Windward Review Vol 21 (2023): Myths and Hauntings

Myths and Hauntings
Windward Review
Volume 21, 2023

Myths and Hauntings
Windward Review
Volume 21, 2023

Senior Executive Editor
Dr. Robin Carstensen
Windward Review, Vol. 21
Myths and Hauntings
Managing Editor
Dylan Lopez
Creative Dir./ Sr. Editor
Zoe Elise Ramos
Asst. Managing Editor
Raven Reese
Social Media Manager
Amanda King
Associate Editors
Kindel Casey, Katie Colburn, Hannah Eaton, Angela B. Gonzalez, Dustin Hackfeld,
Raymond Herrera, Luke Mitchell, Cale Ortega, Indigo Rodríguez, Cher Sintos, Savannah
Stephenson, Sydney Stephenson, Taylor Sutton, Chloe Tilley, Derek Willis | All Students
of ENGL 4385: Studies in Creative Writing: Literary Publishing, Windward Review,
Spring 2023
Social Media Editors
Kindel Casey, Cale Ortega, Indigo Rodríguez, Cher Sintos, Savannah Stephenson, Chloe
Tilley
Design Team
Dr. Catherine Schumann, Dr. Susan Garza | Students of ENGL 3378: Document Design
and Publishing, Spring 2023
Copyediting
Celine Ramos, Dr. Robin Carstensen, Amanda King
WR Logo Design
Indigo Rodríguez
Flash! Micro Contest Judge
Dr. Lizbette Ocasio-Russe
Cover Artist
Jeff Janko,
Untitled photography of Corpus Christi, TX
WR is a not-for-profit journal established by Robb and Vanessa
Furse Jackson. We are managed on a voluntary basis—out of a
love for the work—by students & faculty from the Texas A&M
U.-Corpus Christi English Department. We are also staffed by
Islander Creative Writers and Corpus Christi creatives. We
are generously funded by the Paul and Mary Haas Foundation.
Special thanks to the TAMU-CC College of Liberal Arts.
Follow us:
FB @The Windward Review
IG @thewindwardreview
@Islander Creative Writers
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www. tamucc.edu/liberal-arts/windward-review/
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Table of Contents
Letter of Gratitude from the Managing Editor ...................6
Chloe Rodriguez
My Mother Teaches Me to Pick Spanish Moss ..........................8
Elegy as a Caja China ...............................................................10
Please, Don’t Remind Me of What We Had in Cuba. .............12
Samantha Caudillo
Mariela ......................................................................................14
Raizel Auza
The Evening Dew .....................................................................17
Elijah X.A. Esquivel
The Spines of Names ................................................................18
Eylie Sasajima
the wych elm’s lullaby ................................................................20
Julieta Corpus
The Tradition of Silence ............................................................21
Prescience ..................................................................................22
Kevin Sandefur
Persistence ..................................................................................23
Amanda King
Ghost Maker ..............................................................................33
Roommates ................................................................................34
Guillermo Gallegos
We Will All Be Underwater .......................................................35
Ellianna Nejat
Giant Fleas ................................................................................38
Fairy Ring .................................................................................39
Thomas Piekarski
Birth of Mars ............................................................................40
Elijah X.A. Esquivel
The Curse of Echo ....................................................................41
Kevin Sandefur
Apollo ........................................................................................45
Kathleen Naderer
A Forsaken City-State ...............................................................46
Jenna Ulizio
Advent .......................................................................................49
Raymond Tamez III
Genesis X Revelation ................................................................61
3

Roy Gomez
A Wooden Castle ........................................................................62
Steve Brisendine
green tomatoes ............................................................................63
Liberal, Kansas, with Easy Access to
Faraway Places: Dream I ....................................................64
Kansas City Which is Not Really
Kansas City: Dream IX ......................................................66
Un/bidden ...................................................................................67
The Maybe-Ghost of Mike Sparrow ..........................................68
Emily Clemente
Those Birds .................................................................................70
Ace Boggess
Changing the Guts .....................................................................81
Slow Down .................................................................................82
Preface as Postcript .....................................................................83
Invitation ....................................................................................84
Liam Leslie
My Piety. And Their Portraits ...................................................85
Sandra Valerio
When I Walk by Robert A’s .......................................................87
Natasha Santana Loving
He Walked Alongside Me ..........................................................88
Donna Faulkner née Miller
Garden for Bones .......................................................................91
Bonnie Stump
an open grave .............................................................................92
Jeff Janko
Graveyard Angel .........................................................................93
Pier .............................................................................................94
Harbor Bridge ............................................................................95
Laurence Musgrove
It’s Nothing ................................................................................96
Makena Metz
The Orchard Tender .................................................................97
Tina Lentz-McMillan
Story About a Deer ....................................................................99
By Its Name, a Wolf .................................................................100
How to Talk to God .................................................................101
Deal With God .........................................................................102
I Want a God ...........................................................................103
Aaron Holub
No Country for Young Women ................................................105
4

Joseph Wilson
I am Sitting in the Dallas Museum of Art Courtyard
Fountain Pen in Hand ...........................................................107
Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
Summerland or The Spirit in the Sideboard ...........................109
Lorraine Caputo
Pa’ Barquisimeto Lara Saliendo ...............................................114
Tropical Storms ........................................................................116
Brandi Burns
Down, Down, Down ................................................................117
Alexandra Shimalla
It’s the Little Things .................................................................120
Alyssa Liney Pruitt
Disorders ...................................................................................128
Delaney McLemore
Two Grams ...............................................................................130
Liesel Hamilton
Dementia Zoom Call ...............................................................136
Brianna Sandoval
The Tree’s Shadow ...................................................................138
Elizabeth N. Flores
Mama and the Doctor ..............................................................146
The Banker ...............................................................................147
Cameron Fowler
I Am Afraid to Sleep ................................................................149
William David
Traveler’s Lament ....................................................................151
Daunte Gaiter
In Loving Memory ..................................................................152
KeYanla Cleckley
Stuck .........................................................................................154
Liz Torres Shannon
A Beautiful Goodbye ................................................................157
Alena Sandoval
A Mother’s Love of Mountains ................................................162
Nikiphoros Vlastos
American Sonnet for Those Never Published or Spoke ...........164
Contributors’ Notes ..............................................................165
5

Letter of Gratitude from the
Managing Editor
Dear Readers,
It is my great pleasure to introduce to you the latest edition of the
Windward Review, Vol. 21, Myths and Hauntings. In the pages of this
journal, you will find a rich tapestry of voices sharing their poetry, fiction,
creative non-fiction, flash, plays, works in translation, hybrid pieces,
and visual art. Our contributors have filled these pages with beautiful
works that are a living testament to the diverse creative community
growing in our South Texas borderland region, and a wider world of
interconnected, creative voices.
Over the last few years, the Windward Review has sought to transform
the publishing landscape by introducing new standards of editing centered
on creating connections between editors and submitters. More
than just reading submissions, we want to understand the intentions,
emotions, and perspectives of each submitter, allowing editors to get
in touch with each piece and provide gentle, but constructive feedback
on every submission. We cherish the opportunity to work with writers
of all stripes, and we recognize that every writer has a unique voice and
passion for the written word.
This year, we continue the Windward’s exploration of storytelling with
the theme Myths and Hauntings. In this volume, we are delving into
the beauty of myths that have been passed down, with their ever-shifting
literary forms, and the significance of hauntings, which echo the
past and carry the weight of lived experiences. This year, writers sent
in life lessons, accounts of heroic deeds, painful remembrances, and
even chance encounters with the supernatural. In addition, many of the
pieces we received helped expand our interpretation to include historically
relevant myths that connect us to our lands and cultures, and to
include forms of hauntings that comprise our shared histories. These
urgent stories told from such a diverse group of writers helps place the
Windward Review in a relevant global conversation on the importance
of truth, and challenges us to confront—and perhaps expel—the things
that haunt us.
I want to acknowledge our outstanding team of student editors from
ENGL 4385, Literary Publishing. Annual publications are a colossal
undertaking, and the Windward’s empathetic approach to publishing
6

means that editors spend more time reflecting on submissions and
crafting thoughtful letters to all our contributors. Additionally, this year
student editors had the added challenge of crafting this volume’s theme,
and went to great lengths to define an engaging, bold dichotomy that
allowed for a wide range of literary interpretations. With Myths and
Hauntings being one of our most well-received themes, I think it’s safe
to say they knocked it out of the park!
Our student editors worked tirelessly to bring this journal to life and
have evolved our editorial process to be sustainable for future generations
of Islander students. To all our editors, designers, proofreaders,
and social media experts, we thank you for your sincere dedication, and
for making this journal possible.
As a journal, we are committed to fostering a safe, accepting space for
all writers to share their work. With each volume, it is a privilege to witness
the magic of language—the beauty, insight, and myriad emotions
expressed in every submission we receive. To our contributors, we thank
you for entrusting us with your work, and for allowing us to be part of
your literary journeys.
To all our readers, I invite you to immerse yourselves in these wonderful
creative works, and to read with empathy and understanding. Thank you
all for embarking on this journey with us, and we look forward to sharing
more inspiring works with you in the future.
With love and gratitude,
Dylan Lopez
Managing Editor
7

Chloe Rodriguez
My Mother Teaches Me to Pick
Spanish Moss
She tells me of the red chiggers that we take home
in fallen moss, berry bugs that die in the cold.
She goes high into the limbs of live oak or
big cypress trees my small legs and short arms
could not yet reach, climbing for heaven from where I
watched, dropping wispy moss to me as I folded it
tenderly, tucked snug in her oversized burlap bag
that hung past my waist to my knees. A plush pillow,
filled with silvery-grey green strands, the fairy hair
of the trees, at home she places the large copper
pot engraved with Celtic knots mingling with
intricate flowers on the gas stove and
begins with her fingers, separating
the folded moss into three piles— one she
will throw in the pot, another tossed in our shoes
or mattresses, the last, she stores in a jar
for the coming months. She stirs the boiling moss,
ushering the magic steam up to her face. Moss
she will braid over and over into a wreath until
her father’s death when she will place it in his
8

shoes, within the seams of his coat pockets,
to make his final pillow. She prays over the
mason jar of its juice, splashes its tinctured
water in her scotch when she thinks no one is
looking until she is drunk. She will take me each
winter until I am grown, and teach me over
and over how to pick Spanish Moss, and tell me
how she wishes she could still feel the magic
in the land, or the spirits of the swamp.
9

Chloe Rodriguez
Elegy as a Caja China
The caja china is an outdoor roasting oven that uses coal placed
above the meat for cooking. The meat goes inside the box on a rack,
and the coal goes above it, on a metal shelf.
Abuelita explains la caja china,
the magic box, as a tender holder of secrets.
The practice is not foreign,
the wrapping of a body
with the wood of a box.
Tradition disguised as dinner
cherished by forgetting, and prayer
cupped by Cuban communion o misa.
But I no longer know what home tastes like.
I can push the thought against my teeth,
roll it
back and
forth, yet
still wonder what my tastebuds would call
Motherland.
La familia’s madre lengua begets
my tongue but I’m not
convinced it knows the language or
if it recites regurgitated imitation.
Abuelita explains how time will grace
the pork to stretch and harden, crisp
across bone and muscle and blood,
an over-starched skinsuit of delicacy
anointed in the mojo marinade of sour orange.
And those oranges picked premature
will never ripen, never to know
what it means to be dulce.
10

Will begin to ache for root and
sour at the snipped tendon
where fruit is birthed
from branch
from tree
from grove
to box to body
and box again.
11

Chloe Rodriguez
Please, Don’t Remind Me of What
We Had in Cuba.
“But in Cuba we had”
Our relics sit in the musty chestnut box, smelling
of old air, faint promises of revolution and Guerlain,
books of Mantillas we could finger through before Misa,
mira, touch the lace, trace the flowers of home, hija,
it is nothing but a velvet lined box of memory, the past
hidden behind the partitions of your prayers and
leaf through the fabrics of Havana, feel the heat rise
and flush your face. Stop, smell the Guarapo on
hope. Surely, you’ve adapted to life here now, let the
casket rest, stuff it back into the drawer, remember
Papi’s breath, imagine his starched Guayabera, calloused
hands, and arthritic fingers placing blooms in crystal
longing does nothing for the soul, except remind the
heart of its emptiness, the body of its ghost limb, the
vases delicately, the music fell silent, and Cuba seemed
to glance at him, handsomely, el guapo and his rosas,
absence turns us bitter if we let memory reside within us
too long. Let it abandon the body before the haunting
praying to La Virgin and St. Jude. He placed this mantilla
on my head each day, when we kneeled, eyes closed
can become more than just a visitor. You tell me of
our lost causes, how to find grace within conflict and
12

heaven glossing over us, we waited silently to be answered.
Take the mantilla, drape it over your suffering, remember
how to act when tragedy bears us gifts. Please you do
not need to place the paper-thin prayer veil over me,
do not tie it around your neck, do not presume to know,
listen for just a moment and do not even
to understand what is lost remains lost, to know all we can
do with time is ration blessings because beginnings need
hope.
13

Samantha Caudillo
Mariela
A car drove up to Dominguez’s house, like all visitors they seemed to
be staying with him. Sr. Dominguez was a businessman who would welcome
visitors from all over Mexico in his home often. The man who was driving
opened his door and then rushed to the other side of the car to open the
door for a woman, likely his wife. Finally, the one Mariela had been waiting
for, a child stepped out of the car. She was young, probably around seven,
and her smile was bright with innocence. Her dark brown hair fell to her
waist, a little hand reached for the woman. Then she turned. Her eyes filled
Mariela with hope. They were brown like the earth Mariela would dig up to
plant her strawberry plants. Brown like Letty’s were before she died.
Mariela had just finished telling her daughter, Letty, to take her
little brother, Mateo, to their room and sneak out through the window to
the neighbor’s house, when the door slammed open. He was drunk like he
always was when he came back from work. He grabbed Mariela roughly,
throwing her to the floor.
“I know you’ve been sneaking around with that carnicero.” He
laughed. “What can he offer you that I can’t, huh? He cuts meat for a living!
I’m rich.” He pounded his chest with his fist, “I can give you everything,
Mariela. Why do you sneak around with him?”
Mariela stood from the floor, looking him in his eyes, “You’re drunk
and don’t know what you’re saying. Go to sleep. We’ll talk about this in the
morning.”
He pulled her back by her long braid, dragging her face close to him,
his breath suffocated her with the stench of alcohol. She tried freeing
herself from his grip, but he held firm. Then came the first blow. Shouting
as fists came flying at her. She tried to shield herself, but it didn’t help. His
fists landed everywhere except her face. When he finished, he grabbed her
hair again, pulling her close.
“You’re mine. I won’t tolerate what is mine being used by others. Do
you understand?”
She nodded, stumbling as he pushed her away. She watched him go
into their room and fall on the bed. Then she waited until she heard his
14

snores echoing in the house. Her chest rose and fell in anger. Every day it
was someone new. Yesterday it was the owner of the store around the corner.
The day before it was the new teacher that arrived in town a few weeks
ago. Each day a different man, but each day he beats her the same.
Mariela shook with excitement. This was the final piece. Letty’s eyes
were finally here. She would make sure he would pay, but first, she needed
her children. She had waited so long for this moment that she couldn’t
believe it was here. When her children were killed years ago, she was saved
by a bruja who taught her many things, including how to get peace for her
and her children. She only needed to find children that shared similarities
with her precious babies. This might have been a difficult task had Mariela
not stumbled upon a boy one day wandering alone by the river with a smile
like Mateo’s. It was yet another trick the bruja taught her. She would find
an arm that had a mole right where her son did. And she would take it. She
would sew it to the other parts she had found. The sweet boy was so naïve,
Mariela almost stopped herself, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. Now, Mateo
was complete. Letty was nearly there, missing only her eyes, but not for
long.
It was pitch black when the last light was turned off from Sr. Dominguez’s
home. Mariela was once again grateful for Dominguez’s greed, who
sought the land where he could build a house with the best view of the
winding river. He didn’t believe the warnings from the townspeople of a
wailing ghost wandering the water in search of the children she drowned.
All he cared about was his room having a view of the beautiful river Mariela
was now crawling out from. She began walking towards the window
she had seen the little girl in. She tapped on the glass three times. Tiny
footsteps began coming closer to the window. A little face appeared in the
window, searching for the source of the sound until they landed on Mariela.
The little girl, not yet tainted from the harsh world, smiled at the sight of
the woman in front of her. She pushed the window open causing Mariela’s
heart to twist. She didn’t like doing this, but her children needed her as she
needed them. The little girl’s hair blew slightly in the breeze as she pushed
herself an inch more out of the window towards the bruja in front of her.
“You’re really pretty,” she said, “My name is Rosa. What is yours?”
“Mariela!”
She flinched at the sound of her drunk husband storming through
the yard toward her. It was still bright outside. Letty and Mateo were playing
soccer near the river when they heard his voice. They looked at their
mother, fear in their eyes. She told them to hide behind a couple of barrels
nearby and be quiet. Then she turned towards him in time to see his fist
before it connected with her face.
15

“Luis told me he saw you with the man visiting from out of town.
Now you want to leave me? After everything I have done for you? Everything
I got you?”
Mariela shook her head, but he didn’t wait for her answer. He hit her
again, knocking her down to the floor. Letty and Mateo scrambled out of
their hiding place and stood in front of her, pushing their dad away. He saw
it then. The fear in his wife’s eyes when her children stood up to him. He
knew how to hurt her. It happened before Mariela could react. He grabbed
Letty and Mateo, dragged them to the river, and threw them in.
“No!” Mariela jumped up, running for her children, but he locked her
in his arms. “No, please. They can’t swim. You know they can’t swim. Let me
save them. Please!”
“You should have thought about that before betraying me.” He huffed
in her ear. “This is your fault. If you had stayed only mine our children
would still be alive.”
The shrieks filled the night as Mariela ran to her house on the other
side of the river. She turned one last time before going under the water.
The window was still open, but Rosa’s face was not there. Instead, the woman
from the car clutched her daughter to her body, sobbing horrifically. She
yelled over and over about her daughter’s eyes. Mariela turned and hurried
home.
Her children were complete. She began the chant she learned that
would give her children life once again. Each word left her mouth a desperate
plea. Then Mateo’s arm moved. Letty’s foot twitched. Their bodies slowly
came to life. Tears sprang to her eyes as her children took her in, smiles
appearing on their faces. They ran to their mama, hugging her as hard as
they could. She kissed every inch of their faces, making sure to kiss their
stitches more than once. She couldn’t believe they were back in her arms.
“Mama, where is papa?” Mateo asked.
Mariela smiled at her son, pulling him close to her, “Why don’t we go
visit him? I’m sure he will be so excited to see you.”
16

Raizel Auza
The Evening Dew
the evening dew
reminds me of you
it strangely even has your scent,
as nature is constantly your descendant
i see you as a purple-orange sunset sky
sometimes as a tiny yellow butterfly
maybe you pass by as a chilly wind
or a playful flame as your twin
perhaps a ghost-like fog
or a slimy jumping frog
though you made it pour all day
i’ve been trying to keep my feelings at bay
because i know i’ll simply cry
since i couldn’t say goodbye
and even though it’s 56
i know you’re here to keep me from getting sick
i love how you show me you’re still here
because it’s always crystal clear
and that’s why, the evening dew
reminds me of you
*3rd Place - Robb Jackson High School Poetry Awards, 2023
17

Elijah X.A. Esquivel
The
Spines
of
Names
eerie whispers resigned beneath creaks,
floorboards, concrete pillars, & volumes
of despondent history books; printed graves reeves
through rings encircling spines wind together stories:
an education in how to erase yourself.
photographs promised to be housed, kept like memories reserved
within framed borders in family vaults: legacy homes no longer standing,
a treasury of memories unsigned, undelivered, and not yours…
heirloom headdress of the Sunrise, Sunset People warbonnet flake off
like bluebonnet petals curling away by fealtered Fall weathering, fated
crumblings
betray the blood-soaked feathers
that pierced Texan settlers. red plumes stick out
like flowers blooming atop a barrel cactus; flesh ruptured
from the punctured hearts. Ownerless land,
stabbed and signed into Red, White, and Blue Lone Star dreams
by cowboys and conquistadors, manifest Destiny:
the spine of a name risen on a pike, emblazoned on a Flag—
Texas was meant to be friendly to Indingenous forerunners.
burnt sienna Turkey feathers, golden-pleated Eagle crest the peddlers
of Freedom; give Thanks to holidays that bleached white to the bone,
dissettled
tribes slaughtered in the name of a Pilgrim’s Progress. encant the
murder-legacy
of your religious damnation: “What God says is best,
is best, though
all the men in the world are against it,”.
18

put da’ heathen’s prey ‘pon de’ wall. starve the kindred folk,
buffalo buffalo. rise up, Fallen Buffalo Soldiers. reclaim
the lands taken away from your ancestors to erect an American travesty.
nightly-painted
Navy blue skies inhale the smoke of burning embers
the campfire roars beneath the big, bright stars,
deep in the heart of Texas.
what Festivities shroud burials celebrating the constellations of Texan
Royalty. country
stars, gunsmoke actors, Wild West saloons, tin pan posters
decorate the dining rooms of barbecue palaces. American
Movie Classics bedazzle the dreams floating overhead,
igniting passions without address. behead
the silent brown face, carved into the faded past;
not sculpted into memorial mountains, four founders preach
a Treaty Wound/wound in discarded Massacres.
Govern the People, Subalter your Origins.
The Spines of Names is where immorals live.
19

Eylie Sasajima
the wych elm’s lullaby
when the boys find your skull in the tangle of a tree trunk, they will not
know that you were a woman. they see clumps of dried skin and hair
clinging to weathered bone. that alone terrifies them. that alone makes
them run. i will have drunk your rotten flesh by then, and i will tell you
that it was divine and not sweet at all. i would have eaten your skeleton
too, if i had the time. it will take men to pry what is left of you out of
my arms, and i will weep chlorophyll to see you go. the secrets of your
face are mine. i will remember you, mangled and dead, like fallen leaves
remember the earth. how lucky i was to be your first grave. how gentle
it must have been to be held instead of buried. dying may be quick and
horrible, but death is forever and soft. when the detectives piece together
your tattered parts and your peculiar teeth, they will only have
enough for people to wonder whether you were a whore, a witch, or a
spy. what a tragedy that you did not have enough lives to be all three.
20

Julieta Corpus
The Tradition of Silence
The tradition of silence is a Mexican woman living
En la frontera, slowly suffocating. She sits before a
Blank paper with crippled fingers, unable to type her truth.
Silence gouges out her eyes— windows that witness
Injustices, inequalities, and fear.
The tradition of silence is a Mexican woman living
En la frontera with a knife piercing her tongue. A
Sharp reminder to refrain from protesting:
Know your place and stay there or we’ll cut it off.
Pero tanto va el cántaro al río hasta que se rompe.
Something within her begins to galvanize a rebellion;
An agitation just below the painlayers urges her to vent.
The woman hears the faint echoes of her mother’s songs
Y cuentos, sus dichos — her words of wisdom, saying:
Mija, it is time to start screaming, howling, roaring.
At last, unfurling fiery wings and uncoiling her serpent’s tongue,
The Mexican woman / mujer-frontera begins to write:
The tradition of silence is a Mexican woman living
En la frontera, slowly suffocating.
21

Julieta Corpus
Prescience
There is too much absence in this house, so much
That it spills on the walls, peeks through cracks,
Enters air ducts.
It crawls on floors with an outstretched arm, supplicant.
Dried lips, skinned— a face twisted into permanent
Impatience, weariness.
There is too much absence in this house, it howls
Your name through foggy window panes, splatters salt
On the walls.
It finds me.
Advancing slowly, like mercury, beneath the sheets, absence
Penetrates the emptiness between my legs,
Stabs at desire with a broken fingernail — I shudder,
Not out of pleasure.
The sadist now lies entwined in my womb, to be reborn
In winter— drooling, pestilent, ubiquitous.
22

Kevin Sandefur
Persistence
We are sailing
on a river of darkness
towards a light
on the distant shore.
23
#
The lights in the emergency room were the wrong color for three
AM. They should have been warmer. Softer. Friendlier. Instead, they
felt more like a morgue, stark and alien. Under those lights, the swollen
bruise on Jamal’s face looked all the bluer, even against his darker skin.
The astringent odor that filled the room only made everything worse.
There wasn’t any hope or comfort in that smell.
Jamal and I were waiting to be released, waiting for the sheriff
to come tell us we were free to leave. I just wanted to go home. My head
was beginning to throb from the fall, and my throat was bruised and
sore where Kavanaugh choked me. All I could think about was the way
his body bobbed up and down in the shallow water when the deputy
poked at it with a stick.
#
It was the end of summer, the weekend before I had to leave
again to go back to school. One last drive in the country. Jamal had
suggested it. “For old time’s sake,” he said. We used to do it all the time
before I’d gone away. I missed the simplicity of it, the driving for its own
sake without any real destination, talking all night, or not, as the mood
struck us.
We stashed a bottle of Jack in the trunk of my dad’s car and
headed east on the county roads. The few fields close to town were
already harvested, so we had a clear view of the full moon as it came up,
fat and orange, like some ancient autumn god rising from the horizon.
We aimed straight into it, knights on a quest.
The state park presented itself first. We drove around its pavilions
and trailheads, down the circle drive that led to the river caves. The

finite loop of park road brought us back out far too soon, so we turned
east again, deeper into the dusk.
We rolled down the windows and drank in the cool Illinois air,
thick with the sweet smell of the pine trees lining the roadside like giant
courtiers. With the fading twilight at our backs, we drove through the
massive scars left by the quarries and into the spare land beyond, past
the solitary dusk-to-dawn lamps of isolated cabins in the Shawnee, then
finally back down into the darkening woodlands that lined the river.
We always ended up back at the river. That was how we came to Ford’s
Landing.
Almost there. Just a little farther now, and we’ll be ashore. We’ll
be on the other side.
24
#
#
“Tell me you felt it, too,” Jamal urged after the doctor left.
“I felt something. I’m not sure what. Was it her? Did she kill Kavanaugh,
or did we?”
“How do we tell?” Jamal buried his head in his hands. “God, what
if it was us?”
head.
“Maybe it was both.”
“How’s that any better? You know they’re gonna blame me.”
“Sheriff’s a fair man,” I said to convince myself.
“Easy for the white kid to say,” Jamal countered, then shook his
“Sorry.”
He was right, but I didn’t know what to do. The sheriff walked in,
carrying a big evidence bag with the bayonet in it. The bag was stamped
“Hardin County” in large letters on the outside. Blood smears had mixed
with the rust on the blade to form a dark, reddish coating inside the
clear plastic. He laid it on the chair beside him and sat across from us.
“You kids want to tell me what you were doing all the way out
there in the middle of nowhere?”
Part of me chafed at the sheriff calling us kids, but he’d watched
us all grow up, so I guess we always would be to him. I shrugged. “We
were just out cruising in the country. Enjoying the night,” I said.

