Reunion: The Dallas Review Volume 11

Reunion | The Dallas Review 

Volume 11 | 2021

Volume 11 | 2021

Copyright © 2021 

The University of Texas at Dallas 

All rights revert back to writers and artists after publication. 

Reunion: The Dallas Review is edited by students and faculty in the School of Arts and Humanities at The 

University of Texas at Dallas. Political, social or artistic commentary represents the views of the writers and 

artists, and inclusion in the journal does not indicate editorial endorsement or non-endorsement. 

Reunion does not claim to represent the views of the University or its officials. 

Volume 11 layout and design by Alana King 

Logo and brand designed by Daira Cano 

ISSN: 2160-2190 

Special thanks to the School of Arts and Humanities' professors for their guidance and support — for their 

assistance and dedication to the University and its students. Thank you to the staff members of the School of 

Arts and Humanities, Student Fees Committee, 

Dean Amanda Smith, Dena Davis, Lisa Lyles, and the Student Union and Advisory Board. 

The editors also extend a heartfelt thanks to contributors and would-be contributors for the pleasure of 

reading and viewing their creative work. 

For submission guidelines, sample work from past issues, and more information, please visit: 

https://ah.utdallas.edu/reunion/reunion-the-dallas-review/ 

Reunion: The Dallas Review 

c/o the Office of Arts and Humanities 

The University of Texas at Dallas 

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Richardson, TX 75080

REUNION | The Dallas Review, Volume 11 

REUNION EDITORIAL STAFF 

Editor-in-Chief 

Editorial Management Team 

Editorial Management Interns 

CNF Editor 

CNF Readers 

Drama Editor 

Drama Reader 

Fiction Editor 

Fiction Readers 

Poetry Editor 

Poetry Readers 

Translation Editor 

Translation Readers 

Visual Arts Editor 

Visual Arts Reviewer 

Editors at Large 

Faculty Advisors 

Dean, School of Arts & Humanities 

Volume 11 Layout Designer 

Webmaster 

Alana King 

Alexandra Balasa and Kristina Kirk 

Hannah Colvin, Ally Duong, and Annie Duyen Le 

Tran 

Sunny Anne Williams 

Lauren Dougherty and Angela Ford 

Laurence Wensel 

Hayden Dillard 

Adam Michael Wright 

Aleena Hassan, Rica Lelina, Patricia Mathu, and Annie 

Duyen Le Tran 

Diana Miller 

Samir Abubaker, Matthew Baker, Alisha Chunara, 

Patricia Mathu, and Johnny Nguyen 

Sam Worthington 

Lauren Dougherty and Annie Duyen Le Tran 

Laurence Wensel 

Hayden Dillard 

Dr. Sarah R. Valente, Chelsea Kaye Major, 

and Brian DiNuzzo 

Dr. Manuel Martinez 

Dr. Nils Roemer 

Alana King 

Brandon Brown

FROM THE EDITOR: 

The second time around, I want to keep this short and sweet so that you can enjoy the beautiful 

art, drama, poetry, and prose that make up Volume 11. 

I’ll begin this the same way I began last year: by thanking every person who had a hand in making 

Volume 11 a reality as well as the people who have also made Reunion grow in spite of a global 

pandemic and a myriad of other things that all seemed to happen simultaneously and without a 

pause to catch our breaths. 

Thank you to Reunion’s 2020-2021 staff, to the Robert Bone Memorial Creative Writing Contest 

judges, and to UTD’s Arts & Humanities Department for their continued support. I also want to 

give a special shout out and a thank you to our first group of Editorial Management Interns, who 

spent their summer helping us copy-edit and proofread this issue. 

Thank you to everyone who submitted. Our 2020-2021 Reading Period broke our submissions 

record with over twelve hundred General and Contest submissions coming in from October to 

January. And again, thank you again to Volume 11’s staff, the ones who then had to read and 

evaluate more than twelve hundred submissions 

And thanks to each of you for reading this issue. I hope you enjoy reading this annual print issue 

and that you will check out Reunion Online at https://ah.utdallas.edu/reunion/reunion-the-dallasreview/ 

to enjoy even more amazing artists and writers.

P.S.: on a personal note, as I pass the baton on a new crop staffers and editors, I’m thinking about 

the last four years that I’ve been on staff at Reunion. This wasn’t always easy to balance with 

everything going on school-wise and personal-life-wise, but I’m forever grateful for the time I got 

to spend as an Editor and as part of the Management team. 

Thank you again for your support and for reading, 

Alana

REUNION | The Dallas Review, Volume 11 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CREATIVE NONFICTION 

MACKENZIE MOORE 

Westworld..............................................................30 

WESLEY KORPELA 

To Draw a Fading Man .................................................52 

ANNA OBERG 

Dry Leaves ............................................................77 

PAM MURPHY 

My Mother’s Guns ......................................................85 

KYLIE R. WALTERS 

Thoughts at 21 in Waterville, ME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113

DRAMA 

ANDREW SIAÑEZ-DE LA O 

Visions of an Eagle atop a Cactus eating a Snake ...........................64 

FICTION 

NHI NGO 

Hồi Hương (Homecoming) ............................................... 1 

LAWRENCE F. FARRAR 

Life Ain't Equal ........................................................34 

MARY LYNN REED 

Flares ................................................................94 

POETRY 

LINDA M. CRATE 

born to break the mold ..................................................33 

MORIAH BRAY 

Gringa ...............................................................50 

Arturo Chavez. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 

KAREN SCHUBERT 

Almost Everyone Makes It ...............................................60

ACE BOGGESS 

Against Nostalgia ......................................................84 

MATT VEKAKIS 

Lake Lincoln . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 

JAE DYCHE 

July Saturdays off River Road . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 

TRANSLATION 

HASSAN AL-NASSAR 

Translated by Hadi Umayra 

(Aisha, Baghdad, and Me)........................16 

MAURIZIO CASTÈ 

Translated by Toti O’Brien 

Voci (Voices)..........................................................48 

Dopo l’incendio (After the Fire) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .118 

VISUAL ART 

ADAM COULTER 

Yesterday’s Barn....................................................cover 

On a Snowy Day.....................................................47

VISUAL ART 

JAMES READE VENABLE 

Spread Your Wings ...................................................15 

Ready to Jump . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 

MATTHEW GWATHMEY 

Some Faces 1..........................................................32 

Some Faces 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 

RACHEL GILMOUR 

Hear the Cries, See Injustice, & Speak Your Heart ...........................61 

2020-2021 CONTEST WINNERS 

UNDERGRADUATE WINNERS 

First Place Winner: Chaz Holsomback (Poetry) 

Back and Forth. .............................................126 

Second Place Winner: Kayla Osborn (Poetry) 

There is no art in a cigarette. ...................................127 

Third Place Winner: Madison York (Poetry) 

17463 Davenport Rd. .........................................128 

HONORABLE MENTION 

Ayesha Asad Binary Plus One (Poetry) .........................129

Bryan Ordonez-Santini The boy who fought the Sun (Fiction) ...............130 

GRADUATE WINNERS 

First Place Winner: Matthew W. Baker (Poetry) 

End of Touch. ...............................................132 

Second Place Winner: Nikita D'Monte (Poetry) 

Silence. ....................................................135 

Third Place Winner: Sunny Anne Williams (Poetry) 

The Giver. ..................................................138 

HONORABLE MENTION 

p joshua laskey The Man on the Bus (Fiction) . .....................139 

Annie Duyen Tran The Friend I Never Get to See These Days (Poetry).... 152 

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES .............................................155

NHI NGO 

Hồi Hương (Homecoming) 

An knew she was fighting a losing battle even as she continued to fiddle with the collar of her 

button-down. So far, all attempts to loosen its chokehold around her throat had proven to be 

futile: the shirt was simply too old, too ill-fitting, pinching around her shoulders and waist almost 

claustrophobically. Something she’d long since outgrown, and ought to have let go of by now. With 

a sigh, An dropped her hand and let it rest on the rim of the fruit basket. At least I’m not being 

strapped down by a seatbelt, she mused, with an unprecedented appreciation for the general disregard 

for traffic safety regulations that had always ran rampant in this part of the world. 

She slumped into the back seat of the Uber and breathed in a lungful of stale leather and 

something sickly sweet, head coming to a rest against the car window. The glass was but a flimsy 

barrier against the relentless tropical sun: An could feel the summer heat on her face, her hands, 

melding the black of her shirt into her skin. She closed her eyes, the sunshine lighting the back of 

her eyelids red. The migraine was coming back with a vengeance. 

An hadn’t slept well on the plane. She never had, especially on long flights like this one 

had been, and the email certainly hadn’t helped. She had managed to remain alert on the ride from 

Tân Sơn Nhất to the hotel, voraciously taking in the new skyscrapers carved onto the city’s skyline, 

the ever-narrowing streets incredibly, impossibly cluttered with people and vehicles, the storefronts 

that had remained unchanged and those that hadn’t. But now, the thought of watching the 

passing scenery grow more and more familiar seemed almost unbearable. 

up. 

“Back from abroad?” the Uber driver, a middle-aged man with smile-crinkled eyes, piped 

An opened her eyes and straightened up sheepishly, ignoring the twinge in her back. 

Reunion | 1

“Yes,” she replied. Her mother used to say that you could always tell when someone 

had been out of the country for too long. Back then, An had rolled her eyes at this; now, 

she stared at the thinning hair at the back of the man’s head and wondered what mark 

America had left on her. 

“You come back often?” 

“No, not really. This is actually the first time I’ve been back in,” An paused, hoping 

to give off an air of nonchalance, “about ten years.” 

The driver hummed. “Wow, bet everything looks different to you, huh? Well, you 

know what they say about Saigon—it never stops growing.” 

An gave a somewhat tentative nod. She hadn’t exactly gotten better at making 

small talk over the years; moments like this always made her long for Marie’s presence, for 

her girlfriend’s warm eyes and easy smile. 

“Any plans to explore the city?” 

“Not really.” An shrugged. “I won’t be here for long. I’m just here to visit family.” 

There was a lull in the conversation, during which the man was no doubt taking in 

An’s all-black attire and the sympathy basket held primly in her lap. 

“Ah. Funeral?” he asked sympathetically. “My condolences. Were you close?” 

An considered this. “No,” she admitted, averting her eyes from the rearview mirror. 

2 | Reunion

Her mind drifted as she half-listened to the Vietnamese pop song currently being 

blared out of the car stereo, something about a guy throwing a fit because his girlfriend 

hadn’t picked up his call at 2 a.m.: “Không một tin nhắn từ tối qua.” Years and years of radio 

silence. And then, two days ago, her mother’s name had appeared in her work email’s 

inbox. An, it began, just like that. No fanfare. I know you probably don’t want to hear from 

me, but I thought I should let you know. It’s about your father. 

The car lurched to a stop, snapping An out of her reverie. Peering out of the side 

window, she was greeted by the sight of Aunt Hương’s convenience store, the scarlet shade 

of its drooping tin roof now washed-out and tainted with gray. A funeral flag hung limply 

from the streetlight next to the alley of her childhood home; the house itself was only a 

three-minute walk down the narrow street. 

“Thank you. You can just let me off here,” An said, fumbling for her wallet and 

willing her voice to remain steady. “The alley’s too narrow for the car, anyway.” 

The Uber driver nodded his thanks and bade her goodbye quite cheerfully as she 

clambered out of the car and into the tepid pool of July. Standing on the cracked sidewalk, 

An allowed herself to be enveloped by the polluted sunlight and its stifling heat, by 

the pandemonium of the traffic on the main street for just a moment, and thought, There 

it is. Saigon, in all the ways An had ever known and loved and despised. Then she shook 

her head, tightened her grip on the fruit basket, and made her way toward the house with 

the green gates. 

Her first observation was, So they redid the paint on the gates, after all. The 

wrought-iron bars, now a smooth mint green instead of the chipped moss-like color, 

swung back with a creak when An gave it a nudge. Left open for the guests, most likely. 

The front yard was virtually unchanged, with planters of roses and periwinkles scattered 

here and there; in the corner, a yellow apricot blossom tree stood proudly, its branches 


gently swaying in a rare afternoon breeze. Somewhere, the cicadas broke into their 

ear-splitting song. 

Marie would’ve enjoyed the ambience, An thought. 

—o— 

“Are you sure you’re gonna be all right by yourself?” Marie asked. The disapproving note 

in her voice was quite lost amidst the bustle of the airport, but no matter—An could read 

it in the downturn of her mouth, in the tilt of her chin. 

“I have flown by myself before, you know,” she pointed out, fidgeting with the strap 

of her backpack. 

Marie gave her a look that plainly said, Don’t act obtuse now. “That’s not what I’m 

talking about.” 

An sighed. She wanted to reach up and smooth out the furrow in Marie’s brow 

with her fingers, with her lips, but her skin prickled at the thought of being seen in public—some 

anxieties weren’t so easy to unlearn, even after so many years. 

“I’ll be fine,” she said instead, trying for a reassuring smile. “I can handle myself.” 

“Just for the record, I still don’t think this is a good idea,” Marie said bluntly. “You 

don’t owe them—him—anything, An. You shouldn’t feel obliged to—” 

“It’s not about obligation,” An protested. “I’m not excusing their actions, but I 

just—it’s—” 


An cut herself off, frustrated. She didn’t know how to put it into words, least of 

all to Marie, whose family had never been anything but open affection and a boundless 

capacity for acceptance. How do you explain, My parents fucked me up because they’d never 

known, had never been taught, any other way of loving me? How do you explain, I don’t 

want to forgive them, I probably shouldn’t forgive them, but every Christmas spent at your 

parents’ make me think “what if, what if, what if?” 

Some of the internal struggle must have shown on her face, because Marie’s eyes 

softened; carefully, she reached for An’s hand, making sure to give her ample time to draw 

away. An didn’t. Her girlfriend’s palm was soft and warm, an anchor against the currents 

of turmoil washing over An. Grounding. 

“I’ll call you,” An promised. 

“You’d better.” Marie flashed her a smile, small but genuine, and released her hand. 

Her warmth followed An all the way to the tarmac. 

“An? Is that you?” 

—o— 

A loud voice cut through the thick summer air. An instinctively took a step back. 

Please, please, please, anyone but her, An implored any higher being who might be 

listening. Slowly, she turned around. Of course, of all people she could run into, it had to 

be— 

“Aunt Tiên,” she greeted, inclining her head. She might have been disowned, but 

never let it be said that An hadn’t been raised with manners. 


“My goodness, it really is you!” her aunt exclaimed from the doorstep of the house, 

her lips tactlessly stretched into an arc of fuchsia. An had never disliked the color more 

than in that moment. Before she could respond, however, Aunt Tiên had already peered 

back inside, calling out: 

“Chị Linh! Bé An’s here! I told you she’d be coming.” 

An grimaced at the nickname. 

Moments later, An’s mother appeared in the doorway. An’s heart gave a painful 

stutter as she took in her mother’s thin face, her peppered hair, her narrow shoulders. The 

older woman’s eyes remained sharp and dry, however, as she stood half-shrouded in the 

shade of the front porch, back ramrod straight and seemingly unbothered by the way the 

loose white robe dwarfed her figure. Her gaze lingered on An for what seemed like eons, 

and despite herself, An’s first thought was, It’s probably not too late to make a run for it. Just 

turn around and walk away. You’ve done it once before, haven’t you? 

“Má,” An said instead. “I’m home.” The word tasted like thuốc Bắc, bitter and 

scalding, on her tongue. 

Her mother nodded. Her countenance was perfectly unreadable. “Come in,” she 

said, and walked back into the house without a backward glance. 

The house hadn’t changed. The cracked tile by the front door still hadn’t been 

replaced; the drawn curtains were still in the same uninspiring shade of brown; the walls 

were still a dusty beige; the family photo that had been taken when An was seven still 

hung beside the Phan Thiết beach landscape painting. (An supposed it would’ve been too 

suspicious to remove it—Aunt Tiên obviously hadn’t heard about what’d transpired that 

night. She wasn’t sure how her parents had been able to keep up the charade for so long, 

but perhaps she’d underestimated the lengths they’d go to save face.) 


The altar and the casket in the living area were new, though, as were the round tables 

for attending guests. Funeral sprays framed the casket on both sides; a haze of cloying 

incense smoke drifted around aimlessly, clogging up An’s lungs and leaving her throat dry 

and scratchy. The room was deserted save for the chanting monk sitting off to the side. 

“You’d just missed Uncle Minh and his family, dear,” Aunt Tiên piped up, shaking 

her head. “They dropped by this morning. Everyone’s been asking after you!” 

“Oh, that’s a shame,” An said, as if she hadn’t specifically chosen a time where she 

would least likely run into any of her extended family. 

An’s mother gave no comment. She gestured for An to step in front of the altar 

and handed her three joss sticks. An caught a glimpse of the polished dark wood that lay 

partially obscured behind all the flowers and candles, and thought, So it isn’t open casket, 

after all. She couldn’t tell whether the painful thump of her heart was out of relief or disappointment. 

An old man stared at her from the center of the altar. The portrait must have been 

new: the background was a crisp blue, sharp against the outline of his neatly combed hair 

and the deep indigo of a shirt she did not recognize. His eyes, unobscured by thick glasses 

for once, were a dark, austere brown. Even in the photo, he wasn’t smiling, though An 

hadn’t expected him to be. Time and distance had somehow marred her father’s features, 

making his face appear almost foreign and eerie. A near stranger. 

For the first time, she allowed herself to ask: How? Did it happen in his sleep? Did 

her mother find him slumped over the dining table, or collapsed in the garden? Heart 

attack, the email had simply said, and An had let out an ugly, vicious laugh upon reading 

this for the very first time, thinking, Oh, so he did have a heart, after all. But none of it 

mattered now, because it was too late for questions. It was too late for anything. 


The monk was still droning on and on. An steadied her grip on the joss sticks—oh, 

since when had her hands started trembling?—and bowed her head. 

“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” 

Silence. The way her father’s presence had pressed down on the house, had pressed 

down on her shoulders, her lungs until she could scarcely breathe. Hidden comic books 

under the pillow. Stolen doodles on the margins of textbooks. A clandestine set of colored 

pencils from her mother. 

“Where there is hatred, let me sow love.” 

The torn sketchbook in the trash can. Her mother’s stony silence. Her father’s 

sneer. “This is what you’ve been wasting your time on? No wonder you’re failing Algebra, 

really, how stupid do you have to be to not get long division?” 

“Where there is injury, pardon.” 

The acceptance letter. The way her father had glowered from across the dining 

table. “Art school? Are you trying to humiliate us in front of our relatives? Grow up and be 

rational for once! Đúng là con hư tại mẹ mà. Linh, I told you to stop coddling her—” 

“Where there is discord, unity.” 

Marie—the final straw. The closest her mother had ever come to begging, “Đừng 

mà An, you’re still young. You’re just confused right now. Stay, and we’ll talk, okay?” Her father’s 

voice bellowing after her, “Cút! Cút ra khỏi nhà tao! You’re no daughter of mine.” The 

fury that had set her veins ablaze, more vicious and visceral than anything she had ever 

felt. “Good fucking riddance,” she’d spat out without looking back. “Let’s hope I don’t ever 

have to look at your face again.” 


An straightened up and met her father’s gaze. Ba, she thought, testing the word 

within the confines of her mind. But nothing else would come forth, not her tears, not her 

anger, not her resentment, not the spite she’d spent the better part of her life cultivating. 

Not even the cadence of his voice. 

It shouldn’t have felt this heartbreaking, mourning the ghost of a stranger. 

—o— 

“Oh, but I’m so sorry about your dad, dear,” Aunt Tiên said as they all settled down at the 

table farthest away from the front door. An busied herself with pouring tea into three tiny 

tea cups, studiously avoiding her mother’s eyes. “It really came as a shock to all of us. I 

mean, anh Trung had always seemed so healthy, hadn’t he?” 

An nodded, not trusting her voice just yet, and took a sip from her cup. It was 

what they’d serve at Buddhist temples, a bland, lukewarm tea with an odd aftertaste that 

she’d never been able to pinpoint. A fresh wave of nostalgia washed over her. 

“In any case, I’m glad I got to see you, at least,” Aunt Tiên continued, undeterred 

by the lackluster responses she’d been receiving. “Look how much you’ve grown! You’re 

like a proper Việt kiều now, huh?” 

An glanced down at her shirt, which she’d bought at a flea market down the street 

years ago. “I suppose so,” she said. 

“Still, no American boy has caught your eye, dear? Really, I was hoping to see you 

finally bring home a boyfriend after all this time.” Aunt Tiên sighed as though she viewed 

this as a personal affront. Knowing her aunt, she probably did. 


Straight to the point as always, huh? 

“It’s hard to meet new people when work’s so busy, Auntie,” An replied, fully aware 

of her own overly-sharp smile but past the point of caring. 

Her aunt tutted. “You’re not getting any younger, you know. Don’t you find it lonely, 

living all by yourself so far away from home?” 

“It’s really not that bad. I have a roommate,” An said, deliberately casual. “Her 

name’s Marie.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mother’s hand twitch around the 

porcelain cup, but the older woman said nothing. Aunt Tiên, as always, plowed on without 

even seeming to notice: 

“Now, what is it that you do again? I think your mom mentioned an office job 

once, but I was never quite sure—” 

“I’m an illustrator, actually,” An cut in, determinedly not looking in her mother’s 

direction. She wisely decided to omit the ‘freelance’ part. 

