Current Issue

Contents

1. Haldane – Stephen Watt
2. Loch Ness Lonely – Ethan Bernard
3. The Minimalist – Mitchell Stocks
4. Of Rivers and Swamps and ‘Gators of the Mind – Richard Hartwell
5. Loyal Companion – Steve Hood
6. What is Love? – Joseph Giordano
7. On the Night of the Hurricane Forecast – Cara Ehlenfeldt
8. Chain Reaction – Maureen Bowden
9. Big Boned, Chicken Bone – Scott T. Hutchinson
10. Lemon-Lime Refrigerator Cake – Aprile Michelle Bratten
11. Follow Through – Kevin Tosca
12. Their Language or Ours – N.T. Arevalo

Haldane –- Stephen Watt

Supple leopard-print coats hunt dusty terrains
where ductile, fragile bones become estranged
from blinded creatures in broken homes. Lovers
swing, beneath scaffold and telephone wires
which staff small birds like musical notes;
chimes of the off-license harmony.
Window portraits imitate the moon, eroded
by speed-bump dust, flakes, indigo June insects
split from silk cocoons and Chinese whispers.

Greasy footballs roll like heads in the burn.
Mushrooms sprout, twist, squashed under cow hooves
or stirred in soup pots, turning youth’s stomachs
in the wooded sylvan and makeshift gang-huts.
Dogs munch on pram-crunched digestives, old lady diets,
neglecting the chalked, square mathematics of infant minds
and the rolled-up genie smoke
which sails from the washed steps of my closest friend
guides me home to love, laughter, teasing, cheap weed.

Stephen Watt is a Glaswegian poet whose debut collection ‘Spit’ was published by Bonacia Ltd in 2012. His writing style has varied from Cooper-Clarke inspired punk to dark stories influenced by Scottish west coast suburban areas. Updates can be found on the official Spit Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/StephenWattSpit and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/StephenWattSpit.

back to top

Loch Ness Lonely –- Ethan Bernard

Forlorn and weary, the Loch Ness Monster lumbers towards mossy darkness, into watery caverns of night. Always a second out of the firm grasp of the camera. Swimming towards invisible waves of scientific instruments a moment too late, then returning to uncharted depths to contemplate the latest close call. How to bridge the chasm between mystery and discovery? In those sidelong glimpses, dismissed as a log or a fake, the hope persists: to make contact. Until that day you remain, tracing arabesques over moonstarved waters as a fearful Bigfoot clings tentatively to your back, conversing with aliens who speak of far-flung galaxies abounding in light.

Ethan Bernard’s poetry has appeared in The Orange Room Review, and his fiction has appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly and Barrelhouse.

back to top

The Minimalist –- Mitchell Stocks

It started with the index finger he snapped off while cracking his knuckles. It should have hurt, but Buster hadn’t felt a thing. Not those ghost itches the Vietnam War amputees in rehab were always talking about or even just an ordinary sense of loss. He had kept the finger in his pocket like a talisman and showed it to his co-workers to quantify their squeamishness. High in most cases. Like Gertrude Wellenbach who fainted dead away and Allen Lundborg who twitched his nose and said the finger looked like a poodle turd and smelled like lutefisk. His mother, saddened by the accident, preserved the finger in a Vlasic pickle jar where finger and kosher dills collaborate to this day.

It was just one finger, and it wasn’t even on his writing hand, God having cursed him with a dominant left wing and too little coordination to do anything productive with it. He hadn’t really missed the finger and, for ten years, viewed it as a welcome conversation starter, something no one could top with a cute story about their toddler Cody’s latest novel or how they once waived to Evil Knievel in the lobby of the Butte Sheraton.

The gap was like a hole created by a missing tooth, smooth and magnetic, enslaving an impressionable tongue until the tongue falters and abandons the hole for a more compelling venture like collecting bacteria or sprouting canker sores. And so it was with the thumb of his left hand that soon tired of rubbing the fingerless joint as if polishing an elk ivory.

Indeed! Polishing elk ivories had become his profession of sorts. Knowledge work. The promise of the Third Wave, the scorn of those, like Buster, who were foolish enough to trade their tertiary education for a bench and a computer screen and a narrow slice of boredom preparing abstracts of technical articles with time and motion experts monitoring every key stroke.

And then one day, like lightning to a moonless night, Buster knew that a more dramatic commitment to minimalism was required, a course of action so bold and consequential no one would ever again doubt his resolve to be somebody. He promptly broke off the middle finger of his three-fingered hand. When his mother noticed the missing digit over meatloaf and cherry cobbler, she warned him to “Be careful what you wish for” or maybe she said “Beggars can’t be choosers,” anyway what do mothers know, always spoiling the fun.

How spontaneous his first attempt at greatness now seems! He would use his middle finger to serve science, maybe write an article for somebody else to abstract. He dug a hole in the rose bed two feet deep which wasn’t easy now that his right hand was digitally challenged. But he persevered, and before his shirt was completely torn from his back, he had buried his finger, tamped the earth flat and even spread some dried leaves and twigs over the spot like Fess Parker as Daniel Boone avoiding detection by an Iroquois hunting party.

