
Give me ten minutes to shower and change and then let’s go and have a coffee at Starbucks.”

And when they arrived at the café, Em had arranged that all their friends were there.

Penny Luker is the editor for the writings section at ATG. She writes poems and short stories. Her first book, “Missing and other short stories” is published by Lulu. Her poems have been published in three anthologies recently, including “Voices in Verse” by Eternity Press.
Visit her website to read more of her work. Web:http://www.thewritingroom.fastmail.fm

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Katrina Parker Williams teaches English composition and grammar at a community college. She is a Barton College graduate with a B.S. in Communications and a Masters of Education in English from East Carolina University. She is also the author of a fictional novel titled Liquor House Music. Her work has appeared in Charlotte Viewpoint, Muscadine Lines, USADEEPSOUTH, and the Wilson Community College website.

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“Engaged? I don’t even have a boyfriend? How could I be engaged?”

“Well,” Aubrie said, with a superior tone, “I don’t know. Maybe some strange boy walked up to you and said, ‘Hey, let’s get engaged!”

This comment led us into a fabulous side conversation in which we referenced an old inside joke about a funny commercial and various other crazy ideas. (This included jokes about me being in my thirties and unable to have children, or my mom being 70 or 80 at my wedding, just to give you a small glimpse. Oh, that last one was from Hope, 7.) After a rather lengthy—and quite silly, of course—discussion, we reverted back to a somewhat serious (as if that’s possible) tone.

“Well, really, girls I think you should pray for me to meet my husband,” I told them. Because I want a guy who will love me and take care of me, and it’s hard to find one.” My eyes met each of theirs in the rearview mirror; they were all staring at me seriously.

“Yeah,” Aub piped up, “how are you gonna find a boy now that you’re not in college?” (Thanks for that, by the way. As if I didn’t already feel stressed. On a good note, though, she thinks you should be at least 22 to get married.)

“Hey!” I protested. “Wait a minute. Aubrie, you told me last year that I couldn’t get a boyfriend yet.”

“What?” She looked genuinely lost.

“You said if I got a boyfriend and brought him to your house you would kick him out because we have a deal about you baby-sitting my kids and you thought you were too young to start babysitting.”

“Oh yeah.” Oh yeah…she remembered.

“But you won’t be too young by the time I have kids,” I explained to her again. “If I get married in a year or two…” I said, not really thinking, “then you would…”

“Next year!?!” Aubrie interrupted. “You’re getting married next year? Well then, you better get choppin,’ Mallie!” And I swear she was twenty instead of nine when she said it.

“Splkjf,” I sputtered.

“How are you getting married next year if you don’t even have a boyfriend?”

“No, I said in a year or—whatever. But seriously, I can’t just walk up to a stranger and say, ‘Hi, wanna get married?’ So I think you girls should keep an eye out for a nice guy.”

“But our mom and dad won’t let us go up to strange men and talk to them!” Aubrie protested, and I cringed. Put it that way and—yeah—yikes! “Oh, our mom could!”

“Or our dad!” Virginia, 6, chimed in. “Or we could meet nice boys and talk to them when they’re not strangers and then tell them about you!”

I’m starting to get a funny feeling. You know what I mean…. I’m imagining all the awkward situations this could produce.
“Hm, I think we should come up with a plan,” I said. “You had a plan to get Virginia and my brother together, Aubrie. Got a plan for me?”

(There was another little delay in our conversation here, as Aub had to explain to Virginia her plan of making Vi drink spicy soda, fly through the air and then land in my 20-year-old brother’s lap. They’d meet each other’s eyes, fall in love, and live happily ever after. “Then we’d be related to Mallie!”)

“So, come on, how am I going to meet him?” I asked again.

“I know!” Hope spoke up. “Maybe when you go to the grocery store, you’ll have your hands full and you’ll be texting, texting, texting, and he’ll be coming the other way with his hands full, texting, texting, texting, and then—you’ll run into each other and drop all your stuff and then you’ll look at each other and fall in love!” (All the girls were smiling and practically sighing at this point.)

“Okay, that could work,” I said to Hope. A thousand buts popped into my head, but I let them slide.

“Or,” Virginia said, her eyes sparkling, “you could ask all your friends to tell you the boys they know and you could meet them!”

“That’s very plausible, Vi,” I said, smiling at her. “I love it!”

She frowned a little and leaned back, looking out the window.

“Oh,” I said quickly. “Plausible means it sounds like it would work. Great job!” Her smile returned.

“Okay, I’ve got it!” Aubrie called from the very back seat. “Is this plausible?” (She’s quick to pick up that stuff.) “Maybe your mailman—“

“Um,” I interrupted. “My mailman’s a woman, so I’m not liking your plan so far. Well, let’s say I get a new mailman…”

“And he’s a young guy, like your age,” Aubrie didn’t even skip a beat, “and you’re taking your dog for a walk, and she runs right up to the new mailman, and she knocks all the mail over and you help him clean it up and then you see each other and fall in love!”

“ ” I began, but Aubrie wasn’t done yet.

“Or you could call all your girlfriends and ask them to bring all their boy friends—not boyfriends, but boy friends—know what I mean? And that’s how you could meet him. And you could accidentally kiss, and—“

“Whoa!” I broke in. “How does one ‘accidentally’ kiss? Like, I fall forward and my lips crash into his? I think we’re getting out of control here….”

The girls began giggling, imagining a ton of accidental kissing, and I joined in, enjoying their creative and joyful minds.

“Okay, but seriously girls,” I said. “I really do think you should pray for me to meet my husband soon, because I think God has one for me. Okay?”

They all agreed and then we resumed our usual banter and sillies and good-natured teasing. Man, I love those girls. And Aubrie’s right…I better get choppin’!

Mallory is a recent college graduate with a BA in History, but her true passion is literature! She loves observing the world around her and trys to capture it in words–a true challenge.

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Tertiary highlights
Scents of amber afternoons
Wild woman ghost skirts.

Ivana Plucinski is a Slovakia born poetess and has been a German resident for many years; she writes in English. Her work has appeared in e-zines. Her literary sensibility for the intimacy of words and her passion for writing have her alternating between reporting from a female angle and spiritual relationships with emphasis on nonlinearity. Currently she is working on her historic epic saga.

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After grudgingly, slowly dressing in the horrendous ensemble, I shuffled downstairs looking as depressed as possible to show Mom, who I knew had probably already found something to disapprove of even though she had not seen me yet. I stood in front of her in the kitchen saying without speaking, “is this okay?”

“Brush your hair, and don’t forget the under-part, and tuck in that shirt. God Cathy, don’t you know to do that?” She stood there, eyeballing me top to bottom.

Mom was in a bad mood that day. Her week at work had been long and hard, her new boss was demanding and demeaning, she’d said. I had gotten in trouble at school again for disobeying a teacher I didn’t like, and fighting with a girl who wouldn’t stop making fun of my clothes. As I rode home on my bike after school each day, she and whoever she could recruit would follow me about twenty feet behind and talk about me loudly, saying that I got my clothes out of the trash like all the dirty Mexicans. Finally, I’d had it and I pounced on her and pushed her into the lockers after gym class. Later, as I sat in the Principle’s office, I realized that it was exactly what she wanted me to do, and my feeling of deep shame and stupidity got much deeper. So I’m sure Mom would have said more to me right then, if she had not been so tired. Whatever happened to her at work, she seemed to come home and do to me. Whatever happened to me in school, I handed her to take to work. So, I trotted back upstairs before either one of us could say what we were thinking.

I stood in front of my mirror tucking in my stupid shirt and wondering for the millionth time that day if Rodney Wilson was thinking about me. During lunch last Friday, we’d sat alone together amongst the pine trees in the far reaches of the schoolyard kissing, locking braces, and producing too much spit. He’d even stuck his tongue in my mouth, but I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there and let him roll it around, hoping and praying I was doing it right, whatever it was. It was now Sunday and I’d thought of him every moment, and relived every second of the encounter again and again. When my Mom shouted for me it took a second for me to wake up, for me to calm down from the excitement of my waking dream. Sometimes she would just bang on the ceiling under my room with a broom handle, and follow that up by screaming for me. When I finally answered her call, she was not pleased. Once I made it down the stairs and was standing in front of her, preparing myself to be yelled at, I felt like my body from the waist down and from the waist up was turning in different directions, the top half right and the bottom half left. Lately, I found myself turning in different directions a lot, and it made me think I would never really feel connected to anything, least of all myself. Why couldn’t I pick out my own clothes? I guessed it was because we were going to see my Uncle, my Mom’s little brother who intimidated everyone, especially my Mom. I guessed those stupid girls might be right after all. No matter what I choose myself to wear, it must look bad.

We were late starting off to my Uncle Dan’s house. Huntington Beach to Los Angeles was about a forty or fifty minute ride, during which I tried to stay quiet and listen to my Aunt, Mom, and Grandma talk. Sometimes it seemed that they forgot I was in the car and they gossiped or said what they were thinking out loud. That day’s topic was my Uncle’s new wife, Charmaine. Just as we were passing the Huntington Beach Mall off the 405 freeway my Aunt had already started in on Charmaine, “she’s not taking care of him, you know,” she fumed, “he’s already thrown up those stitches twice and she was too drunk to help or passed out on the couch.” My Aunt said these words with such distaste and loathing that I was glad I could not look her in the eyes, for fear I would surely melt under her angry gaze. She had that way about her. Then my Mom joined in, “Dan told me on the phone that he’s had to do all his own cooking, she refuses to even make him some soup. She’s just too busy getting drunk all the time, that’s all.”

“The girl must have problems we don’t know about.” My Grandma chimed in, “he married her, and he must have known something was wrong.”

“Wrong or not wrong,” my Aunt continued to work herself up, “her neglect is really going to hurt him if he’s not careful.”

“He shouldn’t have to be careful,” my Mom said, the pitch of her voice matching my Aunts, “she should be taking care of him!” My Aunt and Grandma grunted in agreement.

Charmaine had not done too well with our family. She was loud; she cussed a lot, and drank even more. The two times Uncle Dan had brought her to family gatherings she looked really down and kind of mean. She didn’t really talk to anyone and looked bored with our laughter and jokes. But the ultimate insult came when she asked my Aunt in a very unpleasant voice to get their damn dog, Noodles, out from under the table so she could enjoy the food she was not actually eating. In the interest of keeping things peaceful, Aunty put Noodles outside. But I’ll never forget how quiet the room got, and how little Charmaine seemed to care. Her lack of consideration extended to me as well, she just seemed to pretend that I was not there – until I did not answer her greeting one day, she had humiliated me in some way. Since that time she went out of her way to acknowledge me. It felt fake, of course, but I would take anything I could get.

After what felt like forever, we pulled into Dan’s driveway, which was on a hill that overlooked all of Los Angeles. We pulled more food from the trunk than an army could eat, but we figured if we could not make him well, at least we could make him fat. In fact, our general purpose there was to baby him, feed him, and fuss as much as possible. It was nice to finally have a purpose after the tense car ride. Mom couldn’t say anything to me without sounding offended, and I couldn’t say anything to her without sounding sarcastic. Even though I was riding in a car with the three women closest to me, I felt completely alone and misunderstood, and it seemed to be all my fault. At school, I was an easy target for bullies who possessed a talent for spotting weakness and exploiting it, and, with the exception of two friends, was ignored or ridiculed by everyone else – including teachers. My Father had long since disappeared and my Mom and I grew further apart each day. I saw other friends with brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, all under the same roof. They had a level of comfort and trust I could comprehend for them but not for my family, it seemed just out of reach.

I realized this one morning as I stopped to pick up my friend Dawn on the way to school. We played this game where we’d hit the garage door closer and try to run and dive underneath before it shut. That day I made it, she did not. This garage door was from the olden days when there were no sensors to make it stop if it hit something – so it just kept closing. Dawn tripped and fell in mid-dive and was hit in the back by the heavy, descending door. She managed to pull herself out but got scraped up, bruised, and very scared in the process. She stood up, relieved for a moment that she was out of peril, then began to cry and marched straight inside the house to inform her mother of her terrible accident, so she could receive the proper sympathy and mild scolding. As I watched this episode unfold (from the safety of the sidewalk), I marveled that she could tell her Mom the truth about what happened without worrying how terrible the wrath might be. I knew I could never do that, be that honest and let my pain out. I would have dislodged myself from the door, possibly whimpered a bit, and gone to school hoping the entire day that my Mom wouldn’t find out. I was beginning to think of every situation in my 12 year old life like this; I always felt a need to hide everything and I didn’t quite understand why. I didn’t think I was a bad kid, but I felt bad about almost everything – my hair, my zits, my schoolwork, my personality, and of course, my clothes. So as we parked the car and walked up to Dan’s door, I had my usual urgent need to be hiding behind everyone as soon as the doorbell was rung. This was no easy task, at 5’3, I was the tallest female in the group – we were all short, Mexican women. I thought maybe I could crouch, but then I’d look like I was crouching, and someone was bound to wonder why.

Charmaine answered with her usual greeting, “Hi, come on in.” Then she walked away as if we just knew to follow her.

We entered the house looking for the wreckage of a sick man and his alcoholic wife, but really did not see it immediately. My Uncle appeared from one of the back bedrooms in his striped pajamas, and said “Hello” in his compromised voice. He did not look well. My Mom, Aunt, and Grandma flew into action, surrounding him with food and questions. Charmaine retreated to the kitchen quietly, not looking back as she walked away. I stood there like a prairie dog sniffing the air, trying to decide which way to run. I said hello to my Uncle, and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. Then I took the food to the kitchen.

Charmaine stood leaning up against the counter, lighting a cigarette. She looked up at me, and then back down at her cigarette, then said,
“Hi kid. Nice outfit.”

“Thanks.” I said with my head down. “I didn’t pick it out.”

“I meant that it looks good on you. How have you been?”

“Okay, I guess. How are you?”

“You know, getting along. Is that food for us?”

“Yeah.” I said as I handed her the casserole dish and Tupperware containers. She looked at all the loot with a vague question on her face, as if we thought they didn’t eat in Los Angeles.

“The chicken soup is for Dan.” I said, feeling somewhat embarrassed for thinking she couldn’t provide for my Uncle and guests at the same time. But then I remembered that we’d been to their house for family gatherings, and compared to the usual spread of food my family laid out, her efforts were lacking. I didn’t know what to make of it – did we go too far or did she not go far enough? I imagined the answer to lie somewhere in the middle.

I wandered into the living room to find my Uncle sitting on the couch with a blanket over him, his feet up, and my Aunt, Mother, and Grandma gently drilling him for details of the past few weeks. I sat listening for a while until Charmaine’s eye caught mine, and with a wag of her head summoned me to the kitchen. I stood up to go over to her. In the kitchen were bowls and plates full of dip she and my family had made.

Charmaine said that once we put the food out, we were free for a few hours to go for a walk. I worked feverishly, because it was never that I hated Charmaine, I just didn’t understand her. Before we went for our walk, we went into the bedroom, and Charmaine pulled out her portfolio. I sort of knew that she had been a model at some time in her life, but I never expected to see all these beautiful photographs of her. She looked angelic in some of them, and like a demon from hell in some others. I asked questions about every picture, and I think she felt pride in answering them, as if she hadn’t done this sort of thing in a long time. During this show and tell I felt sort of like her mirror, or audience. She would look at my facial expressions after she showed me each picture, maybe looking for my approval, or my level of interest? I tried not to let her down; I wanted her to know that I thought those pictures were great, and that I thought that she was a very beautiful woman. When we were half way through with her portfolio, Charmaine said we should go for our walk. We popped our heads into the living room and asked if they needed anything, and my mom said, “Nope we’re fine. Enjoy your walk.’

We lit out the back gate and turned right down the fire road that ran behind my Uncle’s home. At first we just walked side by side slowly; the sun filtering through the trees made warm spots on my face and body. Then Charmaine asked me a whopper of a question, she said, “Do you have a boyfriend yet?”

I stuttered through my answer, “No, not really, how can you tell if he’s your boyfriend?”

“Do you get goose bumps when you see him?” Yes. “Do you think about him all the time?” Yes. She looked at my face and saw the answers to those questions without me having to say a word. “What’s his name?” she asked with a crooked smile.

“Rodney Wilson” I said, as my cheeks grew hot. I glanced behind me to make sure no one was lurking in the bushes, especially not my mom.

“What does he look like?”

I said that he had dark brown almost black hair and blue eyes and he was taller than me. I went on to tell her about the note he’d slipped me in music class a week ago which read Cathy, I love you. Rodney. And about how after the class let out I tried to go up to him but he ran away. “Why’d he do that?” I asked Charmaine. “He didn’t talk to me for the rest of the week, until Friday that is, when we were kissing amongst the pines.”

“Sounds like he’s just as nervous as you are. Boys act funny when confronted with someone they actually like. Just remember that it’s not you, it’s him. You are never responsible for another person’s actions. When you go to school Monday, ignore him, play hard to get. That’ll bring him around.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” I said. “It feels so good when he wants to be around me. But it always feels like he chooses the times when we’re going to be together. Like last Friday, he waited till I was alone, and then he came up to me and asked if I’d like to go for a walk with him.”

Charmaine looked at me the whole time I was talking, and that made me feel good. “Maybe he’s scared of his feelings for you,” she said. “He’s not a player, is he?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A player is someone who has lots of girlfriends.”

“I never see him with any other girls,” I said, quickly searching my memory banks for any contact with other girls.

“How old is he?” She asked me.

“He’s twelve, almost a year older than me.” I said excitedly. “He’s taller than me too. Oh, I already said that, sorry.”

“That’s okay. It feels good to be excited, doesn’t it? That’s what being in love is” she said gently, “that feeling of butterflies in your stomach when you think about him. That’s how I feel around your Uncle.” It was the first time I’d heard her talk about Dan in such a loving way. All that stuff that my Mom, Aunt, and Grandma said on the way up there must not be true, I thought.

“You know what?” I said, “I was riding my bike home one day and some boys were headed toward me on their bikes. When they passed me one of them reached out and grabbed my boob.” As I said this, my head hung a little lower, and my voice got lower, as if I was ashamed of what happened. “I haven’t told anyone about that.”

“Not even your Mom?” Charmaine reached out and put her hand on my back and gently rubbed. It felt good when she did that.

“ She’d probably get mad at me for it.” I said this with great distain, and I felt like I was putting my mother down, and I wondered why I needed to do that.
“I don’t think your Mom would get mad at you. You don’t give her much credit,” Charmaine said tenderly. “I remember when my mom was still alive, I did the same thing to her. But she never got mad at me for it; in fact, she would hug me a little tighter and love me a little bit harder.
Charmaine saying that stuff made sense to me, and I believed her word as truth. As I looked up at her walking beside me, I thought about how funny it is that people change when you get to know them. I was glad that I was getting to know Charmaine, I liked this side of her much better than the other side. And another thing, she was actually listening to me, and asking me about my life. Somehow, I felt that I was worth more, that what went on inside myself did matter to someone else besides me. I also felt trust in Charmaine, the idea that I could tell her anything and she wouldn’t yell at me, or put me down, or only pretend to hear me.

Finally, we emerged from the trees onto a street, Charmaine said we’d better get back, or they’ll be worried. We’d been gone for two hours, but to me it seemed like twenty minutes. As my Uncle’s house came into view, I resisted the urge to run the other way. Walking toward the house I made sure to tell myself that I was important, and worth listening to, and that there was at least one person that I could trust. When Charmaine threw open the front door and yelled that we were back, my mom came scurrying out of the kitchen and I looked at her and smiled. She smiled back at me too.

In the dining room all the food we’d brought was laid out, and after getting a Pepsi from the fridge I picked up a plate and dug in. My mom may not have been a good listener but she sure could cook. Charmaine brought the rest of the portfolio so we could look at it while we ate. We giggled, and the laughter came from deep within me; and for the first time ever I felt like I was free to have an opinion.

