Adelaide Literary Magazine No. 34, March 2020

Revista Literária Adelaide

“I’m not lazy, like you.”
Crown glanced at her companion. He was visibly shaken, eyes wide, fists clenched, brow
knitted, nostrils flaring.
Reaching an arm around his shoulder, Crown pulled him close. “Why don’t you do
something about it?”
She imagined the walls of the alleyway painted in red, dressed up for the involuntary
occasion by the mere command of Dean. No one had to get down and dirty, just the ones
who stole the act.
“Come on, you’re going to let him walk away with that money?”
Dean tore away from her grasp and sped down the sidewalk. “I need to go to class.”
Crown squinted at him, a frown creasing her lips.

***

Students crowded into the campus halls, laughter and chatter snuffing out the murmurs
that were exchanged. Classes were dismissed and groups congealed by the door to the next
class. Friends utilized the break they had to escape into the cold, city streets. Dean left the
claustrophobic cluster by the doors to a vacant side of the hall, the lady in black following
in toe. Even she had to push through the students, but they didn’t take any notice to her
presence.

“Dean!” called the voice of his professor from an open door. “Can we have a moment
to talk?”

Dean stopped and turned, Crown halting by his side. A vein in the professor’s forehead
threatened to burst, the muscles in his face straining away from a scowl.

“Um, sure,” Dean replied.
The professor motioned for him to enter.
The office was a madhouse of papers, books, and files. If Crown wasn’t so familiar with
the world outside the dollar store, she would’ve believed they were back on one of the
shelves. Her gaze drifted to the name plate on the desk: Isaac Mitchell.
Professor Mitchell shuffled over next to his desk. He wiped his mustache and leaned
against the surface. “You’ve probably already gotten the call that your exam answer sheet
had a mix up.”
“Yeah,” Dean said.
The professor took off his glasses. “It still boggles me how that even happened.”
Dean shrugged, forcing his hands into his pockets. “It was just a mix up.”
“No, Dean,” he replied. “How in the hell did one of my failing students pass this exam
while the best student I’ve had in years failed?”
Dean shook his head, his eyes wide.
Mitchell hurriedly rounded the desk and grabbed some papers before slapping them
down in front of Dean. It was the test scores; Dean had a 98, while another student, Leanne
Ward, had a 34.

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“How does that happen?” Mitchell asked. He bent over the papers, hands shaking.
“How?”

“I-I don’t know.”
“You do know. How did this happen?”
Dean stepped back. “I swear I don’t know.”
“There is some funny business going on. I know it. Ms. Ward was supposed to pass, but
somehow you got away with switching your answer sheets, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me!” Professor Mitchell stepped around the desk to stand before Dean.
“You know damn well these scores are impossible. Tell me the truth.”
Dean continued to shake his head, petrified, speechless.
“What?” the professor said. “Say something!”
A smile curled on Crown’s lips as she stepped behind the professor. “He’s threatening
you, Dean. He’s caught onto our game.” She reached forward and caressed the professor’s
neck, but he didn’t flinch. “Shall I?”
“I’m not going to let you get away with this,” Professor Mitchell said. “I refuse to believe
that you can just cheat your way out of my class. If I had the proof, it could ruin your entire
education.”
“You’re not going to listen to him any longer, are you?” Crown asked.
“Then just do it already!” Dean cried.
That was all she needed to hear. Crown tightened her grip on the professor’s neck,
digging her long, black nails into his skin. Professor Mitchell gagged, his eyes bulging. He
clawed at her fingers.
Dean staggered back against one of the chairs. He watched in horror as the savage
woman slowly tore the air out of the man. Anyone else would’ve called for help, but he just
stared in a mad daze. Then he ran for the door and out into the hall.
Crown was left to squeeze the man’s neck. She gave him the chance to see the face
of death before it took him. Through her mind’s eye, though, she could see Dean dashing
down the hall, almost stumbling over his feet. Students stepped aside to watch and chuckle
in bewilderment. The whole world became a blur and outstretch of colors racing by, faces of
unfamiliarity in mild curiosity and contempt.
A bit of an over-reaction, she thought.
Once he shoved out into the winter afternoon, Crown stepped out before him. He
gasped loudly, nearly slipping on ice as he came to a stop. He shook his head and muttered
sporadically. “How— how did you do it— how did you do it— how did you do it?” Dean
pressed his back to the wall outside, covering his face with his hands.
“What do you think?” Crown asked. “Do you think I’m real?”
“You’re...you’re just a crown,” he replied.
“But you know I’m more than that.”

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“You just killed him with your bare hands.”
“That’s what you wanted.”
Dean shook his head so fast the Crown might’ve thought his head was spinning.
He looked up at her. “What about those tests? How could he possibly know?”
“You think you can create something from nothing?” she said. “I am not God. I am
merely a giver. You wanted a perfect test score, so I gave you someone else’s.”
Dean wrung his hands, his breath puffing quickly in the cold air. “I— I need to get out
of here,” he said.
“Dean?”
The two turned to face a pale, brunette girl who had departed from the doors. She
stared at him with red, sunken eyes. Crown looked between the two.
“Amelia...” Dean said.
“We need to talk,” she replied.
Dean tried every pocket on him with the hope that his phone was somewhere on his
person. “Amelia, I really can’t right now. I have to go.”
“Where?” Amelia asked. “To that woman?”
Dean looked around wildly.
She won’t see me this time, fool, Crown thought.
Amelia sniffled, but her stance straightened. “She’s the one you’ve been cheating on me
with, isn’t she? The tall one. Long black hair.”
“Cheating?” Dean repeated. “No, she’s... There is no other woman.”
“Yes, there is!” Amelia choked up. “And you’ve been spending money on her too. I know
you took a thousand dollars from my account. It has to be you. You’re the only other person
who has access!”
Dean clenched his teeth, drawing his hands through his hair.
“Dean,” Crown whispered. “This should be a good indication of how reckless any of your
wishes are. People are starting to catch on. Don’t you want this to stay hidden?”
“I don’t want to kill her,” he blurted.
“What?” Amelia gasped. “What the fuck?”
“Exactly my point!” Crown said. “Make your decision, now.”
“What is wrong with you?” Amelia cried.
Dean shook his head, stepping back. “Stop it. Just stop it all!”
Amelia’s expression went slack, staring past him. Nothing came from her lips as she
stood there.
Dean ran from her and the campus. His feet carried him over the patches of ice, across
streets and nearly risking his life against the traffic, down the clear sidewalks to his apartment.
Where once the world was a blur of confusion, now it raced after him; the blaring car horns,
the burning fluorescent lights, and the curses of every passerby. The surge only made the
Crown “tsk” at Dean’s childish terror.

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Back in his apartment they went. Dean slammed the door shut, putting both locks up.
He threw his bag to his desk chair, tore his coat off, and sat down on his bed, covering his
head with his hands. The bag toppled down from the chair, hitting the floor and causing the
Crown of Eyes to roll out.

