TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue 17


Boggs Curry Fiction Contest Winners


Chital Mehta – First Place
Damaged Gifts
View .PDF

William Luvaas – Runner-Up
It Runs in the Family
View .PDF


Fiction

Dante DelBene
Estuary

Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi
Pasture Statues

Troy Pottgen
Happy Hunting

Douglas Steward
Electronic Alchemy

Lenny Levine
What’s in a Name?

Jon Fotch
Bumblebee

Ashley Anderson
Zipper Pulls

Mark Pearce
The Ultimate Christmas Story

John Fretts
Cellar

Robert Granader
Are You My Son?

Maria Wickens
Gangster of Love


Poetry


Sandra Newton
Permanence

Richard T. Rauch
Worth a Lyric

J. Tarwood
When Rain Falls

Rick Kuenning
Things to Love

Sandra Newton
Nothing Lasts Forever

George HS Singer
Training For You

Emma DePanise
Northern Flicker

Anne Dyer Stuart
Facts at Thirteen

George HS Singer
Setting, Salving

Umiemah Farrukh
what is a friend?

Peter Money
A Tree, You Know

Umiemah Farrukh
Merisda

Megan McCormick
A Shape

J. R. Forman
robin

Barbara Schweitzer
Perfect Exchange

Margaret B. Ingraham
On Daylight Savings

Laine Derr
Wild Primrose

Margot Wizansky
Pierogies

Megan McCormick
Sayable Things

Joseph D. Milosch
Rim of Darkness

Rick Kuenning
Monotheist

Kasha Martin Gauthier
Suburban Scarlett

Robin Reagler
Perhaps
The Thread

Ricardo Moran
It Felt Like a Wednesday

Caleb Coy
Remedy For My Mind

Stephen J. Dempsey, Jr.
Of Your Memory

Eric Machan Howd
Through Screens

Mary Warren Foulk
September Survival

J. Scott Price
Crickets

Paula C. Brancato
The Dark

Matt Schumacher
The Scarecrows on Old Mill Road

George HS Singer
Ernestine’s Color Wheel

Allen Strous
Cauldron

Mark Brazaitis
Ice
A Lake in Michigan

Marte Carlock
Painting the Window Sill

Bertha Rogers
No More

Bruce E. Whitacre
Good Housekeeping

Doug Bolling
Where We Are

Paul Hostovsky
The Curiosity Factor

Paul Hostovsky
The Story of the World

Susan Sonde
A Tragedy’s Brewing

Lee Peterson
Cases of Disease

Susan Sonde
Exiles in Winter

Victoria Ketterer
Hometown

Emma DePanise
Pitch

J. Scott Price
Seeking Something

Rand Cardwell
Little Tree

Mikal Wix
Sleepwalking Through E-Block

Robin Reagler
The Dead Stalk Us

Lee Clark Zumpe
indigo blue

Bertha Rogers
Spring and All That

Umiemah Farrukh
Anxiety in My Mind

Hannah Jane Weber
Pancakes

Barbara Schweitzer
The Sweetness Is


Creative Nonfiction

Tamara Adelman
Carson

Kelsey Brogan Fiander-Carr
Don’t Eat, Then

Darius Brown
Interview with Deesha Philyaw


Text and Image


Angus Woodward
Alien Abduction

Joseph Craft
Reflections

 

POETRY


Sandra Newton
PERMANENCE

The bloom of the hydrangea may be more breathtaking
And lush in its multiple fullness,
The peaches more fragrant and heavy
As they drag the branch down toward the dark, moist earth;
The jays and doves that come with ruffled wings,
Only recently awakened from shells, with unsteady gait,
And the butterflies who need multiple attempts
Before they can sip enough nectar
And flutter off with footprints of pollen:
Beautiful and exciting notes
To tell nature’s story,
But transient,
Caught by a scanning eye,
Or only remembered from a past day.
Real nature is in the unseen germinating seed,
In the fruit’s ovarian pit that harbors life,
In the fragile eggs coddled and warmed in tree-blind nests,
And in the sticky-webbed cocoons where
Ugly, prickly-haired caterpillars dream of beauty.
We are allowed only a moment’s glance
Before all goes underground
To a restless sleep,
Waiting for the dawn.

 

J. Tarwood
When Rain Falls

(After Udiel)

To deny water is to deny your soul.

I shelter from time under
the balcony. Sleep’s
for memory. October
always has the melancholy
of anesthetized hours, humid
caresses without haste. To deny water is to deny our instincts,
fleeing words rooted in dirt. cursing
rather than blessing mud. To deny water is to deny your soul,
annihilating the shielding shadow. Years have freed me
from the phony quiescence of Spring.
Surrendering my solitude
as a sentinel, I give

myself to the rain falling on my face.

 

Emma DePanise
Northern Flicker

When I think of woodpeckers, I think of you
because what persistence, what sound.
Because I thought a neighbor nailing
and found instead this feathered frame
drumming a gutter and you are always
that surprise, sky-flecked and maroon. Because I will spend my whole
life forest-wide reverberating shapeless, foraging
through carving empty spaces. Because each rhythm
and hollowed-out home is yours. I give them
to you. Because we both know how to hold
the smallest excavations.

Megan McCormick
Sayable Things

There is a word for a dune
as if it is a single thing,
which is to say that what we call things
is often make believe
for what we want them to be. Ask any of the grains that have fallen
one on another, whether this year
or the last, and they will tell you that
one day the wind moved
and the grain moved with it,
and this is where it stopped
and the wind carried on. Which is to say that a dune
is a lot of things falling
together in their nows
without palms shaping them into a word
they need meet. Ask the snow that sits upon it now,
are you part of the dune
or are you part of the ocean? There is a word for a body,
as if when you trail your fingers
along your skin, the aches you hold inside
aren’t their own living things,
stories that replay each night
like they’re a carousel. As if when you stand,
the weight of a thousands words unsaid
doesn’t pool at the ankles,
bubble into heat tossed
at smaller, more sayable things.

There is a word for anger, too.

Robin Reagler
Perhaps

Hurricane Harvey, 2017

As the power gave out, the generator kicked in
As rain fell, I felt her ghost escaping through a window
Vanishing into green dusk
As the pet dog found its inner watch dog
I dragged both mutts across the mushy field of weeds
Helicopters buzzing above, filming us
And the rain fell and continued falling
In an endless loop of rainfall
And I honestly wondered if perhaps it wouldn’t end If perhaps I should open my mouth
Wide to catch it as it came down and down At night I never slept
There was nothing to be done
When we made love it was more about fear
And placing a barrier between ourselves
And the future which had become THE FUTURE
As I catalogued the details of the real
As real as the hand that glides into her
As real as the mouth that takes her on these shores
And with waves crashing down upon us I told her
A story
A story about simple times
A story erasing the story I believed was true
Because believing came down to this
And only this:
We are wind swept

 

Robin Reagler
The Thread

I used to be somebody’s daughter.
When sadness threatens to take me down, the rituals
kick in. I begin
by walking it out.
Sadness, the thread,
I, the spool. I walk to breathe
I breathe to think
I think to write
I write to love Sunshine hits metal
The brightness, blinding I want you to understand how I feel
[We pause inside this poem together]

Paula C. Brancato
The Dark

A lion sits on the golden stones of a building in Caltigirone.
A fiery Mediterranean sun sets.
I hold my daughter’s hand or did then. Why do people die?

The long days of Covid – I want to know.

In the piazza, water flows from the gargoyle’s head with the bitterness of iron.

The violinist sits in moonlight, in a white shirt,
his music
braille, as the fountain bubbles
like a player piano.
A tendu, she places the tips of her fingers into the palms of her lover,
rises en pointe,
pirouettes in darkness.

 

Mark Brazaitis
Ice

The first thing she’s going to do, she told me,
well, the first thing after the necessary things
like checking in with her parole officer,
like applying for a driver’s license,
like seeing if the clothes in her bedroom closet still fit,
which they might because, in the past month,
nervous about leaving (though it’s all
she’s wanted to do since she arrived),
she hasn’t eaten much more
than her fingernails, yes, the first thing she’s going to do
is find her figure skates. Her mother won’t have thrown them away.
Her mother has saved everything-broken Barbies,
elementary-school report cards, ancient drawings
painted colorfully, cheerfully, between the lines-
because she couldn’t save her daughter. She knows what world she’ll meet outside.
On job applications, she’ll check a box.
No bank will give her a loan.
Every man she dates will wonder, and some will ask,
Did you do it?-the crime-and, Did you…
you know…do it with one of…?
She’ll be out of prison
and forever a prisoner. There’s a pond behind her mother’s house,
If February is as cold as it was a decade ago,
it will be frozen.
She’ll skate like she’s a satellite
streaking around the sun.
She’ll jump like she’s a rocket to Mars.
If the ice is weak, the water she’ll crash into
couldn’t be any colder, or more terrifying,
than her first night in her cell
when she woke to a darkness
that would only have been merciful
if it had been complete.

 

Marte Carlock
Painting The Window Sill

I was painting the window sill
a mosquito lit in the wet paint
there was no saving her even if I wanted to
she had no way of knowing how or why
that place once safe had changed I guess the cosmos works like that
where sometimes for reasons unexplained
rash decisions yield happy consequences
and routine ones are fatal.

 

Robin Reagler
The Dead Stalk Us

Someone is following you tonight, but fret
Not. It’s just my mom on the haunt.
She left all her sneakiness behind
When she died. If you listen
Closely, her footsteps chime, there’s data
In every echo. Walk as though
You are asleep, whisper love songs
To yourself, and you’ll be fine.
Neighbors are taking turns trailing you
Both, making sure you’re safe.
Overhead there’s an astronaut orbiting
Planet Earth. Let that be me,
Magnetized to you both, as I truly am.
Now you glide Into the open
Field, hands deep in the pockets of your
Dress. You want so much
To turn around, offer her an arm to steady
Her in her trek, but that can’t
Be. So instead you look for the bird
Nest that is her obituary, the willow
Tree that is her legacy, and into the sky. Please
Know that I am up here, half
To blame for my own phantom madness,
Drowsy with passion I never knew was
Mine, keeping my desire a secret, even
From myself. From the sky,
The blurring shapes sharpen.
My dead mom winds her way
Through these nights. Shelter her
Until she’s ready to move on.