“Uh-huh. So, it’s just a coincidence then, you two showing up
where Kavanaugh drowned himself in two feet of water?”
I gingerly touched the swollen lump on my head. “I guess I
missed most of that.”
25
#
The moonlight sparkled on the slowly moving current, a flickering
contrast to the steady, glistening sheen of the riverbank. The rocks
on the shore were flat and oval, worn smooth by the water and each
other. Our footsteps crunched loudly on the wet gravel. The full moon
was higher up in the sky now, bright enough that we didn’t need any
extra light to find our way from the car to the water’s edge. With the sun
completely gone, the temperature had dropped several degrees. I was
glad we’d brought the bottle.
I took a swig and handed it to Jamal. “This is great,” I said as he
drank. “How come we never came out here more?”
He wiped a stray drop from his mouth. “Too far from town,
maybe? It was always easier just to go to the shorelines and caves at the
park.”
“That’s true. Good times.”
“Good times, indeed.” He’d started to hand back the bottle when
his face went completely blank, and I turned to see where he was staring.
Not twelve feet away from us, standing on the riverbank, was a
hooded figure in a black robe.
I already killed one man to get us this far. I know my soul’s
forfeit, but we’re gonna make it this time. All of us, we’re gonna break
through.
When we were growing up, we used to play along the shoreline
all the time. In a river town, everything centers on the water. When the
river’s as big as the Ohio, the current constantly brings new discoveries
for a kid.
#
#
Our favorite game was the treasure hunt. A hundred and fifty
years ago, the original ferryman at Ford’s Landing also had been a
notorious river pirate and smuggler. There were rumors that he’d buried
his hoard somewhere in the area. After he was forcibly retired, the new
owners moved the ferry downstream to where the town was starting

to grow. Now the old landing’s narrow, gravelly beach was just another
isolated stretch of abandoned riverbank.
The rumors about Ford’s treasure centered mainly on the state
park at Cave-In-Rock. More than one gang of outlaws had used it for
a hideout, so that was naturally where we spent most of our time. We
never found much besides an occasional civil war belt buckle or old shell
casings. Anything really interesting our parents talked us into donating
to the park museum, where they would put it on display with a little
card listing us as the donors.
We’d spent hours searching the shorelines, learning made-up
histories and other nonsense about the river’s ways from the older kids,
and passing that precious knowledge on to the younger ones. That was
how we first heard about Old Connie.
26
#
I was lying when I told the sheriff that I didn’t remember anything.
I didn’t know what else to say. How do you explain that you’re not
sure whether all your memories are really your own?
The first clear memory I had was watching the patterns traced
by the paramedic’s penlight shining in my eyes. Jamal and I were
wrapped in blankets at the river’s edge, and the sheriff was there with
two deputies and the ambulance crew. I knew all of them; went to school
with a couple.
Sitting in the ER, the memory triggered a question I’d had at the
time. “How’d you all get there so fast?” I asked the sheriff.
He turned to stare blankly at me before answering. “We’ve been
watching Kavanaugh for a long time,” the sheriff said flatly. “We always
suspected he was hauling contraband of some sort. Never figured you
two would show up. We came running when we saw the ruckus, but by
the time we got there, everybody was napping.” He leaned forward in
his chair. “Something I’ve been curious about. Those cuts on the back of
Kavanaugh’s legs? They might’ve kept him from standing up, but he still
should’ve been able to drag himself out of the water. Any idea why he
didn’t?”
Neither Jamal nor I answered. In the pause, I could hear everything
in the rest of the building: first the beeping of the medical devices,
then the voices of the other, unseen occupants of the emergency room,
casualties of a full moon on a Friday night. A broken bone from a fall.
Stitches from a bar fight. I was envious of them, hidden behind their
curtains, immediate needs all being attended, normal injuries with
normal outcomes. I doubted they had any reason to question what their

lives would be like when they left the emergency room.
Jamal cleared his throat. “I don’t know, sheriff,” he said. “My
memory’s pretty jumbled up right now.”
“I guess things did happen pretty fast,” the sheriff agreed. “Had
to, in order to be over before we could even get close.”
“It’s not that so much,” Jamal said. “It was more like ... one thing
happening twice at the same time.”
“Son, I’ve got no idea what that means.”
“Not sure I do, either. Sorry.”
I hadn’t heard the name for years, let alone said it out loud. It
was from a song we sang when we were growing up — not exactly a
nursery rhyme, but more of a cautionary tale:
27
#
Never sleep too near the water
else you’ll dream of dreadful slaughter
‘til Old Connie pulls you down
and holds you under ‘til you drown.
It was a silly song we sang to scare each other in our non-PC
adolescence. We’d always assumed it was universal, like Mother Goose
or the Bogeyman, until I went away to school and realized it was strictly
local to Cave-In-Rock. It never once occurred to me she might be real.
“Please tell me you’re seeing this,” Jamal whispered.
“Hello?” I tried softly.
#
The figure pulled back its hood to reveal the face of a young
black woman, no more than twenty years old. The moonlight made her
seem opalescent, almost translucent. She dropped the rest of her robe to
reveal a plain blouse and long skirt above her bare feet.
Somehow, I knew. “It’s Connie,” I said.
“Do you think she can see us?” Jamal asked.
Her stare was distant, looking right past us at something downriver.
I turned and saw a tiny figure-eight of light being drawn in the air
about five miles down, near the mouth of the river cave. “Is that somebody
signaling?” Jamal asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Her clothes, the old ferry landing ... you think
this was part of the Underground Railroad?”
Jamal shook his head. “Not so much around here. This part of the
country, more likely reverse railroad.”
“Damn.” The reverse railroad had been the worst of the worst,
kidnapping free blacks and selling them across the river in Kentucky.
“Damned, indeed,” he agreed.
The muffled sound of a small boat engine broke the stillness and
drew all our attention back to the water. There was a skiff approaching,
carrying what looked like a half dozen crates under tarps. The boat
ground up onto the bank, and a large, stocky man jumped out into the
shallow water.
“Damn,” Jamal hissed, “it’s Bob Kavanaugh.”
28
#
I know you. You’re John Crenshaw’s man, come to take us back to
the salt works. Ain’t gonna happen.
“What about this?” The sheriff held up the evidence bag. “This
knife belong to you two?”
#
“It’s a bayonet,” I said without thinking, and regretted it instantly
as the sheriff turned to study me.
“It’s not ours,” Jamal added.
“Then where’d it come from?”
“It was already there,” Jamal said. “We found it under the rocks.”
“You just happened to be digging around?”
Jamal shifted in his chair. “Something like that.”
The sheriff raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t say anything more.
I wondered if he’d finally run out of questions. Days from now, when it
was all over, he would ask if we wanted to keep the bayonet as a souvenir.
We would tell him no, that he should donate it to the museum. Jamal
would print up a little card, saying “Courtesy of Miss Constance.”
But right then, still sitting in the ER, nobody was thinking about
that. The bayonet was still in the evidence bag, and the sheriff was still

sitting there looking at it, not talking, just turning it over and over in
his hands while he stared at it through the plastic.
“Doc says we’re okay,” I offered. “Just some bruises and scrapes.”
The sheriff looked back and forth between Jamal and me. “That’s
good,” he said. “That’s real good. Glad to hear it. Here’s the deal: Anybody
asks, you found this at the riverbank. We clear on that?”
“That’s kind of what actually happened,” Jamal said.
“Kind of,” I agreed.
“Good talk,” the sheriff said.
29
#
If there was anything crooked going on anywhere in Hardin
County, Bob Kavanaugh was sure to be in the middle of it. We’d known
him all our lives and regretted every minute. He’d been king of the bullies
in grade school, three years ahead of us but still singling Jamal and
I out for special attention for most of fifth grade. I’d always assumed
it was because of Jamal being black. We didn’t have many other friends
that year, so we were easy targets. Eventually Kavanaugh got bored with
us and moved on to someone else. Dollars to donuts the crates in the
skiff were either booze or cigarettes, or both, and none of it with genuine
tax stamps.
He called out “Who’s there?” as he walked up the bank.
“Just me and Jamal,” I said. “No need to get excited. We were just
leaving.”
“Where’d the other one go?” he asked.
Jamal and I looked around. Connie was gone. “What other one?”
“I thought I saw three of you when I pulled up.”
“Nope, just us,” Jamal said. “Soon to be none.”
Kavanaugh kept walking until he was right in front of us. “Just
out for a stroll?”
“Yup. And a drink. Want one?” I offered him the bottle. He just
stared at it. “Well, good talk,” I said. “See you around.”
“Not so fast.”
“Look Kavanaugh,” Jamal said. “We don’t want to be any trouble.”

“I don’t expect you will be,” Kavanaugh replied, and punched
Jamal hard in the face. He dropped straight down and stayed there,
unmoving.
“Dammit, Kavanaugh” I said and backed away from him, just
out of reach of his next swing. “Jamal!” I yelled, but he didn’t respond.
30
#
Get up, woman. Your babies need you. Get up, Constance.
#
“We don’t have to do this,” I pleaded, but he kept coming. I
figured I could beat him to the car, but I didn’t think I could get inside
before he closed on me, and besides, there was no way I was leaving
Jamal behind. I kept backing away, trying to circle around. Kavanaugh
was half again bigger than me, and I knew if he got his hands on me it
would be over quick. “Jamal, dammit, wake up!”
Jamal groaned and moved a little, and Kavanaugh turned at
the sound. I used the opening to smash the bottle across his head. He
staggered, but didn’t fall, and started advancing on me again.
“I’ll send you to hell for that.”
Maybe so. But I ain’t goin’ alone.
#
#
I felt the water splashing over my shoes and realized that I’d
backed into the shallows at the river’s edge. I kicked a bunch of water
up into Kavanaugh’s face and used the distraction to land three quick
punches as hard as I could, two to the head and one to the gut, all
without effect.
“Damn,” I said, and then he was on me, both hands clamped
around my throat, lifting me up out of the water as my feet kicked
empty air.
Reach down, baby, under the rocks. That’s it, right there
where we left it, just for this. Cold, hard steel.
#
#
My vision was going dark around the edges when I saw Jamal

fishing around under the gravel. He pulled his hand back up, and the
bayonet was in it. A moment later, Kavanaugh got the strangest look
on his face. It was part surprise, but mostly just confusion, like he
didn’t know for sure what was happening.
We both fell, and that must’ve been when I hit my head.
Don’t you get up. I let you go, you’re gonna keep comin’ after
my babies, and I can’t have that. This ends here. Now, tonight. You
stay down.
#
#
Jamal told the coroner’s jury that he didn’t remember anything
after he’d been punched. Given the defensive nature of our injuries,
and the generally low regard for Kavanaugh in the community, the
verdict of accidental drowning was both quick and final.
When it was over, the sheriff pulled us both aside in the parking
lot. “I wanted to thank you for keeping it simple in there,” he said.
“That was smart. I know for a fact you two weren’t ever mixed up with
that lowlife.”
He paused as the dead man’s wife and daughter came out of
the building and walked to their car. They stared at us as they passed.
I felt sorry for them, but the sheriff assured me not to worry. “The
church will look out for them. If they’ll take the help.”
Once they’d left, he turned back to us. “What I also wanted to
say is that I’ve been doing this long enough to know when somebody’s
not telling me the whole story.”
Jamal and I glanced at each other and then back at the sheriff.
He saw that, of course, and he obviously wasn’t going to leave until he
got what he wanted.
“It was Old Connie,” Jamal finally said.
“Okay, now, you stop right there,” the sheriff said. He took off
his cap and rubbed his forehead, then stared at his shoes. “I don’t need
to hear any more of this,” he said without looking up. “Best we not
bring it up again. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” we agreed.
31

#
We are sailing
on a river of darkness
towards a light
on the distant shore.
When we get there
won’t be no sorrow
just sweet freedom
forever more.
#
32

Amanda King
Ghost Maker
to the girl
who drew us as ghosts, she and
I, arched smiling marshmallow
ghosts, girl drew us, the hollows
of our eyes real guileless pits,
one a sweet empty dead face
the other blushing shy ghost
with a bow, pale face, pink
bow, and the bones of her
wrists as she drew, now sharp
in my chest to see the sketch,
hands clasped, touching ghosts,
my dead face, her wrists, she
the ghost maker. I see oh
see her all over, the author
of my dead hopes, can’t
help but arch toward it, telltale
pink smiling hope, down
to the guileless pit of this,
I her lone ghost and she
sweet empty, haunts me.
33

Amanda King
Roommates
Alone I am every mythic creepy thing stripped of wings, plucked bald
and scabby, a clawed hand, no nails, no bed, just the tendersoft hills of
each finger rounding nakedly. Alone I am five of me. I am a snowed out
television screen buzzing softly. The second me is stuck on repeat, mental
looping, no explanation, no explanation, no explanation, no change.
The third eats stale things that crumble in bed and sweeps my legs like
windshield wipers to push the salt and grit into the tucked edges of the
quilt. The fourth crouches, observant, chewing rails into each cheek,
teeth tracks, salt slick in in every fold. The fifth has eyes like fishbowls
that carry me and me and me and me around when we go out. The fifth
makes plans for the weekend, doesn’t cancel last minute, peels scales
and pats flesh dry. She shaves in case. Sometimes she mentions leaving
us and all she does is sigh when we scrabble and laugh and burble and
cry, oh, no.
34

Guillermo Gallegos
We Will All Be Underwater
As a child,
I killed a girl who had my face.
I am not human like she is–
Was.
I could not tell you what I am exactly,
But I know my face,
And I know my age,
And I know I want to live.
I wanted to live more than anything,
And for that she had to die.
I didn’t even raise a hand to her.
I simply spoke my name
And then she was dead.
There was no funeral for her
Because I slipped into her role
And I wore our shared face well.
As the weeks went on,
My flesh began to fall apart when I scratched.
Luckily, I had kept her body under her–
My bed.
In the dark,
I cut grafts with a crude tool
And my own nails.
Her body remains fresh
Even as the seasons changed.
Weeks became months.
I must perform alchemy on her flesh.
Fluids drained from femoral arteries,
To keep my own blood red and flowing.
Oils placed beneath her skin,
35

To make my own skin soft to the touch.
Perfumes and stones anointing her ears,
To disguise my scent as human.
She remains still,
And silent.
Then
I begin to see her
In the corner of my vision.
When I see her face,
I cannot understand her expression.
This must be her revenge!
I retaliate
By cutting off her hair,
And beating on her corpse,
Until my hands
Could no longer uncurl from fists.
The damage heals slower,
Her hair remains short.
She continues to haunt me.
Confess!
I must confess to her murder!
I tell her parents what I have done,
And they do not believe me.
I show them her body,
But they say nothing,
Only mentioning that her hair
Is uneven
She continues to haunt me.
I confess to her friends,
I confess to teachers,
I confess to strangers,
Hoping this will satisfy her in some way.
She continues to haunt me.
Finally I throw myself at her feet.
I beg her forgiveness for ruining her.
36

Her body,
With exposed muscle tissue,
Moves to stand.
I stare at the floor,
Terrified to meet her gaze.
“Is this life worth living?”
I make myself look at her face,
And I see that expression again.
In this light,
It makes her look
Bone tired.
“Is this life– my life– worth living?”
I say yes.
All I ever wanted was to live!
And even now I just want to live!
She turns out her rotting palms...
“Then take all of it.”
—
It has been almost a decade now.
Her body is long gone,
Devoured piece by piece
To cement my place in her former life.
I no longer use her name.
Her friends and parents struggled at first,
To use my name instead,
But there was no resistance to it.
They often tell me it suits me better
Than the old one
I hope she can forgive me one day,
For stealing her life.
*3rd Place - Flash! Micro Contest, 2023
37

Ellianna Nejat
Giant Fleas
There was you
then three
forming out of the downpour
oddly dry
their little bodies
as if safe in our home
as I reached for love
an attack
by something even smaller
and more blood-thirsty
38

Ellianna Nejat
Fairy Ring
Damp air coats my tongue, trying its hardest to mask the sweetness of
decay invading my nose. Far away birds sing warnings, but my feet can’t
seem to stop planting footsteps in the lusciously soft grass. The wide
circle of vibrant mushrooms along the forest floor tell of the luck in the
area. My greedy feet continue forward, uncaring that once inside the
ring, I’ll be forever lost to the world.
39

Thomas Piekarski
Birth of Mars
I yet a zygote when old Betelgeuse
shone brilliantly through thin magnetic blinds
and swallowed me into its mammoth gut
that chained assembled bugs on frozen walls.
I writhed in pain not wishing to expire
and prayed for coming of a sacred beast.
What will compelled my shadow I can’t say
for in a verdant field outside it grew.
Now clear the mind of past felicity
I mumbled to myself and furthermore
those angels I expected didn’t come.
Thick air within the room most stifling
that pressured me so hard I nearly broke.
As seasons do engulfing many years
my brain shrunk to a little ball of steel.
Then buoyed by loud cheers from up above
a mating call as big as dawn emerged
and sanctified I swam free of the womb.
40

Elijah X.A. Esquivel
The Curse of Echo
— alive, in her. Her voice still refrains,
but, they say that her bones
received the form of stones.
Since then, she lies concealed
in the woods, never revealed
nor seen on the mountains: but
is heard in all of them: a phantom.”
‘Staring, intranced, incanted within his own
sighting, reciting. Insighted, he palms
a white egg, born-beloved—eyes receiving eyes—hard death. A stone
seed,
spurned. On either side:
an orchid breached; I hold myself kneeling,
wilting, turning-handed flower. My hour of bountiful youth,
an eternity begotten, bemoan, solitary piece I stoop atop fawning
a falling fantasy, I kiss and I kissed, cold, wet, with a hungry mouth,
wanting, endeavoring
to drink my own shadow-self,
starved. “But—,
A tantalizing thirst grows in me…,”
unfills my whole.
Eye me,
an entire entity,
reflection encasted-form. Those heavenly orbs
of mine, imagistic firmaments, retaining multitudes
of hues,
41

shades,
and stores
of Earth’s splendors: scrumptulous Women, bathing, hemming,
like burdening fruit, all ripe together, in summer weather, draping
the vine. Mine. My divine right. Without returning
my own eyes, I may not have seen them
as they had seen me. ‘But,
little did they know, the echo
of his madness was sensibly shut.’
In the fury of their eyes, terrorized — against itself
by the curving slight of moonlight, mesmerized — avenge yourself
through silence laid steady standing by, hypnotized…
i un-end myself, “‘A phantom!’” ‘You call me hence!’
Against the wood and stone of the meadow round, her voice is found,
in vaults, revolving winding-wound, where it doubles still every
sound.
“‘Call me hence!’” The forests resounded with laughter, her presence
he could but hear, not see. After her call, he answered: ‘In essence,
are you she who has been banned outwards? and inwards bound?
Bound to re—,’
“‘Bound to re-bound. Inwards and outwards banned,’” recanted the
land. ‘Grand
and vast the woes, insensible marvels, thereby related
that belied his fate, his dealt hand.’ “And yet, you turn
—to penetrate me with your gaze—insatiable gaze.
Wretched,
from the place that suffered the stream, sensational
craze. Man, deranged,
you do not see me,
in darkness
42

with no rays of the sun
to bask me. The Eve
of my birth on dread, unfloured, earth,
deadwood, packed beneath covert groves. Bone
of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh,
my Self before Me. We’ve come to warm you,
to light
you: I will
delight you.
Diminutive to our wrath, Tyrant enacted
o’er our bodies, Consumer of thy fruit.”’
is
“‘Echo,’ is her name, of requite Extracted.
But the event, the thing itself, the planned nature of his death, and
the novel
of his frenzy confirmed it. For his demise was well-deserved,
a punishment earned
for commanding docile all that life had to offer. Now, all that one is
left to surmise is:
this the hole that silenced echoes go to die in?
“‘Or will another wandering hand open the book that contains
the pains?,’”
Resigned away, the Myth of Echo read: “It is her voice alone
which remains—
*2nd Place - Flash! Micro Contest, 2023
43

APPENDIX
Lines 1–7, Line 71 :: [Metamorphoses, Ovid, Fable VI, Book III] “Her voice still continues,
but they say that her bones received the form of stones. Since then, she lies
concealed in the woods, and is never seen on the mountains: but is heard in all of
them. It is her voice alone which remains alive in her.”
Lines 8–11 :: [The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Salvador Dali] The visual symbols of the
seed and the egg.
Line 29 :: [“The Goblin Market”, Christina Rossetti]
“All ripe together
In summer weather,—” (Lines 15–16).
Lines 56–58, Line 64 :: [Paradise Lost, John Milton, Book VII]
“Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my Self
Before me; Woman is her Name, of Man
Extracted…”.
SOURCES
Dali, Salvador, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) —
Milton, John, Paradise Lost (1667) —
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20/20-h/20-h.htm
Ovid, The Metamorphoses (8 CE) —
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21765/21765-h/21765-h.htm
Rossetti, Christina, “The Goblin Market,” (1862) —
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
44

Kevin Sandefur
Apollo
They come through my window
every morning without fail,
creeping over the sill
and across the floor
to crawl into my bed.
I don’t know
where they’ve been,
and I don’t care.
I throw back the covers,
letting them caress
my entire body,
stretching myself out
for their kisses
to roam
from my head
to my toes
and then back again,
my spine arching
into their bright embrace,
my bare skin
glowing at their touch.
I wrap myself round with them,
heat against heat,
because their warmth
fills me with joy,
and my spirit rises up
to greet the day.
45

Kathleen Naderer
A Forsaken City-State
“Hestia spare me,” muttered the woman as she saw her son sitting
upright, eyes set straightforward and unblinking.
There would be no grace given. Though the fire still burned in its
sacred home, its sanctity had long since been violated. No longer did any
gods oversee this household. No longer did any gods listen to the pleas of
the living, dying, or dead.
If only, if only. If only Prometheus hadn’t stolen the fire, if only
Orpheus hadn’t strummed and stumbled his way to the Underworld, if only
Heracles and Sisyphus left well enough alone, if only they hadn’t cheated
and insulted Thanatos. If only, if only.
Perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps then the gods would have mercy, perhaps
then the gods would return order, perhaps then the gods would resume
their sacred duties. Perhaps then her son could rest. Perhaps then he would
stop his seemingly eternal quest to return to her home. Perhaps, perhaps.
Gently, the woman made her way towards her son. No sudden movements.
She’d learned this the hard way from her husband and daughter. The
dead could be frightfully still, yet easily startled at times.
If only, if only. If only things were as before. If only death had not
become so difficult. If only he would stop making his way to her table and
sitting, sitting as he did when he lived, sitting as if for dinner. If only, if
only.
Perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps their psyches found some peace with
Aether, as some philosophized. Although the gods had abandoned humanity,
the primordial states remained. Perhaps.
Gently, the woman made her way around sticky pools of humours
spreading across the floor, tacky areas of brown-red deepening to brownblack.
No bright red, no fresh red, on either her son or her floor, so perhaps
damage was minimal. Perhaps he merely wished to visit home in his state of
unrest. Perhaps he merely missed his mother. Perhaps, perhaps.
46

Her husband had taken to death like a rabid dog. Then he had taken
an amphora to the skull, shards of glass filling his hair, one large shard
piercing his eye socket. She’d had to push it further down, further in, until
all motion ceased. For him, she held no pity or regret. If only she could.
Perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps if her husband still remained dead it
would have been easier for their family. Perhaps ending his shade had been
a mistake. Perhaps the soldiers could have used him, just as her family could
have used the money earned from turning him over. Perhaps, perhaps.
If only, if only. If only she’d kept the family dagger on her person
at all times. If only she’d assured her daughter that death was different for
everyone. If only she’d concealed the way seeing her child that way hurt. If
only, if only.
When her daughter’s time came, she lingered for more than a year.
Her daughter had been raised with more control. She would not be like her
father. Silent dignity. She fumbled through her remaining days, quiet as
possible for the dead, struggling to help with household chores, delicately
gumming her porridge after acquiescing to the teeth extraction. Her formerly
graceful fingers now worked tirelessly, nailless and clumsily, at the
loom all through the night. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Neither the woman nor her
son could bring themselves to tell her daughter that although she had no
need for sleep, they did.
She was found, stretched on the kline, slumber eternally peaceful,
dagger holding her mouth firmly shut, fresh red already beginning to turn
brown, neatly pooled on the shroud she’d woven for herself. If only.
Perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps her son would be different. Perhaps his
own indifference would keep him from his sister’s fate. Perhaps he would
one day stop shuffling through the gates of the cemetery to sit at her table
with those empty eyes. Perhaps.
Gently, the woman began to sing a lullaby, one she hadn’t sung since
her son was old enough to walk. It took several repetitions but eventually
his attention focused on her and he stood from her table.
If only, if only. If only she could imagine his staggering stance that
of a toddler learning to walk, a young man learning to hold his drink. If only.
Gently, slowly, the woman led her son’s mortal shade to its resting
place, still singing his lullaby, their own private ekphora.
47

Unlike his sister, in his death he remained mostly unresponsive,
incapable of even mediocre attempts at useful labor. So the woman led him
to the cemetery gates, where he was ushered by soldiers back inside. Here he
would stay until the city needed a hoplon, then he and the other dead would
serve as a protective shield for the living. Far more honorable than other
methods of shade disposal.
Gently weeping, the woman made her solitary way back home,
ignoring the vacant stare fixed on her retreating form, the son straining to
catch the final notes of the lullaby she still breathed as she left him to his
fate.
48