“There’s— there’s something you’re not telling me,” he said. “How did she see you?”
Crown held her hands behind her back. “You tell me. You make me real, Dean. And
through that, I’m more real to ones who know you.”
Hours went by and not a single word broke the silence. An occasional ring from Dean’s
phone quickly became sporadic alerts. Crown stood, hands on her hips as she glanced
between Dean and the phone.
“Aren’t you—”
Dean shot up from the bed and grabbed the phone. He yanked the single window open
and chucked it out before slamming it shut. With the incessant ringing gone, he returned to
his spot on the bed.
Crown scowled. “Pathetic, little boy, of course having me around was going to get
someone killed. What did you expect?”
“Not this,” he said.
“I help you tap into what you really want.”
Dean looked up from his knees, tears streaming down his fiery eyes. “Then...I’ll do
everyone the benefit of staying in here.”
The Crown threw her hands up. “You’re going to bend that easily? Get your shit together.
You’re the only human being on this planet wielding the real gift of power.”
“Shut up.” He fell down on his side, his back facing her as he clamped his hands over
his ears.
She stared at his fetal form. There were things she could’ve said. Something doesn’t
make sense, she thought. Recounting what little time they had together so far... The angered
phone calls from Dean’s mother, the failing grades, the girlfriend from another planet.
“You never really wanted any of it, did you?” Crown said.
Dean pulled the sheets over his body.
Crown stomped to the bed, bellowing with a voice of hundreds of crows. “Wake up!”
Dean shot up from his spot, fixating his gaze on her and shoving his feeble body into the
corner. They watched each other. Silent. Unmoving.
The sun crested down below the horizon, and the city awakened into night life. Dean sat
there, eyes growing heavy, but the panic imbedded in him keeping him awake. Crown was
unphased, but after hundreds of thousands of years, for once her patience ran thin.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Someone pounded at the door.
Dean jolted awake. Crown merely glanced to where the sound came from.
Broad daylight blasted in through the window, hitting the space between him and Crown.

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“Dean, open up,” said a man.
“We need to talk,” a woman said. “Where have you been? Please, just open up.”
Dean sat up straight, his face pale.
“Open up for your mother and father!” the woman cried with a another set of knocks.
“I don’t think he’s here.”
“Then where? Go get the landlord.”
Crown turned to Dean. “This is it. They know what you did. You may have passed, but
only at the cost of someone’s life.”
“Dean, sweety, please,” his mother sobbed, “just open up.” A pause. She pounded again.
“Open up, damnit. Don’t hide from me.”
“They’re just going to force you back into that life,” Crown said. “And if not that, you’ll
go somewhere much worse.”
“Let me in!”
“You have the power, Dean.”
“Don’t ignore me!”
“Use it.”
Dean clutched his head and moaned. He fell from the bed, hitting the hardwood floor.
“I wish it were all gone,” he cried.
Footsteps thundered down the hall outside, encroaching on the door. The clicking of
keys shrieked in the silence. The lock in the door twisted, and the three shoved inside.
There was no Dean. There was never a boy named Dean. Just a young woman, above
average height and long black hair. She sat on the floor, brushing tears from her eyes.
“Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad,” she sniffled. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Mom said.
“You don’t need to apologize,” Dad added.
The two kneeled down and embraced their daughter.
“Let’s talk about this outside,” Mom said, pulling back. She pushed a strand of hair from
the girl’s eyes.
“I’d like that very much,” she replied with a smile.

Sarah B. Moore has a passion for telling visual stories through comics and illustrations, using
her self-taught abilities in art to do so. She is pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing at Full Sail
University. Sarah’s writing ranges from high fantasy adventures to dark and bizarre horrors.
Sarah has a flash fiction piece, “Home,” published in Adelaide Literary Magazine and another,
“A Terrible Day for Rain,” in Scarlet Leaf Review. She is co-writing and illustrating a webcomic
called Of Ash and Stars that will be published on LINE Webtoons. Sarah spends her free time
painting landscapes and keeping her fantasy worlds from invading planet earth.

153

WASTELAND

by Robert Perron

Snippets of Java code flitted between Doug’s ears blocking the babble around Linda’s work
table: Georgia’s high-pitched entreaties and propositions, Rama and Shawn’s murmurs,
Linda’s interjections. Doug glanced at the time on his phone—almost the half hour, almost
time for the meeting to end.

Linda’s alto intruded, “Doug, do you have an opinion on this?”
He didn’t but experience and sensitivity training told him one must be rendered. He
nudged the bridge of his glasses. What was the point under discussion? Ah, yes, the calendar
service needed a default sound for non-urgent notifications. Four sets of eyes engaged his.
“Something unobtrusive,” he said.
The eyes remained engaged.
“But which gets the user’s attention.”
The eyes refused to let up.
“Like a tick.” Doug tapped a fingernail on the table.
Nods and murmurs. Georgia pushed keys on her laptop. “Let’s pencil that in. Okay, now
I’d like to talk about the test schedule.”
Linda put up a hand. “No. Enough for today.” As Rama and Shawn escaped to the hallway,
Doug unbent his knees and lifted his thin frame. Georgia gathered her laptop, twenty pages
of printout, her notepad, phone, and two pens.
“Doug, I need you a minute,” said Linda. She waited for Georgia’s smile and exit before
turning to Doug, her off-white blouse straining against its buttons. “How long you need to
code this thing?”
Doug lifted his eyes to Linda’s face. “What level of effort?”
“Minimal.”
“Six weeks. But—it won’t meet Georgia’s exacting standards.”
Linda dropped into her chair and sighed. Doug followed her gaze to the upper right
corner of the whiteboard on the far wall. Tomorrow was Friday, layoff day, not every Friday,
fifteen weeks since the last, but always a Friday. Doug said, “Is there one coming?”
“That’s what I hear from upstairs.” From Danny D’Amato no doubt. Danny used to work
with them in engineering.

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“How bad?”
Linda swung toward Doug legs askew. Doug directed his vision to the whiteboard, wiped
and ready for Linda’s ancillary duty as grapevine central. On a layoff day, calls and emails
filtered into her office and she posted the casualties in black markup. As official as company
communication on the matter got. Employees below upper management would drift in and
out to monitor the bloodletting.
“A dozen,” Linda said. “More or less.”
“Know who?”
“A few ideas.”

Doug used to think he was immune with twenty-one years and a top-bracket pay grade.
But he’d come to realize not only did he lack immunity but had entered the target zone,
seniority these days more of a millstone than an asset. He wanted to ask where his head lay
in relation to the chopping block, but knew Linda had said as much as she would.

Following a layoff, the company hired back, but at the low end, out of college or out
of country, India and China favored. To avoid age discrimination lawsuits, layoffs crossed all
demographics; but hiring back didn’t. “I still say the money they save is not worth the dilution
of talent.”

Linda snorted. “We need talent? Look at what we’re building.”
Doug had no rejoinder. He thought about the meeting that had just ended. Their
product: yet another calendar service with maybe one bell and two whistles not seen before.
Not heavy stuff, not like the early years of meticulous research and serious development,
their products today appendages of what already cluttered the marketplace.
“Anyhow,” said Linda. She extended a hand toward the whiteboard. “Drop in tomorrow.
If you hear anything yourself, you can contribute.”
Oh, oh, thought Doug.
Linda peered and said, “What’s the matter?”
“A scheduling issue. My father-in-law’s in hospice.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“If he dies tonight, I might have to take tomorrow off.”
“Jesus, Doug, shouldn’t you be there right now?”
“There’s no point. He’s unconscious.”
Linda’s wordless, outstretched lips clued Doug that he’d flunked another sensitivity test. But
couldn’t she, a product manager, understand the logic? That the man had passed from sentience,
and there was no point visiting an inert body. And Doug had liked his father-in-law. A different style,
blue collar, old-time union, worked in the GM plant his entire life, over-indulgent, overweight, but
smart with cars. Many a weekend he and Doug had gone under the hood together.
Doug’s thoughts returned to the scheduling issue. “What if somebody’s getting laid off
and they’re not here on Friday?”
“You know, if my son ever tells me he wants to be an engineer, I’ll slap him.”

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“Very funny, Linda.”
“That’s not a joke. As for your inquiry, they’ll find you wherever you are and serve you.”

***

Doug drove a ten-year-old Audi A4 in mint condition. He did his own maintenance. His father-
in-law used to help. He drove the middle lane with cruise control set two miles over the
limit and the sound system oscillating the mountain scene from an old rock opera. “I lift my
eyes—to the splatter of rain.” Drums and guitars, a riff of keyboard. “I spread my arms—to
wind and pain.”