He released his dog Lester who, instead of searching for the finger, promptly found a pleasant spot under a cottonwood tree and scratched his butt on the lawn before taking a two hour nap. Buster decided to extend his experiment. Each day he reburied his finger six inches closer to the surface. On the fourth day he laid it on top of the ground among the leaves and twigs. On the fifth day, he hit Lester in the side with his finger, a perfect strike thrown with his left hand. He wished he’d paid more attention during that season of Little League he had tolerated as a child. “I could have been a star,” he thought. “For the A’s or the Dodgers … Nah. Probably not.”

And then one day it hit him. Performance art. No more knowledge work. The stage beckoned. He’d call his show, ‘The Minimalist.’ He discussed the venture with mother over breakfast the following morning. She scraped yolk from his face with her thumbnail and said, “Be careful what you wish for,” hesitated, then added, “All the world’s a stage.” He had never loved her more.

The script took months to write. Even as a skilled knowledge worker, it wasn’t easy typing with just one hand. Then there was finding a producer, director, financing and a suitable venue. His decision to donate a limb to The Limb Bank after each performance proved to be the clincher. Everyone loves a philanthropist. And why not? There was much more to this than self-promotion.

National acclaim was assured by the interview with Morley Safer. He was generous in his comparisons to the great Evil Knievel and saved the tough question for last. “Why are you doing this son?” A good question. A fair question. “Because it’s not there,” Buster replied. And that’s exactly how they played it on 60 Minutes, straight up just like you’d expect them to. When mother saw the show, she shook her head and said, “Be careful what you wish for” and/or “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” and he could not agree with her more.

Mother attended the premier in a beehive and floral house coat that shaped the season’s fashion trend. She was quoted in People as warning all to “Be careful what you wish for” and that “A stitch in time saves nine.” Mother. Such a card.

Buster knew no art is fully appreciated unless the artist’s sacrifice is visible. During the curtain call of his final performance, he felt profoundly satisfied by what he had accomplished. Propped in his specially made sling, he listened to members of an appreciative audience admire his life’s work only a few among them insensitively calling for an encore.

Mitchell Stocks was raised in Michigan and Montana and has lived in Asia for eighteen years. He is a practicing international lawyer and a lecturer in the Law and English Departments at City University in Hong Kong. He received his MFA in fiction from City University in July 2012. Mitchell’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Guard Literary Review, Prick of the Spindle (http://www.prickofthespindle.com/pages/vol.6.4/vol-6-4.html) and the Prime Mincer Literary Journal. He reads fiction for Drunken Boat.

back to top

Of Rivers and Swamps and ‘Gators of the Mind –- Richard Hartwell

Brenda read once somewhere of the number of millions of cubic feet or billions of gallons of water per minute or second that some of the world’s great rivers ejaculate into their oceans. The numbers are so vast they lose context when pulled from the immediacy of their environments. She stands staring out of the motel window in the grown up river town of Fortuna. Across the road the Eel River slides by for the last two miles or so until it empties into Humbolt Bay.

She has seen bigger, broader, deeper, more raging rivers: the Columbia and Mississippi, the Ohio and American, and Feather, and, of course, the Rogue; all come quickly to her mind. All come differently, with different associations; however, they are all kin. Her disparate lives seem somehow linked to the gliding or swift or raging rivers she has been near; some connection or bond of what she is or has been.

As Brenda looks into the waters of the Eel, beyond the flash and dance of dappled light reflected back from facets of momentary diamonds chipped on its surface, what she sees when she looks beyond all that, deeper into the water, is the raw muscle and power of the river; the bulk of its energy, built up by the torque and tension of gravity and slope of momentum and mountains, of seasons and seemingly endless time. Time endless for the river, not for her. It’s not just the volume of water or the speed of the current or the breadth of the basin or the expanse of the watershed. All these are merely convenient calculations used to hammer an imprimatur on what is, or at least should be, impervious to man. Once again she bemoans too much education; too much to just accept things in awe. A fleeting phrase snags momentarily as her memory flows by: Not only damn the man, damn the dam! But which dam? And which man to damn? Too many of those, like too much education and too many lives, near too many rivers.

The orchestration of frogs last night under the window was not just a pleasant interlude of beautiful, natural music. It was a reminder of how quickly the real world can reassert itself after a disturbance created by man, or a man.

The frogs must have congregated in the large mud puddle beneath this window of the motel, a puddle presumably created by the construction of the building next door. Brenda looks down at the shadows just below the surface of the large, pond-like puddle. Probably merely tractor ruts or discarded boards pinioned to the bottom of this urban swamp. To her eyes, these quickly become ‘gators, lurking in the shadows, waiting for a meal. The shadows don’t move, but the slight ripple of wind across the opaque surface provides a stealthy glide to the ‘gators’ hunt. Brenda almost cries out a warning through the window to a crane that lands looking for the frogs. The choir ensemble must be on break; there is no natural music to draw the crane forward; a fruitless stop. It soon leaves, un-sated. The ‘gators remain unperturbed, the swamp-like puddle also.