FICTION

Douglas Steward
Electronic Alchemy

It was tantalizing to behold, the boulder-sized glob of yellow- ish-orange stone, illuminated by the dappled sunlight in my driveway. My sixteen-year-old, Luke, helped Dr. Jurcik carry it inside to my home office. My bliss ended abruptly when Luke hastily deposited the monstrosity on my credenza, resulting in a loud “clunk.” “Try not to scratch the furniture,” I said. “It’s all I have to bequeath you when I die.” He shrugged. “Dad said I could have the leather couch in his apart- ment. That sounds like a better investment.” “Thirty-five pounds of gold,” Dr. Emil Jurcik said. “That comes out to a value of approximately one million dol- lars. Think of how many desks you could buy with that amount of money.” Luke’s eyebrows shot up. “Mom, that’s more than the money you lost on those stock options.” “Let’s not broach that subject right now,” I said. “What you see here used to be electronic waste,” Dr. Jurcik said. “Computer parts, old VCRs, cell phones. That sort of thing.” “And now it’s gold?” Luke said. “How’d you manage that?” “That’s what I’m here to talk with your mother about, young man.” “Whatever you do, don’t leave her alone with it,” Luke said. “Goodbye, Luke.” I shooed him out into the hallway, then turned my attention to my new client, Dr. Jurcik. When I began my practice as an intellectual property attorney, I chose to work remotely from home. It gave me time to pursue other interests and set my own time schedule. And all I had to do was put up advertise- ments on the Internet and the inventors came calling. That’s how Dr. Jurcik found me. He was willing to drive all the way from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, to do it. I was en- amored by the way he rolled his r’s at the end of a word, such as vaterrrr instead of water. It was disarming. “This will shift the paradigm of environmentalism, our economic fu- ture, and stun the scientific community around the world,” he’d told me over the phone. I hear that sort of thing a lot. Inventors are great boasters. Dr. Jurcik turned out to fit the bill as a prototypical Hollywood stereo- type of an Eastern European professor. Small in stature, salt-and-pepper mustache. Apt to lose his glasses on top of his head. I offered him a cup of coffee at my kitchen table. “I didn’t think they gave out degrees in alchemy anymore, at least not since the Middle Ages,” I said. “A very narrow field, I’ll admit,” Dr. Jurcik said. He took a sip and asked for a spoonful of sugar. “You need a diverse background to become credentialed,” he said. “I have advanced degrees in chemistry and metallurgy. And I’ve also made an extensive study of the Late Medieval period in Europe.” “You’ve studied history?” “Most of the important scholarly work in alchemy takes place then. That is, until King Henry IV of England made it a felony in the year 1404. Most alchemists don’t believe this is binding anymore. Especially in the United States.” “You have anything to substantiate your claims? I’ll need to see a mar- ketable process before we can proceed.” He rooted around in a well-worn briefcase, then pulled out some dog- eared papers. “You can indeed turn lead into gold these days. All you need is a particle accelerator, an endless supply of energy, and a terrific amount of lead. You end up with such a minuscule amount of gold that it’s not economically viable.” “But you have something better?” “Ah, yes. Electronic waste, we have an unlimited supply of it. Twenty million tons is disposed of worldwide every day. Only a tiny percentage gets recycled. The rest of it sits in landfills, poisoning our groundwater by leaking substances such as mercury, cadmium, and lead.” “Electronic waste?” “E-waste for short. I’m talking about computer motherboards, key- boards, DVD players. LCD televisions that no one wants anymore. That’s the real magic here. We need a lot of it to produce a single ounce of gold, but fortunately we have a lot to work with.” “Sounds like you could become very wealthy doing this.” Dr. Jurcik secured his eyeglasses on his nose. He looked me straight in the eyes. “Beyond your wildest dreams,” he said. “That’s why the alche- mists of old were so enthusiastic about it.” I made copies of his notes, gave him some standard legal forms to sign. He climbed back into his Subaru wagon and departed. I made a quick scan of his research papers. The whole thing seemed preposterous. He didn’t segregate the materials. According to his notes, he just dumped the whole mess into an apparatus he had developed and flipped the switch. Still, I was enamored. Luke caught me examining the golden nugget in my office, tapping on the side of it and listening for an echo. “Are you considering biting it to see if it’s real?” “I would if I could get my mouth around it.” The chunk of gold captured my imagination. I ignored the stack of pa- perwork that spilled over in my inbox. It could keep until later in the day. Instead I found myself returning to the Internet forums, reading inflated opinions on how this particular stock is over-margined or another has garnered way too much short interest. There were opportunities galore out there if only I had the capital to purchase some options contracts. If I can find some way to leverage this immense dome of precious metal, I could get back on track, I thought. The giant dollop of gold sitting on my desk rightfully belonged to Dr. Jurcik. He did say he might pledge it as perhaps a down payment on legal fees. That meant I had a claim on the gold, at least in the broadest view of the law. The rest of my Saturday was ruined as far as accomplishing anything constructive. Try as I might, I couldn’t concentrate on work. I kept turn- ing around in my chair and checking on the massive blob on my creden- za. Maybe it was just the lighting or my fertile imagination, but I could swear that thing moved. I told Luke to get his things together after dinner, I would drive him over to his father’s apartment building. Neil and I separated two years ago, just when Luke was developing into a teenager. That time was fraught for all of us. If Luke was affected by the shuttling back and forth between our marital home and Neil’s apartment every week, he didn’t show it. I would have liked more time with him but Neil forbade it. Something about me being a less than positive influence on our son. Neil described our marriage as one big chemical reaction, a process that converts two or more substances into something completely new. He’s a biologist so he says irritating things like that. I argued with him that the original elements are still there, lurking just below the surface. I was flummoxed when he agreed with me and suggested a trial sep- aration. Just like Neil to use my own words against me. I made myself my normal Monday morning cup of coffee, mahogany black right out of the French press, with a hint of sugar tossed in. Still in my slippers, I traipsed into the office, prepared to tackle some legal briefs. Maybe take a break by 9 a.m. to peruse the financial forums. I’d forgotten about the large mound of reconstituted e-waste on my credenza. The sight of it caused me to let go of my coffee mug. The black, inky coffee spilled along the cracks and divots in the wood floor all the way to the area rug under my desk. The giant rock of precious metal had lost its golden hue and darkened to a rainy-day gray. Worse, it had begun to warp and deteriorate. Its once oval shape now resembled a mountain- side where half had been blown off by a geothermal explosion. It was melting, right there on top of my credenza. I could see the outline of a computer keyboard sticking out of the top of the brackish mound. It peeked out, gray and misshapen, looking for a way to escape. I summoned all my courage and touched the crested butte of gray. It felt rough and plasticky, like the square bin where I kept my old LP collection. I regretted not checking on it that Sunday. But Sunday was my day to do absolutely nothing, to recline on my sofa in a T-shirt and running shorts and catch up on episodes of Billions. Neil usually took Luke to church. Good for him. I frantically tried Dr. Jurcik on my cell. An automated voice told me that his voicemail was full. He probably never bothered to retrieve his messages. As intimidating as that molten gray dune of lava was, I decid- ed to push on with my work that morning and then catch up with Dr. Jurcik later the next day. I mopped the coffee off the floor. I even ate a tuna sandwich in front of the gray menace while I perused some intraday trading charts. “Who am I kidding, looking at this stuff?” I confessed to the sinister mound of circuitry behind me. “This is how I went broke in the first place!” It glared back at me. I decided to ask Luke to carry it out to the garage on Wednesday, when he was scheduled to return from his father’s apartment. By Tuesday morning a large portion of the gray blob had dripped off the credenza and onto the floor. What looked like a melting motherboard pooled on the floor, capaci- tors and PCI slots erupting up from the sludge. A river of wires and plas- tic parts meandered past solid-steel desk legs, oozing into the crevices between the wood planks. The dull-gray mass of coagulation threw off an acrid, pungent odor. I was afraid it might burrow right through the floor into the basement, not stopping until it had tunneled straight to China. I spent the day rescuing my files and relocating them to Luke’s bed- room upstairs. Then Luke surprised me by showing up that afternoon after school. “I thought you weren’t returning until tomorrow.” “Can’t I stop by for a snack and to see my favorite mother?” “You’re here to see the gold.” “Of course I am,” he said, grabbing two Oreos from the kitchen cab- inet. “I have to warn you, things have changed.” “You found a way to spend it already?” he said, finishing off the cook- ies in one smooth motion. He opened the door to my office and stood there, mouth agape, black cookie crumbles clinging to his teeth. “What’s this? And what happened to my golden college fund?” “I don’t know. It’s somehow reverted back to its essential elements.” “No, this is something new. And hideous.” “That’s why you’ll be staying at your father’s until I get this situation resolved.” I couldn’t risk his prolonged exposure to it. For all I knew it was emit- ting carcinogenic vapors. He tapped the gray motherboard on the floor with his shoe. “It’s like we’re living inside that movie about the killer globule, The Thing.” “You’re referring to The Blob with Steve McQueen, and please step away before it eats your tennis shoe.” I rustled around in my basement, looking for an old hazmat suit left over from a previous client. I stepped into the white, plastic bodysuit and pulled the neoprene hood over my head. I adjusted the anti-fog visor on my face and approached the gray effluent with trepidation. It was diffi- cult handling a shovel in my oversized rubber gloves, but I managed to get ahold of it alright. With great effort I inserted the blade of the shovel under what I took to be a dot matrix printer emanating from the ooze. With all my might, I heaved. Not an inch of it budged. To make matters worse, the shovel was caught fast. It stuck straight out into the room, a sideways flagpole. I quit in a rage, stomping out of the room and removing the hood to catch my breath. Later I watched that shovel slowly become enveloped by the gray sludge. I felt like tossing the hazmat suit in after it. By the next day the gray monster had bloomed into a muddy mass two feet high that took over half my office. A fax machine emerged from beneath the gray quagmire, right in front of my built-in wooden shelves. Who uses fax machines anymore? I worked a safe distance away on my spare laptop at the kitchen table. I was determined to reach Dr. Jurcik. Only he could reverse this eco- logical disaster that was happening in my office. I phoned Washington University and asked for Dr. Jurcik’s extension. “Can you spell that, please?” “Emil Jurcik, he’s a professor there.” “We have no record of a Jurcik. We have a Dr. Jurkiewicz.” “Fine, what does he teach?” “Germanic studies.” “Why not just connect me to the Alchemy Department, please? I’ll speak with whoever picks up the phone there.” “I don’t know if the wizard is available right now.” I could hear snickering in the background. I hung up, humiliated. I remembered that the Mackrells, neighbors of ours on an adjacent street, became fed up with the consistent flooding of their pre-war-era basement after every major rain. In due time insects infiltrated their house, mobilizing in their custom kitchen and sending Sheila Mackrell into a tizzy. They hired a pest control company to nuke the bugs and put the house up for sale. I needed Neil’s permission before I could sell our home. And I didn’t want to alert him to the ecological terror that had seeped into an asset we were both still responsible for. Especially because I’d squandered most of our assets before, namely Luke’s college fund. My goal was to sell the house, split the proceeds, finalize our divorce, and move on from this misadventure. “Where will you live?” he said. I moved my phone to the other ear. “I haven’t thought it through that far.” “Of course you haven’t.” “Neil, are you going to make this a thing?” “It’s only because this is how we ended up in this situation in the first place.” “Neil, it’s been two years since we separated. The house is the only thing holding us together.” “At least we still have that.” There was a long silence before he said, “Luke told me there’s some- thing wrong with the house, that’s why he’s been living with me all this week.” “Luke has a vivid imagination. Remember when he wanted to develop his own cryptocurrency?” “That was your idea.” “Yes, but he believed me. Very impressionable, that one.” Neil finally gave in. He always does. I counted on him to do that. I glanced at my office door. The gray mass was flowing past the desk chair that I’d forgotten to liberate. Too late now. My next call was to Fay Bunting. Fay’s a Realtor from this well-connected family in Grosse Pointe; ev- eryone knows at least one of the Buntings. Fay would know someone who would covet buying a Grosse Pointe Park original, despite a few minor bumps and bruises. Not to mention a grayish toxic goo taking over the spare bedroom/office. “That’s quite a pungent bouquet,” she said when she arrived, pulling a handkerchief out of her purse and holding it to her mouth and nose. “Where is the offending organism?” I escorted her to the door of my office. She raised up on the toes of her high heels, examining the gray in- vader. “A little staging can do wonders, right?” I said. “Perhaps place a big winged-back chair in front of it?” “It’s fairly conspicuous, I’m not sure we can hide it.” “What about air fresheners? I could bake some cookies the morning of the first showing. I hear that can do wonders.” She removed herself from eyesight of the calamity and took refuge the kitchen. “There’s not enough chocolate chip cookies in the world that will mask that odor.” “Or,” I continued, “say it’s a piece of modern art. People go for that sort of thing nowadays.” “I suppose.” “What do you think we can list the house for? I owe two hundred thousand on it.” “That much, huh?” “I’m hoping I could split the proceeds with my husband. We’re sep- arated.” Fay thought for a minute. “You’d better forget about price and just concentrate on finding the right buyer. For whatever you can get.” Fay scheduled three showings the next day. I vacated my upstairs of- fice each time, leaving my client documents securely locked in the filing cabinet in Luke’s bedroom and removing any clutter from the kitchen. I returned to find most of my house intact, including the protruding blob that occupied my office. I checked a Realtor app on my phone for feedback. Large family liked the backyard but are looking for a larger home. Single woman would prefer an updated kitchen. And more closet space. Young couple is having trouble with financing and have stopped looking for a new home altogether. After that the showings trickled to a standstill. Fay Bunting stopped returning my calls. Not that I blamed her. By then the toxic mess had breached the doorway of my office and slithered into the hallway, threatening to intrude upon the kitchen at any moment. It had already devoured Luke’s pair of hiking boots. It was at that point I realized I hadn’t seen Luke in almost a week. I scheduled a breakfast with him at the Original Pancake House, the one over on Mack Avenue. Oh God, it’s come to this? I thought. I’m scheduling meetings with my own son. “How’s it going in physics?” I began after we sat down. “That class is nonessential,” he said, tipping the dispenser and engulf- ing his gold-rush-style flapjacks with syrup. “I dropped it.” “Does your father know about this?” “He doesn’t ask about school.” Luke held up the empty syrup dis- penser so the waitress could see he needed a refill. “He doesn’t ask about much of anything.” “Come hell or high water, you’re taking that course next year, buster.” “Speaking of high water, do we still have a house to go back to?” I sighed and let my fork rest on top of my banana pancakes. “I’m not sure.” I suddenly wasn’t very hungry. Luke had no trouble digging into his flapjacks. He spoke in between chewing. “You should sleep at Dad’s. There’s always the leather sofa in front of the TV.” “I’m not quite ready to admit defeat and move in with your father.” I pushed my plate away. “But I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to practice law like this.” “We could live off my stock portfolio,” he said. “Where are you going to get the money to invest?” “I was going to borrow it from your golden nugget nest egg. Until you found a way to lose that too.” He grimaced and shook his head. “What do you want from me, Luke? I’m doing the best I can.” “Try being the responsible adult around here?” He mopped up his remaining reservoir of syrup with toast. “Is that asking too much?” I was too tired to reprimand him for that comment. I dropped him off at school and returned home. The gray mudslide had flowed right through the kitchen and into the living room. This thing was pushing me farther and farther away from my family, from my home, from my law practice. I was forced to wash the dishes in the upstairs bathroom. Never mind doing laundry. That had become a thing of the past. I sat at the top of the stairs and watched the gray river roll past me. I thought I could see a flat-screen television, its grayed-out screen surfac- ing high over the morass and then plunging back beneath the surface. Soon it would gush right out my front door and into my neighbor’s rose garden. Then it would become the city’s problem. All I could do was wait for my life to fully unravel and then perhaps take some responsibility for the hole I’d dug myself. Until then, it was just me and the gray demon. It heaved and seeped through the house below me, content to slowly take over.  

