“I just want us to be on the same page.” Amber’s voice, which always sounded sweet and bubbly, had a cold viciousness.

“Fuck you! We’re done.”

“No, Dana. I made the call so I’m telling you we’re over, you spineless shi-”

That’s where I hung up. Amber called to tell me that she’d been sleeping around with some Steve guy. I remember last weekend going to her parents’ house for lunch, saving an inchworm from a spiderweb. She was out the night before fooling around. That night we went skinny-dipping in her parents’ pool, her shivering lips lying an ‘I love you.’

Going to work was the last thing I wanted to do. Driving around delivering food all the while thinking, rehashing that phone call over and over again until I went crazy.

I stood outside smoking and staring at traffic. The air felt thick and I could smell the threat of rain. I sat down on the hood of my car and threw my cigarette into the street. The sky was starless and overcast. I tried not to think, tried to make my mind turn off but it didn’t work.

The paved road turned into dirt abruptly, small stones plinked off the car.

I turned onto Amber’s street. Her red Camry was parked half on the lawn. The house looked foreign in the darkness. Suddenly, the garage motion light flashed on, sending hard shadows across the lawn. I sped away, imagining Amber pulling a curtain aside with a wrinkled brow, shrugging slightly again, going back to her knitting or drinking or lying.

“That took longer than half an hour.” He was a round, slob of a man in a shirt littered with stains. I just shrugged and handed him the food. He gave me a fifty cent tip.

I pulled up to the curb in front of an apartment building, two stories of green paint with white trim. Trash bags lined the small patch of grass on the right side of the stoop. I climbed the stairs up to apartment two. A woman with a tight, blonde ponytail answered my knock.

Most of the apartments on Mechanic street suffered from being unforgivably small and dirty. Her apartment was no exception: Dishes lined the counter, mail and other papers were piled high on the kitchen table. I turned to my left and noted laundry baskets of clothes overtaking the sofa.

“Sorry about the mess.” She sounded so insincere and unashamed of her home. “I’ll go get your money, wait there.”

Suddenly, a gremlin ran into the room in a flurry of long black hair and smiles.

“Hi.” She looked to be no older than three. She swayed on her feet and chewed her fingers.

“Hi.” I felt odd talking to her kid. I shuffled on my feet and angled the pizza warmer between our eyes.

She couldn’t be fooled. “Hi.” She leaned over, her head upside down, her hair brushing the dirty floor.

Mumbles from the back bedroom escalated into shouts. I leaned forward and craned my neck.

“It’s my money! Who said you could spend my money?”

“It’s just dinner. For all of us.”

“We have shit here to heat.” A tired box spring groaned. He lumbered out into the kitchen. “Who are you?” He was a large man, with huge shoulders and a deep tan.

I opened my mouth to introduce myself but her voice filled the void.

“He’s just the delivery boy.”

“Get outta here. Go home.” He stepped forward. “Leave.”

“No, don’t. Leave him alone.”

I looked around wishing I could dissolve into the clutter.

“Kayla, honey. Go watch TV.”

The little girl didn’t say a word, just plodded off into the living room and disappeared between the laundry baskets.

The three of us stood in the kitchen avoiding eye contact with one another. He was at the sink, leaning against the counter and breathing heavily as if the physical toll of standing was too much for his apelike body to bear.

I broke the silence. “I can go wait in my car if that will be best for you.”

“Just pay him so he can get outta here,” he said.

“Are you gonna give me the money?”

“Use your own damn money.”

She set her jaw and blinked hard. “Give me the money.”

He spit into the sink. “Somebody needs to learn the value of a dollar. We’ll switch. I’ll stay home on my fat ass ordering pizza and watching Kayla while you spend all day roofing.”

I wanted to drop the food and leave, pay for it out of my tips or maybe my boss would swallow the story. In the silence all I could hear was the ticking of a wall clock. Each second seemed to increase the heat in the room until I wiped sweat out of my eyes. I waited for him to throw dishes on the floor or hit her, for the situation to escalate into charges of domestic battery with him being taken down by men in sirened cars and blue hats.

She sighed heavily and stormed into the back bedroom. He laughed and shook his head. “What’s that? Oh, you do have money of your own!” He scowled at me and walked into the bedroom doorway, hands drumming on the jamb. She pushed past him using her elbows and marched up to me to hand me a perfectly crisp twenty dollar bill. “Don’t it feel good? Spending your own money?”

“You are such an asshole.”

He chuckled. “Well I got some unflattering words for you, honey.”

“Oh yeah?!” She lost it, running up to him and slapping his chest with her small hands. “Say it! Just fucking say it!”

“Trust me, bitch. You don’t wanna hear it.” All joking melted out of him and malice flooded in.

“Get out.”

I took the cold pizza out of the warmer and placed it on the table, toppling the stacks of papers and mail. She started shoving him, demanding that he leave. Suddenly, she slapped him across the face. I reached for the doorknob.

“Fine, I’ll say it, bitch. You’re just pissed because you realized that Kayla is gonna grow up dirty and stupid just like her ma.”