“Oh,” her aunt paused emphatically. An knew that inflection well, and waited for 

the inevitable. “And how much does that make?” 

There you go. An plastered a smile on her face. “Just enough, Auntie.” 

“Well, that’s kids these days for you, I suppose.” Her aunt sighed, shaking her head. 

“They all think they know better than their parents, don’t they? Luckily, that doesn’t seem 

to be the case for my boy… You remember Đức, An? Well, he’s gone into accounting now. 

Lots of stability in the field, thank goodness! I’m sure you know how hard that is to come 

by nowadays, An, what’s with your job—” 


“I don’t think An’s in need of your career advice, Tiên,” her mother interrupted 

coolly. It was good to know that her mother would still side with her over Aunt Tiên, 

though An suspected that might just be a testament to how much her mother disliked her 

sister-in-law. 

“Of course not, chị Linh,” Aunt Tiên replied. Her voice was saccharine sweet as she 

turned back to An: 

“But really, dear, now’s the time to start making plans for the future. I mean, now 

that your dad’s gone, your mom’s going to be all alone, isn’t she? How are you going to take 

care of her? Really, I’ve always said your parents should’ve at least tried for another kid. 

Having a son in the family would’ve—” 

“Tiên,” An’s mother cut in, with the sharpest hint of steel etched into the singular 

word. It was an art An had never been quite able to master. “Didn’t you say you had some 

errands to run later? I think you’d better leave before rush hour starts.” 

She gave the clock on the wall a pointed look—it was already 4:30 p.m. 

“Oh my, I really lost track of the time there, didn’t I?” Aunt Tiên’s smile was unflinching 

as she rose from her seat. “Thanks for reminding me, chị Linh. An, dear, let’s talk 

more at the service tomorrow, okay?” 

An stiffened at the mention of the service. Right. Somehow, she’d nearly forgotten. 

People would expect his only daughter to be there, wouldn’t they? She watched the sway 

of her aunt’s black dress disappear through the front door. The silence Aunt Tiên had left 

behind—the silence of those who no longer knew how to speak to each other without 

allowing the wounds to fester—stretched on, on, on. 

Reunion | 11

“Charming as ever, isn’t she,” An finally said, turning around and looking her 

mother fully in the eye for the first time. 

“Well,” the older woman began, “she did help with the funeral arrangements. Helping 

hands are hard to come by these days.” 

An winced, even though her tone hadn’t been accusatory. At this, her mother’s 

impassive expression softened ever so slightly, and An remembered a time when no other 

person in the world had known her so thoroughly, so completely. It was surprisingly 

disconcerting to sit across from her mother (so, so close) after all this time, to map out 

the new lines on her face, to look at the set of her mouth and no longer recognize what it 

meant. 

“I didn’t think you’d come,” her mother said. An couldn’t tell whether she was displeased 

or not. 

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want to give them an excuse to talk about you not raising me 

right.” An shrugged, tapping her fingers on the shiny aluminum table. It was uncomfortably 

close to the truth: that in spite of everything, she had never stopped caring, had never 

stopped thinking about who she’d left behind. 

“I’m glad you did,” her mother said, then visibly hesitated. “He would’ve wanted to 

see you.” 

An suppressed an incredulous laugh. Don’t speak ill of the dead, she reprimanded 

herself. 

“Old age did mellow him out, you know,” her mother continued doggedly. “He’d… 

bring you up in passing sometimes.” 


“What, about what terrible life choices I must be making?” An’s voice sounded 

brittle to her own ears. A part of her, the one that had been raised to say ‘dạ’ and ‘vâng’ 

and to keep her head down at family gatherings, was mortified at the tone she was using; 

the other part, weary and bitter and childishly petulant, thought this had been a long time 

coming. 

“That’d always been your father’s way of showing concern. You know this,” her 

mother said quietly. “In the end, we just wanted what’s best for you, An. A stable job. 

Something that would put food on the table.” 

“Well, as you can see, I haven’t starved yet,” An said flatly. She felt cold and nauseous 

and so very tired of clinging to this anger, but what else did she have? 

“I think I should go,” she eventually said, standing up. She made a futile attempt at 

smoothing out the creases on her black button-down, and thought about how she hadn’t 

packed anything in white. “How early should I be here tomorrow?” An asked, because she 

hadn’t attended a Vietnamese funeral in years but knew that there were auspicious dates 

and times involved. 

“An,” her mother said. She had also risen from her chair, the fluorescent light 

turning her face pale and her eyes into steel. An knew that expression well: it was the calm 

before the storm, the silence around the dining table before the inevitable outburst. 

What An had expected to hear was, “Don’t bother coming, I’ll find a way to deal 

with your aunt,” or “You do realize showing up in black will just raise even more questions, 

right?” or perhaps even “At least iron your shirt, for God’s sake.” 

What her mother said was, “I saw your portfolio.” 

An stared at her. 


“Not that I know much of anything about art, of course, so this is probably just 

meaningless talk to you.” Her mother smiled, a small, rueful quirk that deepened the lines 

around her mouth. “But they were lovely. I loved the one you did of Nhà thờ Đức Bà.” She 

shook her head, voice turning soft and wistful. “You’ve always had such a way with colors.” 

“Má,” An said. With a start, she remembered: You’ve never been good at apologizing 

with your words. 

Her mother’s hands were wrung together as if she’d had half a mind to reach across 

the table before thinking better of it. They were the hands that had held An together, once. 

When had they become so thin, so frail? 

“Má,” An repeated. “May I hug you?” 

Her mother stilled. Then the slope of her shoulders slackened, and in that moment, 

she looked small and weary and ancient. An old woman, grieving for the dead and 

the living alike. 

“An,” she replied. “I’m sorry we made you feel like you had to ask.” 

She was taller than her mother now. She had been for a long time, of course, and 

yet there was nothing unfamiliar, nothing awkward about the way her mother gathered 

An into her arms, about the way she ran a hand, sure and steady, down An’s back. 

“Stay for dinner,” her mother whispered, in a tone that An had only ever heard 

once, on that last evening so many years ago. “Tell me about her.” 

An closed her stinging eyes and breathed in the faint scent of her mother’s hair, the 

fragrance of lavender that had remained unchanged after all this time. 

14 | Reunion 

“Okay,” she said.


Spread Your Wings 



HASSAN AL-NASSAR

HADI UMAYRA 

Aisha, Baghdad, and Me 

My love with Acadian lips, my letters are planted with questions. 

She tries to take my longing away from me. 

I didn't offend her, 

or her charming neighbor 

when I raised Baghdad 

to the seasons of my lips. 

*** 

Although I haven't seen her face in a long time, 

long as my country's age, 

I kissed the earth to thank the soil. 

*** 

In all that breadth, 

the shores of the heart are determined, 

and wherever I go 

my feet take me to my country. 

*** 

The heart is equal to the terrain of love… 

Equal to the cloud of longing and the anxiety of waiting. 

And the finger of love, 

as it always refers to its shores, is still. 



My hand painted her mouth and rounded breasts. 

My hand, which landed on her belly button, 

hasn't been comfortable running in two decades. 

*** 

Aisha says, 

“Honey, maybe that city 

that looks like the sunset bent on my lips… 

It didn’t provide me with a shadow 

but it must have given me its heart, 

similar to my boyfriend's lips 

in the curvature of the sunset.” 

*** 

The heart says, 

“between the truth and illusion 

two bullets have been shot. 

One blows up a bag full of the world's illusion 

and the other one settles in the heart. 

Those two bullets made me hear the heartbeat of al-Rasaftain.” 

*** 



The reality says, 

“On the doorstep of our old house, 

I was closer to my mouth than my lips. 

I was closer to my fingers than my hands. 

And my soul running in the streets calls my body curses 

and says, 

I’m there… 

I'm right there on our old doorstep.” 

*** 

Your mouth looks like an ember, 

a split-mouth from a fire 

swimming in the flames, 

and it went out in the river of my mouth. 

*** 

My body has lost its luster. 

It is walking around a city 

that Aisha loves. 

*** 



Short news: 

One window for the whole world, 

only one, 

which opens overlooking the city. 

There is no light in my country, 

and the whole world is in darkness. 

*** 

I breathed Baghdad so that I would not suffocate. 

And I’ve always been away. 

Estrangement drags my steps 

and rolls anxiety over my fingers. 

I've given my destiny to the wind 

and my lips to my girlfriend, 

and my heart is for who I breath. 

*** 

My differences are marked in police patrols, 

or distributed on the borders of exile 

and maybe the Coast Guard, too. 

They are flowers scattered on the shores of love. 

It lined the color of my eyes with a heart brush 

and wrote, I’m from Baghdad. 

*** 



When that side darkens 

the world confirms, 

definitely in the city that Aisha loves, 

new dawn. 

*** 

The evening is a lot there, 

as well as love, light, water, and trees. 

All of that doesn't need proof that my country is just like the air. 

*** 

In distant cities, a deleted record grows, 

and that's where Aisha waits. 

Flowers and obelisks of love 

gather and roam on the necks of young girls. 

*** 

Once I suspected, after opening the door of my heart, 

that you're the one who lives in the valley. 

You do not love me, and won’t shoot arrows at my body 

when we throw away the clothes. 

Aisha whispers secretly with suspicion: 

Since we fell in love with each other, I've been busy with someone else. 

So I smile, for as long as my expectation was true, 

we were the same… 



I'm also busy with another one. 

There she is, 

her beauty eats wheat from my heart in the evening 

before falling asleep over my hand like a cloud. 

And she got me a cup of love that tasted like a drink 

when I passed longing through the holes of my soul 

from behind the darkness. 

Aisha screamed, 

“You wear whatever clothes!!!” 

So I smiled again and said, 

“I’m the one taking her clothes off. 

She is the virgin in al-Akkad house. 

Despite the waves of time, 

of wars and widows, 

despite my love, 

my heart, she’s al-Zawraa.” 

So Aisha wore a dress of shyness 

and said, 

“It's my big house 

wearing a childhood dream. 

Sometimes it hugs me, longing, 

and sometimes it throws me to the wind on purpose… 



Sometimes... Oh myself. 

It's my last dream.” 

I shouted, 

“Iraq is my spiritual orchard.” 

*** 

In the tent of my soul, 

Baghdad lies in peace. 


MACKENZIE MOORE 

Westworld 

I’m worried she told me. I was laying on the red Persian rug in the family room that I 

think they bought from a thrift store. One in Butte? Or maybe it was the rancher from 

Facebook Marketplace. I couldn’t remember, but that didn’t take anything away from the 

experience. Rugs are like fine china: regal wonders to have in a first house. I wondered 

how many homes it had had, before theirs. I knew when I stood up, my back would 

be blanketed with cat hair. It could’ve used a deep cleaning, but then again, I probably 

could’ve too. Treat the neighbors to a show: take us both outside, shake us out, and see 

who’d lose more particles. I’d been shedding little pieces for days. Most were microscopic. 

At least that’s what I told myself. 

I’m worried, she cleared her throat again through a moat of post-nasal drip, that 

you’re carving yourself up. Hollowing out—even more. Trailing her words was a look that I 

didn’t need to see to feel it boring down into my sternum. 

I received her words like I often prepare to drive over broken glass. Ready. Tensed. 

I cocked my head, digging into my right ear with calculated restraint—yet another tic I’m 

fairly sure won’t damage anything, but still hope might unclog something—a responsible 

search and rescue mission. Maybe in my stalling, I believed I could dislodge whatever 

boulder had wedged itself into my rational synapses. Pull it out, hand it over like the participation 

trophies they give kids, these days. See? Problem solved. 

My excavation attempts weren’t doing much to fill the silence though, so from the 

floor, I shook my head: not that she could tell I didn’t mean the gesture as one of agreement 

I was largely hidden by the coffee table. It was awfully hard to tell my bounce was 

contentious. I vibrated in place, considering my next words, looking for which ones were 

priced right. Me as Bob Barker, trying to find my footing before an audience of one. To 


say, You’re not wrong, felt too close to admitting she was right. Sure, the statement didn’t 

lock me into any explicit promise—any pact—that I’d change my current practice of serving 

my self worth like a sales flyer pot roast. Half price, always. 

But still. I was hesitant to be so vague. After all, she’d been propping me up for two 

decades and change. I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t trying to change. I just couldn’t 

quite budget what it might cost me, down the line, if I admitted to this manic energy. To 

timestamp the moment when I got so good at hoarding gasoline. Or when I turned into 

a Zippo salesman. Or when I apparently lost all self control not to simply light myself 

on fire because, for all intents and purposes, it worked. In the wake of orange flashing 

lights—encouraging me to slow down—I jammed my foot down on the gas like you’d kill 

a cockroach. I’d eroded myself into something that looked a lot like success. I was tired 

and touchy, and it was all mildly embarrassing. I don’t know why I expected otherwise, 

sleeping every night next to my own insufferable expectations. 

I know. That reply was simpler; those syllables would do the trick. I lobbed the 

words back up and over the coffee table, out of my side of the court. Satisfied with the 

weight off my sternum, I readjusted my shoulder blades; they dug into the lush, matted 

pile, sharp as box cutters after months away from the weighted cable machine that kept 

them strong. 

She nodded. I saw it from the corner of my eye. And we sat—and laid—in silence 

like that for a few more minutes. Soon, her fiancé would come upstairs; we would all don 

our helmets and backpacks and fanny packs and fleece jackets. We’d bike off into the sunset 

for beer. But before I pulled my butterfly shoulder blades from their resting place on 

the rug—covered in peppery gray hairs—she would remind me once more: 

I know you know. That’s why I worry. 




Some Faces 1

LINDA M. CRATE 

born to break the mold 

the soft needled pines 

gave me solace 

when no human could, 

and the crows appreciated 

my magic when no one 

else would; 

and the chipmunks were 

curious of me 

every time i would enter the wood— 

little gray squirrels, too, 

would watch me before climbing 

to safety; 

and white-tailed deer have run out 

in front of me and stared 

with their eyes 

as have little red foxes— 

i am not someone 

you cannot forget, 

and only nature seems to appreciate 

my beauty and my wildness; 

as men try to cut me down and mold me 

into their image of what woman should be 

but i always wriggle out of the kiln before they 

can set me into a new frame because 

i was born to break the mold. 


LAWRENCE F. FARRAR 

Life Ain’t Equal 

On a blustery April day in 1951, somewhere between the monkey bars and the swings, 

eleven-year-old Stevie Aldrich punched classmate Rick Brandley in the nose. Rick retreated 

a couple of steps, lifted a pudgy hand to a pudgy face, and tried to staunch the bleeding. 

He was crying and, according to Stevie’s twin brother, Jack, snorting like a scared pony. 

“Don’t you ever say that again.” Slim and crew cut, Stevie cocked his fist, ready to 

pop Rick a second time, but he didn’t get a chance. A hand gripped his shoulder. 

“That’s enough. What’s going on here?” The hand and the voice belonged to old 

Charlie Lindbeck, the custodian at Franklin Elementary School. “You boys know better 

than to be fighting here on the school grounds.” 

said. 

Stevie tried to shake free, but Lindbeck tightened his hold. “Who started this?” he 

“Stevie did,” Rick said, dabbing at his nose with a white handkerchief. “I didn’t do 

anything.” 

“You’re a liar.” Stevie struggled to go after him again. 

Mike Dalbert chimed in. “Rick said something mean about Stevie’s mother.” Mike 

was one of the classmates who’d clustered around the two sixth graders, eager to see a 

fight. 

“What did you say?” Lindbeck said. 


“Nothing.” Although Rick was a chunky kid, he had a pipsqueak voice. Some of the 

boys said he sounded like Porky Pig, which was an exaggeration, but the best they could 

do. 

“I’ll get you,” Stevie said, still trying to break free. 

“Well, we’d better go see your teacher,” Lindbeck announced. And, with a gang of 

spectators trailing behind, he marched the combatants up the steps of the old brick school 

and then up a flight of stairs to Miss Grace Johnson’s classroom. When the offenders and 

their minder paraded in, the teacher was having a snack. An open bag of potato chips lay 

on her desk with a half-consumed Coke standing next to it. With the other children still at 

recess, the desks stood empty. The place smelled of near rancid milk, the odor emanating 

from a carton of little bottles placed by the door. Stevie always avoided the stuff. 

A humorless, gray haired woman with a long neck, Miss Johnson regularly pinned 

an artificial flower at the top of her dress; Mavis Ingebritsen said that was to make her 

neck look shorter. Mavis also contended that Miss Johnson had false teeth. How she knew 

these things Stevie had no idea. What he did know was that when Miss Johnson peered at 

him over the top of her gold-rimmed reading glasses, it made him squirm. 

Like Lindbeck, the teacher asked what had happened. Rick said Stevie started 

it and Stevie said Rick deserved whatever he got. And neither of them said what it was 

about. Naturally, Stevie later reported to his brother, Miss Johnson delivered one of her 

lectures about how fighting never solved anything. She said it was not the American way 

and even gestured toward the American flag in its little holder next to the blackboard. 

Stevie couldn’t figure out what that had to do with anything. 

Since Rick kept dabbing at his nose, even though it had long since stopped bleeding, 

Stevie calculated he was just trying to rouse the teacher’s sympathy. He also knew 


that people in the town where they lived—and Miss Johnson was one of them—went out 

of their way to avoid offending Rick’s parents, the Brandleys, and other members of the 

island crowd. 

----- 

That’s the way it was in their little town then, back in the fifties: not offending the Brandleys 

and people like them. There were two kinds of people: the ones with big houses, big 

cars, and big opinions of themselves. They often as not had a lot of influence over what 

happened. Not surprisingly, they seemed afflicted with a sense of superiority and acted as 

if they embodied everything worthwhile. There weren’t many of them, and they all lived 

on an island in the lake you reached by going over a narrow little bridge. 

Then there were the people who didn’t live on the island. That was everybody else. 

They lived in what the island people referred to as the village. They tended to have small 

houses, small cars, and, even if they didn’t want to admit it, a lesser sense of self-worth. 

Stevie’s family lived in the village; their house was a little postwar pre-fab and they didn’t 

even own a car, small or otherwise. 

The twins, Stevie and Jack, were eleven going on twelve. They shared a room 

furnished with two cots and not much else. They were both brown-eyed dishwater blonds 

with crew cuts. Jack had freckles and Stevie didn’t. Jack claimed he was an inch taller, but 

Stevie outweighed him by five or six pounds. Jack also had a little gap between his front 

teeth that showed when he smiled. 

The warm air had already arrived that spring and the local boys never wore anything 

except jeans, tee shirts, and beat up Keds or some variation thereof. When the island 

kids showed up in town on weekends, they came outfitted in polo shirts, Bermuda shorts, 

and white shoes they called bucks. Most of them went to private schools and oozed preppiness. 

(Much to Rick’s unhappiness, his father had insisted he attend Franklin. It would 


give him a common touch). You could just tell, Stevie said, they looked down on the village 

kids. Of course, the village kids weren’t exactly in love with them either. Stevie knew 

he could outrun or outswim any one of them any day of the week. Just let him hear one 

smart remark, and he had a knuckle sandwich ready to go. 

When Stevie or Jack complained about the kids like Rick, whom they referred to as 

stupid snobs, dopes, and jerks (their list of epithets still pretty limited), their dad, Herman 

Aldrich, said, “There’s them, and there’s us. Like there’s kind of a line in between. Just the 

way it is. Life ain’t equal for everybody. People like the Brandleys, well they’re upper crust. 

We ain’t.” 

Stevie and Jack had heard things like that for as long as they could remember, but 

now they were old enough to ask why it had to be that way. Stevie didn’t like the notion 

of any kind of crust—bread, pie, or upper. Neither did Jack. In the twins’ estimation, the 

measure of who counted for something had to do with who could hit a ball the farthest, 

win a spelling contest, catch bees in a bottle, or, if necessary, beat somebody up. Well, they 

topped Rick Brandley in all those categories and a lot of others. 

Rick knew it and he looked for ways to get at them. A lot of it took the form of 

name calling and insults, the thrust of which was they were low class nothings from the 

village, and he was a high class something from the island. It was true his father was a big 

shot with the railroad. Stevie and Jack had only seen Rick’s father once or twice,; but they 

were acutely conscious he wore a suit, like a preacher. 

And their father, according to Stevie, if you got right down to it, didn’t amount to 

much of anything. When he had a job, he worked as a carpenter’s helper. The boys’ mother 

praised him for being good at doing things with his hands, but they didn’t see much evidence 

of it. The back screen door barely clung to its hinges, the sink leaked, and the front 

step seemed ready to cave in. 


Anyway, their dad had thrown out his back and was laid up, something that seemed to 

happen a lot. This didn’t surprise them since he was scrawny to begin with. 

He said he sure wished they had a TV, so he could watch Arthur Godfrey’s Talent 

Scouts. But the family couldn’t afford one. That meant he spent most of the day lounging 

in a beat-up recliner Stevie and Jack had dragged into the yard where he tuned in to radio 

programs like Ma Perkins or Our Gal Sunday. In the evening, he sprawled on the sofa 

listening to Fibber McGee and Molly and Amos and Andy. 

Even when it wasn’t hot, their father seemed to favor just an undershirt and jeans. 