Ashley Anderson
Zipper Pulls

After I reached my wit’s end, I booked a consultation for a zipper supplement surgery. Being at home with my family for the winter holidays had been slightly less than torture. My dad retired three days before his sixty-sixth birthday and, since then, had made it known that “everything’s about me now. I don’t care what anyone else wants.” I felt something building in my chest, sitting there and ominously growing as each day passed by, and I knew for sure that it wasn’t my sense of holiday cheer. During the last few days I spent with my family, even the sound of my dad’s voice was enough to cause my heart rate to spike. For the first month I was back in my apartment almost 700 miles away, the attacks started creeping up on me like those cartoon cavemen with clubs. I would be going about my day, minding my own business, when one of them would sneak up behind me and club me with an anxiety attack. Racing heart, tight chest, gasps for air. Uncontrollable crying. Inability to focus until after the attack subsided. After the first attack, I thought that it was my body’s way of coping with the tension I had experienced while at home for the holidays. A releasing of the pressure valve, so to speak. But after the second and the third attacks reared their heads, I knew that this was not a release, but probably a sign of something bigger going on. I remembered seeing a commercial on TV weeks ago about a new treatment for anxiety called zipper supplement surgery. In the commer- cial, a woman stood in front of the bathroom mirror while a voice nar- rated the scene. “Do you struggle with your feelings? Do you feel like you need to just let it all out? Then you may be a candidate for zipper supplement surgery!” The woman slowly unzipped herself in a way that made me feel like a voyeur as I watched. As the zipper tab moved farther away from the base of her neck, I could see all of her emotions fall out of her chest and into the sink, words like “anxiety” and “stress” and “joy.” They filled the basin and tumbled effortlessly onto the floor, sliding to a resting point that the emotions themselves looked comfortable with. Some stopped under the edge of the vanity, while another leaned back against the woman’s toes. At first, I didn’t understand why something that had become so com- mon needed a commercial, but I guess zipper supplement surgery had become just like any other medication. The commercial continued to play as the woman, fully zipped up, stepped over her feelings as she left the bathroom with a smile on her face. “Ask your doctor about zippers!” Before seeing the commercial, I had tried almost all of it: deep breath- ing exercises, yoga, meditation, watching my diet, better sleep habits – every exercise and lifestyle change I could manage. Nothing worked. As time went on, I increasingly just wanted to stay in my apartment and curl up on my couch, making myself easy prey for the little anxiety cavemen with their attack clubs. I explained this to the doctor during my consultation for zipper sup- plement surgery. “I’m worried that this is going to take over my life,” I said, “and I don’t have time for this to control me. I know that sounds bad, but…” “No, it makes sense,” he said. His shiny bald head gleamed under the examining room lights. “The purpose of zipper supplement surgery is to provide a coping mechanism for those who are struggling.” He contin- ued typing notes into the examining room’s computer. I assumed he was working toward building some kind of patient file for me and, as I talked, he took notes to determine whether or not I was a viable candidate for the procedure. I wondered why he didn’t finish the sentence after the word strug- gling. Did he think I was trying to take the easy way out of learning how to deal with my feelings? The sadness, the hopelessness, the fear I sometimes felt about anything and everything with no apparent cause? I told myself to take deep breaths as I felt my chest tighten. Recently, when my chest tightened with the anxious feelings that snuck up on me, I could feel the acid from my stomach rising in my chest and up toward the back of my throat. That made everything tighter, as if there wasn’t enough room for my insides and my anxiety in the same body. “Based on your symptoms and what we’ve talked about, it appears that you’re suffering from multiple issues.” He began rattling them off – general anxiety disorder, depression, and another that I was sure I had resolved by now, but apparently hadn’t. “I’m going to go ahead and rec- ommend the zipper supplement surgery for you. Let’s go ahead and get that scheduled,” the doctor said as he clicked through various windows on the computer screen. He picked up a card from a stack in the drawer to his left, scribbled a date and time on the card, and handed it to me. “When you call to preregister for the surgery, they will give you more in- formation about what you need to do before checking in on your sched- uled date.” The doctor looked at me and must have sensed something in my facial expression. “Have you had surgery before?” I swallowed. “No.” The doctor looked at me as if he was reconsidering his recommen- dation. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s become a pretty standard surgery.” As I walked out of the examining room, I looked down at the date and time scribbled on the appointment card. I had two weeks to prepare myself for a surgery to permanently change my body so that maybe, just maybe, I could find a way to learn how to deal with the feelings that I just kept pushing further and further down into darkness. He didn’t ask if I had insurance or provide me with any recommendations as to how someone pays for a zipper supplement surgery. I guess he just assumed that I could afford it. In the two weeks between the consultation and the surgery, I tried convincing myself that this was just one big set of body piercings. After all, I was comfortable with people pushing needles through differ- ent parts of my body to adorn with jewelry, so in my logic, there shouldn’t be that much of a difference. Right? Maybe. To try and calm my fears, I went online to the clinic’s website to see if I could find more information as to just what they, the surgeons, were going to do to me. I had so many questions as to how this works. How this didn’t work. There had to be something that a person gave up in order to have a zipper installed in their chest. After digging deeper than probably necessary or safe, I found a video of a surgeon installing a chest zipper. In my head, I wasn’t sure why I needed to clarify where the zipper was to be placed because, in all hon- esty, I had only seen people with zippers inserted into their chests. If it wasn’t for the tell-tale zipper pull popping out of shirts, then it was the lump right at the base of the neck in the winter, when people tried to wrap the pull up in their scarves to prevent the metal from absorbing the cold air. I clicked on the “play” icon in the video screen and began to watch. First, they knock you out. With anesthesia, not violence – a com- forting thought, considering I likened my anxiety to aggressive cartoon cavemen. I fiddled with the volume on my laptop as the video continued. On my screen, an operating room opened up before me as a reassuring yet slightly clinical voice explained the procedure. “Once the anesthesia has gone into effect, surgeons then open the chest cavity and score the sternum tissue.” I watched as the camera zooms in on the sleeping body on the operating table. There was so much blood, enough blood to remember why I decided against going into any kind of medicine despite being told that I had the smarts and compassion to be successful. The surgeon had cut through the layers of this person’s body, different shades of flesh and pink and red, and then hands off the scalpel to another set of hands. The surgeon then took a tool I hadn’t seen before from a headless set of hands and my eyes wide. The surgeon inserted this thing into the opened chest on the table, pressed it against the sternum, and the video recording captured the sound of tree trunks cracking as they’re being felled, sturdy and strong trunks being broken fiber by fiber. The tool itself looks like a demonic eyelash curler, which only reinforced my opinion that the ones you can buy at the drug store were, indeed, medieval torture devices. To make it worse – the surgeon does this more than once. This poor person’s sternum is almost completely torn apart. The video continued. “Once the sternum is marked, the zipper is measured and adjusted to account for the patient’s anatomy.” I shudder at the narrator’s use of the word marked. I watched as the surgeon lift- ed the long, seemingly heavy zipper off a steel tray lined with the same bluish liner you see on TV hospital dramas. The surgeon placed the zip- per just where they wanted it to be. “Once the zipper is measured and placed,” the narrator said, “the surgeon stitches the zipper into place. As the patient heals, the skin will bind to the zipper and it becomes a part of the patient’s anatomy.” A lull in the action. Everyone prepared for the first stitch. The sur- geon took a thick, bent needle from the assistant and dips it into a vial of clear liquid that I assumed was to help the zipper bind to the patient’s body. Next, the surgeon positioned themselves to best reach the bottom of the zipper. As the surgeon pierces the skin, the patient’s body convulsed as if being shocked by a defibrillator. The patient’s back arched, shoulders tucking in toward the spine ever so slightly, and the upper body fell back to the table with a thud. What I just witnessed made my eyes widen. I started to sweat. I wondered what made a sedated body move like that. “The stitching process can take as long as six to ten hours, depending on the patient’s response to the stitching serum.” While the narrator spoke, the surgeon prepared for the next stitch. Before I could watch another convulsion, I slammed the lid to my laptop shut and whirled around in my desk chair. “What am I doing?” I asked myself out loud, hoping that something in my apartment – the gray walls, the couch, the bright teal rug in the middle of the living room – would have an answer for me. As my surgery date crept closer, I did what I needed to do to make sure my life was arranged before this procedure. I drank as much water as I could the day before, knowing that I couldn’t have anything to eat or drink after midnight, during the darkness between today and tomor- row. I had a friend who was willing to sit and wait while the zipper was installed drive me to the hospital. I didn’t want to be alone because, for some slightly rational reason, I was worried that I was going to die and not come out of this alive. Maybe those anxiety cavemen were going to leap out of my chest and bludgeon me to death. Or maybe they would go after the surgeon and his team, leaving me sedated on the operating table with the inner caves of my chest exposed for the world to see. The last things I remember before being wheeled off to surgery are spotty. The odd shade of blue-green-gray on the walls. How the colors around me felt dull, even before the anesthesia sent me off to dreamland. My friend saying that I shouldn’t worry about the anxiety cavemen blud- geoning me. (When did I tell her about those?) A nurse collecting my clothes in a clear plastic bag with a cotton drawstring. The anesthesiolo- gist telling me to breathe deeply as they placed the mask over my mouth and nose. Me trying to fight back against the mask, feeling the wild hysteria of someone trapped and unable to breathe. A nurse or an aid or someone wearing scrubs gently but firmly grabbed my wrists. “Ma’am, you’re going to be okay. Just breathe deeply,” they said in a soothing tone. I remember breathing too shallow, too fast, before the edges of my vision went dark. Sometimes I think of the conversation I once had with a friend —for simplicity’s sake, we’ll just call him Friend—one night after class when I lived in the last city where I had an address. Friend was a captain in an Army airborne unit, served four tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, and almost died while practicing a jump. If he hadn’t joined the Army out of his felt obligation to family tradition, Friend says that he probably would’ve joined the Franciscans. Friend, like me, was a writer who was in graduate school because he just wanted to teach. That evening in class, we discussed an essay he wrote about how he would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and conduct security sweeps of his house. Friend and I had talked about how PTSD changes not just survivor’s minds, but the minds of those around them, too. “Sometimes I wonder why my PTSD does to my kids. Especially my daughter,” Friend said as we stood under the streetlight halfway between the English building and the parking garage. The part of campus that surrounded us was rather quaint, student living learning community and other university-owned houses that looked like little Swiss chalets. The mid-fall trees still held onto some of their leaves, but the ones who had given in to the wind and the rain lay plastered on the concrete sidewalk. The tab of Friend’s zipper pull gleamed in the light as it partially peaked out from under the collar of his shirt. The same thing happened as peo- ple walking past on the sidewalk caught the light from the streetlamps. It wasn’t yet cold enough for the zipper pulls to be hidden under scarves and coats yet. I thought about what Friend had said about his daughter. I thought back to my experiences as a kid and how, more than once as an adult, I looked up things my dad had done or still does on the internet, looking for some kind of explanation for his behavior. The hyper vigilance, the insistence on being tough and going so far as to refusing to let my sis- ters and I cry when we were hurt, the requirement that everything had to always be secured—car doors, windows, kitchen cabinets—but yet it was against the rules for my sisters and I to lock doors in the house. My dad always told us that, even as adults when we would come home for the holidays, that we weren’t old enough to have earned or deserve that level of privacy. I didn’t mean to cry—after all, Friend and I had this conversation before, just not as personal—but I felt my voice crack and the muscles around my eyes contract. The thinking to myself shifted to thinking out loud. There was too much in my head that, in reality, would take years of therapy and the zip- per supplement surgery to begin to cope with. “The worse part was when we were little and tried to wake him up for anything. My dad sleeps a lot, and when it would be dinner time or we’d have to ask him a question, we’d have to stand far enough away where he couldn’t reach us when he woke up. Heaven forbid you should touch him, because he would come out of a dead sleep with the intent of going for your throat,” I said. “Did he explain why he did that?” asked Friend out of curiosity. “All he would do is yell,” I said. “I figured it out when I was older, but when you’re a kid, it’s terrifying thinking that your dad would try to hurt you just because you woke him up for dinner. But as an adult, it’s harder to grapple with the other ways he’s done things that have hurt me mentally and emotionally, because I can’t always walk away from those things.” Friend gave me a side hug. “I needed to hear that,” he said. “I needed to hear that.” I don’t know how long the surgery actually took. I woke up in a ge- neric-looking hospital room with the same kind of familiar surroundings I saw before I was knocked out for surgery: the strange blue-green-gray paint color, the beige curtain separating the beds in the hospital room. My friend sat beside me, reading a book. “Hey sleepy gus, you’re awake!” she said, putting her book down on the bedside table next to the phone. The table itself looked awkwardly bare. I tried to move and sit myself up a little straighter, but my lower back and hips screamed in pain just as much as my chest did. “Agh!” I cried as my body flopped back on the bed. The surgeon told me during our con- sultation that moving would be quite painful for the first few days after the surgery as my muscles and joints learned how to move again with the addition of the zipper. I panted as if I had just tried to run a 5K. My lower back and hips felt like they had just spent hours in yoga class doing vinyasas that only involved corpse pose and bridge pose. “Yeah dude, you might want to take it easy. They had you in there for awhile,” she said. “How long?” “Like, a good twelve hours at least. They kept giving me progress reports, but dang, you seemed to be taking forever. It’s Saturday.” My surgery was scheduled for Friday. A whole day had passed with- out me knowing. I could see the sleeplessness etching itself into my friend’s face. “You didn’t have to stay after the surgery was over,” I said. “Are you kidding? I want to see what this thing looks like!” Not quite the response I expected, but my brain was still cloudy from anesthesia so, to be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect. There was a pause. “Can I see it?” she asked. “What?” “The zipper!” “Oh!” I imagined myself shaking the cobwebs out of my brain. “I mean, I guess. I don’t know how to do this, though.” My friend gently fiddled with the hospital gown until enough of my chest was exposed that she could see the zipper, but not so much that I would flash anyone who walked into the room. I gasped, not having braced myself for what I would actually look like post-op. She whistled through her teeth. “Dayum! That has to hurt like a bitch.” Her tone sounded more like she was talking about someone’s new tattoo instead of a completely foreign-to-the-body device implanted in my chest. But really, was there that much of a difference? The newness of the zipper shone menacingly in the artificial light of my hospital room. It felt heavy, like a folded weighted blanket sitting on my chest as I felt my lungs and diaphragm adapt to breathing properly with the added pressure to inhale and exhale. Blood, my blood, had dried around the seams where zipper met flesh. In some ways, I wanted to know what it felt like to unzip the zipper, what sensations happened when all of your feelings just came tumbling out of your chest and into the world. In other ways, I wished my friend would cover me up again. The zipper’s metal made my skin feel extra cold. I felt my eyelids flutter with sleep as the doctor walked in. “Good to see that you’re awake,” he said in a rather upbeat tone. I tried to stay awake, but my body decided that it had enough activity for now. My friend picked up her book and waved. “I’m going to head out now. I’ll text you later to see how you’re doing.” I nodded, not thinking to ask where my clothes and phone were. The doctor looked up my charts on his little device he held in his hand. “You’ve had quite the ordeal the past day or so, miss,” he said. I thought he sounded a little patronizing and I didn’t like it. “That was kind of to be expected, don’t you think?” I tried to chuckle. Even that hurt. “We had you in there for almost fourteen hours installing the zipper,” the doctor said as he took my pulse and listened to my heart. “Each time we wanted to make a stitch, we had to time it with a lull in your convulsions. There must have been something in there that wanted out pretty badly.” The cause of my anxiety, possibly? I felt the sarcasm that dripped from my thoughts pool in the base of my skull. The convulsions ex- plained why my back and hips felt the way they did. The doctor finished checking my vital signs. “I’ll let you get some rest,” the doctor said. It wasn’t long before I felt myself falling asleep, letting any leftover drugs take over my system and work their way out. Months later, I found myself sitting in my desk chair with that famil- iar feeling of tightness and panic. I was still learning how to move again. The physical therapy twice a week helped some, but even the cute ther- apist with the bright blue eyes and the buzzed dark hair couldn’t bring my body back to what it used to be. “Some people just never regain full mobility after this surgery,” he said with a sad look on his face. “No one seems to understand why.” In other words, I may never fully heal. I kept trying, though, because sitting still just made the feelings feel that much worse. I had to retrain my muscles on how to bend and twist again. We spent some physical therapy appointments just bending and twisting, while others we would stretch and toss a medicine ball back and forth. The therapy room was always bright and sunny. The aides were always friendly. Getting up and moving became a bright spot, even if my body felt after the lightest half hour of stretching. Sitting in my desk chair, the pressure of my feelings against my zipper became more and more intense. I tried to control my breathing, just like I had been taught. Focus on something tangible. Deep breath in, deep breath out. Keep looking at the random nail a previous renter had left in the wall above my desk. My skin and muscles that held the zipper in place began to ache, the kind of ache you get in your belly after you kept eating Thanksgiving dinner long after your stomach told you that it was full. It looked so easy, unzipping the zipper and letting your emotions tumble out. The woman on the commercial could do it. The people in the videos I watched as part of my consultation could do it. Why couldn’t I do that? I knew that I couldn’t wait much longer to unzip the zipper without doing damage to my healing incisions. I got up and made my way to the bathroom. I glanced at myself in the mirror and already saw the tears running down my face. If someone asked, I couldn’t give them a reason as to why I was crying, let alone tell them why I was having yet another one of these attacks. I peeled my shirt off and exposed my zipper, its silver color contrasting with the violet purple walls of my bathroom. Slowly, carefully, I tugged at my zipper pull and unclenched the teeth, pair by pair. As I created space for my feelings to fall out for the first time, I winced. I didn’t know what this would feel like. I didn’t know what to expect when something actually fell out of my chest. What would those feelings look like? Where would they go? I kept unzipping, and tiny pebbles fell out of my chest, slowly at first, but gaining more momentum as I continued to unclench zipper teeth. The pebbles hit the floor and slid under the edge of the vanity, landed in the sink, bounced off the counter and into the toilet. Tiny pebbles like the ones my friends’ toddler-aged children picked up at the park and put in their pockets for safe keeping. Pebbles continued to fill the sink and cover the floor. A tiny pile of them sat in the toilet, waiting to be flushed down the drain My breathing was quick and shallow, panting almost, as I stood root- ed to my bathroom floor and stared into the mirror. My zipper was completely undone, top to bottom, and I could catch the faintest glimpse of my sternum and ribs in the open space of my chest. I couldn’t look at anything except myself in the mirror, making eye contact with only my reflection as I continued to cry. It was as if my emotions needed yet another escape route beside the one carved out specifically for them. What had I done? I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand even though nothing was there. I felt a tense kind of satisfaction, similar to what it feels like after throwing up and the muscles around the stomach have just started to relax. I stood in front of the mirror until my breathing returned to normal. As I zipped myself closed, I winced as the tugging of the zipper pull forced my skin to move in ways it wasn’t meant to move. The tears came back as exhaustion descended. I rinsed my face with some water and looked at the pebbles. I thought about leaving them where they had landed, possibly making a note to clean them up later. Going to bed sounded like the next logical step, but I stood there, feeling paralyzed, not knowing what to do now that I had put my body back together. Instead of getting ready for bed, I slowly sank to my bathroom floor and sat there, knees to chest in a way that I thought I would never sit again, and stared at the pebbles. What to do with them, what to do next, did not come to mind. All I could do was sit and stare at them.