Doug tapped the steering wheel and sang along. “Why doesn’t the re-a-a-a-lity of life,”
boom, boom, “fe-e-e-el like the re-a-a-a-lity of life?”

This wasn’t the soundtrack but a studio make-over. Danny D’Amato had seen the rock
opera live in New York City and sneered at the studio version, but Doug liked it. Danny and
Doug used to talk about such things in the old days when Danny worked downstairs. No more
now that he had a perch with the vice-presidents and directors.

Doug dropped his right hand into his lap and gave a rub. He thought of the power of
genital gratification, how it led men to lunacies like leering and wanking and worse, defying
reason. He thought of the idiocy of wetting his pants over Linda, his colleague, unapproachable
in the flesh. Then he thought of standing behind her, wrapping his arms, cupping his hands,
pressing his phallus.

“Why doesn’t the re-a-a-a-lity—”
Doug nosed the Audi alongside his wife’s Toyota Highlander. The Highlander pointed
out the driveway, and Mim stood by the driver’s door. She said, “I’m going back to hospice.
Eric’s in his room.”
Oh, oh, another scheduling conflict. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Doug jogged after
work. As he opened the car door, dropped his feet, and unbundled his body, his mind
rummaged past couples counseling sessions for an empathic response that might segue to
logical argument.
“Mim,” he said, “I know how important it is for you to be there.” Good start. He shifted
weight to his left leg, then his right. “Eric should be okay alone for forty minutes. I mean,
he’s twelve.”
Mim lifted her face to the sky. “Go for your run,” she said. “I’ll wait.”
Doug raised his hands. “I mean—”
“Go. But could you get started, like, right now?”
Doug turned toward the house.
“Wait. One other thing.”
Doug turned back toward Mim.
“You have to have a talk with Eric.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it’s disgusting what he’s doing.”

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Doug’s heart thumped.
Mim said, “Haven’t you noticed? Biting and biting those fingernails. They’re terrible.”
Doug hastened through the front door, climbed stairs two at a time, and passed Eric’s
closed door. Fingernails. He continued to the master bedroom, undid shoes and socks,
dropped his Dockers, dropped his Hanes. He slipped off his button-down casual and checked
his profile in the full-length mirror on the inside of the bedroom door. Thin in the chest and
shoulders with long legs but heavy thighs. Brown hair fading at the forehead, fading top rear.
Horn-rimmed glasses with progressive lenses.
Downstairs, outside, Doug tightened his Adidas and lifted a left hand. “Thirty-five minutes.”
Mim smiled. On this she could count, Doug knew. Thirty-five minutes meant two
thousand one hundred seconds, no more, no less.
Doug dreamed of fleetness, of knees lifted, quadriceps parallel to the ground, feet
bouncing on their balls, and forearms swinging in perfect synchronicity. But manifestation
saw a stodgy, pigeon-toed ramble with forearms that flapped. Still, Doug managed seven-
minute miles, better than most modern humans. Today he trotted his short circuit, his five-
miler. He checked his watch at Fourth and Maple—a hundred and nineteen seconds, two
seconds off. He adjusted his gait and felt better, felt on, felt the rhythm. “Oh, why doesn’t the
re-a-a-a-lity of life,” he sang. At Fourth and Oak, Doug made a second time check. Spot on.

***

Next morning, Doug’s eyes opened at zero six thirty-nine. No Mim. He threw his legs from
their bed and strode to the master toilet. From the bedroom, an incoming text chimed. Doug
finished his pee, washed his hands, and checked the message: dad still the same staying with
mom. Doug summoned empathy and applied thumbs to keypad: tell mom am thinking of her.

Downstairs Doug popped a pod of breakfast blend in the Keurig and four Eggo buttermilk
waffles in the toaster. Eric, a flounce of brown hanging over oval, black-rimmed glasses,
slipped into the kitchen, took a stool at the bar, and said, “Is it true what they say about
grandpa’s dying, that it’s before his time?”

“Yes,” said Doug. “Six years and eight months.”
“Why?”
“Smoking and excessive use of alcohol. And corpulence.” The waffles jumped from the
toaster. Eric leaned his forehead into his right hand.
Doug said, “It’s okay, Eric. I know, it’s sad.”
Eric dropped his hand and lifted his head. “I was thinking of something else.” His eyes
engaged Doug’s through their two sets of lenses. “Is it really impossible to square the circle?”
Doug hesitated. Coming of age, always ticklish. “It is.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because pi’s transcendental.” Doug finished spreading butter on the waffles and pushed
a plate toward his son.
Eric said, “I’m really struggling with that concept.”

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“Orange juice or cranberry?”
“Orange. Half a glass.”
Doug placed glasses of juice, a small jug of Canadian maple syrup, and his coffee on
the counter. He took the stool next to Eric and said, “Okay, you understand pixels in digital
imaging, right? Like little squares.”
“Uh huh.”
“But you can draw a circle with them? And it looks like a circle.”
“As long as the resolution is good,” said Eric. “Say twelve eighty by eight hundred.”
“But if you magnify the screen or look at it in an icon editor, you see it’s not perfect. It’s
jagged. Now suppose you keep increasing the resolution, can you ever make those jagged
lines go away?”
“Okay, I see that. You’ll never get to a perfect circle.” Eric chewed on a piece of waffle
and swallowed. “But why is it?”
“Because the pixels are still square no matter how small—”
“Right. I get the idea of the pixels getting smaller and smaller. It’s like what Archimedes
did inscribing polygons in circles.”
“Good observation,” said Doug. “So it sounds like you’ve got it.”
“No, no, Dad. Why? Why is it we can’t go all the way to a smooth circle? Why do numbers
have to be transcendental? It doesn’t fit in with—” Eric waved his fork. “—with the world.”
“Ah. Semantics.” Doug took a sip of coffee. He’d thought around this issue all his life, but
how to squeeze it into a few pubescent words. “Okay, here’s my take. We like to think what’s
in our head is real. But it’s only what’s in our head.”
“But it’s real inside our head,” said Eric. “Right?”
Doug raised a finger. “If we see a tree, the tree in our head is not the tree itself.”
“But it’s the tree as we know it.”
“Okay, let’s try something else. Let’s try numbers. We see five sticks. The sticks are real.
We see five rocks. The rocks are real. But is the five real?”
“Well,” said Eric, “you can do a lot with five without the sticks and rocks.”
“You can. That’s why it’s insidious. It’s so powerful what we can do in our heads, we
think it’s real.”
“But it’s not?”
“It’s not. In my opinion. It just helps get us closer.”
“That’s kind of deep.”
“You’re young,” said Doug. “You’ve got a lifetime to ponder it.”
Doug moved the dishes to the sink and turned to his son. “There’s something I’ve got
to talk to you about.”
Eric dropped off his stool. “Yeah, Dad.”
Doug’s eyes brushed Eric’s nails. Gnawed to the quick.

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“What is it?”
“Well, this summer, you want to do some hut-to-hut in the White Mountains, just the
two of us?”
“You mean, like walking all day and sleeping in bunks?”
“Something like that. Fun.”
“I’ll think about it.”

***

Next day, Doug and Linda stood side by side inspecting her whiteboard. To Doug’s left, at
Linda’s work table, sat Georgia. She chewed the left side of her lower lip and ran a hand
through her hair. Her name appeared fourth on the list of ten.