Jenna Ulizio
Advent
If the world was going to end, the matter could wait no longer. Pluto
had been orbiting this city for millennia. In a sense. However, the magic
weakly thrumming through its alleys and canals had finally succeeded in
calling him.
Calling him home.
The sea thrashed against the small metal boat. Night surrounded
him in a brilliant tapestry of sea noise, half-realized shapes, pinpricks of
struggling light, and the roar of an overhead highway. The ocean was never
Pluto’s realm, but darkness was a familiar face.
Pluto gently steered the vessel over another surge. If it had not
been dark before, he was now fully swallowed. He could just make out the
thick support columns. Above him soared concrete, a piece of a pointless
goliath. Humanity had so desperately wanted to make gods of themselves.
Yet, here they were, and these were their miracles. There truly was nothing
else like them.
Pluto traveled under the overpass and through the storm barrier.
Immediately, the water calmed. The boat rocked once more before gently
bobbing. However, this all went unnoticed as Pluto stood in shock. The
entire river was aflame. Suddenly, he was transported. Images ripped him
through time. A lopsided siege in an ever-pressing advance. Strange lights
over distant lands. Explosions dotting the Earth, suffocating on blood and
tears. A single body burning before him amidst yet another city razed. The
feeling of his heart on fire.
Rome, his home, collapsing. Olympus, a field of ash.
He stumbled out of the reverie and nearly out of the boat. His
hands trembled as he gingerly held his head. Fear coiled in his chest. An
ache settled in his body from carrying the past– the long, long past– with
him. He breathed, trying for a tabula rasa and failing. When his apathy, a
god’s greatest shield, had left him, Pluto could not remember.
With a shake, Pluto brought his gaze back to the flames. They shot
through the night. The sky seemed so quaint with this scene below. The
stars had no luster. Yet, the river was not on fire. Instead, a long series of
49

fires floated across its surface. Buildings caught their colors, they stained
the sky, and the water burned like oil paint. The fires snaked down the river
as far as he could see. The lights burned so bright, phosphenes popped behind
his eyes.
Somehow, he found it eerily beautiful as he gathered himself and
slowly drove the boat forward. The city sprawled on either side. It gave
a polite distance between water and brick, but everywhere contained an
urban mark. Metal fences looped around picturesque fields, only to have a
cityscape backdrop.
admit.
The Romantic Period had left an impression on him, that he would
Pluto drifted through the alleys of fire, watching the roaring
flames. It was just like humans to tame something they thought they could
control. Something wild. Chaotic. Beautiful. It was just like them to place
fire surrounded by its mortal enemy, no escape, only burning passion that
sputters out eventually.
“No, that’s not right,” Tanner hummed. Pluto shifted, watching him.
“Fire and water…they’re not enemies. They’re lovers of a sort.” He gave Pluto
a small smile. He tore his gaze away.
“I’ve never heard it told like that.”
“All these years…” Tanner shook his head as he laughed. “Fire and
water, total opposites. It’s a romantics dream. They can never touch, only
gaze on from a distance. Yet, when they do risk everything, it’s not their
demise. It’s their happiest moment before collapsing together into the sky.
They create something new, something to be proud of.” And Pluto thought
he understood something.
Pluto had not, and he pushed the memory away. It was the one
thing he could not have and the only thing he wanted.
The city was quiet around him. Calm, only a few fellow drifters
observing the show from the sidewalks. Like him, yet so different. The people’s
gazes slipped away from him, leaving only a gentle caress on his mind
and possibly a twinge of sadness.
The first bridge yawned above him, beckoning Pluto under. Shadows
immediately cascaded across his shoulders. The firelight was distant
now. It mattered not. Darkness was, while not his domain, not a problem.
Which is how he could make out the faded golden sign on the
bridge’s underside: Ceres. Her name bore a hole through him. Bright, twinkling
laughter seemed to echo under the thick rocks, warmth seeping into
him like sun-baked earth on bare feet.
50

apart?
How many mistakes had he made? How many families had he torn
He had broken her. Both of them. Even as he had watched them
wilt in his kingdom, he selfishly grieved whom he had ended. He had been a
petulant child, and he would give everything to go back and do it again.
But Rome had fallen, and the gods were dying, and soon enough for
a deity, the world would end. As someone who had been living through the
end of his world, he doubted he could live through it again. And this time,
he knew he could do something. He just had to bring himself to do it.
Pluto powered up the boat. Even humans were not cruel enough to
place his name so close to hers. He continued down the fiery canal, brownstones
smashed against glittering complexes passing by. Pluto passed under
bridge after bridge, reading the shadowed signs as he went: the names
of his family, accompanied by the slew of emotions that came with them.
Light played against the walls, the water, and even the blank black sky. If
Pluto didn’t know any better, he would maybe call it beautiful.
He was growing soft in his time. Had his sibling felt this way, too,
when it happened?
Finally, the boat drifted under another masterfully crafted bridge.
Perhaps it was his perception, but Pluto could have sworn on the decaying
Pantheon that it had gotten colder. A look at the rusted plaque confirmed
why. It was his. Written in a bold, all-caps demonstrative font was his wearied
name long past revered: Pluto.
It was nothing to be proud of anymore.
He was not that person, but even if he were to update that sign, he
had no idea who the replacement was.
Pluto brought the boat to a stop, letting the anchor drown in the
dark depths below. He cast another glance at the plaque, tentatively brushing
a hand over it. He could practically feel the violent swells of his legacy,
rumbling just beneath the surface. He breathed in deeply, turning away
to face the water. Looking deep into it, he waited. It was subtle at first. A
rippling that could have easily been mistaken for the tides. But soon the
water cleared, slowly, and lights like torches rose just below the surface.
He breathed the overworld air once more. Carefully stepping to the edge of
the boat, he adjusted his long, black jacket. Holding tightly to his hat, Pluto
stepped off the edge. He was going down, down into the Underworld.
The water moved and bent away from him, closing up over his
head. But he was no longer in the canals. His feet landed softly in a field of
grass. His jacket curled back around him, blowing in a light breeze. Fire-
51

light blazed around him here, too, but instead of floating fires, torches
burned atop pillars. The field he was in stretched on for miles, many miles
more, and even miles upon those.
The Fields of Asphodel whispered the song of souls along a spring
breeze.
The sky was a deep gray, nearly black. It was neither day nor night.
The concept of timein the Underworld was, as a whole, neither here nor
there. Forever translated as so, no matter what you spoke. Pluto gazed
silently at his kingdom. The dead knew eternal peace. It was far too kind a
fate for them, all of them, but there was little else he could live with.
Pluto glanced back at the ground to his left. A path that had not
been carved into the ground moments ago now snaked through the fields.
He stepped on it and began walking. Dread dripped into his heart.
Homecomings were rarely pleasant.
He had no wish to see his undead subjects, so Pluto willed them
away. As he crested a hill, the scenery shifted subtlety. It grew darker,
storm clouds gathering. Lands beyond stretched beyond, farther than Pluto
should have been able to see.
In the center of everything, like a cracked crown jewel, sat Pluto’s
palace. It shifted with the times and the mood of its lord, but ever since
The Fall, it had always been ruined. No one needed to live in it anymore. No
one lived down here. As he crossed the vast distance in an impossible time,
he saw that it had taken on the appearance of a pantheon. He was mildly
horrified but mostly resigned that he had let himself get so nostalgic. Great
granite pillars, black as the night of the Overworld, stood cracked, broken,
and cleaved. Yet still, some semblance of a great structure yawned tiredly
before him.
Pluto’s immaculately shined shoes rang out against the checkered
tiles when he crossed the building’s threshold. He drifted around the wild
courtyard, the scent of ephemeral beauty and eternal spring pushing him
away. Stepping deeper into the court, he stopped before the throne. His
throne. Some things never changed, and the oppressively large, opaque
throne had not. Nor had the whisper of a god sitting upon it.
“Umbra, I see you’re still in charge.” The person sitting on the
throne was practically a skeleton. Few would cross the bridge to call them
human. Umbra was a barely living excuse of his. They were his shadow, in
every sense of the word. Umbra was a placeholder, able to do anything Pluto
would have needed to do. A temporary cheating of death that had lasted
centuries.
52

“Who else, my lord?” They answered in their monotone voice.
“I need you to open the door to the cellar,” Pluto stated. He would
have done it himself, but he had lost the right to that knowledge when he
forfeited his throne. It was a place he was seldom allowed to go, purely a
domain of the Fates.
This was not one of the times he was allowed inside.
If Umbra was concerned about the breach in protocol, they did not
show it. They raised a hand, and a stairwell opened up at Pluto’s feet. Wordlessly,
he bid farewell to his regent and descended into total darkness. The
floor grated shut above him.
After a moment of breathing in dust, he instinctively reached out
and tugged on a light that wasn’t there. Impossibly, dim, industrial lights
thundered on across the cellar. It had grown even more cluttered since the
last time history had sent him down here. The cellar could only be loosely
described as akin to office cubicles. False walls created a labyrinth. Odds
and ends, trinkets of eras bygone and yet to come were haplessly strewn
all over. Newspapers, photos, pages, tablets, and pamphlets were plastered
to the walls, whispering of a timeline incomplete. They were marked up,
strung together. Fraying threads haphazardly blocked any free space to
walk. There were more mirrors than Pluto thought necessary, and he was
certain he would find a good few scrying bowls laying around, too.
Pluto focused on the information he came for. He closed his eyes,
distracted by a feeling of warmth, then dread, desperately trying to grasp
the question in mind–
His eyes popped open. Pluto was not standing where he had been.
A false wall stood before him, a rat’s nest of strings nearly skewering him.
They raced around the labyrinth to converge on one single strip of paper. It
read in simple type: The End.
There was a date beneath it.
Pluto breathed in sharply. He had not expected this to work, or at
least, a part of him had hoped it wouldn’t. As he reached to unpin the slip of
paper, he noticed a tremor in his hands. He tried to push away the questions
demanding answers for what this meant. Nothing was certain when
one was a god, and in this world, certainty was a chance encounter.
Folding the paper into his pocket, Pluto dropped his head, closing
his eyes. He could feel the whispers of magic, slowly gasping a last breath
for centuries, pulling at the hem of his jacket. It was getting harder and
harder to ignore, this turf war that had no regard for the turf it was fighting
over. This was his ball and chain. As much as he told himself he wasn’t
53

involved, he was the only one trying to keep it all from going up in flames.
Some time ago, he had dropped the illusion of a passive wanderer,
ansomewhere along the way, Pluto had taken up a stake in the game
and played. Maybe, he did not want the mortals to die, or maybe, not all
of them. The problem now was that the game was changing, and the only
hand he had was not one he wanted to play. Time was ticking down, and he
had to step off of this path before it was too late.
His eyes opened again. He had moved. A mirror was propped up in
front of him, leaning against a corkboard. A series of articles dated in the
future was pinned to it. One headline consumed his attention. “Separatist
Vagabond Arrested, Time Travel Machine Destroyed in Explosion.” The
photo was a clear image of a man kneeling in a street. Guns pointed at him
as flames curled in watery reflections. The obvious spectacle was not what
captured Pluto. The man was looking directly into the camera. Despite an
attempt at stoicism, Pluto could trace the betrayal written all over it, the
sadness overflowing in his eyes.
Pluto met his eyes in the mirror. Three reflections stood behind
him, smiling. He could do this no longer.
“But you already have,” breathed an archaic voice into his ear.
“There is no stopping fate, godling,” another cackled.
“You can deny nothing that which your heart beats true.” The last
Fate brought a chilled breath across Pluto’s neck.
“I refuse this!” Pluto called out, whirling away. He was entirely
penned in by the infernal strings. A decaying woman stood a few feet away,
watching him with a smile on her face. Her hair was white and falling out,
shorn roughly to her skull. Ragged clothes engulfed her emaciated frame.
A wind could have blown her over, yet she stood with her chin held high.
Something must have crossed Pluto’s face, as she clucked and shook her
head at him.
“You have grown conflicted, Pluto.” She leveled him with a look that
could move boulders. “Or shall I say Hades?” The name was a nail across his
back. The Fates drifted freely, teetering and glowing.
“He is I and I am him. The name no longer matters.” Pluto called to
the shadows around the room. He could feel the mirage of what he used to
be, the coldness he used to command like a scepter, and the apathy he had
hidden so greedily behind. Anything to get away from this specter.
“Could you not have been so much more, godling?”
“Hecate, the world has moved beyond us now.” The old goddess
54

ecame the most animated she had been.
“Oh, but Pluto, you are wrong. Look at you! You’re practically glowing.
You wander these centuries waiting for a death that will never come.
You stand at a crossroads when all you must do is walk forward.” Her voice
grew deeper, beyond her feeble warbling. “I do not understand your conflict.”
“There is no conflict.”
“Lies!” The fates sang in unison.
Hecate rolled her shoulders and moved towards Pluto. The petite
old woman took confidant strides. Pluto willed himself to not move. “You
have always been soft, a child given a toy he does not know how to use. I
had hoped your time away would teach you your place. But now you have
fallen in love with a mortal.”
“I do not love him.” Hecate let out a harsh laugh, raising a wrinkled
finger to wipe away a golden tear.
“That is oddly specific of you.” Pluto closed his eyes, a long string
of Latin curses running through his mind. But he didn’t, not anymore. His
love only brought pain. It was the only thing he knew how to do, but he was
trying to do the right thing. He would not be loved after this.
“You thought you loved Persephone, so you refused to let her go.
Now you know love, and you love your little time traveler, so you are letting
him go. You have learned your lesson, so you think, and you are doing the
world a favor. But what if you are wrong?” Hecate smiled.
“I have to let him go back. This is the only way to stop this. Stop
them. Stop you.” The crushing guilt Pluto had tried for so long to reconcile
began to break against the dam.
“Are you truly stopping the inevitable, godling? Or merely appeasing
a selfish fantasy?”
“Hecate, I tire of this game. Not every reality is a ghost story.”
“Then stop living like one.” Her voice was harsh, eyes hard. “Return
to your home, Pluto. You could be so much more than anyone ever
dreamed.”
“I am not letting this happen again, Hecate! You live in a world of
gods and monsters, but that is not the world that has survived. As much
as anyone thinks otherwise, it’s just mortals now. I refuse to play a part in
your scheming anymore.”
Hecate’s hair billowed around her. “Oh, Pluto, you should have been
55

so much more. We never should have let you grow so attached.”
“Stopping this is not some act of love, or loyalty, or whatever other
human folly you think it to be. Saving the mortals means saving us.” Pluto
forced himself to meet the goddess-witch’s eyes. “Humans took everything
from me. My family, my home, my fate, they washed it all away. The mortals
can all drown in the oceans of their sins for all I care. I refuse to let everything
else go down with it.
“So, this once, you get your wish. It’s time my regent go to rest.
Make no mistake, my allegiance is to no one, no surviving god or hierophant,
and especially not to you. Once this matter is seen to, I return to
my reign. My time among the mortals is over. I know my place, and they
shall know theirs.” Somewhere inside Pluto, something he had not realized
he possessed began to crack. He knew, when he made this pact all those
ages ago, that this would only hurt him. He had not imagined how much so.
His domain was the epitome of the end, and he had finally come to it.
He remembered, centuries ago, thinking he would be grateful to
return home. Now, he knew he was the farthest from it he had ever been.
The paper in his pocket promised this new exile to be an endless one.
Hecate gave him an appraising look. Pluto felt each of his years pile
onto him. He had never wished to know what the end felt like more as he
looked into her ancient eyes.
“I doubted you still had it in you. But are you willing to pay the cost
of your victory?” Hecate pointed to the article behind him. Pluto did not
have to look back at it to know exactly what she meant. The Fates laughed
cruelly. Pluto shook his head, everything he kept so tidily locked away tearing
him apart from the inside.
Calling to the shadows in the room, he twisted them around his fingers
and yanked like a puppetmaster above a stage. It was not until he saw
Hecate mirroring his movement did he question who was in control.
Pluto stumbled back against another mirror. His breath hitched
and he blinked hard. It took his addled mind a moment to catch up and recognize
the hotel bathroom for what it was.Trying to calm down, he let his
head thump against the mirror. He could not stand the thought of seeing
himself, of the nervous energy no one else would still. His jacket threatened
to drag him right back to the Underworld with the weight of its contents.
What must be done must be done. Drowning in thoughts, Pluto
forced himself out the door. The room was economical, not too posh but by
most standards cozy. Gray light reached its tips into the far portion of the
room. Next to the floor-to-ceiling wall of curtains was a stiff armchair. A
56

man lay slumped in the chair, a book opened against his chest, body relaxed
in sleep.
He was alone, at peace, with the staccato tapping of rain against the
windows.
“Tanner,” Pluto said hollowly.
He was immediately awake and pointing a letter opener at him.
Pluto remained standing, perfectly still. Weapons he did not fear. The man,
Tanner, knew this as well. The letter opener lowered as he reached over to
tug on the lamp. A dull light filled the room.
“Pluto?” Tanner asked, evidence of sleep absent from his voice.
The light haloed around him. The brilliant gold of his hair was tousled, and
Pluto fought the urge to smooth it back. Confusion was evident in Tanner’s
features, but his deep brown eyes harbored something disastrously close to
hope.
it.
Pluto despised how he was to be the one fueling and extinguishing
He tore his heart from his chest. “I found the date.”
Tanner blinked rapidly. He stuttered, running a hand through his
hair. Then he laughed, and the pure joy in it made Pluto want to stay forever
in this golden moment. “You–” Pluto took out the paper for him. “Do
you know what this means?” Reaching out to take the slip, his free hand
gripped Pluto’s arm, trying to pull him down, down into his warm happiness.
Pluto pulled away, longing sharpened like a honed sword in his
back. “It means we no longer have a reason to keep meeting. You may return
to your future and your life and leave this past behind you.”
Tanner’s face crumbled under the weight of his confusion. “But
what about you? I can come back to visit you. And surely there’s hope I can
find you in the future, Pluto?”
“The only hope I have for these next two hundred years, Tanner
Therisca–” and at that moment he could not do it. He had gone full circle.
Stealing someone away from their life, only to be their end. Pluto looked
away. He was the same coward he always had been. “–is that you mortals
will either get out of my way, or you will have finally destroyed me.”
“You’re not that person anymore.”
“I never was a person. You merely hoped it to be true.”
“Pluto.”
57

He could barely get the words out, the truth in the lie. “If you return,
you can put an end to The End.”
“But you could help me. Pluto, this is–”
“Trust me when I say I cannot interfere anymore.”
“No, stop with that holier than thou–”
“I am–”
“You belong here, you know that. It doesn’t even have to be with
me, we could–”
Pluto could not listen to him any longer. He never was the strongest
god. Just the most cowardly.
“Goodbye, Tanner. You won’t love me, not after this.” And he left.
Pluto heard the steps behind him, the voice, but he was far too caught up in
his own unraveling to stop. He reached the door first, and when he flung it
open, all that was there were shadows, and he stepped into their embrace.
Then he was on the street, immediately freezing down to his bones in a
drenching rain. All of this could be so easily washed away, but he couldn’t
stop falling. Pounding against the sidewalk, the black cloud he had so desperately
outrun rumbled closer. He collapsed against a railing, gripping the
metal surface. The storm enveloped him, and now he was drowning in his
sins all over again.
As he brought his watery gaze to the river, he saw that every fire
from before was completely extinguished. Fire and water never could mix.
He had never told him before. That was the first time Pluto had acknowledged
out loud what had grown between them for what it was. Love.
If death always wins, why did Pluto feel so alone? He looked out at
the troubled water through his haze. The gods would survive, more or less.
Pluto was returning to his throne more powerful than ever. Everything
was to be as it always was. Pluto the lovesick fool, ending yet another in his
endless games. It was going to happen, one way or another. He had seen the
writing on the wall.
Pluto had played his hand, and he had been dealt out. He shivered
in the cold, sore loser that he was.
A prickle of unease dripped down his spine, a raindrop that burrowed
beneath his coat. A trio of laughing voices floated to his ears. Pluto’s
head shot up, out at the water. Standing below him was the ethereal form of
Hecate. A smile cut across her mouth.
“Two hundred years is a rather long time, Pluto.”
58

“I’ve gone longer, Hecate.”
“Do you realize you have stopped nothing?”
“I have all but delivered Tanner to the authorities in his time. His
arrest will mean the machine is destroyed, and The End will be averted.”
Hecate giggled, then snorted, and finally, the laughs poured out of
her. She choked on them, dust flying from her mouth. Her hands gripped
her middle as if she would come apart at the seams from laughing so hard.
Pluto stared at her blankly. But in his head, everything was shifting.
He knew. He knew, even before she said the words, and he could have
screamed. Oh, what had he done?
“Godling, you have started everything.”
“No, that’s not right. Tanner’s death stops it.”
“Lies,” The Fates countered back with.
Pluto stepped back from the railing.
“Tanner will be locked away, and the threads of time will continue
to fray. His trial will be the most closely scrutinized of all time. It will
inspire millions to try to recreate the impossible. One will beg any deity left
that will listen. Tanner will die, and you will welcome him into your domain.
You will never listen to any prayer again. So I will respond, and The
End will begin, just as planned.”
“No, that’s not…” Pluto saw the article, the fires, the guns. The
heartbreak in Tanner’s eyes. The threads of time and death interweaving
around him, the pull he feels to the charming, insightful man who had
taught him so much, cared beyond reason, and possibly, probably, loved
him, too.
He saw that thread, bright red bleeding away into gray, and he saw
it snap.
Pluto felt cleaved in two. Pluto was nothing but a fool. Tanner was
just another choice he would never reconcile. Another pointless soul in a
kingdom he never asked for. Pluto was the god of hauntings, and how he
hated it.
“Now do you understand, Pluto, that this world is a world where
the monsters rule like gods? You play with a mortal for centuries. You never
change, and it will be the death of everything. There were no crossroads, no
choices. You only had to keep walking your path.”
Pluto can barely speak. He feels as if the ground will crack beneath.
“I was the Greek hero who so desperately tried to outrun fate.”
59

“And you know better than any what happens to them.” Pluto
squeezed his eyes shut.
Hecate laughed and laughed at him. “In all these years, you never
surprised me once.” With a final chorus of cackles, she was gone.
Pluto was left alone on the bridge, water churning, clouds pressing
in, thoughts a full senate of knives closing him in. The world had well and
truly ended. He finally responded to Hecate, the mist smudging around
him. The ridges of the water looked like hills. The buildings, ruined pantheons.
The cobbles a throne he never wanted.
“They arrive in the Underworld.”
Pluto had finally returned home.
60

Raymond Tamez III
Genesis X Revelation
Alpha
In Nomine Deus
Venimus de pulvere stellarum
Manus dei efficta
Evolved through the Codes of the Heavens
Quantum portal to Inner-Revelation
Cursed on the land, the sea, our life
Blood shall be shed for our sacrifice
The membrane of Akashic History
Embed the beams of Souls
The fire and its Rage
Marks the torment of our Sorrows
Apokalypsis, Revelation for of all
Take a look up to the sky
With its thunder and its might
It’s the Archangel Mikael
And the Serpent Lucifer
The Empyrean battle of the World
An Ethereal wonder to behold
And there, the Dragon plunged to Hell
And salvation had thus Prevailed
Alpha et Omega in Nomine Dei
Angeli Triumphantis
Nova Genesis… Neo-Revelatio…
*2nd Place - Robb Jackson High School Poetry Awards, 2023
61

Roy Gomez
A Wooden Castle
A blast of unseasonably cold air storms through the plain as summer
holds its final days of warmth captive. Violent gusts of wind assault the
cedar board and batten siding. The oxblood painted facade, now withered
by time, poses gauntly beneath the rumbling overcast sky. The
macabre visage points true north, never viewing a sunrise or sunset.
Inside the double Dutch doors, the earthy aromas of barley, leather, iron,
and wood no longer alleviate the banality of every day. The dull rustic
interior matches the sisal fiber rope that hangs from spikes nailed into
load bearing posts. Scant light created by the naked bulbs hanging from
the gambrel roof truss beams cast deep shadows where children once
played and laughed, chased by golden dogs with spirited yaps. Deadly
iron, cast as scythes, shovels, and pitchforks are strewn aside; a patina
of rust has claimed them. In the tack room, the curry combs, dandy
brushes, and leather saddles sit unused. As a result, unkempt stallions
stare somberly in their stables. Overhead, the cooing of pigeons can be
heard in the hayloft. There is no medal of valor for their unremitting
toil. The chickens below peck at the dirt floor searching for loose grain,
but the insuppressible appetite of the silos used to hold fodder are in
desperate need of sustenance.
Outside, the heavy clouds begin to lighten their load. The downfall beats
against the wooden shingles, steadily rising into a deafening white
noise. Rain muddies the dirt and straw at the entrance of the drive bay
doors. The iron weathervane mounted above vocalizes its squeaky song,
hopelessly spinning, searching for direction.
62

Steve Brisendine
green tomatoes
these vines will be gone
after this evening; this
is our final chance
to turn waste into harvest,
to steal dinners from the mouth
of the compost pile
(cool, smooth, heavy in the hand,
the sort my mother
would choose – Be sure to use good
cornmeal, I can hear her say)
63

Steve Brisendine
Liberal, Kansas, with Easy Access to
Faraway Places: Dream I
Everyone has come home for the weekend,
although I am the only one who has lived in
this part of our fused houses; the other two
never had basements.
The utility room has grown while I was not
around to prune it back; it now doubles as the
senior citizens’ Sunday school classroom in
a Baptist church in the Kansas City suburbs,
though the washer and dryer can be loud and
disrupt the morning lesson.
Its new twin bed will do for me; let someone
else have my old room across the hall, and be
haunted by the phantom of my potential.
The country club golf course is just beyond
the back fence; I could get in a quick nine, or
even eighteen if it could be cajoled into
becoming the municipal course, but the sun
has fallen pinky-width low to the horizon
and I never much liked the game anyway.
Tomorrow will be busy: a baseball game in
Kansas City, then transporting some great
bulky something or things from vaguely
Ottawa to perhaps Wichita, all before noon,
The load requires a trailer; this will make
the interchange at Emporia tricky, but I or
64

perhaps a still-unset we will manage, even
if the cargo itself remains unidentifiable.
It appears to be both carcass and appliance
(Is there such a thing as self-freezing meat?)
with a long space down the top for a cord;
whether spinal or electrical, or some hybrid,
it will help to secure the thing for travel.
In the meantime, I will read ghost stories
and dig through this old desk for all the
homework I never handed in; this alone
could take what hours remain of the night.
65

Steve Brisendine
Kansas City Which is Not Really
Kansas City: Dream IX
A warm wet May or June afternoon, gray above and green below,
and I have descended to the lowest level of the museum; one
long room, open on more or less the west side to an overgrown
ravine, a tangle of thin-branched, white-barked almost-trees.
It is either the Nelson-Atkins or the Kansas City Museum,
though also both and neither, depending upon whether
the thing or things contained in this discreetly lit display case
is (or possibly are)
a polished white gleaming narwhal skeleton,
a stylized bas-relief of a narwhal, executed in white marble
or
a matched set of crossed lances, ebony-shafted and of unknown
provenance, whose deadly white points are narwhal tusks.
Each takes a turn in the case, each time I look away. I hope it is not my
task to make a final decision; this rain has made me too sleepy to think.
66

Steve Brisendine
Un/bidden
Four nights
since tiny ghosts
and their kin walked my street,
yet phantoms masked as my younger
self still
haunt me;
I know of no exorcism,
no charm to counter this
blessed curse of
recall.
67