Then it was time to go. Charmaine took me aside and gave me a big hug and kissed both my cheeks. My Uncle was feeling better to – he said that next time we came up we’d see his portfolio, he was practicing his poses with his pajama top wrapped around his head. We all laughed as we loaded up the trunk of Moms car. I almost didn’t want to leave, but with what I’d learned today, about Charmaine and myself I thought it might be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Three weeks later we had the big May birthday bash. We had three birthdays: Myself (I was going to be twelve), my Uncle (my Aunt’s husband), and my little cousin Ryan. We all sat down to a dinner of beef roast, new red potatoes, and string beans fresh from the garden, and asparagus, with fresh rolls. We gobbled up dinner and had to move right on to the presents because Ryan was getting antsy. While my Mom, Aunty and Grandma cleared the dishes off the table, and replaced the empty space with two German chocolate cakes, ice cream, plates and forks. The rest of us were retrieving the gifts and piling them high where we were sitting. Ryan could no longer contain himself. He stood on his chair and proclaimed that since he was the youngest he should get to go first. And he did. In keeping with the age thing, I figured I was next. I opened the one from my mom first–clothes, socks, some hair ornaments, and a fifty-dollar bill in the card. My Aunt and Uncle, who are very practical gift givers, gave me an overnight bag made of black leather, and a gift certificate to Nordstroms. My cousins got together and gave me a bunch of art supplies and drawing pads, which was great. Many nights I sat up in my room drawing till three or four in the morning. Next was my Uncle’s gift in a card, a check for $200.00. He believed that I’d have no trouble deciding on the best way to spend this money. And then at the bottom of the pile was a round flat thing. I opened the card and it read, “You are very special Cathy. Believe this about yourself always, and remember that you deserve to be heard. You have a light inside you that is so bright, keep that fire burning. Love You, Charmaine.” As I opened the gift gently, a round mirror emerged, with a stained glass crescent moon covering the right side of the mirror. When I finally saw it I was speechless. I felt like I’d been given an adult gift. When I went around the table to thank everyone for their gifts I stopped at Charmaine and asked her to come outside with me. We went to the backyard and Charmaine lit up a cigarette.

“I loved your gift! Its so beautiful!”

“Did you remember all the things we talked about when you all came up to see us a few weeks ago?”

“Yes I remembered. I was in a bad way that day, and being able to talk to you made me feel more worthy, like I really can trust people, and maybe even trust myself one day.”
“You’ve got a good start kid, and if ever you need to talk, I’ll always be ready to listen.” I gave her a big hug and kissed her on both cheeks.

When mom and I got home from the party and had brought all my gifts into the house, I got a hammer, nails, and my mirror and raced up to my room. I hung it next to my dresser at eye level for me. When I stepped back and looked into the mirror, I saw what Charmaine had seen in me that day. My features seemed to be transformed ever so slightly; in the reflection staring back at me, I saw a girl who was worth something, who was smart, and funny, and beautiful. In that mirror, I saw all the possibilities of what I could be. And, like Charmaine, the mirror seemed to reveal the truth about myself.

Two weeks later, Charmaine was in a motorcycle accident. She was on the back of a bike with no helmet on; both passenger and rider (not my Uncle) had been drinking. As he turned a corner and sped up the cars in front of him stopped suddenly and he hit them. Charmaine was thrown 30 feet, landing on her head. She made it to the hospital alive, but deteriorated quickly. Mom and I went to see her, she was in a coma, but the nurse said that she could probably still hear us. So we sat down at her bedside. I thanked her over and over again, while my mom prayed. Charmaine passed away three days later.

I was shocked and saddened by her death. I thought of all the conversations we’d never have, all the things that had yet to happen in my life that I would never get to share with her. In the last month she’d become the one adult I could look up to, and tell my feelings too. At her funeral I didn’t cry much, but I felt this sadness inside, like an anvil in my gut that I couldn’t take out and just leave somewhere; nope, it would take a long time to get rid of that feeling. When we got home from the funeral, I went straight upstairs and looked in my Moon Mirror. I saw no sadness, no heaviness, just a girl, a beautiful girl, who was capable of fulfilling every wish that Charmaine had for her. Just like I was her mirror that day at my Uncles house, when I fulfilled her wishes by looking at her portfolio with her, she rewarded me with a mirror that I could look into and see the best part of myself, the best of what she saw in me that day.

Catherine Kizer lives in Pittsbugh PA. Her office is on the last landing on the stairs. Kinda cramped. She’s been writing for many years, well, not too many, she’s not that old.

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My feet wanted to march in a hike.
I slowed them.
My brain buzzed with chatter louder than jays.
I turned it off.
I followed the ancient pattern, focused old pain
in the acorn I rolled in my palm.
Waited politely while the woman ahead
went through gyrations known only to Buddha
at the 400, it seemed, stations of her new belief.
Women patted rocks, sat cross-legged
in the center, flung arms around bodies
passing, shared a caress.
I kept stepping across rocks for oncoming traffic.
The occasional smile twitched
the corner of my mouth. I confess
I bent over buttercups, noticed purple vetch,
fingered pink foxtail stars, watched salal bells
chime their silent song. But illumination?
Enlightenment? Deep release? No.

My heart jolted.
At the end of one lane
in the matrix of white of a granite boulder,
a granite heart marked the turn in the path.
My feet refused to carry me around.
My fingers, as if drawn by a cord,
pressed their soft flesh against the stone heart
while my knees folded me to the ground.
Head bowed, I felt you, long dead,
fill my body with tears long-shed.
As I rose, your hand led me to the labyrinth’s center.
There, in a rock hollow, I dropped
the acorn dull with old pain
to the lichen and cedar tips,
faded flowers, one silver bead.

Calm, I started the outward trek.
Found myself halted again
at the heartstone. Something
seemed to be bothering my eyes.
Despite a sense of sacrilege
I fished a tissue from my jeans.
Nose buried, blew away tears –
and sticky mugwort.
My hair lifted in the freshening breeze,
I felt you flow away from me.
Able now to take that turn in the road
I rejoined the writer-women, my lips sealed,
eyes glowing like opals, matching the looks
on their faces, their stilled hands.

Patricia Wellingham-Jones has a longtime interest in ‘healing writing’ and the benefits people gain from writing and reading their work together. Widely published, her chapbooks include Don’t Turn Away: Poems About Breast Cancer, Voices on the Land, and End-Cycle, poems about caregiving.

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Just seventeen.

A carefully crafted blueprint is what she carries. A constructed plan. A book of instructions. A map of straight and narrow roads to follow. A compass to put her back on track in the event that she might find herself turned in the wrong direction. The voices of others repeating themselves in her head. And a single simple mirror to reflect back and to remind her.

Timetables….schedules….deadlines. Always something important to do..somewhere urgent to go…someplace elsewhere to be. Forever in search of the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Forever in search of she.

A world holding its breath. A life waiting. The college degree..the profession..the marriage..the kids. A life fulfilled…and fulfilling. Time passing. A few wrong turns..a couple of detours..and an occasional dead-end. That road map is no use to her now. Life’s instructions are nothing other than words that fill a tired old book. And that carefully crafted blueprint is – right before her very eyes – slowly fading. There is no pot of gold at the end of each rainbow…and no one else’s voice ringing in her head. The mirror is all that she still carries. It’s all that remains.

No longer seventeen.

With an empty backpack and pockets without plans. Caught. Somewhere in the middle of her very adult-world responsibilities and still wishing on her childhood star. A found inner compass. A new sense of self. A growing strength. With only her mirror’s reflection answering her questioning gaze. A quiet whisper..almost inaudible to those passing by. She begins again.

Filled with questions…with self-doubt..with fear that sometimes paralyzes. She is learning to breathe..to sit with the discomfort..to believe. Often confusing and always a surprise…her inner compass has became her eternal companion and guide. Altho not the paths she imagined she’d follow..the crooked ones have become her new friends.

A trail of new dreams. Without any real goals or absolute destinations. In this moment. No longer needing to know where it is she is going…and yet knowing that she must go. Learning to trust in herself and her voice. Learning to listen. Daring to be heard… and to be seen. The mirror’s ever-changing reflection a constant reminder of who she is. Always becoming.

Marcie has a passion and interest for the visual world which began at a very young age. Although trained and working as an architect, she never stopped practicing photography. She is known to have her camera always with her, turning her lens towards anything that captivates her attention.http://www.marciescudder.com

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Throughout life, my hands are always busy. Busy with my five children and fourteen grandchildren. Busy working inside and outside my home. Busy at other tasks I love, and some done out of necessity. At least I have had a partner in my husband for over fifty years. We find hope through hardship with parents, siblings, our own children; striving and thriving in variation. Life brings aches and pains, but always moves forward.

Rebecca, 1981: My mother pulls the gown out of its garment bag in the closet for another February wedding—my own. The dress fits but needs minor updating for a 1980s wedding, nearly thirty years after its first trip down the aisle. We trim off the point on the sleeves and hem them into a simple long sleeve. I envision some beadwork to accent the flowers on the neck and bodice. The rest of the dress remains the same; the lace is a delicate sheath with roses shaped by the ultra-fine netting. I am proud to wear my mother’s dress, but do so also because it’s available and it fits. I imagine this will be the gown’s final wear, as styles continue to change. After my wedding, the dress is stowed safely back in the closet, to continue being a remnant of two histories.

My life resembles my parents, but not a direct reflection by any means. For me, life unfolds with joy and struggle as well. How else would it be complete? I navigate alongside my best friends: my hard-working and supportive husband for nearly thirty years, and my two daughters, a mixture of both their parents’ ambition, character and heart. We work hard and play hard. Adventure and trial intermingle, but we always look toward a triumphant love.

Rachel, 2009: Standing in front of the mirror at the bridal boutique, with the dress clipped tightly behind my back to fit, my mother and I admire the cascading lace around my petite figure. Unfortunately this dress, my favorite so far, is $1000 over budget. But there is a dress in the back of my mind: an ivory gown made of satin and lace of much better quality, and in the same flattering style. We leave and stop at my grandmother’s house to try on the dress that my mother and grandmother both wore. It fits almost perfectly, only an inch or so big in places. Fifty years old and much of the dress is back in style; with a little restructuring it will look brand new, but vintage. The satin and lace are still in perfect condition, safe from discoloration. The plans are made and the two of them (much more skilled at sewing) carefully take apart and re-piece parts of the bodice and the waist, removing the sleeves and shortening the train, for my own wedding in May.

I try on my grandmother and mother’s dress again; though altered, the dress is still the same. I stand in front of the former models of this gown and await their response.

“I think it looks better now than when I wore it,” says my grandmother. I beam, my mother tears up, and my grandmother looks proud of all that has passed, all that has changed, and all that is yet to look forward to. Thirty, then fifty, then more years of marriage; hard work, struggle, and success; children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. A wedding dress endures the test of age and change.

Martha Grace Byrne recently received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Writing/Literature and Communication. She put study into practice as an editorial assistant at Oregon Bride magazine, and later Indigo Editing & Publications. Currently she does career coaching at a Portland university. She loves her family, her poodle, plaid, watching TV on DVD, and carrying a book in her over-sized purse at all times.

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I thought, fool.
Still I viewed the grubby glass of liquid gold,
And dipped my little finger in.

The sludge dripped
A warning to my brain.
Gingerly I stirred; aroma
Took me back, breathless and desirable
So many years ago to that moment
I first tried it and gasped with pleasure.
No time to lose, I cupped the oversweet memory
In both hands
And gulped back.

Afterwards I felt so grateful It was pathetic.
I couldn’t look him in the eye and just say thank you.
Too good for that.
And from such a person!
I lied there and then
As he stroked me with his inquisitive eyes.

“Not bad.”

Tina Kyle commutes regularly between France and England in her motorhome, which was once her only home and is affectionately called Liebling. When not travelling she studies Buddhism, languages and creative writing with an emphasis on poetry - her other love. Some of her short poetry is printed online. She is working towards an Open University degree in modern languages.

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“Yeah, well, you don’t know my block,” she said. Her block had the only tree in a five-block radius. She imagined its gnarled tawny trunk to be like her backbone, tough after all these years of holding her up and pushing her forward, a bit twisted from the weight of the world. The tree was crowned with a halo of petal green leaves, soft fringe. She loved that tree, it was a misfit, like her. It was probably the only reason she stayed in Manhattan.

“I think it looks more like a row of books,” she squinted into the sunlight the Hudson was splashing in her eyes. “Like the way disorganized libraries lean on each other.”

She leaned on his shoulder and it was bonier than she’d remembered. He smelled of sandpaper and vanilla ice cream. “Tell me more about your block,” he said.

She told him about the pale blue stucco box church that looked like it belonged in the dusty desert of the South West. She told how she’d spend hours with the tree and the church, writing of places with no tree and no church. The gilded cross crucified the strip of sky between 4th and 5th, sending shadows onto her notebook as she filled them with stories. She told how she had begun to lace white Christmas lights in the heart-branches of her tree one night so it wouldn’t feel so out of place in this lit-up City. She had to lean far out her fire escape to get to the tippy-tops.

Soon his lit-up-cigarette was the brightest light on the shore. The night had begun to throw its dark blanket over the City sky, obliterating any chance of stars to wish on. The teeth-buildings lit up into a beaming grin, the tip of the Empire suddenly turning blood red because it was almost Valentine’s Day.

“Look at that Vampire City,” he said. “Luring people in and then sucking their blood right out. “ He took one last drag before throwing his light into the water. She watched it float down current, against the reflection of Manhattan, a city streaming in silver lines like tear-stains on a dark cheek.

She turned to look at his face in the half-dark. There was always something half-dark and beautiful about his face, even in the daytime, like there was a whole side of him she was waiting to be revealed. She’d known him for so long, but there was a part of him that was deeper than she’d ever gotten to, even though she knew how to swim to the bottom of dark waters.

He turned and smiled, his pointy cusps growing in front of her eyes. She always loved that part, like they were excited to see her.

She lifted her skirt a bit, and they both watched her legs fuse and extend into a long blue-silver tail.

“It’s a city of magic, only everyone is chasing the wrong kind,” she smiled, and so did he, the whites of his eyes gleaming as white as his fangs. His bright smile lit up the branches of her heart, she felt less alone next to him. She flexed her tail like Popeye’s, catapulting herself into the water. She disappeared under the frothy surface, only to reappear several feet away. She turned to him and waved high as an Olympic swimmer. When she returned, she had the seaweed hair and saltwater lips he always wished to puncture, but Mermaid blood wasn’t good for him.

He waited for her to return with handfuls of little silver fish wiggling like extra fingers in her palms. He would puncture them underneath their eyeballs and suck on them like half-empty ice-cream cones. It was a dirty habit, but it kept him from dirtier ones, she figured. She always said a little prayer for the fish as she scooped them up with her long fingers, the kind of prayer she heard while sitting outside the blue stucco church on her block in her Daytime Life.

Her daytime life was one of walking and writing and waitressing at the restaurant. Everyone at the restaurant assumed she was an actress, and she just said yes, for she was always pretending to be something she wasn’t. Normal. Normal like the girls who came into the restaurants with their boyfriends and split the bill. Normal, like the owner, who paced back and forth counting busboys’ mistakes and bar tips till nighttime.

Nighttime was always messier than Day, even for normal people. She’d watch them roll out of the restaurant on Friday nights at 2 in the morning like rowdy sailors on port call. They’d swerve like vampires with full bellies, leaning into each other’s necks. She would watch for the glint of fangs, but never saw them. What she saw were watery eyes, like everyone had been swimming too long and had gulped too much salt water. Drinking too much salt water was an easy way to forget, every guilty mermaid and merman knew that. She wondered what these land creatures could want to forget so badly. She watched them lean out the restaurant door, sea sick into the night streets, then totter off like small boats in choppy waters.

But Monday nights she did not have to pretend. Monday nights she could lean on his shoulder and watch the sky turn off and the city turn on. Monday nights she could grow into herself and he could, too, and no one would flinch.

Is it possible to be star-crossed in a city where the stars aren’t visible? Where people wish on themselves instead of far off fire-planets, where windows light up at night like stacked constellations, florescent and electric, all in rows?

‘When you live in a city with no stars to wish on, you have to wish on each other,’ she thought. It was morning. She nudged his brown curls with her fingers and rolled over, pushing bare toes into the sand. They’d fallen asleep at the feet of the city again. He opened his eyes like little half-moons and smiled, his fangs now rounded off like used pencil erasers he could safely run his tongue over. It was Tuesday, and her lunch shift started at 11. He had to be at the bike shop in Jersey City by twelve.

He trusted himself now that it was broad daylight and all of Manhattan was sunlit and sparkling like some innocent thing. He nuzzled his nose into the nape of her neck and she giggled, wiggling her toes and kicking up sand spray. She wrapped her arms around his and tried to soak him up like a sea sponge. She wanted to hold him like water, her night boy, her secret. Her fellow freak, her comrade. Here in the daylight they were just Boy, and Girl.

“Later, gater,” he lifted himself from the shore, gathering his things. Then he scooped up the hollowed bodies of silver fish discarded like empty beer cans and began to walk off toward his bike. She imagined him later, with a wrench in his hand and grease on his cheeks like a football player and felt that familiar growl in her heart. She imagined him there, and her in the City, and her heart suddenly turned into the darkest part of the ocean where no fish live, where the dark is so dark it feels palpable, like tar. She sunk there for a moment before reminding herself to push off with her tail, move toward the light, come up for air. It wasn’t good to stay in that dark place for too long.

“Later,” and she made her way for the morning city, where everyone was pretending.

“Pancakes, or omelets? The kind with cut up veggies like peppers and mushrooms? Or grits and butter rolls with gobs of honey?” The girl at the counter looked hungrily into her boyfriend’s eyes, absentmindedly twirling her toes around his ankle.

“Coffee coffee coffee,” he said.

Mermaid girl delivered, black coffee from a heavy-bottomed pot. The boyfriend’s eyes lit up and he took a sip. Mermaid watched the couple charge themselves with chemistry and caffeine and felt the salt water itch at the back of her throat. She thought of the boy. It was only Thursday. Four more days until her weekly date with Vampire Boy, her secret.

“How I wish I could be like them,” she thought. Out in day hours with arms around each other like expensive jewelry. Out, sun-drenched, with hands in each other’s back jean pockets. Girls with two long confident legs for walking city steps, and boys with mouths that couldn’t hurt too much. Being someone safe with someone steady, who wouldn’t change.

At dusk that night she sat on the church steps again, and felt that growling. The way her tar-heart growled, knowing there was something under the water. She only had an hour before the sun went down, before she best be home in the bathtub imagining he was there, or down by the docks, hiding in the shadows. She watched the shadow of the church cross inch its way across her notebook page, warning her of the time like a clock-hand. She tried to write stories of anything but him, but he had those fangs and that swagger and that wrench and oil that seeped into everything she did.

“Why did you come to the City?” he asked. He was on fire again, lighting cigarettes and burning them out. His teeth were still soft enough not to puncture tobacco.

She looked into the city. “There’s something beautiful there,” she said. “Some magic, some sparkle. You know how the sidewalks on Fifth Avenue sparkle like they have glitter in them when the sun hits them right? Its like that. If you look at it the right way, the city is all glitter and glitter always rubs off.”

He smiled, his kind of relieved thankful smile where his eyes stayed tired. He loved her for her optimism, for the way she could go to the deepest of waters but always come up for air. He didn’t think he’d have the strength, like if he swam to the bottom-most reaches he’d just stay there and sink like a stone.

“You are a ray of light, Mermaid Girl,” he hugged her, hard.

“And you are my night boy,” she whispered into the tip of his ear so the words could drip down his ear canal. She pulled away because she felt something and knew they were growing. The white tips, long and hard, his dangerous smile. And she felt her skin turn to scales and fin and there they were again, half together and half apart, completely understanding each other, but completely different from each other at the same time. They held each other and watched the city turn, too, into its monstrous grin of fangs and molars, darkness and light.