Music from the living room drifted into the kitchen.

“You want a smoke, man?” He followed me out the door.

“Yes. Yes I do.”

We stood on the stoop, moths circling the bare bulb above us. The mark of her palm wasn’t visible on his tan face.

“Looks like I’m sleeping in my car. Again.”

I walked down the steps and climbed into my car.

“She’s not mine.” He called after me. “The kid. She ain’t mine.”

I started my car. A man on the radio sang: “Stick to the side roads. They have interesting thoughts.” I turned the radio off.

Matthew A. Nolan is a twenty-six year old living in Western Massachusetts.

Photos by Victor Bezrukov.

Dukla's Polish cover art

Like most readers, I have my momentary fancies. I think it was in 2006 that I sought everything labeled magical realism, which, in my collegiate ineptitude, was relegated to Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, and Salman Rushdie. The Nabokov canon was its own phase. Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald went together. Once upon a time it was Dennis Cooper, J. T. LeRoy, Hubert Selby Jr., and Chuck Palahniuk (don’t tell anyone). A reader isn’t that different from a normal person, really. Our passion may be different, but we’re subject to the same system of evolving tastes as anyone else. Even writers.

Readers who happen to be writers generally add another dimension to their infatuations. It shows up in their writing, in those they emulate and echo. Sometimes this is a conscious directive, but more often it’s something latent. Unfortunately for me, I keep a journal, and it serves as a record of my “theories” on literature.

I’m developing some ideas about narrative–or at least I’ve been thinking about narrative lately. There’s a part of me that finds the traditional narrative structure so artificial and unsatisfactory… I don’t know that I’m necessarily tired of artifice, as it does work for some pieces, but it’s just not very engaging for me right now.

That was November 11, 2011, at 3:50 p.m. Throughout last year I consumed fiction after fiction that skirted around what I’d deemed the traditional narrative–everything from Wittgenstein’s Mistress to Beckett’s trilogy to Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which might not even be fiction–and, as with all fancies, I’d warped my sensibility as writer and reader. The idea of an emotional narrative arc started to take shape in my head–something that moved quietly through these novels and worked itself out in the dark parts of your brain. I think of it now like music. It’s something that takes place whether you understand it or not, and by the time you reach the final pages of The Unnamable, despite drifting through the narrator’s consciousness, it’s like you’ve swallowed too much cold milk. This, to me, was something new, and something worth pursuing.

Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk

Even though I’m struggling with my own limitations, I’m still enamored with this idea, which is why I fell in love with Andrzej Stasiuk’s Dukla, recently published by the always exciting Dalkey Archive. Originally published to much acclaim in 1997, this is the novel’s first translation into English, and it hurts to know we’ve had to wait fourteen years to read this. Duklais every artifice-fearing reader’s dream.

“For a long time now it’s seemed to me that the only thing worth describing is light, its variations and its eternal nature. Actions interest me to a much lesser degree.” This is the unnamed narrator’s confession, not far into the tri-part novella that comprises the bulk of this volume. “There’ll be no plot,” he warns us in the opening “essay,” with its “promise of a beginning and hope of an end. A plot is the remission of sins, the mother of fools, but it melts away in the rising light of the day.” In this way, Dukla has already canceled out our instinctual expectations as readers. Even now, I’m not sure whether to call it fiction, travelogue, memoir, essay, philosophy, or prose poetry. In truth it would disappoint me if I could. What matters is everything that’s here–the textures, the absence and presence of light, the summer’s heat and the silence of snow. The novel itself is an experience, and it wants you to be as open to its touch as possible.

Dukla is a real place–a small town and summer resort in Poland. Dukla is a series of glances at Dukla, all viewed through different lights and lenses. The novella at the heart of the book ties itself to a single, definable narrator and his repeated visits to the area, from his erotic awakening as a thirteen year old boy to his travels as an adult. “It’s a strange thing,” he says, “that I don’t recall any of my thoughts or feelings from that time. I don’t remember any of the things that actually were dearest to me, so I have to imagine them to myself.” These imaginings are delicately observed, painful reconstructions of life itself, drawn in a prose style so acute, so organic, and so affecting it’s easy to forget the novel is not native to English (this book is, needless to say, a triumph of translation). He takes what’s visible–what’s allowed by light–and deduces from it the logical conclusions any human being would deduce. In this way, fiction is inevitable. Fiction is the truth derived from memory or actuality–the visible world. What’s startling, then, is when Stasiuk takes away the light.

When night falls, the world vanishes. “Without the world, without the variety of forms all around, a person is naught but a mirror in which nothing is reflected… The primal matter of the dark enters the veins and circulates like blood.” Here, in a novel admitting that “the imagination is powerless,” is the denial of that admission. In this sense, Dukla itself is a contradiction. With nothing left to see, the mind reaches inward and creates its own reality, or the basis of fiction. Dukla is not a novel about light at all, but a novel about darkness.