Steve Brisendine
The Maybe-Ghost of Mike Sparrow
I have no face on mental file to put above the name,
only scattered impressions of a lanky politeness
who wore a Liberal Bee Jays baseball uniform
(oh yes, I have please and no thank you heard the jokes,
all one of them) and dated my fifteen-years-older
sister, one Kansas summer when I was four, maybe five.
He pitched one season for the town team, same field
(tucked inside the racetrack at the county fairgrounds)
as Guidry, Hargrove, more than a couple others
you might know – all college boys in those days,
headed back or on to various somewheres else
at the end of our wind-blasted grain-dust summers;
Whatever paid Mike Sparrow’s bills after that,
it sure as death and taxes wasn’t throwing fastballs.
But I was four, maybe five, and even with his head
turned to watch one of his pitches clear the chain links
next to the backstretch (just 365 to dead center, with
favorable winds from behind the concession stand)
he was still a minor deity, the demigod of perseverance
at the dry far edge of the pancake prairie earth,
68

or at the least a shirttail Titan in white polyester,
shrugging off the weight of a double-digit ERA.
He left me his signature – small, blue, meticulous,
no well-practiced scrawl – on the horsehide curvature
of a new Rawlings ball. It rested, part of a packratty
jumble, on my dresser for four or five more years;
eventually, when my parents insisted I take my own
shot at embarrassing myself on a baseball field,
I took it outside and put it into a semblance of play.
My father pitched meat to me, and I to him,
on the hardpack grade-school playground just across
Clay Avenue. I swung often, if not judiciously.
There was contact – at least when it was just us.
Still, the ink held up longer than I thought it might.
Looking back, I sometimes see Mike Sparrow’s name
fresh and hopeful, but more often blurred, ash-battered.
My sister is gone; he might be, too. Perhaps I have
thought of him more since that year than she did.
If the Heaven carved out of Iowa corn is closed to him,
let him stride out of a wheat field and throw smoke.
69

Emily Clemente
Those Birds
In those days, Sandy Allison was wearing white. Her skirts were white,
her boots were white, the little pearl clips that held back both sides of her
hair were white. The tennis racket she carried around with her wherever
she went was white, too, even though I’m pretty sure she was supposed
to give that back to the school after she got kicked off the girls’ team. Not
that anyone would ever bother to ask her for it back anyways. They didn’t
like to say it, but I could tell people were sometimes scared of Sandy, the
same way they were sometimes scared of me when they saw my face and
realized how I looked exactly like my mother if she were a boy, the same
timid eyes and frame and everything.
Sandy and I hung around near the abandoned drive-in a lot, me so
I could avoid Michael Senior until choir practice and she so her mother
wouldn’t know she wasn’t playing tennis anymore. We always sat facing
the metal fence, her white boots dangling off the tulip ledge and my choir
hymnal folded into the pocket of my corduroy jacket. We liked feeding little
bits of our leftover black-and-white cookies to the birds on West Kinley
Street.
Here, Mickey, she said to me, handing me a chocolate cookie-half.
She always did that, give me the side she didn’t want. Sometimes it was
chocolate and sometimes it was vanilla. I liked both, so I didn’t really care.
We ate as we sat, in slow, meticulous bites, because it was better to savor it
that way so we could remember how it tasted in our mouths.
We should go visit there one day, Sandy said to me, aiming a pointed
toe from the ledge. When it’s dark. We could bring flashlights and a projector
and watch a movie.
We shouldn’t do that, I said.
She sighed. Oh, Mickey.
She was always saying that to me, oh, Mickey, oh Mickey, like my name
was the answer to every unpunctuated silence. I knew Sandy wanted the
drive-in to be a remnant of something enchanting, where if you looked
70

close enough, you could still find the blinking lights and music and the hot
smell of cars and popcorn behind the overgrown weeds. But to me, that
place had always been abandoned. It terrified me sometimes. I couldn’t
look at it for too long or I would start to feel sick, like I was being watched
by a string of broken eyes.
I’d live there if I could, you know, she said. I’d sit there by myself, and
face that wooden movie screen all day, the one all eaten away by kudzu and
vandals and no one would ever bother me.
You’re crazy, I told her, and she laughed, but I didn’t mean it as a
joke. Sandy Allison really was crazy. Everyone knew she’d punched Ruthie
Brinker and that was why she’d gotten kicked off the girls’ team.
Sandy, don’t you think it’s ugly?
She looked at the drive-in for a long while, trying to think of what to
say back. Then she tossed her last little bit of crumb toward the birds.
No, I think it’s beautiful.
I looked at her again but I didn’t say anything. In those days I was thirteen
and I frightened myself if I said what I was really thinking out loud. I
didn’t think there was anything beautiful about something that reminded
me of a decomposing body.
71
___
Sandy Allison loved horror movies. That was the first thing she ever
told me about herself. She wanted to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds
because her mother wouldn’t let her see it when it played in the movie
theater, the real movie theater, the one that overtook the drive-in when
teenagers decided that they didn’t care much for watching from their cars
anymore and crowding behind foggy windows.
I wanted to be a boy scout but because of Michael Senior, I never could
be. But I never told that to Sandy Allison. Instead, I was a choir boy. Which
was fine. I had an okay voice. My mother first loved Michael Senior for his
voice, he always reminded me.
Sandy and I didn’t have much in common, but maybe that’s why we got
along so well. We didn’t have to talk about much to be around each other.
She knew I was Michael Senior’s son and he was the music director at the
West Kinley Street Baptist church. I knew she’d been kicked off the girls’
tennis team and her mother didn’t know about it, and really, that was all
that mattered.

Sandy Allison’s mother picked out all her outfits, and Sandy told me
that she might not have minded so much anyways if it wasn’t her mother
who had been picking them out. If she’d leave her house in a sweater and
a pair of stockings, she’d change into another sweater and another pair of
stockings. Always the complete opposite, she told me, but I couldn’t help
but think it was always exactly the same. She’d disappear behind the leafy
bushes while I watched around to make sure that nobody was looking. No
one ever was, but sometimes I wondered what she would have wanted me
to do if someone had. It was sort of funny, looking back, Sandy Allison
putting all of her trust in me while she rolled off her stockings and lifted
her arms into a different sweater just so she could spite her mother.
72
___
Mickey, do you like hotdogs, Sandy asked me one day, and I told her
I had to think about it first. The only kinds I’d ever really had were the
ones that Michael Senior made, and those were always chargrilled to the
point where they were black on all sides and tasted like ash between your
teeth. I’d had hotdogs once at the church cookout too, but those weren’t
much better. One of the ladies from the women’s ministry had made an
entire batch of pigs in a blanket, and I guess she hadn’t cooked them long
enough, because the bread was wet and doughy, and the hotdogs tasted
raw and sour when I’d bitten into them.
I don’t care for them, I told Sandy when we got to the bakery-deli, and
she frowned as she took a bite of her vanilla-half black-and-white cookie
and told me that she would buy a hotdog herself, and I could try some
too if I wanted any, and it didn’t matter if I didn’t like it, because she was
buying it. I watched her go in the store and I waited on one of the little
ledges outside, where someone had planted pink and yellow tulips that
might have looked pretty if it weren’t for the boarded-up drive in in the
distance.
Here, Mickey, she said.
Sandy Allison came back with one of those little baskets lined with
red checkered paper. The edges were shiny with grease and hotness, and
there was a big hotdog bun in the middle with a whole layer of toppings
and fixings between both sides of the bun. Sandy Allison insisted that we
could share it and I asked her how. We didn’t have a fork or anything like
that, and Sandy said we’d have to split it with our hands. I asked her how
again, it wasn’t like we could stick our fingers in the middle or we’d get
hotdogs toppings all over our hands, and she said we’d have to hold each

side of the hotdog bun and pull carefully, slowly, and we wouldn’t get
toppings anywhere. We did just that, over the paper basket. It took about
ten seconds but it felt like forever watching that hotdog rip apart. We
were sitting next to each other on the ledge, and I could feel the scalloped
edges of her sock against my ankle. Eat it, Sandy Allison told me, and she
ate her side, and I ate mine, and we were quiet, the heat in the air holding
all the grease and sweetness and questions we ever could have wanted to
ask each other.
Michael Senior told me that the church was having a pancake breakfast,
and I thought maybe I could invite Sandy Allison. If it was another
cookout, I would have faked sick and just stayed home, but Michael
Senior promised me that no one from the women’s ministry was bringing
pigs in a blanket this time, just pancakes, and maybe some eggs and
orange juice, so I decided that it would be alright. When I asked Sandy
Allison, she’d seemed a bit strange about the whole idea. She asked if we
had to bless the pancakes before we ate them, and if it was against the
Lord’s will to be eating bacon on Sundays. I told her we’d probably say a
prayer before everyone ate, and there was nothing written in the Bible
about it being a sin to eat bacon on Sundays, at least not that I knew of,
and she decided that she was happy about that, because she loved eating
bacon on Sunday mornings.
Sandy Allison showed up at my house in a blue dress with a white
sweater and a big white sash around her waist that tied into a bow on
her back. She said that she and her mother were going to try and make
some cinnamon rolls, but her mother had burned the cinnamon rolls, and
besides, she didn’t know if it was a potluck-type thing anyways. Michael
Senior told her that it was quite alright, and she didn’t need to bring anything,
all the food would be in the fellowship hall, and we all loaded into
our station wagon. Sandy Allison smiled as she sat next to me, looking
straight ahead as we spoke. She spoke a lot as we sat there, about how
she’d never really been to a pancake breakfast before, let alone one at a
church. Michael Senior liked her, I think, because he responded nicely,
like he did to the kids at Sunday School, and I tried to talk to her while
I watched him. It was funny to speak that way, knowing she was right
beside me when I wasn’t even looking.
We were a little early to the pancake breakfast, so Michael Senior let
me and Sandy Allison grab our own table while he and some other men
from the church set up the serving stations. Sandy Allison laid her hands
over her skirt and crossed her ankles so the scallops in her socks brushed
over one another, and she kept glancing around the fellowship hall, as
though it were this big and beautiful place, when really it was just a tiny
73

crammed room in the back of the church that smelled like cleaning supplies
and leftover barbecue. People flooded in eventually, they all seemed
to come at once, it felt like, and Sandy Allison asked me softly if I knew all
of them. I told her that of course I knew all of them, but I didn’t say hello
to any of them, and none of them said hello to me. They all said hello to
Michael Senior, who was scooping eggs at the serving table, and once we’d
all settled down, we bowed our heads for the blessing and Sandy Allison
was quiet and prayerful.
When we took her home later, Sandy Allison told me that those were
some of the best pancakes she’d ever had, really, and that it was enlightening,
all of it really was. Then she asked me, and mind you, we were there,
standing on her doorstep while Michael Senior waited in the station wagon
in her driveway, if I still wanted to go to the abandoned drive-in sometime
to watch The Birds. I whispered, of course, even though I was terrified and
I didn’t know how or when.
___
Sandy Allison and I went walking to the bakery that next Friday after
school. We stopped to get a black-and-white cookie, and then we asked for
hotdog. We’d mastered how to pull it apart by now, a careful tug on each
side and it would cut itself cleanly right down the middle.
I think I know how we can watch The Birds, Sandy told me, and I
stopped chewing my hotdog to show her that I was listening. We’ll have
to go when it’s dark, she said, because that’s the only way we can project a
movie and see it well. I told her that made sense, and she said, plus, that’s
the only way we could go and no one would see us.
Sandy Allison and I decided to go visit the theater when it was dark the
Friday after the pancake breakfast. We couldn’t watch the movie yet; we
still didn’t have a projector and we still didn’t have a car, but we could go to
the drive-in and see what it was all about, just so we’d know what it might
be like, a few years later when we were old enough, and how it might feel
to be in a place like that when you were all alone. The plan was that we’d
just go get our cookies and hotdog as usual, then go home and come back
as soon as the sky started to turn orange. I was terrified, of course, but I’d
already promised.
Sandy Allison was going to tell her mother that she’d forgotten one of
her bracelets on the ledge, and I was going to tell Michael Senior that I’d
taken off my watch near Hunt’s Bakery-Deli and that’s why we had to go
74

ack and get them. For good measure, she and I decided that we’d really
lose our things and leave them there, just in case anyone got suspicious,
so Sandy Allison helped me hide my watch behind the bench near Hunt’s
Bakery-Deli, and I showed Sandy Allison where she could place her bracelet
amongst the tulips in the little display on the ledge in front of the
abandoned drive-in. This way, we’d be close by anyways once we’d gotten
there. It made sense. If anyone asked, we could just say we’d decided to
walk over because we were close by. But we knew that no one would ask
us anyways because our plan was perfect.
I saw Sandy Allison getting all jittery with excitement that Friday
when we walked home from school. She was so stirred up that she got us
three cookies from Hunt’s Bakery-Deli, that was three halves for both of
us, like eating one and a half cookies each. She said it was celebratory,
that it was special, and when we went back for a hotdog, she swung her
ankles back and forth against the ledge. I couldn’t just feel her scalloped
socks, I could feel her whole ankle, like she kept trying to get to mine, but
was just sitting there, rocking carelessly, and for some reason that frightened
me even more.
We were careful when we hid the items. One of us stood watch while
the other person fulfilled the plan. Sandy Allison thought it would be a
good idea if we hid each other’s things, since we were too attached to
them and knew them too well ourselves. I didn’t really think it made a
whole lot of sense to me, since we’d already agreed where we were going
to put them, but I went along with it because it didn’t really matter. All I
knew was that we would be there, and then at the drive-in, and it was all
happening tonight. I asked Sandy Allison if she knew the plan, and she
said yes, and she kept saying how excited she was, how she’d always loved
horror movies and how she wanted to see The Birds, and even though we
wouldn’t be watching it tonight, her mother would never know and that
made her incredibly happy.
That night at dinner, I tried to think of a good way to make it seem
like I realized that I forgot my watch. What time is it, I decided to ask Michael
Senior. And he said to me, as he was taking a bite of mashed potatoes,
don’t you have a watch, son? And then I put on my best face of panic
and said, oh no! I think I left my watch near Hunt’s Bakery-Deli today
when I was with Sandy Allison!
I thought I had gotten him but he gave me a quizzical look and asked
why I had taken the watch off in the first place, so I thought quickly and
told him that I didn’t want to get any hotdog grease on it, and eventually
he let me go, but told me to come back quick, will you, son, because
75

it was starting to get dark outside. I bolted out the door, and thinking
back now, I’m sure Michael Senior knew, he had to have known that I was
going somewhere else because why else would he have let me go. I waited
by Hunt’s Bakery-Deli, which was closed by then, my back turned to the
abandoned theater, and watched the sky fade.
Sandy Allison arrived a few minutes later, and her hair was all down
without any pins. She was wearing a big coat and carrying something in
her other arm, which looked like a sack with flowers on it, but I couldn’t
really tell. I asked her why she looked like that and she gave me a look
and said that this was what her mother had told her to wear, that it was
too cold outside to be in nothing but her skirt and a buttoned blouse and
a pair of scalloped socks with her Mary Janes, and her mother made her
put on a big fur coat. But I don’t care much for this fur coat, she said, so
I’m going to swap my clothes out for something else when we get closer.
I didn’t really see why it mattered what Sandy Allison wore if we
were just going to the drive-in and we weren’t going to be seeing anyone,
and if it was going to be dark, but I also didn’t see why it mattered to argue
about it, so I told her it made sense and we grabbed my watch. By the
time we headed over to the ledge, it was almost fully dark. If it was the
summertime, we would have heard crickets by now, but since it was cold
these days, there weren’t any crickets, just this loud, impending silence.
We were standing right next to the ledge, the one with all of the tulips,
and Sandy Allison just kept looking over her shoulder at the drive-in
movie theater, like she couldn’t believe it or something, and I told her,
hey, Sandy Allison, you ought to get your bracelet now, it’s behind those
tulips, and then we can head over to the movie theater.
Sandy Allison still didn’t say anything, so I asked her again and then
she quietly shook her head and said, no, I don’t want my bracelet. I think
I’m just going to leave it there, because I don’t want it back anymore. I
told her that I didn’t really understand, but that was alright, because it
was dark by now and we could finally head over to the theater, but Sandy
Allison said that she wasn’t ready just yet, that she had to get dressed and
ready first, and then she took off her fur coat.
Sandy, what are you doing? I asked, stepping back.
Oh, it’s dark enough that you can’t see me, she said, slipping the flower
dress over her head as she took off her blouse and skirt from underneath
and left them all in a pile on the ledge with her fur coat.
I’d never seen Sandy Allison wear a dress like that before, and something
told me that it wasn’t really Sandy Allison’s dress, that it was her
76

mother’s. I don’t know why, but that made me feel strange, it made me feel
frightened, but it irritated me all at the same time.
Let’s just go, Sandy, I said, and I grabbed her by the arm.
Hold it, Mickey, she said, and I reluctantly let go of her, just wanting to
go in there and get it all over with.
We walked over to the gate and I realized how dark it was. So dark, in
fact, that I couldn’t see the theater. There were shadowy frames, but no
weeds or plywood or glass lights, and in the darkness of it all, it didn’t even
look abandoned, it didn’t even look like anything, and suddenly I couldn’t
even think of anything to be afraid of.
It’s not scary, I realized. No, it’s not scary when you’re standing in front
of nothing.
We’re here, Sandy! I exclaimed. We’re really here! I jumped over the
chains and began to run toward the theater, my breath feeling hot against
the coldness of the air, but when I turned around, I realized that Sandy
Allison wasn’t anywhere near me, she was all the way back on West Kinley
Street, staring through the metal gate, like the cold had plastered her
frozen.
Sandy? I called.
From far away, she looked very small. I walked back over to look at her
through the lattice of the metal and all I could really see were her eyes.
Mickey, it’s awful dark in there, she said, and it was more of a whisper.
Sandy, come on, I said, we can’t just stand here all night.
I grabbed her arm to try and pull her in.
No, she said, and she yanked herself away. I’m not going in there.
Why, I asked.
Are you kidding me, she asked. It’s terrifying.
Sandy, I don’t understand you, what about The Birds, what about the
whole plan? I yelled, come on!
Mickey, no! Sandy Allison said, and before I had time to say anything
else, she turned and ran away. Her Mary Janes squeaked briefly against
the concrete of the pavement, and then everything was silent and I was
all alone in the abandoned drive-in theater, staring out onto a pitch-black
West Kinley Street through the openings in a metal fence.
77

78
___
The last time I ever saw Sandy Allison, she was eating a hotdog on the
ledge near the bakery-deli. I was on my way to choir practice, wearing my
jacket with the big pockets so I could hide my hymnal.
Hi Mickey, she said, and she smiled at me.
Hi Sandy, I said, but I didn’t smile back. We knew each other still, but
now only by name.
She asked me if I wanted some of her hotdog. I can’t, I told her. My father
was waiting for me in the chapel, probably stalling the congregation
with the church piano.
I know you can’t, she said, choir practice, I didn’t forget. But I figured
I’d ask anyways. She tilted her chin and I noticed that her hair was pinned
back now with pearl clips that matched her scalloped socks. They were
big and bumpy enough to be ugly, but they framed her head with such a
perfect symmetry that I almost didn’t mind.
She was looking down at her Mary Janes. I don’t think we should go to
the drive-in again, she said.
Why, I asked.
Because, she began, well, my mom…and The Birds, well…Mickey,
listen, she said. I lied. I’ve never actually seen a horror movie before. My
mom won’t let me. I’m sorry, Mickey, she said. I’m sorry I lied.
It’s okay, I told her. I’ve never seen a horror movie either.
Maybe we really shouldn’t hang around each other anymore. I think
it’s just because we’re too…well, you know…my mom found out that I got
kicked off the tennis team and everything. I think I lie a lot, Mickey, and
I’m sorry.
How did she find that out?
I told her, she said, and she was still looking at her Mary Janes.
Geez, Sandy. I said. Why’d you do it? Why’d you punch Ruthie Brinker?
Was it that hard to keep your hands to yourself?
Oh, Sandy said, I had to punch her, because she was saying things
about me that made me feel bad. Things that weren’t true, things that I
didn’t want to hear.

Like what?
She was saying I was crazy, that I got it from my mother. That one day
I was going to be just like her.
Anything else?
Well she was also saying I was sweet on the choir director’s son and
anyone who loved him was crazy too. That he had dead eyes. Like his
mother.
Wait, Sandy, she was saying you loved me?
Yeah.
What did you say back?
Nothing.
What do you mean, nothing?
I punched her.
I have to go, I said, and I shuffled my feet against the sidewalk. I could
have stayed and explained to her but I was already late, so I decided to just
wave and walk away, and I heard her say, bye Mickey, softly, as I made my
way up West Kinley Street.
Bye, I said.
Then I walked away. Maybe I realized those were the last words she’d
ever say to me, maybe I didn’t, but either way that was the end of Sandy
Allison. Not the actual end of Sandy Allison, but the end of Sandy Allison to
me, and when you’re thirteen, what difference does it make.
I looked behind me and I saw her sitting there alone, watching a group
of birds that had gathered at her feet. She was trying to feed them little
bits of her hotdog, but every time she tossed a piece, they all would fly
away. She kept trying until all of her hotdog was gone, and when all the
birds had gone away, her eyes were all glossy and hot like she wanted to
cry.
Somewhere far back, if I squint my eyes hard enough, I can still see
Sandy Allison eating that hotdog in the late-afternoon sun. I can see her
as the demolition crew announces that they are going to commence, as the
drive-in gets ready to be gone once and for all, no more exposed bricks, no
more wire frame of a broken projection screen, no more shattered lights,
no more boarded entrance littered with plywood just nothing.
79

I can see her again like I am thirteen, like I’m walking down West
Kinley Street, like I’m entering the chapel, like Michael Senior glares at me
from the piano over his bifocals while I extract my hymnal from my jacket
pocket. I see her like the sky frowns at me through the stained-glass windows,
through the openings in the sky, and I keep trying to figure out why,
what it is about Sandy Allison on that ledge that day that can’t seem to
unstick itself from my mind. Maybe because I’d never seen someone wear
anything so stark-bright before until that day, all white and symmetrical.
Or maybe, I realize now, as the theater goes crumbling, it isn’t because
of Sandy Allison at all. Maybe it’s because of those birds.
80

Ace Boggess
Changing the Guts
I’ll try today, watch a video
on YouTube like those about
how to remove a blood stain
from a sock, build a fire tornado,
play the chords to “Sympathy
for the Devil.” I’m not proficient
at mechanics: switching out
spark plugs in my car,
hooking up a refrigerator.
At least I recognize the parts:
bulbous floater like a breast
that I’m afraid to touch;
simple hook; chain which, like all chains,
brings me post-traumatic stress.
I have to figure out
how they go together &
set them in their proper slots
until they function, until I do
without feeling like a bear
on a cycle, out of place.
81

Ace Boggess
Slow Down
1.
Dr. Fauci tells senators the virus
could blossom
like a mushroom cloud
over cities of America
if we don’t slow down.
2.
I waited a lifetime
to race hands along highways of the inner thigh,
lips over the unpaved slope of neck.
I wasted a lifetime on slowness.
3.
Senators challenge, demanding answers,
their desire as hasty as mine,
theirs for coins showering like confetti
across the reopening nation—
a re-Awakening
minus the Enlightenment.
4.
I missed out on first chances,
so slow I stalled,
always pre- something,
slow, slow, slow.
5.
I won’t find an exit from this road.
There are signs ahead I slow to read.
Each one tells me Stop or Miles to Go.
82

Ace Boggess
Preface as Postscript
Now, the Woodward book, the president
confessing in advance he lies
(will lie) about the virus,
choosing a deceptive faith
over pragmatism like the joke
about the guy who drowns in a flood
after refusing car, boat, & helicopter,
then blames his god
for not answering prayers
of salvation. & there are tapes.
& there is proof: the president’s
inarticulate voice. & there is death
banging its boots
to release the scorpions in them
as the country nears 200,000 stung.
83

Ace Boggess
Invitation
First in a year, to entertain strangers,
a public appearance—
pandemic still a stifling mist.
I miss people though they frighten me,
have since before the virus
set out on its epic quest
to kiss every pair of lips on Earth.
What can I say but yes?
Not to read my verses,
that erotic act I love to share
with others, but to write instant poems
at a street fair hosted by the laureate.
Place me there, a mask
on top of the mask I’ve worn,
the one that swears I’m human.
Needle pricks will have vanished
from my arm by then,
chances of death diminishing daily,
chances of life igniting.
84

Liam Leslie
My Piety. And Their Portraits.
Dry, sterile moments find my mind mulling the modern spaces we live
in. Images of tiresome apartments come and go in predictable shapes,
sizes, and colors. My memory rolls the uniform tape. Morning drives
display ready-make fragments, that by the same dusk, are assembled
and occupied by the equally hurried. They are listed as “Move-In Ready”.
And every time they come to market, blissful exaggeration follows.
Always a grand and animated production. The commercial processions
mark, occasion, and breed expectation. They celebrate the new.
I remember my own tours. Routined, smartly dressed, and orderly
extroverts invariably preside. Casually outfitting their most solicitous
smile, parading around, noting this spec and that feature.
Fully furnished—crisp white paint—wet, static smell latched
to the air—fresh lightbulbs humming LED raw—stainless-steel
appliances glistening—paper thin walls—”a polite community”—
their promise—and “homey, in due time”.
Those. Those are not the small, sharp margins of existence in which I
may nestle. There. There I cannot find the ethereal touches. There, piety,
reverence, and loyalty are void.
In those sterile spaces, I find no pleasantly frail, humbly purposed,
buttercream-colored cushions with soft floral embroidery. The
ones bare of plastic keeping them from the time, the wooden chairs, and
the guests that sit on them. The ones that have seen the seats, smiles,
and strife of family. I find no old-as-shit antique lamps, no dusty, cultured
curtains, and no portraits of familiar people I have never met.
I enter a proper home. The one of my grandparents, and I accept the
breath of something more. I respire those lingering smells of ageless
and mingled odors. Banal days of before anchor quietly here. My senses
move through both past and present at the same time, the composite of
85

normalcy, of domesticity. I walk comfortably unaware, becoming just
another stride that makes the creak.
My grandmother is spirited and resolute. She is from a small
farming town in Oklahoma. She is modest and proud. She is a widow.
She is a bereaved sibling. She is the devoted matriarch of a long-empty
home. And she is so faithful.
I take the stories with her iced tea.
She speaks while the air folds like an old quilt, and I fade away
from sense and time. The walls give way to their impulse. They transform
into echo chamber. A dramatic, conducted cacophony of tales
heard before, featuring characters I have never known.
easy.
There is a terse, muted disclosure that things were not always
Then, she continues. My ears meet my great-grandparents, my
great-uncle, and my grandfather. Her affectionate recounts become my
unattached mourning. They become the source of my eidolon. Depictions
of “her acute memory, able to recall the exact dates of postcards
sent decades before”, and “his insatiable desire for ridiculous trivial
knowledge found in encyclopedias”, and “his soft, compelling way with
words”.
My mind begins to abandon the sounds of the refiltered stories
drifting about, and I now see instead of hear. I see the mounted frames,
the memories frozen in time. Their smiling faces exhibiting that same
heroic gleam found in the implications of their stories.
The details between the floorboards, the records retained by the
rings of the cottonwood trees, the captured sounds of years within the
walls, they all want to say more about the glanced over adversity of kin.
But the photos assert she will remain faithful. Thus, the spirits in the
stills hold their legend. Her faith forces my trust. Her stories instruct
my piety. Their photos establish my eidolon. And so, warmly, I greet my
ancestors.
86