“You know this can’t last,” he whispered. He always sounded like he had a little lisp after his fangs grew in. “We are too different and I’m not made for swimming.”

“You have not seen what I’ve seen under that water,” she said. “Stranger things have evolved under there, their own species. There are a lot of miracles in dark places, you’ll see.”

Her eyes turned to two blue pools and suddenly he was swimming in them and he understood. The way her force kept her going, the strength of her delicate lines. She looked at his sharp teeth, sharp cheekbones, sharp eyes, and saw how soft they were, really, how they only wanted to be hard so they could reach soft things.

And the little silver fish stayed safe and untouched in the water that night, and she hardly noticed the blood. He tried to be gentle because she was a strong thing, a different thing. She was a thing that believed in light in the darkest of places and he was hungry for something like that.

When she woke up the next morning her feet were the first to reach out for him, 10 curious yawning toes. When her toes couldn’t find him she opened her sleepy eyes. When her eyes couldn’t find him she searched her mind. It was Tuesday? Yes. And they always woke up on the shore together like two washed up things, but this time he was gone.

He had left, and after the shock of it, cold like plunging into ice water with nothing on but a fin, she knew it had been inevitable. And the ocean in her tar-heart grew quickly and she found herself splashing in the darkness of it. She thought her heart had bottomed out, had grown deeper, and that she had forgotten how to swim and would surely drown.

And something strange happened after that. Couples in the restaurant would order pancakes with whipped cream and strawberries with hands on each other’s thighs, and this only made her nauseous, not charmed, as if she’d eaten the pancakes all by herself. If she saw a boy with dark flashing eyes and sharp cheek bones like him, she felt the faintest of growls in her heart. Nothing more.

At night she no longer grew her tail even though she always waited for it. She sat in the tub for hours, past the time her skin had pruned. Her legs stayed separate, foreign to each other. It was like she had been split in half and could no longer do her nightly mending and deep-sea exploring.

Every Monday for several weeks she went down by the water. Down where Manhattan beamed its thousand-watt grin, smiling with secrets, fangs aglow. She waited, kicking her toes in the sand all night. When the sun came up she looked around for a boy on a motorcycle or remnants of punctured silver fish, but there was nothing. One time she even went to the bike shop and looked around, but there was no boy with grease on his sharp cheekbones like a vampire football star. There was no one at all.

At first she missed him, then she missed how she used to see the couples in her restaurant when she knew him, foreign but romantic. Now everything seemed dark. Then she missed herself, permanently split in two. “I guess I’m like everyone else now,” she thought. “Broken in two and pessimistic.”

She even tried staying past her shift at the restaurant one night, drinking glass after glass of blood red wine. But she left feeling nothing magical. She was sure she’d drank gallons of salt-water over the days, too, her own tears, but it did nothing to help her forget. All she could do was remember.

Maybe he’d been right. Maybe she was naive and this was a nighttime city, a darkness city. Maybe they had been too different, though she had thought they were so alike. Maybe myths get swallowed whole by such sharp corners in this City. Maybe the reason he looked for magic was because he didn’t believe in it. Maybe it didn’t exist.

The next Monday night she plunged in. Walked right down to the water and jumped with legs, like two pogo sticks. It was different than it used to be, when she propelled herself with one long sleek fin.

It was quiet under the water. The quiet was peaceful and deep. She was thankful for something peaceful and deafeningly quiet to hush her mind. Her heartbeat dropped from her throat back into her chest. She heard it echoing through the water. She flailed with her legs, useless things. They slowly moved her upward, like helicopter wings just revving up. Everything was different now.

When she ejected, she looked back at their shore, then at the City grinning. No tail, no fish, no fangs. Just a big gaping mouth puffing out smoke. The Empire was soaked red because it was Valentine’s Day, but she was alone.
Oh, Vampire City. You were not supposed to be so blood-hungry. And weren’t mermaids supposed to be survive always in the dark corners?

A helicopter’s wings beat the air overhead. The bird was a vulture, the bird was a mother whose nest had been destroyed and who was in wild mourning for her babies. Under water the girl’s legs beat like helicopter wings but she struggled to stay afloat, bobbing up and down in the water.

And for the first time she felt it, the sharpness growing in her own mouth. She almost sliced her tongue before she knew what had happened. It was dark even with the bright lights of Manhattan looking on, and she was hungry. She was hungry for something full of life, hungry for something she was missing.

She dove under the water. She swam as fast as her puny legs could take her, the salt water of the ocean whisking all the tears off her cheeks.

She took. Armfuls of flashing silver fish, anything with tails and beating hearts. She tried out her fangs, they sliced like butcher’s knives, she drank and felt streams of electricity. When she came up for air she knew she was as dark and electric and hungry as all of Manhattan now. It was in her veins. She imagined her new teeth looked like Empire, dipped in red. She smiled and felt at home again, but still just as lonely.

The second dive she went deeper. Her legs were weak and ridiculous, but she still remembered how to swim and did her best. She looked for anything moving with life.

And that’s when she saw a flash of silver like a light-source, moving in the distance. Fear was fuel and she followed it. She grabbed at the tail thick as a tree trunk and began beating her puny helicopter legs toward the surface to examine her catch.

There, soppy, was a boy with a tail and a shock of black hair like matted down batwings. There was a boy with sharp cheekbones and a broad chest and the prettiest green and blue merman tail she had ever seen.

He took over, grabbing her by the waist with one arm, putting one slim merman hand over her fang-infested mouth with the other. He dragged her to the shore, where they lay on the sand panting and staring into each other’s changed eyes.

“Where the hell did you go?” She asked him, ignoring his tail.

“Nowhere. I mean, I felt different after last time, and had to get away, and then this happened, so…. What the hell happened to you?” he asked her. He had no lisp, she was the one with the lisp now.

She opened her mouth wide and ran her tongue over her fangs to demonstrate, accidentally slicing it. “I hate when that happens!” she began to cry.

He held her and she was shaking. She felt the urge arise, to consume, to feed, to take in what she needed most. The Empire tip looked over her shoulder as if egging her on. It knew what it was suggesting; taking was how it got so large and bright and hungry. She felt as if her senses were heightened and she could smell his beating heart under his skin.

“You were right, there are some strange hybrids under the water. And above.” he added, looking at her. He waved his tail and made some joke about Hudson River pollution and mutants and myths, but she barely heard because she was watching his beautiful face in the City’s reflected light. They were trying to convince themselves that the other was real.

Monday nights became, also, Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday nights. Down by the docks on the Jersey Shore, he would swim far out toward the city, bringing back wriggling bouquets of fish and underwater creatures for her to gnaw on. She thought she’d be better at restraining herself than he’d been, at least in the nighttime like this. And so far, she was right. They were gentle in the nighttime, two beautiful monsters, Merman and Vampire. But daytime was another story. They were just a Boy and a Girl then. A waitress and a bike shop boy. And, then, they realized, in a City like this and on days like those, anything could happen.

Sarah Herrington is a NYC-based writer. Her poetry appears in the anthology “Bowery Women”, and her fiction in the anthology “Just Like A Girl.” She has published work in dozens of print and online journals. Sarah has mentored and taught teen girl writers through Girls Write Now. She is a regular reader at the Bowery Poetry Club, Cornelia Street Café, St Marks Poetry Project and other venue. She is currently completing her first YA novel.http://www.sarahherrington.com

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Life as it Is
We talk while I am driving. He says he is busy at work, no time for anything, even for writing a short e-mail to me. He is sorry he did not call yesterday. He promises to call tomorrow and meet me, maybe, tomorrow. I AM DRIVING TO ROBERT’S PLACE.
I hang up on the highway. I HAVE A CALL FROM ROBERT. I TELL HIM TO LIGHT CANDLES AND GET WINE GLASSES READY.
When I enter 401, I see a gorgeous rainbow. It is like a huge bridge over the highway. To the left there is another rainbow, a smaller one. The bigger one consists of two rainbows, as if glued to each other. I think the two glued rainbows are me and Alex. THE SMALLER RAINBOW IS ROBERT.
I call to Alex to share my excitement. He says he cannot talk. I hang up, saying there is nothing important. I AM DRIVING PAST HIS OFFICE. THEN I CALL TO ROBERT. HE IS WAITING FOR ME. I SAY I WILL BE THERE SOON.
Soon Alex calls back and asks what I was trying to say. I am telling him about the rainbow. ROBERT KISSES ME AND UNDOES MY BRA. He says he has another call. ROBERT TAKES ME TO BED AND KISSES ME ALL OVER. I say bye and hang up. ROBERT TAKES AWAY MY PHONE AND PUTS IT ON THE FLOOR BESIDE THE BED.
HE MAKES LOVE TO ME AND I LIKE IT. HE IS A SKILFUL LOVER. HE IS AWESOME. Maybe tomorrow I will meet Alex and have sex with him at a motel. I like Alex a lot. I AM CRAZY ABOUT ROBERT. MAYBE THE SMALLER RAINBOW IS ALEX?

Farida lives in Toronto, Ontario. Some of her poems were included in The Maynard Anthology 2008 (Canada), the collection of poetry “Immortal Verses” (USA) and in “Favourite Memories” book of poetry (the UK). New pieces are accepted for issue 130 of Zigote in my Coffee (due out January 25, 2010), Other Clutter, Canadian Immigrant Magazine and Calliope (Winter 2010 issue).

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She remembered her first cigarette clearly, she must have been 14, a year for firsts. She had snuck out of a friend’s house, Kate’s, late at night, one beer and a cigarette a piece. She thought she’d fallen in love with this friend many times, Kate was overwhelmingly beautiful, and so different from herself. So often Rachel was jealous of Kate’s features, her large green eyes were almost cartoonish underneath the bouncy lashes that extended all the way to her brow, and her little lips. They were thin, but puffed out slightly, and did not disappear when she smiled, as Rachel’s did. Kate had soft freckles, they dusted her tiny nose and cheeks, and made her seem magical. Kate’s hair, which was wild and unmanageable, and unusually skinny legs were remembered by Rachel to be her only major flaws. Physical anyway, Kate was spoiled, and vain, which Rachel would come to know painfully in the following years. They had met suddenly and fallen into their friendship almost out of necessity. They were going through the worst parts of their adolescent years and thought miraculously that they should do this together, every minute together. They had celebrated the day they saw a news article explaining that the scientific community had come to accept the big bang theory as a relative truth, and brought the article to the home-room they shared, and smirked as other students began to question their young faith. Rachel found it lovely to find another born atheist in this world so filled with piously cruel children. They decorated each other’s faces with sparkles and enjoyed being kids together.

This particular night they had walked down to the elementary school a few blocks from Kate’s house and sat on the green foam benches, cracking the cans and laying down to look up at the stars. It was a rich school, the grass was dreamy, soft, evenly cut with a baseball diamond sensibility. The rock piles were pink and uniform, and decorated with several well shaped boulders, amongst pine trees. She remembers holding in a nauseated cough when she took her first real drag of a Marlboro Red, a cowboy killer. She felt sick all night. And promised herself in her sleepless confusion that she’d never smoke again.

Rachel threw her cigarette out the window. She stuck her entire hand out to do this. She was very paranoid about it flying back in the car, and secretly burning her clothing which was strewn haphazardly around the floor and backseat. Her paranoia led her to imagine wildly that somehow the car might catch fire from a stray cigarette without her noticing, and explode when the flames reached the gas tank. She had never heard of anything remotely similar to this actually happening but she could picture the local news story clearly, and the disappointment of the community that such a senseless death had occurred as a result of smoking a cigarette. It made her feel ashamed.

She was nearly home now, and rolled the windows completely down to “air out” on the last stretch of highway which dipped like a ribbon along the foothills. She could see her exit clearly and sighed that she’d finally be off the icy road. She thought of her father’s phone message from earlier, all he had said was that it was her father, and he stated his full name comically as if to emphasize how little they actually spoke anymore, and he sang the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon, and hung up. Rachel never could quite understand what he was trying to tell her. She later left him a message telling him that she knew she didn’t have any money in her account, and promised she wouldn’t overdraw again. Money was the most logical explanation. It seemed to be spent dry so quickly, she hardly knew what the hell she was spending money on. She never seemed to buy new clothes, or jewelry, and her car had great gas mileage. It was probably cigarettes.

When she rolled around to her neighborhood she thought how pretty it was, all covered in snow. The trees were heavy with it, and the branches arched over the street sides like great white arms, which felt like a strange embrace in this neighborhood. She hated it on principal; it was a typical suburb, families everywhere. When she’d pick her siblings up from school occasionally in the fall, the grass outside was overrun with young mothers, decorated with Ann Taylor pearls, khaki capri pants and white tank tops, beaming hair-do’s and fat diamond rings. She hated this, but remembered the lush greenbelts with affection, like jungles where the flora bulged out along the creek in the summer. It was safe, the only danger she’d known was the death of her pets by coyotes and foxes, and BMWs.

When she finally reached her home her father’s Dodge sat half on the sidewalk and half in the street, dealer plates hanging loosely out of the trunk. He always left the entire driveway for her mother. The house was noisy when she entered, and the little pug, Frida, jumped wildly at her legs despite her repeated commands for it to calm down. When she left for college she got into the habit of giving the dog a treat every time she came home so Frida wouldn’t forget about her, or stop loving her. She regretted this now, as the dog would never cease to jump and bark until she got her dehydrated chicken strip.

“Hello?” She asked loudly into the open space where the family room opened up to the kitchen and stair case. The television was on and no one sat in the surrounding chairs, all the lights were on. She was reminded of how wasteful they all were as she walked through to turn off one or two of the lights. She headed for the refrigerator and grabbed herself a Diet Coke, and took some potato chips from the pantry. Frida stared up at her with those large, sad, bulging eyes, and her little pig tail wagged with her whining, Rachel threw her a treat which she gladly carried off to her bed. Rachel settled at the kitchen table and began leafing through the news paper left there presumably by her mother who read it religiously every morning. “Hey kid,” her father said as he slowly moved down the stairs, he was extremely tall and in his old age moved heavily. “Hey, dad, where’s all the kids?” “With your grandparents, they insisted on having them stay for ice cream.” He walked over to the sink past the table and spit into the drain, naturally filling a small glass on the counter with water and swishing a gulp in his mouth before spitting again. He sat at the table with her, two chairs away, with his long legs crossed over one another.

“Did you get my message?”

“Yeah, what the hell were you talking about?”

He did not like it when she swore, but as she grew older he loosened up when the kids weren’t around.

“It wasn’t about money.” He sort of smiled and pulled a can of dip out of his breast pocket.

Rachel estimated that he had picked up chewing again several years ago, about when she left. When she was a child she’d hide his chew every evening while he was watching which ever game after work, in jacket pockets, couch cushions, or behind their radio in the den. It was a small amusement for a lonely child, as she did not yet have siblings to play with. He eventually quit as a birthday present to Rachel’s mother when she was pregnant again, when Rachel was 10. Now, as a smoker, Rachel respected her father’s restraint in quitting, even for that short time. She now knew what that addiction was like, almost like tunnel vision when she was without it.

“Well, what was it about? I don’t get it.”

“You know that song, don’t you?”

“Yeah of course I do, but that doesn’t mean I know what the hell you were talking about.”

“Well, I don’t know, I just heard that song on the radio and at the end that line about when I hung up the phone it occurred to me, he’d grown up just like me.” He took every opportunity he had to sing a song. He stuck a dip in his mouth and pushed it inside his cheek. “I was just thinking about you and, you grew up just like me. I knew you were comin’ home tonight but I just wanted to call you. Just kinda’ missing you.”

He beamed at her for a short moment. Though he had completely fallen in love with her youngest sister, Rachel had the sense that he once was enamored with her in the same way, especially as a first child.

“That’s sweet, dad.”

“I thought you’d be able to figure out that song. I mean, you’re college educated. I shouldn’t have told you, should have just waited for you to figure it out.”

“Well, knowing what it means now, dad, it was a clever little puzzle, but I’m not sure I’d have ever gotten that one. Plus it’s kind of a negative song, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, I can only remember those few lyrics.”

She still thought it was sweet. She always knew how soft he was, though he had grown increasingly distempered as he aged.

“So what’s up, dad? How are you?”

“Well you know how the car business is. But, it’s alright, as long as my babies are happy, I’m happy. I’m too old to find a new job anyway, I’m ready to retire. You should see your sister play that video game. Boy, she is something else.”

“Oh yeah? She was telling me about it on the phone the other day, I think it’s a little violent for a seven year old, don’t you?”

“Yeah probably, but she enjoys herself. She is so good at that game, it blows my mind. Some of those guys who play on there, if they knew they were playing with a seven year old girl they’d just shit.” He giggled warmly, that genuine feeling. “She got to that level nineteen, the one with the dogs, she doesn’t even hesitate, just bang! Blows them away.” He made his hands into a gun and pointed them at the dog, closing one eye with Frida in his phantom sights. “I shot a dog once.” “What?” “In Viet Nam.”

“Why’d you have to shoot a dog?”

She was eager to hear his story, but didn’t want to interrupt the flow with too much urgency. Rachel’s mother had often relayed her father’s war stories, though she admittedly knew very little about his time there either, it being a good twenty years before they had met. It was distant, and Rachel was often reminded of the strange compartments of life while thinking of his time in the war. How a life could change so drastically in what she, as a young person, had constructed to be so fleeting an experience. As long as she felt she’d known her father, she had always been central to his life, and so it was difficult to imagine a time when she was not even a thought. Could he have predicted he’d end up here, in this strange existence? It was frightening to wonder the same about her life, and the things she had never imagined about herself. She could almost feel the kitchen scene becoming a jungle, wicked visions of the war she’d seen in movies.

“Well, some soldiers had dogs you know, these big German Shepherds. A guy would get one as a puppy and train it himself, it would be only his dog. They were attack dogs essentially, and they’d be chained to a guy’s wrist, so when they let it go it would attack. I was out one day with one of my buddies who had one of these dogs, and some bombs went off near us. We all tried to get to cover, and after the noise cut out we sort of slowly, started looking around and my buddy was laying on the ground. Looked like he was dead, and this dog was just going crazy on his arm–wouldn’t let us near him. We tried, but we didn’t know if he was dead or not.” He looked at Rachel, taking on his dramatic persona, and shifted in his seat, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward.

“That dog would not let us near him. So, I had to shoot it.”

“That’s terrible, dad. Was the guy dead?” “Oh no, he was alive.” Her father began to laugh.

“He probably would have been dead if I didn’t kill that dog. When he woke up he was just furious. After he calmed down I said I was sorry, and he understood but that was his dog you know, what if someone shot your little dog, as cowardly as she is?”

“Ow, dad don’t even joke about that.” She leaned over to push the little dog’s face into an even messier version of itself and smiled.

“Yeah those dogs were rough. I saw one dog take out two guys on bicycles once. Two guys.” He paused before beginning again. “These Viet Cong rode up to us on their bicycles while we were patrolling around. We didn’t know they were VC of course, you never did, but one of them tried to throw a grenade at us and it kind of fizzed out, it was a dud.” He stared out into the kitchen while he was talking, occasionally widening his eyes and looking over at Rachel excitedly for emphasis. “So, they got scared you know, and they started to ride away as fast as they could, but my buddy said some gibberish command at the dog and let it loose. It took off, man, those things were fast. It tackled one off his bicycle and just kept on going and took the other guy down. Just ripped him to shreds.” He sort of smiled at this, not concluding with death. “I must have been about your age when that happened.”

“Well I know one thing, dad, I’m glad I don’t have to go to war. I can’t imagine killing a dog let alone a person.”