In the darkness is our imagination. While the absence of light eradicates the physical world–the landscape, the animals burrowed in the snow, even your own hand in front of your face–the imagination reaches out into its limitlessness and recreates what was lost. This, Stasiuk admits, is the closest we’ll come to eternity. Even after those landscapes and animals and all of humanity have passed from the earth, in the dark anything is possible. Dukla reminds us to get lost, now and then, in that darkness.

The rocking chair is made of wicker and it is white. There is a warm breeze from the harbor. I have done nothing all day. A few weeks ago I kissed my love’s arm on the spot where thin white scars crossed his skin. I seem to be helpless in most things. A bird giggles to itself in the trees. There is an apple on the table, it’s been there for days. Tonight he will sleep again on a bench in Columbus Circle. The flag on the porch is new; the stars and stripes are bright on the fabric. Soon there will be a new flagpole to display it from. I’ve spoken only a few words aloud all day. The sun is strong. His friends say they are sorry when he tells them he is homeless. Then they go to dinner. I smell thick harbor seaweed and salt on the wind. There are huge bushes of honeysuckle along the driveway. My little sister hops off a yellow bus for the last time until September, notebooks and pastel drawings spilling from her hands. The sun is strong. Yesterday I took his knife away. I doubt that he would have used it for self-defense. The grass is lush and green. My sister asks me brightly if I want to start a lemonade stand with her. The porch has recently been repainted white. The sun is clear. His knife is in my room, hidden behind the books. All day and all night its red plastic handle lingers.

Evelyn Weinstein is a music-maker. She collects dragons and masks. She’s been published in Teen Ink and various local collections.

Photo by Jose Mesa.

i want a lumberjack hat so i can keep stuff in it, like hot air. i want to walk around with a hat on with hot air in the hat in the space between the fur and the hat and my hair, i want to be like a cloud of floating air-hat-hairness for as long as this postnuclear winter wears on.

you know, i don’t usually include biographical details in these things, it’s a voice thing, it’s actually physically my voice i’m talking about, my voice cracks when i talk about myself, not like, squeak, you know, in the middle of what you’re saying. i mean like you’re supposed to crack an egg on a flat surface, and that’s how i normally, you get a clean break and you don’t have to pry your fingers under the shell to get what you want of it out of it. the egg i mean. but when i talk about myself it’s like i cracked it on a countertop edge and you’re not supposed to do that, the shell turns into a crater and all this shrapnel gets between your teeth and you get proteins and amino acids all up and down your fingers and you get salmonella from that if you don’t wash your hands.

ok?

this winter’s making me sick, i’m not joking, stepping on dirt in january and feeling it sag underneath your feet when it’s not supposed to do that? not seeing snow down here’s not natural, so late in the winter i mean. it’s giving me these dreams, i’m not making this up, i’m having extremely vivid dreams about people transforming into very friendly and human-like animals. like a man and a woman get trapped in an exercise ball, fighting each other to the death with samurai swords, and then when they go still inside of there because holy shit, they probably killed each other, you open it up and find a dead kangaroo which you know you can bring back to life with your sincere encouragement and brotherly love, and you do, and you get it to hop around even, and then you get to hop around too because you’re also a kangaroo.

i thought my spirit animal was a killer whale. i’m not exaggerating when i tell you that writing a sentence like that last winter, when i was waist deep in crime and punishment and chewing my nails waiting to make up my mind and grow up and stuff, spirit animals were the farthest thing from me. i got what i needed, it was cold as fuck the whole time, did what i needed i mean, it was awesome. the nose smells what it expects.

i’d like to take this moment to observe that in st. petersburg the sun shines about a thousand hours less than it does in boston, every winter.

i’d like to slush through sidewalk moats and not think about three months ago, the storm we got on halloween, when everybody lost power. i don’t know if i’m alone in this, but the first thing i did when the lights came back on was play fallout 3. i don’t know if that means anything, and i don’t know if i’m alone in that either.

Photo by Derrick Tyson.

When school is out, I go to Garner State Park with my friend Raynell. She has three sisters, and a brother named Cotton. Raynell’s mom makes the girls wear tennis shoes in the river. The ones I bring have holes worn through and my big toes stick out. Cotton goes barefoot, which is how he cuts his foot open. His dad says it doesn’t look bad, but Cotton’s mom drives him into Leaky anyway. He gets nine stitches.

A few days later, Cotton gets real sick. Raynell’s mom calls mine to say he’s in the hospital.

“It’s blood poisoning,” Mom tells Dad at the dinner table.

I go with my parents to see Cotton in the hospital. He has needles in his arms. Cotton’s mom says the doctors are giving him medicine, to fight off the infection. At first Cotton gets better, then a whole lot worse. Then he dies.

Raynell and I are best friends, have been our whole lives. Our street falls off steep below my house, then dead-ends into a stretch of gully wash that separates the edge of our sub-division from the country club. We’re members there. My father plays golf Saturday mornings.

The day before Cotton’s funeral, Raynell and I meet on the corner. She has a pack of Marlboros she’s swiped off her father’s dresser. We walk to the deserted place at the end of our street.