Doug shifted his weight from left leg to right, and back. “This is so unfair,” he said.
Georgia dropped her head in her arms. Linda brushed by Doug and put an arm over
her shoulders. “Look, sweetie, you need references, anything I can help you with, just let me
know. This isn’t the end of the world.”
Georgia lifted her head. She pulled her laptop and notebook and printouts toward her,
her pens and phone. Linda kept a hand on her shoulder and the other on an arm, and guided
her toward the door. She watched Georgia recede down the hall.
Doug said, “I guess that wasn’t a surprise.”
“No, I was pretty sure about Georgia.” Linda looked at her phone. “It’s going on two.” She
stared at the whiteboard. “They should all be in by now. But—you haven’t heard any news?”
“Nothing.”
“They need one more big head to get their money’s worth.”
Doug’s phone buzzed. He stepped into the hallway and looked down. Not the company
reaching out to his private phone; it was Mim. Doug swiped and put the phone to his ear.
“Dad passed,” she said.
Doug had rehearsed this moment but didn’t want it to sound rehearsed. He took a small
breath and held it for a second before responding.
Linda’s eyebrows rose as Doug stepped back into her office. “My father-in-law.”
“Sorry,” said Linda. “Why don’t you get going? I’ll let the others know.”
“No rush,” said Doug. “Mim will be home for Eric.” He looked at Linda’s outstretched
lips. “The wake won’t be till tomorrow.”
“Doug, go home right now. Jesus Christ.” Her desk phone buzzed. She picked up the
handset and listened, replaced the handset, and walked to the whiteboard.
“Wow,” said Doug as he watched the eleventh name take form. Danny D’Amato. Who
would’ve thought?

***

Doug tightened and knotted the laces of his Adidas and set off. His knees rose and the balls
of his feet propelled him with the barest grazing of earth. His arms pumped in synchronous

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perfection, fists forward, elbows back, forward, back. He refused to glance at his watch for
fear of jinxing the flow but sensed he was doing six—no, closer to five—five-minute miles,
his strides exceeding two meters.

His course flowed uphill on a track of dirt and rock with solid wall on the right and sheer
drop-off on the left, a Colorado jeep road, he realized. He’d been to the Colorado Rockies
years before, and the roads to the trailheads could be as rough as the trails. Doug skimmed
over rocks and potholes, ripples and washouts. His body experienced no strain; no burning
lungs, no tearing calves, no drag on his gait. He was close to flying.

The wall on Doug’s right receded to a slope. Ahead appeared a Buddha-like figure in
light blue hospital bottoms, his naked belly flopping over the drawstring. He sat cross-legged
amidst a pile of beer cans and cigarette packs. Smoke swirled from a filter-tipped ash in
his left hand. His right hand tipped a pint of Southern Comfort. Doug sensed recognition
and thought, no way, but when the pint came down, there it was, the cherubic face of his
deceased father-in-law.

Doug raised his left palm. “Hi, Dad, how’s it going?”
His father-in-law’s mouth broadened. “Doug, my boy,” he said, “good to see you. How’s
it going, you ask?” His arms opened like bat wings and his male mammilla jiggled. “Check it
out.”
Doug twisted his head to check it out, taking care to maintain stride. His father-in-law
leaned forward, his stomach folds compressed like an accordion. “I love it here. I can do
whatever the fuck I want.”
Doug stuttered a step and stifled a gasp. In three years of dating and sixteen years of
marriage, in all those years, not once had Doug heard his father-in-law drop the F bomb.
Doug took a final glance over his shoulder. Wow. People really change when they’re dead.
The road leveled and a copse of aspen appeared and in it a length of flesh. As Doug
drew close, he saw that the flesh belonged to Linda in three-quarter profile, breasts sagging,
nipples jutting. She turned full frontal with a Cheshire smile, her right hand behind her head,
and her left hand entangled in the auburn below her tummy bulge.
Doug raised his left palm. “Hi, Linda. Nice pudenda.”
“Thanks, Doug. You looking for a little get-off?”
Doug shook his head and laughed. “Not anymore. You see, I’m impervious to lust.” Linda
pushed out her lips. “It’s true. Impervious.”
Doug looked away and lengthened his stride. “O-o-o-oh,” he sang, “why doesn’t the
re-a-a-a-lity of life,” boom, boom, “fe-e-e-el like the re-a-a-a-lity of life?”
That’s so true, thought Doug. Why didn’t the accessible, like Mim and Eric, appear on
these jaunts? Instead of the dead and the unapproachable? Where was this vaunted reality?
The sky blackened and rain slapped the trail. Doug inhaled its moisture but didn’t suffer
its stings. As if in a cocoon, he cantered cool and dry.
The rain dwindled and a left-leaning sun pushed bleached rays through lingering clouds.
The jeep road had given way to a path of rough rock. Doug wasn’t in Colorado anymore but
closer to home, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, above tree line, on the Gulfside Trail.

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Doug recognized the pile of boulders called Mount Adams and knew in twenty minutes he’d
be looking left into the abyss of King Ravine. But when the occasion arrived, his downward
gaze met a phenomenon of fascination, no doubt resulting from the storm: a cloud inversion
cloaked the ravine in frothy white from rim to rim. Above, azure skies. At Doug’s feet, a roiling
ocean of lather.

Doug wondered if he could jog upon the upper surface of low-lying clouds. So far, his
fleet step had held him above the pits and protrusions of road and trail, so why not condensed
vapor? On the next stride, Doug crossed right leg over left and yawed off the trail. He crossed
again and lost half a meter of altitude. He crossed a third time and pressed upon heaven’s
halo.

He crossed again.

Robert Perron lives and writes in New York City and New Hampshire. Past life includes high-
tech and military service. His stories have appeared in Adelaide, Lowestoft Chronicle, The
Manchester Review, and many other journals. Visit https://robertperron.com for a complete
list. His first novel, The Blue House Raid (The Ardent Writer Press), is due out later in 2020.

161

X-RED

by Boris Kokotov

Recently, Carol, my partner, has become overly concerned about nutritional facts of our
food, comparing different brands’ daily values of sugar, sodium, and fats, checking the
expiration date of every item. For my part, I used to check only the expiration date of my
medicine. Prescription drugs are poisonous, all of them! So, as a rule, I pick up a bottle from
the pharmacy, keep it on the shelf until its expiration date, and throw it away, unopened.

The expiration, as a concept, began to bother me after an episode with a chair. She told
me the chair in our living room was wobbly. Told me a second time, then a third. A loosened
bolt, not a big deal. I turned the chair over, tightened the bolt and then spotted a faded ink
stamp on the seat’s bottom: x-red cherry wood, proudly made in USA. No doubt in my mind:
x-red stood for expired. The question was, when?

It is dangerous to be under the sway of objects that have exceeded their normal life
span. The aura will suffer. Aside from myself, our cat loved to sleep in this chair. I wondered
if any harm was done to us. So I inspected the cat first in spite of its loud protests. It took me
a while to discover a suspicious label on its belly – it was completely obscured by the fur. My
attempt to remove the label failed; the cat broke from my grasp and fled.

It occurred to me that perhaps everything in the house is marked! I opened the curio
cabinet, took out a porcelain vase we had bought at a flea market last year, and turned it
over – but before I had a chance to scrutinize its base, the vase slipped out of my hands, hit
the hardwood floor, and shattered in pieces. Expired!

Now, Carol has a tattoo on her left ankle, a flower with multiple petals. This morning I
made out a dubious sign at the center of the flower. Shall I investigate this further, knowing
what happened to the vase? Will she try to escape like the cat, hissing and scratching me
with her nails?

Boris Kokotov was born in Moscow. He is a poet and translator, the author of several poetry
collections. His translations from German Romantics were published in the anthology The
Century of Translation in Moscow. His translation of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (Vodoley,
Moscow, 2012) was nominated for the best translation of the year in Russia. His original
work in English and translations to English appeared in Adelaide, Blackbird, Chiron Review,
Constellations, Ezra, In Translation, The Lake, Poet Lore, and Washington Square Review,
among others. He lives in Baltimore.

162

SEEKING A KATHLEEN

by Adrianna Zapata

Izza sits at the kitchen table. It’s 10 p.m. and her mom is still not home. The leftovers of her
sister’s dinner are on the stove, still in pots, waiting for the last person to eat from them.
The counters are clean as always, the only thing littering its surface is the day-old mail still
unopened. The sink is empty, and the shades are drawn over her one lonely window when
her mother walks in. She comes into the kitchen with a puffy face and eyes cast to the floor.