John Fretts
Cellar

Another February, another funeral. Daniel Pjowski, Danny, has always hated February. When he was a kid it was the dismal weather he hated. Dark clouds harassed the Pennsylvania coun- tryside with ice and rain, not the jolly idealistic “Winter-Wonderland” snowfall from classic Christmas movies his mother played every December. This was real weather, real sleet and wind that chilled you to your core. You couldn’t go sled- ding or build a snowman. There was nothing holly jolly about February, in fact everything about February was dismal. The weather, the holidays, and even worse it was always hard for him to spell. Now to Danny, February is now when people die. Aunts, uncles, and friends all seemed to die in February, just to make the month that much worse. What made this February harder than the rest was that only a year had passed since they had buried Julian forever in the orange clay of Southeast Georgia. That February would have been the hardest, but the numb- ness that comes from so much shock and pain at once caused Danny to forget the entire month Danny fails again to tie a black tie around his prickly unshaven neck, a twin to the tie they buried Juju in ( Julian preferred to be called Juju) and he fixes a few stray blonde hairs that fell in front of his blue eyes, unused to the length his hair had grown to. I don’t see it. People always tell me I look like Grandfather, I never saw it looking at him. All I saw from him was disgust and anger. Danny presses a gold pin with two crossed rifles into the lapel of a black jacket, his mother’s idea. He has long lost any zeal and care for patriotism or his past in the military, but his mother thought it would be a nice gesture, since it is something he had in common with his Grandfather. Bastard never even gave me a chance. Most of the guys Danny knew were taught how to tie ties from their fathers, a passage of manhood shared between fathers and sons. Danny had asked his father and he only sighed and told him he couldn’t, he didn’t know how to either. He told Danny when he was younger that his father knew, but Grandfather couldn’t have cared less. The tie is wrong again. Fucking hell. Danny was ignoring his phone, the funeral wasn’t for another three hours and his family promised not to psychoanalyze him, but that didn’t stop another dig- ital flood of “HEY BUD HOW YOU HOLDING UP?” from extended family and his father (who either didn’t know or didn’t care). He stood there, eyes fixed on himself in the mirror, his mind wanders to how he must have looked a year ago. His hair was cropped short and professional then, his neck was cleanly shav- en, and everything about him was put together, tidy, professional, except for the tears that streamed from his eyes. Now it was the opposite, now he stood there brushing unkempt blonde hairs, tugging his collar from some stubble, but his eyes were simply dry… and tired. Danny stood there and tried to picture himself as his grandfather, to see what people saw that was similar, to understand why they were the same. He imagined his hair white, added jowls and sags to his face, he pictures wrinkles cracking and crossing upon his forehead, but he doesn’t see it. He keeps only a few essential things in his room, he feels things are better that way, too much clutter meant too many memories. He wasn’t much for nick- knacks either, but there a small classic green plastic army man toy next to his mirror. A featureless and unremarkable toy that stood strong and dutiful on the corner of his dresser, anonymous and forgettable. When Danny was a kid his grandfather caused tingles to flash across the back of his neck and his palms to sweat. There was only one time he could remember spending time with Grandfather alone as a kid. The freckle-faced teen who watched him when his parents were out of the house was sick with something his parents called “mono.” His parents loaded him into their Lincoln Town Car and dropped him off at the big black door of his grandparents’ brick Victorian house. Danny’s little white arms held a clear tub of Snyder’s pretzels against his chest. The pretzels had been long gone, and in their place was a conglomeration of plastic men and little plastic war machines. Grandma opened the door, a relief for little Danny. “Oh who’s this here? A lil’ burglar?” “Hi Grandma.” “Jackie! Guess who’s here! It’s Barry Williams!” “Barry Williams? The kid from The Brady Bunch? He ain’t no Barry Williams, Diane… That makes no goddamn sense” a low voice rumbled out the front door. “Oh don’t mind that old grump come on in I was just starting to make some sandwiches, do you like ham? I got chip chopped ham and cheese.” “Yes grandma.” Little Danny’s small voice quivered a little. Danny scurried into the old brick house, sticking close to his grandma’s skirts. Danny had been to his grandparents’ house many times, Christmas, Easter, the usuals. Every time he was able to hide in a crowd, behind his cousins and the grown-ups… hidden from the empty glare of his grandfather. That was it. It was the way his grandfather looked at him. His eyes wide and his lips tightly pressed together. White tufts of hair made up fraying eyebrows. Unblinking eyes that were light blue and strained. Grandma led Danny through the white living room. It was a room that Grandma called the parlor, and Danny wasn’t allowed to sit on any of the white leather couches that lived there, his mom told him that they were the most valu- able things in the house. It was silly to Danny though, couches you couldn’t sit on. He still did, on occasion, when his grandfather was in the living room and he was sure he could get away with it. There were three places you could go from the parlor, but only two places where kids were allowed to go. Kids could go right, through the wooden archway to get to the den, or head straight into the dining room and kitchen area. Only Grandma, Grandfather, and other grownups could go left into the cellar. Cousin Jay always said there’s ghosts down there and that Danny had an older brother who went down there and never came back. That’s why Danny is an only child, he told him. The actual living room, the den, had a gray box TV in the corner with a VCR built into it that whirred and could rewind a tape extra fast. They didn’t have any cartoons on VHS, they always just watched boring black and white movies, so Danny never bothered with it. The grownups never watched cartoons. The couches here were made of soft warm fabric and were decorated with the same red flowers Grandma kept in her garden out front. In the center of the floor was a dark blue rug with swirling green vines and flowers, Danny called it the jungle rug, his mom called it “Oriental.” “You can play right here Danny, I’m sure your little men will have a lot of fun on the jungle rug.” Danny just smiled, nodded, and dropped the bin of fighters. “I gotta’ take care of my petunias and poppies so play here and I’ll check on you, and don’t worry, your grandfather will be about the house too so don’t you worry about being left on your own. When I get back we’ll all sit down for ham and cheese sandwiches. Oh, and don’t let your grandfather smoke in the house! And Danny. . . get me if he does anything scary.” Danny had finally gotten his knot tied but he had to break his promise to himself to avoid his phone. Swiping away two texts from his mom, a couple texts from a couple of cousins, a missed call from his dad, and a message from a stranger on a dating app, Danny had ignored the concerns of all the loved ones in his world, and a half-hearted “HEYYYY” from a stranger and had found the instructions he needed for tying a full Windsor knot from someone else’s dad on the internet. It took three attempts and a single F-bomb but Danny had made it happen. Danny always had a way of making it happen before last year, before that funeral in Georgia, before his honorable discharge, and now he was pleased to be in form once again. His therapist reminds him weekly to celebrate the small victories. Danny used to be dependable, sharp, clean, loyal, almost everything the brass wanted him to be. He was athletic and quick, punctual. Nervous, but not postal worker nervous. Julian was nothing like that, but he was everything the buck sergeants wanted him to be, cool, funny, laidback, and with hair just within regu- lation. Danny was textbook, Juju was cool. I can’t think about him right now. As the smallest thought of Juju (all the guys in Charlie Company called Julian Juju) crept in, Danny’s lower lip shook, his skin grew cold. I should have been there. I should have gone down there. Danny had been playing quietly for ten minutes. The green men, Danny’s favorite, had taken a defensive position behind some sandbags and TV remote. The green men were strong, brave, standing proudly before the faces of the evil gray plastic soldiers. The war had started as a result of a tragic attack the cowardly grays had done against the pure of heart, civilized greens. A plane had crashed into a humongous green building (an idea that Danny had stolen from the news one day) and the grays were preparing a horrible weapon! “Crack Crack Crack Crack Crack” “Pew Pew Pew” “KRRrrRRRSHHHH” Explosions, gunfire, and droplets of saliva spewed out from Danny’s lips. It was a glorious war, and the greens were winning and tearing down statues. The cellar door, back near the white room, slammed shut. The battle paused. The staggering of heavy footsteps was unmistakably his grandfather’s. A hob- ble he had as long as Danny could remember. He’d overheard his parents talk about it in the car after Easter one year. They’d been talking for a while, but Danny didn’t listen until he heard the word mortar, which sounded cool, so he couldn’t remember much of the details, just his parents worrying about a knee replacement and a VA, whatever that was. “What are you doin’? You playing war?” There he was, standing in the archway to the den, his arm helping him stay upright against the brown arch. He wore a white T-shirt tucked into his jeans, his gut fumbled over his belt. He shadowed Danny, who was laying on his belly with a small green grenadier in his hand. Danny was petrified. He stared back at Grandfather silently. “Cat got your tongue? Not a game you should play anyway. Let me see that clicker.” Grandfather hobbled over, bent at the waist, and removed the cover three greens had moved behind, exposing them now to the machine gun fire of the evil grays. Grandfather continued his expedition, knocking through the greens, causing many casualties to the greens and a few grays, and slowly fumbled his way onto a floral couch. He kicked his feet up onto the arm rest, and turned on some boring grown up show about some rich guy, Bill, taking care of his kids in the city with the help of Mr. French (who for some reason reminded Danny of his mom). Danny knew the show was Family Affair, but he liked to tell his parents it was called Boring Affair. Mom seemed to prefer the new funny shows like Everybody Loves Raymond but cries at night sometimes after dad would make jokes like Ray. Dad liked the show where the episodes were an hour and the clock would tick between commercials. That guy used his gun to stop bad guys. That guy was cool. There’s a lot of old people here. Danny had made it to the funeral. His eyes were bloodshot, but it was a funeral so his grim expression camouflaged him with the rest of the mourners, even if his pain wasn’t the same as theirs. He shook a couple of his cousins’ hands, hugged his mom, nodded to his dad and hung his coat. “Dan, are you ready to go see him?” His mother had crept behind him in the funeral home. She always had a way of sneaking up on him as an adult, likely utilizing her small size to dash between tall crowds and into his blind spot, which had grown hard for people to do since his six months in and out of the wire around Kandahar. “Mom, I told you about what that does to me.” “Sorry, I didn’t mean to… your father went ahead to save us some good seats and I told him I would go with you to the casket.” “Mom, there’s like ten people here.” “I know, but I don’t want people to think we don’t care, in case there’s pictures. Plus you know we’re really here for Grandma.” With his grandfather there, Danny was no longer able to make the explosions, shout commands, or depict any aspect of the battle the way he wanted. He made Danny’s skin crawl. Maybe he’ll yell at me, maybe I’m doing it all wrong. The greens were on their own without “Danny-support.” The greens were stuck in place on the jungle rug. Fighting off groups of grays daily, writing letters to their green Suzys and Marys, and hearing about baseball games through an imaginary radio, the faces of the green men, although featureless, made Danny’s heart heavy. And the grays! There were more and more grays after every skirmish. Danny had no idea he had so many grays and he kept finding more and more. He found them under the couches, an end table, and he found them behind stacks of books. They climb out from the floor and join the fray, women grays, children grays, all rejecting the presence of Danny’s handsome strong greens. The grays would crawl under the jungle rug with their gray families, it was where Danny’s toy helicopters and jets couldn’t find them. Danny could hear them crying in between battles. Both green and gray. The battle was going poorly and Danny was getting bored. On the TV Grand- father was watching something about cowboys. They were fighting Indians with their six shooters for some reason Danny didn’t understand but rooted for the cowboys anyway. “Black Echo.” Danny flinched at the sudden sound of Grandfather’s voice. “Black Echo.” He said it once again and followed it with a snore. Danny was relieved his grandfather was asleep and couldn’t look at him. He turned back to his war with a renewed sense of