“What’s it like?” I ask.

Raynell lights up a cigarette. “People bring us food all day, say how great it was when Cotton was alive.” She blows smoke out in a steady stream, like she’s been doing it forever. “I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

“Me too.” I’ve missed Raynell.

My parents take me to Cotton’s funeral the next day. I wear my nicest dress. The blue brocade with puff sleeves. We file past Cotton’s casket. It’s the first dead body I’ve ever seen. I look close at Cotton’s mouth. A girl at youth camp once told me how the lips are sewn shut on the inside by running a needle through the nose. Her father owned a mortuary.

The organ starts playing and we find a seat. The priest tells everyone how Cotton got his nickname. “His hair was so blond it was white almost, like an angel’s.”

Cotton’s mother makes a noise that sounds like a bird cawing. It rises into the vaulted ceiling.

After Cotton’s funeral, Raynell and I spend more and more time down at the end of our street. Most evenings, we sit on the trunk of a fallen tree by the dry creek bed. Raynell smokes cigarettes she gets from the packs her father leaves around their house. I smoke sometimes, too.

When Raynell sleeps over at my house, she makes us practice kissing. My stuffed animals, a Beatles poster, each other. She says we need to be ready for the real thing. We lie awake and talk about what life might be like, when our parents no longer tell us what to do.

“We can sleep with boys,” Raynell says.

“Or move to far off places,” I say.

“Either way, we’ll be the bosses of our own lives.”

One morning, Raynell and I walk to school, like usual. We’re one block away when we hear the first bell.

“We’re late,” I say.

Raynell shrugs. “Maybe we should skip.”

“They’ll report us.”

“So?” Raynell heads back and I follow.

We go to my house because my parents both work. I try to forge letters, excusing our absence. What if the lady in the attendance office compares our signatures to our parents? I bet she keeps things like that on file.

“We should leave town,” Raynell says. “Our parents are going to kill us anyway.”

Raynell is the same age as me, but looks younger. She’s built tiny and has the longest hair. It’s so thick she can barely get a brush through it. Her mother combs it out once a week, after it’s been washed.

Raynell’s shown me bruises before, where her father roughed her up over something not even as bad as playing hooky. Once, Raynell said, he yanked her mother around by her hair.

I pull out bread and spread slices with peanut butter and jelly. I empty books from my school satchel and fill it up with sandwiches, bags of Fritos, bottles of coke. I walk with Raynell to the nearest highway. We turn right when we hit the feeder. Two hours later, the bottoms of my feet feel like burnt mush.

“Let’s rest a while,” Raynell says.

“Maybe we should go back.”

“Or hitch a ride.”

I try to picture what my future might be like with Raynell, thumbing rides, hopping railroad cars. We cross the stretch of grass that separates the feeder from the highway. Raynell puts her thumb up.

A white cab with a flat-bed trailer passes by. It slows and pulls onto the shoulder. Raynell grabs my arm, hauls me over. She steps onto the running board and tugs the passenger door open.

A man sits behind the wheel. His face looks like the inside of a grapefruit, grainy and moist. His hair is cropped short, the ends yellow.

“We’re headed for the next town,” Raynell says.

“Hop in.”

Raynell jumps onto the bench seat. I slide in beside her, yank the big door shut. The man checks his left mirror and sidles back onto the highway.

“Where you headed?” Raynell asks.

“New Mexico.”

“June and I are sisters,” Raynell says, but the man seems more interested in his truck gaining speed.

“We’re step-sisters really.”

The man shifts the truck into second gear.

“Our grandparents live in the next town. That’s where we’re going.”

He shifts right and up. “Thought you girls might be runnin’ away.”

“We’d never do that,” I say.

“Cause you’re good girls?” The man pulls the gear shift down. His knotty fist is close to Raynell’s thigh.

“Yes, we are,” I say.

“But good girls don’t skip out of school.” The man slides the gear back up and over.

“That’s our exit,” I say. I jerk my head around at the road sign he’s passing.

“There’ll be another.”

“Let us out,” I say.

“Wait a minute, little girl.” The smooth edges come off his voice.

I grab the handle of the truck door. “We’ll jump.” I take Raynell’s arm as if I mean to pull her out along with me.

“You asked me for a ride.” The man’s voice softens a little.

“We’re running away alright,” Raynell says, from out of nowhere. “I hate my life.”

Everyone’s real quiet, like we’re not sure what to do next.

“My name’s James,” the man offers.

“You hungry?” Raynell asks. She picks my satchel up off the floor. Pulls out a sandwich and hands it to James.

“Thanks,” he says.

Raynell hands me a sandwich, then takes one for herself. Everything seems okay between us, even though we’re barreling down a highway with a man we’ve never met.

After dark, James stops at a rest area. He walks us to the women’s side and waits. After, he helps us into the cab and closes the door. We hear him making nearby, on the dry concrete. He climbs back into the truck and up onto a platform bed behind the seat.

“Stretch out down there if you’d like, or–” He pats the place beside him, “One of you can sleep with me. Promise not to touch.”