Turning from the window, Brenda crosses to the bathroom, ignoring the five twenties fanned on the end table. She ignores the mirror also and starts the water in the bathtub, as hot as she thinks she can stand it. She unwraps the sheet she has held cocooned around her and steps gingerly into the tub. She lowers herself slowly letting the sound and sense of the rushing water from the faucet surround her inch by inch. The fierce tingle of hot water on her skin feels like hundreds of razor cuts, an enjoyable pain. Brenda recalls that one or two more would go unnoticed. Nearby, the Eel flows on.

Rick Hartwell is a retired middle school (remember, the hormonally-challenged?) English teacher living in Moreno Valley, California. He believes in the succinct, that the small becomes large; and, like the Transcendentalists and William Blake, that the instant contains eternity. Given his “druthers,” if he’s not writing poetry, Rick would rather still be tailing plywood in a mill in Oregon.

back to top

Loyal Companion –- Steve Hood

Adolf loved dear his dog, Blondi,
but Eva hated her,
kicked her, sometimes.

A unique bond between species,
dogs of snowy death camps bark,
well clothed in lush fur.

Before killed by a cyanide pill,
she looked into his eyes,
lapped water from a bowl.

And her five playful puppies taken
from Goebbels’ children
were shot in a nearby garden.

Steve Hood is an attorney and political activist living in Bellingham, WA. His poems have appeared in Windfall, Washington Free Press, and Whatcom Watch. His first chapbook entitled From Here To Astronomy, was published by Pudding House.

back to top

What is Love? –- Joseph Giordano

Giselle’s blue eyes were poetry. Long blonde hair tumbled down bare shoulders to a plunging teal dress. Inside the guild house, singles huddled over wooden tables or stood near the bar. A recording of Jacques Brel singing “Quand on n’a que l’amour,” When you only have love, played in the background. There was a fireplace, and the room smelled of wood burning. Outside, the evening was cool with a misty drizzle. Around the Grand Place, stone gothic buildings’ spires were lighted, and young people milled around the slippery cobble stone pavement of the plaza, hugging, laughing, or listening to street musicians.

Giselle’s movements seemed choreographed to the men whose eyes followed her like compass needles to true north. Michelle Legrand’s fiancé excused himself for the men’s room, and when next she saw him, he and Giselle were close and giggly. Michelle stormed out into the plaza. By midnight, Giselle had flitted with three other men and broken three girls’ hearts. Yet Giselle went home alone.

The next day Giselle looked into her makeup mirror and sighed. Men were drawn to her like candy. She liked being popular, but it wasn’t love. She phoned her mother and invited her to lunch.

* * *

The sky was patchy, but the day had warmed. Giselle and her mother, Elizabeth, took an outside table at Le Bistro café. The sidewalk behind them was busy with people headed toward the brown and gray labyrinth of antique-laden tents of the Place du Sablon flea market. Elizabeth was statuesque with a silver coif. She’d just come from the hairdresser.

Elizabeth sat back and ran fingers through her hair. “Love, Giselle. You ask how I’d describe love.” She looked into the distance and smiled. “Love is a tremor in your heart. You’re at once completely invincible and desperately vulnerable. There’s melting warmth and butterflies when you see him, an indelible image when he’s gone, and breathless anticipation in between.”

Giselle’s mouth opened.

Elizabeth gave a slight laugh. She leaned forward and squeezed Giselle’s hand. “They say true love only happens once in a lifetime. When you meet the right man, you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about.”

* * *

It was a mild summer’s day and Giselle peered into a shoe store window on Avenue Louise. A shadow touched her shoulder.

“Shall I buy those sandals for you?” The young man startled her. He wore a blue Brioni blazer with the collar turned up and jeans.

She looked him in the eye. He had a confident smile.

“I’m Lucas.”

“Giselle, enchanté.”

“Enchanté. So, shall we purchase the shoes?”

Giselle tilted her head. “I’m not sure I’m buying today.”

“Perhaps some wine will put you in the mood.”

* * *

“So, what do you do?” Giselle’s eyes looked over a golden glass of Meursault.

“I’m a consultant for the EU. And you?”

“I’m assistant curator at the Musée des Beaux-arts.”

“Ah, Rubens is my favorite Flemish painter. He loved women.”

“I suppose. His second wife was barely a teenager.”

“Well, he was a wealthy man.”

“Do you know the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan Van Eyck? Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. They’ve just finished the restoration.”

“No.”

“You must.”

“Shall we go to Ghent?”

“Today?”

“I have a car.

* * *

On the drive back, Lucas was still talking about the painting. “I wonder what type of brush Van Eyck used to achieve the detail?”

“He could have used a goose feather. It’s called genius.”

“Well you were right, my mind’s changed on Flemish painters.”

“It’s the greatest landscape ever created. In what other field did man peak in the 15th century?”

“Amazing. Are you hungry?”

“Famished.”

“Do you know Comme Chez Soi?”

“I’m not dressed for it.”

“I know the owner. We’ll go as Bohemians.”

* * *

“The rack of lamb with sage was exquisite. And you know your wines.”

Lucas said, “Without food and wine, love grows cold.”

Giselle smiled. They’d arrived at her apartment. “Want to come up for a drink?”