“Did you tell him to leave” Izza asks her in a quiet voice that she usually reserves for
when the girls are asleep.

“I’ve had a tough day. Can we just talk about it tomorrow?” Her mom, Vera, says already
walking out of the kitchen to retreat to her room as she always does when Izza brings this up.

“No. It’s always tomorrow with you” Izza says slowly getting louder with the anger she
felt going through herself. “He hasn’t paid rent and he’s going to get us evicted!”

At this, Vera stops and turns around. “Izza not tonight,” she says simply, pain evident in
every word that comes out of her mouth. She turns to walk out of the room her hands already
moving to pull on her hair, a tick she didn’t have before she had met Izza’s father.

“Don’t you care that we’re going to lose the house? When you left Papi, I thought we
were done with dead beats. I thought it was just going to be us girls,” she whispers this last
part to her mother, wondering how a strong woman could once again be reduced to this.

“He’s not a deadbeat, it’s just a hard time, it’s my fault he lost his job. I’m bad luck for
him. He’s trying to do better,” she says, but even her voice sounds doubtful on Izza’s ears.

“He stays home all day! He only eats and sleeps, and then when night comes around he
drinks and talks to you like you’re worthless. Do you want your kids seeing that? Isn’t that
why we left that house so we could have this house, our home for the girls where everything
was perfect? You had to go and ruin it by inviting him. It’s been two years that he’s been
unemployed,” she says with tears in her voice, since she can never have a disagreement
without getting choked up. Vera knows Izza doesn’t like confrontation, which is probably half
the reason why Izza lets Vera get away with acting immature for so long.

“Izza! That’s enough! I already told you I’m tired. Please, just not tonight, mija” Vera
says, her voice exasperated.

Grabbing her sweater, Izza walks out of the door after hearing this. Immediately she feels
a burst of cold air hit her and within two seconds she has her hair covered in small snowflakes
as she takes the three-minute walk down to the open coffee house in her neighborhood. After

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opening the door to the coffee house, she brushes off the flakes of snow that were starting
to melt. They were already leaving massive wet spots on her pre-owned jacket, making it
look more worn down than it even was. She was grateful for the ever-present warmth of the
coffee house. It smelled like cinnamon and quiet music played in the background for the three
people who were in the dining area with her.

Sitting down at the usual table in the back, she begins to think of a plan, a plan to get
herself out of this situation and take her sisters with her. She needed them to have a life
better than her own. With her head still resting in her hands, she heard someone ask, “What
can I get you today?”

“Some advice would be nice” Izza says, talking into her hands, not bothering to raise
her head.

“I’m sorry what?” The waitress asks, obviously confused.

“Just some coffee would be nice,” she says, changing her answer for the waitress. With
the sound of her footsteps retreating to get the coffee, Izza raises her head again, still feeling
overwhelmed, but a tiny bit better knowing she had put some distance between herself and
the problem.

She thought to herself, I’m eighteen working a part time job in a rundown restaurant.
How am I possibly going to be able to support these two little girls and go to school at the
same time! I just wish for once, I had someone to help me figure this all out, someone to
help share this burden with me.

With her head still bowed, Izza thinks back to the first relationship that she saved her
mother from. They ran away from her dad three years ago now; her mother had promised
Izza then that no man would jeopardize their safety. The fear from that night was burned
into her memory.

“Izza… I’m scared for mamá,” Penelope says, catching Izza by surprise. She hadn’t even
realized that she was awake and listening, she made a mental note to herself to pay more
attention before scooping Pen up into her arms.

“Hey! What are you doing up, baby? You have school tomorrow, don’t you? Let’s go
back and tuck you in before you wake up Lola,” Izza said to her 7-year-old sister, ignoring her
question. Izza was hoping the sleep would overcome her little body before she asked again. As
Izza walked Penelope down the narrow hallway, the closer they got to their mother’s room,
the clearer they could hear their arguing. As they came back into her sister’s room, Izza shut
the door behind her to close off the distant shouts.

“Izza… can you stay with us?” Lola asks from under the covers of her Tangled themed
bedspread, fear both evident in their little faces. And this was how Izza would find herself on
her little sister’s floor at 3 am when her mother’s scream woke her up.

Jumping to her feet, Izza sees the time on the cable box blink back to her 3:04 AM when
the scream comes again, this time muffled. She makes her way out of the room, closing
the door gently to try and keep the girls asleep. However, hearing another muffled scream
prompts her to run down the hallway swinging open the door to her parent’s room. The
room is burned in her memory instantly. Her mother’s on the floor, trying to hold as much of
herself close to her knees as possible, while her father towers over her, his hand stretched
out, ready to strike her again.

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“What are you doing to her!” Izza says rushing over to her mother, already seeing the
fresh bruises appearing on her arm and face.

He ignores Izza’s questions and instead he directs himself at Vera, “Get the fuck off the floor!”

Vera instead stays frozen between the wall and Izza’s father, causing him to get angrier.
“Am I going to have to make you get off this floor, woman?”

Izza, seeing that her mother is about to be hit again, yells for him to stop. Her father,
finally taking notice of her for the first time since she walked in, pauses and stares at her. His
chest rises and falls rapidly, almost comically.

As if speaking to an animal that could attack at any moment Izza says,” Maybe you
should go.” No eye contact can be given, and her breath shakes on every word uttered.

With no word spoken on his end, he grabs his coat and keys. Looking straight into his
wife’s eyes he says, “You did this to yourself,” before walking out of the room, and out of
their lives.

While tracing the lines of the fake marbled print on the table, she sees two hands put
down a mug of coffee, and a plate of food, breaking her out of her memories. Izza looks up
just in time to see a waitress sliding into the seat across from her. She must be in her mid-
thirties. She wears a name tag that just say’s Kath.

“You look like you need some help, honey. So, eat this food, on the house and tell me
what’s on your mind. People usually find it easier to talk with a full stomach.” Kath says in
one breath, before continuing when she sees Izza still looking at her in shock. “Well, go on!
It’s not getting any hotter, girl.” She says, looking at Izza like she’s the one with three heads.

“Well…thanks,” Izza whispers back to her, a little freaked out that this lady came along
right when she’s praying for some sort of help. The food is amazing though so for a couple
of minutes she just eats in silence, or rather inhales her food, until she hears Kath clear her
throat deliberately.

Looking up meekly at her through roughly cut hair, Izza says, “I’m just having a bad day
I guess.”

“You look like you’re having more than a bad day. Those bags under your eyes talk more
like a bad year than just a day. I should know.” Kath replies, crossing both of her arms over
her chest right underneath a silver cross hanging from her neck. Her hair is pulled back away
from her face and it gives Izza the feeling that she can trust her, because Kath’s eyes have
nothing evil in them. By this point in Izza’s life she can recognize evil.

Setting her fork down on the table, Izza takes a deep breath before she says, “I’m torn
between being a good daughter, and living my own life. I love my mom, but I’m losing hope
that she will ever change. She has this weakness for men who treat her like crap, and I can’t
let my two sisters live on like this.”

Kath makes no move to speak, and the rest tumbles out of Izza, “So, I can stay here and
not go to college, protecting my sisters from whatever else is going to happen or I can leave,
but is that even an option? How could I live with myself-”

Kath holds up one of hands silencing her, on her face is a look Izza has seen on her own
many times before; sadness. Her face twisted, and it seemed in that moment that every fine
line was accentuated, and she seemed a lot older than the years she lived.