As long as he had a pack of Chesterfields and a can of Hamm’s beer, nothing seemed to 

bother him. He pretty much took things as they came. About the only time Stevie could 

remember his father sort of fired up occurred one day the boys came home for lunch and 

found him listening to a speech by General MacArthur on their old floor model radio. As 

usual, static riddled the reception and he had to bend close to hear. 

“It’s his farewell speech,” their dad declared. “I didn’t think Truman had it in him. 

Finally getting rid of Dugout Doug.” Herman had been in the war somewhere in the Pacific. 

He never said much, but they knew he didn’t like MacArthur. 

Life was hard for the Aldrich family and it wasn’t getting any better, what with 

their father out of work and all. Their mother, Marta, didn’t make it when she tried to 

get on at the Ben Franklin. She only had an eighth-grade education and, according to 

Herman, she talked funny—some kind of accent from the old country. Stevie and Jack 

couldn’t figure out for sure which old country it might be since she grew up in Wisconsin. 

Their dad teased her—said she was a Bohunk. 

Not exactly good-looking to begin with, Marta wore frumpy print dresses and 

stockings that came up to just below her knees. Her hair looked like she combed it with an 

eggbeater. None of that bothered the boys too much. What did bother them, more than 


anything else, turned out to be the job she finally landed—as a cleaning lady for the 

Brandleys, the parents of their arch-nemesis. Rick exploited the situation at every opportunity. 

It had been when he’d smirked and said, “Your mother has to clean my toilet,” that 

Stevie punched him. 

Well, Rick had gone home that day and informed his mother Stevie hit him, and 

the next thing Stevie knew he and his parents received a summons to a conference with 

Miss Johnson. Stevie’s dad allowed as how his back was hurting that day and, besides, 

he didn’t feel like getting spiffed up. So, Marta (on her day off) had to accompany Stevie. 

Beset by a dancing case of nerves, Marta told Stevie she wished he had never hit that little 

Brandley boy. He told her it was just one punch and Rick had it coming. 

“You would have thought,” Stevie said later, “she was talking about the Louis-Walcott 

fight.” Even when he spelled out the hurtful words, she didn’t seem to understand. 

To make things worse they had to sit at student desks in the cloakroom and wait for the 

Brandleys. Stevie’s mother fretted about meeting the teacher, let alone the Brandleys. “She’s 

one of them educated people. And I don’t talk so good.” 

Stevie tried to reassure her. But it was true, she didn’t talk very well. 

The Brandleys showed up thirty minutes late. 

“Hello, Marta,” Mrs. Brandley said. About the same age as Stevie’s mother, Mrs. 

Brandley looked quite a bit younger. A blonde lady, she had on a skirt, a blouse with a little 

ruffled collar, and a cardigan draped over her shoulders. Stevie had to admit she looked 

pretty classy. “It’s really unfortunate we have to be here under these circumstances,” she 

said. Her voice pulsed with condescension. 

Yes, ma’am,” Marta replied. “I hope your boy is feeling lots better.” It went without 

saying; Stevie’s mother had decked herself out in one of her God-awful dresses. It looked 


like something from the Goodwill—which was where she got it. 

Your boy? Stevie thought. She meant your jerk. Ma’am? And how about my feelings? 

he wondered. He’d landed that punch for her—well, maybe for himself—but for her 

too. 

Stevie doubted Rick had told his parents exactly what he’d said, although it probably 

wouldn’t have mattered. After all, the insult he fired off at Stevie was true, and people 

like members of the Aldrich family weren’t supposed to have such tender feelings. 

When they entered the room, with a sweep of her hand Miss Johnson invited Mrs. 

Brandley to sit in the only straight back chair other than her own. Once again Marta had 

to perch uncomfortably at a too-small student desk. Stevie immediately spotted a pen and 

pencil set, prominently displayed on an otherwise clean-topped desk. It had been a yearend 

gift handed over by Rick to Miss Johnson. “Don’t forget, boys, sticks and stones might 

break your bones, but names will never hurt you.” Stevie couldn’t believe Miss Johnson 

actually said that. Besides, it wasn’t true. Words could hurt—a lot. 

Miss Johnson delivered a little speech on how she was concerned about the safety 

of all her pupils and wanted to assure Mrs. Brandley there would be no future incidents. 

Since Stevie admitted he landed a punch, Miss Johnson made him say he was sorry, which 

turned out to be a lie because he wasn’t sorry. Then she made him shake hands with the 

little jerk. “No hard feelings, boys. Okay?” 

Stevie’s mother twisted a Kleenex in her hands and looked at her shoes, which, Stevie 

noticed, were pretty scuffed up. Later, he told Jack, “During the whole time, she didn’t 

say a word for me, not one. I think she was afraid of Mrs. Brandley and Miss Johnson. You 

could see it in her eyes.” 


After the meeting, the Brandleys climbed into their new cream-colored Chrysler. It had 

white sidewalls. Rick rolled down the car window and sent Stevie a nasty and triumphant 

smile. “As my father always says, we Brandleys are never wrong,” he said. 

If he’d had one, Stevie would have thrown a rock. With his stomach doing loopthe-loops 

of anger and frustration, he stood watching until the car disappeared. Stevie and 

his mother walked home. She didn’t cry, but she kept saying things like, “What am I gonna 

do? What am I gonna do? You and your brother will be the death of me.” 

Either Stevie or Jack could take care of Rick twenty-six ways from Sunday, but it 

didn’t matter. After that teacher meeting, Marta said over and over that they ought to be 

nice to Rick. They shouldn’t hurt his feelings. As if he had any, Stevie said. After all, their 

mother told them, she needed the job, and they must not irritate Mrs. Brandley or her 

son. Herman didn’t say anything, but the brothers could tell he bought into it. Maybe his 

back hurt. Or maybe he didn’t care. Or maybe he was just worn down. 

Stevie and Jack wondered if there could be a more unfair, more humiliating situation. 

It troubled them greatly to hear Marta refer to Rick’s mother so deferentially—the 

Mrs. or Mrs. Brandley—as if she was talking about a queen or something. She acted like it 

was a privilege to set foot in the Brandleys’ house, which she said was real nice and had a 

lot of nice things. They already knew Rick had a new Monarch bike and a Daisy BB gun. 

She didn’t have to remind them. 

Stevie and Jack couldn’t get a handle on it. They’d never heard the word obsequious, 

but if they had, they would have slapped it on her. Why should they have to put up 

with this? 

“Ma, why can’t you get a different job?” Stevie asked on a Sunday morning at 

breakfast. They had crammed themselves around the little drop-leaf kitchen table. Stevie 

watched Jack who, in turn, eyed the last piece of French toast. 


“Hey. I already told you, there ain’t no other jobs to be had around here,” Marta 

said. “Besides, them Brandleys pay pretty good.” 

“But, Ma, everybody knows you . . .” 

“I don’t notice you boys passing up the food what’s put on the table. That’s where 

the money goes, you know. Besides, I ain’t exactly the first person from around here that’s 

done work on the island.” 

“But, Ma, if you stay there, Rick and the others are just going to lord it over us,” 

Stevie said. “Maybe you can get on at the cannery.” 

“Or at Polly’s Grill,” Jack added. “Pa said he heard they’re hiring at both places.” 

“Cannery don’t pay nothing. As for Polly’s, I’d have trouble writing down the orders.” 

She seemed determined to stick to her job as cleaning lady for the Brandleys. 

----- 

That maybe she was doing the best she could and that maybe they should try to get along 

with Rick didn’t enter the boys’ minds. They were better than him, and the fact their 

mother had to demean herself before Rick’s family troubled them a lot. If she wouldn’t 

change her job, it meant she didn’t care how they felt. It all hurt. And the hurt soon translated 

into anger which they directed toward their mother. They wanted to punish her. For 

what wasn’t clear. 

Lying awake in their nighttime room, they decided they wouldn’t be seen in public 

with her. And so, when she told them it was time to go to church with her on Sunday 


morning, they said they weren’t going. This wasn’t hard since they never wanted to go anyway. 

But this time they held fast, and she went alone. They’d show her a thing or two. 

A day or two later they decided they would quit talking to her. She’d say something 

to one of them and he would look away, act like he didn’t hear her. At first, she didn’t get 

it. When she latched onto what they were up to, she quit talking to them, too. This led to 

some awkward situations in which they sought to make their dad an intermediary. Stevie 

would say something like, “Would you tell Ma to pass the biscuits?” 

And she’d say, “You tell Stevie to get them himself.” 

This tactic didn’t work very well, especially after their dad declared, “I ain’t no 

talking parrot. You got something to say, you say it yourself.” 

After a day or two of this, they decided to quit eating the food their mother prepared. 

After all, she had pointed out to them, more than once, that the money she earned 

went to pay for what they ate. This was no easy decision, since they relished her cooking. 

The result of their protest was that they were hungry a lot of the time. They made their 

own lunches, and when Marta put dinner on the table, they said they would rather feed it 

to their old Spaniel, Freckles. They ostentatiously carried their plates out to his doghouse. 

But when they thought Marta wasn’t watching, they hurriedly ate the food themselves and 

then told her they had given it to the dog. Freckles got the short end of this deception. 

Marta said she wouldn’t have to feed him since they already had. 

In the face of their boycott, Marta simply said, “You don’t want to eat the food I 

cook. Fine. I won’t make none for you anymore.” And she didn’t. 

For a few days, they pretty much lived on peanut butter sandwiches since, as their 

father observed, neither one of them so much as knew how to boil water. You could say 

they weren’t very smart. Mostly they only hurt themselves. Of course, they were only 


eleven years old and still pretty innocent of the greater world around them. So, it continued 

to baffle them as to why, even though they could outdo Rick in just about everything, 

their mother had to bow and scrape in front of the Brandleys and expected them to do the 

same. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand the notion that life was unfair; it was just that 

they didn’t want to accept it. Their dad said, “Life ain’t equal for everybody.” He’d accepted 

it; the boys didn’t. 

After a while, it became increasingly difficult to keep up the protest against their 

mother, especially the part about not eating her cooking. When your stomach growls, it 

gets harder to stick up for something, especially when you’re not sure exactly what it is. 

Besides, they got to feeling guilty; it wasn’t Ma’s fault those Brandleys were who they were. 

The boys knew they’d unfairly made their mother a scapegoat. Anyway, their protest petered 

out. 

In the days that followed, Rick picked up where he left off, but Stevie and Jack 

kept a lid on it and let his remarks run off them as if they were wearing slickers. They just 

smiled and tried to let him think they were happy as bluebirds. 

On a Saturday morning in late April, Stevie and Jack came into the kitchen and 

discovered their mom slumped over the table, her head buried in her arms. 

“I’m just feeling blue and there’s nothing else to it. That lady at the grocery said she 

just couldn’t let us charge nothing else. Your Pa can’t do no work, and I’m about wore out. 

We’re as busted as we’ve ever been.” 

out.” 

“It’s okay, Ma,” Stevie said. “Maybe Jack and I can earn something. School’s almost 

“Well, that would be real nice, Stevie.” She lifted her head. “Matter of fact, I asked 

the Mrs. if she knew anybody else who might need some part time cleaning help. Said she 


didn’t know nobody. But then she said they needed a lot of yard work done and wondered 

if you boys would like the job. Man they had before got sick.” 

Work for the Brandleys? Stevie and Jack? Could there be a worse idea on the face 

of the earth? They could picture Rick parading around making smart-alec comments 

while they raked and crawled around under the shrubbery. 

“But, Ma, you know how . . .” 

“The Mrs. was real nice about it. Said she wanted to help us out. Dollar an hour for 

each of you.” 

In the end, Jack took the job, but Stevie finagled out of it. He said he could make 

more caddying out at the country club. You were supposed to be twelve to work there, but 

he was close enough. 

The next weekend Stevie was hanging around playing mumblety-peg with some 

other caddies when the caddy master called his number. “Got a special request from a 

twosome. Asked for you by name, Aldrich.” 

Stevie had a bad feeling. 

“Sir, I don’t have much experience and I don’t think I can carry double.” 

“Look, kid, what the members ask for the members get. Do you want to work here 

or not?” 

Stevie nodded and trudged up toward the first tee. 

When he got there, Rick said to his father, “This is him. The one I told you about.” 


Mr. Brandley didn’t look very happy, but he asked for his driver and said, “Let’s play golf.” 

Stevie supposed something worse could have happened to him somewhere somehow, 

but at that moment he couldn’t imagine what it might be. 

When Stevie handed Rick his club, the jerk said, “Don’t rattle the clubs when I’m 

hitting.” Stevie expected it would be a long day, a very long day. It was. 

Stevie caddied all that summer. He would see the Brandleys come and go, but they 

never asked for him again. He supposed Rick’s father thought once was enough. 

In their hearts, Stevie and Jack hadn’t given up on their resistance to an unfair 

world. But right then, as summer rolled along, it seemed like life, with all its inequities, 

would just go on the way it always had. And they couldn’t do much about it. Perhaps they 

yearned for something out of reach. They hoped they were wrong. 


ADAM COULTER 

On a Snowy Day 




Voci 

Poiché non ho mai sentito la voce di Dio 

E quella degli uomini non mi bastava 

Mi rivolsi agli animali, alle piante, alle pietre. 

E ognuno di loro, nel suo linguaggio muto 

Mi ha risposto e io ho imparato: 

La mutevolezza dalle nuvole in cielo 

La pazienza dal lavorio della marea 

Che instancabile scolpì le montagne 

La forza vitale dal cactus del deserto 

Il valore del lavoro dalle lunghe radici 

Che si spingono nel ventre della terra 

La crudeltà del Caso dalle tartarughe 

Che disperatamente corrono al mare 

L’abnegazione dallo sguardo del cane 

La fiera indipendenza lucida dal gatto 

Il respiro dagli alberi che mormorano 

Sommessi nell’ombra dolce della sera 

La tenerezza dal cinguettìo dei passeri 

Al mattino sui davanzali delle finestre. 

Questo ed altro ancora ho imparato 

E una sapienza per la quale 

Non riesco a trovare parole 

Ma che sigillo e custodisco in me 

Come un segreto tesoro 

O un antico patto siglato 

Con i miei silenti complici 

Per avere una tregua o una via di fuga 

Dal vano rumore insensato del mondo.

TOTI O’BRIEN 

Voices 

Because I never heard God’s voice 

and the human voice often baffled me 

I asked animals, plants and stones. 

They replied, each in its silent 

tongue. And I learned: 

from the clouds in the sky, versatility 

patience from the labors of tides 

relentlessly sculpting mountains 

from the desert cactus, vitality 

the importance of work from long roots 

digging into the belly of the Earth 

from the turtle that runs, madly 

toward the sea, the cruelty of Fate 

abnegation from the gaze of the dog 

fiery self-sufficiency from the cat 

from the trees softly murmuring 

in sweet twilight, to breathe 

tenderness from the sparrows 

chirping at dawn upon the windowsill. 

This and more I have learned. 

Wisdom for which I have no words 

and I seal tightly within myself 

like a secret treasure, ancient pact 

I signed with my silent allies 

to ensure a truce, a way out 

from all the vain clatter, around. 


MORIAH BRAY 

Gringa 

My Uber driver, Alejandro, calls me 

Gringa 

tells me to call him Alex. 

¿De dónde eres? 

¿Qué parte del norte? 

We are driving 

from Puerto Vallarta an hour north 

to Sayulita where los gringos 

outnumber los locales. 

Soy de Florida, de 

los Estados Unidos 

de America. Pero 

mi padre es de Michoacán 

In baby talk, I implore him to 

understand 

I have reason enough to 

love this place, 

to love him. 


Ayy, Gringa 

tu padre es de México! 

—Sí, pero no conozco a Él. 

He knows my Spanish 

the way birds know 

which branches to nest on, 

which to flit from. 

¿Por qué viniste 

a México? 

Why did I come here? 

Para saber 

cómo llamarme. 


WESLEY KORPELA 

To Draw a Fading Man 

Gathering the Supplies 

I am twelve years old. In front of me I have gathered my pad of poster-sized paper, two 

pencils, and some charcoals I pretend to know how to use. My grandma’s birthday is coming 

up and I have an idea for her gift. 

I pull a small stack of photographs out of my desk drawer. Over the past several 

days, I have combed through each of the gallon-sized bags my father uses to store old photos. 

The stack is my collection of finalists, and I need to choose the winner. 

I discard several off the bat. The photos are from too far away for me to gather 

enough detail. I narrow it down to two. One is a professional headshot and the other is 

casual. I go with the casual one. It is closest to how I remember him. I prop the photo 

against my lamp. 

I am going to draw a portrait of my grandpa. 

*** 

I am three years old when my grandpa dies. I only have two memories of him. 

First, I remember sitting in my grandpa’s recliner. He is finishing breakfast in the 

kitchen. He can probably hear me giggling. In the hallway leading to the living room, a 

giant bellows, “WHO IS SITTING IN MY CHAIR?” I squirm as he lumbers towards me. 

He places me next to the chair as he takes his spot. I try to run, but he successfully wraps 

his legs around me. I squeal. There is no escape. I am caught in what he calls a bear trap. 


Secondly, I remember my grandpa heading to the bedroom. My family is getting 

ready to drive back home. My grandpa says he is feeling under the weather. He needs to 

take a nap. I do not remember him saying goodbye. It is the last time I remember seeing 

him. 

My mom tells me my grandpa has died. For years, I believe he died during his nap. 

Creating the Outline 

I am drawing the outline of my grandpa’s head. I include the folds of his ears and the 

wrinkles around his jaw and forehead. I am approaching portraiture completely wrong. I 

should draw the eyes, nose, and lips first and then work my way out. 

I am too scared to do it correctly. The face is what I know must be right. I imagine 

scenarios where I hand my drawing to my grandma and she does not recognize who I 

drew. I bury my face in my hand, thinking of the embarrassment. 

My knee bounces. I consider crumpling the paper and starting over. Maybe if I 

pick a younger photo of him, it will be easier. My heart thumps. Maybe I should give up 

entirely. 

I sigh. I return to sketching in his hairline. 

*** 

I am around ten years old. I am working with my father on a school project about 

my family ancestry. 

His side of the family has a well-documented and well-told history, my father tells 

me. My grandma is mostly French but has various Western European ancestry. My 


grandpa was pure Finnish. My first response is, “Oh, I thought we were only Finnish.” 

I say this because it is the ancestry my extended family identifies with most. When 

my cousin walks barefoot and shirtless in the subzero Upper Michigan tundra, people say 

it is a feat manageable thanks to his Finnish blood. It is implied to me that the scholarliness 

of my father’s side is Finnish. Even with my appearance, I am told the way my eyebrows 

taper off is Finnish. 

My father says this is part of my grandpa’s legacy. He was a proud Finn and made 

sure my father and my uncles all were too. I too find it an alluring identity. I ask him if 

I can learn more about my Finnish heritage. He directs me to his copy of my grandpa’s 

sister’s sixty-eight-paged autobiography. 

I become enthralled by the world my grandfather grew up in. I read about how his 

parents married after World War I, built a farm from nothing, and raised seven children. 

It is a nostalgic story centered on a family’s self-reliance as it struggled to pull itself out of 

impoverishment. 

When I complete it, I feel my first longing to know my grandfather. I wish I could 

read the story of his life. I settle for relocating my great-aunt’s book to the bookshelf in my 

bedroom. I feel initiated into my father’s side of the family. 

There is no avoiding it. I must draw his face. 

Tackling the Face 

I draw his nose. It is large. I think of my large nose. I wonder if my grandpa got 

tired of people pointing it out too. I then wonder if people would say I have my grandpa’s 

nose. I think they would, and I smile. 


I draw his mouth. His lips are thin. There is hardly much to draw in terms of detail 

and shading. I take a deep sigh of relief. I hold the paper up multiple times. I think it looks 

a lot like him. I sit back in my chair with my hands behind my head. 

Maybe this will all be easier than I expected. 

I am fifteen years old. I am sitting in a plush recliner that has long since replaced 

the one my grandpa had. It is my favorite spot to sit in my grandma’s living room. 

For the past several years, I have been spending a week in August alone at my 

grandma’s in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I love having my grandma all to myself. 

*** 

She and I both like to talk. Like most grandmas, she mainly likes to gossip about 

her friends or recall the obscurest of memories from over the last forty years. During this 

visit, I pull out one of her thick photo albums every night. She happily guides me through 

her life with my grandpa. 

There is a small black-and-white photo of my grandpa and grandma posing in 

front of a bush. My grandma walks me through her and my grandpa’s first date where she 

lost her glasses and he helped her find them. 

There is a photo of my father and all my uncles as young boys in a bathtub. She 

tells me about how often the family moved as my father grew up. 

There is a photo of my grandpa and my grandma sitting at the head table of his 

retirement party. She informs me of his excellent work through many years as a teacher, 

school administrator, and then superintendent. 


There is a photo of my grandpa and grandma in their later years together at a heritage 

center called Little Finland. My grandma corrects my memory and informs me that 

this is the place my grandfather died from a heart attack while helping with yardwork. 

My grandma and I flip through the unorganized last pages in the photo album. 

Both of our abilities to gab feel maxed out, but she stops on what looks like an inconsequential 

picture. It is a photo of my grandpa driving his tractor with some of my cousins 

and siblings riding in the trailer. 

Your grandfather used to have such bad back acne. You would see it whenever he 

took off his shirt on the lawnmower or tractor. Your dad had the same problem.” 

I am about to laugh off my grandma’s comment as too much information, but she 

continues her tangent. “He used to be so hard on your dad. I remember many conversations 

with your dad where he would ask me what he should do.” My grandma does not 

continue the story and goes to bed. 