* * *

Giselle took Lucas by the hand upstairs to her bedroom. She was close enough to feel his breath. He smelled like saddle leather. She walked him to the bed until he fell backwards on the spread. Giselle’s hands went to his belt.

* * *

Giselle rested in Lucas’s arms until well past midnight. Tender kisses and little smiles passed the time. Lucas said, “Unfortunately I fly to Berlin early tomorrow, and I’m not packed. I need to go.”

She smiled when he kissed her cheek. She heard his footfalls down the stairs and the door close when he left the apartment.

She turned her pillow to the cool side. Giselle allowed images of the day to float through her head. This has been a growing experience, she thought. In the twilight just before sleep, she was surprised how indifferent she felt about Lucas.

Joe Giordano was born in Brooklyn. He and his wife, Jane, lived in Greece, Brazil, Belgium and Netherlands. They now live in Texas with their little Shih Tzu, Sophia. Joe’s stories appeared in Bartleby Snopes, Black Heart Magazine, Crack the Spine, The Summerset Review, Forge, River Poets Journal, Marco Polo Arts Magazine, Writers Abroad, Bong is Bard, The Stone Hobo, Johnny America, Infective Ink, The Shine Journal, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Alliterati Magazine, Milk Sugar, The Newer York and Orion Headless.

back to top

On the Night of the Hurricane Forecast –- Cara Ehlenfeldt

The saxophone sobs quietly between my ear and shoulder,
comfort unofferable. It has been so long since I have wrapped
myself in such an inaccessible shade of blue in hopes of drawing
some rare bird or feeling. The sky grows tempestuous again, as
leaves become birds which become coins, nickels nicking the
windows. I once shooed them away; I will not now.

Cara Ehlenfeldt is from Tabernacle, New Jersey. She would like to have conversations with Vergil, Catullus, and other Latin poets, but will settle for just reading their poems.

back to top

Chain Reaction –- Maureen Bowden

The trouble started when Sophie Melencamp turned up with a tatty piece of tin, engraved ‘The Force Be With You’, hanging on a chain around her neck. There aren’t many rules in our school. We have a uniform but you’d never guess. The girls fold their skirts over at the waistband until they’re no more than two inches longer than their polo shirts and the lads sling their crotches so low that they show their bum-cracks. There’s only one rule that we’re not allowed to break: we can’t wear jewellery. Necklaces, bracelets, ear, nose and tongue piercings, are banned, and anyone with ironmongery in their bellybutton had better keep it covered. There was no way Sophie was getting round this.

She’s a joiner: the only one in the school who’d been a Brownie, a Guide and a member of the Blue Peter Shipmates. She joined Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, The National Trust and the Save Our Public Toilets Campaign. She even joined the Bing Crosby Fan Club, because her granddad, the local branch secretary, gave her half price membership.

“What’s occurrin’, Sophe?” said Welsh Tegwyn.

“I’ve joined The Rays of the Jedi, Teg,” she said. “We have a mission to shine the light of truth into the souls of those who walk in darkness.”

“Fascinating,” said Miss Barber, who had slithered into the classroom unnoticed, while we were examining Sophie’s truth-bringer. “Now take that thing off and don’t bring it into this school again.”

Teg raised his hand. “Excuse me Miss, but you can’t make her do that. It’s her religion, like. She could take you to the European Court of Human Rights. Isn’t it?”

Miss Barber bared her teeth, looking even more like an alligator than usual. She pointed at Teg. “You, Ivor the Engine,” she said, “shut up.” She pointed at Sophie. “You, Princess bloody Leia, follow me.” Sophie followed with her head held high: a holy martyr, meeting her fate with dignity.

“Tidy,” said Teg.

* * *

She was suspended. The letter page in the local rag, The Daily Oracle, commonly known as The Orifice, was buzzing over the next few days. The community was divided over the issue and the debate was hotting up.

The Orifice sent a reporter to interview the former headmaster, Jack Scarlett, who had been dismissed, years earlier, for inappropriate behaviour. His imaginative use of language had earned him the nickname ‘Scratch-my-Scrotum-Jack’, or ‘Scratch’, for short.

“There’s no point having rules if you let these scumbags break them,” he told the reporter. His description of their little darlings as scumbags upset all the doting parents, including absent dads, who were uncertain about who their little darlings were.

There were further repercussions from the front-page headline, “Headmaster claims there’s no point having rules.” The next day the Orifice published a letter from Snake, the president of the local chapter of The Sons of Chaos Motorbike Club, saying that the club endorsed Scratch’s rejection of rules and they were offering him honorary membership.

Two days later the Orifice published a letter from Scratch, saying, “The Sons of Chaos can stick their honorary membership where Paddy stuck his ninepence.” Next day the committee of the Irish social club, The Emerald Islanders, accused him of racism for using the ‘P’ word.

The Rays of the Jedi organised a protest march down the High Street the following Saturday, in support of Sophie. Various banner-waving factions attended. The supporters’ banners read, “Suspend the Oppressors.”

The opposers’ read, “No Bling’s the Thing”.