vigor. But, things had changed. Off the rug, near the TV, were a bunch of greens. A lot of greens, some of them in dresses. It was a crowd of greens and there were grays there too. They were shouting at a group of greens who had guns. The crowd carried signs and yelled, the gunmen yelled back. Danny didn’t make the sound, but he heard the crack of rifles anyway. Grandfather started to shake, groan, cry even. Danny couldn’t see Grandma through the window. He was supposed to get her if Grandpa started to smoke, or shake. . . something scary. Danny’s heart began race. The screams of agony and terror coming from the floor filled his body with ice. He backed away from his grandfather, from the TV, from the jungle rug, all the way into the white room. He backed away further and further until he felt the sharp corners of an open door push in between his shoulders. His body lurched forward at the sudden impact as he ran into the open cellar door. He hesitated before turning and looking through the open door and down into the cellar. Sgt. Valdez had picked Danny to check out the hole. It was early September, and as Pfc. Whelker put it, “hot as balls.” They’d been outside the wire for six hours on some shit intel from a desk jockey about a stash of mortars. The FOB had been hit with seven mortar shells over the past three weeks and a couple of the ANA guys got injured, one of them died, but word in the guard towers and the chow line was that Colonel Sellers was pissed about a destroyed cache of coffee he had hid. The local elders had nothing to tell them about mortars so the good Colonel set the company about searching for them on their own. They’d been through four houses with their translator they lovingly called Mo Bags (Mohamed Bashir was his real name, but the company felt the nickname made him more trustworthy.) They were on edge that day. They’d all been alter- nating through the night on perimeter security, but the Colonel wanted every breathing person with boots and a rifle for this one, so they mounted up with the rest of the grunts in the company at 0420. The eight-man squad was sweating through their armor, exhausted from being yelled at in a language they didn’t even come close to comprehending, and deprived of a full nights sleep. Now they were at house five. House five was a simple one-story building, a couple rooms. It looked like the family shared a bedroom and there was a table with five plates on the table, each with the remnants of a recent meal on them. Outside the house Sgt. Valdez and Mo Bags were questioning a military age male, a woman who Juju guessed was 34, Danny figured 38, but neither were sure, and two little girls with bare feet who were holding each other in the shade. Cpl. Patterson tried handing them a Snickers bar, but they didn’t even budge. Not even for some chocolate. Danny and Julian had jack shit to do at the moment. Half the squad was pulling security around the perimeter or monitoring comms traffic in the truck. They contemplated throwing rocks at each other for fun, but ultimately decided that would only further aggravate an already pissed off Valdez. Danny spotted a small yellow flower and picked it out of the ground. “What’s this?” “It’s a flower, Juju.” “It’s cute. Like a daisy.” Julian hit Danny with a sharp grin and a wink. “Yeah, it suits you.” Danny locked eyes with Julian and tucked the flower into the webbing of his IOTV ballistic body armor next to his grenade pouch. “Goddamnit, fine, fuck.” Valdez turned away from Mo Bags, and headed straight for Juju and Danny. “Andrews, Pollack quit fucking off, Patterson the kids don’t fucking want chocolate. For some reason Mo Bags keeps telling me this is the place, the family doesn’t know shit, but something is off and it’s not whatever they had for breakfast. So we’re gonna’ flip the place. Juju, Pollack, I need the two of you with me.” “You know you really shouldn’t call him Pollack, shits offensive Sgt.” inter- jected Patterson. Valdez turned to Patterson, “Patterson shut the fuck up and keep an eye on Mo Bags. Make sure Smith and Whelker stay hydrated on the perimeter and keep an ear open for any radio chatter.” Valdez called it flipping, but it really was breaking and entering. They went through their room with only a few clothes tucked in a chest, flipped their mattress over. The family must have been fairly well off for the vil- lage since they had a couch and old TV set in their den with a VCR. “Yo Pollack, these guys got 24 on VHS. What fucking year they living in?” Valdez was knocking through a stack of VHS tapes on a bedside table. “—Sarge, Pjowski, I think we’ve got something here.” Danny and Valdez left the bedroom and headed to where they assumed Juju had made some kind of discovery. Juju had moved aside a small chest that was filled with loose linens. Under the chest was a hole that Valdez figured was around three feet in diameter, just barely big enough one of them could fit through. “Pol- lack, toss me a Chem light.” Danny set down his assault pack, pulled out a Chem light and ripped open the black plastic sleeve, cracked and tossed the green glowing tube to Valdez. Valdez dropped the light into the hole. Juju looked over the edge and whistled. “Goddamn. . . Looks like there’s more. Pollack you’re up, I think we found the cache.” “Rog-” “I’ve got this one Sarge.” Juju had seen the color on Danny’s face fade away as he looked into the narrow hole. Juju was the only one Danny had told about what he saw at his grandparents’ house who had believed him. “Careful Juju, turn your Nods on and keep on your toes. Mortars gotta’ be around here somewhere and they might not want to hand them over. We’ll pull you out when you’re clear.” Danny locked eyes with Juju and silently mouthed “thanks.” Juju just winked and jumped into the hole. Valdez handed him his m4 and gave his helmet a slap. Barely a second passed before- “Fuck-!” Crack Crack Crack. Three flashes blinded Danny and Valdez at the edge of the hole as the familiar sound of an m4 firing a burst rang out. Danny locked arms with his mother and crossed through the double doors into the viewing. Someone handed him a pamphlet with a picture of his grandfa- ther on it, smiling in a green dress uniform, his collar tightly pressed, his tie neat- ly knotted around his neck. They wandered past groups of mourners mingling. Chit-Chatting next to flowers and a casket. “So sorry for your loss,” was their go to response to Danny and his mother’s presence. It’s strange how beautiful all the flowers are and how polished a casket there is for this man. Danny and his mother stopped at the casket. It was the first time the sight of his grandfather didn’t terrify Danny. He looked peaceful; the funerary team had done an excellent job painting patience on his face. There was a picture of Dan- ny’s grandfather from when he was a young man. Before the war. It was him and Danny’s grandma in Florida and they were smiling outside an old Thunderbird. Grandfather was wearing a yellow shirt and embarrassingly short shorts. This was the first time Danny ever saw a resemblance between him and his grandfather and there was something off-putting about how familiar his grandfather looked. “If you look at your graduation photo you look just like him.” Grandma had limped next to Danny, her cane tapped against his black dress shoe. “This was back when we were in college together” “Grandfather went to college?” “Oh yeah, before the war. He studied English, hehe you’d never guess it but he used to write the sweetest poetry… Good lookin’ too.” “Then how did he end up in Nam?” “Your father.” “Grandma that’s scandalous.” “Hehehe. . . Your Grandfather dropped out looking for work to support us before he got drafted.” “I’m sorry, I never knew. . .” Her eyes were red, despite her polite smile. “are you okay?” “Yeah,” a little smile crossed her lips and with a tinge of sadness in her eyes, “I told him to quit smokin’ so many times, but after he started smoking in the war he didn’t stop. He wasn’t always so stubborn.” Grandma got quiet for a moment. “Y’know, I didn’t lose him in the war… at least not literally, but a lot of him was lost to it. I still had part of him until now, and I thank God for that… I’m sorry about what happened to you, finding Julian like that-” “I don’t want to talk about him. I’m- I can’t” Danny’s knuckles on his free hand squeezed tightly until they turned white, trying to block out visions of Ju- lian. His smile, the way he opened beers with a lighter, the way they made Danny collect his gear, the toppled chair, and the tight bedsheet wrapped around Juju’s neck when he found him. Diane, Danny’s grandmother, recognized the look in Danny’s eyes when she mentioned Julian. It was the same look she used to see in the Marys and Suzys who’d receive the letters saying that Johnny wasn’t coming home. A musky, humid breeze swept upward from the dark opening into the base- ment. The steps were dusty and wooden. They creaked every time Danny heard his grandfather descend into the cellar. From where Danny stood the stairs went on forever, there was no light to be seen at the bottom. Danny anxiously looked around him to see if his grandfather was watching, then took a step down into the stairwell. He blindly reached around for a light switch but found only an L-shaped flashlight that he accidentally kicked while stepping onto the second step. The yellow light helped Danny find the steps and not fall, but he still couldn’t see the bottom. Brick walls lined both sides of the stairs and Danny let his hand drag along the wall to help his balance. Creek Creek Creek. Each step Danny took caused a stair to let out a small cry and a sharp breath. He continued going down more and more stairs, and still could not see the bottom of the stairs. The walls began to grow more and more dirty… more and more narrow. Danny felt as the bricks faded away and dragged his hand along the stone and dirt. He kept going. Then he began to hear voices in the distance. Someone was crying ahead, muttering something he couldn’t understand. Then he heard someone shout in a language he didn’t understand. Crack Crack Crack. Three gunshots somewhere further. The stairs ended. A light green glowstick lay on the dirt ground, providing only a faint green glow. Roots hung low from cracks in the ceiling. The air reeked to Danny, it smelled of gunpowder and another scent that reminded Danny of a dead rabbit he had found in his parents’ yard. The air was cold and wet on Dan- ny’s arms. He crept forward… heading towards what voices he could hear. The voices were just whispers, but Danny could feel them growing louder. He was getting closer. The ceiling grew low and narrow and Danny, despite his small height, had to hunch over to continue forward. Soon, Danny begins to make out a soft voice repeating “nononononoooo.” Eventually Danny gets to a small opening and has to crawl to pass through. He gets on his hands and knees and brushes his way into the hole. Danny points his flashlight at the source of the whispers as fast as he can. There’s a man in green, sitting in the dirt, arms wrapped around his legs gently rocking back and forth. His green shirt is plain but dirty, and he has two huge pockets on his chest and a belt around his waist that reminds Danny of Batman. He has one of those metal helmets that Danny’s toys had, a black rifle sits on the ground next to him. He’s got a red pack of smokes sticking out of one of his pockets. His blue eyes are fixed on something Danny can’t see from where he is and he doesn’t notice Danny at all. There’s another man sitting next to him. He has a checkered square pattern on his gray uniform. He has a big bulky vest that has pockets that are filled with bullets. A small yellow flower is tucked into his vest next to one of the pockets. He has a helmet too, but he has big black night vision goggles and he looks like the guys Danny sees on the news. His head is in his hands and Danny can’t make out his face. Danny notices four red cans of Folgers coffee, the kind his dad drinks, and a black rifle with a laser pointer leaned against the wall. His eyes are locked on whatever the other man is looking at. Danny swings his flashlight following their eyes. In the dirt of the cave Danny finds a black puddle. He drags his flashlight to the middle. Two boys are there. At first Danny thinks they’re sleeping, three holes in each of their backs. They were the same height as Danny, but Danny thought they were wearing Pajamas. One had a round straw hat. The other wasn’t even wearing shoes. Neither were moving. The flashlight flickers and Danny hears a rattle as both men stand up. The green man turned to Danny, terror in his gray eyes, “You aren’t supposed to be down here.” The gray man looked at him too, his eyes were sad and heavy, “Danny?” Hearing his own name sends electricity through every muscle and joint in his body, he turned to run back through the tunnel but was already at the bottom of the stairs. Startled, he climbed only a few steps into the light of the cellar door, and burst into the white room screaming, tears running down his face. Danny had told his grandparents and parents what had happened but no one believed him or listened, they told him he had seen too many movies. Grandma yelled at Grandfather to stop watching Westerns around the boy. As he grew older he forgot more and more of the details. He began to think it was just a dream, and by the time he was a teenager he was convinced that it was just a kid’s daydream. He dismissed it and never spoke about it, but always maintained a fear of his grandparent’s basement. One night in their CHU, when neither of them could sleep, he turned to Juju and asked him what he was afraid of. “Losing myself out here, I guess. How about you?” Danny chuckled, “You’re gonna think I’m lying. . . or crazy. . . but I have a thing about Cellars.”