In bed, I think about my father. I am approaching a year of not saying a word to 

him. I have not lived with him for longer. My grandma does not know any of this. I doubt 

she knows about my father’s affair, the reason for my parents’ divorce and my vow of silence. 

My heart leaps for my grandpa. Like me, he saw how deceitful, careless, egotistical, 

and cold my father is. My grandpa must have continually confronted my father about it. 

We had the same cause. He acted. I decide to as well. 

I write a two-page letter for my grandma to find on my nightstand. I include the 

details of my father’s affair, a list of my grievances against him, and insight into what his 

and my relationship is like now. I do not know what she will do with the information. 

Maybe she will set my father straight. 


My grandma never acknowledges the letter. 

I attempt to draw my grandpa’s eyes. 

Erasing the Eyes 

The first time I draw them, they are too far set. I have a massive eraser that has 

the phrase “FOR BIG MISTAKES” printed on it. I erase the eyes. The second time I draw 

them, they are too close. I erase the eyes. The third time I draw them, I make one much 

larger than the other one. I erase the eyes. 

“Dang it.” I have drawn the eyes too many times. The mistakes no longer erase 

entirely. I need to make the next one count. I take a break. I get a drink of water. I stare at 

the photo. He has a twinkling calm stare I need to capture. 

I attempt to draw my grandpa’s eyes. 

*** 

I am twenty-two years old. I am fighting back tears at work. 

My cousin has messaged our cousins’ group chat with a startling revelation. Her 

father told her how my grandfather zipped up and suffocated his sons in sleeping bags as 

punishment. I remain composed during my last hour of work and on the bus ride home. 

I collapse on the couch as soon as I get to my apartment. I sob. 

The news is not a surprise. It fits my grandfather’s known behavior. Over the past 

several years, I have learned about my grandfather’s more unsavory personality. I learned 

about how he would belittle my grandma for telling a joke wrong. I heard about how my 

grandma and great-aunt would talk about how awful their husbands were, but then laugh 


it off. I know about how my father and uncles always craved his approval and never felt 

like they got it. But this story of child abuse contorts my body. 

The first thing I feel is confusion. I did not know my grandfather, but I wonder 

why it often feels like every man in my life disappoints me. 

The second thing I feel is tremendous guilt. My father has said and done things 

that have left me traumatized, but he has never physically abused me. My pain feels cheap 

compared to his. I wonder if I am making it too much about myself. 

The third thing I feel is frustration. I am angry at my father for deceiving me. How 

could he let me develop a fondness and longing for someone who caused him such tremendous 

pain? I am angry at my uncles for creating a revisionist history. Why did they 

still feel obligated to grovel at his feet after death and speak nothing but his praises? I am 

angry at my grandma. How could she stand aside and let her children be abused? 

They were all his victims, I remind myself. My grandfather conditioned them to 

love him no matter what, and they are still grappling with the conditioning. But this reminder 

does not assuage my grief for the man I worked so hard to know and understand. 

Across from me on my bookshelf is my grandfather’s book. My great-uncle had 

compiled some of my grandfather’s poems and other writings and gotten them published 

posthumously. I remember feeling so excited when my grandma handed me my copy. 

I want to rip it down off the shelf and tear it apart. 

Framing the Portrait 

It is my grandma’s birthday. My portrait is complete. 

“Wesley, what a wonderful drawing.” She stares at it silently. Her eyes scan over it 


several times. “You did a great job with his eyes. You really captured them.” 

She passes the portrait to one of my uncles, who agrees about the eyes. I feel a lot 

of pride. I tell them how hard they were. I wonder what my grandma feels right now. I had 

predicted she would cry, but she does not. She talks a little about where she could hang it 

and then changes the conversation. 

The next time I visit her, I go looking for it. I discover it in the basement’s guest 

bedroom. It is on the far back wall where it’s poorly lit. My heart sinks. She must not like 

it, I conclude. 

*** 

It is the future. I do not how old I will be. 

My grandma has died. My father and uncles have divvied up her possessions by 

themselves with little input from their children. 

My father and I are again not on speaking terms. He leaves a box of things for me 

at my mom’s house. It likely includes nothing I told him I would be interested in claiming 

over the years. I say it is whatever, but I am again disappointed. 

In the box is the framed portrait of my grandfather. I cringe. It does not really look 

like him. It looks close, but I say, “No cigar.” I chuckle at the eyes. They are drawn much 

darker than the rest of the sketch. I can recall how frustrating they were. 

I take the portrait down to my mom’s basement. I ignore her reminder that she 

is trying to get rid of things down there, not add to it all. I locate the box that I put my 

grandpa’s book and the collection of his photographs in. I haven’t touched it in years. 

I shove the portrait into the box of fading memories. 


KAREN SCHUBERT 

Almost Everyone Makes It 

Soon as back yards firm up in spring, we play dodgeball, thrower hissing, small kids 

springing, balls smacking the garage. We play pick-up—aim between garages. For my 

eleventh birthday I wish for a bat and mitt. No girls in Little League. Pennee’s father puts 

his arms around mine and we swing. 

Deep summer, we camp in Ricky and Joey’s yard. One dawn, the boys sneak into Dean’s 

tent and grab his pants. He tears after them in white briefs. When I get home from 

church camp, I gather small kids on someone’s kitchen steps, teach them rounds, I love 

the mountains, I love the rolling hills. I cartwheel for hours, back walkover, no-hand flip. 

Billy catches a sparrow with a hamster cage propped by a small stick. It is softer than we 

imagined. We let it go. 

Fall football pulps the lawn, girls sidelined to the porch, boys throw and pummel, chase 

Dean across the driveway, like the end line goes as far as Dean can run. My dad loses his 

job at the tire store, pulls the drapes, pours a martini, lights a Raleigh, watches black and 

white TV as the air grays with smoke. 

One winter, we flood Scott’s yard with the garden hose until the ice is thick, rig up a 

bright light, the two Karens make cocoa and cookies, and everyone skates. 


RACHEL GILMOUR 

Hear the Cries, See Injustice, & Speak Your Heart 




ANDREW SIAÑEZ-DE LA O 

Visions of an Eagle atop a Cactus eating a Snake 

NOTE: The characters of MIJITA and PAPÁ should be cast Latinx. 

MIJITA and her PAPÁ sit next to each other on the ground, in the desert, huddled closely for 

warmth. The stage is dimly lit, there is a small lantern sitting in front of them. Maybe their 

legs are tucked into two old sleeping bags, or they are covered by a thick, rough blanket. They 

have two backpacks, packed tightly, beside them, nothing special about them. 

Like the desert, these two have a stillness to them. Silence is something that neither of them 

are afraid of. 

It’s cold. 

MIJITA coughs. 

¿Estás bien? 

Yes. 

PAPÁ 

MIJITA 

They sit in silence. 

She shifts. 

He shifts. 

She coughs. 


He rubs her back. 

You should try and get some sleep. 

I’m not tired. 

Are you too cold? 

I’m fine. 

PAPÁ 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

MIJITA 

Silence. 

She shifts. 

He shifts. 

Are you tired? 

No. 

Are you nervous? 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

MIJITA 


A little. But that’s okay. That's normal. 

PAPÁ 

Silence. 

She shivers. 

He rubs her back. 

Do you think they’re scared? 

I know they are. 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

She looks at him, concerned. 

How do you know? 

Because I was. 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

She holds him a little tighter, moves a little closer. 

Why did you do it? 

MIJITA 

Silence. 


She nudges him. 

It’s complicated. 

Is it the same reason they do it? 

PAPÁ 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

Maybe. Not always. Sometimes...sometimes home stops being home. 

She breaks into a small coughing fit. He doesn’t know what to do. He holds her a little tighter, 

letting out a long sigh into the top of her head. When she is done coughing, he starts to say 

something, but— 

And sometimes you see visions. 

What? 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

MIJITA 

Visions. Like with the eagle and the snake and the… 

He laughs. He straightens up. 

Cactus. 

PAPÁ 


Cactus, yeah. And they… 

You know the story. 

Yeah, but I want you to tell it. 

Aren’t you a little old for stories? 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

She laughs. 

Never. Who said that? 

MIJITA 

She nudges him. 

Come on. 

MIJITA 

He straightens up, clears his throat. He begins to tell this in the voice a parent uses when 

starting a fairytale, a deeper, wiser voice. Whimsical and slow. Measured and precise, but as 

the story goes on, his voice softens. Returns to being the voice of a father who is sitting out in 

the desert with his daughter. 


PAPÁ 

Thousands of years ago, before there were cities in these deserts, there were seven villages 

in seven caves. The people who lived in these caves were made of clay, dark browns and 

reds, and, over time, those hard layers fell away and left our ancestors. 

MIJITA 

Yes, yes, yes, and they lived happily for hundreds of years until— 

PAPÁ 

Do you want me to tell the story or what? 

I want you to get to the good part. 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

It’s all good, but fine. Their home, Aztlán, had been a paradise unrivaled, but they were 

being attacked by other tribes and they desperately needed a new home so they prayed to 

their Gods and were given a vision. A vision of an eagle atop a cactus— 

Eating a snake! 

MIJTIA 

PAPÁ 

So they left. The seven tribes traveled south for hundreds of miles through the heart of 

Mexico until they found what they were looking for. On a small swampy island in Lake 

Texcoco was that eagle. They had found their new home. They built that island into a great 

city surrounded by floating gardens and great temples and canals filled with people in 

boats traveling from one end of the island to the other, a beating heart in the middle of the 

lake. Tenochtitlan. The home of the Aztecs. 


But… 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

But...the conquistadors came and destroyed it all. A great people, a thriving city, destroyed. 

Gone. 

Silence. 

PAPÁ 

This is a sad story, why am I telling you this? How old were you when I first— 

Like four or something. 

God, I’m a horrible dad. 

No! Not at all. 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

I should’ve just read you those Harry Potter books. Or like Disney movies, I don’t know. I 

just watched cartoons growing up. El Capitán Planeta, Transformers, and— 

Dad. It’s a good story. 

MIJITA 

They laugh. 


The night feels a little warmer 

It’s history. 

Our history. 

PAPÁ 

MIJITA 

Silence 

MIJITA 

Did you see a vision? Is that why you and abuela left? 

PAPÁ 

No. Home...stopped being safe. And when that happens, you do whatever you can to, 

umm… We’re a wandering people, Mijita. A lot of us are still looking for a new home. 

Moses had his desert, we…we have this one. 

He takes a sharp, sudden breath. It is deep, like he is waking up from a dream, or rather, like 

he is trying to wake up from one. 

PAPÁ 

But…if I did have a vision, I think I know what it would be. 

What would it be? 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

Well, I think, IF I had a vision, if the Gods gave me a glimpse into the future, at my new 

home…I think it would be of you. 


Dad… 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

A vision of my daughter. Her mother’s eyes. Her father’s eyebrows. 

Dad! 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

Seriously, those are my eyebrows! They’re so bushy! 

She pushes him. 

They laugh. 

PAPÁ 

That’s what I would’ve wanted. What I would’ve fought for. Home. 

Te amo, papá. 

I love you too, mija. 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

Silence. 

He checks his watch, then the horizon. 


Are you ready? 

Is it time? Are they— 

Shh shh. 

PAPÁ 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

He stands, slowly lifting the lantern up, holding it out in front of him slightly above eye level. 

After a moment he switches it off, then on, then off. He waits. 

She gasps and stands up. 

Are those— 

Yes. 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

Out in the desert, the audience, small points of light flash in the distance. On, then off, then 

on, then off. Maybe this is a light cue, or maybe other lanterns in the audience, or maybe it’s 

just MIJITA, her gaze panning across the dark horizon before her. 

How many of them are there? 

More than we can help right now. 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 


Help? How are we going to— 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

By being here. Bearing witness. And guiding them, just a little. 

The lantern. 

A little light in the dark. 

MIJITA 

PAPÁ 

He winks. 

He lifts the lantern back up. 

He turns it on. 

Then off. 

But we can’t stay. Let’s go. 

PAPÁ 

She moves to grab the bags, but he stops her. 

No no, leave the bags, it’s for them. 

PAPÁ 


He walks off stage, leaving her in the dim light. She starts to follow, but then turns back to 

the horizon. She pulls out her phone and points her flashlight out into the desert. Looking out 

into the dark she crosses herself. 

Father. 

Son. 

And the holy spirit. 

She kisses her knuckle and looks out into the desert. 

From offstage: 

Vamanos, mijita! 

PAPÁ 

Silence. 

To the desert. 

Good luck. 

MIJITA 

She exits. 

The night is still. 

Out in the desert, lights flash. 

End of Play. 




Some Faces 2

ANNA OBERG 

Dry Leaves 

Dry leaves gather in the crease between the curb and the street. I focus on the rustle as 

one skims the sidewalk. The intermittent sound reminds me of watching my dad shave, 

perched on the toilet lid, my knees pulled to my chest and tucked into my t-shirt, stretching 

it tight. My feet are cold. 

He is methodical. The blade slides through the shaving cream like a snowplow, 

only backwards, dragging it and the whiskers along with the razor. He does this every day. 

All of his adult days. 

*** 

Life happens by way of accretion. I remember the death of both of my dad’s parents. The 

funerals are separate but only a year apart, the difference smeared over by time. I remember 

the graveside service on the hill in the Tennessee sun. Me with a toddler and another 

baby on the way, tears of frustration streaming down my face because I can’t get the car 

seat in and we are holding up the procession. We have to pull out right now, behind the 

hearse. It is hot, and I don’t want Gabe, shrieking at my ineptitude, to disturb the peace. 

I remember the way the cicadas roar in the August humidity. My ankles are swollen. 

It’s not about me, I tell myself. The heat sears the top of my head, even through the 

shade tent. The casket thumps lightly when it reaches the ground. Then silence. 

*** 

And, now, this is what has changed. I only know my parents’ parents through stories my 

dad tells, ones he passes down as we gather around the table on holidays or random visits. 

He tells stories when I visit him after his heart attack. These are stories I remember, 


as though it takes something dire to make that part of my brain kick in. 

*** 

There is the story of his father’s father who committed suicide. He tells me this at the 

kitchen table as the cicadas saw above the air conditioner, and the evening turns from 

gold to blue. A train wails from the tracks by the lake at the back of the neighborhood. My 

great-grandfather shot himself in the house while my grandfather was there, at home with 

his mother. I can only wonder if he was a witness. 

*** 

There is the story my mother’s voice tells when she calls to inform me my dad has had a 

heart attack. And the story his voice tells when she puts him on the line from his hospital 

bed. He says, this will always have happened now. 

I realize I am witnessing him see his own mortality for the first time. And I begin 

to reckon with my own. 

He says, now I’ll always have had a heart attack—as if it is something shameful, 

something he has done wrong. Some sin he has committed he can’t take back. As if he 

were guilty of something. Shame is braided into his tone. He is apologizing for not stopping 

time. 

I realize, suddenly, how I sound when I say such things—assume anyone can hear 

me when I complain of my own interior, the way I’ve wasted moments, come to terms 

with my regrets. 

Panic is not a birthright. I understand I have to learn to navigate my own pain, the 

way he is learning to navigate his. 


*** 

I watch the leaves blow down the street. Fall unfolds and refolds before me as clouds skirt 

over the sun. I feel myself soften, become pliable as the wind gets colder and the days 

shorten. In the fade, I’m learning what I know, what is left behind. This memory of my dad 

shaving lives deep. He smiles at me in the mirror, early morning dim outside the window, 

as he wipes the last little streaks of shave cream from his neck. 

*** 

I remember a New Year’s Eve party in college, at some rented cabin in the mountains. It 

is a huge party, and I drink champagne all night. Someone brings out moonshine in an 

unlabeled mason jar. I hear it can make you hallucinate, so I chicken out and don’t try it. I 

wear a black tank top that doesn’t quite cover my belly and jeans with high heels. At some 

point, someone puts pink bunny ears on me, and we take a polaroid. The picture is somewhere 

in a box, now. 

I invite that boy Joel, who I try to like, but really, we have no chemistry. He tries 

the moonshine and passes out later. 

At some point during the party—and this is what I keep returning to—there is an 

accident. Someone I don’t know falls down the stairs and hits his head on the hard floor. 

There is blood everywhere. It is foggy, this memory, but I remember the gray, marbled tile 

at the bottom of the stairs. Cobbled lights announce the ambulance, swirling through the 

bubbles in my glass. The paramedics clear the crowd. I have no idea who calls 911. 

Through the wine haze, I look at him there, on the ground at the base of the stairs, 

halo of blood around his face, on the gray tile, and it doesn’t register that he is hurt. It feels 

unreal, like time has stopped, like nothing is happening. It is hearsay—right in front of 

me—but already a memory as I look at him in real time, as they lift him on the gurney, 


everywhere. It is foggy, this memory, but I remember the gray, marbled tile at the bottom 

of the stairs. Cobbled lights announce the ambulance, swirling through the bubbles in my 

glass. The paramedics clear the crowd. I have no idea who calls 911. 

Through the wine haze, I look at him there, on the ground at the base of the stairs, 

halo of blood around his face, on the gray tile, and it doesn’t register that he is hurt. It feels 

unreal, like time has stopped, like nothing is happening. It is hearsay—right in front of 

me—but already a memory as I look at him in real time, as they lift him on the gurney, 

and roll him out into the dark night. 

The party goes on. 

*** 

Memory works as a lesson. Or, maybe, it is the teacher. 

Inside memory there is certainty. The past has already occurred. It’s a study in 

vividness—how well you remember. There is a scent, a fragrance, the way another’s hand 

feels in yours for the first time. The way your eyes meet. The way your foot grazes his leg 

under the table. The way you apologize, nonchalant. The way the autumn light hits the far 

wall, how you can’t stop looking at it. How you are tired from wandering an art museum, 

but now, here you’re awake, so awake. Not at all because of who you’re with, but, now, here 

you can’t stop staring at the far wall, because this light is the most ferociously beautiful 

exhibit of the day. It distracts. It becomes history even as it propels you headlong into the 

future. 

I wonder if it’s hunger that makes my body ache this way, or the act of remembering 

what my life was a lifetime ago, before I was married. Before kids. Back then, when I 

used to wonder what would happen to me, what the world would set on my plate, whether 

or not I’d be able to eat it. 


*** 

There is something too about the way memory works, how it reveals the things I see and 

what I pass over. How I find the stain on the paper and remember the day there is fly in 

my coffee, and I spit it all over the desk. I shred the paper, thinking about how to narrate 

my life, how to make something out of the insignificant. 

Sense of place is retroactive. It is established in memory. It exists nowhere—it cannot 

occur without nostalgia. 

A summer night at the baseball park east of the mountains—a single cicada rails 

at the world, and I’m transported to the driveway at my childhood home where I lay for 

hours looking at the stars, letting the residual heat in the pavement soak my bones. 

Time fades. The leaves turn. They shutter, dance on the wind as they fall, crunch underfoot. 

They blow away, to settle where they will. 

Memory is a sense of place. 

*** 

*** 

When my mother calls, or rather, texts—and I call her back—to tell me my father has had 

a heart attack, there is a sudden urgency to contend with memory. To understand where 

this event falls on the spectrum between past and present. My whole past suddenly comes 

into focus, and I see that hurt boy on the floor again at the party on New Year’s Eve. The 

memory is framed in smoke, blurred on the edges, clear in the center, fading from view. 

Suddenly, the boy on the floor is my father. It’s a metaphor. And I wonder—I’m surviving 

my life, but am I living it? I wonder what it means to fall so suddenly. If, somehow, time 

has been suspended between this moment and some other unspoken thing that hasn’t 

happened yet. 


Memory is immaterial—yet erasure is physical. To forget, to know something was 

there that is now gone, this is one of life’s biggest hurts. The hole is gaping. The pain of 

presence is preferred to the agony of forgetting. To forget is to understand the tenuous 

hold memory has. There is always a threat of falling through a crack. 

*** 

Memory staves off the present, keeps it at bay—keeps me from occupying myself in the 

now. But it also solidifies experience. Remembering makes an event real, lends it uniqueness—humanness. 

I know a family whose son lost his memory in a soccer accident. There was one 

moment of before, and now, a long, painful after. He headed the ball, and suddenly, is having 

to relearn the story of his whole life. 

His parents and sister visit one early autumn day. We take a picnic down by the 

river. In the shadow of a ponderosa, they tell the story of his experience, what it is like 

for him. How he has a girlfriend in the before, but never remembers her in the after. The 

accident opens a wide space, as though a bridge has collapsed and cannot be rebuilt. 

Talking to them makes me think of life and experience. Of how much of what I 

know, what I am built upon, is memory? 

*** 

One Saturday, I go to synagogue with my dad. I’m in my senior year of college. It’s an 

assignment for my Jewish Studies class, the one I tack on to my full schedule in order to 

graduate on time. I’ve just changed my major for the fifth time. It’s evident—I’m having 

trouble deciding what to do with my life. While I’m there, I mark down nothing of the day, 

nothing of God, really, except the way the stained-glass mosaic glows blue into the interior. 


My dad covers his head and the light shines in, mellow and drowsy, through the 

window at the front of the room. It is more peaceful there than anywhere I’ve ever been. 

There is so much peace it is almost sorrow. A river runs warm and deep, deep into a place 

I’ve been trying to bury. There is no pressure, here, to make myself believe. And so, again, 

like a breath, God becomes possible. 