Sandra Valerio
When I Walk by Robert A’s
Early mornings I breathe in
the thickness of this elegiac dampened darkness,
determined to turn the corner between night and day
here along a Rainbowed Lane of shadows.
My neon shoes crunch, crack, and fracture
the sticks where an already broken twig meets its cousins-
A chorus of newly-birthed orphaned
limbs in an endless tussle.
A low hum breaks my gaze.
The slipshod before me
splits, scatters, spreads open the sound
a purring murmur pulls alongside me and my dogs.
Even now, after his departure
Robert’s smile greets me on this corner
where I expected his wave without words,
busy man that he is.
He stops anyway and always. Says to me:
“Those are some good-looking dogs you got there.”
“You’ve got a good habit going there with your morning walks.”
“I’m proud of you.”
Me.
Little Miss Me here
missing the little things I’d hear
when I walk by Robert A’s house.
87

Natasha Santana Loving
He Walked Alongside Me
I don’t really get snow. It’s not in my blood. Well, I’m sure it is, but not in
recent memory. I wasn’t raised on the stuff. I don’t understand the ways
it sticks to my boots, transforming into water just long enough to sneak
into the cracks and crevices before phasing back into its hard, icy state.
The ground is frozen. The trees are barren. The sun whispers through
thick clouds, dense with swirls of black and gray. The cold Wyoming
wind, peppered with pine and horse shit, is such a far cry from home.
The desert.
The Sonoran Desert. The land where ancient saguaros stretch their
terrible arms to the endless blue sky, tearing holes into the blanket of
night, just big enough to let pinpricks of heaven shine through. Where
the dust fills your nose and the sun scorches your skin. Snakes. Scorpions.
Taquerias.
He’s here. He’s followed me. He walked alongside me, I think. Out of the
Arizona desert. Over the Santa Catalina Mountains and through the
Phoenix Valley. He swam across the mighty Colorado. He wove through
the grand Arches. He ascended the proud Rockies and settled down here.
In this laundromat on the corner of 4th and Clark. Across from me. Well.
Technically, there’s a laundry bag across from me. But his eyes are there.
Like they’ve always been.
Thai and Lao people love their superstition. Ghosts and spirits. Nāgas.
Devilish people stomping on ants, only to be reborn under the crushing
sole of a shoe. Who can begrudge the superstition? Life is confusing.
Sometimes bleak. Sometimes boring. Sometimes beautiful, now and
then. Why shouldn’t ghosts live in the trees? Why shouldn’t dragons
course along rivers? Why shouldn’t gods themselves pull the tender
shoots of plants from the frozen earth?
Why shouldn’t my great-grandfather sit across from me in this laundromat?
88

On the corner of 4th and Clark.
In Laramie, Wyoming.
I think he followed me even before the desert. I think he followed me
from lush, tropical jungles. Through herds of water buffalo and fields of
rice. Across rivers dotted with lotus and lilypads. Through the mouths of
catfish and the feet of elephants. In the body of my mother. In the songs
of my grandmother. I think he followed me across the Pacific into the
New World.
I’ve never actually met E’Paw. This is what I know about him. What I
think I know. His name was Won Narmbut. He was a Laotian man. He
lived his life in Ban Don Bom, Thailand. That is where he died. Maybe
that is where he was born. Dom Bom is a village near Khon Kaen, a large
city in the Isan region. E’Paw is, in many ways, its founder. Many of its
inhabitants are related to my family. My family helped build the houses
and temples. E’Paw was a farmer. He grew rice. Or rubber. Or both. He
became a rich man. He sold land for government development. He used
that money to build a house for each of his ten children. When that was
done, he kept building. He was a simple man. He was a humble man. He
was a loved man. He was a respected man. He was a good man.
That is what I’m told.
My mom used to talk about this song by the Jonas Brothers. Well, it
was originally by the British band Busted, but my mom liked the Jonas
Brothers version. Probably for the best. The Jo Bros changed up all of
the suggestive lyrics, leaving a song much more suited for the sensibilities
of Disney preteens and mothers alike. In the song, they explore the
eponymous year 3000 and note, “your great-great-great granddaughter
is doin’ fine.” She always liked that. She said it made her think of E’Paw,
her grandfather. The man who raised her. She said it sounded like someone
was talking to him, showing him my mother: a newly American girl
doing well for herself in an alien, American world. She is so far from the
fields of her homeland. He couldn’t protect her here. He couldn’t even
fathom her here. They were putting him at ease. She’s doin’ just fine. (No
one tell my mother that the original lyrics said “your great-great-great
granddaughter is pretty fine.” Though, as I think about it, I don’t think
she’d mind much).
I think I feel him at the temple. I feel a lot of ghosts there. In the cotton
fields. In the chicken coop. In the prayer hall. I grew up here. Going
to festivals and ceremonies. Bringing donations of dollars and rice.
89

Lighting lotus boats on the night of Loy Krathong. Filling water guns
on Songkran. Picking peppers with the monks. Nine people were killed
here. The abbot. Six monks. One of them a novice. A nun, aunt to the
young monk. A temple employee. Shot in back of the head. Some shot
again in the torso. Placed facedown in a circle. “These people were
peace-loving,’’ said the judge. “These people didn’t seek violence.’’ In
Buddhism, the kind I was raised on, we believe in the karmic cycle.
Rebirth. Another chance at life. No gods to burn and sacrifice for. No
Heaven. No Hell. The end of suffering. The end of rebirth, but not annihilation.
I wonder where those people went. What lives they live now.
I wonder if they’re still at the temple, as frogs or worms or chickens. I
wonder if their ghosts are still waiting to be born.
If they were reborn, then why can I feel them?
I don’t know if he’d love me. My blood is mixed. My tongue is foreign. My
love is queer. I’ve crossed so many borders, frolicked in frozen fields and
danced in dusty deserts. I never knew him. I don’t know how much of
him will survive me. I wear a necklace. The chain is Thai gold. Pure and
soft. The pendant is a little shadowbox. Encased in Thai gold is a small
Thai coin. Dirty and unremarkable, honestly difficult to identify. The
coin was burned with him. One coin for each of his children. His ashes
are interned at the temple. Some are with us. The coin is what I have.
Not memories. Not stories. Not ghosts. Him. Here. I never knew him.
The gold burns my chest. It fills it, like water has penetrated my lungs.
The whole Pacific. And it spills out of my mouth. It fills the desert,
drowning the canyons and mesas. It washes over the plains, splashing
the Rockies and drowning the valleys. I feel him. In the laundromat.
In my small apartment. I see him now, out the window of the car. He’s
dancing amongst the pronghorn. He’s sliding down the hills. He’s kissing
the clouds. He leaves no prints in the snow, no current in the air, but
there he is. In my eyes. In my voice. In my blood.
He’s here. Right alongside me.
90

Donna Faulkner née Miller
Garden for Bones
Beneath iron skies
brewing rain,
the dead lay in wait
for the living.
Cracked tombstones yield
to daisies.
Cold park benches
wait.
The living sit on
cold park benches
and quietly stare out
at all the death.
Daffodils
wither in dirty jars,
worms squirm
the footpath.
Daisies make
their own way
while ivy
strangles the oak.
91

Bonnie Stump
an open grave
i. dimly lit lantern swinging on a rusted chain, a voice over the
phone speaking in a clipped tone, the shards of a mirror splintering into
knife-sharp edges, a rotting mossy-still heart beating once again, a toetag
shifting with every small movement
ii. clawing your way out with raw-red fingers, a panicky intake of
breath, your head clearing the mound of dirt, petals falling from your
mouth, chewing your way through the flowers laid on your chest, suffocation
has never tasted this lily-sweet, incoherent as you pass through
the valley of death, shadows cling to you like a second skin, gripping
your headstone to pull yourself out
iii. forevermore grief, faithless devotion to your dying god, a welcomed
return, it is nearing winter and your mother waits for you, it is
the night before the world’s end, a door swinging open, you are cradled
by your sister’s salt-tinged hands, there is rage lined in the outskirts of
your hometown, you will do this over and over again
iv. your ache for nothingness was stolen from you in the night,
the Northern wind blows in heavy, do you feel like an open wound? you
should. if you look out the kitchen window, you can see the grave from
here — god decrees that there is no rest for something as Dark as you, a
curse upon you and yours, time unravels — you are carried out in a casket
made from the tree that was struck by lightning last summer, your
father and brother lay you gently to rest
v. your mother brings the lantern out into the field, the rusty chain
creaks, the priest murmurs low over the phone, a quick conversation of
hollow words and short fuses of anger, you shattered the mirror four
months ago, avoiding your double-vision, something is haunting you,
as dawn steadily approaches, your heart – covered in pinecones, buried
beneath the tree that sheds evergreen needles – begins once more, your
eyes fluttering open and your feet shifting as you drag yourself upwards,
the toe-tag catching on the corners of your wooden box
vi. your mother carries you home. the open grave waits behind.
92

Jeff Janko
Cover Artist’s Statement
My photographs are captured moments in time where light has created
a scene of beauty. I love to work in black and white because it eliminates
the distraction of color and allows the composition to dominate.
93

I am always looking at light and the way it illuminates an object or place.
94

95

Laurence Musgrove
It’s Nothing
Today is Saturday, and the large elm tree that once stood tall and broad
in the alley out back is celebrating its one-week anniversary of vanishing
under the teeth of a chainsaw handled by a crew of men who
appeared just after the latest ice storm and sliced the limbs in pieces
hoisted down by a long red rope looped over another limb so the men
on the ground could stand and slowly release the latest victim to the
ground, and without that tree now and its vast toss of shadow, the
dumpster it cooled in summer will likely now bake and stink uncovered,
and the scratch and grab and munch of squirrels who used to race
around within its leaves will be silent, and beyond the narrow alley and
through the ghost that was that tree, our dogs now spy from our third
floor more to alarm them, more times for us to say to them, “Hey, it’s
OK. It’s nothing. You’re OK. We’re OK.”
96

Makena Metz
The Orchard Tender
I eye the perfect one to pick,
I lure them, in I hold them quick.
The scent of death, of fruit, rebirth,
which piece to try my knife on first?
Before the morn the butcher starts,
peeling open bloodied heartsand
while their skin lays in my sink,
I wet my lips with viscous ink
with bloody pops and bloody rips,
the bloody center soft and thick,
I take a breath, don’t say a wordthe
crack of bone is all that’s heard.
The socket pops, the joint- it cracks,
flesh tears, leaves deep gaping flaps.
They don’t have faces, don’t have namesthe
juice, the red floods like the rain.
Another breath-
The tear of flesh-
Tender meat’s best eaten fresh.
Sweet and tart and marrow thick.
Blind, I reach inside and pick,
remove the pit, a tender piece
the fleshy bit that stains my teeth.
I chew, it’s tough-
It’s not enough.
97

Mellow, tart, and dark, and dead,
all there is, forbidden red.
I reach for more but there is nonethe
tree is barren, taking’s done.
Fingertips and fingerprints stained,
the water washes down the drain
like blood cells drifting down a vein.
Nerve ending dies and rifts the pain,
but not the thirst - remains the same.
I hold the corpse in the night swift breeze
standing in the copse of trees,
bones littering the earth like stems,
graves of blood, red ruby gems.
98

Tina Lentz-McMillan
Story About a Deer
She died somewhere close to home. I was not supposed to find her, but
a lot of roads lead to this same destination. This exchange is a rite of
passage only few know.
I can almost feel her wet, hot breath fogging up my resolve, and hear
her dying—animal sounds—so close to words. This deer was alive just
yesterday. Now the moon covers her withering with a white-blanket.
Some would see this as a mercy, but I do not believe in peaceful passing
by such hands.
A part of me wishes I was there to hold her while she choked on the
bullet. I could help her find some faraway field, lined with galaxies of
milkweed and soft burrowing rabbits tucked away in their warrens.
Someplace slow enough to study the shellac of the cobalt beetle and accept
how all things seem to crawl along this same winnowing path.
In the distance, I can see my mother leaping across a river, startled by
the strength of her own legs as if she had been born just hours ago. And
I can see my father, a shadow of his father, grasping his ancestor’s old
leather Bible. The soft promise he held cut out of him with a dull kitchen
knife.
When I am older, he will try to teach me how to take the heart from the
animal just as he was taught. And he will tell me stories about how he
found my mother across the sea. He will pretend it was destiny as he
cuts open an apple, handing me a piece. My mother will ask to plant papayas
and bananas instead and will gaze at them through the west-window.
We will look at the coastal grass that blankets the gulf against
storms, and I will worry it is not tall enough for the deer to hide and my
mother will quietly tuck me in, saying wala nang isa dito.
99

Tina Lentz-McMillan
By Its Name, a Wolf
There is a wolf who visits me, leaves
gifts, like the body of a dove.
Unable to bury it, I cover it with linen: a confession
I can’t speak aloud. My mother seems comfortable
in this silence and how she sits out of focus.
She never questions why I call
this animal to me. At the white-sink
I find a brittle suyod waiting,
unbuttoned by this discovery
because I forgot it was lost.
There is a mountain of sheets
waiting to be washed. I know the work
needs to be done, but I turn off the lights
without asking. My mother opens the door
like she knows there is only one way in.
Old men call it by a different name: say god
as they feed it all the fowl in the neighborhood.
And with those hands they touch
my mother before she was my mother.
Summer is closing, being folded in
with the pants that need patches
on their knees. And I am searching
for a space to store all the feathers
I’ve collected. Somewhere my mother sleeps,
her quiet a curse dripping from a great wide maw.
And I hope the red thread that connects us
can withstand the teeth it demands.
100

Tina Lentz-McMillan
How to Talk to God
Inspect the new leaves of a plant,
find that it is good. Do not lament
the dirt beneath your fingernails.
Pick up fallen feathers that gather
in your backyard. They are good
for making anything except arrows.
Stop on the side of the road, search
your glove compartment and find
an old address from when you were
a child. Go to that place, let it be
a field where wild poppies grow.
Drink from the river that walks through
the valley. Find your mother
resting beneath an old oak tree.
Tell her where you’ve come from.
Forget the story halfway.
101

Tina Lentz-McMillan
Deal With God
You ask god why
you long for Spring.
Around you sprout
white crocuses, the kind
that reveal their faces
after a hard rain. You kneel
to pick them beside an old riverbed
awake with fresh water. God is
collecting stones from its mouth,
for an altar. You place the flowers
on the stone’s face, waiting for god
to answer. The flowers wilt,
turn into moss. The altar now
a bed. How did god not know
you were missing
your childhood, dressed in white
lace trim — now a pall that covers
your beloved
brown body.
You climb onto this gentle grave,
asking for more
flowers.
102

Tina Lentz-McMillan
I Want a God
I want a god who is a woman,
who has walked down an empty street
and guessed at shadows. Who has had to sit
quiet in a room while the men sing,
nurturing her tongue for her own communion.
A god with a body that is both
soft and strong enough to hold the universe.
Soft enough to remember her mother’s
straw braided hair, strong enough to bend
without breaking against the crown
of her baby. Asking to be seen and heard.
A god who understands what it means
to be small, to fit beneath the sink,
what it means to draw outlines with chalk
so rough it cuts your hand, what it means
to look out across a table and see yourself
in the lines of pain tucked in the body. A god
who is familiar with mangoes plucked
from the tree. This god would look like me,
like my mother, she would know how
103

the sacred comes in the breath of your own
name, how dust can coat a whole room
if we let it. This god would give us a place
to pray again. Even though it would take us
our whole lives to remember her.
104

Aaron Holub
No Country for Young Women
The flames raged consistently from the small hours of the morning
on. Truckers driving along FM296 gossiped all night—over CB—about the
“burning thing.” By dawn, they’d identified what was on fire. It was an SUV.
The nearby corpse, prostrate on the prairie grass, became visible an
hour later.
Knowledge of the corpse spread like flames across the SUV’s hood, and
Texline locals were panicking because illicit occurrences never happened so
close to their own backyards…and on Palm Sunday of all days.
At 9:00 a.m. sharp, Marshal Purcell trotted to the makeshift podium in
front of his office. In a throaty, solemn tone, he assured the gathering press
that the situation was just the result of a “drug deal gone bad,” and that it
was “a one-off kinda thing,” and that there was “no reason to expect similar
incidents in the future.”
The local news outlets returned to their newsrooms, where they reported
on the incident using the same restrained, considerate, dispassionate
perspective with which all news outlets cover stories. Their headlines read:
‘Woman Killed in the Dead of Night’
‘Locals Outraged as Homicide Stresses Texline’s Inadequate Safety
Measures”
‘Murderers on the Loose in the Panhandle’
Calls from frantic townsfolk immediately flooded the lines to the City
Marshal’s office, demanding action. But the town was so sparsely populated
that it didn’t maintain a local police force. Thus, too many officers, from
the neighboring police departments in Dalhart and Clayton, New Mexico,
converged on the small town of Texline. They came to assist in the investigation,
to stretch yellow tape, and to tell concerned townsfolk that there
was nothing to see here.
The surfeit authorities patrolling the area allowed the people of Texline
to feel more at ease, but they still had questions. Who was the victim?
Why was the victim killed? Who killed the victim? The boisterous crowds
wouldn’t disperse until they received answers.
105

So Marshal Purcell of Texline and Captain Lahmann of the Clayton PD
investigated the crime scene, though neither of the men had the experience
to do so. They examined the body—barehanded—in an aimless, irresolute
way. The victim was a Caucasian adult female in her early twenties. She
had three bullet wounds from small caliber ammo: one in her chest, one in
her glutes, and one in her forehead. Her ears were missing. The army green
4runner—seemingly the victim’s—had been ransacked—allegedly by the
perpetrators—and was still aflame. “WHORE” was scrawled in red lipstick
upon the vehicle’s windshield. When forensics later checked the few sparse
tire tracks they could find near the crime scene, they found that the tread
patterns were either those of minivans or large SUVs. There was a single
discarded Starbucks cup in proximity to the murder, but its connection to
the crime could not be ascertained.
In a stroke of good fortune, Marshal Purcell found the woman’s H&M
purse stashed beneath the passenger seat. He squealed gutturally, as it was
salvageable, and flaunted his discovery to Captain Lahmann. He indiscreetly
delved through the contents until he found her ID. It was a Colorado driver’s
license showing that she hailed from Pueblo.
Marshal Purcell held the ID up for Captain Lahmann to read, his
thumb underlining her state of origin. They both shrugged.
Back at his office, Marshal Purcell phoned the victim’s bank. The teller
granted Purcell access to her (the victim’s) account after being informed of
the unfortunate circumstances. Purcell shook his head as he surfed through
the transactions. His shoulders drooped, and he groaned more frequently
the further he proceeded. Eventually he observed more than he could
stomach, and he jabbed the off button on his computer with performative
disgust.
The victim’s bank statement showed that she had recently purchased
bulk amounts of condoms, birth control pills, hormonal rings, contraceptive
patches, spermicidal sponges, and cervical caps from various stores and
vendors all around Pueblo.
None of these items were present at the crime scene.
Later that day, a tween girl was riding her pink bike around the outskirts
of Dumas. There was a thin line of black smoke bisecting the scarlet
sky. The girl followed the smoke to a pile of burning cardboard boxes, which
were stashed beneath a picnic table, at a southbound rest area on US 87.
106

Joseph Wilson
I am Sitting in the Dallas Museum of
Art Courtyard Fountain Pen in Hand
But I began writing this poem
Many years before my daughter was born
When she was in her mother’s womb
On the way to Dallas yesterday
I told my only daughter that “I am depressed”
Have been very sad for weeks now
Because she is moving to Germany
Has moved already
Left this morning on Delta to Atlanta
By now she is on Air France to Paris
Later today she will land in Vienna
To begin the next book chapter of her memoir
This morning at 4 I looked over to her in the other hotel bed
She was still awake fingering her iPhone
I squeezed the back of her hand
Drank from my glass of water
And fell back to sleep next to my wife
Upon awakening the news feed in Facebook
Declared that FEMA is stockpiling body-bags
For a potential comet strike
So my first conscious act this morning was to try to memorize my
daughter’s face
As she licked cream cheese from the top of her everything bagel
I thought I may never see her again
As I walked her to my car
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That her mother would drive to DFW
I started crying
I could not stop crying
Thinking about not talking to her and not hugging her shoulder
Not seeing her in my everyday spaces
And that I was getting her silk blouse all wet
That night back home in bed side to side with my wife
With Netflix on and with the housedogs nestled against her ribcage
All of them asleep safe and warm under the quilt
my great-grandmother made
I took a very deep breath
And another very deep breath
And closed my eyes
108

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
Summerland or The Spirit
in the Sideboard
Willie sat all bunched up with his head down and his arms
wrapped tightly around his knees in his perfect hideout. He could hear
them on the other side of the door, and farther away, outside, he could
hear the sounds of the city—horses clopping in the street and people
talking as they passed by. He tried not to giggle. He knew if he giggled
and they knew it was him, he would get in a lot of trouble. But he also
knew they probably wouldn’t think it was him. They would think it was
Freddie or Sally, and they would get excited about that, which wasn’t
exactly fair. But a lot of things weren’t fair—lots and lots of things,
like how Mrs. Brill was there practically all the time now and how he
was always being shushed. There wasn’t anyone he could tell that to,
not on this side and not in Summerland either because who could he
tell but Freddie and Sally, and they told everything to Mama and Papa.
This made him think again, even though he knew it was wrong, how
he wished Mrs. Brill had never come to board in their house. He liked
things better before, even if Mama and Papa didn’t know about Summerland
then and they hadn’t talked to Freddie and Sally yet. And even if
it used to make him feel funny sometimes when he would walk into the
parlor and find Mama sitting alone with a book in her lap, looking sad.
Willie checked his vest pocket for the piece of paper. He was
careful to make sure that his elbow didn’t knock into the sideboard
door because it had one of those little handles that bangs if you open
it or close it too fast, which he did sometimes when he was asked to
take out the big silver serving tray they kept in there. When that happened,
Papa’s forehead would crease up and Mama would tsk him. Willie
thought, they will do more than scowl and tsk me if they open this door
and see me sitting on their best fancy tray! And again, he almost started
giggling. But he held his breath, and became very quiet and still, and
listened to what was happening in the room.
Mrs. Brill was speaking. “The twins are here.”
“O, good!” said Mama. “Did you hear that, George?”
“Yes, Dear,” said Papa. The way he said it, Willie wondered, does he
feel differently about it? Does he—?
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“I am ready,” said Mrs. Brill.
Willie knew that meant Mrs. Brill was going to write down what
they said. It was probably Freddie who was talking to her. He seemed
to talk a lot more than Sally. It was funny to think of either of them
really talking because they were only two years old when they passed
from scarlet fever and went to Summerland. Of course, Willie reminded
himself, they’ve grown a lot older since then. They are 12 now if they
have ages (which Mrs. Brill says they do), because they passed four years
before I was born. It was all so complicated. Willie wished he could see
and hear his brother and sister, like Mrs. Brill. Sometimes, he tried to
imagine that he could, but he knew it was just pretend.
To Willie, it felt like the séances—that is what they were called—
had been going on forever, but really it had only been a couple of
months, since early May, that Mrs. Brill had been boarding with them.
Willie remembered clearly the day she moved into their house. Mama
went upstairs to bring the new boarder a welcome basket of homemade
biscuits, like she always did when someone moved in. When she came
back, she was as excited as she was when Papa took her to see Lillie
Langtry at Wallack’s Theatre. She told Papa that Mrs. Brill used to be a
famous spiritualist, but she had lost all her money and was poor now.
Mama knew it was true because she remembered seeing notices in the
paper back in the early ’70s for Mrs. Brill’s lectures about the spirit
world. The next evening, they were all sitting in the parlor by candlelight
(Mrs. Brill explained that spirits preferred it to gas light), watching
Mrs. Brill as she found her path to Summerland, which was her name for
where loved ones go when they pass over.
“Pass me the mirror,” said Mama. “Quickly.”
Willie knew that meant Mrs. Brill had finished writing because
whenever she wrote down what someone in Summerland said, the words
came out backwards, so you had to use a mirror to read it.
Mama started reading the new message aloud. “‘Sally and I are
doing very well, Mother and Father. It is so beautiful and peaceful here,
and so bright. We miss you and hear your prayers, every one. Yesterday,
we saw Ben Franklin again. He’s teaching us many things. We know you
are well, for we are watching over you, and will continue to do so. We
hope to visit with you more tomorrow evening. Say hello to our brother,
Willie. Don’t fret yourself, mother. He is a good boy.’”
It annoyed Willie, to be talked about when they thought he wasn’t
there. He wanted to burst out of his hiding place and whoop and holler
and bang the silver tray and scare them all away—Mrs. Brill and his
parents, Freddie and Sally, and Benjamin Franklin, too. Then, Willie
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thought, why didn’t Freddie and Sally know he was there, if they were
in Summerland and could see everything? He had so many questions.
Why do the spirits only talk to Mrs. Brill? Why can’t we see them if they
can see us? Why is the writing backwards? Who else have Freddie and
Sally met besides Benjamin Franklin? Willie had tried to ask, but Mama
always shushed him. It was because he asked so many questions that
Mama said it might be better if the séances were just for the grown-ups.
“I wish he could learn from you,” Mama was saying. “There is so
much you could teach him.” Not so much, thought Willie. I know a lot.
Like arithmetic and all the Greek gods (and their Roman names, too)
and how gas lamps and magic lanterns work and how to drive a horse
and buggy as well as any grownup practically. And how to hide during a
séance.
It was silent in the room now, which meant Mrs. Brill had started
writing what they were saying again. Willie could picture Mama so
clearly in his mind, sitting on the edge of her chair, waiting anxiously
for Mrs. Brill to finish, like she always did. It seemed like all Mama and
Papa did these days was think about Freddie and Sally and Summerland.
Mama had practically stopped going outside because she wanted to be
near them. Willie had begun to forget what New York City looked like,
except for what he could see of 7th Avenue from his bedroom window.
Willie reached slowly into his vest pocket and took out a small
folded-up piece of paper. He unfolded it as quietly as a mouse. He
couldn’t read what was written on it in the dark, but he could remember
clearly every line of every letter of every word in the entire note. Willie
waited for Mama to begin reading aloud again because he knew that no
one would be listening then for anything else.
Mama began. “‘I am painting every day—’”
“That is Sally speaking,” explained Mrs. Brill. “She remembers how
you asked to hear from her.”
“Oh, good!” said Mama.
Willie slowly pushed the piece of paper through the narrow crack
between the door and the bottom of the side board.
“‘Sometimes I paint the palaces here and sometimes I paint you
and Papa and Willie, and us with you. Because we are with you even
though you can’t see us, and we are watching over you and protecting
you. I can’t do it now because soon we have to go, but sometime I will
send you a drawing through Mrs. Brill…’.”
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Willie waited and waited. The séance seemed to go on forever.
His neck hurt and he was hungry. He wished he wasn’t trapped in the
sideboard. He wished he was in his own room, looking out his window at
the city….
The séance was finally over now. Willie could tell by the sound of
the chairs scraping the floor when they stood up and the swooshing of
Mama’s dress. It was Mama who was talking. “No, we insist. Don’t we,
George? You have given us so much…” They were giving Ms. Brill money
again.
“But you won’t let me pay for room and board…”
“It’s the least we can do,” said Papa. “Excuse me, did you drop
this?”
“I don’t believe so,” said Mrs. Brill.
Papa had found his note. Willie held his breath and squeezed his
knees even more tightly.
“It’s written backwards!” exclaimed Mama. “Quick, George. Hand
me the mirror!”
Willie’s lips moved in the dark in time to Mama reading the note.
“‘You are talking to Freddie and Sally practically all the time. I
know you miss them but they have many people they can talk to and play
games with here in Summerland. And there are other people who don’t
and other places too, like Central Park which we haven’t been to in forever
it feels like. I think you should take Willie to the park soon before
summer’s over and it gets too cold to play catch or have any outdoor fun.
Sincerely, President Lincoln.”
There was silence. Willie waited to see what would happen. His
heart was beating very fast. Finally, his father spoke.
“It appears someone has been holding his own seances,” said Papa.
“I am so sorry, Mrs. Brill—” began Mama.
“There is nothing comical about spiritualism,” said Mrs. Brill.
“Of course not. I will go talk to him at once,” said Mama.
Willie heard her dress swooshing as she walked down the hall
toward his room. He heard Papa leading Mrs. Brill to the front door.
Suddenly, he didn’t want to leave the sideboard. He wasn’t sure if they
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elieved the note, but he had the feeling he was going to get yelled
at no matter what. He took a deep breath and reached for the sideboard
door. Before he could push it open, it opened by itself. Papa was
standing there and so was Mama and all Willie could think was—I’m
sitting on the silver tray, I’m sitting on the silver tray and I’m in more
trouble than I’ve ever been in in my whole life.
But Papa didn’t yell at him. He said, “Look who we have here,
Mama. I do believe it is President Lincoln himself.”
Mama scooped him up in her arms and held him close. Willie felt
a couple of tears drop onto his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said.
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mama, squeezing him harder.
Willie opened his eyes and saw Papa smiling at him over Mama’s
shoulder.
He tousled Willie’s hair and said, “Do you know what we’re going
to do tomorrow?
“What?” asked Willie, wriggling out of his mother’s grasp.
“We’re going to go on a carriage ride through the park,” said
Papa. “And then we can have a picnic lunch on the Great Lawn, just
you, me and Mama, and we can play catch and hide-and-seek and
whatever else we can think of. Does that sound like a good idea?”
“It sounds like a wonderful idea!” said Willie. Then, he thought of
his note and what he had overhead. “But what about Mrs. Brill?”
“I don’t think we’ll invite her this time,” said Mama. “If that’s
alright with you.”
Willie laughed and told his parents that it was. Then, he ran to
his room to begin to gather up all the things that were needed for a
perfect summer day in the park.
113