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“Let me stop you there. I can help you, if you let me,” she says, waiting for Izza’s reply.
This was the moment she would remember for the rest of her life. The day Izza Gonzales
met Kathleen Baker, the woman who was going to change her life.
“Ok. How are you going to help me?” Izza asks. Unlike countless times before when help
has been offered, for once she does not feel like there’s a catch.
Kathleen’s lips settle into a small smile. “How old was your mom when she had you?”
Kath asks, disregarding Izza’s question.
“She just turned eighteen.”
“I recognized this story, because I lived it. Looking at you, I thought of my oldest, Sarah.
She had that same look on her face that you did when I walked up to you. Like you had to take
on the whole world by yourself.” She pauses and looks down at the coffee table full of round
coffee stains from the bottom of mugs and traces the outline of one with a finger.
“I had her when I was nineteen years old with a man who made me feel like he was the
only good thing going for me in this world.” Her face looked sad, and Izza wondered how she
could already feel so connected to a waitress she had just met in a coffee shop.
“I made the mistake of thinking that my daughter would stick it out with me when it
wasn’t her place to. She was a child growing up in an abusive home and although she knew it
wasn’t my fault, she grew resentful of me for not leaving. I was her mama, and I stayed with
a man who demeaned me for sixteen years of my life until my daughter told me I needed to
change, or she was going to change without me.” Kath had said all this while staring down
at her hands that were chapped from over-washing, and Izza looked at her and realized how
common it was for strong women to forget their strength.
“Well, what happened?” Izza said quietly as if afraid the answer would scare her, but
she hoped it wouldn’t.
“Well, I got mad. Because here I am getting beat on and now, I have my daughter who
I love who’s telling me she’s leaving me. But then I realized getting mad wasn’t changing
anything, so I cleaned out my account and left with my little girl that night,” Kath said, her
smile growing like she’s remembering something worth being proud of.
“But what if I lay myself down on the line and she doesn’t leave him?” Izza says, making
Kath lose her smile.
“Well, that’s possible. But hopefully she’s like me and realizes what’s at stake.”
“But what if she doesn’t.” Izza insists.
Kath leans over the side of the table and grabs a napkin out of the dispenser before
taking a pen out of her breast pocket. She writes for a solid minute before she speaks again.
“I wrote on here my full name, address, phone number and work schedule for the next week
in case you need me and I’m not at home. If something happens, anything, call me.” Getting
up from her seat Kath leans over and hugs Izza, and when she does, Izza feels something she
hasn’t felt in a long time; hope.

Adrianna Zapata is a Creative Writing major studying at Salem State, she will be graduating in the
spring of 2019. Her story, “Luzcinda” is inspired both by experiences as a Latina woman, and love.

166

POETRY

The Winner

NOMINALISM

by Andrea Bernal,
translated from Spanish

by Charles Olsen

1.  In a house 2. Semblance

In a house of lies A semblance.
built without nets, This is how I live.
with our bodies, Easy.
rooms without doors, Not going anywhere.
we confess. The blue bridge is a lie.
A lie the gray stairs.
Don’t cross,
there is no up or down.
On my back forgotten rust,
a weight.
A semblance.
Easy,
it is finding the way among ants and stones.
The beloved’s hand,
unconscious trajectory,
will come to rest
for a while.

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3.  Eyes Paula Andrea González Bernal (Andrea
Bernal poet) (Madrid, 1985) is a philosophy
Blind lighthouse eyes. teacher and poet. As a philosophy teacher
Don’t make constant turns around the sea. she studied at the University of Salamanca
and was awarded a special prize. As a
4. Contrast poet she is known as “Andrea Bernal”.
She published her first poem “Primavera
Your vine daring to arrange itself on concrete. viva/Live Spring” in 2006 at Lord Byron
Your restless bee approaching my eye. Editions, being the youngest poet of an
I, who would ask everything of you, anthology that included poets such as
but I know now Jaime Siles and Cristina Peri Rossi. In 2013
everything is nothing. she published “Los pájaros/The Birds” with
Eolas editions, León. This book is presented
5. Your name in León, Salamanca and Madrid, with the
writers Raquel Lanseros, Julio Llamazares
Your name was wiped. and Antonio Colinas (current winner of the
The lake dried up. Reina Sofia Poetry Prize in Spain). In 2016,
They’ll say you still exist. she published “Adiós a la noche/ Goodbye
My window cries night” with Isla de Siltolá editions. This book
in another hemisphere. was also presented by Antonio Colinas and
Spaces to view life beyond. Julio Llamazares in Madrid. In addition
Today, opaque, they tremble to poetry, she has worked as an art critic
without sense in several Spanish Museums and other
or pretext. cultural institutions such as Domus Artium
Salamanca, Musac and art galleries.

Her current literary work is based on
the French translation of her new book
“Todo lo contrario a la belleza / Everything
opposite to beauty”that will be publish in
Spanish language this october with “A voice,
once” another poetry book. (Both in Islade
Siltolá and Eolas again). She is also working
in a book of short stories “La felicidad de los
lobos/The happiness of the wolves”, being
considering to be in editions “Devenir”.

Actually, she is doing her Phd about

Schiller and Chejov too.

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SHORTLIST WINNER NOMINEES

BIPOLARITY

by Pedro Xavier Solis,
translated from Spanish

by Diane Neuhauser

Bipolarity

Some days your mind opens like a sprung cage
with birds breaking away, chirping, flapping their wings
fluttering and swooping over the high green of trees
free revelry without limit, only light and song and flight.

Other days your mind capsizes into the depth of your heart
like a boat inundated in the darkness of the sea bed
with a chorus of ghosts singing in the deaf night
sunken, prow encased, without sail or keel or direction.

Bipolaridad

Hay días en que su mente amanece como una jaula abierta
de la que brotan gorjeos de pájaros alzando sus alas
revoloteando y piando sobre las copas altas de los árboles,
libre jolgorio sin derrotero, sólo luz y canto y vuelo.

Otros días su mente zozobra en lo profundo del corazón
como un barco anegado en la obscuridad del lecho marino
con un coro de fantasmas cantando en la noche sorda
echado a pique, proa encallada, sin velas ni quilla ni ruta.

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Pedro Xavier Solís is a Nicaraguan poet and essayist. He serves on the boards of directors
of the Nicaraguan Academy of Language and of the Granada International Poetry Festival.
Poesia Reunida (2012) is a selection of his poetry from 1980-2010, and Atlas (2017), his
most recent collection, focuses on the eternal political themes of love and war. His work
has been translated into Italian, Romanian, and Arabic, along with English in Tides (Mind
made Books, 2015) translated by Suzanne J. Levine and Worlds Within and Apart (APAC,
2018) translated by Diane Neuhauser.

Diane Neuhauser has returned to Latin American poetry after a long career as a strategic
management consultant for US corporations. She is now translating poetry from Spanish to
English, with a special interest in Nicaragua. A doctoral program at Vanderbilt University in
Hispanic poetry (many years ago) and recent stays in Central America have given her the
impetus to turn to translating.

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HOW WORDS
BECOME THINGS

by Cathy Essinger

For June Belle

My granddaughter, not yet two, some things will always remain
points at the moon, unnamed despite
and pipes along the length of our efforts to put words into her mouth.
her outstretched arm It is not language
the word, “Balloon!”
that causes her eyes to come
Charmed by her misconception, I correct her open at night, or words
nonetheless, saying.“No, that’s the moon,” but that pull her into my arms when owls hoot
she just laughs, their spooky syllables.

placing her hand over my mouth and repeating, Words cannot find the silky
“Balloon!” until she is sure I get the joke. blanket that has slipped
Already she knows beneath the bed, or cause
her head to drop upon
that every metaphor is a lie, and that language my shoulder.
alone will never suffice, no matter how words
rub against the things Still, lying in bed at night, I hear her practicing
her words, burbles that linger in the air…yes,
they want to become, no like balloons…
matter how much static
they create or how many sparks rise that float above her bed, soft and meaningless,
into the waiting air, sounds that mean nothing,
nudging her into sleep.