The John Lennon Appreciation Society turned up, chanting “All we are saying is give peace a chance”; the Rays were carrying light sabres that looked suspiciously like the ones piled into Argos’ sin bin for the after-Christmas sale; and the Emerald Islanders, carrying giant plastic shamrocks, were after Scratch’s blood. It looked as if they’d get it, because The Sons of Chaos, with their ponytails, tatts and Death’s Head patches, came roaring into town on a fleet of Harley Davidsons, to give him a good kicking.

No one knew how it started, but before long, the Rays, the Suspenders, the No Blingers and the Don’t-Call-Me-Paddies were knocking seven kinds of thingy out of each other with their banners and shamrocks, while the Give Peace a Chancers, who were trying to separate them, were landing a few punches themselves. It got messy when some joker hurled a brick through the window of Vision Express, and one of the Sons, who’d appointed themselves Riot Controllers, picked him up and tossed him after the brick.

The plods showed up with tasers, teargas canisters and rubber bullets. Eventually, those who could still stand were carted off in the ’urry up wagons and the rest were left lying in the gutter until the ambulances arrived.

* * *

The headline in the Orifice, which drew attention to the Council’s neglect of the High Street, read “The Pot-Holes Overflowed with Innocent Blood”. This led to a flood of letters demanding urgent road repairs.

All the rioters, including those still hospitalised, were let off with a caution, except for the joker. He was given a hundred hours community service and he had to pay for the window. He apologised to Vision Express, explaining that the brick was intended for The Card Factory next door, but his eyesight isn’t all it should be. The manager accepted his apology, offering him a free eye test and a bogof.

A convoy of council vans turned up at both ends of the High Street, with traffic cones and diversion signs, and two days before the start of the Easter holiday a gang of Polish subcontractors started digging up the road.

Scratch disappeared. It was rumoured that he’d gone on the run from the Sons and the Don’t-Call-Me-Paddies.

Teg reckoned that one or the other of them had caught up with him. “He’ll not be seen again by yur,” he said, “least ways, not with all his body parts attached. Isn’t it?”

* * *

Sophie had been grounded on the day of the riot so she missed all the fun. She watched a Richard Dawkins lecture on BBC 2, and she must have spent the next few weeks considering the matter, because on the first day of the summer term she turned up at school, without the truth-bringer on a chain, and announced that she was a Born Again Atheist. Tidy.

Maureen Bowden is an expatriate Liverpudlian, living with her husband, on Anglesey, attempting to avoid the onslaught of two grown-up children, one former foster-daughter and nine grandchildren. She retired after forty-two years with what is now known as ‘Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’. She writes for fun and has had several poems and short stories accepted for publication.

back to top

Big Boned, Chicken Bone –- Scott T. Hutchison

His own mama calls him BB, laughs while
excusing him for any and all things, and with
meaty arms she spoons and dollops first his plate
then her own with red-eye gravy and fried heaven.

While on another street: He cannot eat, squirms at the lonely dinner table
as his stomach bunches, Mother glowering down at him, tongue-stabbing
how he’s no bigger than a chicken bone, picking at him for poor performance
in math, science, ever turning into something manly.

BB opens up the big brown paper grocery bag
that his mother packs his lunch in: snacks of Oreos,
Fritos, Ho-Ho’s, a zip-loc filled with Cheerios. Three
wax-papered gloopy globby sandwiches with smiles of mayo.

Sits alone in the lunch room, straw-launched spitballs
firing his way. Tries to eat the peanut-butter sandwich,
but his mouth goes dry, sticks, and his milk, spilled
by a tormentor, is a stagnant pool the color of a wet sheet.

Practically the whole school floods the granite fence line
of the graveyard after the final bell. On the fight card:
the fat boy and the human skeleton, a ticket created
by the dominant impresarios in need of a new diversion.

He goes because they’ve given him no alternatives
he can live with. They threaten to feed BB
their fists. He tries to think it through: rush
little Chicken Bone, land on him, crush him.

All he has is the sharpness of elbows. Maybe he can
jab an eyeball. If he can hurt before getting hurt
he has a chance. Then maybe the mean kids will
leave him alone at lunch. What’s a loser got to lose?

They are not enemies, but know their weight and places on
the predatory scale. Have never thrown punches, but are familiar with
the impact. And so: they serve the public this day, slake the mob, because
one must be on the bottom, one is fated to hear the bone break.

Scott T. Hutchison lives in the Belknap Mountains of New Hampshire. His poetry and fiction have appeared in such publications as The Georgia Review and The Southern Review. New work is forthcoming in Amoskeag and Blue Ridge Literary Review. Examples of his work can be found at The Medulla Review, NH Book Notes, Foliate Oak, Midway Journal, and Liquid Imagination.

back to top

Lemon-Lime Refrigerator Cake –- April Michelle Bratten

She parted her mouth
into a disturbed flower,

red, white, wet,

and as cold as the refrigerator
she bent her hefty ass in front of.

She eyed my sad round face,
said I was only allowed to eat
one small piece

because girls aged 9
must watch their figures.

Her pregnant belly loomed before the pan
like a tarred-out sun,
a big black disaster,

as she scooped out
my tiny jiggling serving.

It moved like jelly, like
her thighs, underarms, and neck.