Lorraine Caputo
Pa’ Barquisimeto Lara Saliendo
This Saturday awakens
with the sun still in bed
outside the rain squalls
clouds low upon the mountains
Up by the plaza across
from the closed-door church
men shout Barquisimeto Lara Lara Lara
The buses come
the buses go
with nasal honks
The chill wind continues to mist
twisting limbs of
palm & cedar
raggedly tearing clouds
A soiled man with split shoes
carries a sack of empty
bottles & cans
He enters a community store
& leaves with a second
bag of vegetables
& this day ages
with the sun now & again
opening doors of blue sky
casting elusive rainbows
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A young woman walks by
her curled auburn locks, blue poncho
yellow bellbottoms fluttering
But rapidly I must
stow this poem grab my pack
and board one of those buses
pa’ Barquisimeto Lara saliendo
*Barquisimeto is the capital of Lara state; “pa’ Barquisimeto Lara saliendo” – “for
Barquisimeto Lara, leaving”
115

Lorraine Caputo
Tropical Storms
When I entered the town
its streets flowed like rivers
from the tropical downpour
Several nights later,
again the grumbling thunder
warned of a thick shower
& the eve before I left
once more the thunder grunted —
but the rains were postponed
until that next day’s journey
116

Brandi Burns
Down, Down, Down
I woke up on the shower floor. My fault, I should have used a shower
chair like I’m old, but I forgot. For a split second I forgot until ten minutes
of my life went down the drain. I watch the water dance around the
drain,
Down
Down
Down the rabbit hole. It’s tea time, the
body craves the caffeine hit to spike the blood pressure so I don’t go
Down
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Down
Down the rabbit hole.
But I waited too late and the cup is shattered all over the floor. Thousands
of me reflect back with tiny drops of blood blooming red on my
skin.
Crip time. Tick tock tick tock. I am already late. This world was not
built for me.
Eat me. Drink me. But do not eat that, your body will reject it and hate
you. But do not drink that. That is poison and your body will hate you.
Take another pill that won’t work but beware the Jabberwock. You don’t
have the vorpal blade to go snicker-snack and slay your demons because
someone, somewhere decided your syndrome wasn’t worth studying.

Who the fuck are you?
November 26th, 2015. The day I started shrinking, turning into less than
I was, not meant to live in this world according to you. Who is this?
Who? Who is living your life – I died that day.
Or was it May 29th, 1999, when I flew through the air till gravity defined
me, shattered me into a million pieces? Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall /
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall / All the doctors couldn’t put me back
together again, at least, not as I was.
Or was it November 24th? Who the fuck are you?
Shut up. Your narrative is too tragic. You want a cure, so you don’t belong
here. White Queen running backwards – wait! Don’t leave me here.
Crip time. Your body dictates the time – “I’m not myself you see”.
Thirty-seven years and forty-six doctors before the Red Queen gave me
my crown and revealed that I had zebra stripes since birth.
Who are you?
Like Alice my body has morphed, swollen in pain, while my soul has
diminished, shrinking from my body, scared to connect, terrified to feel
that embodiment because all it brings is torment.
Who are you?
I look in the mirror and no longer recognize myself. What happened to
that girl before her body reached its limit and started to unravel? “But
you look fine”.
Who are you?
His eyes question me as I plead for help and I can see myself reflected
in his beady, hateful eyes. Something not even pitiful, but something
to be despised. “As I am, so too will you be some day”. Why even get in
this profession if you don’t want to help? Or have the years and press of
despaired humanity wore you down and crafted you into this hardened
thing? Is it easier to hate me because you can’t help me?
How many hours have I spent in this tube, magnets crashing all around
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me, vibrating my very thoughts out of my head? Alice, where are you? I
need you to help me make sense of this world I never wanted to be a part
of.
And I’m mourning you, the you that I was and will never be again.
pardon me while the brain fog descends clouds my vision makes me say
the wrong thing tugs at my brain here we go again
down
down
down the rabbit hole
*1st Place - Flash! Micro Contest, 2023
119

Alexandra Shimalla
It’s the Little Things
1.
Why am I like this? I ask myself as I stand outside the apartment door,
cautiously, anxiously whipping my head back and forth to check the rest
of the hallway for other people, normal people. My hand comes back
to the door handle that I’ve already locked and checked twice but that
tightness in my stomach and chest tells me no you need to check again…
and again…and again. I make it halfway down the hallway before my
thoughts tell me that maybe I didn’t actually lock the door and someone
may break in and take all my things.
This has never happened. But these thoughts always happen.
The door is always locked. My things are always safe. No one has ever
broken into my apartment. I’ve never even left a light on. Once, maintenance
came to fix the dishwasher, and I noticed immediately that they
left the foyer light on. But I haven’t.
Yet here I stand in the hallway, with my racing heart and sweaty palms,
slowly walking away. That ghost in my head whispering, “You didn’t really
lock it, though. The door is still open. Anyone could walk right in.”
It doesn’t matter that you need a special key that’s not really a key to
open the door, which happens after you’ve used a separate, different key
to get into the permanently locked building.
It doesn’t matter.
I’ve walked a few doors down, but quickly pivot and double back down
the hallway, praying that no one is going open their door and wander
into the empty expanse and catch me in the act of Crazy. I jiggle the
handle again, press against the door. Still locked.
Then I pray. I ask anyone listening to please help me leave. Please help
me. The door is locked. I can walk away.
The farther I get from the door, the anxiety ebbs away. Sometimes it
flows away on its own; other times I push it out. By the time I get to my
car, the thoughts are gone.
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2.
I’m a particular person. I have a daily planner, which I buy each year from
the same company for $80. It’s a beautiful leather-bound book with each
page devoted to a single day. Crisp lines denote various tasks, a pretty pink
bookmark helps me open to the exact day. Each night, I sit down to write
the next day’s plan, using different colors to help me quickly visualize the
compartments of my day, so to speak (work, freelance business, graduate
school, random life tasks and errands, meal plan).
I have a planner for the general week to dos. I have a Google calendar with
my appointments, color coded by life, school, work, and freelance business.
I have my calendar for my full-time job linked to that email. I have a wall
calendar, vibrant and flowery, that’s tacked above one of my desks. Color-coded
with freelance assignments, homework due dates, fun experiences,
and pay days.
Being organized doesn’t make me Crazy.
3.
I just like the things I like, and I like everything in its proper place. I’m not
Crazy enough to care too much about the order of things, mostly, but I do
care that everything is always put back in the proper spot. My perfumes go
on the gray, floral tray, arranged tallest in the back so that I can clearly see
the labels (even though I pick them up based on their different colors and
bottle shapes). My clothes are arranged by garment—jeans, shorts, skirts,
short sleeve shirts, gym clothes, dresses, more formal pants—and the most
clean items are always hung at the very end, the far right of the group to
ensure I’m not always wearing the same things.
But my drawers of underwear, pjs, t-shirts: Everything is folded, but nothing
is in order.
Without consistency, I’m not Crazy.
4.
My mom always told me I was too rigid growing up. She didn’t say I had
problems, but it was silently said.
I had a giant, classroom-size whiteboard behind or above my desk growing
up (I changed my room layout a few items to more efficiently utilize the
space). Every Sunday, I stared at the board, my colored markers, and my
school planner for the week and month. I would outline the big life tasks
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to get done—laundry, clean shower, watch new episode of CSI (because fun
has to be organized and planned, too)—and my major assignments that
were due. One color for regular life. One color for school. The week plan
would then be outlined in the planner, ensuring that I would get all my
homework done accordingly. The balance to achieve is adding enough to
the list that the day is productive, but not too much that it becomes overwhelming.
If you can’t accomplish all the tasks, then reconfigure the week
plan to ensure maximum productivity and success.
“What happens if you didn’t get these things done today, Alex?” she would
ask every so often, while just staring at the board, my neat piles of textbooks
and binders, looseleaf paper and pens on my desk. I could see her
analyzing. Judging my Crazy.
Responding always felt like a test.
Say what she wanted me to: “Everything will be fine. It’s okay if I don’t get
everything done.” But then I fall behind on my homework and either have
to stay up until 11 at night to finish everything or miss deadlines and risk
poor grades.
What I would say instead: “I’ll get everything done.” No matter the stress.
5.
My parents owned a deli when I was in high school. It opened my freshman
year, and they sold it around the time I graduated college. It was a local favorite.
Every Sunday after church, we’d go to the deli to get lunchmeat for
the week. Sometimes they had other tasks they needed to get done on their
day off before Monday came around.
The day I got my driver’s license and could drive myself to church—and,
therefore, quickly ferry my way home as soon as we stood up at the end of
mass—was monumental.
6.
I can feel that hot, sticky feeling creeping up from my toes. I start sweating.
I get a tension headache between my eyebrows—the dead center
between them and just above my nose. My stomach hurts. I feel sweaty and
prickly all over.
Mass ended at 12 p.m., but we’re still here. It’s already 12:30. Mom is talking
to yet another person.
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I’m standing here, waiting, anxious, not-so-subtly rocking back and forth
on my feet and scowling. I’m praying the other person will shut up so we
can finally leave.
Dad is talking to someone, too. I’m trapped here. It feels like we’re never
going to leave. I’m running through the day’s tasks on my whiteboard – my
mind like a Wall Street ticker, spinning spinning spinning.
When they’re finally done, we start walking to the car.
“I wish you wouldn’t look so angry all the time when I speak with people.
You look like such a bitch,” Mom says.
I don’t answer. I will not cry. I just want to go home.
We pile into the minivan, and we start heading in the wrong direction.
“Wait, where are we going?” I ask.
“We need lunchmeat and to do payroll,” answers Dad.
The stomachache gets worse. I can feel the air. Everyone is wondering if
I’m going to cry. Crazy Alex. The hot, prickly feeling intensifies. Why am I
like this? I’m silent.
When we get to the deli, I stay in the car.
7.
When I moved to Orlando, I’d do the same thing with the apartment door
– but also with the fridge, the lights in my bedroom, the oven. If I used the
toaster that morning, God help me. I would pray and pray. Help me stop
this. Help me leave, please. I’m going to be late for work. Make this stop.
What’s interesting: I’ve never left the fridge open–ever.
Much like with the front door debacle, I don’t know where these thoughts
come from. Why does my brain think that leaving the fridge open is the
worst thing possible? Literal worst-case scenario: I’d have to restock the
food. So maybe it’s a money thing. Maybe the idea that all the food I’ve
purchased could spoil from my not paying attention spurs these rituals.
I’ve never done that before, so how does the idea take root?
8.
I don’t remember the exact moment that these doubts began filling my
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ain. I lived in university housing during my first year of graduate school,
and I would just check the handle before I left. Just a quick tap, and I was
satisfied. The door locked automatically. When I moved to my second
apartment during graduate school, the keys weren’t keys but these little
knobs that you had to hold against a screen in the door where the traditional
lock should’ve been. Maybe it was the uncertainty surrounding
trusting this weird little device to really lock my door? If I can’t use a real
key to make sure my apartment is locked, I’m supposed to trust this knob
will activate a lock? The quick, gentle tap was no longer satisfying.
When my friends and I would go out, we’d pregame at my apartment since
I lived downtown, but that also meant I had to check the door in front
of people. I needed to do the checks quicker. I’d check once. Walk away,
mumble something, and stagger back to the door to do a rapid two, three
checks. I was drunk. They were drunk. No one noticed, or if they did, they
either didn’t care or forgot immediately.
It was harder to hide with my parents. I wasn’t drunk. I couldn’t blame it
on anything. We’d walk halfway down the hall, and I’d have to go back. “I
just want to check that I really locked the door,” I’d laugh.
After graduate school, after living with my parents for about six months,
I moved to downtown Orlando. After a very short stint there—the best
thing COVID-19 did for my life—I lived with my parents again (again again
again?), and the fridge followed me, despite the distance. Not the actual
machine, but the thoughts. The doubts. I’ve never left the fridge open—
let’s re-iterate that. But is it really locked? The fridge in question is in the
garage. The fridge in the kitchen holds no power over me. But the white
one with the pebbly surface in the garage? The one that’s been in our family
for more years than I can pin down? The one that I’ve opened and closed
without problem for 99% of those years? It has me now. And even though
I’ve since moved out from their guest bedroom (again again?), that fridge
still has me when I visit.
I close it. I listen for that suction sound to denote it’s closed. But is it?
What about the food? What if I left the door open? Mom and Dad’s food is
in there, too. I press against it once. Okay, good. But what if? I press my
hand against it a second time. Okay. I walk a step towards the door leading
back into the house. But? I lean my body to the left, extend my hand and
shoulder, and press into the door with all my weight, until the machine
jiggles from the pressure. I need to go, the rational part of my brain tells
me. My parents will wonder what I’m doing out here. Take one step, then
two, then I’m right in front of the door to the house. I press against that
invisible ocean current and open the door.
Once I’m through the door, the thoughts are gone.
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9.
For the longest time, I didn’t light candles in my apartments. When I lived
in university housing, I was worried that it would set the finicky fire alarm
off, which went off at least twice a week or any time I dared use the oven.
When I started lighting them in my second apartment in graduate school
or even in Orlando, there was no problem. Blow it out, see that black
smoke curl up, and I knew it was out.
But at my parents’ house, it’s a problem.
Is the candle really out? I stare at the black wick without a flame. I see the
cooled wax, smooth, pooled around the bottom of the glass jar and I still
wonder…is it really out? There’s no fire. There’s no gentle flame. Just that
black wick and cooled wax. I put my finger to the wick for tactile reassurance.
There’s no fire. It’s safe to leave. But am I certain? I put the top on
just in case. Turn towards the door, ready to walk out, but I should look
back–just once more.
10.
The garage door at my parents’ house, the one I’ve never left open, taunts
me. I get into my truck, settle myself in, connect my phone to the vehicle
and get ready to roll away, I look back. I’ve already pressed the garage controller
and shut the door. I can see it’s shut, sealed however tightly garage
doors are to the ground. I study the tan and white pattern of the door. It’s
shut, I mentally repeat once, twice. I put the truck into gear and start driving
down the driveway slowly. But what if it isn’t shut? What if someone
gets into the house? What if a murderer, in this small, quiet town in North
Georgia known not for its ax-murderers, was to get in and it would be all
my fault for leaving the garage door open? What if, more realistically and
equally horrific, an animal gets into the garage?
My heart clenches at the thoughts, so I press the brakes and look back.
I stare harder at that beige and white pattern, as if the more intense my
stare, the more real I can cement the image into my brain that yes, in fact,
that door is shut and has been since I pressed the garage door button as
soon as I got into the truck several minutes ago.
My eyes see it’s shut. It’s shut. It’s shut. It’s shut. I drive away.
By the time I’m at the front of the neighborhood, the questions are gone.
It’s shut or maybe it isn’t, but I keep going. There’s no force to tell me to
turn around.
125

11.
For years, I refused to read about obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I bet that’s surprising.
It wasn’t so much that I made the conscious decision to not open Google
and do a quick read of the first three links on page one. It was more that if
I didn’t think about it, didn’t consciously address or label what was happening,
then it wasn’t something as Crazy as the people you see on TLC’s
“My Strange Addiction.”
I’m not eating dish detergent, so having structure in my life isn’t Crazy.
I simultaneously don’t want to put a name to these problems, while the
curious learner in me wants to unravel the thread of my Crazy just a little
– to peak under the anxiety and see what obsessive-compulsive disorder
really is.
I know that I experience compulsions. I “arrange things in a particular,
precise way” and “repeatedly check on things,” and I “don’t get pleasure
from performing the behaviors or rituals.”
I’ve never spoken about this. To anyone.
12.
The large black fridge stands in front of me, totally unassuming. My immaculate,
new, expensive apartment in downtown Orlando sprawls around
me. The toaster is off, the lights are off, the door is waiting for me to walk
through it and leave for work, and the fridge? It’s shut. The door is shut.
But is the oven off? I have to deal with the fridge first. I press my hand
into the fridge door. Hard. It’s shut. It’s so shut the pressure from my hand
moves the appliance ever so slightly, which means I have to wiggle it back
into place. I press my body into the beast of it again. Both the fridge and
freezer doors are still shut. I do it again. And again for good measure. I
pray for help. Help me walk away. I make it to the front door. I’m running
late. That prickly feeling in my stomach creeps into my chest. I need to
check the apartment again. I lug my backpack, purse, giant red lunchbox,
insulated cup of tea, water bottle, and keys hanging off my fingers back
through the apartment. I bump into the counter and almost spill the tea.
The bedroom lights are off. I’m safe. I body-bump the fridge and freezer
again. The doors are sealed shut. My food is safe. I look at the oven. I haven’t
tackled that yet. I run my fingers over the ridges in the knobs on the
stovetop. They’re all pointing off. I haven’t used my stove since last night.
They’ve been off since I turned them off last night after using one burner.
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I check again. They’re off. I temporarily turn the stove light on to get a
better look. I feel the ridges again: All pointing to the upward off position.
They’re off. I’m safe.
I’m now five minutes behind schedule. Work is eight minutes away, but I
need to go. Now. I will myself to walk to the door. I feel the pull of the anxieties,
telling me I need to check everything again.
Is the fridge really shut, though?
I feel like I’m pushing against an undercurrent in the ocean. My hand
reaches for the knob. I turn around. I’m safe, I tell myself. The apartment
is safe; I’ve checked half a dozen times. I open the door and walk into the
quiet, carpeted hallway. I wonder what other people do. Simply lock the
door without a care in the world and then peacefully walk away? What is
that like?
I pray that no one enters the hallway because then I’d have to pretend I’m
normal and lock the door and walk away, but I need to check. I need to
check.
I lock the door. Stand in front of it. No one is in the hallway. I don’t hear
anyone coming. I take a step away. Then another. Then I walk back to the
door and try the handle. It’s locked. I walk three steps away. I’m forced to
pause. It’s locked, I tell myself. It’s safe. I walk back to the door. Let me just
check one more time. I try the handle. I put my hand on the handle and
press against the door, hard. It doesn’t budge. It’s locked. It’s safe. I have to
go. I’m so late. I need to go, please, God, let me leave.
I turn off my brain. I won’t allow these thoughts in anymore. I need to go. I
make it to the car and notice I’m running 10 minutes late. I drive through
the parking deck and the thoughts fade and fade until whether or not my
fridge is open isn’t even a memory.
It’s like it never happened.
127

Alyssa Liney Pruitt
Disorders
Depression isn’t “I’m sad”
Depression is “I wish, just for a little bit,
A split second,
I could genuinely be happy
Be happy with myself.”
Anxiety isn’t “I’m nervous”
Anxiety is “I wish, I can for a minute,
A day,
I could put myself out there
Without feeling trapped in my head”
Insomnia isn’t “I can’t sleep”
Insomnia is “I wish, I can rest for a couple hours-
A night,
I could actually feel like a human
Waking up refreshed to make the most out of the day”
Body dysmorphia isn’t “I’m fat nor skinny.”
Body dysmorphia is “I wanna see myself-
For the way other do
I could stop hating myself
Look at myself and say “I love you, for you.”
OCD isn’t “ I need to be organized.”
OCD is “I wish I can function for the a week-
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My whole life
So I can stop thinking,
every little decision will affect others
I can do it once, and be thankful to live my life.”
Everyone out there has that one thing,
that wish to have the other person’s life.
I don’t see a disorder, or a wrecked mentality,
I see perfect, Beautiful, strong human beings
That fight for life everyday.
“I’m so amazed and thankful you can resonate with my poem
‘Disorders’. I hope it can reach many others to truly be themselves
in that looking glass. Not who someone told them what and who
they are.”
- Alyssa Liney Pruitt
_
129

Delaney McLemore
Two Grams
In my family, when someone says sick, you have to gauge what
kind from their surroundings. What was the setting? When my mother
told me from three or four “Your daddy is sick,” it meant brain sick;
I knew because he lived in the mental hospital. I would figure out that
most of my family members dealt with a twist in their intellect, myself
included: I’d spent five days in a psych ward after trying to open a vein
on the side of a mountain when I was twenty-one. I counted objects all
the time, sets of threes, added up the numbers I saw in birth dates and
years of publication to figure out if something was lucky or not then
spent days curled fetal, beset by nightmares of body broken.
Sometimes sick means your body is broken. Casts. Surgeries. My
family was used to the hospital, but we hated to go there. The first time
I saw my dad after leaving my husband, he rolled up to my mom’s house,
a place he wasn’t welcome, with an ounce of fresh weed “ya need to let
dry out a little” because it hadn’t quite cured yet. On this visit, we ended
up at the hospital because of an infection in his hand. The only reason
he was willing to go was my ability to watch his dog, the source of the
wound. “He don’t mean nothin’ by it.” He was lucky not to lose a finger,
like the plate of bone covering his frontal lobe. Instead, a piece of metal
protects his brain, or what is left of his brain after the accident.
Remember: there are many ways to be sick. Like his mother. My
grandmother died before I was born, buried on Christmas. That was
what they told me, the children still living around the city she’s buried
in. Except my father, the orphan out on the West Coast, who told me the
story again around the holidays and my brothers’ birthdays, all three in
December.
“Yep, she was sick for a while,” Dad said. But what sick did he
mean? What killed her?
130

My grandmother died from cancer. Or my grandmother died
from a broken heart. Or my grandmother died from a life of hard labor
and a lack of care by the people who loved her. Or my grandmother died
because she misused substances or because she was prescribed substances
the way many women in the sixties were: without regard for
addiction. Or my grandmother died because she was guilty for the life
she had carved for her children. Or my grandmother died because all of
this was true. Or none of it. And she died knowing there would be generations
who only knew her in the mouths of her children, spit in the dirt
of her grave.
I visit her, one of the youngest of her grandchildren, and I show
her the ways I live.
Look, I tell her. I’m so healthy. Let me show you what my body
can do.
__
When does a body stop being a body? How much of the mass
turns to ash to become dust? How much of a person needs to be left behind
for the corpse to carry meaning?
Gram Parsons died in a hotel room in Joshua Tree. It was 1973
and he was twenty-six years old. He overdosed on alcohol and morphine,
a cocktail he should have known to avoid, according to Keith Richards.
Despite the ice cubes inserted into his anus, the breath blown into lungs,
there was no recovery. Did his mother’s cry ring out in the night? The
whisper of a ghost who wanted too much more for her son. Did she feel
him leave again the world he had entered through her body? Perhaps
she didn’t cry until she heard where his body had gone.
While Gram cruised in the coffin that would carry him home to
Louisiana, to his stepfather who lingered after his mother’s death, two
friends gathered their will, donned cheap suits, and borrowed someone’s
girlfriend’s hearse, adorned with no license plates and a cracked windshield.
They would steal his body, they whispered. They would take him
to the place where he wanted to die. They knew better, they did. There
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was no earth heavy enough to hold him. This was the Gram Parsons
death pact.
__
The first time I visited my grandmother’s grave, I was dry for
more than six months. I quit drinking after my husband issued another
ultimatum. This came the morning after I tipped my bartender fifty-five
on forty-five before I poured a glass of water down somebody’s neck.
They kicked me out, sent me out to my car to drive the seventeen miles
home, the place my husband wasn’t. I should have died, or at least puked
on the side of the road, but I was fortunate to have hurt no one. Six
months later, I stood at the foot of my grandmother’s grave on All Saints
Day, trying to bring her to life.
What I know about my grandmother: Her name was Evelyn Honeycutt
Maffia, Honeycutt being her given name. She had once been Evelyn
McLemore when she was the second wife of my grandfather, Marion
Lee McLemore, but it’s unclear if their marriage was legal. He had two
families. Evelyn was a gospel singer. She was a part of a trio with her sisters;
they traveled around the South and she was onstage when Marion
first fell for her. She had six children with him, and they all suffered
from his alcoholism until he abandoned them, my father the youngest.
She raised them by herself in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, in public
housing, until she married a merchant marine named Ted Maffia and
he bought her a house out in Kenner. She was sick for a long time before
she died.
That word again: sick. My grandmother had cancer and my
grandmother was an addict. Which killed her? Or again, was it all because
of the guilt she carried, knowing her children all suffered abuse at
the hands of their father, then the youngest at the hands of their siblings?
Did my grandmother die because she had failed them?
In a way, I was afraid to face her as I grapevine toward the
grave. I had brought my husband with me as a touchstone, but as soon
as we reached the copper plate set with Evelyn’s name, it was like she
was beckoning me closer. When I looked at my husband, all I could feel
was guilt; I had failed him. I would never love him the way he loved me.
132