As we walk out, there is a basin of water. It makes me think, as we pass through 

the doorway into the sunlight, of my father shaving his chin, using the stopper to keep the 

water, blobs of shave cream floating like ice bergs in the sink basin. And of me, sitting on 

the toilet lid in the morning light. And, I understand as we leave the synagogue—reaching 

across the span of time—memory is belief. 


ACE BOGGESS 

Against Nostalgia 

Why does the past have an alluring sheen 

that, when present, was as dull as hardened mud? 

We spend our lives trying to return to the moment 

we missed while we were busy dreading it, 

already forgetting: routines of marriage, work, 

publication, drug addiction, rehabilitation. 

Even the jail cell had its insights 

about how to laugh amongst the horrible. 


PAM MURPHY 

My Mother’s Guns 

My mother taught me early how Southern women stay safe: wear your hair in a ball cap 

when driving after dark; hide in the closet during tornadoes; learn the proper set of a 

rat trap; call Granddaddy for snakes and break-ins; and always, always, carry a gun. My 

mother carried a gun in the dash when she drove to football games on Friday nights, 

where she signed my brother out from the team and me from band so we could ride 

home with her. She carried a gun when we took a trip to Pensacola my junior year of high 

school. She carried a gun in the dash on routine trips to the dentist. 

My mother’s guns never hurt anybody. Mostly they remained on shelves in her 

closet, between pages in a magazine in her nightstand. Sometimes when she was home 

alone with my brother and me, she moved one of the revolvers into plain sight, warning 

us against touching it, reminding us of accidental shootings. My mother’s guns never hurt 

anyone, no, but there were close calls. Once she threatened to put a bullet in a Bible salesman 

if he didn’t turn around and get back in his car. Maybe his tires kicked up gravel, but 

I really can’t remember. All I know is I was young and embarrassed. We lived on twenty 

acres near a creek, and it was the age of cult kidnappings or at least rumors of them, the 

years of the Atlanta Child Murders, the final push of the Cold War. We were all scared, for 

different reasons. 

My mother kept a pistol on top of the piano when my father wasn’t home, and he 

often wasn’t. He worked second shift, gone from early afternoon until late at night; and 

sometimes later still, stopping at bars to meet friends for a drink, he said. When he came 

home later and later with stories about his drives home, explanations for absence, maybe 

my mother needed something to wrap her fists around, something solid and real. For me, 

my father was two people: the man who played catch with me in the backyard and took 

me camping and fishing and gave me the CB handle Little Princess, and the man who disappeared, 

who yelled at my mother in the kitchen and threw Corelle plates at our paneled walls. 


If my father was two people, my mother was an entourage. For me, she was a bodyguard, 

a bouncer, the one who marched us to my grandparents’ house in ugly weather; the 

one who tossed my brother and me in closets or under beds until danger passed. And yet, 

at the same time, she seemed singular, contained by concepts, by lines she’d drawn around 

herself. Or more accurately by lines drawn for her that she traced incessantly. Maybe 

my mother’s guns represented independence. Maybe. But only the freedom to rather the 

freedom from kind, a means of protection against all manner of aggressors. When she was 

sixteen, she saved enough money to buy a yellow polka-dot bikini and would sneak off to 

the community pool with her girlfriend. I liked to hear her tell that story, to picture her 

rebelling against the strict code her father, a Methodist preacher, enforced. Her brothers 

could go to the pool, she said, but she could not. It wasn’t an age thing, he said; it was a 

boy versus girl thing. 

Before she met my father, she eloped with a man whose name she never told me, 

and her father had the marriage annulled. Then she dropped out of high school and married 

my father. The transgressive bikini, the covert trip to the pool, the marriages: those 

choices weren’t really about freedom, but were instead actions taken under her father’s 

watch, actions subject to his anger, to the consequence of sin in his household. I might 

conjure a yellow-haired, confident teenager laughing and breaking the rules, but I know 

she was afraid. I know she hoped for someone to save her from a dark house, from the 

person she was pretending to be until she could be more. 

My mother’s guns were in some ways simply another sign of her containment, 

another way in which she relented and gave in to the surrogate power of men. Even as the 

guns represented freedom from helplessness, they didn’t allow her the freedom to change 

her mind about herself, didn’t give her what she really needed or wanted. I mostly remember 

her in the house, washing dishes and divvying up chores with me. The laundry room 

was accessible from the carport, just outside the kitchen door, and she often asked me to 

stand at the door to listen for her when she washed or dried clothes after dark. We mostly 

got along okay, but when I convinced myself that I could persuade her to move us from 


the farm to a city, anywhere else really, I pushed her deeper into her corner, into our 

corner I see now, into the house built for her, for us. She was making my bed and I was 

dusting my pressboard dresser the day she’d had enough. I don’t remember what she said 

to me. I only know what I said. I hate you. I think I hated her limitations, our limits, and 

maybe I saw it then, her helplessness, her inability to save either of us. Either way, I’d gone 

too far. She slapped me hard. We never talked about it again. 

Given time, her choice became simple: either become the woman in the bikini or 

the woman with the guns, one embracing escape and the other afraid of it, afraid enough 

to shoot. She sometimes whispered her secrets to me: the desire to be a nurse, to be cosmopolitan, 

to play the piano—and not for the church. She was attuned to notes, to the 

keys on the piano, to the melodies of Conway Twitty and John Cougar and Loretta Lynn. 

I suppose she had some sort of instinctual sense of the piano. Or it was simply 

that she learned well and early how to mimic others, how to imitate and, by imitating, be 

noticed, be adored. 

I remember her on family vacations in her red-starred denim-blue bikini, such 

tiny rebellions. She kept her blonde hair short and her skin tanned, and I copied her in 

every way, daughter imitating the imitator. In my favorite photo of us, we sit side by side 

among the tame rapids by my favorite childhood swimming hole. I’m maybe nine, and 

we’re wearing our patriotic bikinis, our bodies bronzed, our sun-bleached hair bunched 

underneath tinted plastic visors. I read the magazines she read—Ladies Home Journal, 

Redbook, Family Circle, Cosmopolitan. I read the romance novels she read. When she did 

her deep knee bends and jumping jacks in the living room, I did them too. When she 

asked my father to set up for target practice in the backyard, I joined her. The guns, I see 

now, were another kind of tether, a relationship with a protector and a substitute for courage. 

I don’t mean she wasn’t courageous; she was. But the kind of courage she wanted—the 

kind that meant saying, I’m not happy. I want a different life—that kind of courage eluded 

her. 


My mother’s guns were lovely things, belying their power and violence. They represented 

what she was and what she became, a beautiful woman mostly dangerous to herself. 

I remember two of her pistols, both .22 calibers, one of them older and brandless and 

completely unsafe. The other gun was a Heritage, an Old West, single-action replica. To 

fire, we turned the safety off and cocked the hammer back. In some ways, those two guns 

are like two versions of her, one ready for violence and the other simply a brandishing, an 

empty threat. 

And sometimes I think my mother’s beauty was a different kind of weapon, a gun 

itself, something she carried into shopping malls and restaurants and family reunions; 

something brandished at the community pool in that bikini all those years ago, something 

her own father tried to deny with criticism and censure. When he told her she wasn’t pretty, 

he couldn’t have believed it. Cover your knees, he’d say, you don’t want people to see how 

ugly they are. I don’t know how many times he told her this, but she’s repeated it all my 

life. My guess is that once was enough. Maybe he thought he was protecting her with such 

shame. I like to think he didn’t know better. In his mind, either she couldn’t wield her own 

beauty responsibly or he couldn’t trust others to appreciate its power. Either way makes 

me angry. 

There is a line, I know, in parenting, a line between protection and restriction. 

When I was younger, my mother kept me safe when my father could not. Maybe the 

free-floating threats to us were mostly forged in her imagination, but my mother’s fear 

spread over my youth like a shield. I resented her clenched jaw the afternoon she walked 

onto the bus to threaten Larry Morgan, who’d taken my sweater from me. I rolled my eyes 

when she had to drive us somewhere at night, when she tensed up in fear, on the road, 

alone with two children and no man, after dark. 

In my recurring childhood dreams, in fact, it was I who rescued my mother, 

sometimes from a white-gloved disembodied hand that came for her, appearing from our 

ceiling, sometimes from snakes that slithered up from the dirt of those nightmares. 


In others still, I hid behind her silver Ford LTD in the parking lot of Fairy Stewart’s store, 

dodging machine gun fire from masked men. I don’t remember her ever having a gun in 

those dreams, no weapon at all, and I suppose they were more portentous than I liked to 

imagine. Maybe it was the guns I was saving her from in those dreams. Or maybe I was 

saving her from herself. 

In any case, I have all my mother’s guns now. I sent them home with my husband 

after I watched my mother bite my brother’s left bicep just after Thanksgiving last year, the 

first without a family gathering at her place. I had fielded calls all that day from family: 

two aunts, an uncle, my mother herself. She was talking nonsense, repeating herself, and 

I had asked my brother to go see her with me. At first, I didn’t recognize her. She seemed 

possessed, her eyes blinking unnaturally. She had moved permanently to the couch, it 

seemed, where she said she’d slept each night for two weeks next to her medicine table, her 

purse, and the television remote. She was shrinking, trying to fit in the smallest place possible, 

to live in the smallest way. She had taken too many narcotics, and she was a danger 

to herself. The drugs, I decided, had taken control of her. I took them, too—another kind 

of weapon—but then watched as she opened her hand to reveal a blue Oxycontin. When I 

grabbed it away, she kicked me in the stomach, and I slapped her. Even now, it’s that slap, 

that violence I visited on her, that hurts me the most. 

When I was nine, I killed a bluebird, shot it off the telephone wire next to my 

grandparents’ carport. I spent those summer afternoons on their porch, cutting watermelons 

cooled in the creek, shucking corn, snapping beans, while my mother worked the 

production line at Lamar Manufacturing, stitching side seams in men’s dress pants. Red 

wasps, yellowjackets, and sweat bees took turns harassing me and my cousins, climbing up 

our pants legs or waiting in the bend of our arms or in the seats of fold-out chairs. Everything 

hurt. Everything seemed intent on violence, such that the day I shot that blue bird 

with my pellet gun, it felt simply like another step in becoming my mother, another lesson 

in how to lash out in ineffectual ways. The bird’s wings never opened. It just tumbled backwards 

and hit the mud below with a thump. I smiled. I was a good shot like my mother, 


like my father. When I walked to the bird, though, and stooped down, it didn’t seem real. 

I never told my mother or talked about how it felt to watch my grandmother toss the bird 

over the pasture fence. 

The day I slapped her, though, she leaned back on her loveseat and pointed her anger 

at me. I weigh 105 pounds now, she said and glanced at my husband. How much do you 

think your wife weighs? She mumbled sarcastically about how I had tried on a pair of her 

shorts that were too tight on me. I tried not to let her see me cry, but she did and laughed. 

My husband squeezed my hand, as much to reassure me as to control his own anger. 

My mother’s guns never hurt anybody, it’s true, but she’s hurt me and my brother 

plenty. It’s true, he had said an hour before the slap: if she didn’t agree to rehab for the pain 

pills, she would never see his kids again. I didn’t make such ultimatums, no, but I did yell 

at her. I did slap her. At the hospital the next morning, after our intervention and the slap, 

my mother told the doctor it was an accident, all those pain pills she took the day before, 

the paranoia, the whole thing, told him it wouldn’t happen again. You can watch me, she 

said, flush them down the toilet. 

She was diagnosed with a urinary-tract infection and sent home. A real problem 

with the elderly, the doctor said, infections of that kind causing confusion, loopiness, a 

kind of high. He didn’t say the word elderly in front of my mother. I wish he hadn’t said it 

in front of me. It sounded so weak, so passive and endangered. I heard it, though, and put 

myself in charge of doling out dosages in proper increments. Anxiety pill, depression pill, 

sleeping pill, bladder medicine, heartburn aids, vitamins, antibiotics, steroids. The next 

day, after she insisted I go home, I left her just one day’s medicine at a time. 

How often protection looks like restriction. How often we want to read it that way. 

I remember my mother driving me to Dr. Smith’s house when I had tonsillitis again and 

again and again. I remember her making me fudge when I felt too sick to eat anything 


else. She ping-ponged from the sewing factory where she worked, to my school, to the 

grocery store and pharmacy. She gave twenty-one years to an unfaithful man, and then 

another twenty-one years to another unfaithful man. I just want her to be happy, but that 

desire is just another kind of unsafe weapon liable to backfire. 

When she told me recently that she doesn’t want to be a burden, that she’s going 

to get better so that we can all enjoy life for a few more years, it seemed like such a low 

bar: getting better. Part of me, too, hates that analogy, that tired challenge of raising and 

lowering bars, calibrating performance, assessing skill against unknown challengers, but 

maybe I learned that all from her. My mother always built defenses against the unknown, 

the unpredictable. And her guns, her unlined face, her faith in her beauty: they encircled 

her like a hedge. In fact, she taught me to pray for just that as she sat at the foot of my 

childhood bed at night. Place a hedge of protection around her, she’d say, and now maybe 

she needs me to ask the same for her. But maybe it’s not protection she needs, not the guns 

to ward off Bible salesmen, not the suggestion that a face, preserved and young, is enough 

of a weapon to safeguard against loneliness or betrayal. Besides, I don’t tell her what I’ve 

protected her from. Protection isn’t it. Not all of it, anyway. 

Maybe getting better is enough; maybe it’s the only thing. 


MORIAH BRAY 

Arturo Chavez 

Your last name is Chavez 

(Should I call you father?) 

For years I bleated the first 

syllable—chipped the second 

against my teeth 

an earthen vase transmuted to small Pez candy. 

Mira, I didn’t grow up speaking 

Spanish never danced la bachata 

or ate carne asada 

or knew the smell of my abuela’s 

hands, cocoa butter and chile 

laced. 

Still, I thought my name was mija 

until the age of four, 

would rub ray the red velvet 

brim of my silver-sequined sombrero gifted by my 

mother’s friend 


(a real Mexican lady) 

who sold me cowtails at the 

supermercado, “Para ti, Hermosa.” 

My feeble gracias proof of southern 

manners in any language. 

I first learned to roll an R 

by repeating hud da da, each clumsy thud 

propelled relentlessly by a hopeless need 

to greet you with a familiar tongue. Eres mi padre. 

Soy tu hija. Mucho gusto. 

But you remain beyond me. 

I look for you in my amber almond eyes, 

the blood in my veins. 

I practice your name Arturo Chavez, Arturo Chavez 

Arturo Chavez… 


MARY LYNN REED 

Flares 

There are some connections that defy all explanation, my mother said. I was sixteen and 

she was thirty-eight, about to die. We sat at the kitchen table, and she held my hands. 

There are people who will blaze into your life and shine like flares on the highway, she told 

me. You’ll know it when it happens. There will be no question whether it’s love or whether 

it’s real or whether it will last. The people who decimate your heart do it in a single glance. 

A gesture. A word. And it will stay with you forever. When you’re eighty-nine and a respirator 

is working your lungs to breathe, or you’re forty-five and cancer has ravished your 

body, you will dream of that moment, and know that you lived. 

My mother and I sat at the kitchen table and looked at photo albums, back to 

front, working from present to past. She stopped on the second page of the first book, to 

caress the only picture of my father I’d ever seen. He was holding six-month-old me in his 

arms and smiling as if there were a lifetime of love in his heart. 

“He wasn’t a bad man,” my mother said. “He just had promises to keep. It’s good to 

love a man who keeps his promises.” 

But his promises were not to us. They were to his wife and three other children 

and my mother’s failing health had nothing to do with that, she told me. The muscle her 

doctors called her heart was defective, it always had been. It would give out before she rose 

to the top of the transplant list. Be ready, she said. 

Be prepared. 

Now I’m thirty-two, and I’m sitting in a bar where the Pacific Ocean glimmers just 

outside the window, but I’m not watching the waves, or the sunset, or the palm trees gently 


I’m watching my mother’s hands hold a whiskey glass in front of me. I see the hands 

shake. Then I feel the warmth of her smile as she stands at our old kitchen counter chopping 

celery, sliding it into the crock pot with those long slender fingers, the same fingers 

that struggle to grip my Jim Beam in this dusty bar decorated with surf boards and hula 

skirts. 

Three stools down, a guy with a thick mustache sticks his stubby fingers into his 

drink, then sucks them. On the other side, a man with a weathered brow loosens his tie 

and slips off his wedding band, cranes his neck to see if anyone noticed. The bartender 

is a woman my age, heavy-set and gruff. She pours me another whiskey. Amber is such a 

soothing color. 

I’m glad Daniel kept the house in Atlanta, glad for the five-hour plane ride between 

us. Glad for a quick divorce, glad for a new job in a new city where the sun shines 

more than two hundred and sixty days a year. Can that be right? 

The guy with the loosened tie approaches, says, “Hi.” His eyes are black and cold. 

I imagine him a lawyer, losing a big case and needing to forget. Doesn’t want to fight with 

the wife, so he’s here, hoping the gray at his temples and the body he still pushes hard at 

the gym will score him someone uninhibited and accommodating. 

I nod at the bartender, ask her to call me a cab. 

“Let me drive you,” the man says. 

The bartender wipes down the countertop, points toward the door. “One already 

here, Love.” 

The man puts his hand on my arm and I look at it for a long beat. I try to smile, 

but it’s a weak attempt. “Go home,” I say, and pull away. 


The streetlight above my taxi glows a different sort of amber. Electric halo, shining like the 

rings of Saturn. 

My mother’s thirty-two and I’m ten and she’s telling me I shouldn’t be so particular 

about my friends. People will surprise you, she whispers, as I rest my head against the cab 

window. You might even surprise yourself. If you try. 

On Saturday, I can’t seem to force myself out of my chair. The drapes are closed 

because the goddamned California sun is blinding as a comet. I’ve watched the same infomercial 

three times and I’m convinced that there really is unlimited wealth potential in 

real estate, and I would begin today, if I had the energy to move my legs a single inch. 

There’s a knock at my door. I turn up the volume on the TV and hope whoever it is 

will go the hell away. The knock persists. I think about getting up, but don’t. There’s a large 

yellow dog barking on the TV as a young girl runs through a suburban backyard, tugging 

clothes off the line. 

The knock moves to the window, and I wonder if I should be scared. I don’t know 

anyone in San Diego. I moved into this apartment three weeks ago. I don’t know anyone in 

California. On the entire West coast. 

It’s an ad for laundry detergent. Dirt, grass stains, doggie foot prints. Tide cures 

them all! 

The knock moves back to the door. One quick tap, a last-ditch effort. I push myself 

up, and peek out. A woman stands there, looking at her sneakers. Short brown hair, Mickey 

Mouse sweatshirt, faded jeans. The sun behind her is radioactive; it hits my retinas and 

stings. I recoil and close the drapes. My reflection in the mirror frightens me. 

Answer the door, my mother says. Her voice is strong. Insistent. I didn’t teach 


you to be this rude. 

I’m alone, Mother. I don’t know this woman. 

There’s no more knocking, so I put my hand on the door and count to ten, hoping 

she’ll be gone by the time I open it. But she’s not. 

She seems shocked at my appearance but doesn’t look away. “Sorry to bother you,” 

she says. “I’m Lindsay, your next-door neighbor.” 

She bends down to a bouquet of flowers on the ground. I think maybe it’s a welcome 

gift, and wonder: Do people in Southern California do this sort of thing? Is this 

boyish woman I’ve never met giving me flowers? For no reason other than I’m here, living 

next door to her? 

“You weren’t home yesterday, and they left these with me,” she says. “I tried last 

night, too, but—” 

A delivery. Of course. And once I see the mixture of red roses and white orchids, I 

don’t have to look at the card. 

“My ex-husband,” I say. “Trying to save his soul.” 

Lindsay shoves her hands in her pockets and starts to walk away. “Nice to meet 

you,” she says over her shoulder. 

“You want some coffee?” The words come out before I can stop them. I haven’t 

been friendly to anyone, not even the people I call friends, in over a year. Not since I 

caught Daniel going down on his secretary in the middle of our king-size bed, on top of 

the quilt we bought at a Dutch market on our second wedding anniversary. It was hand- 


stitched, beautiful. I loved that fucking quilt. 

says. 

Lindsay stops halfway between her door and mine. “Sure. I’d love some coffee,” she 

I look back in my apartment. “I don’t think I have any, actually—” 

She smiles, almost blushing. Her eyes are warm and brown and full of something I 

haven’t seen in a long time. Tenderness, perhaps. Innocence. She runs her fingers through 

her wavy hair, then motions for me to follow her. 

“Wait—I can’t go out like this,” I say. “I look like hell.” 

“Just to the corner. Jack in the Box. Cheap and hot. My favorite.” 

I feel like a homeless person, stinking of the previous night’s alcohol, wearing 

sweatpants crusted with Stouffer’s French bread pizza from three days ago and sneakers 

with holes bigger than my toes. Lindsay buys our coffees because I walked off with no 

money. I am a charity case, a bum. 

I sit in a booth and try to mat my hair down against my head. She brings the coffee 

on a tray with cream and sugar, little pink packets of Sweet’N Low, a dozen swizzle sticks, 

and napkins. 

“Need anything else?” she asks. 

I laugh. What else is there to need? 

She stirs her own coffee, wipes wet spots off the table. “What’s funny?” she says. 