“I’m glad too, I wouldn’t let you go even if you wanted to. I wasn’t drafted though, I wanted to go. I was 17 when I joined, and where I grew up, we didn’t barely have a Main Street let alone a single television in the whole town, barely had radio. I didn’t know there was a war going on, it was right in the beginning. I wasn’t old enough to just join so I told my mom, ‘I’m goin, so you can sign this and let me go or I’ll forge it myself.’ And that was that. A couple of my buddies and I thought we’d join the marines together, thought that was a pretty good idea. We’d fly in to California, check in and then go to the beach, check out those California girls like we heard about in songs. It wasn’t like that when we got there though,” He laughed again at this. “Never went to the beach in California, and never saw any of those guys again, we all went to different places.” He paused to look down at the tattoo on his arm, which he claimed to be an eagle’s head holding a banner that said “USMC,” but it was so faded and wrinkled it looked to Rachel like nothing but a birth mark. He rubbed it for a moment, and Rachel thought of Kate, who she hadn’t seen since high school. She had heard that Kate now wore her unmanageable hair in dread locks, and smoked two packs a day. “I was a good shot, so they made me a sniper. Man, when I was a kid I could take out a bird from about a mile away with a slingshot.” He made the motion, seeming deep in memory.

“I know, dad. Dad, did you ever kill a person?”

“Of course I did, what do you think snipers are for? What do they teach you in college anyway?” Rachel cracked a smile, and rolled her eyes a bit. “It was a gruesome job. We’d all put money in a jar and who ever’d logged the most kills at the end of the week would get the jar.”

“That’s awful.” Rachel began coughing, with a deep wheeze, it was not a seasonal cold.

“That’s quite a cough, are you alright? Still getting over that bug, huh?” Rachel nodded her head, trying desperately to control her breath so it was believable. She didn’t look him in the eyes and got the feeling that he knew.

“Anyway, it really was horrible. I did my job, you know. But I didn’t take joy in it, or pride, like some guys did. I didn’t take souvenirs. Some guys’d cut a guy’s ear off that he’d killed and keep it.” He looked over at her with that disbelieving face, as if after so many years he still didn’t understand, it was almost funny to him. “I took my gun and did what they told me to do, killed who they told me to kill and ducked when something flew at my head. It’s funny, it’s like you are watching yourself do these things; in training they teach you to disassociate, I guess so you can live with yourself while you’re blowing someone’s head off. It’s almost like you’re a ghost… After I got out, and became a real human again, I felt I needed to serve God, of course. Became a missionary. I’ll always regret signing up.”

“How’d you get out?”

“I got a tremor, drank some bad water.” She had little idea of what he meant by “bad water,” but she found it sort of magical, and didn’t ask. It was a blessing to be home, after all. “I couldn’t shoot, so they sent me home. I remember walking up to my house. I hadn’t talked to mom in a few years, she didn’t know I was coming. I stood there at the edge of the yard. It was a big yard, you know, I mean it was the only house for a few miles with those horrible corn fields all around. She came out of the house and walked right by me. I just stood there. She got to the mail box and turned around and looked at me and started crying. When she realized, she came up and gave me the longest hug I think I’d ever had. Until you were born, of course.” Rachel smiled when he said this.

“She didn’t even recognize me.”

Kori is from a large suburb of Denver, Colorado called Littleton and is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is about to graduate in May with a degree in Creative Writing and Sociology. She has always had a large interest in women’s issues and writing, and besides writing fiction and poetry, she is currently working on an honors thesis for her sociology major focusing on romantic relationships in the jam band sub culture, with an emphasis on gender norms and the unfortunate absence of feminist values in this subculture.

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She pushed her foot down harder on the accelerator
and sped forward.
It was a new day.

Karen lives in the UK. She is happily married and has a grown up family. She enjoys writing poetry, prose and articles on numerous subjects. Her work has been published in a number of anthologies, a talking book and online. She also enjoys being part of the ATG team. Karen is happiest when she is doing anything creative, watching the natural world or spending time with her friends and family. She also has a keen interest in mental health issues, having been published in a number of magazines and online on the subject.

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One thing I have gladly suffered in this life is competition. For thirty years, I vacillated to marry because I had never met a man that rivalled Obika’s durability. Even with my efforts in academics, (a bachelor in Science and two Master of plate tectonics) I could go no-where. Once, I almost drained my whole life savings in an American university where I hoped to take a PhD in cognitive science and marry someone handsomer than he. But Azuka gave me a good looking, dusted my CV, and applied for consultancy in three oil companies in Port Harcourt city.

Now before I became Nonyelum’s illusory contender, I called her my sister even though she is my childhood playmate. We had built and pushed down our sand houses in the village arena under the watchful eyes of the comely maidens whose broad hips attracted the older men seeking new wives. As we grew older, we ran about naked and potbellied through the tepid rainwater splashing down the dusty zinc roofs onto the rocky ground. And as more years passed, she became the essence of my sick state of mind; and often I filmed her life with Obika in my mental camera- the real and imagined.

Nonyelum lost her father at infancy and her mother before her breasts were fully formed. Her intense beauty that was freshly plucked spinach pushed her into an early marriage to Obika whom we supposed was moneyed because he lived in America. I had believed Obika owned the world too. The day she set out for America; she being the first female in our village to attain such a feat akin to feasting with the grand masquerader of Osisha, our chi or god; even the rocks and coconut trees swayed as we wept and heaped our bulky gifts on the soft earth- sculptures presented to commemorate us overseas, and remind her to send us the new money called dollar.

Azuka had looked over the large expanse of land filled with gifts, then into her camera. “She won’t send you dollar,” she said walking away with threaded eyebrows.

I lost my line of argument, watched the climbing smoke and well wishers that resembled a gray charcoal wedge from where I stood. Then I raced down the sparse valley, joined the queue, and handed Nonyelum my beloved box of crayons.

“Look at you, child,” Azuka said the day we met Nonyelum in December. Dust raced in circles as harmattan dried the earth to an uncanny unevenness. Nonyelum’s face was marked with tears, like a sofa covered with dust. She looked thin and unhappy with eyes like the paleness of a half moon in cloudy skies.

We stuck together like compound leaves and talked for minutes, studying the aftermath of an awful marriage on her features. And on seeing the dewdrops on the waist of a broad leaf, I called her a changed city.

“It’s such a pity that Obika turned out a looser that left you sick and tending three mouths,” Azuka said with an unhappy look. Slowly, she turned to me. “I’m sorry for you too.”

The body of the message was short. And it made my eyes water. Like it did whenever I peeled fresh onions.

Jill is published in Snap online literary journal, Identity Theory and P&W journals.

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There is a box of her clothes in the basement still. He keeps saying he’ll give them away. He remembers the day she left him, through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole. He was the reason she knew it was there.

They were still children then, really. At college, in a dorm room. Hiding their white pills – this one makes you smaller, this one makes you grow. It was all too much, too deep for her.

The real world came calling, with a house in the suburbs. She went with him, faithfully, her vices in the pockets of her aprons. Till he found her, down the rabbit hole, gone to see the Queen. It was all too much, too deep for her.

Savannah is a writer, ergonomist, and doctoral student.

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In a sun-filled glade in the wormwood

fleabane torments wolfbane

who howls threats with his painted tongue

at the leopard’s bane chewing on blood flowers

Under skunk cabbage possum grapes play dead

Porcupine grass lays down its quills

Spider lily spins snail vines

ties Canary Island broom

to sweep the place clean

Gopher plant and mole plant

lay out the lawn design

pattern the dance floor in lambs quarters

Fairy wands and fairy dusters

loop moth orchids on the dove trees

Drape the clearing with white baby’s breath

2

Alice sets the table with flamingo celery

harts’ tongue fern and pork and beans

Elephant’s food and liverleaf

fill separate blue bowls

Toadflax squats by the pond

where goldfish plant and pickerel weed swoop

Swan river daisy teases a sea urchin

Crab cactus and shrimp plant and lobster-claw

hope they won’t be canapés

3

Cockscombs his woolly blue curls

ties them into a pony tail palm

Apes’ earrings dangle under huge elephant ears

Gayfeather tickles goat’s beard

Cowslips into her Chinese woolflower gown

Wake-robin tunes up his voice

Kingfisher daisy rattles percussion

while harebell chimes from a shadblow

Lambs ears and bunny ears perk

deer tongue fern says the dance shall begin

The freckle face panda plant stirs its bones

Firetail blazing colts foot thunders up

Coyote brushes against beefwood

thinks of a snack

4

Out of sight in the golden fleece

the false dragonhead lifts his parrot’s beak

Horehound skulks and spies with Virginia creeper

The rattlesnake master guards his serpent’s tongue

Venus flytrap licks her fleshy lips and waits

The devil’s walking stick keeps them company

Tiger flower prowls and lion’s tail twitches

Baboon flower patrols the treetops

Yellow-eyed grass watches for trouble below

Bull bay and dog-tooth violet and buffalo berry

keep their red shanks ready

Emu bush buries her head in the sand

The Cheshire Cat grins and observes

from deep in the butterfly bush

5

Blissfully unaware

Alice and naked ladies dance

Their little birds’ feet skip through the old tunes

In tiny sweet tones they sing chickabiddy

while their five-finger ferns pin foxgloves

to the donkey’s tail

Flame bush bursts into a red-hot reel

Hummingbird flower deigns

to dance the turkey-foot

Even touch-me-not grabs

the cardinal climber and swings

Spurned dandelion takes his bleeding heart

to fawn lily for comfort

Under the pussy willow Miss Willmott’s ghost

cuddles a teddybear cactus

Wallflowers watch the dance from the sidelines

with hens and chicks and poor pigweed

Standing alone Queens tears drip

from the ladies’ sagging wattles

7

Monstera lights fairy lanterns

Bells-of-Ireland call birds of paradise

in a fireworks display so grand

it bends the devil’s backbone

for the grand finale of Alice’s garden party

*plant names from Sunset Western Garden Book

Patricia Wellingham-Jones has a longtime interest in ‘healing writing’ and the benefits people gain from writing and reading their work together. Widely published, her chapbooks include Don’t Turn Away: Poems About Breast Cancer, Voices on the Land, and End-Cycle, poems about caregiving.

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Ivana Plucinski just finished her historic book about medieval Europe and making the Sclavs in octosyllabic rhymeform, she lives in Germany and already has some entries in previous ATG.

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But the image is misleading, false.
The mirage of a willing mind;
a wishful trick of memory,
but time will make the truth unwind.

Placing glasses before her eyes,
she sees deep wrinkles dance their track.
She looks in the mirror once more
and sees her mother staring back.

Penny Luker is the editor for the writings section at ATG. She writes poems and short stories. Her first book, “Missing and other short stories” is published by Lulu. Her poems have been published in three anthologies recently, including “Voices in Verse” by Eternity Press.
Visit her website to read more of her work. Web:http://www.thewritingroom.fastmail.fm

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Dottie was humming a tune at breakfast, sharing a large round table with Pearl, Olive, Maynard, Myrtle, Fiona, Matilda, and Fern. Despite the impending lukewarm gruel, prunes, and coffee-flavored tepid water being plopped in front of the sagging residents, tunes from long ago were dancing in Dottie’s head. Without realizing it, she was humming “All In and Down and Out Blues.” It came to her after listening to the news of the economy.

“Feeling chipper today, there, Dottie? The rest of us would appreciate it if you’d can it and let us eat in peace,” said Maynard.

“Speak for yourself, Maynard. I rather enjoy it. At least one of us is feeling lighthearted for a change. Maybe it will be contagious; you never know,” said Matilda.

“Contagious, my arse. Only thing that’s contagious is when you’ve gotta go but your arse says no,” said Maynard.

“Pipe down, will ya? I’d like to eat my Oliver Twist special without uninspired banter,” added Fiona.

“Alright, alright. I’ll keep my humming to myself, then,” said Dottie.