It moved like the ocean I knew so well.

The soft cake
was cold in my mouth.

It was the snow-covered prairie I had yet to see.
It was the owl hooting above my quiet tent many years after that.
It was the wedding dress that I never wanted to wear.
It was a small apartment, an Irish man, and the New York City skyline.

With my fork, I quickly swiped
another sliver from the pan
and popped it into my mouth
while her flabby back was turned.

It was the cold rain pouring from a roof to calm my bare feet.
It was the green sky before the big tornado of 2001.
It was the white window dressing of the Hotel Buckminster.
It was a highway, paper, wine, and Lake Pontchartrain Bridge.

My young mouth sucked at the future.

Hey! she suddenly screamed,
slamming her fist on the old wooden table.

I said just one.

April Michelle Bratten was born in Marrero, Louisiana, USA. She received her Bachelor’s degree in English literature from Minot State University in Minot, North Dakota. She has been published widely in print and online. Her chapbook, Raw Dogs and Other Metaphors is available from Maverick Duck Press. Her full length poetry collection, It Broke Anyway, is now available from NeoPoiesis Press. April co-edits and writes book reviews for Up the Staircase Quarterly.

back to top

Follow Through –- Kevin Tosca

A tall, slim, attractive girl of fifteen or sixteen named Dawn stood on the path by the river. In one hand, she held a pair of bypass pruning shears; in the other, cradled and steadied against her chest like a baby or an oversized jug of wine, a growing pile of flowers.

It was a late spring Sunday morning, cool and freshened by a light breeze, a gift for anyone hearty and brave enough to be up with the sun. Normally, Dawn wasn’t allowed to go out alone no matter what time of year or day it was, but when there was no one’s permission to ask, where was the wrong? Besides, her grandfather would be so proud of her, and when her father, who lived in the basement, woke up –- he always woke up late –- he’d be proud, too.

She went back to cutting the flowers and watching the pigeons and ducks and swans and squirrels, and soon a woman came along, not a jogger or bicycler in fancy swishing clothes, but a walker. The woman wore jeans, like Dawn, low-heeled shoes and a sweatshirt with a hood on it. On the sweatshirt, in big white letters, was the word Barnard.

The woman stopped and asked Dawn what she was doing. Dawn didn’t answer. Then the woman introduced herself. She had a pretty name, Alicia, but there wasn’t much you could do with a name.

Alicia waited, and then she asked Dawn if she knew what all the flowers cradled in her arm were called. Dawn shook her head and smiled her artless smile, standing there with her pile against her and her razor sharp shears poised in the other hand—special Swiss scissors, her grandfather had once explained, that could slice through one inch of very hard wood.

So Alicia started to sift through the pile, one by one, giving names to each of the flowers and setting them on the ground after doing so.

“Wisteria,” she said, “dog rose, cosmos, iris.” She stopped. “What is it?” she asked.

Dawn was staring at Alicia’s hand; specifically, she was staring at the ring finger on her left hand.

“It’s so pretty,” Dawn said.

Alicia looked down and blushed. “What? This?”

“It’s so so pretty,” Dawn said, letting the rest of the flowers fall to the ground.

“Yes, well,” Alicia said, “thank you. My husband can be a kind of benevolent maniac, you know.”

Dawn, with a movement as quick and sure as a butcher’s, reached out for Alicia’s long, delicate finger. Alicia recoiled, but as Dawn’s fingers lightly stroked her own, and as she saw the wonder in Dawn’s eyes, she relaxed, she blushed deeper.

“What a beautiful morning,” she said.

She started to bend down, to retrieve the flowers Dawn had dropped so she could no doubt finish her lesson, when Dawn, as quick and sure as she had before, snipped off Alicia’s ringed finger.

Alicia stood still. She looked at her finger in Dawn’s hand, and then she looked at her own hand. When the fountain began, she screamed.

Confused, Dawn dropped her shears and the finger and pressed her hands over her ears. She watched as Alicia struggled out of her sweatshirt, as she yanked off the pink shirt underneath that and wrapped it around her hand, as she bent down to pick up her finger and ran.

Dawn watched her go, watched the way the morning sun reflected and sparkled off the ring as she went, and then Dawn reached down to gather her flowers, to pick up her shears. It was time to go home, but as she walked she couldn’t shake off the confusion that had come, couldn’t understand why the woman had acted like that. At the butchers, right next to the florists, right there on First Street where Dawn walked with one of her family members every other day, she had seen so many different parts of animals and sometimes even the whole animal itself, head and all, on display.

They, she thought, as she was also thinking about how proud her grandfather and father were going to be of her and her flowers, must have had on some beautiful, beautiful jewelry.

Kevin Tosca’s stories have been recently published in The Legendary, The Linnet’s Wings, Midwestern Gothic, Cleaver Magazine, Thin Air and elsewhere. He was born in the United States. He lives in Europe. Read more at http://www.kevintosca.com.

back to top

Their Language or Ours –- N.T. Arevalo

“They’ve got us speaking their language, Ma.”