CREATIVE NONFICTION

Tamara Adelman
Carson

I’m not the kind of person who has the habit of cruising dogs on Petfinder, but this is what I was doing Thursday night on my iPhone when I saw Carson, a yellow lab with a nice big smile. I clicked on him: Santa Monica Shelter. Fate. The next day my car drove itself to the shel- ter on Ninth and Olympic. “Is Carson still here?” A petite woman with short orange hair and a nametag that read “Bunny” looked up at me. She squinted. “Who?” “Carson, the dog,” I said. I don’t know why, but I almost started crying. “Is Carson your dog?” “No.” I took a deep breath to fight back the tears. “Not yet.” Then what’s your problem? Her look said it all, but she typed his name into her computer and told me to go out- side. Someone would meet me there. “Who you here for?” I was greeted by a man who was talkative, but who never stopped moving. He escorted me back to the source of the din of barking and howl- ing, and I was shocked to see a horse amongst all the concrete cages of bunnies and cats and dogs. “Carson.” I was still staring at the horse, who I realized was a police horse and not a stray. He repositioned a hose from a full to an empty bucket, and moved some blankets to the dryer. “Ah, yes,” he said. “He’s been here a while. He’s an older dog. It’s hard to tell how old, maybe seven or eight.” I hoped for seven. My last dog, a golden retriever, died suddenly two years ago, before he had a chance to get old. I felt like I missed out on something. Carson did look a lot like Benny. He had a light coat, a full square jaw, and brown eyes with blond eyelashes. He looked so lonely Carson there standing in his cage, but he didn’t bark. He didn’t wag his tail either. It hung there, kind of droopy, with a slight lilt, like it had the potential to wag. “This dog isn’t going to go running with you,” the man said. “I don’t need a dog to run with me.” “Good, because there’s something wrong with his knee. He must have hurt it. My dog injured his knee, and it healed up okay, but this dog isn’t going to run with you.” I let his words sink in. This was not a three-year- old. This was not the kind of dog, despite his classic Labrador look, a family with young children would adopt. It was up to me to adopt this dog. “Having a dog is a big responsibility,” he said. I nodded. “This dog might have cancer.” He was trying to talk me out of it. “Why don’t you go home and think about it overnight.” He gave me his card. His name was Scott. I thanked Scott and walked out the back to my car. What just hap- pened? When I got home I filled a bowl with water and found an old leash. I was ready. I couldn’t stand the thought of Carson spending another night in the shelter. How could he get any sleep at night with all the barking? But with no history on the dog, what was I getting myself into? In the morning I grabbed my swim bag and put the leash on the front seat of the car. I looked at Scott’s card, which had the shelter hours on it. It opened at 8 a.m. on Saturdays. I decided to skip the swim. I’d be disappointed if Carson was gone. Scott wasn’t there, but Bunny said an attendant would bring Carson out into a pen so I could visit with him. I walked over to the fenced-in patch of fake grass and opened the gate. There was a bench, so I sat and waited. The attendant led him in. Carson dragged his butt against the ground, produced some runny stool, and then lay on his back waiting for a belly rub. I promised Bunny I’d be back within ten days with a rabies certificate, paid the $50 adoption fee, and loaded Carson into the backseat of the car. By the time I opened my door, he’d jumped over the seat and waited for me from the passenger side. Long white pieces of dog hair blanketed the upholstery. I drove straight to a vet that takes walk-ins. Carson got his shots, an exam, and some medication. He had arthritis but was basically healthy except for the kennel cough. I glanced at the side mirror as I drove home and saw Carson sniffing the outside air from the open window. No groomer would want a dog with kennel cough, so I would have to bathe him myself, but first I would have to get him up the stairs. He froze up. No amount of begging or tugging would convince him to try the stairs, which was a small problem since I live on the second floor. I couldn’t tell if it was the stairs themselves or the walls and railings by the stairs that invoked such paralyzing fear. Had something happened to him on stairs? He wasn’t great on a leash and he kept trying to wiggle out of the end I’d looped around his neck. Finally I straddled him, holding his middle and moving his paws, one at a time up each stair. Once inside, I escorted him straight to the bathtub and snatched up handfuls of hair before it went down the drain. He didn’t seem to mind the bath too much. I rubbed him with a towel and then let him wander around my place. That night he snored, and the sounds of his breathing were of comfort to me as I watched back episodes of The Dog Whisperer. “You don’t get the dog you want, you get the dog you need,” Cesar told a fast-talking client who had a hyper dog. I wondered what issues my almost perfect dog could possibly have besides the stairs thing. When I left the apartment, Carson started crying by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs. Then it erupted into a howl. Then some barking. By the time I hightailed it back up the stairs to “shh” him like Cesar said, he stopped. I got him something called the “ThunderShirt,” a tight, Vel- croed- on jersey that was “supposed to make your dog feel like he’s getting a hug” the girl at Centinela Feed said. Carson seemed to like it, but he continued to howl. Some of Cesar’s cases required a treatment called “no touch, no talk, no eye contact.” It meant give the dog space. What was I doing to contribute to Carson’s state? Maybe I loved him too much. I made an effort to ignore him, not be so needy myself. If he was sleeping in the other room, I gave him his space. When I left the house, I didn’t look at him. When I got home, I didn’t say hello right away. It worked. It turned out Scott was wrong. Carson loves to run. Whatever it was with his knee in the shelter, it doesn’t bother him. Last week I put my Rollerblades on and took Carson to the bike path. It was a misty morning, a little on the cool side, and I could hardly see past the Santa Monica pier. A figure with a crop of bright orange hair was coming toward us on roller skates. She smiled as she passed us headed toward Venice. At first I wasn’t sure who she was, but after Carson tried to lunge toward her, I realized it was Bunny. I’m sure she didn’t recognize us—why would she? But I had to stifle the urge to call out after her, “Seven! I think he’s closer to seven!” We cut through the fog, girl and yellow lab: an encounter fertilized by mutual need had made Cesar’s declaration grow. I got the dog I need.