I wanted to feel so close to him, to share this sense of loss we shared for
the paternal grandmothers we would never know. But as his thick pink
lips split into a smile, I felt cold and alone.
He would never be sick, not the way I was. He could drink two
beers and stop. But I was never going to be that kind of healthy. I looked
at my grandmother, copper-plate crown over bone. I felt her then, a
shiver of warmth across my shoulders. An arm. An apology.
__
Gram’s body lay in wait for the plane that would take him back to
Louisiana. His family had purchased a plot outside of New Orleans. They
were bringing him home. But his body never made it back, at least, not
the body he carried to the end–that was stolen by his friends, slithered
through the night in a borrowed hearse to Joshua Tree. When they
reached Cap Rock, they removed the coffin and poured gasoline overthe
expensive wooden box. They threw a match and watched as a fireball
filled the sky. The two men escaped as police officers flew after them in
the night.
Thirty-five pounds of Gram was left. Cremation requires an
incredible amount of heat in an enclosed area, versus the loose fire on
a cliff, exposed to wind and water in the atmosphere. There was no way
for Gram’s friends to destroy his body, not at Joshua Tree.
It was thos thirty-five pounds reclaimed by Gram’s family. His
mother was already dead by then, having left this earth in 1965. She
didn’t have to watch as the last pieces of her son were buried beneath
the grass. Instead, those left who loved her son carved a wound in the
ground beside my grandmother, two years after her death. She had been
waiting for him, like his own mother, like her own waited for her. Like
she waits for me.
__
Three days ago, or three years ago, or three minutes ago, my
father called and told me he was sick.
133

“I had a heart attack, baby.” He sounded fine from the two thousand
miles separating us, my adopted home in Louisiana, his stuck in
Oregon. He went on to tell me about the EMTs, how his blood pressure
was some ridiculous number, how he had to quit smoking cigarettes. He
told me what he wanted done to his body when he goes. The bench he
wants built on a hill.
My father has always been sick and has always been dying. I’m
not ready for it, but as reality creeps closer to me, I think about my
grandmother and Gram.
Not long ago, I visited them. Their bodies are long gone, but the
copper plates reading their names still shine under the light of an April
morning. I went alone and stoned from vaporized weed oil, not all the
way sober, not married. I left the husband not a year after showing him
my grandmother’s grave, once he showed me the harm he could cause.
When I left my husband, it was in a curling gray fog of relapse,
a period that would stretch over two years as I bounced around the
country finding a home. After I dried out, again, and began to build a
life in Louisiana, one made up of ghosts of dead relatives and rock stars,
of hot sauce and hot plates and hot nights never turning into hungover
mornings, I started to wonder if this might be a version of healthy, that I
might be building something in Louisiana no one in my family ever had.
So, I make pilgrimages to the parts remaining, those bodies now
fifty years buried, my grandmother and Gram. I’ve adopted him into our
family, a kind of weird legendary uncle. I drive the 111 miles separating
my new home in Lafayette and Metairie, the working-class suburb outside
New Orleans where the Garden of Memories sprawled. I was getting
used to the route, the split highway over the bayou with no rest stops
and not enough of a barrier between my car and the water.
A broken candle had melted into the song lyrics raised from the
plate over Gram:
Another young man safely strummed
His silver string guitar
And he played to people everywhere
Some say he was a star.
But he was just a country boy
134

His simple songs confess
And the music he had in him
So very few possess.
I sat on the strip of grass separating Evelyn and Gram. Hundreds of people
every year take the same steps from stone path to lyric stone, these
two Grams their target, but do they think to look to the right? Does
Evelyn call out to them, like she does to me? Say see me in her graveyard
gravel?
Once, a man was there. As I parked behind his silver rented van,
I walked slowly toward him, not wanting to interrupt his honoring. He
looked up.
“You a fan?” he asked me.
“Of who?” I played dumb.
“Oh, I’m sorry, are you visiting family?”
“I’m teasing. She’s right there.”
“I wondered about her,” he said, “who she was.”
I don’t remember what I told him. Maybe it sounded something
like this.
135

Liesel Hamilton
Dementia Zoom Call
When we finally connect
—picture to picture—
her cheeks are hollow, her face more old
lady than Oma.
Who are you?
My dad returns
a syllable his eighteen-year-old
self eagerly shook off. In this moment,
he cannot be the Americanized Tom
his mother has always loathed.
I am Thomas—
your son—
Thomas.
A once-monumental change, now irrelevant. He fails
to register in her wrinkled eyes where
blue has given way to gray. Her face widens
as she smiles and even though her mouth
is full of teeth, I see only blackness.
Papa, she says.
136

Perhaps we all never stop wanting
our mothers, our fathers. But papa is not
one of my dad’s many names. His lips
tighten, wanting what she wants, wanting
Mutti, but all he has is a German so thick
it congeals before our eyes.
Nein. Ich bin
Thomas,
deine Sohne,
Thomas.
When the screen is black, my dad says
nothing, but my mom says that she remembers
when words stopped making sense in the mouth
of his mother’s father.
Your dad cried, she says, not for his Opa,
but because he didn’t
want words to disappear from his father,
from his mother
As my mom talks, I watch my father’s blue eyes
and in the moment, they seem to turn slightly
greyer. He grimaces and his crow’s feet dig into his temple,
skin drips from his arms, calcium leaches
from his bones.
137

Brianna Sandoval
The Tree’s Shadow
Author’s Memo
This screenplay was adapted from a play I once wrote in high school. I
revisited the story and changed some things that I felt would better suit
me. When I first wrote this story, my family had gone through a rough
patch and my outlet at the time was my theater class. I felt that these
emotions I had bottled up were let out in this play, and that my true
form of healing is through written words. There are things that we feel
are left unsaid, or should have never been spoken when a relationship
comes to an end. Whether it be friendships or romances, healing is hard
but it’s harder when we can’t come to terms with the things we did or
said that added to the fire. They sit in us until they begin to torment and
haunt us in our own minds. For Carrie, her words that she knew she said
to Janet were too much for her to admit. The more she denied, the more
she began to get swallowed into her own guilt and grief. Much like I had
for a few years. It’s not until our past revisits us as a mere ghost to make
us face the harsh reality we lived.
EXT. Park-Bench-Morning
The Tree’s Shadow
Carrie walks over to a bench and takes a seat. She breathes in the fresh
air and takes in the beauty. She hasn’t been outside in a while. She begins
to look around and notices, Janet. Janet is her ex-girlfriend. They
had been together for several years before she walked out on their relationship.
Carrie immediately gets up and begins to walk to her.
Tree
Carrie:
Janet!
(Janet turns, she is frightened but remains still.)
Carrie:
Janet, I... I don’t know what to say.
138

Janet:
Carrie, I’m sorry.
Carrie:
You leave after all that time together. With no explanation and all you
have to say is ‘I’m sorry.’
(Janet opens her mouth to apologize again but then stops.)
Janet:
Carrie, your clothes, and your hair. Are you taking care of yourself?
Carrie:
Why did you leave? What did I do wrong? Was it something I said?
Janet:
You didn’t do anything wrong, Carrie! Something happened. It’s hard to
explain.
Carrie:
(raising her voice) Then explain, I have plenty of time.
Janet:
It’s.. complicated.
Carrie:
It can’t be that complicated if you just got up and walked away from our
life together.
Carrie:
(looks towards Janet) Janet, the past three months I have been losing my
mind. Trying to find an answer to what led to you justdisappearing. I
called, I texted, and I can only hear your voice through your answering
machine. I need an explanation, anything. Please.
(Janet is hesitant but nods her head in agreement. She grabs onto Carrie’s
hand and leads her closer to the tree. Janet sits and Carrie follows.
Janet closes her eyes and inhales. When she opens, they are full of dread
about what she is about to tell Carrie.)
Janet:
Do you remember the day you officially asked me to be your girlfriend?
Carrie:
Of course I do, what does that have to-
Janet:
Please just let me continue. (Carrie nods)
139

Janet:
It was our sixth date, and we had gotten ice cream. We then took this
path and came to this very tree. This is where you made us official.
(Carrie begins to talk but Janet places a hand on her arm to quiet her.)
Janet:
I had been nervous, and you reassured me of how much you liked me. So
you asked and I said yes. The rest of the night we walked circles around
this park and talked about anything we could. Just so we didn’t have to
separate from one another. We then spent several wonderful years together
as partners. And I don’t regret a single second of it.
Carrie:
Then why leave?
Janet:
Because I began to lose you.
Carrie:
You never-
Janet:
But I was, or at least in my mind I was. It doesn’t matter now.
Carrie:
Of course it matters. It matters because I couldn’t stand to lose you,
Janet.
Janet:
And I didn’t want to lose you.
(Janet takes a deep breath)
Janet:
That night,you had come home late from a work event. You had begged
me to go but I didn’t because I was slowly beginning to lose myself. I had
asked how the event was and you told me about it. You then mentioned
your co-worker, Ana, who you had been partnered with to work with a new
client. I knew it was unreasonable for me to be jealous but I was anyway.
Carrie:
Ana is just a friend.
Janet:
I know that now.
Carrie:
Then please come home baby. Let’s talk this through and go back to how
we were.
140

Janet:
I want that more than anything but-
Carrie:
What’s stopping you?
Janet:
That night, when you brought up Ana, my mind took me to the worst
possible scenario. I accused you of having an affair with her and we
fought. Then my worst fear came true, it left you without a single
thought.
Carrie:
What are you-
Janet:
Carrie, I left our apartment that night. I couldn’t believe what you had
said to me. I had already lost you. I came to this park to think about how
our relationship began, and how it’s been.
Carrie:
Janet, whatever I said-
Janet:
(raising her hand) Once I began to retrace our argument, I thought,
“Carrie has done so much to prove her love to me. She has never hid nor
have I ever had a reason to doubt her untiltonight.’ This one night that
caused this doubt was because I had feared the worst and didn’t want to
live through the hurt that is caused by infidelity again. It was too much
and I saw how much it took out of a person.
Carrie:
Baby? What did I say?
Janet:
You know what you said, love.
Carrie:
I don’t. I can’t remember.
Janet:
Because you don’t want to.
(Carrie looks at Janet and sees the hurt in her eyes. It slowly begins to
come back.)
141

INT. Living Room-Evening - Three Months Ago
Carrie walks into her shared apartment with Janet. Janet is sitting on the
couch with a glass of wine in her hand. She is watching TV
Carrie:
Hey baby.
Janet:
Hey, how was the event?
Carrie:
It was great! Ana and I think we’ve sealed the deal with our latest client.
The event itself was amazing!
Janet:
Oh..
Carrie:
(notices Janet’s change in tone) Oh?
Janet:
Sounds like it was a fun time with Ana.
Carrie:
And the client.
Janet:
(rolls her eyes while taking another sip of her wine) Lately though, every
time you’re with Ana it’s been a grand time. When you’re at work, when
you grab lunch, or when you meet with her in OUR apartment over Zoom.
Carrie:
Don’t start with this again. I already told you, we have this huge client
and we have to be on top of our game.
Janet:
While she’s on top of you..
Carrie:
Fuck, Janet! Do you really think that low of me? That after seven years
together, I would throw it all away as if it meant nothing.
Janet:
I don’t know, Carrie! It’s hard to tell when it’s always, Ana this, Ana that,
or Ana came up with this idea. That’s all I ever hear from you is Ana! Do
you know how terrible it feels to know that you’re losing the one person
142

in your life that you love. I love you so fucking much Carrie, that it’s
hurting me to know that I’m losing you!
Carrie:
You’re not losing me! I’m still here Janet. I’m here everyday, all night, I
try to go out with you but you never want to anymore. You stayed holed
up in the room or on the couch getting wine drunk. If anything I’m the
one losing you.
Janet:
Please, I’m sure I lost you when you first got partnered up with her.
Carrie:
(rubs her forehead and turns away from Janet) You NEVER lost me, Janet.
You’re the love of my life and I don’t see myself being with anyone else
but you! Why can’t you understand that?
Janet:
Because your never fucking HERE Carrie! I’m alone in this fucking
apartment, I’ve lost my job, I’ve lost savings and you’re the only person
that has been consistent in my life. And now, I’m losing you!
Carrie:
(frustrated at this point gives up) Fine! You want to know the truth. You
lost me when you gave up on yourself and Ana was there to find me to
lift me up again.
Carrie looks at Janet who looks as if someone drove a knife through her.
Carrie is instantly hit with regret and shame, the words that came out of
her mouth were a consequence of anger.
EXT. Park-Tree - Morning
Carrie:
No, I would never say something like that to you.
Janet:
(crying) but you did, and I felt as if my entire frame shattered into a
million pieces.
Carrie:
Baby..
Janet:
Was it true? Had I truly lost the best thing that has ever happened to
me? That’s all I could think of. The question burning me from the inside.
143

Did you mean it?
(Carrie looks at Janet and caresses her cheek. She wipes the tears from
her eyes and her own begin to form.)
Carrie:
Baby, what I said to you that night. That wasn’t true and it wasn’t right
for me to say. You NEVER lost me. I’m always going to be here, throughy
your darkest days, your brightest day and the days were you just want to
lounge around and get wine drunk. (They laugh)
Janet:
I know you would, and that’s why I love you. I should have never assumed
anything was going on between you and Ana.
Carrie:
I can understand why you did though. I wasn’t making time for you because
I got too caught up in my career. Tell you what, how about we start
over? We go on a nice stroll in this park again, go get ice cream. Everything
we did during our date together.
(Carrie Smiles and Janet laughs.)
Janet:
I would love to do that. More than anything but you know I can’t.
Carrie:
Did you already have other plans? We could schedule for another
day.
Janet:
Baby, no day would work because I’m not really here, remember.
Carrie:
Okay, now you’re jus-
(Carrie looks back towards Janet and is met with the shade of tree next
to her.
Carrie gets up and looks around. She feels as though she’s losing her
mind. She begins to walk down the path. She reaches the bridge and she
stops.)
EXT. Park-Bridge - Morning
Carrie begins to slowly walk up the bridge and notices a white ribbon
flapping in the wind. As she gets closer, flowers begin to pile and in the
center lies a picture of Janet. It’s her memorial.
144

EXT. Park-Bridge - Evening
Janet is walking across the bridge. She then heads over to the rail and
takes a seat on it as she has done so many times before. She tries to
calm herself as she scrolls through her phone. She then stumbles upon
a photo of her and Carrie that was taken on their first date. She realizes
that in order to save her relationship, she has to fight for it. She puts
her phone in her pocket and begins to move back over to the walkway.
However, the same movements she has made before fail her. Janet loses
her footing falling down below, she dies instantly.
EXT. Park-Bridge Memorial - Morning
Carrie kneels down to look at the picture. She begins crying realizing
that the last words she had ever spoken to Janet were out of anger. The
anger she felt because she thought Janet had left was a reflection of how
she was truly feeling about herself. She also feels guilt because Janet
would not have been here had Carrie had not said those words to her.
Carrie:
Janet, I’m sorry.
END.
145

Elizabeth N. Flores
Mama and the Doctor
The doctor gently examined Mama,
who was half-awake, while walking
the family through the coming weeks.
The leg is healing nicely.
She can leave the hospital tomorrow.
A month in rehab,
and she’ll be on her way,
as long as she uses her walker.
He was cordial too. That is, until he made
a snide remark about Obamacare
on his way out the door, not noticing
Mama’s disapproving look before
she drifted back to sleep.
My brothers and I all weighed in.
I bet Mama tells him off the next time
he comes in.
No, she won’t do that.
Always respect teachers and doctors.
She’s drilled that into us all our lives.
But she’s bolder now that she’s in her 80s.
The doctor stopped by after breakfast
the next day to wish Mama well.
“You’ll be dancing before you know it, Senora.”
“Thank you, Doctor. I hope you have the life you deserve.”
The doctor smiled but looked puzzled,
as if he was thinking, what an odd thing to say.
“Ouch,” my younger brother whispered.
146

Elizabeth N. Flores
The Banker
The old man called Frost Bank twice a day.
First, after his 7 a.m. breakfast. He was persuaded
that bankers were now ready to start their day.
Then, during his lunch at noon, convinced that all bankers
ate at their desks as he once did.
He knew the inner workings of the bank.
He spent forty years there, as a teller,
a trusted loan officer, and finally
retiring as vice-president,
before his dementia caused any big mistakes.
He grew frustrated that whoever answered
would not stay on the line.
I made lots of money for those ungrateful bastards!
The family discussed who would tell him
that when he called he reached a recording.
His oldest grandson, his namesake,
volunteered with his own plan.
I’ll show Grandpop the photo of us inside the bank vault
on my birthday when I turned four.
We can make a safety deposit box
out of a shoe box like we did for show and tell
when I was in first grade.
I’ll remind him he taught me to roll pennies.
I’ll bring wrappings and we’ll roll pennies and nickels together.
147

We’ll clean his collection of calculators.
Maybe he’ll talk about the first one he bought.
Those details sometimes come pouring out
when he’s not too tired.
I’ll tell Grandpop to forget those bastards. He’s too busy,
and why waste his time calling them.
We’ll see if that works.
148

Cameron Fowler
I Am Afraid to Sleep
Whispered kisses pepper the constellation of freckles across my abdomen,
formed by long summers at the beach. Strong, calloused hands
hungrily gripping, roaming, snaking across thelandscape of my body like
a river.
I want this... Right?
His darkening eyes and darker desires become all too consuming. Hunger
and desire quickly devolves to crossed boundaries and uncomfortable
pressure and I can feel the bile rise in my throat.
I try to push back but he grabs my hair and begins to slam my head
against th—
My eyes snap open to a sweaty, anxious, mess. Heavy breaths drowning
out the box fan in the corner of my room. A shadow darts back into the
hallway. His shadow.
Three years.
Three years and I am still plagued with nightmares about that night.
A poltergeist, refusing to let go. This haunting presence, a constant
reminder of what he did. The Astrals told me it was rare for a spirit to
haunt its own victim. They said that usually the damned are immediately
taken away, but this one was—he is—different. An anomaly. But still
very much himself.
Still tormenting me in his death as he did in his life.
They told me that if I healed myself he would stop tormenting me and
move on.
149

But I did everything they told me to do. I’ve put in the work, I did the
therapy. I answered their invasive questions and I had my breakthrough.
I healed.
I healed.
Like they told me to.
So why.
Why am I still having these nightmares? Why do I still feel him? Why do
I still see the marks he left that night—and every night since? Why won’t
he leave me alone?
When he died I thought I was finally free.
I am afraid to sleep because I know that when I close my eyes in this
realm they will just open again in that realm. In that room. In that moment.
With him.
150

William David
Traveler’s Lament
The further I drive the cleaner I get
and soon the city’s lights will fade.
Jobs are just busy traffic lanes without
a human heart though, beyond the façade
you’re face to face with an open road.
After winter’s bitterness, I escape
leaving this place is a sweet payoff.
Childhood was easy with the world
to take—to have—to hold. Though,
somehow everything got twisted.
The beginning was with such vitality
only to end up with cheap shots and thrills.
Until the reticent night the magic
scenery gives more than takes .
Nihilism falls into distress.
To drive to where the road levitates from
the frontier’s humidity and madness
drive into a wilderness of benevolence.
Away trips from the hustle reignite
that human voice—touch—intellect.
151

Daunte Gaiter
In Loving Memory
You really leaving me like this?
After all my love?
I even got you this ring,
but fuck our marriage huh?
Acting just like my parents.
What kind of wife is that?
Saying you’d be right by my side,
holding my hand.
You promised we’d be forever.
You Promised you’d never leave.
Even after we fought.
You Promised you’d keep me clean.
You crossed your heart.
When you was sixteen.
You a god damn lie.
Look at you now.
You was always driving me crazy,
look at you now.
Drove yourself straight in the fucking ground.
I don’t give a fuck if you’re dead.
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You broke my heart.
Got me screaming at a grave.
You think you can leave me huh?
What you think you my Daddy?
I’ll summon you back.
Drag you straight out of the pits of Hell.
Whatever it takes.
You damn coward.
How you gonna leave me here?
I bet you forgot your daughter.
She’s going on eighteen.
Asking me where’s her mama.
Watching her daddy drink
I guess I’m just sharing my trauma.
Our family curse.
Haunts this family forever.
Why don’t you curse me.
Haunt me forever.
I’ll do whatever it takes.
Make me your vessel.
I’ll give you, my skin.
Let me feel you one more time.
Haunt me forever.
Haunt me forever.
153

KeYanla Cleckley
Stuck
A few years back, I remember being released from jail. I walked endlessly
for miles down winding, unpaved roads with cracks deep enough
to reach the Earth’s core. The serene quiet made me recede into a void
I didn’t know I could reach. It made me reach parts of my soul I hadn’t
touched in years. It made me think of my mom. She wouldn’t be proud of
who I’ve become. She would be disappointed.
Simple as that.
To make it worse, my only belongings were two pairs of shoes with one
shoelace, two dollars, and a baggy Metallica t-shirt with my mother’s
name on the tag. Everything I owned disappeared in a matter of seconds
when I was arrested. I remember feeling on top of the world. Now? I felt
an anvil holding me under water.
Water. I was dehydrated from the summer heat. I sped up walking in
hopes of finding a store nearby. It wasn’t until nightfall that I found a
secluded gas station. The windows had faded with old posters and trash
glued to tattered walls. The sounds of crickets filled the night air. The
entire parking lot was deserted.
When I walked in, the faint sound of an old bell rang out into the store.
A loud snore from an old man sleeping behind a junky, makeshift register
filled the room. I walked the empty aisles. The names and objects
confused me. I just searched for what I was used to. I grabbed a water
bottle and slammed it on the counter. The old man sprung awake. He
looked sternly at me.
“2.50,” he said. I rummaged in my pocket for what felt like eons and I
handed over two dollars. This would just have to do. He looked at me
once more and took the change.
“I get quite a few like you around here,” the old man sighed. “I got
enough change for the day to pay the rest off.”
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Ashamed, I quickly glanced away. I stared outside the window and saw a
concrete bench empty. I could sleep there tonight. “Thank you,” I remarked
to the man as I grabbed my water and walked to claim my spot.
As I laid down, I thought of what my next day would entail. Walking
forever, looking for a place to call home. It felt like things fell apart after
my mother died. I never had a place to call my own for years. I had to
fend for myself. Any way I could. Though, she never would’ve wanted the
way I went about it. Cheating. Lying. Fighting. I was ashamed but I could
retry. I had a fresh start. Something honorable. I could start by asking
the old man in the morning. Maybe he could help me.
When I awoke, a man had touched my shoulder. I rose up and squinted.
Once my eyes adjusted, I saw a man wearing cowboy boots. Before I
could make his face, the man picked me up and tossed me to the ground.
“What makes you think you can sleep here,” he yelled. I tried to raise
up but he knocked the wind out of me. “Well ain’t you gonna say something!”
His voice was erratic. It was rushed and angry. His face trembled with
bitterness. His eyes glinted. This man thought I did something. As if
I had done something terrible. Clenching my stomach from the fall, I
placed myself in a sitting position.
“The old man didn’t seem to mind,” I said as I stared at the ground.
“Well, I do. I don’t understand why my father lets trash around here,” the
man said. “All you do is take!” He pointed to the gas station front door. I
looked over to see broken glass on the ground. Food had been tossed and
the cash register was open. Important items were missing throughout
the store, especially the old man.
“Where’s the old man?” I said as I stood up. The tension from his gaze
made me flinch. The man screamed. He grabbed a piece of his blonde
hair and made a fist. The strands floating to the ground nearby. Without
thinking, he punched the bench and walked towards the gas station
doorway. Blood dripped from his palm as he pointed to the crime scene.
I slowly walked over to where he stood. Each step felt heavy and hard.
I felt I was walking through concrete. When I reached the doorway, the
smell of decay was prominent. It reeked of dried blood and gunpowder.
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The lights flickered with every second. I looked down to see a trail of
blood. I followed it with my eyes until I saw a head. A head covered with
gray hair. Blood drained from a bullet hole in the middle of his head,
while a book laid on top of his face and neck.
I rushed away to vomit. I felt faint.
“Explain it!” The stranger had grabbed me by the shoulders. The man
pushed me to the ground once more. Reaching into his pocket, he
grabbed his phone and dialed 911. “Hello, I would like to report a murder.”
How could I have been so careless? How could I have let something happen?
I truly was a lost cause. I no longer belonged. As the sirens came
closer, I wept for my innocence.
156