“Wait, Dottie! I remember that one. It’s hippity hop to the bucket shop. I’ve lost all my money, and now I have flopped. It’s hard times, pity poor boy.
It’s hard times when you’re down and out,” sang Pearl.
Olive took the next verse. “Now this is the truth, and it certainly exposes that Wall Street’s proposition is not all roses. I put up my money to win some more. I lost all I had and it left me sore.” She sang with a hoarse voice, but could definitely carry a tune.
“I thought I would drink to wear it off. Bootleg’s so high that it left me worse off. If they catch you with whiskey in your car, you’re handicapped, and there you are.” Despite not being able to sing on key to save her life, Fern clapped and threw her head back in glee.
“For some people, singing should be illegal. They should give out tickets, particularly to those who sound like tortured fowl,” added Maynard.
“I suppose you’d be the one to hand them out. Wouldn’t you, Maynard? King of nothing,” snorted Olive.
“Did you all hear about Lottie’s striptease act?” asked Maynard, trying to upstage the singing.
“No, and we don’t want to hear about it, either,” said Fiona.
Maynard continued, “She wandered into a neighbor’s pool, buck naked. Story goes that she scared some school children, who called the police. They came, wrapped her up, and returned to sender. Where’s the caring concern when you need it?”
“Oh dears” circulated the cafeteria and the residents returned to shoveling gruel and prunes into their mouths, most of them thinking they could be next. When it came to sudden bursts of outlandish behavior and/or death, they all felt as if they were on deck.
“There he goes again, raining on everyone’s parade,” said Matilda, shaking her head.
“If this is a parade, I’d hate to see a funeral march,” added Maynard.
“Good for Lottie; she’s reveling in what God gave her. Wish I had the nerve to do that. People are always saying that we’re not in our right minds when we do that kind of thing. I beg to differ,” said Olive.
“I want a cappuccino!” shouted Mavis. “Now! Bring me a cappuccino now!” she slammed her tray on the table and the contents went flying, colliding with her neighbor’s and toppling orange juice glasses in a domino effect of cascading breakfast items. “Where’s my cappuccino?! I ordered it an hour ago!”
Several attendants came running to investigate the commotion. “What’s going on in here?”
“Mavis suddenly decided she wanted a cappuccino, like most mornings,” said Myrtle. “I know how she feels. This coffee is for the birds. Hell, the birds wouldn’t even drink it.”
“Mavis, you know we don’t have cappuccinos—only Folgers,” said an attendant.
“Reminders don’t help where dementia’s concerned. Or maybe you missed that lesson in nursing aide school,” said Maynard. “Put this one in your noggin’; dementia equals short- and long-term memory loss.”
Mavis slammed her fists against the table, causing the silverware to dance. Three attendants came over to restrain her. “Let go of me! Let go of me!”
Maynard leaned over to Dottie and said, “Watch this caring concern.” Seconds later, the attendants forced a pill down Mavis’s throat by shoving it into her mouth, tipping her head back, and keeping her mouth closed until she swallowed. Although they had to repeat the sequence several times, they were eventually successful.
“What was that you gave her? Risperadol? Klonopin? You know some of that stuff kills us old folks. Read about it in the New York Times on Sunday. Could have a lawsuit on your hands, if you’re not careful.”
The three attendants shot him looks of annoyance. Most attendants couldn’t decide if they preferred the residents catatonic, demented or lucid. The lucid ones were always meddlers and know-it-alls.
“Somebody’s gotta keep you honest,” Maynard said, reading their minds.
Lulu came running over to Dottie, cell phone in hand. “Dottie, it’s for you! Jillian called like she said she would.”
“Maybe Jillian’s coming to get me!” Caring Concern, the cafeteria and all its inhabitants became a blurry beige background as Dottie snatched the phone from Lulu. Residents always tried to squeeze new possibilities out of phone calls from family members.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Maynard said, and then under his breath he added, “Brought to you by the Council on Broken Promises.”
Pearl hit Maynard on the arm and said, “Pipe down, you old coot. Let her have her hopes and dreams. What else will keep her going?”
“Not knowing what’s on the other side. Isn’t that what we all live for?”
#
Lulu approached Mrs. Hoover one morning as they were allocating the Pill Time! pills into little Dixie cups on a cart with wheels. “I was thinking the other day. You know how the residents have been complaining about the totally dullsville activities around here? What if we recreated speakeasies with mood lighting, jazz tunes, boas, candy cigarettes, and martinis? We could do karaoke with old school tunes. Don’t you think the residents would dig the scene, Mrs. Hoover?”
Mrs. Hoover froze mid-pour and looked up at Lulu. “Turn the community room into a jazz club and concoct bathtub gin?”
“Yes, exactly! Right on, Mrs. H. Well, we wouldn’t have to brew bathtub gin. That’s probably not allowed here.”
“Absolutely not. Out of the question. Are you concentrating on the pill allocation?” Mrs. Hoover glared at Lulu with venomous eyes.
“Yes, dude, I mean Mrs. Hoover. But don’t you think we need to shake things up around here? Everyone is all geezed out.”
“Excuse me?” she said as she poured Remeron dissolving tablets into everyone’s tiny cups. All the residents took sedating antidepressants for sleep.
“Oh, you know, they’re all acting like old geezers.”
“That’s because that’s what they are.”
“But being old doesn’t mean you have to get all geezy. Think about it. When you’re old, will you want to go to Brain Calisthenics or Smooth Move Meal-time Management? Snoozer city. When I’m old, I’ll want head bangin’ music cranked, spiked OJ, computer games, cake dancing, and psychedelic Sundays.”
“Lulu, don’t go getting creative on me. We don’t need creative; we need rock solid dependable, pills on time, meals on time, bathing, diaper changing, and age-appropriate activities. The last girl who took it upon herself to free her inner artist was shortlisted. Speakeasies and other such wanton activities would be bad for their nervous systems.”
#
Lulu loved her self-appointed assignment as a secret agent plotting a top-secret operation, although she regretted not having some experience in considering all the variables, coordinates, inputs, outputs, and planning accordingly. Surely with her inexperience in secret agenting, something would fall through the cracks. But she had lined up the karaoke machine with classics from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s; boas, sparkly flapper hats and candy cigarettes for the women; and zoot suit hats and candy cigars for the men. And she would mix martinis for all. Alcohol was strictly prohibited in Caring Concern. But Prohibitions encouraged prohibited behavior. Her friends thought she was wickedly sick for pulling this off in an old folk’s home.
Lulu made sure to schedule the speakeasy when Mrs. Hoover was off and the more malleable, compassionate charge nurse was on duty. She also simply told the attendants and residents she had a special karaoke event planned. “Carry what?” said the residents. One said, “Carry okey, artichokey,” and then erupted in a fit of laughter.
Lulu’s fellow attendants reminded her that “creative” activities such as this that were frowned upon by The Vacuum, as they had dubbed Mrs. Hoover, after Lulu had observed that she sucked, funneled, and destroyed everything in her path.
Molly, the admin girl, radioed Lulu to let her know that The Vacuum’s Buick boat had motored out of the lot. She had been charged with being the eyes and ears of the command center. Molly was also given strict orders to take out the easy listening CD and pipe red hot jazz tunes throughout Caring Concern.
“Coast is clear,” Molly said after she had practiced her delivery a few times, settling on a James Bond spy girl tone.
With that, Lulu unlocked a utility closet with all the speakeasy props spilling forth. She loaded the arms of her assistants and ordered them to hurry. “We have no time to waste.” She wondered if she was being a bit dramatic, but she enjoyed feeling like a cross between a stage director and a secret agent. In no time, the attendants, normally filled with ennui and slow as molasses, had transformed the Community Caring and Sharing Room into a moody, candle-lit, sparkling speakeasy jazz club. She had given all her assistants feathered boas, and sequined hats, which they wore over their pastel scrubs. From assisted living attendants to sassy flappers in one fell swoop.
Lulu made an announcement on the intercom system. “Let the speakeasy begin!”
Like the other residents, Dottie attempted to clear her ears, thinking she had misheard the announcement. Lulu sped over to Dottie’s room and said, “Ready for some singing, Mrs. M?”
“Some what, dear?” Lulu jolted Dottie from her state of permanent ennui.
“You’re going to a speakeasy, Dottie!”
“Oh, don’t be silly. A speakeasy? Where?”
“Right here! Start doing some vocal warm-ups; you’re the headliner!” Dottie glanced up at Lulu, thinking she had lost her marbles, but when Lulu wrapped a red boa around Dottie’s neck and shoulders, Dottie was distracted by the silky fluffiness of the feathers and repeatedly swiped the boa against her cheeks and lips.
“Dear?”
“Yes?” said Lulu.
“I’m going to need a little red lippy. You can find it in my cosmetic kit in the bathroom.” Lulu fetched the red lipstick and painted Dottie’s lips. Lulu held up a mirror and, as Dottie inspected, she grinned from ear to ear.
“Perfect, dear.”
“You look like a hottie, Dottie.” They both broke out in hysterics.
#
The residents were positioned around the speakeasy candle-lit tables with party favors and plastic martini glasses. The attendants poured watered-down martinis and passed out candy cigarettes and cigars. Lulu stood proudly at the front of the lounge, holding the karaoke microphone in hand.
“Say goodbye to Arthritis Relief and Smooth Move Meal-time Management and hello to Caring Concern’s first Speakeasy!” The residents broke out in applause. “I invite all of you to grab the mic and take a stab at singing some of your old faves. The song list is on your table.”
Fiona was the first to take the microphone and request “Barnie Google.” She crooned like a loon that had lost its note while all the residents politely pretended not to notice. Hazel agreed to sing only if Pearl would do a “Toot Toot Tootsie” duet. The duo sounded like two plucky, clucking hens with excess hormone in their feed. The microphones were too close to their mouths and distorted their hen pecking sound. The residents got a kick out of it, and everyone shared a laugh.
The clucky hen duet was followed by Edwina singing “Yes We Have No Bananas,” Cornelia doing “Swingin’ Down the Lane,” and Mavis covering “Ain’t We Got Fun.” Most couldn’t remember the lyrics or read the screen, so they la-di-da-ed over the words.
Lottie was next, one of the few residents for whom mobility was not an issue. She chose a sexy slinky number and was adding boa-aided theatrics to her piece. She twirled her boa, then wrapped it and unraveled it, moved it back and forth on her backside, like drying her bum with a towel. The residents hooted and hollered and egged her on as she pulled her shirt down to bare her shoulders. Maynard, Thaddeus, and Virgil whistled. Encouraged, Lottie began unbuttoning her shirt to reveal her cross-your-heart Playtex bra propping up her sizeable bosoms. She threw her shirt to the side and shimmied. Her massive chest jiggled and wobbled and she swirled her hips to boot.
At about the time she began unbuttoning, none of the attendants, including Lulu, knew what to do, so they did nothing. Striptease acts weren’t covered in the senior living attendants’ week-long training session, but then, of course, neither were speakeasies.
“Lordy, lordy!”
“Someone, please stop her!”
“Lord have mercy! This isn’t a striptease joint, there, Lottie.”
Lottie spun around and started unclipping her bra in the back. Maynard’s eyes popped out of his head in anticipation of the massive bosom show. Lulu ran in and stood in front of Lottie. She knew she hadn’t anticipated all of the possible snafus and a striptease act was the last possible incident she would have imagined at a senior living facility. Lulu whispered in Dottie’s ear and helped her rebutton her shirt.
Maynard said, “Just when this was starting to get good.” The two other men agreed it was a shame to stop there.
To distract everyone, Lulu thought this was as good a time as any to ask Dottie to come forward to sing a few numbers.
“Oh great, another tone-deaf loon,” added Maynard.
Lulu pushed Dottie’s wheelchair up to the karaoke machine and handed her the microphone. Dottie handled the mic like a pro—knowing exactly how far to hold it from her mouth.
“What will it be, Dottie?”
“’Dream a Little Dream of Me.’ Hit it!” Dottie’s voice sounded scratchy and hoarse at first, but as she sang, she blew out the dust, mold, and cobwebs and a rich, earthy, resonant sound emanated from her vocal chords.
“She’s lip synching!” shouted Edwina. Lulu shook her head, no and held her finger in the shhh! position.
Dottie hit the high, the low, and the in-between notes. She held notes so long, the residents were worried that her lungs and ticker would give out. She slid and scatted and dooby-doo-wopped, and carried her fellow residents away to a place and time they thought they’d never see again. When she finished her set, the ones who could were on their feet; all were chanting, “Encore, encore, encore!”
The residents didn’t let anyone else sing for rest of the speakeasy. Although some protested, Maynard shut them up by saying, “We’ve got a pro in our ranks. Do you want to turn this into amateur’s night?”
Dottie started singing an upbeat rendition of “I Found a Million Dollar Baby.” Feet and fingers were tapping, heads were swaying, and eyes were closed in glee. Mid-refrain, Dottie abruptly stopped as the karaoke machine’s back-up music played on. At first she looked like she was trying to recover lyrics from the far corners of her memory, but then her face scrunched up and she scowled.
Her audience starting chanting, “Dottie, Dottie, Dottie, Dottie!” wanting more from her. But she dropped the microphone on the floor with a loud kerplunk and lowered her eyes and head as if trying to disappear inside herself. Lulu ran over to her, placing her hand on Dottie’s back and squatting down to talk to her. Dottie started shaking her head and cupping her hands over her eyes. “I gave this up long, long ago. I don’t want to do it anymore.” Looking out at the candle-lit residents, she said to Lulu, “Tell them to go away. All of them.”
Lulu decided that the best thing to do was to take Dottie back to her room. She unsecured the wheelchair brakes and began rolling Dottie away. The residents, unsure of what was happening, broke out in applause, bravos, and whistles. Lulu gestured for them to stop. As she pushed Dottie out of the speakeasy, and turned toward the residents’ rooms, a large, looming figure caught her eye. The Vaccum.
The Vacuum had been summoned by someone, who would never admit to paging her, and stood in the back of the community-room-turned-speakeasy lounge, looking at the disobedience, sin, and ruckus.
The Vacuum approached Lulu and Dottie, saying, “Lulu, I’ll take it from here.”And then in a voice that not even Dottie could hear, The Vaccum added, “If you ever set foot in here again, I’ll see to it that you’re locked up for trespassing. And, believe me, the local police and I are on a first-name basis.” The Vacuum pointed toward the door. As if Lulu couldn’t figure out where the door was, she would later tell her friends, after she said, “We did the Prohibition right—doing what was prohibited.”
Lulu and her boa and sparkling flapper hat left without a chance to say goodbye. And without a chance to see that Dottie actually bounced back and became an instant celebrity at Caring Concern. And that she started singing her way through the days and long, arduous nights. Lulu left without the chance to learn that the residents were bee-bopping and do wopping for weeks, remembering what they could and recreating the scene in their vivid and sometimes distorted imaginations with a live jazz band, real flappers, free-flowing martinis, gambling, and a striptease act. Of course, everyone remembered who the stripper was, except for the stripper. Maynard now had a school-boy crush on the stripper who couldn’t remember, so much so that he was giddy, giggly, and gay—actually gay almost every day—and like a bee to honey with Lottie, always hoping to sneak a peak of her bountiful bosom.
#
Lulu, in very un-Lulu-like garb, with big sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat with flowers and ribbons, and a frilly dress, entered the pink and mauve lobby with the oversized ceramic vase as the centerpiece with zig-zaggy bare branches jutting out in different directions. Impressionist prints lined the entryway with muted pastels. Why everything had to be lamo pastels, Lulu didn’t get. Perhaps more nervous system preservation efforts. What were they preserving their nervous systems for anyway? She wanted to go out with a short-circuited bang. Maybe even mid-orgasm. She smiled and twirled her tongue stud.
Lulu snuck by the front office and headed back toward Dottie’s room, Pink Panther music playing in her head as she slunk down hallways and around corners, low florescent lighting and more corporate old folk home art. Lulu came upon Dottie’s room, 342, and noticed that Dottie’s name plate was gone. Her heart fluttered when she thought that Jillian had finally done her mom right. How that must have delighted Dottie to finally be with her family. As she cracked the door open, she noticed that there were no personal effects anywhere, no signs of Dottie’s life in a box, just a clinical hospital-looking room, polished and scrubbed and functional, waiting for the next prisoner.
Lulu sat on Dottie’s bed remembering the first time she showed Dottie her iPod and Dottie had thought Lulu had earbugs. Lulu’s peeps got a good laugh out of that one. She could hear Dottie’s jazz renditions at the controversial speakeasy that cost her job. Speakeasy come, speakeasy go.
“Lulu! What are you doing here?” asked Mia, appearing from out of nowhere. “You’re not supposed to be here. If The Vacuum sees you, she’ll go postal.”
“Dude, chill. I was just coming back to see Dottie. But it’s cool; I see she’s gone home with Jillian.”
Mia’s gaze dropped and darted back up to Lulu. “No, Lulu, she’s not with Jillian.”
“Where is she, then? Not with that bunk son of hers.”
“Lulu, she passed a few weeks ago. I’m sorry no one told you.”
Even though Lulu knew that old people came here to die, she was startled. She removed her sunglasses and shook her head. “You’re shittin’ me—right? She wouldn’t have kicked off without saying goodbye.”
“Yep, happens all the time here. Hate to say it, but you get used to it after awhile. You just try not to get too attached. I mean, God’s calling them home. It’s a blessing, really.”
“Holy shit.” Lulu’s crying always began with what felt like a mini-heart attack, transmuted into a suffocating feeling, and then all hell broke loose. She pressed on her heart to short circuit the chain reaction. She didn’t want to be gossip fodder for The Vacuum and her sucking up sidekicks.
“Stay right here; I have something for you,” Mia said in her calming Mother of the Abbey voice. Mia stepped out for a few minutes and was back clutching a brown paper bag. “Here, I saved this for you. Dottie left a Post-It Note on this stuff that said ‘For Lulu’.”
Lulu peeked inside the bag and pulled out the LP—Dixie Land Jive, Dottie and the Street Lanterns and 25 containers of glitter.
“Right on! She was always going to play this for me, but we didn’t have a record player. Thanks, Mia, this is tres clutch!”
#
The next day, Lulu carted her mother’s record player to her band’s rehearsal. They all gave her shit about going old school on them. “What’s up with the vinyl? What’s next, the phonograph?”
Lulu waited with her hand holding the needle above the record until their chiding subsided. “You done yet? Dudes, I have a song I want us to cover.”
Lulu carefully placed the needle on the vinyl and watched the black grooved disk rotate. Crackling preceded the brass section’s bold entrance. She closed her eyes when Dottie’s voice began like a woman’s silhouette entering a smoke-filled tavern, all eyes searching for the woman behind the shadow. Dottie’s smoky, sultry voice began.
I let a song go out of my heart.
It was the sweetest melody.
I know I lost heaven ’cause you were the song.
Since you and I have drifted apart.
Life doesn’t mean a thing to me.
Please come back, sweet music, I know I was wrong.
The band members were mesmerized by the vinyl, the record player, the brass, and the jazz rifts, imagining an era of sequins, gin, glitz, and glamour. “Dude, she’s the bomb. Where’d you find this? Who is she?” they asked.
“She was this really famous kick-ass jazz singer in the golden era of speakeasies and bathtub gin. She asked me to cover this song.”
Lulu popped open the containers of glitter and ran around the room sprinkling the band members, thoroughly glitterizing their rehearsal space. They all exchanged WTF expressions.
“And these are her ashes.”

Ann TinkhamAnn is a writer based in Boulder, Colorado. She has coauthored a nonfiction book, Climbing Mountains in Stilettos (SourceBooks, 2007). Her fiction has appeared in All Things Girl, Apt, Dark Sky, Double Dare Press, Edifice Wrecked, Hiss Quarterly, Lily, Miranda, MotherVerse, Scruffy Dog Review, Short Story Library, Slow Trains, Stone Table Review, Syntax, The Battered Suitcase, Thirst for Fire, Toasted Cheese, Wild Violet, Word Riot, and Writethis.com. Website: http://boulderbadgirls.com/

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On this chilly morning,
I tasted the bittersweet sting
of an anklet of ant bites,
of my sweaty rosary beads
wrapped around my neck,
of the honey
in my jasmine green tea–
the memory
of knee-length gray hair,
of a thousand hums
and a thousand grains
held gingerly in my grandmother’s
straw-colored cone hat she had once forgotten
in the summer rice fields.

Now,
I find her face
darting in and out
like sparrows playing with shadows
among the melon vines,
her smiles whenever she placed
a jade orb of this melon sweetness in our arms–
everything glowing softly in the fog
outside my window,
even these sharp edges of my heart.

Kathy Nguyen goes by A~Lotus or Ambiguitylotus online. She has been writing poetry since 7-8 years old but seriously worked on it since high school. She loves not only looking for patterns and symbolism when it comes to writing poetry but also in every single connection, thing, and person in her life. She aspires to go to nursing school and get a doctorate degree and believes that everything happens for a reason, including using art for therapy (and for keeping sanity!) and as a form of expression as well as to complement her love for science. Website: http://alotus-poetry.livejournal.com

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Patricia Wellingham-Jones has a longtime interest in ‘healing writing’ and the benefits people gain from writing and reading their work together. Widely published, her chapbooks include Don’t Turn Away: Poems About Breast Cancer, Voices on the Land, and End-Cycle, poems about caregiving.

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Beside her, Jason stirred, making Meg involuntarily tense her muscles. When he settled back and she heard his soft, consistent breathing, she felt herself relax. For most of the twelve years that the two were married, Jason occasionally poked fun at Meg’s late sleeping. He considered himself the early riser, and Meg encouraged this false belief. It was easiest that way. In their first years of marriage, when Jason woke up to find Meg sitting silently, calmly, awake an hour before she needed to be, a slight smile would slide across his lips. His pale green eyes would grow big, and his face would contort into that hopeful, pathetic look. An acidic taste crept up Meg’s throat as she simply recalled that look. Sex with Jason in itself was not bad, and she was grateful. She didn’t mind the occasional afternoons that they were both home alone without the kids or the nights before they fell asleep when his naked legs would brush against hers. Jason was a good man, and he loved her, loved to please her. The sex was fine, but that passive, begging look he gave was painful to see. The look reminded Meg of the power she held, the love that she didn’t have for Jason, the love he carried for her. So in the opening hours of the day, when Meg couldn’t sleep, she sat up in bed, stared at her walls, and waited until Jason’s breathing changed and she knew it was time to lay back down and shut her eyes and listen to her husband shower, shave, start the coffee. She had a while yet, that morning – Jason was like a clock.

She couldn’t remember when she realized that her mother didn’t love her father, but she was young, probably fresh in high school. Looking back, she wondered why the realization didn’t surprise her, why she accepted it without concern or disgust or judgment. She supposed it was because the lack of love had been obvious all along, and she had lived in its void, and she just hadn’t put a name on it. Meg’s mother married for security. As a child, she was brutally abused until she ran away at 16 and began working three jobs to pay for rent and the barest of groceries. When she met Meg’s father, and she realized that he was a good man who wouldn’t hurt her and would give her a reprieve from long hours waitressing, she agreed to marriage without a second thought. She didn’t need love, but she needed security, and she found it in Meg’s father.

Meg married to avoid. She met Jason in college, and they began dating towards the end of their senior year. Neither of them initiated a relationship originally; they had mutual friends who coerced them into meeting. That first date was kept perfectly in Meg’s mind not because she remembered it with fondness but because she found flaws with Jason even then, among introductions and nervousness and trivial questions to keep conversation flowing. His faults resonated in her mind as she undressed in her apartment after the date was over – he chewed too loudly, he talked about himself too much, he knew he was very intelligent, he didn’t make her laugh, he was boring boring boring. But Meg was shy at first meeting and plain at first glance, and she wasn’t being asked on many dates, so when he asked her out again, she accepted. On the second date, she saw all the flaws she had discovered previously and decided that they weren’t flukes, but still Meg chastised herself for being too judgmental and tried to focus on Jason’s good qualities. He listened to her, laughed at her jokes, shared many of her interests, displayed a certain kindness and concern for her well-being. As the dating continued, she admitted that she did find him attractive, and conversation between them was satisfactory if she worked at it, but she remained conflicted about how she felt towards Jason. After graduation, Meg and Jason remained in the city of the college unlike many of their peers, so Meg’s options for other prospective dates decreased even more, and Jason was persistent.

She felt lonely in the city without her friends and the community that college had offered, and Jason was a trustworthy companion. A year passed, and two, and when Jason proposed, Meg knew she didn’t love him but was too afraid of living life by herself to say no.

Sorry. Meg formed the word with her lips and silently recited it to the stark, white wall. The word was meant for her sleeping, dreaming husband, but she didn’t want to look at him. She felt heaviness cover her shoulders, and she sank deeper into bed. Guilt. While Meg found nothing wrong with marrying a man she didn’t love, she had guilt, from time to time, for letting Jason believe that she loved him. So much of Jason irritated her because of who she was, but he was a good man, and he didn’t deserve a wife who didn’t love him. And Meg didn’t love him. She had sex with him because she was a woman and she needed physical contact, but there was nothing special to her about his body. She made his favorite meals because he was more prone to washing the dishes then. She asked him about work and how he was feeling because they had children, and she wanted to put up a good front for them. She dressed up when they went out, and took care to her hair and make-up, and bought new lingerie not to excite him but to keep him from going elsewhere for excitement. Meg didn’t want Jason, but she wanted him to want her, because then he would have no reason to leave, and she wouldn’t be lonely.

Sometimes she wanted him to leave. When he spoke to her with a hint of condescension because he believed himself to be her intellectual superior. When he asked her trivial questions. When he acted like he knew her. She wanted to scream sometimes, to throw things, to tell him that their life was a lie, to ask him if he really never questioned the authenticity of their marriage. Maybe she would be happier if he left. Maybe he would, too.

Jason rolled from his side to his back, and Meg heard the subtle deepening of his breathing. She knew it was time to crawl back down if she was to avoid the look. But with a deep breath and one last gaze at the white walls, her friends, her comforters, Meg pulled back the sheets from Jason’s body. His passive, milky, green eyes fluttered open as Meg slowly put her mouth on his. Her heart raced as she moved herself on top of him and encouraged him to touch her, to feel her, to love her.

Rachel is an undergraduate at Wheaton College in Illinois, where she is studying English and Secondary Education. She went to school to find a husband but so far has had little luck.

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My father was kind of skinny guy, but he was tall, with a salt and pepper beard, blazing blue eyes that matched the ocean, and abdominal muscles as tight as a teenager’s. Cricket, who had gotten lead poisoning while he was a Chicago house painter, would follow behind Charlie, staying close to the blue-black water. Cricket told people he’d been a famous arsonist, although as far as the town regulars could find out on the Internet, he’d never committed a crime in his life. He wore a thin, blonde, ponytail, surrounded by a shaved head and mumbled “Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare,” toward the waves, before he tried to pan for gold in the ocean.

A rich lady with a time share, who visited the beach every summer without her husband, sent her son running toward my father. Then she chased after her son. Her large breasts bobbled in her tight bikini top as she ran. “Hey Charlie,” she said, after she reached my father. With a bare foot she drew a circle in the sand. She stood up straighter as she slowly lengthened her slim, tan, leg from her waist. “Did you do something new to your kite? Isn’t that a new tail on the end, there?”

“Huh?” Charlie said. He pointed at the ocean, pretending the waves were too loud, pretending he couldn’t hear what she said.

I stood beside my father, pulling at loose threads on my cut-offs, my thighs and shoulders tingling from the sunburn I’d gotten the day before. Then I walked over to Cricket to get some gold- panning lessons and give my father some privacy.

Cricket grinned, a tiny strand of tobacco between his stained teeth, as I walked toward him. When I reached Cricket’s favorite gold-panning spot, he put his skinny arm around my shoulders to give me a hug, his long beard braided in a thin strand that reached his breastbone. “Don’t worry Audrey,” Cricket said, slipping the leather strap from his congas over my shoulder. “She tries that with every guy at the beach. He won’t fall for that shit. You need to learn to drum.”