Kelsey Brogan Fiander-Carr
Don’t Eat, Then

When the drum major orders the band to stand, you listen, only feeling dizzy for a second in the stands. This is the National Anthem. The marching band of the home and away teams stand as well as the crowds of parents, friends, and coaches on each side. When the veterans from the Vietnam War or World War II, you can’t remember, begin to raise the American flag, your school’s River Rhapsody, the highest-level choir, starts to sing the National Anthem. When they belt out the first oh say can you see, your stomach begins to rumble. You’re standing, clutching your burnt-orange saxophone and remember that you haven’t eaten since lunch. The options today were mac sticks or pulled pork. You hate pork, and actually kind of like the mac sticks, so you went for those. Mac sticks are the public schools’ healthy version of a mozzarella stick concoction. It’s prac- tically bread with cheese inside, served with marinara sauce. Honestly, it’s not bad. Mr. French, one of the Vice Principals of your high school, announces the captains of the football teams. You know them. The ones from your school are members of Student Government, the club that you are secre- tary of. Can you even spell sec-rea-tery? No, no. You decide it is indeed spelled s-e-c-r-e-t-a-r-y, but you will spell check yourself after halftime. Your stomach rumbles again as the first kick-off becomes a first down for your school’s football team. “First down, Pirates,” Mr. French announces. You, even if you weren’t raised watching the Eagles, know that your team, the Pirates, have made a first down because Kim Evens, the drum major, held up a wrinkled poster board that read “Short Pirates.” This is a shortened version of some song in Pirates of the Caribbean. Or is it some other movie? You will also look this up. It’s the least you can do figuring that this song is practically ingrained into your brain after playing it in these stands for the past four seasons. Dat dat daat daaaata dat dat datada rings from your burnt saxophone you got from the used music store. Your mom made payments, but the store stopped calling for money after two months. You nor your mom asked any questions. Your ears are ringing. You’re blaring your saxophone as loud as you can while making a good sound, but the real ring comes from the trumpets behind you. Loud asses. You end, cheering “go, pirates.” Kim Evens lets you and your section sit. Your neck strap rubs your neck in all the wrong ways. You thought about asking your mom for a new one each time the sharpness of its fabric put small cuts on the back of your neck. Your mom never saw those because your hair was long enough to cover anything. Anything. You think, there are better ways to spend money. Your stomach growls again. You believe that there is a tiger in there begging for food. This occupies you until Kim Evens tells you to play another song. Your mom gets paid on Wednesday, so the possibility of her having money during the game for you to get concession food is slim to none, but mostly none. Your stomach rumbles again. Luckily, everyone is shak- ing their legs up and down in anticipation of a field goal. You don’t want anyone to know that you are hungry. Many of your band members ate after school, but you had nothing. You spent that time doing homework for AP Psych, or maybe it was for AP Literature. After that, you helped your section memorize their music. The first quarter is almost done. Your team is winning. Your jaw hurts from adjusting to the fast octave changes in the stands-tunes you’ve been playing. Your gloves are discolored from all the brass. Your mom works until the last moment before she has to leave in order to make it to halftime. By that time, the athletic department would have stopped checking people in. Your mom gets a free pass into the stadium every week. You don’t complain, and you think that it’s only fair because she only stays for halftime anyway. She says that high school football isn’t as entertaining as her Eagles. Often, she tells you that she will take you to an Eagles’ game. A real one. In Philadelphia. Your mom says that she’s from there. You know that she is actually from Aston, but you let her live her little lie. She wants you to go to college where she grew up. Moving to Pennsylvania with her seems scary, but you know that you cannot live in Florida without her. She is everything to you. “Alright, to the track,” Kim Evens announces. It’s the second quarter. You and your section have to walk down to the track to the right of the bleachers. You are the last to leave. You have each of your section members show you that they have everything they need to perform. Maybe a member forgets to take off their lyer, so you stop them and stash it next to your section bag. Maybe a member takes the wrong hat box, so you have to swap them. Maybe a member has everything and calls you Supreme Leader and salutes you. You tell them to get down to the track before Mr. C, your director, beats their ass. Not all of the section leaders wait to be the last to go to the track, but you do. You need to. You always put yourself last. By the end of the game, you want to go home and maybe heat up some popcorn or eat the stale pretzels in the cabinet. When you get into the car, your mom gives you a bag. Maybe she already had it out, but nonetheless, she gives you a McChicken from McDonald’s. You know that this sandwich is a dollar but a dollar-seven with tax. Although Saturdays during band season meant competitions, your Saturdays normally meant spending the day with your mom at her store. Most of the day, you sit in her office at Dollar Tree a few miles from your duplex and either read or draw. Sometimes, you do homework, but you’d rather not do that. The only times that you are ordered out of the office is when your mom has to count the safe. She says something to the effect of, “I can’t lose my job,” each time she begins to open the safe, using your birthday as a code, signaling you to leave. When she is in the safe, you stare at the balloon section just outside of her office. Next to the balloons are large tanks of helium. Amid the beeping sounds coming from the registers with cashiers, you press the helium. Without a balloon on it, the helium tank makes a funny squeaking noise that you like. Sure, maybe you like the noise, but maybe you also like when your mom scolds you. “Brogan,” is all she has to say for you to stop and enter her office again. Before you leave the store, you are given a mission. Your mom hands you her debit card, the pink one with the breast cancer ribbon for your aunt Sue. “Four dollars left,” your mom would have said. This means that she has four dollars to her name. However, to you, this also meant, with the ten dollar overdraft protection, you are able to have a scavenger hunt for 14 items. If you stick to food, you can get the full 14, but you know your mom wants Diet Coke, so you budget that in. The food isn’t taxed, but the drink is. You do not ask her to go around the store with you even though you want her to. You like spending every moment with her. She is the only person you feel like you don’t annoy. You and her always feel like it’s you two against the world. When you used to ask your mom if she wanted to go around the store with you, the look of shame on her face would an- swer that question for you. However, in this moment, you think that your mom shouldn’t have anything to feel shameful for, but you constantly make a mental note to never ask her again. You do not want her to feel shame for something out of her control. You head down the first food aisle. Your go to is spaghetti. For four dollars, you can get noodles, sauce, a small bag of frozen meatballs, and garlic bread. You know that you and your mom will be the only two eat- ing spaghetti if there isn’t any meat in it, but you know that your mom likes the sauce with some sort of meat. Your two older brothers, Chris and Timmy, aren’t fans of spaghetti, but will eat it if there are meatballs. You look down at your mom’s debit card. Is this one meal worth the four dollars? You are going to the food bank tomorrow, so you assume you can track down some ground beef there, so maybe you will wait to make spaghetti until Sunday. Maybe you will make it tonight. You’ll decide soon. You volunteer every Sunday at your local food bank. Your mom’s assis- tant’s sister will pick you up at 5:30 in the morning from your duplex. You will help set up the rundown church with aisles of food to fill cars with and will be rewarded with a box of food yourself. You can pick exactly what you want. You are the cook in your household. At the store, you manage to hunt around for five nights of dinner. The total is $13.07. You decide to make spaghetti tonight, without the meat. Your mom fell in love with the sight of the garlic bread you picked out, but there are only five slices in one box, and you know you need at least eight to suffice your family’s wants. Garlic bread trumps meat in the sauce. (You discover that you can use ground beef to make sloppy joe’s on white bread tomorrow after the food bank. Your brothers like sloppy joe’s. You don’t, but you’ll eat it). At home, you put the groceries away and begin to prepare dinner. “I’m sick of spaghetti,” your brothers would say when they see you cooking angel hair noodles in your favorite pot. “Then don’t eat, then.” Your mom would answer fast from the living room, but she would sit back down on the couch and sip her Diet Coke. Choking back the tears, she grabs the remote. When she turns on General Hospital, you sit on the love seat four feet from where your mom will die in a few months. You let the noodles simmer while the bread heats up. “I love spaghetti,” you would say every time.

Darius Brown
Interview with Deeshaw Philyaw

INTERVIEWER
I am interviewing the wonderful Miss Deesha Philyaw. How are
you today?

DEESHA PHILYAW

I’m good.

INTERVIEWER

Your work is so wide-ranging, covering everything from political es-
says, parenting advice, editorials, interviews with writers, and, of course,
short fiction. I was just wondering, how do your decide on genre and also
how do you come up with your stories?

DEESHA PHILYAW

Sure. So I don’t write as much nonfic-
tion now as I used to, but at the time, I

was writing everything because I just really
wanted to get published. I wanted to get published because I thought—
that’s the thing that made you a real writer.
I don’t believe that anymore.
But I just really dug it and was looking for opportunities. A lot of

things that came my way (and then also since) were because I was look-
ing to make money writing, so my writing tended to be nonfiction. It’s

more likely to get published if it’s a personal essay somewhere, or an Op-
ed or something like that, and you can get paid for more that than a short

story. That’s just the way it works. So that’s how I kind of stumbled into
some of the other kinds of writing.

And then there was a site called Literary Mama that was look-
ing for columnists. That’s how I got into writing personal essays about

parenting. I had to come up with an idea every month, you know, for
that, that column. But I tend not to be someone who can take like, the
situation happening today, and then do a take on it really quickly. I have
friends who write like that, and I admire them so much, because they can
react and respond to something and have like a lot to say, quickly, and
coherently, and then pitch it to someone and get it published. I’m much
slower. And I tend to be kind of pithy. Sometimes something will happen
and I’m like—you know I’ll have something to say. But, you know, I have
friends who will have a whole essay worth of something to say. I wish
I could; I can’t. So what ends up happening is, I might get an idea for
something. And I take notes, and I come back to it. Then a week later, I
come back in a month later, I come back, and then I have something to
say.

INTERVIEWER
How did you write during the pandemic?

DEESHA PHILYAW

In the pandemic I started working on just how I was feeling as a single
person who was physically isolated during a lot of the pandemic. And I
didn’t know what I was going to do with those notes. But I started taking
those notes down. And there was even a point where I was like, I’m never
publishing this anywhere. It’s too personal; I can’t do that. But I think
for a lot of us, you know, the pandemic changed us in different ways. And

it made me more willing to share, you know, things that were more per-
sonal. And so then I was invited to contribute an essay to an anthology

featuring black writers writing about the pandemic. And I was like, Oh, I
got something, and then I kind of developed it from there.
But the fiction, like those stories come from everywhere, so I could

overhear a piece of a conversation I can see a quote and a poem, or some-
thing that later, you know, I can build an idea or build a character or

situation, or conflict around it. So I get ideas from everywhere.

INTERVIEWER

How important would you say black culture is when it came to writ-
ing your writing this collection?

DEESHA PHILYAW

My writing in that in the collection was rooted in a lot of memory
and nostalgia, so I was writing those stories, starting from the fact that
though I was living in Pittsburgh, I was not in my environment. I grew

up in the South. I was born and raised in Florida. And so I was not nec-
essarily homesick for Jacksonville, my specific hometown, but really just

longing for that life.
You know, nothing’s very simple. And where I was surrounded by
family, and things were very familiar. And so even though I live in a
colder place, I live in a different region, I was always harkening back,
and thinking back. I was raised by my grandmother and my mother, and
I wasn’t with them anymore. But I had those memories, and so when it
came time to write characters, the characters were people like the people
that I grew up with, they were in situations that were familiar to me. They
had a backyard. That was my backyard. So that’s where that came from.
And so now, I’m finding some of my stories are set in the present
where we are in the midst of a pandemic in. What’s that, like? I also
wrote a satirical horror story recently, that has to do with what it’s like
to date now. And so that’s a kind of culture too. But still, you know, my
characters are black and, and a lot of the things that are sort of personal
to us. The way we speak the way we fellowship, and the things that make
us us, are still present in my story.