Ma’s a fisherwoman, standing in the Monterey Bay, as I say this to her. A sea lion is curled on a rock we can’t see and it looks like he’s suspended on the water. There’s only a small bulge out of our sight, where his back arches from the rock. He waves his tail to the sun and his eyes squint in prayer.

“Jodie, it don’t matter.” She walks another foot into the water, her tall boots made for doing this kind of thing. She bends forward, the thin blue and brown checkers of Dad’s old shirt get wet first, followed by the tips of her breast, her hair.

“I got it!”

Ma lifts up and the shirt’s so wet it shows everything. Only the patch of jeans from her waist to her thighs stay dry, keeping their original dull denim and Ma’s honor. Ma trods out of the bay, back to the long wall of rocks I stand above. The sea lion dives back in the water. I kick at the sand lining the path above her.

“Next time,” she sighs, heaving herself over the last rock, “just let me do the calling.” She reaches for the phone’s case, the one I dropped right after I threw it into the bay.

“These things aren’t cheap, you know.” She reaches for my shirt and wipes it against my sleeve. She punches in numbers I can’t see and presses the phone to her ear. I hear it ring.

“Press 8 if you want to be connected,” I hear it say.

“Do you see Ma?” I whine, poking at her thigh. “Do you see what I was talking about? Next it’ll ask you to punch in more of its numbers. Some stupid — “

“Shh!” She’s waving me away. “Is Buck Thornton there? His wife. Yes.”

“Did you get someone for real?” I snap, walking back to the edge of the rocks. I can see the sea lion rising and ducking, rising and ducking. He’s headed to a crowd gathering at the end of a pier.

“Well, will you tell him I called? Yes. Thank you.” Ma looks over the phone and mumbles. “Impressive little doohickey.”

“What do we do now?” I ask, weaving between tourists that walk between her and I.

She huffs. “First off, I don’t let you do the calling anymore.” She pinches my arm but it’s not meant to hurt. “I gotta find a place with a hand dryer or something. Then I got to figure out what it is we’re supposed to do.”

I nod. I’m not going to be the one to tell her what I know. I pick up our bag. It’s loaded with every Steinbeck story about this town. Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday. Dad read these books over and over, until Ma and I memorized the stories. Until we knew just what he meant without him having to say much at all. By the end, we could recite the dialogue by heart and move just like Steinbeck had everyone move and shimmy and snort. Dad would be glad to know that when we finally arrived in Monterey, it was the day after a Lousy Wednesday.

“You’ve got to get him out of here,” Dad had whispered to Ma as they sat close on the worn orange couch in the ward, the week before we left. I was flipping through the magazines at the table, pretending to read then pretending to inspect the wax plant that was supposed to make the place better. They were pretending I couldn’t hear.

“Buck, I’ll figure it out.”

“You gonna keep reading him the stories?”

“Yeah.” Ma’s voice lifted as if she was talking to the windows or the empty door where no one stood. No one was waiting. Just a long row of low blue doors, sealed, hiding the other crazy people inside.

“Take him far.”

“Fine, Buck.”

“California, Mathilda!”

He’d been crowing about it for weeks. He found articles and gave them to Ma. He pressed his fingers to the charts to show me lines going up where it showed the words “California” and going down where it said “Kentucky.”

“California, the bay, it’s the one place in this country growing jobs,” he hissed.

Ma ignored his papers and started counting out the rice for dinner. Just one cup for all three of us. That would do, she’d say. Ma knew how to keep us going the longest, longer than anyone else who tried to make it off the Ohio River. Most of them had moved to cities or West Virginia, only to move again, or move back home.

“There’s nothing out there,” Mr. Sumner had said, his kids running back to the field where we used to play, his wife giving Ma one long, sorrowful stare.

“Where’d you get those anyway Buck?” Ma had asked Dad when he started taping all the articles to the wall.

“The Google. At the library. The computer told me.”

Ma laughed. This was back when she laughed all the time. Before Dad lost his head, started screaming out in the woods in the middle of the night. “The computer’s sure got a lot of ideas about our life.”

When he insisted in the ward he was angrier and more pressing. “There’s got to be some descendant of Doc’s that knows how to employ a good fisherwoman,” he mumbled as we sat with him in that place that was meant to look like a living room. But wasn’t a thing breathing but us tired three.

“Buck, I got enough — “

“You don’t.” I couldn’t stop myself from looking up from my magazines but Dad wouldn’t look at me. “I got myself in here. I’m off your hands.”

Ma started to cry. I couldn’t see it but I could feel her breath enter quicker into that room which offered any other empty thing but oxygen. Dad pushed her hair behind her ear. “Just go.”

* * *

The whole ride out here Ma told me all the things Dad said never to say and how never to say it:

Don’t ask for water or pop. It’s rude.

Don’t speak in grunts, boy. Say it loud and all the way through.

Ma’am and Sir is everyone’s name that’s bigger than you, you hear?

Don’t talk bigger than your britches. And don’t wear pants that aren’t pressed and saying “Hello, I’m honored to meet you” when they come in a room.

Say wash like “wah-shh.” Practice it slow, maybe in a mirror. It’ll sound right to those Californians, even if it sounds wrong to you.

Don’t forget to read with your Ma on Fridays. Sundays too. And tell her your favorite parts.