I gingerly slapped out some awkward beats while the beach home lady shrugged, lay a blanket out in the sand directly in Charlie’s way, opening the pages of a novel. Her son began building a sand castle. Charlie scowled, as he rocked the string holder back and forth to keep his kite flying, and backed away slowly.

“I don’t believe in women anymore,” my father whispered when he reached us. “They’re too much trouble. You’re the only female in my life. Don’t leave me alone with that crazy lady.”

Cricket nodded at me and headed farther down the beach, his fingers running through the meditation beads in his sweatshirt pocket like a wiggling gerbil, his conga drum strapped across his bare, sunburned chest.

“Hope you find some gold today,” my father yelled out, as Cricket walked away.
It was the summer I turned fifteen.

Charlie had moved out to the Washington Coast from Las Vegas, ten years earlier, after he and my mother split up. My father had lived in Nevada since he’d come home from the Vietnam War to move in with his uncle, while he tried to stop having nightmares.

Charlie’s uncle was an iron worker who helped build the Las Vegas playground into a Disneyland for adults during the seventies. “When I was welding,” Charlie would say. “I pulled that mask over my face, lit the torch to seven hundred degrees, and watched the rest of my life melt away.” He would point at a picture pinned to his beach tent. In the yellowed, torn, photo, Charlie stood outside his uncle’s work shop holding a Darth Vader hood in one hand and a desert rat in the other, the shop surrounded by sujaro and Eschevaria cacti, palm trees, and scads of geckos and rodents. “We tried to turn half of them into pets because there were so few people out there,” Charlie said.

My father’s uncle was the only person he trusted until he met my mother Avenue. She was really pretty; she had long black hair and she strip danced in a small town in the Sierras. She had come to Nevada on vacation to check out the nuclear bomb testing sites and would never go back home.

Avenue didn’t talk of her dancing career until they ran into one of her old boyfriends at a Willie Nelson Casino show and he told my father everything. My dad didn’t give a shit by then, though. It turned out okay.

She and my dad split up, not because she’d been a strip dancer, but because she didn’t want to be poor any longer, and since she still wore pretty, thick, long hair and men found her beautiful, she married a rich guy who owned a mortgage company. She remembered her dance moves and her new husband liked them a lot. I could hear the two of them at night. In their house with too many rooms I felt afraid at night, and I huddled up outside their door and slept on the carpet. Before they woke up in the mornings, I crawled back in bed. They never caught me huddled up outside their bedroom door.

On the beach, after my father got out of the way of that married lady’s long, tan, legs, we watched the ugly kite the rest of the afternoon, watched it dip and sway before moving clouds until it was nearly time for the sunset. Then, while I reeled the kite in, Charlie jogged the few blocks to the bookstore to pick up his pet bird “Gopher,” a green Macaw from Columbia. Gopher could mimic engine sounds and other bird calls and coyote sounds, but refused to speak human words no matter how hard my father tried to teach him.

As my father walked back down the street, he kept Gopher tucked in his jacket, protected from the evening wind blowing in. When he reached me, I had the kite tied up and the lines rolled up neatly.

Charlie, Gopher, and I liked to watch the sunsets to see if we could spot a green light that flashes across the edge of the ocean just after the sun dips below the horizon when there aren’t any clouds in the sky. Most people only catch the green flash every few years, so tourists don’t know about it. We sat on a log with charcoal ends from midnight campfires. Sand, salty waves and empty crab shells left by tourists smelled like summer.

My father gave Gopher his English lesson.

“I’m an angry, hungry, bear,” Charlie said, his lips barely an inch from Gopher’s beak.

“He knows you’re not a bear,” I said. “That’s why he won’t talk. And maybe you shouldn’t have named him Gopher. Gawd, Dad. That’s so lame.”

“You try then.”

Gopher preferred imitating the crashing waves.
With salt water lapping at his ankles, Cricket was playing his conga drums, his elbows and shoulders rattling out a frantic, awkward beat. He believed the luckiest hours for panning were right at sunset and sunrise, he believed the right rhythm would separate gold from the sand.

“It’s almost time,” my father said. “Don’t blink … keep your eyes wide open … or you’ll miss it.” He kept Gopher out of the wind, a black and red Carhardt gently warming Gopher’s wings.

It was easier for me to catch the magic light, which meant I saw twice as many flashes as Charlie.

“It’s not green like a fir tree,” I told my father. “It’s the color of apples, like old glass bottles, like beach grass. Last time it was darker. Could it be a space ship landing way out there?”

The first ten years Charlie lived in Rocky Beach, he carried Gopher around with him wherever he went, while he still worked the vacation rentals. The eight or nine small cabins facing Paradise Creek were a hometown operation. My father’s job was to make sure people didn’t break in a steal things when the cabins were closed up for the winter, make sure other beach bums didn’t homestead to get out of the winter wind. In the springtime, Charlie pruned roses and fruit trees. Summers, he mowed lawns and picked berries to sell in the rent shack. Back then, Whistler was the maintenance man, before he opened the kite shop. He fixed broken pipes, fixed holes in walls, set up rat traps and tarred sections of leaky roofs.

After sunset, my father helped him finish things up.

Harley, the former owner of the rustic retreat, an old hippy like my dad, kept one of the cabins vacant so he could use it as a brewery. On hand-made labels, Harley drew a made-up, Chinese-healing sounding name: “Ginsingluk.” During sunset, when tourists came out of souvenir shops and the bars, Harley hooked a cart to the back of his sand bike and rode slowly down the beach. As the sunset lovers traded a few dollars for his amber bottles, he smiled with his large teeth, and explained the secret main ingredient: marijuana tincture.

Harley kept a big barn turned into a shop—near his own house two blocks off the beach—and he let my father set up his welding equipment there, to keep his skills up. In the old barn, a stack of smashed beer cans climbed three-quarters up the red walls. A small TV sat on a shelf tuned to a baseball game, and Harley and Cricket sat in the overstuffed chairs, a blue and white styrofoam cooler of beer resting between them.

“It’s your birthday,” Cricket said to Harley, “tomorrow…. so I brought you a present.” He handed Harley a white envelope with an old address scratched off, Harley’s name written in red with a large marker.

Harley unfolded the paper while he slipped the cigar he was smoking to the side of his mouth, pressed his lips together tightly to hold it.

On the page, hand written letters read: “Official Land Deed, A two-acre Gold-Mine on the Salmon river is hereby bequeathed to Harley Rogers on this 29th day of June.” Beneath the letters, a small map was neatly drawn from Hwy 121 to a small plot of land on a salmon river in Southern Idaho. On the map, small cabins were given windows and doors and tree varieties stood at alternating heights, thin needles labelled Douglas fir, and gangly red branches labelled Viney Maple; tree stubs, and shrubs, penciled in, edging a dirt road. The shack at the gold mine was colored in yellow with a red trim.

‘Damn,” Harley said raising his eyebrows. “Are you shitting me? You own a gold mine?”

Cricket nodded silently. “You own it now, buddy.”

Harley got up and leaned over to hug Cricket and slap him on the back. “That’s damn nice of you … handing it off to me like this.”

“I thought you would take better care of it than my relatives,” he said. “My family’s worthless. They’re all criminals.”

Harley walked over to my father and pulled on his arm. I watched them walk quickly to the far side of the house where they started laughing so hard they were falling against each other, hugging like graduates, and slapping each other on the backs, my father’s thin frame dwarfed by Harley’s two-hundred and seventy pound biker-body. A few minutes later, when they walked back to the barn, I watched Harley wipe at his eyes and try to stop chuckling while he focused on the baseball game and chugged a beer in two gulps.

“That’s the best gift I’ve ever received,” Harley said after awhile. “It’s priceless.”

Cricket nodded, chewing on his lower lip. He took out his meditation beads and began quietly mumbling.

I realized then, that the gold mine was just like Cricket’s imaginary friends and the houses he felt sad about burning down. I felt sorry for him, felt mad at my dad and Harley for laughing and being mean.

Harley didn’t know anything about running a cabin resort, though, and pretty soon he ran out of money and lost it. Some bigwig Californians came in, burned the rustic cabins down, turned the property into a six-story playground for weddings or corporate vacations – big, noisy parties that keep the neighbors up all night. After my father’s cabin got burnt down, we set up a tent on Harley’s property and lived in it year round.

“We used to have three types of people who came to town,” Charlie said when we turned up the gas lamp in the evenings. “We had guests, we had visitors, and we had tourists – but the people who stay in that resort – we won’t even call them tourists.”

I knew I wasn’t ever going to have to work there, because the summer I turned seventeen, right before my last year in high school, Charlie taught me how to weld.

My father led me to the back side of Harley’s shop and pulled out a black metal screen to stand between us and Harley and Cricket. I pulled a huge welding hood over my eyes. When he flipped open a plastic eye shield, I did the same thing so we could talk to one another, until we turned up the torch.

“Now listen,” my father said. “What happens is that the sparks are gonna fly up and scare you. But don’t flinch or you’ll mess up the solder. The sparks won’t hurt you as long as we clean the metal off good.” He had me dressed in so many layers of leather that I could barely move my arms, anyway. I was way too stiff to flinch.

Welders have to make sure solder heats up high enough before they run it along a seam; when it’s done right, the mixture of tin and lead appears shiny and smooth as its cooling down, but if you move the rod too fast, with solder that’s not hot enough, the metal looks grayish and leaves sharp, ugly points. The best thing about welding is that you can generally fix things with the tip of the iron if it’s not perfect the first time.

That summer, I learned to heat the torch to 374 degrees, to weld copper into daisies or roses and lamp bases. Within a few months, I was selling my copper olive-oil lamps on Third Avenue at the Sleepy Cove Bookstore. Olive oil won’t smudge up white walls. It makes a pretty, smoke-free light.

My father thought I might be able to join the welders union one day, something he never got around to doing, but one of his female friends, who worked on bridges, told him it’s still pretty rough out there for female quotas.

“If a woman’s too good at what she does,” my dad told me. “If she’s a better welder than some of the guys are, they’ll steal her tools. Or they’ll tell her the foreman wants her to weld pipes together that aren’t in the blueprints. They’ll cut a chain holding a part she’s welding together to burn her. They’ll do anything to get her fired.”

So my father helped me learn to make jewellery and olive oil lamps instead.

We started working twelve hours per day making our oil lamps. My father payed Cricket to ride up and down the beach delivering them to shops along the way. After a long day of welding, as soon as we hit the sleeping bag, we’d be out like a light until the staticky rock and roll started up at the six-story resort down the street. Electric guitars and a base drum playing from squeaky loudspeakers so loudly that so you couldn’t hear the waves.
It was starting to sound like Las Vegas downtown:

This was supposed to be the Washington Coast, not sin city.

My father would say, “Audrey, get the phone book. Call the FBI, call the CIA, call the Governor; let’s hire Cricket to burn the place down.”

The Rocky Beach City Council members weren’t local, so they didn’t care about the people who had to get up early and go to work. It was money they were interested in. Since the City Council wouldn’t even build a skate park for the kids across the street from the Rocky Beach grocery store, why would they make big money follow an eleven p.m. noise curfew?

My father and some of the neighbors finally called the cops when the resort music went on past three a.m., but they wished they could have taken care of it themselves.

When the oncologist diagnosed my father’s cancer, he refused to take the poisonous chemotherapy they prescribed for his lymphoma. On the Internet, Charlie met a woman who studied herbology in the mountains of Peru for almost a decade and healed her own son of brain cancer. She said he could help out on her organic farm outside of Puerto Vallarta in exchange for her healing, if he could come up with the money to get to Mexico.

“Chemotherapy costs a ton of money I don’t have and kills you anyway,” Charlie said. “If I use herbs I might die, but at least I won’t feel like shit until the very end. And I plan on coming home healed. I’m going to swim in the warm salt water and make love to women in Spanish and eat a lot of mangoes,” he said.

One Wednesday morning after he’d gotten the cancer news, after there’d been a huge storm warning that pretty much cleared out the hotel, Charlie got up at sunrise to fly his kite at the city park. Mornings following large storms were a good time to walk around town in the quiet because most of the tourists hadn’t come back yet.

He lit a cigarette and walked the white string out a ways before he took off running across the grass. Even with his slow-growing cancer my father ran fast – outran the track team during sprinting practice when he coached at the high school. And he got that ugly, too-long, dragon-shaped monster kite lifted up higher than the fog lights on the radio tower at the airport in just a short time.

He paced around some, reeling the line and moving it back and forth in front of his chest gracefully, drinking a little breakfast whiskey and enjoying the sunrise in the peace and quiet. But then something terrible happened, the wind died down-suddenly-just like that, and his kite started falling away from the clouds.

At the edge of the park, over a twenty-foot high chain-link fence, alien-looking metal houses with wires and knobs sticking out everywhere were the power breakers for all of Rocky Beach.

My dad tried to reel the line in as fast as he could.

The huge kite flew over the schoolhouse and missed the maple trees. He ran fast across the grass, feeling pretty sure he could run around the edges of the fence, and guide the kite to the parking lot, but then the kite dropped all at once like a dead goose. The damp kite draped its dragon body across the circuits and there was a blanket of small bursts of red and blue fire, like a field of firecrackers that never made it very high off the ground, going off all at once. He’d knocked all the power out for the entire peninsula with his big kite.

Loud noises from the huge explosion brought everyone out of the breakfast cafes and there was smoke and the firemen came and the police. A wet-silver smell of burning metal in the cool air replaced dewy beach fog.

“Jesus Christ, Charlie.” said Arthur Hornyak, one of the policemen. “Don’t you know you aren’t supposed to fly kites in the city park. Stay on the beach with those things. They’re dangerous.”

Linemen collected as many pieces as they could find, strewn through the breakers, to give to Charlie for a souvenir. He stitched them together and hung them outside our tent in the woods.

That winter was one of the coldest winters we’d suffered at the beach, it felt too cold for Gopher, under the tent.

Before he left for Mexico, Charlie had to put Gopher up for adoption.

I remember the day he sent Gopher off on the bus to go and live with his new owners; he tucked his head low into his jacket like Gopher did when they walked the beach together most afternoons.

The new owners made Charlie sign papers saying he’d give up all rights to his pet, and he kept reading the sentences over and over to me, as we sat drinking hot chocolate in a cafe by the boardwalk. “Under no condition will Gopher’s previous owner try to contact the new caretakers by phone, letter, or in person, and he will have no rights from this day forward in regards to the Macaw we are describing herein.”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to participate in Gopher’s life,” Charlie said, striking matches, one by one, against a thin sulphur strip, holding them up to his lips to blow out slowly. “See how healthy Gopher is. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t get to take the bus down to Dark Sands beach to visit him.”

That same winter, Harley, who still believed in women, got into a fight with his girlfriend who sang jazz scat at The Last Stop Tavern every other weekend. After their fight, the girlfriend wrote Harley a letter and mailed it to the shop. In it she called my father’s friend a “lazy slob, a drunk, and a two-timing gambler.”

Charlie listened to his buddy read the letter all the way through. Without saying anything, my father bent down and crawled into his tent to pull out the tin box he kept Gopher’s adoption papers stored in.

A propane torch we used to practice welding hung in a lean to under a fifty-year-old fir tree.

An evening wind rustled the branches and shook leftover morning rain onto my father’s shoulders as he ducked into the shelter to find the torch. A few minutes later, he handed the crook-necked metal handle to me, and said, “Fire that sucker up.” Cricket stood beside me, looking at the torch longingly, so I handed it to him, instead. “I use that thing all day. You take it.”

I asked if we could make costumes first by weaving leaf stems together to wear like necklaces as if we were forest spirits. My father tied Harley’s long hair back with a piece of string to keep it from catching on fire and we slid the extra hood over his long gray curls before we pulled our own hoods over our faces.

Using clothespins, we hung Harley’s letter and my father’s pet-adoption papers from a metal wire we’d tied between two trees to dry our clothes on. The branches were high enough we needed to climb a ladder to reach the clothespins.

Cricket held the torch toward the dark sky and I remember bright flames shooting through layers of paper like a meteor. Harley mailed the ashes to his angry girlfriend and told her he didn’t care how mad she got at him, he still loved her; he told her to plant a tree with her angry words so she could transform her negative energy.

My father buried the ashes from Gopher’s adoption contract around a wild strawberry plant and built a campfire. At midnight, after he’d finished a half-pint of whiskey, he told us the story about the day he lost his bird and the day Whistler gave him a big, black monster kite.

At the end of the winter, we’d saved enough money for Charlie to move to Puerto Vallarta, to live off his social security income, and heal himself with South American herbs from the Rain Forest. He boarded the Green Tortoise hippie bus headed for Baja and then Guadalajara.

“Como Esta, Mija,” Charlie emailed from Mexico City. “That means, ‘How are you my daughter,’” he wrote. I would go to The Last Stop Tavern to use the free Internet there.

“My body is being replaced by brand-new, cancer-free cells,” he said when he called from his landline in Puerto Vallarta. “You won’t even recognize me pretty soon.”

The next week, from a neighbor’s sailboat, he emailed, “But no one is ever going to make me stop drinking whiskey.”

One day, at The Last Stop Tavern, a contractor from the noisy resort walked in to join a dart tournament. His phony smile had those perfectly straight, white, Californian teeth.

“Hey, tell all your customers,” he told Ivy, the bartender, “Tell them we just built a man-made lake so tourists can catch a salmon to take home or smoke without having to get sea sick.”

“How the hell do the fish like that noisy D. J. music?” Cricket barked out.

While my father was healing his cancer, feeding ripe mangoes to pretty Latina women in Mexico, I often couldn’t sleep during the noisy resort parties. I used Harley’s phone to call my father’s landline in Puerto Vallarta.

He told me to get out of bed, to walk out to the shop and weld.

He said the herb harvest this year was one of the most profitable they’d had in ten years. They were even going to pay him, so he would send me a check at the end of the summer. But you better prepare for the next time there’s a power outage, he said. “Work really hard so you can keep one closet full of extra lamps ready, just in case. Imagine it as if you were a freightliner not too far away. With the power out, it looks as if the ocean reached further inland, as if there weren’t a peninsula at all. Now, imagine all of the windows in town suddenly lighting up with your sweet-smelling, smudge-free, copper, lamps. Imagine the power going out in the middle of a California wedding, and you walking into the hotel lobby with a beer-wagon full of light.”

Loretta is a massage therapist and etsyier who lives in Portland, Oregon near the Willamette River and the Smith and Bybee Lakes Bird Sanctuary. She is finishing her MFA in writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop and completing her novel about three wounded healers living in a logging town. You can find her handmade journals, tea towels, and photographs at http://www.portlandia.etsy.com.

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When they’d first moved in they’d had so many hopes and expectations; family life would reign supreme. Now this was all there was left, just Jill, a husbandless wife and a childless mother standing alone in an empty house, a house so quiet that she thought any moment it might suddenly speak to her, accuse her of ruining everything, blame her for the events of the past couple of years.

The old fridge! She suddenly thought, damn, I didn’t check the old fridge.
There had been a fitted fridge in the kitchen that stopped working almost as soon as they’d moved in. They’d bought a new one and used the old for storage, Jill had completely forgotten about it. She quickly opened the door and found to her dismay a collection of old tumblers and plastic fruit bowls, she shrugged, deciding they weren’t worth taking, then in the quiet she heard a low rumbling sound.

The small freezer compartment at the bottom of the fridge was still plugged in. She opened it not quite knowing what to expect – fortunately there was no food, no mouldy old fish fingers or rotten peas, but just as she was about to close the door and switch it off for good she saw the evidence of one fun filled winters day. All that remained were a few spindly twigs, two wizened raisons and a tiny sliver of carrot.

And there he was once more, her darling little boy, five years old and so excited he could barely stand still.

‘Please Mummy, oh please, just a teeny weeny one, please.’

Mother Jill shook her head firmly.

‘No, Kit, where would we keep it? It’ll melt.’