INTERVIEWER

I did get kind of similarities to Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored
Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, your stories

dealing with all black women and then like also going in with relation-
ships and other topics. Did you draw inspiration at all from that book?

DEESHA PHILYAW

Books like For Colored Girls, all of Ntozake Shange’s work, Gloria
Naylor’s work like The Women of Brewster Place, Alice Walker’s work,
Toni Morrison’s work, and then Louise Merriweather, who wrote Young
Adult book that I have been reading forever since I was ten years old,
called Daddy was a Number Runner, what all of those stories did was to
show me and tell me that, like, our stories—black girls and women—that
we are worthy of books. The way that we talk and the way that we move,
and the way that we eat, and the way that we live, are the stuff of stories,
because that’s not what was reinforced. For me, that’s not what we were
reading in school. These were books that I had to kind of discover on my
own.
I mean I didn’t think about becoming a writer until I was in my late
twenties. But I had that background of reading. And I knew that I was
hungry for stories, featuring women, who looked like me, told by women
who looked like me, because that’s the other thing is that sometimes
other people want to tell our story, and then they get smashed. And it’s
not stories that center us. By us that has that knowing, like what you were
talking about earlier about the culture, you know, those little things that
you can’t learn, just through research.
And in the end, just the comfort with an ease, there’s such a certain
ease when I read a book, like For Colored Girls which is not easy to read,
but the way that the characters are embodied in the way that we can look
at them and see ourselves or see our mothers or see our eyes.

INTERVIEWER

Your collection’s main focus is on black woman and their everyday
lives. Do you think there is a disconnect for people who are not black
women?

DEESHA PHILYAW

I wanted to write those kinds of stories where women could read

those stories and see themselves, thinking about black women in par-
ticular. I knew from what Toni Morrison said, and what August Wilson

said, that we can write about the specificity of black life, and still have it
be universal. You know, August, Wilson said that he could write about
black life forever, and never run out of things to write about. And they
were critics and reporters who would ask the two of them, like, why are
you limiting yourself by you know, writing about black people, or there
was one New York Times reviewer that referred to Toni Morrison’s work
as provincial, because she focused on black folks and black communities.
And that’s just simply not true. There’s a fullness there, right?
And I hear from people who read my book, who aren’t black aren’t
women, who are like— you know, that’s my grandmother’s kitchen table,
or I remember feeling and experiencing grief, the way that it’s described
and that these things that are unorthodox or the experience of having to
take care of a parent who wasn’t good to you, these are things that are
universal, falling in love being afraid to fall in love, being insecure, not
being at home with your body. So, telling these black women’s stories are
entry points of connection for people who aren’t black women.

INTERVIEWER

How do you feel about the current writing space for writers?

DEESHA PHILYAW

I think there’s too much gatekeeping around who gets to tell stories

and what kind of stories get taken seriously or like, are popular, or what-
ever. And there’s all of these, you know, boundaries, and definitions and

stuff. They really only serve to keep people out. And I absolutely object to
all of that. And I think that everybody should be able to tell their stories,

and have that experience of somebody across the world across the coun-
try saying—That’s me; I felt that way, you know, or something like that.

And we only get that by encouraging more people to tell their stories.
We also too often define writing as something that’s, like, supposed
to be painful, and that serious writing has to be very buttoned up, right?
But, you know, there’s a lot of wonderful writing, that’s funny; there’s a
lot of wonderful writing that’s sexy; there’s a lot of wonderful writing
that is just fun to read. And also fun to write. You know I have a lot of
fun reading or writing the stories in my collection. But that doesn’t make
those stories any less serious.

INTERVIEWER

Who in your family was the main storyteller? Who kept all their fam-
ily juice in?

DEESHA PHILYAW

Yeah, my grandmother, because she would tell stories and jokes, but
the same ones over and over again. The good thing about that is that
that’s how I learned them because she told them so much that they made
it easy to remember. But then when she would really tell jokes, it’s like,
I can’t laugh. But the way she would tell the jokes they would always be
like stories. It was never like a quack quack you know, and she would drag
it out and I’m sitting there going, I know exactly. She’s going to shake
but she is gonna crack herself up. And so her laugh it made me laugh but
yeah, that was definitely my mom’s mom.

INTERVIEWER

You have so many dishes in your stories and stuff. I just wanted to
know what is your favorite like soul-food dish, or dish that your mom or
grandma made?

DEESHA PHILYAW

My mother’s potato salad. Like, it can’t be beat. On my dad’s

side, my paternal grandmother mainly made chocolate cakes and Ger-
man chocolate cakes, but every now and then she would make peach

cobbler. And so I loved her fried chicken also. But my favorite isn’t nec-
essarily soul food, but it’s crab. Like, you know, I think three of the nine

stories features crab boils. You know here I can get crab legs.
And then Willie’s Barbecue in Pittsburgh, I think you can go on
Mondays. You have to get there early in the morning to get blue crabs
flown in or driven in or whatever. And so I kind of missed that but I still
will get some crab legs and make them the same way. We used to cook
blue crabs. All the potatoes and the corn and the Zatarain’s and all the
seasoning and things like that. So seafood is my favorite food, hands
down.

INTERVIEWER

Out of the whole nine collection. Which story do you identify
with the most?

DEESHA PHILYAW

Oh, that’s a tough one, which I identify with the most. That’s tough.
My first thought was, “Dear Sister” because that one’s really personal and
semi-autobiographical in some ways. But I think I’m gonna say “How
to Make Love to a Physicist” because what I identify with there is that
sense of longing and fear and having to get out of your own way. You
really want something, but you’re almost afraid. And, you know, there’s a
part where she talks about talking herself out of good things. And then,
do you dare be hopeful? That’s a question that I sit with a lot, just as a
person.
And when I was writing that story, I had to ask myself that question,
am I gonna let them be happy? There’s a school of thought that says that
serious literature isn’t doesn’t have happy endings, you know, that to be,
you know, serious. It has to be somber, and moody and ambivalent, all of
that.
And I was like—No, I want I’m gonna let them be happy. You know,
we get to play God, or puppeteer or puppet master. And in that instance,
I was like, I’m gonna give them a happy ending. And, and that’s “How
to Make Love to a Physicist” is, inspired by my developing a crush on a
physicist that I met. That’s not our story, though. He did not have a crush
on me. But just the idea came from meeting him.

INTERVIEWER

How did you decide that “Eula” was going to be the first story in the
collection and why?

So “Eula” was the first story I ever had published of the stories that are

in the collection. Part of that choice to put it first was kind of sentimen-
tal, but also, it is one of the most like in-your-face, provocative stories.

It’s, you know, explicit sexually, and it touches on a lot of the themes that
you see later in the other stories. So I felt like it was a good introduction
in that way. And it also just let the reader know right away. This book is
different. This book, this is what we’re doing here. Oh, the reader could
decide to proceed or not.

INTERVIEWER

I hear now your book is being turned into an HBO series? How does
it feel to get your work turned into something that big?

DEESHA PHILYAW

It’s exciting on multiple levels, like, first from just the practical ma-
terial level, what I’ve wanted for so long was to be able to make a living,

doing what I do creatively and not have to do other work. And so it’s
making that possible. So just from that standpoint, and the opportunity
to revisit these characters is exciting.
I never had the idea that once the collection was done, like taking one
and then making a novel. I never wanted to do that, but at the same time,
I’m excited about revisiting them, but in a different medium, like seeing
them moving forward in time. And it but you know, in a whole different,
you know, beyond the limits of the stories as they’re currently written. So
that’s exciting.
And then just the opportunity to grow as a writer and trying my
hand at something different. At screenwriting something I have to learn,
learning from my collaborator, my co-writer, Tori Sampson, I’m have
often been in the position of being teacher. And I love being the student.
So I love that opportunity to be a student.

INTERVIEWER

I was just wondering if do you plan on ever making like a sequel series
to the stories? Or do you just plan on just doing it more on the HBO
side and moving on?

DEESHA PHILYAW

Yeah, I think it’ll be HBO. And then you know, the terms of books,
I’m on to other stories, and it’s just something I think about, think that’s
really sweet about just kind of having them frozen in time. And then we
get to imagine you know, where they are.

INTERVIEWER

Do you plan on branching out at all, like maybe directing or
screenwriting?

DEESHA PHILYAW

I definitely want to keep screenwriting. And I want to leverage where
I am right now into other opportunities, like to maybe be in some other
writers rooms for other shows, and then maybe, have a script that I write
on my own, you know, a different TV show or film or something that’s
not related to Church Ladies. Definitely, you know, those are things that
I’m hoping can come next.

INTERVIEWER

When you’re creating a story, and you get stuck, what tech-
niques do you use to overcome writer’s block?

DEESHA PHILYAW

So I have a couple of things I can do if I’m stuck in the story, but
I need to stay in that story. I can play “what if,” you know, and just start
imagining different possibilities for the character. I can put the character
in different situations and see what they do. I can interview the character
or have two characters, you know, talk to each other and see what I can
discover there.

But if I am able to step away from the story, like I’m not on a deadline
or something like that (I usually have more than one project going at a
time), I might turn away from this project, but I’m just gonna go to this
other one, and then come back to it. So I think it’s important to have
more than one thing going.
Also, I think it’s important to interrogate—why am I stuck? Like I
challenge this whole notion of writer’s block, because I think writer’s
block is always something else. We’re stuck because we’re afraid, or we
don’t. And this is a hard one, we don’t actually want to be writing it, like
the novel that I’m working on I started in 2007. And I had years where
I was stuck. But now I can look at and say, I wasn’t so much stuck as I
lost interest. There wasn’t a story. There wasn’t really anything there. The
conflict wasn’t big enough. And I wasn’t skilled enough as a writer, to
identify those problems to diagnose the problem and then fix it. The way
I experienced it was—I’m stuck, because I didn’t know enough. But I
know you know from other people, when they talk about being stuck, it’s
they’re already worried about how other people are going to feel about
what they’re writing. And so they’re in their own way.

And it’s like, so you’re not stuck. You’ve just, you know, distract-
ed yourself. You’re worrying about things; you’re afraid of something that

hasn’t happened yet. And that’s getting in your way. So it’s like figuring
out what’s stopping me. Most of the time now, if I get stuck, it’s like, I
still trying to tell myself the story. And if I look carefully, I’m not so much
stuck as this is just the work. Like I just might have to you know, dig a
little deeper, sometimes even with fiction.
There’s an emotional part, to what I’m writing about. This starts
to hit close to home. And then I just feel like I’m slowing way down. And
I was like, oh wait, I’m sad. allow myself to be sad. Acknowledge it, and
then keep going.

INTERVIEWER
Do you have any advice for future writers as myself?

DEESHA PHILYAW

Embrace revision. I think that’s the most important thing. I think the
best part of writing, and Toni Morrison agrees with me. So it must be
true! The revision part, especially when a draft can take so much out of
us, I get this the inclination to be like—Oh, finally, I’m done here to let
somebody publish it, but the draft is just the beginning. And everybody
writes drafts that are terrible, and some are more terrible than others. But
that’s where you start from, and then going back and revising, based on
your own rereading, or having other people who you trust and who have a
good eye and a good ear, give you feedback, and then responding to their
feedback and making edits. You know, that’s how you grow. And that’s
how you learn. And if you’re resistant to that, it’s going to get in the way
of you growing as a writer. And so I talked earlier about like wanting to
get published, and having that to be a goal.
I think it’s great when people get published. But I would just
encourage you to make growing as a writer your goal, and if that’s the
case, you may or may not publish right away. But if you’re always seeking
to grow, then you’re on the right track, and being open to that criticism.

And we can be really tender and precious, but no, it’s not personal, espe-
cially if you ask people who you know have your best interest in mind.

And you have to be careful who you choose to share your work with, and
who is giving you feedback to help you grow, making sure you all have
the same intentions.
And then when rejection comes, try not to take it personally. I know
people are like—Oh, I got this rejection, and I just can’t write again for
five years. Keep writing despite the rejection.

And be curious. Part of that growing as a writer is having some curios-
ity. And never stop learning, right? This idea that you’ve arrived, whether

you get a degree or you publish something still be hungry, still be creative,
still have this belief that there’s still more to do and more to learn.

INTERVIEWER
What’s next for Deesha Philyaw?

DEESHA PHILYAW

The HBO show, the HBO Max show, scripting that now I’m working

on another short story collection, working on a novel and possibly work-
ing on a YA novel. So a lot. A lot.


 

TEXT & IMAGE

Joseph Craft
Reflections