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Cathryn Essinger is the author of four books of poetry–A Desk in the Elephant House, from
Texas Tech University Press, My Dog Does Not Read Plato, and What I Know About Innocence,
both from Main Street Rag. Her fourth book, The Apricot and the Moon, is forthcoming from
Dos Madres.

Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, The New England Review,
Antioch Review, Rattle, River Styx, as well as PANK, Spillway, and Midwest Gothic. They have
been nominated for Pushcarts and “Best of the Net,” featured on The Writer’s Almanac, and
reprinted in American Life in Poetry.

Website: cathrynessinger.com

175

WHAT WAS THAT
FIGHT ABOUT ANYWAY

by Martin Golan

The night the fight broke out
it got nasty, as an argument can
over something neither of you care much about
We were outside sipping coffee on a chilly night
and something was said or not said or said the wrong way
and ghosts from the past sprang from long-buried graves
and soon were yelling about God knows what
You raised your coffee as if to hurl it
then dumped it on the driveway in a show of disgust
Something hot and good and thoroughly enjoyed
Reduced in a flash to a dark steaming stain
The smoke that rose from it sulked in anger
that all its pleasure was lost forever

In the morning, after a night when reconciliation
stayed one step ahead of whatever words we could find
I slipped outside to get some air
and found the coffee on the driveway had frozen
into the shape of a flower, tendrils twisted and broken
Even the stem slit by rage

The fight brought out too much that stayed too long
Winter came cold and hard
The coffee on the driveway thawed, melted, and started to run
then froze again, a different flower
by day, a different stone by evening
as the splotch of brown turned hard, then soft,

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then hard again
and sometimes, in the middle of the night,
we’d both wake up
and make love, wildly, madly, on the edge of violence
and not speak a word
as if desire had turned against itself
and wanted to destroy us
as we lay there, legs entwined
in sweat and grief
sex, we learned, burns off the anger
but leaves the pain
Months later, after finally a night of untroubled dreams
The argument all but forgotten
I looked out the bedroom window
and didn’t see the stain, but knew
it wasn’t gone, that now it was
a part of us, like all our sorrows and all we grieve
We never lose our losses, they just become
an ache, a wound, a scar
a broken part of who we are

Martin Golan’s first novel, My Wife’s Last Lover, was published to much acclaim, and was
followed up with Where Things Are When You Lose Them, a collection of short stories one
reviewer called “a dozen short but rich literary gems.” He works as a journalist, most recently
an editor for the international news service Reuters.

177

DESIRE: WANTING

by Nikolas Macioci

I need someone to tell me how to live I’ll leave it at this. There’s a
the little bit of life I have left. So far, sadness everywhere
I have barely made sense of it. I want in the room in which I sit,
moments back. I want to do my life again. remarkably inescapable.
All of the things in life I want
Maybe if I go to the streets and ask around, amount to one thing,
someone will hand me a paper with right to wake up in the morning and
answers on it. How to avoid loneliness. go to sleep at night drunk
How to be loved. How to acquire a free on intimacy, to know what it’s
sandwich when you’re homeless. like to lie next to fulfillment
and feel the confirmation of flesh.
Maybe if I stand at a freeway entrance
with cardboard that says I will work R. Nikolas Macioci was born in Columbus,
for love, someone else who’s been wounded Ohio and received a Ph.D. from The Ohio
by want will pull to a stop, take me home State University. He won a number of poetry
to hold me in arms I only dreamed of. competitions, including the 1987 National
Writers’ Union Poetry Competition judged
I will never know the best by Denise Levertov. His publication credits
way to satisfy longing. include two chapbooks: Cafes of Childhood
I have stood in the glare of and Greatest Hits, six full length books of
neon watching couples poetry: Cafes of Childhood (expanded), Why
come and go from a bar on Saturday night, Dance, Necessary Windows, Occasional
listened to gritty chatter leading Heaven, Mother Goosed, and A Human
to anticipated sex. Saloon. He has appeaared in more than
I have lingered on sidewalks at night asking sky 200 magazines such as Negative Capability,
to bless me with somebody, a beggar of stars, The Connecticut Writer, Mississippi Valley
a mendicant of the moon. Review, Blue Unicorn, and Chiron Review.

I’ve been patient all my life,
know wordless ways
to wait, confident cure for solitude would come
in a way I’d never guess, a surprise moment
that illuminates the heart with satisfaction.

178

SHE

by Gabrielle Amarosa

She lives where I live, I wish I could turn myself
Inside me, Inside out
Behind me, So that she was facing the world
Occasionally through me. And I was facing her drums.
I would not touch them.
She pounds a drum I would only sleep.
Incessantly, She does not need the drums to call her
Like another heartbeat. To action or to insanity—
The doctors think it is another heartbeat. She answered both long ago
But it’s not. And they live inside of her
It’s her, and her The way she lives inside of me.
Thrumming, toneless, never-ending drum.
A call to action I don’t have the stamina
Or a call to insanity. To drum the way she drums,
Either way, I rarely pick up. Ceaseless and eternal
But somehow always fresh and new.
Sometimes, briefly, she takes over.
I wish she would do it more often; But maybe
I’m tired, and she’s tireless. My final waking act
I try to imitate her but I’m Can be to drum her out
Too close to her to do it justice. So that I can sleep.
The space between us is like
Between a finger pressed on a mirror Come out, come out,
And its reflection. Come out.
Her drums are louder.
I snatch glimpses of her sometimes COME OUT, COME OUT,
In my own reflection or mind. COME OUT.
I beg her to stay, but she goes. Her drums are faster.
Back to her drums. COMEOUT, COMEOUT, COMEOUT, COMEOUT,
COMEOUT, COMEOUT.
The thumping in my soul
Unfurls into a thumping in my head.

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I am no match for her Gabrielle Amarosa is a Healthcare Business
And we both know it. Intelligence Consultant living and working
The hands of my soul are already raw. in the Boston, MA area. She graduated
The vibrations have already from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with
Shuddered up through my jaw a major in Actuarial Mathematics and a
And settled into my temples. minor in Writing and Rhetoric. Her work
has previously been featured in an Arts in
I catch her attention Reach collection and the May 2019 edition
The same way a child catches a bubble, of Adelaide Literary Magazine.
Where the very act of doing it undoes it.

I slap the drums once more,
Loudly,
Frustrated down to the hard pit of my being.

I am going to sleep.
Either she will come out,
Or she won’t.
I will not be awake for it either way.
My call was not strong enough;
Is hers?

I feel heavier and heavier,
Until even my ears are too heavy
To hear her drums.
I slip into the softest black
And the sweetest silence.
My last conscious thought
Is to wonder whether the drums stopped
Or whether I am just too far away
To hear them or feel her.

I take my hands off the drums,
Open my eyes,
And see the sharpest white.

My turn.

180

THE LUCKY RICH

by Heide Arbitter

Inside this elite community And caused them pain
Lamborghinis once raced He spared the fauna
Now, chopped for parts Along with domestic cats and dogs
With their pink fur
The dead Strangled diamond collars
In their driveways Forced to smile
Incinerated When the paparazzi demanded
By the lightening Later, this landscape
Of Is purchased
God By other
Lucky Rich
Golden mansions Bull dozers
Spoiled residents And bricks
Guarded by Blast through
Navy Seals at the gate The open gate

God 181
Didn’t like any of them

Anymore
They received His solution

Fire from His hands

God left the trees
Rejoicing
No Longer
Wounded by gardeners
Who cut them into abnormal
Shapes

Adelaide Literary Magazine

They make
Noise
Scare the bees
While constructing
Edifices
Which rival royalty

The new wave
Of Lucky Rich move in
But not before
They hire marines
To guard the
Closed gate

Now, the Lucky Rich
Splash in the waterfalls
Of their pools
Throw galas
Cheat on their partners
Ignore their children
But, it does not matter
They have the best lawyers

They forget about
Gratitude
Blessings
God

And
Encounter the same fate

Heide Arbitter’s plays have been produced in New York City and regionally. Some of these
productions include a one-act, HAND WASHED, LINE DRIED, which was produced at the Public
Theatre; a full-length, FROGS FROM THE MOON at the American Theatre of Actors; and a
one-act, TILL WE MEET, at Unboxed Voices. Smith & Kraus and Excalibur have published JILLY
ROSE, SHARON and POPPY. Heide was recently interviewed on the radio, WFUV.