Don’t tell me anything bad about California. Tell me only about pretty things, the places where it looks like your dreams will come true.

Don’t tell them about your Daddy.

* * *

We got a phone, one of those from a gas station, and it kept beeping at us, even though we never said a word to it.

“What’s it saying this time?” Ma asked, yawning, as we crossed into Kansas.

I flipped it open. New message. This time it said: LMFAO.

“What’s that mean?” I ask her.

“This is why I’m not getting you a phone.”

It beeped again. “TTYT, it says now. Can I write back?”

“Absolutely not.”

I did anyway but it took my fingers a real long time. I did it during bathroom breaks and Ma thought I had the runs. I asked it who it was and what LMFAO meant and if it was from Kentucky. It didn’t beep again until Nevada.

“What did you do?” Ma asked, grabbing it from my hand. Every time she touched a button it said, $2, $2, $2.

“Jodie,” Ma sighed.

* * *

When I tried to call Dad for her while she drove, it wanted money first. “Type in your pen number.”

I searched the car for pens. I asked Ma for a pen and she looked at me twisted. I asked the guy at a gas station for a pen but there were no numbers on it. I looked on its box and put in every number I saw. I finally typed in 1 and 2 then 3 then 4. I waited. I waited a long time and it asked the same thing. It wanted me to tell it things, things I didn’t know.

“Ma! I can’t get it to work.”

Ma was driving straight through. No hotels. “No money for that.” She was going to see about fishing jobs. “Ask the computer first,” Dad had said, and Ma hugged him tight in response. She made me try and try again to reach him. She sighed at me most during the morning but tired of it by the end of the day. We napped in rest areas. Sometimes the phone stopped working. Sometimes it had nothing to say.

In Monterey, we saw parts of the ocean for the first time. I pulled the fishing rods out of the truck.

“Leave ‘em,” Ma said. She walked through a sandy path to a cliff. There were moans below. There was sunshine blasting so hard we almost closed our eyes. There was a mean breeze that made Ma’s hair dance.

I put the rods back in the truck. I ran down the path, braking and breathless beside her. It felt good to stretch. It felt good to know we couldn’t go any farther. “What are — “

“Sea lions,” was all she said.

I turned around to the row of buildings by the water. Cannery Row, a long sign between them said, in the oldest of materials, like something someone said long, long ago. We made it, I knew I’d say to Dad. I started to walk toward the sign, to start looking for Doc. Yes, Sir, I’d say to him, like Dad said. Great to meet you. Where can we wah-shh? The front of the truck had started to smell like shoe sweat and old cheese.

The sea lions began honking behind me and it was all I heard until I got to the end of the sand, the beginning of the sidewalk and a plaque: Once lived here . . . It said Doc Ricketts was gone. I looked up at the row of sidewalks beneath the old announcement of Cannery Row but not a person or a crabber or a fisherman passed. I read on to what the sign had to say. It said that canning, fishing were gone. It was an old sign, older than me. It would know, better than me.

The phone began to beep. Chortle. Rumble. Screech.

“I’m eleven!” I cry at it. “I can’t understand you.”

It says, I’m from Los Angeles. Where are you from? Are you cute? It says, Laughing My F*cking Ass Off! It sends me dots like this : and curves like this ). It stops sending words and starts with ringing, ringing like I remember.

“Hello? Hello?” I ask it. Does it know hello? Ma waves at me to come toward her. She’s pointing at things in the water. She looks like she might smile.

“Are you tired of your present carrier? Have you thought ‘I could be getting a better deal somewhere else?’ For one dollar–just one dollar!–a day – “

I let it keep talking. I don’t know what it wants. I try to walk to Ma and listen at the same time. I try to hear all she’s saying to me as I get close. She doesn’t even care about the phone. They are both talking at me and it’s making me walk crooked.

“Look, Jodie! See that? Is that a dolphin? Wow, I wish your Dad . . . “

I won’t look at the bay. I won’t see it. She hasn’t seen the sign, in our language, what it says about everything Dad said. Dad’s not crazy, she told me when they took him. She rubbed my head even though I was shaking, crying. Even though I didn’t think her words were true.

Just press one, it says.

Just press nine, it says.

It can’t make up its mind. Like Dad running from the factory to farmhand, to painting houses, to doing nothing, to saying nothing, to screaming long speeches from East of Eden into the woods behind our trailer. To handing me all the books for the ride. “Here’s all you need to know.” The voice of the phone doesn’t sound like a man anymore. It says the same things so much that it sounds like a song. It wants me to tell it things I don’t know yet. Things I will never need to know. I tell it to kiss the bottom of the ocean.

N.T. Arevalo, a former teacher and activist, began an intense writing practice in 2010. She is the 2012 James D. Houston Memorial Scholarship recipient of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her work has appeared in Eclectica, the long running-now retired Rose & Thorn Journal, and the Oakland Tribune. Arevalo writes from San Francisco. Her website is http://www.arevalossketches.com/ and she tweets @genrationalists

back to top

This issue © 2013 The Waterhouse Review. All stories and poems remain © their respective authors. No part of this e-zine may be reproduced without written permission.