Raynell scrambles up next to James. He leans over Raynell and hands me a pillow. It’s quiet, except for the far-off noises on the highway. Raynell lies on the edge of the bed, but she doesn’t look scared.

The next morning, we wait in the truck while James goes into a grocery store in Sonora. He comes out with two cartons of milk and a tray of cinnamon rolls. He has a pack of cigarettes for himself, and a six-pack of beer.

“Where to, ladies?” he asks.

“New Mexico,” Raynell says. She has a look about her that she didn’t have yesterday.

James stops further west, at a spring pool in Balmoreah. He stuffs his beer in a canvas bag and sets it on a flat rock in the cold water. He hands us each one. I shake my head. I’m Baptist. Raynell’s Catholic, so she takes one.

James tells us stories about all the places he’s been. California, Florida, Nebraska.

“Sounds like fun,” Raynell says.

“Some day I’d like to settle down,” he says. “Open a snake farm.”

“I want to have kids,” she offers.

James and Raynell are in the water, stripped down to their underwear. James puts his face down close to Raynell’s and blows bubbles at her. They pop open when they hit against her mouth.

“I should send you home,” he says.

“What about New Mexico?”

“I could go to jail.”

Raynell throws her arms around James’ neck. “But I love you,” she says.

He smiles, but seems sad, too. “I could give you money to get back.”

“We can take a bus,” I say. I don’t want to live in a truck, or on a snake farm. I want to go to high school, college. Maybe get married someday.

“I want to stay with you,” Raynell says, and she kisses James on the mouth.

Late that night, James pulls his truck into a rest area, just outside of El Paso. Raynell crawls up into the bed of the truck.

I wake early the next morning. Raynell and James are still sleeping. His big hand rests on the rise of her small hip. Her back is nestled into the hollow of his belly. It reminds me of Mom’s mixing bowls back home. I look out at the sky, bright and bigger than I’ve ever seen. I watch a hawk fly up into the blue of it. I wonder where it will ever end.

–

Rebekah Love has a MFA in Creative Writing and teaches at Lonestar College in Houston, Texas. Her work has previously appeared in Red River Review, Sombrilla, Poetry Motel, Illya’s Honey, Rockhurst Review, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, City Works, and Splash of Red.

Photo by katieg93.

We’d joked about committing her before, but this time I could tell the conversation was serious. Lately my mother had been getting out of hand, and all three of us were afraid for her physical well being, as well as our own mental states. We decided that something finally had to be done. After years of talking about it with sarcasm and slapstick, the air of severity had begun to thicken around the subject. It was no longer funny to wag your tongue and talk gibberish like mom would claim she had done the day before at her work in a call center. Something about the computer screens and Visa balances made her tongue tied, and she would have what she called an “episode,” and have to go home early from work. This put great stress on dad who’d already had one heart attack and was working on a second. He worked two jobs because hers didn’t count as a full one. Her heart was stronger, and the irony was that with all her health issues she would probably outlive him.

We met at a Mexican restaurant. My sisters munched on the free chips and salsa and ordered water while I needed a cold cerveza to ease this meeting along. I knew where this was going before it began, but I hoped perhaps this time it would be different. That is the power of my family. We are all such good cons that we actually convince ourselves that we will get better and change along with her. I’m alone in thinking that zero contact with her will do the trick. Hoping was just a delay for denial.

“Listen, mom needs help.” Hannah was the first to bring everything back down to the table. She had a way of doing this. An unfortunate umbilical residue from my mother’s womb. Laughter at any event would be going along at a pretty good clip, and she would bring up homeless people or war refugees. We would be playing cards, joking about how mom would invite her doctors and their families on our family vacation, but Hannah found a way to turn it into something darker about mom’s own immediate family and how they never accepted mom who was just searching for others to fill that need. What about us?

“Ever since the stroke she has been spiraling further down. She won’t get off the pain patches, and she calls off work every other day,” Hannah continued her assessment with no real idea of a solution. I’m quick to correct this in my head. She did not have an actual stroke. The word is a substitution for a long drawn out conversation that I’ve seen many a former family friend glaze over during and magically drop off the face of the earth afterwards. My mother cried wolf so many times in the ER that she inadvertently put herself into a medically induced coma after aspirating stomach bile caused by a colostomy bag blockage that may or may not have existed. She developed a fever which caused hypoxia which burnt out parts of her brain. We say stroke because it’s easier, but the end results are different. Another word was thrown around, but we always avoided it: Munchhausen.

“The truth of the matter is mom does not want help. People need to want it before they can begin.” Ah, June, self-proclaimed surrogate matriarch to us all. Somewhere in our sordid history this woman became a mother of two and the glue that kept our holidays together. It meant a lot to her and to some extent the rest of us, and so she continued after mom was no longer able or willing to cook a turkey. This just gave mom more time now to lie on the couch moaning about something she ate. A Christmas tradition.