“Nothing. I’m just losing my mind.” 

She leans back. “I don’t know your name,” she says. “If you’re going to lose your 

mind in front of me, I should probably know your name.” 

“Jessica. No, not really. Jess. My name is Jess, and despite appearances, I am employed. 

I own clean clothes. And on alternate Tuesdays, I’m reasonably sane.” 

Lindsay smiles again. “Tuesdays. I’ll remember that.” 

“Alternate Tuesdays. Not every one.” 

Lindsay turns out to be thirty-eight, a software engineer at a biotech in Mission 

Valley. Recently split with her partner, Rachel. They’d been together ten years. 

“Daniel and I only lasted three,” I say. 

She listens as I tell my predictable story, nodding in the appropriate places, not 

interrupting or injecting opinions. She’s a good listener. The best I’ve met in years. I don’t 

mention the quilt, or the fact that I stuffed it into a metal trash can, placed it in the center 

of our pristinely landscaped backyard, and burned it to ashes the night I kicked Daniel out 

of our home. It’s the best part of the story but there’s only so much crazy I can share on 

first meeting. 

We take our time, sipping our coffee. Nearly an hour goes by. When we get back to 

the apartments, she pulls her wallet out of her back pocket and hands me a business card. 

“I’m right next door,” she says. “And my work number’s on the card. If you need 

anything—” 


She thinks I’m kidding about losing my mind, I suppose. About everything not 

covered on alternate Tuesdays. 

I tuck the card in my pocket, and say, “Thanks.” Never intending to call. 

Inside, I don’t look at Daniel’s flowers. I don’t read his card. I don’t give my mother enough 

time to whisper in my ear. I go straight to the cabinet, pull out a bottle full of amber reflections. 

I pour and I drink and I pour and I drink and I pour. 

But it will not go away. It is September 17th. All day it has been September 17th. 

Four years ago today, I married him. Four years ago today, I believed in love. In 

happiness. Forever. 

My mother would have forgiven Daniel everything. Had she been me—or I been 

her—she would have taken all his weaknesses and wrapped her love around them. She 

wouldn’t have held a grudge and she wouldn’t have abandoned the marriage. She would 

have made the bastard soup and hot tea and told him it would all be just fine. 

I tell this to Lindsay as we sit in a lesbian bar in Hillcrest, sipping margaritas and 

watching women slow dance together. I don’t know why I let her bring me here, but after 

three drinks, I don’t care. There are no men at the bar with loosened ties or tan lines 

around their ring fingers. 

I’m wearing jeans and a loose silk blouse I bought at Macy’s in New York City 

(the only time I’d ever been) and I’ve never had more sideways glances in a single night, 

anywhere. It’s not a bad feeling—all these women watching me. I’m surprised to find that 

I like it when Lindsay leans in, close enough to smell her citrus perfume (or is that men’s 

cologne?). 


“Mothers don’t always know best,” she says, then slides her hand across the table, 

stopping just short of mine. She’s brazen when tipsy. She’s a risk taker and I appreciate 

that. 

I finish my margarita. 

“Another?” she says. 

“Sure.” 

We get up and dance to a few old 80s tunes. Bouncy, silly songs, where the dancing 

is more communal than intimate. I like the way the lights on the floor sparkle and reflect a 

prism on the wall. 

How did I get here? How many days fell between Daniel’s flowers and Jack in the 

Box coffee and now? Did Lindsay call me, or did I call her? I wonder if I could go to bed 

with her. I wonder if my body would allow it. 

So many women spiral around us. Tall, thin, high-heeled. Stocky, tough, seductive-scowled. 

Polo shirts. Glitter tees. 

I grab Lindsay by the collar, pull her close enough to feel her heat, and say, “Take 

me home now.” 

I should have paused first, focused on my tone. I didn’t mean to be gruff and full of 

rejection. I meant to be open, lightly floating an air of possibility between us. It came out 

all wrong, and her brazen side quickly vanished. 

She whisks us home, the night air sharp and unforgiving. She apologizes at the 

front door and avoids my gaze. I am deflated. The rift of misunderstanding feels impossibly 


wide, and exhaustion closes in fast. 

When I close the door, I’ve never felt more alone. Not even my mother has anything 

to say. 

The new job isn’t going well. I’m a paralegal, perpetual assistant to the more educated, 

esteemed lawyer set. I could spin a tale about how the work itself bores me, how I hate 

the deadlines and the dress code and the lunchtime cliques that never include me. But the 

bottom line is: I hate lawyers. I hate the way they will take absolutely anything—from the 

mundane to the obscene—and derive ridiculous pleasure out of building an argument for 

or against it. I hate the way their superiority so often hits their insecurity and turns into 

condescension. I hate their excessively dry-cleaned and pressed suits. I hate the overly 

important way they order coffee or stand at elevators. I hate the way they slip from casual 

indifference to intense concentration and you never know whether it’s safe to say, “Good 

morning, Ms. O’Neil.” Or, “Have a nice day, Counselor,” without being in danger of a curt, 

hurried reply. 

I don’t know why I thought any of this would be different in a different place. Too 

many cherished re-runs of L.A. Law in my childhood, I suppose. And I’m crazy, but not 

crazy enough to think the problem is that I landed in San Diego and not Los Angeles. I 

will not move again. But the new job isn’t going well. 

In the morning, my head feels like a watermelon with a heartbeat, too heavy for 

my neck to support, and throbbing. I get a shower and decide that, starting today, I will 

dry up and shine like Southern California. To hell with everyone else. I will make my 

own happiness, thank you very much. I vacuum my living room, clean off the tables and 

counter tops, take three Hefty bags full of beer bottles and frozen food cartons out to the 

dumpster. 


I load up the cooler with water and soda and head the SUV east, past Poway and 

Rancho Bernardo, winding through stony-peaked hilltops. I roll the window down, feel 

the temperature fluctuate around corners, elevation trumping the bright orange sun, chilling 

my cheeks and fingertips. I head for the desert. Parched sand and uncluttered vistas. I 

want to see it all. 

I make my way up the mountain roads to Julian, a gold mining town now known 

for home-baked pies and eclectic crafts. I park in a gravel lot, get out and do deep knee 

bends, feel my waistband cutting my gut. I remember teenage summers in spandex and 

bikinis, long before I fell in love with vodka and Alfredo sauce, in equal measure. 

I see her sallow skin. Her sunken eyes. She’s standing next to me, leaning against 

my dusty car-truck, a model she never glimpsed in her lifetime. 

You’re lost, she says. 

I turn away from her and stroll the town of Julian. Buy wind chimes with a Wild 

West motif and a croissant at the bakery. I’m carefree, practically on vacation. I drive to 

a vista spot on Highway 79, just outside of town, where you can see the Anza Borrego. 

Standing on the mountainside, I look down at the desert floor. The western skies are so 

big; it’s disorienting to be able to see that far. It should make me feel small but it doesn’t. 

Something about the endless sand and infinite sky makes me want to be a better person. 

Someone with the capacity to forgive, to connect again. 

There’s a family of four near the guardrail. Husband and father holding tightly onto 

his little girl’s hand. Wife and mother clicking snapshots. Teenage son staring down at his 

phone, looking bored. 

Daniel was from a big family and wanted lots of kids. But I was afraid. Always so 

goddamned afraid. My mother died when I was sixteen, and despite all her efforts, I wasn’t 


prepared. I wasn’t ready. 

The teenager walks back to the family sedan, opens the door. He glances down at 

his shoes, then up at me. His face is pale and unblemished. A single lock of black hair falls 

across his forehead. I feel a tiny shock, like static electricity in dry-heated winter. 

I’m staring at the boy. He’s staring at me. His hand is on the car door; he’s not moving. 

I’m fifteen, and my mother’s just told me. We’re in the car, on our way to Key West. A vacation 

we deserved, she said. A vacation to remember. Staring out the bug-streaked windshield, 

she told me it was just a matter of time. She didn’t cry or lose her winsome spirit. 

Every day holds infinite potential, she said. Every minute just as likely to explode into 

brilliance as fade into oblivion. In Key West, with grains of sand between her toes, tide 

rolling in, deep inhalations of salty ocean air, my mother lived a thousand years in a single 

afternoon. 

Minutes. Seconds. They are so precious, she said. 

Live them. 

I feel the brisk hilltop breeze against my skin as I walk over, prop myself against the hood 

of the family’s car, glance sideways at the teenager. 

“Got a cigarette?” he says, fingers dangling out of his front jeans pockets, head 

slightly down. 

“You shouldn’t smoke,” I say. 


He shrugs, kicks at the gravel next to the curb. 

“You been down there?” I ask, pointing at the desert. 

“Too far, they keep saying. Not this time.” 

I breathe and he breathes, and we watch the desert, from a distance. 

His parents are thirty feet away, absorbed in their little girl, oblivious to this 

strange woman who has sauntered up to their son. 

The boy is still holding the phone but he’s not looking at it. He’s staring at the 

ground. 

He’s fifteen, maybe, tall and gangly, fresh from a hormone growth spurt. He’s only 

a foot from me now. I could reach out and touch his arm. I know the shock of electricity 

would be there. I know it would jolt through me and buzz my senses from head to toe. I 

know I’d be able to recall that feeling, that intensity, at any moment in the future. It’s palpable, 

already, and it hasn’t even happened. 

Maybe he’s sixteen, I tell myself. Not a child. A parent can die on you, Boy. Any 

minute now. 

He slips his phone into his pocket, and as he moves, I catch a glimpse under his 

t-shirt, a thin strip of black hair just above the waistband of his jeans. 

Are you going to talk to me now, Mother? Are you going to tell me to live this moment? 

I’m standing by the side of this road and I see the flare. I see it. It is Right Here. 


The boy looks confused. He’s backing away from me. 

Did I say that out loud? 

The boy’s family is approaching. The father wears a deep scowl. He’s looking at his 

son; he’s looking at me. “What are you doing?” he’s yelling. 

The boy gets in the car, doesn’t look up. I don’t exist. I was never here. I’ve never 

been anywhere. I step over to the guardrail, grip it, and look out. The man is behind me 

now. Car doors slam, the rest of the family tucking inside their Camry. Safe and secure. I 

squat near the ground, clutch my knees. 

“Are you okay, Miss?” the man asks. 

“Go away,” I say. 

“Are you sure? Do you need help?” 

I am folding into myself. I can’t hear anything but the wind. Nothing exists but the 

wind and the sky and the desert. The boy, the car, the family disappear. I don’t hear them 

go. I don’t look back. I will never see them again. Not in a thousand years. Ten thousand. 

They are gone. Everyone goes. 

It’s Wednesday afternoon and I’m back at the bar, but this time I’m looking out the window. 

I’m watching the waves, seeing my mother in a rented convertible, boys on the 

beachfront strip whistling at her. She laughs and throws her head back. “Nothing to lose,” 

she yells. “Nothing to lose!” 

I tap my empty glass and the bartender pours me another. 


“You all right, Sugar?” Her round face is kind, much younger than I’d realized before. 

“Sure,” I say. “I’m fine.” 

After two more whiskeys, the bartender’s wavy hair blurs with the beach beyond 

the window, darkening in the twilight. The jukebox volume rises over happy hour voices. 

People with jobs are mingling, grateful to be out for the day. 

I lost my job two days before. I wish I cared. 

My mother is sitting on the bar stool beside me. Wrinkles of concern, fraught with 

worry. I won’t talk to her. I won’t be that crazy woman anymore. 

She sips her drink, which looks like soda, then says, “I’ve been watching you.” 

No shit, I think. You’ve been haunting me half my life. This is not news, Mother. 

I drain my drink, stare back out the window. The dark edge of sunset. There are 

worse things to be than a drunk in Southern California. 

“You don’t look well.” The background noise in the bar softens in time with her 

words, and my vision clears for the tiniest interval. 

Anger spins me around as Lindsay wrings her hands. “What are you, stalking me 

now?” I yell. 

I ask for another drink. 

“You driving her?” The bartender asks Lindsay. 


“No, she’s not,” I say. “I don’t need a ride. I need another drink, please—” 

When I wake up, I don’t know where the hell I am, but Lindsay is next to me, reading the 

newspaper. 

“Good morning,” she says, getting up. There’s fear in her quick retreat. She knows 

I can hurt her, in a heartbeat. But still, she’s there, wearing that Mickey Mouse T-shirt and 

an apprehensive smile. 

I roll over, feel the discomfort of having slept fully clothed, chafed thighs and underarms. 

My nightstand is by the bed. My dresser is in the corner. We are in my apartment. I 

have no memory of giving her my keys, allowing her in. 

Through the shades, sunlight trickles across the wall. I squint as shadows form. 

Teenage boys bumming cigarettes, watery-eyed and misunderstood. They strut 

and breathe among rippled desert sand, atop stony mountains, at the crest of a wave crashing 

against rock and beach. It’s not a dream. These California boys leaning against truck 

hoods and gazing at vistas, knowing they’re connected to every prehistoric rock, every 

blade of grass. Their image rises as if to speak, not in my mother’s voice, but painted in 

sunbeams on my apartment wall. 

You are alive, the boys tell me. Don’t run away this time. 

Lindsay is standing at the door. “I should go,” she says. 


came. 

I hesitate, looking for the boys again. But the image fades. Gone as quickly as it 

I’m drawn to the window, where I pull the shades up, let the light spill in. It’s not 

like a flare at all. Not an instant revelation. But it’s there, burning inside of my dry mouth. 

Shaking, I turn to Lindsay. “I have nothing to offer you but grief,” I say. “But—stay 

with me awhile? It’s possible I could use—a friend?” 

Quickly, I need to sit down. To rest. 

The room is utterly silent. 

Slowly, Lindsay sits down beside me, gripping her hands, one over another. 

Finally, she looks back up, and says, “Okay—but I won’t be your punching bag. If 

you want a friend, you have to be one. Can you do that?” 

I feel the deep burrowing ache at the center of my chest. And with absolute certainty, 

I know my mother will never speak to me again. Whether I screw this up today or 

tomorrow or next year, she’s done and gone. No more scolding. No more direction. 

The lightness in the room is not from the Sun. It is me, wrapping my arm around 

Lindsay’s shoulder, and saying, as softly as I can manage, “I can do that. And I will. I’m 

going to surprise the hell out of you.” 


110 | Reunion 


Ready to Jump

MATT VEKAKIS 

Lake Lincoln 

The loons stroll the glass 

top beneath moonlight, 

black and silver silks 

draped around the midriffs 

of Maine pine. The girls 

find us in Adirondacks on 

the back deck. Together, 

we drink cheap vodka 

halved with store-brand 

soda, listening to the 

mournful loons splicing 

the silver silks—a sound 

like something lost. I fear 

we’ll lose the moment; 

the out-of-body fearlessness 

as the forest reminds us 

of tomorrow. I stand and 

hobble to the railing to 

Reunion | 111

urinate; the stream arcing 

up toward the lake before 

dropping into darkness, 

hissing. He joins me at the 

railing, a hand fighting with 

a zipper—the other curled 

around my shoulder, fraternal. 

The girls sing and dance like 

nymphs and we howl at Perseus 

as if our bladders will never 

empty, the moon a white fire: 

hot, and endless. 

112 | Reunion

KYLIE R. WALTERS 

Thoughts at 21 in Waterville, ME 

The sky can be a white blue. I was in Santa Cruz once and thought that. Lying down in a 

bed, which was really just a mattress upon a floor, and feeling upside down. I wish there 

were a word for it. 

*** 

When you are twenty-one you can’t see the glass of orange juice you pour yourself at 4 

a.m. during the hottest summer of your life and you can’t see the sweat climbing down 

your back because you don’t know if you’ll ever have such a summer let alone a moment. 

Moments you have had and moments you may have and moments you will have collide 

in the corridor with the moment you’re trying to have right then and there. The fly lands 

on the rim of your glass. A river presses past your floating body. Someone is tracing their 

finger over the bones of your hand. But where are you? 

*** 

Becoming alive in the language and logic you’ve been taught can be a painful thing which 

is not to say it’s not also a beautiful good time. One fact creating weight, though, is that it’s 

taken me all this time to get to these words. Where have I been all this time? How have I 

lived without saying this? Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet, “In the deepest hour of 

the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look 

deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?” 

Lady Gaga has that tattooed on her bicep in the original German. What’s it like having 

that on your arm? Does she feel it’s the projection of something intimate to the world? 

Can a tender thing harden around the edges? 

*** 


I’ve been told more than once that I’m hard on myself and hard on the world and next 

thing I know I’m thinking I’m hard completely, a cinder block of a person. But when I say 

hard, I think I really mean something else like the way things are aren’t good enough or I 

need to say something that won’t be easy to hear. I am not a cinder block of a person. Not at 

all, even if much of what I love isn’t human, or maybe especially because much of what I 

love isn’t human. That’s something I never know quite how to say. 

*** 

One reason I love music is because sometimes when I hear a song, or even just a bit of 

a song, three seconds even, it feels impossible. It says, I am alive in the air as you might 

expect but also in you. And you cannot decide not to notice! And in these moments, these 

outside and inside and inability not to notice moments, I want to stick my head out the 

window and let go of the wheel, because although I might crash, getting my head out the 

window feels more important. Tasting music, how to make a great day in an instant. 

*** 

It feels true that many people walk around like they know what they’re doing. I don’t mean 

in the sense that they know how to make a photocopy and so are doing it but in the sense 

that they know what’s going on with being alive again today. And I may appear as well to 

know what I’m doing and so I feel alone with my terror and joy more often than not. I can 

hardly break through. Chances are I don’t see the woman to my right’s hand quiver as it 

reaches for English breakfast tea and chances are even lower that I see in the quiver the 

crumbling of all inside her, fibers of hope and stability tearing apart right there on aisle 

seven so that she wonders just which way the earth is spinning and just how she’ll die and 

why why why anyone is anywhere, let alone why we are anyone in the first place. She puts 

the tea in her cart and is on her way and I’m still looking for what I need on the shelf. 

*** 


Once in the stacks of the library I was about to get onto the elevator back up to the main 

floor when a book called Alcohol and the Writer caught my eye. It was right on the edge 

of the last aisle and though the doors to the elevator had opened to let me in, I broke my 

stride and reached instead for the book. It was too funny. I had to open it up and see. 

Written by Donald W. Goodwin, M.D. and published in the '80s, the book on that Thursday 

seemed to me far more of a joke than a serious thing. It took me reading the table of 

contents and first page to feel confirmed that, in Goodwin, M.D.’s world, the “writer” is 

male. The book goes on to discuss Poe and Hemingway and Steinbeck and other corners 

of the canon who relied on and wrote about alcohol somehow. This is great, I thought, and 

checked it out. My mind was two places, at least: I want to have a good laugh and what can 

I learn. 

*** 

We are living with who we are, living with the fact that we are people who’ve said the 

things we’ve said. It could be, too, that though, yes, I know nothing of the future, I also 

know more of my own future than anyone else could. I know better than anyone all the 

things I will say one day. It is devastating. We are amorphous, sure, but some part of that is 

still true. We are our own friends. And even that says only part of how it is. I am searching 

forever for the right language for who I am to myself. 

*** 

“I Didn’t Know About You” was composed by Duke Ellington with lyrics by Bob Russell 

but the version of it I love most is the instrumental by Ben Webster and Johnny Hodges. 

The title is enough already to send us away. Can we hope for more? I listen to the song and 

am amazed each time. It is full of reds and texture and floating, climbing, falling feelings. 

I wish we acted more like this music exists. Men of all ages are often surprised to learn I 

enjoy or even know about jazz. What is that about? Much, but, at minimum, gender and 

age and the fact that, on the whole, we give this music so little space in the world. 


*** 

A roommate of mine once boiled water and at the same time I noticed a good smell, like 

something was baking. I loved the moment: the playful gurgling bubbling water accompanied 

by an indistinct warmth. I knew the pairing was inorganic, though, which was part 

of the pleasure to begin with, and it turned out she was trying to make hard boiled eggs 

for the first time. There was humor in that, too, though, because I would expect trying 

to make hard boiled eggs for the first time, if anything, to create a rotten smell. Life gave 

instead something different. And then the egg smell came later, once she ate one. A return 

to order. 

*** 

Alcohol glasses are something at which to look. There is romance and danger in the edge 

of a glass brought to lips but there is also something I enjoy more which is a romance of 

danger. What if this person lets it all go tonight? Or maybe it isn’t night and that, too, is 

exciting. Maybe it’s morning and maybe someone in the world is having a white Russian 

all the same. Any time living is any time and so they are making that wild choice. Don’t I 

wish I could be them for an instant? A little bit of vodka with their coffee and cream at 8 

a.m. Oftentimes, though, it’s just the alcohol-y viscosity I like to notice: the sheer trace of 

a sip as it returns slowly to the bottom of the glass. It takes its time, as if it knows we’re not 

looking. So I like to look. 

*** 

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to live. It is, I think, also a way of trying to 

figure out what I can say, declarative writing and speech often feeling uncomfortable or 

fragile or insufficient. Writing, I would specify, also is, for me, speech. In speech-speech 

I’m trying to achieve what I otherwise realize only in writing, and I usually fail at that 

speech-speech attempt. The greatest risk, however, comes when I don’t immediately think 


I’ve failed to say what I think I wanted to say. Speaking can be like sewing silk. When I 

fold up and move away from this place what will sink in the seams? I wrote that question 

and still want to know what it means. 