The snow had been heavy and unexpected, all the schools were closed. In the sky to ground whiteness they’d played all day. Throwing snowballs, sledging down the hills on the downs, rolling giant snowballs with all the others, adults and children alike, exploring a magical kingdom of delight. After they’d made a big snowman Kit had insisted they make a little one and they did, bringing it home to show daddy and storing it in the bottom drawer of the old freezer where it stayed, forlorn and forgotten, until now.

Jill slid to the floor her arms clutching her body as the sobs raged. Could it really be only eleven years ago?

Eleven years since her baby had found joy around every corner, had laughed and danced and run about just so happy to be alive. When exactly did he change? When did he think he could find happiness by obliterating all reality and sinking into squalid inhuman depths? His innocent face faded and left in its place the pallid hollowed cheeked thing she’d identified that terrible day. Jill scooped up the old twigs and carrot nose, the rock hard currant eyes and in doing so felt a small ball of ice in the corner of the drawer. It felt like reaching through time and touching another day , the pain was too much and she cradled the leftover snowman in her hands willing the clocks to turn back time, outside the fireworks continued and the bonfire flames burned brightly.

Julie has worked as a stand up comic and theatre and radio writer. She lives with her family in London and writes whenever she can. She also works in administration for a charity agency. She has two boys.

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Leona was so close I could almost feel the shade of her house, the heat of her gaze, even ten miles away. My rusted Pontiac became crowded with many versions of the same ghost. I took a giant bite of Alice’s magic mushroom and began shrinking, smaller and smaller.

Now the size of a thimble, I examined the first Leona lounging inn my tattered passenger seat. She was The Original version, composed in blaring Technicolor. She was tall, sleek and ornate in her movements, with all that black hair trailing behind her as she sailed from task to task. I could see my once small hands moving toward the spangle earrings tinkling at her lobes, eyeing the rings playing the light from her long fingers. Her face was dancing with laughter, tossing a constant smile over her shoulder or letting it trickle into the rise and fall of her voice. She was the world’s most beloved and feared bartender who told wild stories about rowdy drunks while she counted out her tips late at night. If it weren’t for the sheer magnetism of this Leona, maybe the ghosts of the rest wouldn’t raise a white-hot boiling in my guts.

Leona The Original was a level woman, easy going even if her sense of humor sometimes bordered on being cruel. There was always an edge of control, though, always a concealed strength that could leap into the light at any moment. Leona incited a certain amount of fear in nearly everyone. She was never the victim of an impolite grocery store clerk or an angry bill collector, a rude neighbor or an out-of-control drunk. She wasn’t so much disarming as she was just, well, powerful. She didn’t have to raise her voice, let alone her fist, for most people to simply back down. It was her steely blue eyes, the steadiness of them, the clear warning shots they fired. You don’t want to go there, not with me, they said to everyone she met.

From the passenger’s seat, this ghost beamed at me like we shared a secret. “You can never go home, you know,” she said with laughter before her form dissolved.

I took my time, riding the brake pedal along crooked streets, plucking at the rain-soaked details, mostly the same regardless of the years between. Boat motors and fishing line, faded toys and plants that seemed to have fried in their cracked pots; the same junk strewn across the same old sun-scorched lawns. Most of the little cottages bore the pathetic stamp of poverty and neglect: peeling paint, broken shutters, abandoned rocking chairs stranded on front porches. As I came off the narrow road that wound its way onto the island, a group of kids wearing more mud than hand-me-down clothes, splashed happily in a rain filled pothole. After them, no one was out in the downpour. For all anyone knew, this could have been a ghost town in a spaghetti western. You could almost hear the lone whistle of high noon, except it was obliterated by the sound of the rain pummeling so many tin roofs like rounds from a machine gun. Clint Eastwood meets Rambo on a desert Isle. Gilligan would be beside himself.

Early on, Leona started spending weekends out with friends. She’d come home in the middle of the night laughing and falling down every few steps or so. She’d get me out of bed to dance through the living room with her, her hair flying in circles and her arms reaching to turn me. She’d put on an old album and try to teach me the twist. There was a tightness in my chest on those nights, a mixture of fear and sadness. Later the partying spread into the weekdays and, after awhile, I began to wish she’d wake me up to listen to the grainy strummings of the Beatles again. I began to long for the attention, the laughter, the me of it all. Eventually, Leona didn’t put makeup on in the mornings or slip her rings onto her fingers. Her only ornament became the bottle of Smirnoff attached to her hand. She trailed cigarette smoke instead of smiles and silken hair. Her voice rose more often than it fell. This Leona was usually found passed out on the couch. The world outside her window turned without her participation. Mail still arrived in her mailbox but she didn’t bother bringing it into the house until the mailman came to the door to tell her it was spilling over onto the ground. Bills still accumulated but Leona wouldn’t pay them until one day, she woke up and found the house dark, or the phone out of order, bags of trash on the curb tickled by maggots. Her friends made it as far as the doorstep but Leona was in the shower when they came, taking a nap, or sick with the flu. I woke myself up in the mornings, dressed in whatever was clean (or cleanest), and left for second grade without breakfast or a kiss goodbye. Leona smiled sleepily at me when I came home, saying, “Hey, Kiddo, want to watch the soaps?”

This Leona now took up residence in my backseat, whispering in my ear, “The Keys are nice this time of year. Why don’t you just keep driving?”

Regardless of me and my brake pedal, the nine unpaved roads that made up the whole of Goodville gave way to Mangrove Court and The House of Yanklewitz. The ghosts dissolved reluctantly from my car as I ate the other half of the magic mushroom, and returned to something closer to my normal size.

The main difference between this house and the neighbors’ was the ancient Poinciana tree in the front yard. It was a tall, lean tree, with millions of delicate leaves and papery orange flowers. Its height was double that of the house but its branches made a great arch that shaded and shrouded the house neatly. As a child, the old tree seemed whimsical, like living in an elaborate fort. As an adult, the fantasy shriveled, and I figured the tree did an excellent job disguising the shambles of the house itself. The faded lime storm-shutters were rusted off the hinges and banging in the breeze moving in off the gulf. A web of fine cracks sprawled up the front window, caused by one of Leona’s notorious temper tantrums twenty years ago.

“You cock-sucking-son-of-a-bitch!” Leona shrieked in my mind, accompanied by the sound of cracking glass and accentuated by a man’s indistinct pleading. Ah, the music of childhood. Shall we dance, then?

The rusted Cadillac, regardless of my cross-country prayers, was parked on the brown lawn like a monument to some dry joke. Getting out of my own car, looking up into the rain, I said, “Thanks a lot. Your sense of humor is rich,” to God, maybe, or to anyone else who might’ve been eavesdropping.

I hadn’t lived with Leona since I was fifteen, twelve long, Leona-free, years. Now here I was in the humming shade of her doorstep carrying a soggy cardboard box and shouldering a red duffle bag. My long, loose skirt was beaten flat against my thighs while I waited. Under the sticky saturation, I sagged, twitching at the mosquitoes landing on my face and bare shoulders. I had the clear sense that Leona was inches away, laughing under her breath from the other side of the peephole. I rapped the door hard, swinging the duffle bag onto my back for the moment, managing the box with just the one arm.

Reluctantly, the door groaned open on its rusted hinges and Leona, larger than life, loomed in its bowed frame. Her scowl-etched features weren’t surprising. I was a little startled, though, by the fact that her jet-black hair, pulled into a brutal bun at the back of her head, now sported thick white steaks framing her face. Leona’s deep set blue eyes, like sparkling gems enfolded in soft flesh, were duller than they used to be and her eyelids were heavier than they ought to be. She wasn’t old, Leona, but she sure looked tired.

“The cat comes back,” she breathed in an even tone, eyeing me remotely. You could always count on a cucumber reaction from Leona. And here I was, expecting a Hallmark moment, waiting for the shriek of joy and the vise grip hug. Not happening, Kiddo.

Now I was standing before yet another Leona. This was a worn version that, if not for the high-held head and squared-off shoulders, might have seemed to any random schmuck the sight of defeat. But I knew better. I’d seen Leona at the height of her glory and then at the bottom of the bucket. I’d seen all the versions that ebbed in between these waves.

In the silent moment passing, I became painfully aware of myself; my old tie-dyed skirt was so worn that my skin shone through in a few spots. The strawberry colored dreadlocks hanging long down my back and rear, laced through with beads, smelled faintly of mildew and patchouli oil. The gleam of my unwashed face highlighted a rash of pimples breaking out on my forehead- two days in a car (without air conditioning, in September) would do that to anyone’s complexion, thank-you-very-much. Then there was the truth, crouching in my thundering pulse, trying to avoid Leona’s steady gaze. She seemed to be plucking at the thing with her eyes, prying into what she couldn’t know but probably did from just a glance. There was a reason I was standing on her doorstep, soaking and miserable, and something like shame masquerading as pride made me want to hide that reason under her doormat and briskly wipe my feet on it. The words, I finally became you, Leona, prodded my tongue only to meet my teeth.

I shifted the weight of the duffle bag upon my back, the rain still coming straight down through my matted hair and into my stinging eyes. My beating heart made a hot lump in my throat as I opened my mouth to say something, anything, to stop her inspection of me and to somehow blast that knowing smirk from her plum-colored lips.

My eyes found my feet as I finally said, “Surprise, it’s me,” in a tone that I hoped was as cool as her gaze. “It’s been a while.”

“It’s been well over a year since you even called, Claire,” shot Leona quickly though her tone was still eerily even and her hands incredibly still.

“Right. I know.” My phone wasn’t ringing off the hook, either, Leona. The beat up Berkies hugging my toes became so engrossing that I couldn’t tear my gaze from them. Reduced to five-years-old in a blink, I thought with dread burning in my wet cheeks. “I suck. Right, I know…but… Leona? It’s raining on me.”

Leona’s eyes glinted with the hint of a bitter smile as she turned her back on me and mumbled, “Well, come on in, then. Be my guest.”

I followed her, bringing in a glistening puddle of water to drip all over the cracking tiles in the narrow entryway. Leona disappeared into the living room but I didn’t follow her. I shivered a little, never mind the rain outside was sticky hot. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to see the old living room. I didn’t want to have a hot meal at her table and I did not want her to ask, “So, what happened?” in a tone that smacked of comedy. I looked back at the door, wondering if it was too late. I could take another hunk of magic mushroom, walk right back out beneath the crack, and take up residence with the insects in the bougainvillea. Leona, I figured, would be neither disappointed nor surprised. It wouldn’t be the first time I bailed.

Leona reappeared, holding two dingy towels. She handed me one and threw the other at the puddle around my feet. Then she leaned against the entryway wall and surveyed me once more. She was enjoying this, making my skin crawl with her eyes alone. I started toweling off and slowly raised my eyes to meet hers, fighting for some crumb of control.

“So, I was in the neighborhood,” I laughed dryly. “And thought I might drop by.”

“You drove that jalopy of yours three thousand miles without as much as a phone call?” Her eyes narrowed. “What, California didn’t want your ass anymore?”

“That pretty much sums it up,” I said smoothly with a tilting smile that I thought must have gone over well because, just for an instant, her posture sagged.

“That’s pretty fucking presumptuous.”

“So, can I crash?”

“Can you crash?”

Now I’d done it; her rigid shoulders fell and her eyes widened. The little horned devil on my shoulder leapt with glee, a triumphant fist slicing the air.

“Just for a while? To try to regroup, you know? Wrap my mind around things?”

Leona snapped back into her usual form, her eyes granite and her mouth iron. “What, exactly, do you need to wrap your mind around? You’re thirty years old, for christsakes!”

“I’m twenty-seven.” Thirty? That was a low blow. Maybe the bitch’s brain had vodka rot.

“And?!”

“And I need a place to crash,” I laughed but I was nervous and the laugh gave me away. “So, how about it? For old times sake?”

Leona rolled her eyes and turned away again, into the living room, saying stiffly, “Put your crap in your old room. It hasn’t changed much except that Harold keeps his magazine collection in there now. You two can sort that out, I guess.”

I thought of Harold with a stab of what felt like guilt but the feeling fled as I entered the living room. This must be what it’s like to be a ghost. There, to my right, the same old nineteen-fifties sofa with its gaudy yellow flowers and nearly-neon green leafs. The old coffee table was still there only now it was polished and only a full jar of Mallow Cream and a liter bottle of Pepsi sat on its nicked surface.

“God,” I said, more to myself than to Leona. “Nothing’s changed.”

Leona cleared her throat. “Plenty has changed.” She straightened her neat little suit, checked her manicured nails, and looked at me with an invitation in her heavy eyes. I declined.

I remembered, instead, the Eager-To-Please Leona. Head over heels for some new guy, the muscle bound cop with his shit-eating grin, then the lean social worker with the Aquanet hair, a few rebounders in the middle. This Leona always took two steps over the line. She wore too much perfume. Her lipstick was a shade brighter than she normally wore. Her hands trembled slightly, seemed to be forever reaching for the vodka bottle that (for the time being) was nowhere to be seen. Her laughter rose a few decibels above natural, giving her a high pitched neigh like a Humane Society mare, something constantly afraid and desperate.

The More-Determined Leona came round between light and dark periods and took charge of what needed to be managed, dug herself out of debt more than once, and dug her heels in to hold onto the little bit of the “good life” she had left. This Leona was always the shocker of jaw-dropping proportions. Months passed with her taking up drunken residence on the couch until, without the slightest warning, I would come home from school one day to a clean house. The laundry would be done, the bathroom reeking of Clorox, the kitchen simmering with the pungent aroma of fried food. I’d find Leona, fresh and clean, dressed in her best, looking, for all the world, as if this were her natural state. She sat with the stacks of bills and her check book, trying to make heads and tails of her balances, until she could sigh with relief. This Leona baked cookies and packed me neat little lunches with all my favorites. Her eyes said, “I’m sorry,” and her PBJ’s said, “You forgive me, right?”

The one constant was this High-Headed-Square-Shouldered Leona who’d stomp you beneath the thick heel of her black pumps long before you ever had the chance to think the word “defeat.” Her shadow prevailed upon this new Leona as she surveyed me surveying the room. There seemed to be little left of all her predecessors.

I wondered what Leona The Original must have been like. Who was she at, say, seventeen? What did she dream for her future self? Had she wanted a career? A perfect little house with a white picket fence? An adoring husband? Had she wanted children?

God, this was where it was all born, this house and this woman. This was my mother and looking into her piercing eyes I felt that fact hit my stomach like lead. I groped in my pocket for the other half of that magic mushroom but it was long gone.

Harmoni McGlothlin is an award winning screenwriter, and a sometimes fiction author, essayist, and occasional poet. Her work was the recipient of a 2007 Silver Telly award and she has been placed in numerous high-end competitions. She is also the author of the book Venus Laughs, a sexy collection of poetic works.

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No expression. No sorrow.

I spoke some more. My words flew
like a gazelle, over and under
your rocky hills.

It’s like a madhouse in here, you said,
plugging your ears.

My body spoke its tempo. Limbs curled,
attitude soul-less with negotiation. Still.
Where shamans speak of music, faith, deliverance

you and I are only skimming surfaces.
Like cups compared to oceans.
Spoons compared to floods.

The face of sunlight carries us along.
The exploration of moonlight
begs us down to sleep.

I dream and in my dreams I search
for the evidence of love
even if that love comes small as a button
on my bedtime dress.

If the story was marriage, if the story was
sacrifice, bodies clamoring
to be together, guided and shining-

yours moonlight, mine a lake,
love reflecting off my skin like gemstones.

Talk about separation.
I can’t remember the last time we spoke
of love or when desire changed its occupation.

I am sick, God damn it, of your mossy
tongue and quiet lips and covered ears
and careless hands dying in the dark pockets
of your coat instead of holding mine.

I don’t want your heart to be the place
I bury my shoes while you bypass mine
and walk on.

Lisa Zaran is an American poet, essayist and author of six collections. Current work can be found or is upcoming in A Little Poetry, Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), Juked and the anthology Not A Muse. She is the founder and editor of Contemporary American Voices.

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Writing can mean different things to different people, even to the same person at different times in life.  It’s not a new idea that writing can take one on a personal journey of self discovery, whether by journaling or meeting with a group of other people, but the practice of facilitating reading and writing specifically to improve health or wellbeing, on a 1 to 1 basis or in groups is gaining recognition.  There are art therapists, drama therapists and now  an increasing number of poetry/writing facilitators/therapists working in settings such as hospices, with the elderly, in mental health care, in prisons and more.  But you don’t have to be ill or distressed  to benefit  from  from writing.   Whether writing for fun, or writing to enable oneself to work through emotional difficulties there may be gains and doing so in a supportive group atmosphere can indeed improve our emotional health and, as a result our physical health. 

A word of caution though, sometimes writing may be  harmful if the writer has deep emotional problems or has been severely traumatised in the past.  This may not be apparent at the outset, therefore, the facilitator, must be skillfed at mananging  the situation and mindful that extra support may also be needed for the individual, whether it comes from someone working in health care, a partner or peer to talk over feelings that emerge. 

I have just joined and organisation called Lapidus that promotes an interest in healing and personal development through writing and reading,  http://lapidus.org.uk/ along with everyone that was on our course and I am very happy with the supportive atmosphere developed between us, enabling us to grow as a writers and individuals.  I also plan to start a group in my community in the near future and to do further trainng in this field.  I will keep you all updated.

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“I only want the bed,” he said.

We were standing in our bedroom; clip boards in hand, doing a room by room inventory of yours mine and don’t even think about it.

The bed itself is relatively new, the furniture, old - our first suite. Solid oak, stained with that baby diarrhea orange so popular in the 70’s that reminded me of making out in my mother’s kitchen surrounded by cabinets.

“It’s good quality,” I said, as I tried to convince him to take the matching bookcase in lieu of the stainless steel toaster.

“I hate the bedroom suite,” he said. We looked on at the expanse of Egyptian cotton masking it all. “I really only want the mattress,” he said.

The old mattress has breast milk and menstrual blood and semen and God only knows how many kids urine in its’ sad history.

“Take all of it or none of it,” I said.

The suite went under his column.

~

“Don’t get a mattress with memory foam,” my best friend, Joanna said. “It keeps you in the same position,” she continued, demonstrating by kinking her neck and contorting her hands. “And they make you sweat,” she said, settling back into her chair, knocking back her wine. “Memory Foam doesn’t breathe or something.”

It sounded exceedingly unpleasant and I made a mental note, along with the other mental notes that included dropping off our marriage certificate with my lawyer, providing him with a picture of Mark so he could be served and signing off my spousal rights. Child custody is to be joint. Visitation - liberal. Visitation. I poured us another glass of wine. Ixnay on the Memory Foamay.

I approached the big box mattress outlet with trepidation.

John, the salesman - a trusting name for a salesman, had a decent ass and the voice of the midnight DJ on Light Rock, Less Talk.

“It’s called the Kingsdon Calm,” he said, walking toward the display.

“Calm. I need calm,” I said, and smiled and John smiled and for a moment I thought we might skip hand in hand through mattress land.

“Is there any memory foam in The Calm?” I asked.

“Only in the pillow top,” John said, as if this discovery was akin to ketchup and fries, love and marriage. “It’s the best of both worlds. Advanced technology incorporates motionless spring coils with the comfort of … memory foam.” He patted the top

“Try it out,” he said, guiding me to the floor model as I slipped off my shoes and imagined slipping into bed with John who I noticed then, had far too effeminate hands for my liking. I closed my eyes and listened to him speak.

“That’s it,” John said, lowering his head as I lowered myself, down, down. “Can you feel that?” he asked. “Feel yourself sinking, sinking into the mattress? The memory foam adjusting itself to the contours of your body?”

And yes. Yes!! I did feel the memory foam! Joanna’s words popped like visions of growing old with Mark.