“I think we need to hold some type of intervention.” Hannah again. “We can’t commit her against her will, but perhaps she will listen to us if we sit her down and actually lay out what we see and how it is affecting us and dad.” That is the central conundrum right there, Han. Mom is not certifiable. She is not what any clinician would call crazy. But what she does wreaks havoc in our lives. How can a selfish hypochondriac be allowed to walk the streets? I agree she needs help, but I just sit and listen. I learned this when we were all in family counseling. No one spoke up, so I did. I ranted to the counselor and to my mom that no one trusted her anymore. She made things up out of thin air. Stories from my childhood changed dramatically from one day to the next. It wasn’t a mix-up of kids, they were complete fabrications. Mount Saint Helen’s did not erupt on my birthday. Not even a tremor was felt for another month. The story she told me became a story I told others, and it was false. I found out by watching a news ticker on the 28th anniversary of the event. The fireworks that, according to her, accompanied my birth never happened, and that soft insulation that all children have in thinking they are special was snuffed away. Just as well though, there wasn’t much left anyway. She lied about little things, too, and lifetimes of impressions would come to sudden and baffling ends by the simple crawl of red lights and “this day in history.”

After my harsh stab at the truth in the session everyone gasped and my mother started to cry. At the time, I still lived at home and here I had to go back in their blue Pontiac wagon. My mother already obsessed in the car as it was. She would ride in the passenger seat and flip the visor down so she could watch the cars behind her in the visor mirror. This time all she did was stare at me. She was silent until we pulled in the driveway when she looked at me and said, “You betrayed me.” To this day I don’t know if she was embarrassed by her son or ashamed because what he said was true. I do know that I have kept quiet ever since. I walked out onto a tree limb, and my entire family watched as it broke. Hannah even shamed me for the words I yelled on the way down.

June piped in again, “So when are we going to do this?” I honestly didn’t think we’d get this far. We might actually set a date. I looked at them both and shrugged my shoulders. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I was my dad’s son. Always excited by the possibility of change, but never thinking too much about the steps or consequences involved. All I knew was that my mother’s illnesses and her ouroboros-like lies confused me, and I didn’t know how to help her.

Hannah was the first to dissent. “Well, John and I are trying for a baby. What happens when all this comes to a head and there I am pregnant or with a newborn? John has already said to me that if we get pregnant he doesn’t want me to stress about her.” We had gotten farther than usual, but the brick wall was just ahead.

“You know, with two kids of my own I can completely understand, but if we wait much longer I’m afraid that she’ll kill dad with another heart attack.” At least June was being honest. Hannah was always afraid of confronting mom, but it still bothered her that she was descending so fully. If she were pregnant then she would have an excuse to bow out when things got ugly, and once the initial shock wore off it would get downright nasty.

“Honestly, I think we should all talk to mom on our own. I already have and I feel I’ve made my peace with her even though she hasn’t changed. I don’t see any of this making a damn bit of difference,” June clipped. We had been talking like this for years, but there was something arrogant and mom-like in her tone. We younger siblings were being trivial and petty, and she had already cleaned this from her mind. The first child always races to be first. Apparently, since she made her peace, the rest of us would have to go on with only half-hearted peace-filled support from her.

So there it was. We’d actually peered over the dark precipice, blinked and stepped back. No one was willing to fight a losing battle for little gain. We would talk about it still and hash over the latest crazy mom story, but to do something was never really an option. I drank the last swig of the beer I’d been nursing and picked up the menu.

“So what do you think?” Hannah looked at me, already defeated and relieved. June picked up a chip and dunked it in some salsa. I looked at both of them and let out a long sigh. It was over for now.

Andrew is an academic advisor and adjunct faculty member at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is a graduate of Xavier University and this is his first published story. He lives with his wife Kristen and their cat Mia.

Photo by HeatherHeatherHeather.

the city has no arms.
he squeezes the back
of his neck and feels a python.

no legs. success
means to crawl.
wings lurk above,
embellishing towers.

thoughts can’t move.
motion isn’t contact.
everyone has their own terrarium,
hiding a few scary eggs.

he masturbates
and it feels like squeezing a reptile,
cold and unresponsive,
lack of breath–

an attempt to kill something,
some vengeful clue
hibernating
in the constrictive gloom.

the night pumps delirium,
a saturnalia of lies.
hope without ethos
or grace.

one primate stands up,
sobbing suddenly
in the rain.

Chris Crittenden does much of his writing in a spruce forest, fifty miles from the nearest traffic light. He teaches environmental ethics for the University of Maine, and embraces a personalized ethos of ecofeminist shamanism. His recent interview on Jane Crown Poetry Radio is available at the site. He blogs as Owl Who Laughs.

Photo by neueweide.

"The key to success is staying organized."

It’s common knowledge among writers that the key to success is to just “stay in the room.” It certainly says something about the nature of this art when so many writers reluctantly drag themselves to their work. We resign ourselves to the commitment of writing like it’s a diet or a 12-step program.

But what happens after you make that commitment? You are seated in a solitary carrel at the library, or you’ve just returned home with your favorite caffeinated concoction. The cursor keeps blinking, but you have no tolerance for excuses and will not leave the room. Now what do you do?