*** 

Every year my father sticks two scratch card lottery tickets in our stockings for Christmas. 

It’s always a fun thing. There is difficulty in being together again and we like something 

about this ritual, which is ill-fit to our collective sense of logic. When I was younger, I 

really wouldn’t have minded winning a bunch of money. At first because I wanted to go 

on vacation on a big boat with all my friends and let no one pay for anything. Later I just 

thought it would’ve been a surreal and confusing moment. Why my ticket and not my 

sister’s or mother’s? Ah, to be chosen! What an asshole I was. Now I think winning would 

be a different kind of interesting thing. Not a miracle, but instead something that reminded 

me here I am, here I am playing the lottery like everyone else. Winning the lottery, no, 

would not be a miracle. It might feel like finding out you have a cavity. I’d probably take 

my friends on a boat still. But then I’d remind myself you’ve got to give it all away. 

*** 

One day we’re going to cook that thing that, in my imagination now, I don’t want us to be 

cooking, and that will be the miracle of it: spaghetti is in the pot. Spaghetti is in the pot 

and your life can never be what you planned it to be. Spaghetti is in the pot and it’s swirling 

about in a gentle way as maybe most other things in my life are. And in this world 

where spaghetti is in the pot, I’m able to have what I never thought I could. Our bed is 

unmade. I don’t mind the beginning of a new day. A layer of rain dresses the car in the 

driveway’s windshield. Where do we go in that car? What is your name? Whose idea was 

spaghetti? 


118 | Reunion 


Dopo l’incendio 

Siamo tutti perduti 

Non ci salva la fede 

E neanche la scienza 

Non ci vale l’Idea 

Non ci scampa la storia 

Né natura, né arte. 

In un modo o nell’altro 

Siamo tutti smarriti 

Nelle ombre del bosco. 

E se tutto è perduto 

Per tutti 

Tanto vale aver fede 

O studiare la scienza 

Guardare alla storia 

Immaginare l’Idea 

Godere dell’arte 

Curarsi della natura 

Purché si sappia 

Che nulla ci servirà. 

E poiché niente 

Ci tiene al riparo 

Conviene praticare 

Qualche ragionevole vizio 

Per non sentirsi superiori 

Per specchiarsi nei caduti; 

Lasciamo che si macchino 

Le vesti candide dei santi 

Tanto siamo tutti perduti 

E quando divampa l’incendio 

Si mescola l’odore d’incenso 

Con quello del legno bruciato 

E nelle ceneri che restano 

I colori non si vedono più.

TOTI O’BRIEN 

After the Fire 

We are all lost. 

Faith doesn’t redeem us 

or science, or the Idea. 

History lets us down. 

So do nature and art. 

This or that way, we are lost 

each and every one 

in the dark of the woods. 

And if all has vanished 

for all, then why not 

have faith, study science 

imagine the Idea 

enjoy art, care for nature 

as long as we know 

that none of it will save us. 

Because nothing 

will shield us 

should we practice as well 

some moderate vices 

not to feel too superior 

to the fallen? 

Let the white robes of saints 

be smeared, since their owners 

are as lost as we are 

and when the fire spreads 

scents of incense 

and of charred wood blur. 

You can’t tell the color 

of ashes. 


JAE DYCHE 

July Saturdays off River Road 

Of late the tremor of digger wasps 

deep in the hot clay 

seems more immediate 

as thoughts become less 

and less distant from 

the infinitude of cicadas 

whining from within 

the alders, and the tongue 

steeps with the sharpness 

of raw elderberries, 

instead let’s think how 

tomorrow the South Folk 

will sweeten with corn silk 

and cattle dung 

and the Glory hymns 

of the Brethren who seek Christ 

beneath the water, the saved 

sun-drying their wings 

where sedge eases 

into field at the old Welton farm 


and further from the shallows, 

nearing the Old Fields Bridge, 

smallmouth maunder 

in riffles between the schist, 

the river stuttering over 

absolution after absolution 

collected on the bedrock. 



2020-2021 Robert Bone Memorial Creative Writing Contest Winners 


ABOUT THE ANNUAL CREATIVE WRITING CONTEST 

Thanks to the Robert Bone Memorial Creative Writing Endowment, Reunion: The Dallas Review 

(previously Sojourn) is proud to sponsor an annual creative writing contest. The purpose of the 

endowment is to encourage UT Dallas students in the field of creative writing. 

Prize winners receive a monetary award, and the selected works are featured in this volume of 

Reunion. All full-time students currently enrolled at The University of Texas at Dallas are eligible 

to submit their works. 

2017 was the inaugural year for the creative writing contest. The 2017 contest winners were 

awarded a cumulative total of $550. 


2020-2021 ROBERT BONE MEMORIAL CREATIVE WRITING CONTEST WINNERS 

UNDERGRADUATE WINNERS 

Chaz Holsomback, Back and Forth (Poetry) 

Kayla Osborn, There is no art in a cigarette. (Poetry) 

Madison York, 17463 Davenport Rd. (Poetry) 

Ayesha Asad, Binary Plus One (Poetry) 

Bryan Ordonez-Santini, The boy who fought the Sun. (Fiction) 

GRADUATE WINNERS 

Matthew W. Baker, End of Touch (Poetry) 

Nikita D’Monte, Silence (Poetry) 

Sunny Anne Williams, The Giver (Poetry) 

p joshua laskey, The Man on the Bus (Fiction) 

Annie Duyen Tran, The Friend I Never Get to See These Days (Poetry) 



CHAZ HOLSOMBACK 

Back and Forth

KAYLA OSBORN 

There is no art in a cigarette. 


MADISON YORK 

17463 Davenport Rd. 

They set out the coffee at 9:30 and it is lukewarm 

and weak. Styrofoam cups and creamer singles stacked in makeshift 

Tupperware bowls. The eggs are scrambled and runny. 

$8-a-dozen donuts grin chubbily out of their cartons and the Pace 

salsa is three months expired. I have donut glaze on my dress. 

Someone says grace, I have donut glaze on my fingers, and this love-iscraving, 

this love-is-community, this love-is-weak coffee in Styrofoam cups. 

Thumb to Matthew 4, donut glaze left behind on the pages of Isaiah, and no one 

lives on bread alone, we live on all sorts of things like breakfast burritos 

and our best friends’ smiles and thunderstorms and hot showers and the Word of God. 

I don’t think I’ve known a person alive who’s willingly come to church with a belly full 

of everything they want. Love-is-patient appetite, and I find it somewhere 

between the donuts and the scrambled egg, in the measured, 

hungry breath of the stranger next to me in the pew. 


AYESHA ASAD 

Binary Plus One 

look at this bruise / scabbed over by time / the burn on my pinky / pink-skinned, oval / 

I touched / the ridges on the gas stove / yesterday / & felt my fingers stumble / as if they 

were shocked / I imagine sometimes / when people say burning / is one of the most painful 

ways to die / why we learn it / from a young age, spoon-fed / hell with honey / baby 

carrots ground into soup / tossed with flame / rose-pink children / grown into blisters, 

beanstalks chopped / & charred / fire whimpered into hair / into clothes / offset by mentions 

/ of jeweled silks & pearls / an apple that tastes sweeter / bitten only by some / & I 

wonder / where most people go / whether they shiver under stones / slicing through skin / 

temporarily / like the time your parents / made you sit in the time out chair / & you cried 

at first / then left eventually, spring-eyed / & showered / cheeks like new apples. / & I wonder, 

sometimes, / whether hell is like that / a rapid bee sting / bitter at first / then soothed 

/ with calamine / and the scent of rain as it wets / a blossom, & the pressure of a kiss / 

against saffron ground / & the river that streams into / your skin, a film of minty foam / 

when people talk about God / why don’t they emphasize His mercy 


BRYAN ORDONEZ-SANTINI 

The boy who fought the Sun. 

Joseph was an Asian boy tall for his age. He towered over the fifth graders and almost 

some adults. His hair was an afterthought, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was not the 

brightest student (before the incident), but had nerves of steel to compensate. While not 

the most popular child at the school, Joseph was someone you just couldn’t miss, as he 

stood out like a jackrabbit at a cottontail convention. On top of that, he had a charisma 

that rivaled that of the American founding fathers. There are countless occasions of Joseph 

talking his way out of trouble, or charming the lunch-ladies into giving him extra chicken 

tenders. 

If Joseph had a fault, however, it would have to be his temper. The smallest inconvenience 

by an inanimate object would send him into a rage, resulting in wanton destruction 

of whatever nuisance that bothered him. It was a relief for both students and teachers 

everywhere, that he was a gentle giant, with occasional violent tendencies. He would never 

hurt a fly, but he would destroy the city should Taco Tuesday be cancelled. 

While he was only eight years old, Joseph soon had an existential crisis. For all of 

the pencils he’d snapped, soda cans he’d crushed, and phone books he had ripped apart, he 

had never fought against an opponent who could fight back. Joseph felt incomplete. His 

anger was not hurting anyone, but it wasn't helping anyone either. It wasn’t setting anyone 

straight. Joseph needed to fight a bully. The problem was, there were no bullies around; the 

counseling department’s propaganda made sure of that. Regardless, Joseph’s midlife crisis 

was one all grade-schoolers could relate to, and it was everyone’s duty to pitch in and help. 

The auditions for Joseph’s first opponent were soon underway. Every student at 

Littleview Elementary was fair game, from Timothy Green, the smallest first grader, to 

Tony Smalls, son of local boxing champion, Jacob Smalls. In fact, Joseph didn’t even have 

to personally screen every man, woman, and child at Littleview at this point; he had built 


he had built up quite an entourage by now, with boys and girls from every grade spreading 

the word about Joseph’s search for a challenger. Rumor has it that the first annual Jungle 

Gym Fight Club was just a ploy made by Joseph’ associates to find the strongest fighter 

around. 

A couple months passed. Joseph still had not found a worthy opponent. What’s 

more, it appeared that his anger issues had subsided. Gone were the days of an unlucky 

milk carton suffering the wrath of Joseph Lee. Gone were the days of soul searching for a 

worthy opponent, and gone were the days of Joseph patrolling the perimeter of the playground, 

thinking of his future aspirations. 

Joseph’s spirit was crushed. Likewise, his enthusiasm was no more. While staff and 

administration were dancing in the rain, celebrating the fact that Joseph’s rampages were 

no more, the student body grieved for the loss of their resident berserker. Bearing a slouch 

now, he was no longer the tallest on campus. He quietly lived out the rest of his recess days 

at the “super kids” swing set, adjacent to the main playground. 

“HEY EVERYONE COME LOOK, JOSEPH IS GONNA FIGHT THE SUN!” 

The playground had never before congregated so quickly into one place. Not even the annual 

clown fest could attract the attention of over 150 children at such a moment’s notice. 

The teachers were foolish to think we were just looking at a dead lizard. We were about to 

witness history. 

Joseph was mad once again, and the source of his anger was a celestial being who 

was undefeated in the history of the universe. Joseph’s spirit was renewed. Not only did he 

meet his match, he found someone leagues stronger than him. It was an opponent that lit 

up the four corners of the world, and then some. Joseph’s next challenger was in fact, the 

Sun. Nevertheless, Joseph was determined and wouldn’t back down. A silence lay upon 

the entire playground. Joseph looked around the crowd. Confusion quickly befell the 

spectators before him. 


How do you fight the Sun? You can’t exactly punch it, and launching a missile at it 

was also out of the question. Doubt immediately spread throughout the crowd, with many 

boys and girls returning to the playground to play tag. Insolent fools. 

Joseph took off his shades. It was so quiet, you could hear the thump the pair made 

as they bounced against the rubber floor. He took a breath. He took a seat. He uttered a 

small prayer to himself, and then asked for a moment of silence. 

He stared at the Sun. He was having a staring contest, with the Sun. He was fighting 

the Sun! “COME BACK HE’S FIGHTING THE SUN!” The mad man wasn’t backing 

down, his gaze entirely focused on the bright star millions of miles away. You could hear 

the eye flesh sizzling as the Sun attempted to cook his nerves away. Joseph wasn’t having 

it, as he somehow made his eyes shine brighter than a diamond in the rough. By then, the 

teachers were running towards this monument to human persistence, intent on stopping 

the carnage. I can’t say I blame them, the Sun is all too important for us to lose in a schoolyard 

fight. 

By the time they got to where Joseph lay however, it was too late. The Sun quickly 

retreated into the clouds, but it had taken its toll on the tall Asian boy. He sat there exhausted, 

crying tears of joy, not able to blink. “I won miss! I really have won!” Joseph was 

taken inside, and that was the last Littleview saw of him. 

Today, many experts argue over the point of Joseph’s grand debacle. Some say it 

was a show of force, an act created to intimidate the school into submitting to him. Others 

think that it represents American audacity towards overwhelming odds. The majority 

think he was just a special needs child who needed extra supervision, and as a result of its 

absence, endangered his eyesight. Whatever his reasons for staring at the Sun may have 

been, one thing is for certain; the Sun did not return for an entire week after its crippling 

defeat against Joseph Lee, the boy who dared to look it in the eye. 


MATTHEW W. BAKER 

End of Touch 

Moon, like a pin you anchor the night 

sky in place stars, atmosphere, and each 

human worry. But, oh, how you ’ve spun so far 

threading a space where it is impossible to consider 

loneliness, my unshakeable ghoul, 

its open mouth swallowing all air, 

drinking all light. How you need 

nothing; you’d done it all before 

I arrived at your shores and began 

to graft my histories over yours. I needed 

to use you to gird myself—thin armor of my skin 

loose in the weft, letting in all 

manner of wind and weapon and want. 

You live so far beyond me, 

yet still, I can’t help but cast my voice 

against the steel disk of your face 

falling through 

this cloud littered night: 

I am afraid 

I will never outrun my need 

for someone to hold me; 

that once I span the crater of my ambitions 

and scale the wall at its edge, I will default 

to seeking someone or something— 


that hand on the knee in that innocuous way 

a lover’s hand might rest. Moon, 

teach me instead to be a bed of nails, a black hole 

in which I delete 

entire constellations of touch. 

You’ve known touch, have felt 

its comets crash into the field of your body, 

yet still each night you rise in the black silt 

of space—no chariot, no horses— 

and race toward some other side I cannot see 

from here. You must be chasing the end 

of touch, its slippery lips. Oh, to dip into that 

deep well in which even I might wash 

myself. Show me the rope. 

I will place myself in the bucket. 

I will lower the mess of my body 

into its mouth. 


NIKITA D’MONTE 

Silence 

The summer breeze teasing the bells 

hung on the docked boats, 

that cacophony still yields music 

the slight hum of whirring fishing rods, 

reeling, bait intact, casting again 

Ripples forming by an unknown force beneath those dark waters, 

splashing inches away 

—from our bare, mud-coated feet as we lie there 

on the shore of our favorite haunting— 

the lake where we first met 

and I, tucked safely in your arms as music trails from your JBL speaker, 

a popular Bollywood love song: Look at me 

Til your heart is content, for destiny 

May not give you a second chance. 

This memory is etched in my mind—the setting sun, that pier, 

you and me— 


all that remains here now are shadows of who we used to be 

and the lies of a future together, 

and silence— 

and the chirping of those crickets, 

and the knowledge that the ripples in the lake are an aftermath of 

broken dreams 

of lovers come before us 

our song has ended—the plentiful summer makes way for the scant winters 

We have come full circle 

The warmth of our hearts has paved way for the glazed look in your eyes 

I cannot do this—you say 

and then nothing 

Silence. 

but my thoughts are loud 

reminding me that I had once dreamed on that pier 

of a life with you: the laughter of children 

whispers of love filling empty rooms. 

You simply walked away 

—but you could not stay away for long could you? 

we met again, not once, not twice, but several times 

Casting 

Reeling 

Casting again 


silence—as you stared at me 

Longingly 

Silently, 

except the slight hum of whirring fishing rods. 


SUNNY ANNE WILLIAMS 

The Giver 

Ein kleines Mädchen sits in a küche, 

the stillest glacier in all of München. 

He cannot face her or put her first. 

The beginning of her erasure. 

He, the conductor of this Ferris wheel; 

she, letting him deconstruct her. 

The feral way he is wont to thunder, 

and shudder all her worth. 

Usual widersinnig he wields 

in circles, incarceration. 

She gave him all the wärme she had, 

and now she pays for it. 

Prost!—a toast to their future. 

He clinks glasses mit ein Geist. 


p joshua laskey 

The Man on the Bus 

“My name’s Chris,” said the man on the bus. “Now, I’m not a stranger to you.” He smiled at 

the kid who’d sat down in the seat beside him. “So now you can talk to me, and if you ever 

need any help, you can tell me, okay?” 

The boy looked confused. 

“Don’t worry,” the man said, “you don’t have to talk to me—or even tell me your 

name. I just wanted you to know mine in case you ever needed my help. I see you all the 

time on this bus, so I figure you must be riding home alone from school at this time of 

day.” 

The boy didn’t say anything. But he didn’t look away either—or put on his headphones 

like he usually did as soon as he’d found a seat. 

“You can listen to your music or whatever,” the man said. “I’m not trying to strike 

up a conversation or anything.” He smiled at the boy and conspicuously went back to 

reading the book in his lap. 

The boy waited a moment before fishing his headphones out of his backpack and 

putting them on. When he got off at his stop a while later, the man didn’t look up or even 

acknowledge that he was leaving. 

A few weeks later, the bus was crowded more than usual, and again the only seat open was 

next to the man. The boy sat down but didn’t immediately search for his headphones or 

even open his backpack. 


The man never looked up from his book. 

The boy noticed, however, that the book wasn’t the same one the man had been 

reading the last time they’d shared a ride. 

Another few weeks went by before they were seated next to each other again. 

down. 

“My mom thinks it’s weird you told me your name,” the boy said just after he’d sat 

The man looked up and realized the bus was nearly empty. 

“Oh?” he said. 

“Yeah.” 

“Do you think it’s weird?” 

“A little,” the boy said. 

“Mm.” The man went back to reading. 

“She says you’re probably some kind of creep and that I should sit as far away from 

you as possible. Even if I have to stand up the entire way home.” 

Without looking up, the man said, “Plenty of other seats today.” 

“What’s your deal?” 


The man looked up. “What do you mean?” 

“It’s too early to be riding home from work at this hour, right? So, what are you, 

some kind of creepy dude that just rides around on buses all day looking for kids to talk 

to?” 

“I work an overnight shift,” the man said, looking down at his book again. 

“Doing what?” 

“Cleaning up other people’s messes.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“I’m a night janitor,” the man said. 

“And people just leave their messes for you to clean up instead of doing it themselves?” 

the boy asked. “My mom’d kill me if I did that. She won’t even do my laundry 

anymore.” 

“Good mom,” the man said—before conspicuously going back to reading by turning 

a page. 

“If you don’t want to talk to me,” the boy said, “you can just say so. You don’t have 

to be rude about it.” 

Before the man could say anything, the boy jammed his hand into his backpack 

and pulled out his headphones in one swift motion. 

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “I wasn’t trying to be rude.” 


“Whatever.” 

The next day, the boy got on the bus accompanied by a man. The man chose the seats 

directly behind Chris, who was reading. 

“Hey, buddy,” the man said in an angry whisper. 

Chris looked up and tried to turn in his seat so that his back was almost against 

the tinted glass of the bus’s window. 

“You been talking to my son?” the man asked—still whispering, but loudly. 

“Are you his son?” Chris asked the boy. 

it?” 

“Don’t talk to him,” the man said, putting a heavy hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Got 

“Is there a problem back there?” the bus driver called from her seat in the front. 

“No, Brenda,” Chris said, waving a hand to the woman’s reflection in the mirror 

above the windshield. 

“Take your hand off my other passengers, sir,” Brenda said with all the sternness of 

a woman tired of having to say such things. 

“You got kids, lady?” the boy’s father barked. “Then keep an eye on this creep. He’s 

using your bus to troll for little boys.” 

Heads turned and all eyes were suddenly on Chris. 


“I’m not a little boy,” the boy said. 

“Saved by a woman, eh, pal?” the man said as he pushed his son out of the seats 

and into the aisle. “Don’t let me ever hear you’ve been talking to him again. Got it? You’ll 

be sorry.” 

“You’re holding up my route, sir. Other people’s time’s just as valuable as yours.” 

Brenda glared into the mirror. 

After the boy and his father had gotten off the bus and it was underway again, 

Brenda looked back at Chris and saw he’d returned to his reading. She decided not to disturb 

him. 

The very next day, the boy sat down right beside Chris—even though the bus wasn’t at all 

crowded. 

“Move along, son,” Brenda called to him. She’d turned in her seat and was looking 

at him directly. 

The boy got up and found another seat. Chris never looked up from his reading. 

A few days later, the boy again sat down in the seat beside Chris’s. 

Brenda didn’t say anything as she pulled away from the curb, but she kept her eyes 

darting up to the mirror every chance it was safe to take them off the road for a moment. 

“Sorry about the other day,” the boy said. 


“Wasn’t your fault,” Chris said. 

“Still. I begged him not to do that. Not to even come with me. But he always does 

whatever he wants.” 

Chris kept reading. 

“That’s another new book,” the boy said. “You read a lot, don’t you?” 

“Not much else to do riding the bus every day.” 

“I listen to audiobooks,” the boy said. “Bet you didn’t know that.” 

Chris looked up and smiled. “Nope. Thought it was music this whole time.” 

“Shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” the boy said, smiling back. 

“Your books don’t even have covers!” Chris said, laughing. 

“I’ve been downloading some of the books you’ve been reading.” 

“Oh?” 

“From the library website. Did you know you could do that?” 

“I like the real thing. Heavy in my hands,” Chris said. “And I like to be able to listen 

to the world when I’m in it. Instead of always having headphones on.” 

“Yeah, but you’re old,” the boy said. 


Chris laughed. “I’m sure I seem that way to you.” 

“Sorry. I didn’t mean …” 

“Everybody’s old when you’re a kid. It’s okay.” 

“You think just because I’m a kid I have to listen to headphones when I’m out in 

the world?” 

“Do you?” 

The boy thought for a moment. “Maybe!” he laughed. “I guess I’m just used to it.” 

“Same with me and the paper pages. Nothing wrong with audiobooks. Or music 

for that matter. Or even headphones. I just didn’t grow up with them.” 

Chris caught Brenda looking at them in the mirror. He smiled at her. 

“I’m Joey,” the boy said. “Now, I’m not a stranger to you either, so you can talk to 

me and if you ever need any help, you can tell me, okay?” 

Chris looked confused. 

“Don’t worry,” the boy said, “you don’t have to talk to me. I just wanted you to 

know my name in case you ever needed any help. We see each other all the time on this 

bus, right?” 

“Right,” Chris said. “But what makes you think I’ll ever need your help?” 

“Just in case,” Joey said. 


The bus pulled to the curb and there was the hiss of opening doors. 

“This is my stop,” Joey said. “See you tomorrow, Chris.” 

Chris watched as Joey got off the bus. Then he looked in the mirror at Brenda— 

who had a huge grin on her face and was shaking her head. 

A few months later, Joey got on the bus followed by a man. Chris was reading and didn’t 

even notice. Brenda wasn’t driving. 

“Hey,” Joey said, sliding into the seat next to Chris. 

“It’s been a while,” Chris said, looking up. 

“Where’s Brenda?” 

“Day off.” 

The man took a seat directly across the aisle from Joey. 

“Whatcha reading, Dad?” Joey asked Chris. 

“What?” 

“New book, right? Didn’t you check that out from the library the last time we were 

there together?” 



“Thanks for taking off work early today to walk me home,” Joey went on. “I’m just 

going to listen to my music ’til it’s time to get off, okay? You can just keep reading.” 

Joey looked away from Chris and fished in his backpack for his headphones. As 

Chris watched him, he caught the eye of the man across the aisle, who quickly looked 

away. 

As soon as Joey had his headphones on, Chris noticed he was only pretending to 

fiddle with the screen of his phone—not actually turning anything on to listen to. Chris 

went back to reading—or pretending to read. 

After a few minutes, he realized he hadn’t turned a single page, so he did so just to 

seem natural. Joey’s hands were shaking holding the phone in his lap. 

When Joey’s stop came, he got up. “Ready, Dad?” 

“Yup,” Chris said, gathering himself and following Joey down the aisle. 

Once they were off the bus, Chris watched as the man he’d seen sitting across from 

them didn’t move—and was eventually whisked away down the street. 

“Are you okay?” he asked. 

“That creepy guy followed me from school to the bus,” Joey said. “I don’t know 

what he wanted, but I also didn’t want to find out.” 

“Smart.” 

“You don’t really have to walk me home, but thanks for getting off with me. Sorry 

I’m making you have to wait for the next bus.” 


“I think I’ll walk you home,” Chris said. 

“No, really; you don’t have to.” 

“I want to.” 

“But my dad’ll see you and get mad.” 

“Then at least let me walk you far enough I can see you go through your front 

door, okay? It’d make me feel better knowing you got home safely.” 

“Sure.” 

As they walked the few blocks towards Joey’s house, they talked about books they’d 

both “experienced”—as they decided should be the verb for a book Chris had read on paper 

and Joey had listened to with an app. They compared whether the whole book actually 

got recorded or if certain bits were left out. Then they started talking about how books are 

adapted into movies and both agreed that films were worthwhile on their own and didn’t 

have to mean you couldn’t also “experience” the book. 

At a corner Chris had never been to, Joey stopped. 

“Okay, that’s my house over there. With the blue front door. Stay here so I don’t get 

in trouble, okay? You can see me go in.” 

Chris waited as Joey crossed the street, unlocked his door, and disappeared inside. 

Then he turned and headed back for the bus stop. 

A few paces down the block, he heard a familiar voice. 


“Hey, creep!” 

When he turned, he saw Joey’s dad almost on top of him. 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Following my son home like this?! You 

think I didn’t see you standing on the corner like a stupid pedophile?!” 

When the man swung, Chris didn’t have time to duck. The sound of crunching 

cartilage filled his ears, but he was too stunned to realize it was his own nose making the 

snap, crackle, and pop. 

“Dad, what’re you doing?!” 

Through his teary eyes, Chris saw Joey running down the street. 

“I told you, he—” 

“And I told you to stay inside. Get the hell back in the house!” 

Joey stood there for a moment—on the verge of tears himself. 

“If I have to tell you one more time …” 

As Joey turned and ran away, Chris started feeling the throbbing pain in his face. 

“You still standing there, creep? Get the hell out of here before I really teach you a 

lesson.” 

Chris couldn’t move. He hurt too much to think. 


“Fine,” said the man, grabbing Chris by the shoulder and spinning him around. 

When the blow landed on the back of his head and pitched Chris forward, it was 

all he could do to maintain his balance and not smash his face into the sidewalk. He saw 

the book he’d been holding fly out of his hands and skitter down the pavement. Then, suddenly, 

he felt fingers around his wrist and his arm’s being wrenched behind his back until 

he heard another loud pop—this time from his shoulder—and then more searing pain. 

“Now, you good-for-nothing homo child molester, get the hell out of here before 

you make me actually murder you!” 

Woozy, Chris stumbled away. 

“Yeah, that’s right. Walk away before you really get hurt, you sorry son-of-a-bitch.” 

The man kept yelling even as Chris rounded a corner and disappeared. 

Months later, Chris boarded the bus at his usual stop. 

“Where you been?” Brenda asked. 

“Had to take some time off,” Chris said. 

“Well, I’ve been worried about you,” she smiled. “And so has someone else.” 

She handed him an envelope. 



“That kid hasn’t been back on my bus since you disappeared except once looking 

for you. When I told him I hadn’t seen you, he came back the next day and asked me to 

make sure I gave you this envelope the next time I saw you.” 

“Thanks.” 

“Go take your seat, okay? Gotta get these people where they’re going.” 

Chris smiled and made his way down the aisle. 

When he was seated next to the window, he opened the envelope and found a wad 

of cash—and a handwritten note: 

I’m so sorry. I hope you’re okay. My dad will kill me if he finds out I got anywhere 

near our bus again, but I wanted you to have this. I figure you might need it. I’m not sure 

you can still be a janitor after getting your arm broken. I ducked into some bushes and saw 

everything. My dad didn’t catch me because I managed to get home before him since he just 

kept screaming at you down the street. Anyway, I’m really sorry. I probably shouldn’t’ve talked 

to you in the first place, but I’m glad I did. Who knows what the man on the bus that day 

might’ve done if you hadn’t been there. Thanks, Chris. 

(Don’t worry about the money or if I’ll get in trouble about it. I stole it from the stash 

my dad thinks is secret in our house, but I know where it is. He never ever knows exactly how 

much is in there. My mom’s always on his case about how careless he is with money. Doesn’t 

want me to grow up to be like him.) 

Your pal, 

Joey 

P.S. I found your library book on the street and returned if for you, so don’t worry about any 

late charges! 


ANNIE DUYEN TRAN 

The Friend I Never Get to See These Days 

Almost all of us have 

a certain friend in 

our lives. A special 

(or not) kind of friend. 

We meet them and come 

to the point of speech. 

We talk; I visit. 

At least… we used to. 

I used to go to 

a tender home. 

It was gorgeous in 

the beginning. Now? 

It is now a house 

I pass by sometimes. 

What I miss is more 

than my friend had known. 

What I cannot see 

is what I want to. 

Honestly, I miss 

my friend. I miss him. 


Lately, tears streak down 

my cheeks. Am I 

a friend to him at 

all? I wish to know. 

Believe me, I do. 

I do. I never 

get to see my friend. 

My tears are sincere. 

I might have been a 

sibling to him. Or, 

just someone less than 

that. An acquaintance. 

Yet, to me. He was 

truly a friend in 

my heart. The best I 

can do is miss him. 



CONTRIBUTORS 


AYESHA ASAD is from Dallas, Texas. Her work has been included in the 2020 Best of the 

Net Anthology, and her writing appears or is forthcoming in PANK, DIAGRAM, Sundog Lit, 

Menacing Hedge, Kissing Dynamite, DREGINALD, and elsewhere. She has been recognized by 

Creative Writing Ink Journal and the Robert Bone Memorial Creative Writing Prize. Currently, 

she studies Literature and Biology at the University of Texas at Dallas. In her free time, she likes 

to dream. 

MATTHEW W. BAKER currently lives in Richardson, TX and teaches rhetoric and creative 

writing at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he is currently in his second year of the PhD 

Literature program, with a focus on contemporary American (U.S.) poetry. He is the author of 

Undoing the Hide’s Taut Musculature (Finishing Line Press), and his poems have been featured 

in The Atlanta Review, The Baltimore Review, Booth Journal, Sundog Lit, and The Summerset 

Review among others. 

ACE BOGGESS is the author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry 

Press, 2021), The Prisoners, and I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So. His poems have appeared 

in Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, J Journal, Mid-American Review, and other 

journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out 

of trouble. 

MORIAH BRAY is a PhD student at Georgia State University working on a manuscript of 

poetry in both English and Spanish. She also serves as the poetry editor of Exhume Literary 

Journal. When she’s not writing, you can find her in a yoga flow or petting her cats. 

Born in Rome in 1961, MAURIZIO CASTÈ has a degree in Theater and one in Philosophy of 

Language. He has been active for three decades as an actor, director, composer and musician. 

He has published a poetry collection, Libro Chiuso (Firenze Libri). His poems are also featured 

in the anthologies Porte e Tempo (Progetto Cultura 2016-17) and Navigare (n. 84, Pagine, 2017). 


ADAM COULTER is a native of Western North Carolina. He works in the medium of 

photography and is a self-taught artist, devoting much of his time to exploring new things 

to photograph. When not out with his camera he enjoys growing grapes in his backyard 

vineyard and glasses of red wine on the back porch. His work has appeared in Okra Southern 

Magazine and Burningword Literary Journal, among others. 

LINDA M. CRATE’s works have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies 

both online and in print. She is the author of seven poetry chapbooks, the latest of which 

is: the samurai (Yellow Arrow Publishing October 2020). She’s also the author of the novel 

Phoenix Tears (Czykmate Books June 2018). Recently she has published four full-length 

poetry collections Vampire Daughter (Dark Gatekeeper Gaming February 2020), The 

Sweetest Blood (Cyberwit February 2020), Mythology of My Bones (Cyberwit August 2020), 

and you will not control me (Cyberwit March 2021). 

NIKITA D’MONTE graduated with a Master’s degree in Studies in Literature with a 

minor in History and Aesthetics from The University of Texas at Dallas. She is currently 

pursuing a Ph.D.-Studies in Literature. Nikita started writing at the age of 8 and has never 

stopped since. She previously worked as a Reader for Reunion: The Dallas Review in 2018 

and hence feels extremely elated that her piece was selected for publication in this esteemed 

magazine. 

ANDREW SIAÑEZ-DE LA O is a playwright and audio drama writer from the U.S. 

Borderlands. His writing often centers Mexican-American heritage and cultural diaspora 

as well as the historical impact of U.S. immigration policies on these communities. He is 

currently a Huntington Playwriting Fellow at the Huntington Theatre Company and his 

work has been developed across the country with the support of companies such as The 

Playwrights Realm, Stages Houston, Company One, and many more. He is a scriptwriter 

for the Latinx children’s fiction podcast, Timestorm, with Cocotazo Media and an organizing 

committee member of the WGA Audio Alliance. 


JAE DYCHE earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. She is 

a current PhD student in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson 

University. She lives in Virginian Blue Ridge and works as a Creative Writing Lead at 

a Fine and Performing Arts High School in Northern Virginia. Her poetry most recently 

appeared in Poet Lore and Atlanta Review. 

LAWRENCE F. FARRAR is a former US diplomat with multiple assignments in Japan 

as well as postings in Germany, Norway, and Washington, DC. He also lived in Japan as 

a graduate student and as a naval officer. His stories have appeared 75 or so times in lit 

magazines, most recently in such publications as Haunted Waters Press Splash (twice), The 

Main Street Rag, Evening Street Review, Blue Lake Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, 

2018 Streetlight Anthology, and Blood Orange. His stories often involve people coming up 

against the customs of a foreign culture. 

RACHEL GILMOUR looks to create art that stirs the senses and provokes a response. 

Her hope here is to normalize conversation surrounding difficult subjects, to contribute to 

forward progress and a positive future. Her art aims to fascinate, challenge, and to show 

beauty in unexpected ways. “The beauty of inspiring others is the ability to stretch your 

impact beyond just the piece in front of you. To create, inspire, and encourage positive 

change is the gift of art.” Rachel works mostly in watercolor & digital mediums, though 

not exclusively. To discover more visit: @RachelAGilmour or https://rachelgilmour.wixsite.com/paint. 

MATTHEW GWATHMEY lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on Wolastoqey Territory. 

He studied creative writing at the University of Virginia and is currently working on 

his PhD at UNB. His first poetry collection, Our Latest in Folktales, was published by Brick 

Books in the spring of 2019. 

CHAZ HOLSOMBACK graduated from UTD with a Bachelors in Philosophy and is now 

working towards a PhD at the University of Dallas’s Institute of Philosophic Studies. 


WESLEY CALDWELL KORPELA is a writer and librarian based out of Milwaukee, WI. 

He received his undergraduate degree from UW-Madison in May 2018 in Theatre & Drama 

and Creative Writing and is working towards his master’s degree at UW-Milwaukee in 

Library & Information Sciences. Other than writing, his interests lie in theater and improvisational 

comedy. He has been published in literary magazines such as The Sheepshead 

Review and Emerald City, and his plays can be found on New Play Exchange. 

Originally from Sacramento, California, p joshua laskey currently writes in Dallas, 

Texas. He is Associate World Literature Editor for The Literary Review as well as a Fellow 

at the Center for Translation Studies (University of Texas at Dallas). He has published 

award-winning creative work including original, adapted, and translated plays as well as 

original and self-translated short stories, flash fiction, and poetry. Find out more at www. 

pjoshualaskey.com. 

MACKENZIE MOORE is a writer and illustrator based in Los Angeles who currently 

writes for narrative podcasting. She has CNF in Hobart, X RAY, and Reed Magazine—her 

poetry chapbooks, Alms Basket for Your Heart and Bento Box are out now. 

PAM MURPHY teaches composition and American Lit at the University of West Georgia 

where she earned her M.A. in English. Her nonfiction work wrestles with the complexities 

of growing up and navigating her evolving worldview as a girl, woman, and mother in the 

Deep South. Pam’s work has previously appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review. 

The Iraqi poet HASSAN AL-NASSAR always looked for opportunities to establish his 

permanent homeland in exile. Therefore, after completing his academic studies at the University 

of Baghdad and publishing his collection of poems entitled Black Poems in 1994, 

he left for Libya in Africa after receiving a contract to work as a teacher. He lived in Libya 

for five years, during which time he completed numerous literary studies and poems. He 

published a collection of poems entitled All Rise... All Sit in 2002 (Dar Azmana, Amman, 

Jordan), as well as the Collection of And The Women Said in 2001 (Dar Dhifaf, Austria). 


NHI NGO is a first-generation Vietnamese immigrant currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree 

in Literature, with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Psychology, at 

the University of Texas at Dallas. Born and raised in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), 

she inherited the love for language and storytelling from her grandfather, a well-respected 

English teacher in the community. Apropos of her bicultural upbringing, Ngo’s writing 

often explores the clashes between Eastern and Western ideologies in relation to identity, 

sexuality, love, and family. She aspires to establish a career in publishing, particularly as a 

professional writer and literary editor. 

ANNA OBERG is a professional photographer based in Estes Park, Colorado. When 

she's not arranging family portraits with the perfect view of Long's Peak as backdrop, she 

focuses on writing tiny memories and small stories. She has been published in Cleaver 

Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, Causeway Lit, The Maine Review, Pidgeonholes, 

and Split Rock Review, among others. 

TOTI O’BRIEN is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. Born in Rome, 

living in Los Angeles, she is an artist, musician and dancer. She is also the author of Other 

Maidens (BlazeVOX 2020) and An Alphabet of Birds (Moonrise Press 2020). 

KAYLA OSBORN is a junior at The University of Texas at Dallas studying literature and 

film. 

MARY LYNN REED’s fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Colorado Review, The 

MacGuffin, and many other places. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University 

of Maryland. She lives in western New York with her wife, and together they co-edit 

the online literary journal MoonPark Review. 

BRYAN ORDONEZ-SANTINI is a writer based in the Dallas area. Writing scripts for his 

online videos and plays alike, he occasionally writes short stories loosely based on his own 

experiences. Bryan attempts to write stories that capture the essence of persistence and 


strong will. In his free time, he enjoys the outdoors; fishing and hiking serve as an excellent 

antidote for a bad case of writer’s block! He is currently a senior at UTD, majoring in 

visual and performing arts with a concentration in theatre. 

KAREN SCHUBERT is the author of The Compost Reader (Accents Publishing) and 

five chapbooks. Her poetry appears most recently in Olney Magazine, Poor Yorick, New 

World Writing, Read+Write: 30 Days of Poetry, and 21st Century Plague: Poems and Prose 

for a Pandemic. Her awards include a Wick Poetry Center Chapbook Prize, an Ohio Arts 

Council Individual Excellence Award, and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and 

Headlands Center for the Arts. She is Founding Director of Lit Youngstown. 

ANNIE TRAN is an asexual writer and is currently in the M.A. program for Literature 

at the University of Texas at Dallas. She graduated with a B.A. in Literature Studies and 

a minor in Creative Writing. Some of her other works have appeared in Route 7 Review, 

WinglessDreamer, and Impermanent Earth. She is an avid fan of J-pop, collects CDs, plays 

visual novels, and her favorite book series are the Artemis Fowl novels. 

HADI UMAYRA is a writer, poet, and translator. He coined the term “Ramified Poetry,” 

a new poetry style. He is working on a theory in translation, which he named the translator 

“Brain Hacker.” Education: Ph.D. Student, Fall 2018-present, University of Texas 

at Dallas, Literature/Concentration in Translation. M.A., 2018, University of Illinois at 

Urbana-Champaign, Translation & Interpreting Studies. B.A., 2006, University of al-Mustansiriya, 

English Literature. Achievements in Original Achievement, authored: Mind’s 

Attraction (Al-Sharjah, UAE: Defaf, 2018), Words’ Endowment (Al-Sharjah, UAE: Defaf, 

2018), Gravity and its explanation for Jamil Sadiqi al-Zahawi (Al-Sharjah, UAE: Defaf, 

2019), and The Ramified Poetry (Dubai, UAE: Dar al-Qalam, 2020). 

MATT VEKAKIS is an incoming MFA student in poetry at the University of Florida. 

Their work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Appalachian Review, Welter, 

Lunch Ticket, High Shelf Press, and Waccamaw, among others. 


JAMES READE VENABLE was born in Manhattan, New York. He went to HB Studio 

to study acting and started his path towards photography with disposable cameras. He 

has always engaged in artistic pursuits, but it was while living in Belgium that he began 

submitting his photographs. He has been published in The Emerson Review, 86 Logic, and 

3 Elements Review. He was also the London Photo Festival’s February 2021 Competition 

Winner for the Theme: Magic. He also focuses on photojournalistic stories. He currently 

lives in Gerpinnes, Belgium, with his wife and dog. 

KYLIE R. WALTERS is a writer, photographer, and Ph.D. student in Screen Cultures at 

Northwestern University. Her work has previously appeared in Stonecoast Review. Further 

work can be found at http://waltersk.com/. 

SUNNY ANNE WILLIAMS is a wanderer whose adventures have taken her all over 

the world, landing her in a PhD program at The University of Texas at Dallas, where she 

studies social and political philosophy. As a storyteller, she is fascinated by the stories we 

tell ourselves and the ways in which those narratives impact our interactions with our 

fellow humans. Sunny’s academic background lies in a Creative Writing BA from Cal State 

Northridge and a Literature MA from Queen Mary University of London. Her creative 

background is a foreground and the ground on which she stands as we speak. 

MADISON YORK is a Christian, abortion abolitionist, and clumsy storyteller. A physics 

senior and life-long homeschooler from Juneau, Alaska, she plans to pursue a career 

in abolition activism (as well as tutoring or editing) after graduating. Her favorite fiction 

authors include Donna Tartt, Markus Zusak, and Catherine Webb. She wants to thank her 

parents, Matt and Sue, for how much they’ve taught her; her younger sisters, Molly and 

Shelby, for being the best editors and friends a person could ask for; her church family and 

friends, for continually challenging and supporting her; and Christ, for giving her salvation, 

hope, and any words to speak at all.

Reunion: The Dallas Review Volume 11

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