Liz Torres Shannon
A Beautiful Goodbye
There is nothing quite as heart-wrenching as watching a loved
one slip away from reality right before your eyes. My dad was always a
cheerful, charming, full-of-life person who had never met a stranger.
But, as children, we didn’t like to go anywhere with him because he was
always turned on to the energizer bunny setting, making it impossible
to keep up with him. He would be at least twenty feet ahead of us at all
times.
Mom and Dad left Houston, their home of more than fifty years,
and moved over three hundred miles away to Brownsville, Texas, to live
out their retirement days. Mom started noticing little things, mostly
forgetfulness at first, but then he locked himself out of the house
several times in a row and flipped his SUV on the gravel road in their
neighborhood. After the car accident, mom forced him to see a doctor—
something he hated to do. The doctor diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease.
Dad quickly withdrew and refused to talk about what was happening
to him. This drove Mom crazy; she’d never been a very patient person
when it came to Dad, to begin with. It was evident that although Mom
loved him, her feelings of ill will toward him were also apparent, stemming
perhaps from his past indiscretions. Mom had no idea how to deal
with what was happening, and she began to treat him more and more
like a child, and he continued to withdraw. Finally, not wanting to be
alone with him in the house so far from family, she got scared, panicked,
and fled to Houston with him.
By the time he got to Houston, hints of the disease were subtle
but noticeable. I observed forgetfulness, and sometimes Dad would ask
the same question repeatedly. As time went on, his behaviors became
more unpredictable. He would occasionally slip into another reality,
thinking he was still a Merchant Marine on a large vessel in the middle
of the ocean. He would pretend to repair things on board the ship and
tinker with the most random objects around him. Other times he would
masturbate in the middle of a room full of people as if no one else was
there.
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It quickly became evident that we could not leave Dad at home
alone. And, on a hot August afternoon, he made it clear that we could
not leave him alone—anywhere. It was an outdoor shopping mall, and by
the second store, he was tired. As we entered a sporting goods store, he
went straight to a chair in the shoe department and sat down. I agreed
to let him sit and rest as we shopped in the store, reminding him of
how important it was that he stay put in the chair until we came back
for him. Dad assured me he would remain seated, and I kept coming
back to check on him, making sure he was still there. When I went back
for him, my stomach dropped, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw
the empty chair; he was nowhere in sight. We searched the store and
then searched the entire outdoor shopping mall. No one had seen him.
Fearing the worst, we decided to call the police. Hours later, when it became
evident that he was not in the area, the police told us we should go
home and wait for their call. As we walked towards our car, thinking the
absolute worst, another police officer showed up with Dad in tow! Dad
was severely sunburned, and his white hair was standing straight up. He
looked like a sunburned, disheveled Albert Einstein!
Besides being agitated by all the fuss being made over him, he acted
as if nothing had happened. But it turns out he did indeed get up from
his chair in the shoe department and wandered outside, thinking he was
a merchant marine and late to board a ship sailing out of Galveston.
We never found out what exactly happened that afternoon. Dad
must have convinced someone that he needed to be in Galveston, and
they agreed to give him a ride. When it became apparent that he was not
in his right mind, they returned him to the shopping mall. Or, maybe
Dad just climbed into the back of a parked pickup truck, and once the
driver noticed him in the back, they brought him back to the shopping
mall. Either way, he rode in the back of a pickup truck, for god knows
how many miles, white hair flying in the hot Houston wind.
When Mom and Dad came to visit me in Louisiana for the holiday
season, I knew Mom wanted to stay. I knew she wanted help with him,
and being a stay-at-home mom, I felt I could offer her that. I thought
between us, we could manage him and let him live out his days in the
constant presence of family. But, within a few months, it had become
clear that it was impossible to take proper, round-the-clock care of him.
The night I was awakened in the middle of the night, to find him going
from room to room as he lit matches to see in the dark because he didn’t
remember that he could turn the light on with the flick of a switch, was
the night I knew we had to do something. Dad would keep us up all night
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when he went into these manic episodes, and it was impossible to reason
with him. We could not sleep in shifts. I had three kids in school and on
a schedule, and Mom couldn’t keep an eye on him 24/7. God knows she
tried. It becomes impossible to care for someone like that if you are not
caring for yourself first.
We began to discuss professional care in a nursing home. It took a
few more months of Dad’s crazy behaviors, a lot of soul-searching, and
family discussions filled with tears to make such a painful decision. The
decision was only made worse by my sister’s reaction to the news. She
berated my mom as only she could do. Mom was devastated and depressed,
but ultimately she knew what she had to do, and not even my
sister’s hurtful words and actions were going to keep her from doing the
right thing for her husband of over fifty years. After a few more months
of research and government bureaucracy, we settled on a beautiful new
facility just minutes from home. We knew it was best for him, but our
hearts hurt from the thought of leaving him in a strange place with unfamiliar
people. We explained, over and over, what his new living situation
would be, but he just didn’t understand.
Finally, on his first day at the nursing home, we got him settled
in and stayed with him the entire day. When it came time to leave, he
resisted very little, but enough to drain us of what little we had left in us
to keep it together. That night, however, I slept like a baby, and I’m sure
Mom did too, not having to listen for noise throughout the night to see if
he was wandering the house or the backyard. It felt good to know he was
safe and in good hands.
When the time came to move him to Denver, where my husband
had taken a new job, I toured endless nursing home facilities, and only
one really stood out as exemplary, but there was a waiting list a mile
long to get in. So I got him into the next best place, clear across the
Denver metroplex. We made the weekly trek to pick him up and bring
him home for the weekends, only to turn around and have him back by
Sunday evening so that we all could start our work and school week on
Monday morning.
We did this for six months until, finally, the call came. I had been
relentless in calling the admissions office each and every week, checking
to see if our position on the waiting list had changed. I think they finally
realized I wasn’t going to give up, and we finally got the call that they
had a place for Dad. The facility was much closer to home and absolutely
beautiful, worthy of its exorbitant price tag. The nursing staff was ter-
159

ific, and he was loved and well cared for throughout his nearly six-year
stay there. The nurses and staff became family, and as time passed, it
became our home away from home. For the first few years, I could bring
him home on the weekends, and he and Mom would spend their weekends
in the adorable apartment we created for them in the walk-out
basement with access to a spacious back patio and the outdoors. So, for
two and a half days a week, Dad would enjoy home-cooked meals and
outings with the family and, of course, quality time with Mom.
As time went on, he became weaker and more feeble. Finally, there
came a time when he couldn’t manage the step into the garage from the
house. I watched as my husband tenderly picked him up and carried him
to the car. At that moment, I knew this would be one of Dad’s very last
visits to the house. The visits home dwindled from every weekend to a
couple of times a month, which turned into once a month, which turned
into holidays, which eventually turned into a one-way only visit—from
us to him.
In May of 2006, I called my family and told them that it was the
beginning of the end. I could sense Dad wasn’t well, and he began to
share with me that he was ready to die. Mom refused to accept this. For
the next couple of months, he would be in and out of the hospital. On
one occasion, arriving DOA. We had no idea that the private room they
had escorted us to at the hospital when we arrived was to tell us he had
died on the way there. However, the hospital had managed to revive
him, and he survived. Mom refused to sign a DNR order even though he
communicated that he was ready to leave this life and was at peace with
his decision. Mom insisted that he be taken to the hospital every time he
appeared to be near death. The hospital would pump him up with fluids,
and Dad would be ok for a few days and then begin to decline again. I
should have stood up to Mom. I should have insisted she let him die in
peace and not put him through the torturous IVs that he hated so much,
along with the trauma and coldness of the emergency room. Finally, he
began to refuse food, and on Monday, July 3, 2006, we got the call that it
was only a matter of time before he was gone.
Mom and I arrived at his room that afternoon. He acknowledged
our presence, and even on his deathbed, his face lit up when he saw
Mom. He could no longer speak, but if he could, he would have said,
“Ayyy me negra!” referring to mom. An endearment he, with his pale,
fair skin, would always call her by because of her dark Mexican complexion.
We sat with him and talked about the upcoming holiday. We
watched CNN and the local news, and then I went out to a nearby deli
160

and got sandwiches for dinner. Mom and I ate our sandwiches and prepared
for the night.
I remember being nervous about the hours to come. I had never
seen anyone die before, and I wondered what it would be like. After dinner,
we settled in for the long night. The nurses brought in two oversized
recliners for us to sleep on, and I positioned Mom’s recliner right
next to Dad’s bed, and mine was a little further down from hers. We
took turns sitting next to him and holding his hand. He could hear and
understand us, and although he could not respond verbally, his eyes said
everything. The way he looked at us needed no words. Through his eyes,
he told us how much he loved us and how grateful he was that we could
be there with him. I told him how much I loved him and that it was ok to
let go when he was ready. I also promised him I would take care of Mom
and assured him that he did not need to worry about her. The night was
long. As I would wake up during the night, I would find him staring at
me, and I would reach for his hand and whisper, “I love you.”
His breathing changed in the early morning, and he began to
breathe a loud raspy breath; even as we were witnessing his journey
come to an end, Mom refused to accept what was happening. She asked
for applesauce and began to spoon-feed him. I tried to explain to her
that he would choke because he would be unable to swallow it, but Mom,
in her state of denial, just kept spooning it in his mouth. Exasperated,
I asked a nurse to come in, and she removed the applesauce from his
mouth and explained to Mom that she shouldn’t attempt to feed him.
She finally listened to the nurse. Within a few hours, his breathing began
to sound as if it was a struggle to take in a full breath. It was loud.
It was a sound I will never forget. Around ten in the morning on the 4th
of July, he finally took the last, loud, raspy breath, followed by complete
silence and a look on his face of pure, infinite peace.
Spending those last hours with him was a limitless blessing and
an extraordinary honor. It has been one of the most beautiful and most
profound experiences of my life. It reminded me that we are all somewhere
in the so-called circle of life of birth, living, and death. However,
that day I also understood that death could be just as beautiful an experience
as birth and that everything we do in-between matters.
161

Alena Sandoval
A Mother’s Love of Mountains
Mothers are supposed to be your candle
They’re supposed to light the way when you’re left in the dark
My mother burnt out when I needed her the most
My mother’s mountain of expectations for me is higher than
Mount Everest
I climb and climb
The air gets thin, and I can’t breath
But I continue climbing to the top
Hoping my mother’s love is there waiting to greet me
But the moment I slip, barely hanging on
She smirks at my imperfections
I’ll never be good enough to reach the top
She doesn’t see me screaming for her approval
I try and express my feelings, but I’m shut down by her anger
Her words hit me like gunshots, and I slowly fall taking every shit
And as I lay there feeling hopeless
I get up and start climbing
I want to fly
I want to fly far far away where the mountain peaks appear in sight of
perfection
But there are strings tied to my limbs holding me back
Strings that force me to be an adult when I’m only a child
162

Strings that shame me for showing my emotions
Strings that ridicule me for being a teenage girl
I desire being able to spread my wings, and be my own person, but
The strings make me feel guilty for wanting to be free of this torment
The strings tell me I’m nothing without them
That I can’t live without them
And I believe them
The strings holding me back have been a part of me my whole life
I love my strings too much
To let them go
No matter how much they tell and scream at me for not being
the perfect daughter
How can I cut the strings that raised me?
How can I move on without them?
No matter how much they rip my heart out, and beat me with
their words
My love for them burns like a thousand candles
I want to climb; I want to fly
To mountains of motherly love
*1st Place - Robb Jackson High School Poetry Awards, 2023
163

Nikiphoros Vlastos
American Sonnet for Those Never
Published or Spoke
After Terrance Hayes
I am a translation of my father’s poems
written, never published or spoke. Only muttered
between him and his ghost in dim light: One of
them whispers to the other You are alive, and
they both weep. My mother only sees how beautiful
she is when her face is half made of her lovers.
And I am sure of what I would have been, given
another life or a few years when I look upon my
brother. O beautiful brother of mine, you need not
read this as though it were vengeful or pitied, only
as you did on me the day I took away your loneliness
& alone we all howl confronting our hollow bodies,
beholden to that which makes us alive & desperately
holding onto those we cannot die without.
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Contributors’ Notes
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road
Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing
has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review,
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.
Steve Brisendine – writer, poet, occasional artist, recovering journalist – lives and
works in Mission, Kansas. His most recent collections are Salt Holds No Secret But
This (Spartan Press, 2022) and To Dance with Cassiopeia and Die (Alien Buddha Press,
2022), a “collaboration” with his former pen name of Stephen Clay Dearborn. His
work has appeared in Modern Haiku, Flint Hills Review, Connecticut River Review and
other journals and anthologies. Write to him at steve.brisendine@live.com.
Brandi Burns is a doctoral candidate specializing in Victorian Literature and
Health Humanities at Florida State University. Her research interests are short fiction,
ghosts, death and mourning, and misbehaving medical practitioners in Victorian
literature. She has been obsessed with Alice in Wonderland since childhood.
Poet-translator Lorraine Caputo’s works appear in over 300 journals on six continents;
and 20 collections of poetry – including On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl
press, 2019). Her writing has been nominated for the Best of the Net. She journeys
through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth.
Samantha Caudillo is a Corpus Christi native who loves to find stories in the lives and
cultures around her. Although she may look like she’s in her own world, she’s constantly
eavesdropping on conversations in hopes of finding inspiration for another writing.
KeYanla Cleckley (she/her/hers) is an imaginative writer, who grew up obsessed
with books. Currently residing in New Braunfels, she holds an MFA in Creating
Writing from Full Sail University and a BS in Political Science with minors in History,
International Studies, and Legal Studies from University of Evansville. When her
head isn’t in the clouds, she knits with her three dogs.
Emily Clemente is an MFA candidate at Florida State University with a concentration
in fiction. She is the recipient of the 2022 Max Steele Award in Fiction from
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her writing has appeared in
december, Deep South Magazine, and Jellyfish Review, among others. You can find more
of her work at emilyclemente.com.
Julieta Corpus became infatuated with the printed word at an early age, devouring
everything from Donald Duck comics to graphically violent news-magazines
like Alarma! In 1978, she crossed the Progreso International Bridge with
her family, leaving behind her belly button, but not her strong sense of culture
and love for her native tongue. She describes her poems as attempts to encapsulate
a moment, an emotion, or an event which, hopefully, will leave an indelible
mark in her readers. Her poems have been published in Tendiendo Puentes, The Mesquite
Review, UTPA’s Gallery Magazine, Festiva: The Writers Issue. She completed her
MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande in May 2016.
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Julieta translated Darklings, a short compilation of Gothic poems by Alan Oak, in
2013 from English to Spanish. She translated a collection of feminist fairy tales by
Sara Rafael Garcia, author of Las Niñas or The Girls and has recently edited poems
by 2020 Texas Poet Laureate Emmy Pérez. In 2016, Julieta collaborated with Poet
Katie Hoerth and Visual Artist Corinne McCormack Whittemore on a book titled,
Borderland Mujeres which will be published by Texas A&M University Press. Her first
collection of poetry, Of Love And Departures / De Amor Y Despedidas was published recently,
in June 2021, by EM Editoriales. Julieta recently won a Writer’s Residency in
Tasajillo, Texas and a grant to translate Austin, Texas author/poet Ire’ne Lara Silva’s
short story collection, Flesh & Bone.
William David is currently pursuing a History Master’s and holds Bachelor’s degrees
in both English and History. He works as a tutor and also in healthcare. He lives
in a bordertown called Edinburg and is working on putting together a chapbook.
Elijah X.A. Esquivel is an English BA graduate from TAMU-CC and a current poet
singer-songwriter. He was raised in South Texas, where his love for music and creativity
led him to create an online journal at: bigpimpninja01.wixsite.com/of-wit-andwrit.
An aspiring author, his work frequently explores themes of resistance, liberation,
and social change while mixing the genres of mythology and science fiction.
Elizabeth N. Flores taught government/political science for 43 years at Del Mar
College and was the college’s first Mexican American Studies Program Coordinator.
Flores earned an MA in Political Science at the University of Michigan and a BA in
Political Science at St. Mary’s University. She was awarded the LULAC Council 1
Educator of the Year Award (2014) and the Del Mar College Dr. Aileen Creighton
Award for Teaching Excellence (2013). Flores retired from teaching in 2022.
Cameron Fowler is a multi-passionate creative based in Corpus Christi, Texas.
After earning a Bachelor’s degree in English from Texas State University, Fowler
began working in the tourism industry as a stewardship and branding specialist while
pursuing a Master’s degree in English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.
Fowler’s writing is heavily influenced by her upbringing in New Braunfels, Texas,
and explores themes of trauma, perfectionism, and the challenges of balancing
multiple roles in an ever-changing, high-performance society. Drawing on personal
experiences such as growing up with undiagnosed ADHD, navigating purity culture,
creative and professional burnout, and overcoming past trauma through reflection
and writing, Fowler’s work aims to provide a voice for those who have experienced
similar challenges. Fowler’s writing style is eclectic and often includes a multi-genre
exploration of her own experiences, childhood, and culture. Recently, Fowler has
been exploring the internal and external tensions of having her heart torn between
the Texas hill country where she grew up and the coast which she now calls home.
“I am Daunte Gaiter, born and raised in Dallas, Texas. I am a scientist by day and
a writer by night. I have an undying love for reading, which inspired me to create
my own stories for you to enjoy. In my writing I like to explore the social interaction
between individuals and society through the eyes of minorities and other outcast
groups. I started writing poems when I was 17, which blossomed into writing creative
fictional stories. I am a Tree hugger, chef, movie enthusiast and social activist.
My goal is to be the best writer I can possibly be, while putting a smile on your face.”
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Guillermo Gallegos, also going by Guy or sometimes OLO, is a former art major
turned biomedical student. While he no longer pursues art as a career, he continues
to make art of all kinds. He is proudly transgender, Latinx, and the doting father of a
fussy cat. Hir work can be found on hir personal website, olo.pink.
Roy Gomez holds an Associate in Arts in English Literature and is currently an undergraduate
at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He was a prose panelist at People’s
Poetry Festival 2023, and his short story, “A Change is Coming,” will appear in Corpus
Christi Writers 2023 anthology. Roy juggles his time as a husband, father, writer, student,
and business owner. He lives in Corpus Christi, Texas with his wife, two kids, and cats.
Liesel Hamilton is the co-author of Wild South Carolina (Hub City Press, 2016).
She has been published in Audubon, Catapult, and The Normal School, among other
publications. She has an MFA from George Mason University and is working on a
collection of essays about birds and mental illness.
Aaron Holub was born in Houston. He has a BA in Literature from the University
of Houston. His writings are primarily focused on the intersection between modernity
and the politics of the south. He currently lives in Cypress, TX.
Jeff Janko is a local professional photographer with a passion for teaching. His
interest in photography began at an early age and he later became the high school
yearbook photographer for Roy Miller High School. He continued on to work as a
photographer for the University of Corpus Christi and majored in photography at
Sam Houston State University. Jeff received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Corpus
Christi State University and later his Master of Arts degree from Texas A&M University-Corpus
Christi. Jeff has been teaching photography in both film and digital
for the past twenty four years at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and Del Mar
College. He has also enjoyed teaching photography for eight years to high school
students attending Texas A&M’s Summer Camp program. Jeff worked for fifteen
years as a digital imaging specialist for Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and
later for the University’s Bell Library. Jeff currently lives with his wife Irma and their
ten cats. He can be contacted at jeffjanko54@gmail.com.
Amanda King is a writer and lives in Corpus Christi, Texas. Her work has been
published in The Southampton Review and the Switchgrass Review.
Nathaniel Lachenmeyer is an award-winning author of books for children and adults.
His first book,The Outsider, which takes as its subject his late father’s struggles with schizophrenia
and homelessness, was published by Broadway Books. His most recent book,
an all-ages graphic novel called The Singing Rock & Other Brand-New Fairy Tales, was
published by First Second/Macmillan. Nathaniel lives outside Atlanta with his family.
Tina Lentz-McMillan is a Filipina/-American/Mestiza poet whose poetry explores
mixed identity. Her current work focuses on how this identity can be Othering
from both sides and interrogates how colonialism can manifest as intergenerational
trauma. Symbols manifest, recur, and change across her body of work to engage the
reader in mythmaking. She has poems published in River City College MUSE, Oroboro
by Death Rattle Literary, and Sky Island Journal, among others. She lives in the lands
of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui Tribe, also known as Tucson, Arizona,
with her husband and their two dogs, cat, and pet parrot. Next creative steps are
exploring an embodied poetic.
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Liam Leslie: “Great acres of vast plains and boundless blue skies are easy to become
acquainted with. Sun cooked soil defines the ground leading to my usual horizon
line. My mind maps this place with ease and that one task is not ever enough.
So, with energy left over, I fill the void with thoughts. Words grow as plants other
than sage and skies other than clear. And its creation— a writer from Wyoming.”
Natasha Santana Loving hails from the deserts of Southern Arizona. It seems
impossible to extricate her from the West. Her writing often concerns theme parks,
the natural environment, migration, and the smallest of stories that connect us all.
She is currently pursuing her MA at the University of Wyoming. Find her through
her email (natsloving@gmail.com), her forthcoming podcast (“Spaceship Earth”), or
by playing The Buffy the Vampire theme song as loudly as you can.
Delaney McLemore has a PhD in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Louisiana
at Lafayette, an MFA in Nonfiction from West Virginia Wesleyan College and
a BA in English from Marshall University. Delaney’s work centers on family, Appalachia,
pop culture, class and addiction. They work and write in New Orleans. Find
them on instagram, @mx.mclemore.
Makena Metz is an LA native who writes for the page, screen, and stage. She has a
MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English from Chapman University’s dual degree
program and was the winner of the 2023 James L. Doti Outstanding Graduate
Student Award. Makena is a proud member of DGA, ASCAP, WIA, and the SCL.
Find her work on Coverfly, NPX, and follow her @makenametz on Tiktok, IG, FB,
Twitter, and check out makenametz.com.
Donna Faulkner née Miller spent her childhood between countries. One foot bare
and carefree in New Zealand, the other tiptoeing the coal dust and camaraderie of
working class England. She lives in Rangiora, New Zealand but likes to roam. You’ll
likely find her riding a remote road on the Harley with Mr Faulkner. She’s published
in erbacce, Havik, Tarot Poetry, Fieldstone Review, East Midlands Writing, Takahē: Hua/
Manu, Etherea Magazine, and others. You can connect with Donna on Instagram @
lady_lilith_poet/ Twitter @nee_miller. https://linktr.ee/donnafaulkner.
Laurence Musgrove is a professor, poet, cartoonist, and editor who teaches literature,
composition, and creative writing at Angelo State University in San Angelo,
Texas. His research focuses on Buddhist approaches to teaching and learning in English.
His poetry appears in a wide range of annual and quarterly journals and in his
collections Local Bird and The Bluebonnet Sutras. His new poetry collection A Stranger’s
Heart is forthcoming from Lamar University Literary Press. Laurence follows
his interests in aphorism and drawing in his weekly cartoons at texosophy.substack.
com. Laurence has edited a number of regional collections, including Texas Weather,
Lone Star Poetry, and Writing Texas. He is also the publisher and editor of the online
project Texas Poetry Assignment which publishes poems on a variety of Texas-related
themes, sponsors online and area readings, and supports hunger relief in our state.
Kathleen Naderer was born and raised in Corpus Christi and loves seeing this city
grow. She earned a bachelor’s degree in writing and rhetoric from St. Edward’s University
in 2010 and is currently working on her Masters of Library Science through
UNT online. She is a part-time tutor and a small business owner with a passion for
telling stories, especially those that capture the beauty and horror of the human
experience. This is her first published short story.
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Ellianna Nejat is a Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Alum and Lindenwood
University MFA program student. She has spent her twenty and something
years reading fantasy and poetry and working on writing about mental health. Her
favorite companion is her cat Zucchini who loves staring out the window at the lush
plants surrounding their home.
Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly. His poetry
has appeared in such publications as The Journal, Poetry Salzburg, Modern Literature,
The Museum of Americana, South African Literary Journal, and Home Planet News. His
books of poetry are Ballad of Billy the Kid, Monterey Bay Adventures, Mercurial World, and
Aurora California.
Alyssa Liney Pruitt: “I currently go to school at The University of Texas Rio Grande
Valley, Majoring in English and Psychology. I started writing poetry in high school.
It started with me writing down my feelings in a journal which was advice from my
therapist, whom I had been seeing for years. It helped me overcome many of my
emotions and I’m hoping for many others going through the same thing I did once to
be heard and seen. It’s a dream of mine to one day publish a book of my poetry for
others to relate to and understand they are not alone in what they feel cause many
people eventually go through the same emotions just not at the same time as others.”
Chloe Rodriguez is a poet, writer, and South Florida native. Chloe has her BA in English
with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Philosophy from Florida
International University. She is currently an MFA candidate for Creative Writing with
a focus in Poetry at Florida State University. When she’s not writing or doesn’t have
a book in hand, you can find her exploring and foraging the outdoors with her dogs.
Kevin Sandefur is the Capital Projects Accountant for the Champaign Unit 4 School
District. His fiction has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Gateway Review, and
Pulp Literature. He lives with a wife and two cats in Champaign County, Illinois, which
is a magical place where miracles happen almost every day, and hardly anyone seems
to find that remarkable.
Brianna Sandoval is a Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi alumni who has a love
for writing and public relations. She’s been writing for most of her life and enjoys creative
writing when she has time to. Born and raised in the Corpus Christi area, she enjoys
spending time at the beach, with her dog, and her family. She also plays a variety of video
games and produces content through her social media accounts. She is excited and
honored that her screenplay was selected to be published in the Windward Review; she
hopes that everyone enjoys her screenplay, and she can continue to have work published.
Eylie Sasajima (she/they), a recent graduate of Washington College, lives in Spring
Grove, Pennsylvania. Her creative work revolves around women, the apocalypse, and
the scenery of south central PA. Her work has appeared in Collegian and Pamplemousse.
You can find them on Twitter @eylieblue or Instagram @eylie_blue.
Liz Torres Shannon is a memoirist and graduate student at the University of Texas
at El Paso. She is the author of The Bear and the Penis: in ordinary lives, live extraordinary
stories. In addition, Liz has had a six-word memoir published in Six Words Fresh
Off the Boat Stories of Immigration, Identity, and Coming to America, from the New York
Times bestselling six-word memoir series in 2017. Liz enjoys reading, writing, Mexican
food, and spending time with her three grandsons, Roon, Bubby, and Leo.
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Alexandra Shimalla is a freelance journalist, higher-education lover, and fitness
enthusiast. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from Stetson University and a
master’s degree in journalism from the University of Georgia.
Bonnie Stump has requested that no biographical note be added.
Jenna Ulizio is a writer and poet from Connecticut, where she attends the University
of Connecticut as an English and History double major. They are also the
lead writer and showrunner for an original audio drama. They can often be found
daydreaming, wandering, reading, and taking care of a growing number of plants.
Sandra Valerio is a native of Molina, a small working class neighborhood located
on the West side of Corpus Christi, Texas. When she was four years old, she
declared herself a writer, only to retire after an afternoon nap so deep her mouth
drooled on her first masterpiece, a seven-line septet. Sandra was schooled early in life
by her five big sisters, the other sisters at local Catholic schools, various community
colleges, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, the United States Air Force, and her current
employer, Del Mar College, where she teaches first and second-year English. She is
a wife, a mother, a grandmother-in-waiting, and a writer who thinks that maybe she
retired too early.
Nikiphoros Vlastos currently attends the University of Wyoming, where he is pursuing
a bachelor’s degree in environment science with a minor in creative writing.
Joseph Wilson taught Senior English, Advanced Placement, Film Studies, and
Creative Writing at Richard King Highschool for 42 years. He created and edited
the art and poetry magazine, Open All Night, for 40 years. His work can also be found
in Corpus Christi Writers 2018, Corpus Christi Writers 2019, Corpus Christi Writers 2020,
Corpus Christi Writers 2021 and Corpus Christi Writers 2022. He writes poetry.
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