My new mattress would hold me, support me, cradle me in the fetal position I had so come to master. More importantly, a mattress with memory foam would bring new memories. Good ones.

I looked forward with anticipation to sleeping on my new mattress. I thought of new dreams to tell myself before I went to sleep, new songs to skate to in the Women’s Final Freestyle while wearing a costume of the most diaphanous of diaphanous blues.

The Calm arrived in splendor of vacuum seal and chunky delivery drivers.

“Where do you want it lady?” they asked.

“In my room,” I said.

On our first night together I dressed the bed in new sheets and lit candles. I wore my “I Heart New York,” t-shirt with no panties and thought somewhat of John with different hands before drifting off.

There were no new dreams.

There were creases on the side of my cheek and worry lines in the middle of my brow from dreams that did not leave with pieces of furniture in the back of a Dodge Ram extended cab. There was me in my sweat soaked t-shirt with a wrinkled and crumpled heart.

I lay on my new mattress and wondered how many more mornings there would be before my dreams became part of my future, and not part of my past - wondered if I would read in my new bed, nurse a sick child or watch movies and if some days I would bury my head in its’ motionless spring coils and scream or cry. I wondered if I would share my bed with anyone other than my children and this wonder became a memory and the chance for more.

Patricia Parkinson lives in British Columbia, Canada with her two kids. Patricia’s work has appeared in various publications online and in print. One day she will finish her novel and quit smoking and go to the gym. Today she is raking leaves.

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The doorbell rang and her mother’s voice rang as well. “She’s here! Darling, where are you? Stephanie is here!”

Footsteps clamored down the stairs and through the living room to the front door. It squeaked open, a flaw her father planned never to fix; it alerted to burglars and rapists and other ne’er-do-wells.

Her mother’s voice bounced through the house and her father’s contributed an undertone of bass notes. Tracey couldn’t hear her sister.

They shuffled through the house and entered the kitchen. Their mother continued her breathless chatter. “I’m so glad you’re here. It just hasn’t been the same without you these past years. Tracey is about to make the apple pie. You should help her.”

She pushed Stephanie toward the table. Stephanie tripped forward and caught herself on the back of the chair. She nodded at Tracey.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” Tracey folded the towel into a neat square.

“The turkey’s in the oven. I made the stuffing you like, Stephanie.” Their mother circled the kitchen, picking up dirty bowls and utensils, and depositing them in the sink.

Tracey unfolded the dishtowel and wrapped it around her fingers until her knuckles turned white. She looked up and saw that Stephanie’s knuckles were white against the dark chair as well.

“Your father made a vegetable casserole. The doctor said he needs more fruit and vegetables to help get his cholesterol down. He eats more of them but I don’t think all the desserts help. Anyway, that’s staying warm in the top oven. I actually need to call your aunt right now. I’ll go do that in the bedroom. Darling, come with me.”

She left the kitchen and their father remained in the center of the room. His hands hung still, like they wanted something to carry, to do. He stepped forward to hug Stephanie and kiss her on her head. He patted Tracey’s hand before following his wife upstairs.

Silence collapsed into the room like baked crust rolled too thin. Tracey plucked at a thread on the edge of the frayed towel and unraveled the strand until it pulled free. Stephanie slid the chair away from the table and sat down. She pushed up her sleeves; fresh tattoos covered her forearms.

“I can’t believe Mom still has those towels,” Stephanie said.

“Yup.”

“Didn’t she get those on the trip to Florida? I was ten and you were, what, eight?”

“I was seven.”

Stephanie nodded. “Right, seven. So, need any help?”

“Sure.” Tracey picked up an apple and dried it with the towel. She held it out to Stephanie; her manicured fingernails flashed in the light. “You can slice off the skin and then I’ll cut them up.”

Stephanie took the apple. Her fingers brushed Tracey’s and both jerked their hands away.

“Sounds good.”

They continued without speaking, the only noises the squeak of the towel over the apples and the crunch of the serrated knife sliding under the skin. Tracey dried the apples carefully to remove all moisture. She knew that Stephanie cut the skin quick and haphazard with the aim of creating a single spiral and didn’t want her slick apples to be the cause of a trip to the emergency room. Tracey stacked the dry apples next to the bowl.

“So, how’ve you been?” Stephanie chanced.

“Like you give a shit.”

“Why are you such a bitch?”

“Why are you?”

Stephanie paused the knife under the skin.

They stared at each other and the silence entered the room again. Tracey noticed that she couldn’t hear her mother’s loud voice upstairs. Stephanie opened and closed her mouth a few times but no words came out. She didn’t look hurt; she appeared more surprised at Tracey’s bluntness.

Stephanie spoke first. “Don’t give me that attitude. I’m trying to help here.”

“Don’t give you – what? Whatever. Fine, help. Just don’t act like everything’s okay ’cause it’s not.”

“Fine.”

“Just ’cause you come home one year, for one holiday, it doesn’t fix anything.”

“Fine.” Stephanie gritted her teeth.

“You know Mom’s okay with it and Dad probably is to, but I’m not and –”

“I said fine!” Stephanie slammed her hand holding the apple onto the table. The knife fell free and clattered against the floor, coming to a stop inches from Tracey’s bare feet. Tracey raised an eyebrow at her sister and her lips pursed as she glanced down. She picked up the knife, put it in the sink, and handed Stephanie a clean one.

Tracey sat down, dried the last apple, and placed it at the top of the pyramid. She pushed the bowl to the side of the table and slid a cutting board in front of her. She had to wait for Stephanie to finish skinning the apple. She always had to wait for Stephanie.

Strands of hair fell from Stephanie’s ponytail and poked her eyes. She brushed them away with the back of her hand, the one with the knife. Tracey winced as the blade moved in front of her sister’s face.

“Let me,” she said. Tracey stood up, walked around the table, and grabbed Stephanie’s ponytail.

“What are you doing?” Stephanie spun in her chair to look at Tracey; her ponytail twisted out of Tracey’s grip.

“I’m trying to fix your hair so it doesn’t fall in your face. Calm down.”

Tracey turned her sister’s head forward and pulled the elastic from the ponytail. Stephanie’s hair spiraled out, longer than she remembered. She pulled the elastic around her right wrist and gathered the hair in her hands.

She considered choosing a single strand of hair and pulling. That’s what Stephanie used to do. The smallest things caused the most pain. Stephanie stiffened. Tracey tugged lightly at the ponytail and Stephanie relaxed, smirked.

“Don’t have it in you, huh?”

“Nope.”

Tracey smoothed the hair a few times more until her hands captured every strand. Holding the ponytail with her right hand, she pulled the elastic off her wrist and around Stephanie’s hair. She folded the elastic over itself three times, released the ponytail, and returned to her chair.

“Thanks.”

Tracey shrugged. She fixed her own ponytail and then accepted the skinned apple from her sister. The white flesh glowed and felt firm and solid in Tracey’s hand. She placed the apple in the center of the cutting board and rested the slicer on top. With both hands she pushed down and the blades separated eight slices from the core. She tossed the slices into the bowl and pushed the core to the edge of the cutting board.

Tracey and Stephanie continued to work in silence. The night had fallen fast and the only light in the kitchen came from the lamp over their heads. They looked so young, their bowed heads and high ponytails silhouetted against the dark window. As little girls they pretended to bake with Play-doh and plastic cookie cutters. Now they baked with real food and sharp knives, and kept pretending.

Jillian Taylor is a writer from King of Prussia, PA. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Rosemont College in Rosemont, PA. Her other short fiction has been published in Short Fiction World and Menda City Review, and is forthcoming at NO POSIT. She is currently at work on her first novel about an assassin who can no longer kill.

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Believe me when I say
I am infected with memories
of happiness, tiny instances
whose translation is merely
to suggest that I, too, was once
a happy person.

As so happens,
anyone who tries to get to the heart
of happiness, moment by moment,
will find that most of life’s happy times
are filled with daily conversations,
forgotten words that echo through
the framework of time.

Some so far gone, that even the most
joyful time in life can indeed
contribute to the bulk of one’s sadness.
Ah, happy times. Good times,
people claim.

As I sit, pouring through my smiles,
trying to find the one that suits me best.

Lisa Zaran is an American poet, essayist and author of six collections. Current work can be found or is upcoming in A Little Poetry, Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), Juked and the anthology Not A Muse. She is the founder and editor of Contemporary American Voices.

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Continued in January

Ann Tinkham is a writer based in Boulder, Colorado. She has coauthored a nonfiction book, Climbing Mountains in Stilettos (SourceBooks, 2007). Her fiction has appeared in All Things Girl, Apt, Dark Sky, Double Dare Press, Edifice Wrecked, Hiss Quarterly, Lily, Miranda, MotherVerse, Scruffy Dog Review, Short Story Library, Slow Trains, Stone Table Review, Syntax, The Battered Suitcase, Thirst for Fire, Toasted Cheese, Wild Violet, Word Riot, and Writethis.com. Website: http://boulderbadgirls.com/

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Yellow leaves illuminate the skies.
All colors blaze like fireflies.
Forked shadows fly south with triumphant cries,
While trees are set afire by the new sunrise

Frost glazes the grass, strand by strand.
It shimmers to turn the morning grand.
Flowers attempt one final stand
Before winter sweeps through the crispy land

Leaves crunch stridently from there to here.
Velvet antlers adorn the elegant deer,
That watch with wary eyes and one cupped ear
Grazing happily in a field quite near.

Corn stalks are brittle and ready to go
As the wind rattles the leaves you start to know,
That they better gather it before it snows.
Waiting orderly in crisp, even rows.

Leave drop and transform to brown
When they fall off the trees barren crown
To swathe the ground in an aromatic gown
That extends all over town.

The sun sets and temperatures drop.
Steamy clouds of breath rise to a top.
Prancing is echoed by hooves that clop
As the farmers prepare to harvest their crop.

Apple cider fizzes, spices afire.
Pine trees ready to shed a spire.
Black birds line up on a wire
As leaves crinkle under a tire.

The wind blows through, bearing a chill.
Corncobs are dry enough to visit the mill
There are hollows all around that leaves fill
And apple pies rest cooling on a sill.

The leaves all descend to the ground.
To be raked into a vast mound
Anywhere there is foliage to be found.
Apples weakened by the wind become downed

Pumpkins blaze, carved with care,
Resting out on a terrace stair.
My evenings are spent with a coffee-colored mare,
As we prepare to use our wintry weather wear.

Then, the snow arrives in a flurry of flakes
All of us put up our rakes
Ice creeps across ponds and lakes
As the winter tundra wakes.

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She keeps waiting and waiting
For something, anything to change
To shake up the day after day after day
The same exact day as the day before
Wanting life to be different
For her to be different
Yet change too, seems paralyzed

She is terrified that this is it
This is all she will ever be
That nothing will change
That she won’t change
That she will never be that woman again
The one that was interesting, interested
The one that he loved

That woman he was drawn to, energized by
Yet wanted to take care of
Is long gone, buried underneath
The weight of life, of uncontrolled change
That silenced her, yet fed her anger
That woman was a partner, an equal
That woman used to be her

That woman was present, was there
In the moment, every day with him
She knew, she knew even back then
To cherish the time the days and the nights
To cherish that woman and all that she was
When life was good
When she was that woman

Seana Duncan is a full time paralegal desperately trying to get out of litigation and find a way to make a living reading and writing. She lives in San Ramon, California with her husband and two children and hopes to escape the suburbs for the big city one day.

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“Don’t be ridiculous, she always stays in your room,” replied Susan trying to keep her voice calm.

“Well it’s time that stopped.”

“How can you be so unkind to your Gran?”

“‘scuse me! But how can you be so unkind? She’s your responsibility. Not mine. What’s the difference of you moving out of your room and me moving out of mine? Anyway every time she comes she goes through my things.”

“Don’t be silly. She’s not like that.” Susan hesitated, ‘surely not,’ she thought.

“I think I’d know. She goes through all my clothes. Anyway I’m not moving out. I need my space, especially when you two start watching all that mush on TV.”

“And I’m not having you dictate to me what will happen in my house.”

“It’s not just your house. It’s dad’s too! You’ve driven him away and if you don’t stop being such a bitch I’ll go. I’d rather live with him anyway!” Terri slammed out of the room.

Susan held her head in her hands and a curtain of her blonde hair swung forward. She knew she had not handled that well and on reflection she could see Terri’s point of view. She didn’t want to give up her space either and she didn’t feel like Christmas. Susan, sat there nursing her coffee, but the warmth of the mug brought little comfort.

“Of course,” Terri said sticking her head round the door, “We could turn the dining room into a room for Gran. Now there will only be three of us for Christmas lunch we can eat in here. I’ll move the table and chairs to the side of the room and you can get the chair bed from the front room.”

Susan was about to object when she realized this was actually a very plausible idea. They set to work and soon the chair bed was set up and made and one of the dining room chairs was being used as a bedside table. The rest of the room was rearranged so that the furniture was all on the other side allowing plenty of room to walk around. Terri rearranged the contents of the dresser so that there was space for her Gran to put her clothes and then they decorated the room with bright Christmas decorations.

Christmas Eve came and Gran arrived.

“You’re in here Gran,” Terri said pushing open the door to the brightly decorated room.

“Oh thank you for being so thoughtful. My arthritis does make your stairs so painful. This is just perfect. It’s so good that you have a downstairs bathroom.”

Susan breathed a sigh of relief. She had thought about not inviting Gran for Christmas but then she would have been on her own and it wasn’t Gran’s fault that she and Barry had split up. They had a quiet evening catching up on each other’s news.

Christmas morning dawned, cold but bright. Everyone tried to be cheerful but the house was quiet without Barry and they were all feeling the gap. They unwrapped their presents and Susan disappeared to the kitchen to get on with the meal. It was ridiculous that she was doing a full Christmas meal for just the three of them, but she didn’t want to admit that her world had changed.

Eating in the kitchen was cosy. Terri had decorated the table with crackers and napkins and Susan produced masses of food. They toasted each other with a small glass of wine and then settled to a companiable quiet as they ate their meal.

Suddenly there was a knock on the door and then it opened. Barry stood there with a few beautifully wrapped presents. Susan was about to ask him what he thought he was playing at when Terri leapt up and gave him a bear hug.

“Oh Daddy, I’ve missed you.” Susan hadn’t heard Terri use the word daddy for several years. These days it was usually dad. His deep brown puppy dog eyes framed with those thick lashes, looked at her plaintively.

“Oh ok. Go and get your father a plate Terri. You’d best go and get yourself a chair Barry,” and as he left the room she slipped the wine bottle in the fridge and placed a fresh glass and some lemonade near the vacant space. Gran looked at the bottle without commenting and helped herself to a few more sprouts.

“Happy Christmas son,” she said when he carried the chair into the room and Barry bent and kissed her.

Terri came to life and told her dad all about their Christmas preparations and her idea for Gran to have the dining room.

“Yes it’s been lovely. The only thing I miss is when I stayed in your room, Terri, I used to tidy up your clothes like I did when you were a toddler. Do you remember being sent up to tidy your room and we used to do it together? But I guess you’re too grown up for that now anyway.”

Susan could see the look on Terri’s face of, ‘So that’s what Gran had been doing.’ She gave her daughter a secret smile.

“Course I remember Gran. You’ve always been great. I’m so glad we’re all here together.”

The meal was surprisingly pleasant. At one point Barry went to the fridge and brought back the bottle of wine. Susan was about to explode when she felt Gran’s tissue paper hand give hers a squeeze. Barry topped up his mother’s glass and then Susan’s.

“What about me?” asked Terri.

“I thought we might share the lemonade,” he said putting the bottle back in the fridge.

“Oh ok.”

“Well that was a lovely meal. Thank you so much for letting me stay. It’s pretty bleak in my bedsit.”

“You shouldn’t be in a bedsit. You should be here. If she hadn’t kicked you out we’d all be happy again,” and Terri sent her mother a look of almost hatred.

There was silence.

“You need to tell her Barry. She’s old enough,” said Gran.

Barry went white. He took a deep breath. “Your mum has been an absolute saint.” He took another breath and then looked at Terri straight in the eye. “I’m an alcoholic. I’ve messed up so many times, lost jobs, failed to go to your school performances, spent money we couldn’t afford and kept dragging us down.”

“You’re not. You’re not. You’re not violent or aggressive. You’re nothing like Phil Mitchell in Eastenders.”

Barry smiled, “Not all alcoholics are violent. Some are. Some, like me, just cause mayhem, disrupt all the careful plans couples have. We were going to have two children, but your mum had to go out to work and pay off my debts. She gave me one last chance about ten times.”

“You should’ve told me,” Terri said turning towards Susan.

“How could I? He was your hero. Always. But you are my baby and I wanted to protect you.” A tear slipped down her cheek.

Suddenly Terri was giving her a bear hug.

“So many things make sense now. I should’ve seen,” Terri said.

“No, neither of us wanted you to see.” Barry replied. “I want you all to know that I’ve not had any alcohol for 3 months and eight days. That’s one day after your mother finally came to her senses and said enough is enough. I know I’ve blown it with your mum, but I still want to be a good dad to you and I know the only way I can do that is by not drinking.”

“That’s a good achievement, son,” said Gran. “I’m very proud of you. Now I think we should go into the front room and open the presents your dad’s brought us.”

Barry passed round his presents and Gran and Terri gave him theirs. Susan went quietly to the cupboard behind the television and took out a wrapped parcel.

“It’s nothing much, so don’t get excited,” she said as she handed Barry his present.

“I didn’t expect anything. Thank you.” It was a book by his favourite author.

Later Barry insisted on doing the washing up and disappeared to the kitchen. After he’d been gone just a few minutes Susan started to worry about the wine in the fridge. She made the excuse of going to make some tea and left Gran and Terri watching some dreadful old film. Terri grimaced at her as she left the room but Susan just smiled.

In the kitchen Barry was immersed in a pile of plates and washing up liquid.

“I’ve just come to make some tea.”

“You’ve come to check up on me and I don’t blame you. Let’s not start lying to each other now. If I thought there was any chance for us, I’d suggest that if I could stay off drink for a year, you let me come home. But there isn’t any chance is there?”

“I cannot live with a drunk.”

“I know that. I couldn’t believe it when you kicked me out. I always thought you’d be there to sort out all my mess. It was the best thing you could ever have done for me. And then it hit me. I’d chucked away everything, everyone I love.”

Susan knew that this was one of her life’s crossroads. If she took him back he might start drinking again, but she still loved him and Terri was not the only one who pined for him.

‘All life is a gamble,’ she thought and then she took the step that would change their lives for better or worse. “You can come home now, but if one drop of alcohol touches your lips you’ll be back out so quickly you won’t know what’s hit you. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” he said solemnly.

“I’ve missed you so much,” Susan said holding out her arms.

Barry leapt over to her and let out a scream of delight as he lifted her into the air and twirled her round.
Gran and Terri rushed to the kitchen to see what the noise was and saw the joy on two faces.

“Come on Gran,” Terri said linking her arm. “Time for us to open the chocolates and watch a mushy film.”

“Or we could watch one of your DVDs. I’d like to keep up to date with what my lovely granddaughter enjoys.”

Penny Luker is the editor for the writings section at ATG. She writes poems and short stories. Her first book, “Missing and other short stories” is published by Lulu. Her poems have been published in two anthologies recently.
Visit her website to read more of her work. Web:http://www.thewritingroom.fastmail.fm

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But when the moisture plummets
from the covered clouds
she speaks.

Her words are fragile
like a bed of heightened tulips
within a whirlwind.

She removes
the heart covered duvet
when she’s red,
like the golden rays
breaking through the gray day,
her heart blooms
with a garden.

Silvi Saxena is currently an undergraduate student at the Pennsylvania State University pursuing a BS degree in Human Development and a minor in English with a creative writing emphasis. Though originally from the Washington D.C. area, she currently resides in State College, PA and attends The Pennsylvania State University. She wishes to one day write a nonfiction book and travel the world promoting it.

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