Eleven months ago, I made the crazy or genius decision to quit my day job to pursue my career as a writer. After almost a year of drafting, re-writing, revising, plotting, outlining, reading my work, starting a writing group, scrutinizing the language in everything I read from my favorite fiction to the descriptions of dinner meals on restaurant menus, attending conferences and workshops and lectures and readings and tearfully thanking my family every day for their unwavering support, I have come to the conclusion that, after “staying in the room,” the key to success is staying organized.

Organization (or the lack thereof) means something different for each person, and of course individual writers have their own needs. I have found that, though I exist on a baseline of “organized clutter,” each of my projects demands different methods of organization. While short stories can happily co-exist in their own pocket folders, my blog posts are kept online in various states of completion. Longer projects, such as novels and collections, require file folders with tabbed dividers for each draft.

Though new technology boasts “an app for everything,” many writers are still unaware of computer programs designed to help them stay organized. Software like StoryMill, Scrivener, and yWriter can keep your desktop–both on the computer and your home furnishings–clutter free by streamlining all of your notes, drafts, character sketches, and bits of dialogue into a single program window. Many of these applications also boast tools like name generators and cliché meters, as well as progress reports to help you maintain your goals.

Screenshot of StoryMill writing software

Whether you are a writer of prose poems or radio drama, finding a way to get organized so you know the current status of your work—which story is plotted but still needs to be drafted, which chapter is polished but awaiting feedback from your trusted readers—is beyond beneficial. Maybe you require an ongoing to-do list, or use colored-coded post-its on your kitchen window. Maybe you develop a spreadsheet to help you track the scenes in your memoir that still need to be reworked. As your work advances from “in-process” to “ready for publication,” effective organization guides you through the multi-tasking required to submit and self-promote while also pursuing your next project.

Personally, I prefer to maintain ongoing “To-Write” and “To-Read” lists in the back of the journal I carry everywhere. Every month I set goals for my “Major Projects,” “Submissions,” “Business,” “Events,” and “Reading.” I try to attend at least one writing event, read two books, and update my blog twice a month while also working on longer projects and ensuring that I constantly have short pieces in an editor’s inbox for consideration. To make these goals more manageable, I select no more than five tasks for each week.

Whatever method you choose, organization will help you determine your next step and set reasonable goals which will make staying in the room a little less scary. And never forget to back up.

Art by Philip Bitnar.

Comose, the hillock gaped at stars even before night-fall.
You questioned, wearily, the fidelity of twilight.
Light and ineffable, like how a thick soup touches a bowl, thinly.

We hadn’t spent ourselves but we felt we were wasting, being wasted.
Neglected poems. Young, and looking at youth as a history. Tired of the places still to see.
Like snails who find the shells cumbersome, we gave in, to the lilac above.

–

Tanuj Solanki, 25, works in an insurance company in Bombay. His work has been published in elimae, nether, Boston Literary Magazine and others. He just can’t learn swimming; but he doesn’t give up either.

Photo by Suus Wansink.

I catch myself clenching my teeth as I inspect the first print. No captions, only titles–I would insist on that, as any explanation would be too final. Every time I look, I compose something different for those little grey cards Greg imagines for the blank wall space adjoining each photograph. 10th September — The Chapel.

It’s still called that, in gleaming letters above a new glass door, though it hasn’t been a church for years. The music ended abruptly, though it’s still turning deep in my belly. The idea of what might grow from the dark tonight kept me here as the revelers headed homeward.

Some of them posed for me, throwing sultry twists. Some glanced at my camera, some moved out of sight, unnerved. A man jeered and thrust obscenely when I mimed taking his photograph, but he couldn’t match the sway and suggestion of the girls.

I took a shot at him anyway, from my hip. Only a furtive wink of the shutter, as he began to lose interest, and there’s the gleam of his tongue and teeth in my hands, the shine on forehead, eyelids. The mist and the lights form a sickly aureole around his head.

I startle when Greg taps his fingers on my arm.

Come on, he says. You can make yourself useful. He jerks his head at the trays of wrapped appetisers on the trestle table; he’s setting out rows of new champagne glasses. He spent months wooing me away from that other studio in town, in his soft-voiced, offhand way.

Not with flattery, but prickly bloody-mindedness. Greg’s so far from the upholstered and beaming Valerie, with her be-ringed fingers and her gift for lulling frazzled couples into paying more than they planned to have their union reduced to glossy 4×6.

I’ve never asked, but I’m certain wedding photography was never his ambition. But we’re successful enough to fund the new shop and his grand plans for my pictures. Greg, curt and scruffy, never asks where I go to take them, never gives any sign that he recognises the clubs and bars, most named for their past lives: temple, church, ministry, tower.

That’s why I said yes, in the end, despite longer hours and less money. He knows I’ll show him the latest set, fresh from the darkroom, without having to ask.

I flick at the nearest bouquet of oyster-coloured balloons clustered in a corner with a finger, run my hand over a vase of white roses as Valerie opens the doors. I hide behind the digital camera, documenting the event while Valerie and Greg mingle with the couples admiring the artfully displayed albums. Most don’t give me a second glance.

One of the prospective brides catches my eye, her fiancé in conversation with Greg. Safe behind the lens, I’ve time to collect names. He’s Noah, she’s Amelia, like me. They look like they could be brother and sister, as the young couples now often do, with matching mannerisms and haircuts.

Amelia’s eyes follow me, alighting on the subjects I choose for each image: the balloons, the flowers, the champagne, a curl of ribbon on white linen. When she looks away, I notice the tattoo on the inside of her wrist. A small, dark crescent moon.

What’s this one? Greg asks me when the party’s over, reviewing my evening’s work on his laptop. The image is clear, enough to pick out the radial creases in her skin. I reach under his arm, standing behind him and click delete. He offers to drive me home after we review my night’s work. Greg’s thorny manner hides a certain kind of chivalry, one which I imagine he owes to someone in the family he never talks about. I feel a flare of affection for him, but, as usual, I don’t accept. I’d brought the other cameras, the tripod with me. I sold the car, and like to walk, like to return to my flat, with its 70s textured ceilings and dim bare bulbs, too tired to think or sleep.

I feel a little guilty about this one. A row of girls before a wall of smudged, cracked mirror in the toilets, reapplying makeup. Some of them well over thirty, but girls nonetheless. It’s reassuring, that they all make the same wide-eyed, pursed-lipped grimaces. I didn’t ask them to pose–I’d perfected gunslinger-stealth, with the camera slung low on its strap behind my back. Most of them too blurred to be useful. I’ve never liked the current mania for pin-sharpness. Instead, I try for a little out of focus, a little bleached, a little grainy.

I stowed the camera, the flash, the macrolens in my old denim bag, as the group left the toilets. I noticed someone watching me in the mirror, as she washed her hands. Blue-black hair cut into a heavy fringe, thin brows, the full-cheeked face and tiny, deceptive mouth of a porcelain doll.

My stomach clenched when I stood next to her and caught the tattoo at her wrist. She had a sweetish smell about her, like burning leaves. You’re the woman from the photographer’s, she said.

I washed my hands, though I didn’t need to, in the grimed sink next to hers. I look down at them, the skin now flecked, translucent and too taut over the bones. My hands wither, while the rest coarsens and thickens in the mirror each day.

Why do you do that? She asked, with a voice I might have expected from her older sister, or even her mother. Why take pictures here?

Because I don’t know what else to do, I could have said. Because I can’t sleep. Because I hate these places, with their thumping noise and sticky floors.

I said nothing. I realised, later, that I had not congratulated Amelia on her engagement, nor had she seemed to expect it.

I can hear Valerie busy behind me, the next day, clearing the remnants of lunch at her desk. D’you want to come out for some air, love?

That’s her genteel way of bumming a cigarette, round the back of the shop, away from the ‘no smoking’ signs. Her warmth makes me want to weep, or beat her bloody.

I hide in the back room, not feeling able to school my expression. When I emerge, it’s time to re-open the shop and there he is. Waiting on the step outside is a man, not too tall, with a sun tattoo at the top of his spine and dyed blue-black hair. With hands large enough to crush my skull.

Valerie’s not here, but I spot her set of keys on the counter. The man turns and bestows a perfect smile when I open the door for him.

I’m–we’re–looking for the lady I spoke to the other night. Val, was it? My fiancée’ll be here in a minute, she’s just parking the car. We wanted to sort out dates.

He must see something in my face; he falters, but then breaks into a smile again when Valerie re-appears, reminds her of his name. Noah. With that, I find I can’t be here. Valerie calls after me, when I walk out of the shop, and I’m sorry to let her down but not enough to turn back.

Valerie calls after me, querulous around apologies to young Noah. Amelia? Amelia, are you alright?

I don’t hear the rest, walking toward my flat. I’m more than halfway before I think to check the pockets of my jeans for my keys. Relieved, I grasp them for the rest of the journey. The flat looks different in daylight, and it takes me longer than usual to find the shoebox in my bedroom, filled with old letters, postcards and photographs. There’s a layer of dust on the top, and I almost don’t want to disturb it. I take the lid off the box, tip the lot onto the kitchen floor, and sit heavily on the cold tiles. I don’t know how long I sit there. When I stand, I feel the old bruise on my hip.

I’ve kept them all this long, though I’m the one who left in the night. All the photographs he took of me. He liked to take pictures of me in front of the mirror, fiddling with my hair. There’s one of me wearing almost nothing, and I look too young – I’d been trying on dresses. He had a wonderful eye. Strange phrase, that, for the ability to find and frame an image, too literal–summoning a lonely, disembodied eye in a cold vacuum of space. I’d begun it as a hobby of sorts, feeling excluded by his talent.

The first he knew of it was when I’d gone, and stolen his camera. It was one he hardly used, that I’d kept hidden. I don’t know if he ever missed it.

Photos by Cameron Russell.