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The Winner

THE SKY STOPPED

BREATHING

by Joanna Kadish

We first heard of fentanyl when Jared, one of our 18 year old boys, was arrested for scrawling
graffiti on school walls on the island where we lived minutes from Seattle. One of the three
kids who came along that day spray-painted swastikas on the yeshiva and wrote “This way
to the ovens.”

Aaron decided not participate, he counseled Jared not to do it either. Jared said later that
he wanted to show he could think for himself and not just follow his brother in everything.
They looked the same side of the coin, Greek gods, tall and athletic, dark blond with hazel-
green eyes. Aaron wore his hair down past his ears while Jared clipped his hair short so their
friends could tell them apart. Jared never told his shrink about this plan: he said it didn’t
seem important. Jared’s psychologist said they had established a trust, and Jared seemed
happy. They spoke about adjusting to a new environment—i.e. going away to school—and
dealing with change.

Local and national media splashed the news over the front pages and airwaves.
Alexander, the one who conceived this venture, also Jewish, had a crisis of conscience and
went to his parents to confess. His parents went to the police.

And what was particularly heinous about this prank—because this is what Jared
considered it, a sendoff before going to college—he had no idea that his friend, the
mastermind who conceived and executed it, was going to paint swastikas. The boy who did
it might not have known himself until the moment he picked up the spray can. They never
discussed what they would paint beforehand. They had a code to never stop the others from
doing whatever. Jared said, “That’s not how we do things.”

All of them had tagged walls around the island, and considered themselves to be
budding graffiti artists, and usually just drew abstractions that meant little to anyone outside
their circle. The comment about the ovens was the kind of joke Alex liked to say around his
friends; apparently he didn’t consider how this would look to people who didn’t know this is
how he dealt with the reality of anti-Semitism. And even though Jared didn’t ink any of the
offending words or images (collaborated from professional handwriting analysis), and found it

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offensive that Alex did this—the lawyer explained that Jared stood by and did nothing to stop
him. Jared was a year older—the other boys were 17 and considered minors. The judge in a
nonjury trial decided to punish Jared and not the others. Biologically there is little difference
between the maturity of youth of 17 or 18; U.S. law makes a distinction where there is none.

That’s when we learned that both boys were addicted to the strongest painkiller ever
developed and needed rehab. This was a surprise to us; they had not told us about the drugs
they were doing, but then a lot of kids keep their drug use from their parents. As a teenager,
I told my father I smoked marijuana occasionally, but I didn’t tell him about the time I did
mescaline or LSD. I stayed away from meth and heroin. The boys’ father smoked marijuana
every day, I joined him occasionally. We assumed that our children would be equally cautious.

It’s hard to imagine fentanyl as the party drug of the year on this particular island — as
it was for a few years—in the sort of community where American flags mingle with Seahawks
memorabilia from porches of multimillion-dollar homes, boasting one of the state’s best
school districts and hundreds of acres of parks and open space. Most of their friends came
from stable families and didn’t lack for the necessities of life. All the parents knew each other
and the kids went into each other’s houses as easily as if they were their own, the parents all
looked out for each other’s kids. And for Aaron and Jared, before the drug vultures moved
in, it was utopia.

A flash of memory: eleven-year-old Aaron and Jared buoyed by limitless energy, holding
a contest to see which one could slide the fastest through wet grass after soccer, which they
had to act out again in the SUV, pushing each other along long bucket seats in back. Then they
upped the ante, dive bombing from the window and sliding upside down. After a time they
plopped down, seemingly exhausted. When I started the engine, the two tow-heads were
at it again, snapping their seat belts and rocking the car with raucous laughter, taking turns
describing in gory detail the soccer they played, boasting of how they kneed and elbowed
their way to the goal several times without getting killed.

We raised our boys to believe in two things: God and sports. They chose lacrosse after
soccer, practiced their skills daily. They turned out to be standout players, competing each
summer in the regional club leagues. Brian, their father, loved watching them play; as a teenager
he was a formidable basketball player in youth leagues; and shined on the baseball diamond
as well. Brian was always one of the more vocal parents on the sidelines, yelling, “take the ball
and run with it,” or, “make a pass.” After games, in the car he would talk about improving the
skills. He had these high standards that were difficult to achieve, and more often than not, he
seemed disappointed in their performance, pointing out where they could have done better.
And they listened to him, but it was hard to see what they thought because they didn’t say.

But all that changed in junior year of high school. Their father wanted to make them
continue with sports, but Aaron the more vocal of the two, said he wasn’t going to do it. Jared
said he didn’t want to do it either. I suggested instead of forcing the boys into something they
didn’t want to do, why not let them chose what sport they wanted to be in. Brian said he
didn’t like quitters; I said what if they no longer like the sport? Let them chose year by year,
so what if they don’t stick with any one thing as long as they do it for the year.

Brian stopped wanting to do things with them. He said if they wanted to talk to him he’d
take them out to eat, but he was damned if he would go snowboarding with them, not unless

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they went back to playing sports. He spent an inordinate amount of time in his room smoking
his bong, and started hanging out with his men friends, and not inviting me or the boys along.

Aaron refused to go to lacrosse practice anymore.

I cajoled them into agreeing to play tennis, hoping that would placate their father, but
many times they ditched practice. It dawned on me that they didn’t want to do a sport at all,
and were too afraid to say that, knowing how much their father loved sports. They started
hanging out with an artsy crowd. Their new friends wore their hair unruly, dressed in black,
and had tats and piercings in odd places. This worried me, but their older sister had a similar
rebellious period and she got through it, and her friends had been similarly attired, and acted
clannish, and sometimes off-putting. Sarah came through high school with honors and left
for college, and stayed on the honor roll. I thought the boys would follow the same path. But
then they tried fentanyl.

Addiction happens fast with fentanyl, only a few uses will rearrange the brain’s wiring and
begin a lifetime of torment for the victim. We hoped teams of the doctors and psychologists
that we hired on learning about this horror would shove the craving that is born out of the
cession of pain into cave, so only a background murmur is left — fentanyl literally deadens
the nerves so the user feels lightheaded, and a mental clouding occurs, thinking turns fuzzy,
and there’s a loss of fine motor control. This type of intoxication is highly pleasurable at first,
and then no longer works, but by then you’re hooked and you need more and more to have
a sense of stasis, and not get violently ill.

We saw what happens when users run out of the Chemical (it’s nearly impossible to
keep up with the body’s growing need). One day Aaron got into a rage and accused Jared of
doing the last of the Chemical and started hitting him like he wanted to kill him. We had no
idea what they were fighting about. It’s likely in the psychosis triggered by the Chemical Aaron
honestly believed Jared did this to hurt him. Jared had to go to the emergency room to see
if his eye had been damaged by the beating he took; it was swollen shut.

***

Neither boy knew anything about the drug when they first smoked its vapor at a friend’s
party soon after graduating high school in 2010. All of this I learned after Jared started talking
about it with us, releasing a torrent of memories in the days after his arrest, when we learned
fentanyl had been found in his blood. One of their best friends from third grade said the high
was totally awesome but it was easy to od. They were told that they wouldn’t get addicted
from smoking, only if they injected. Everyone gathered around Alessandro who put a thin
line of the white powder on a strip of foil that he held in his palm. He flicked a lighter below
it and soon a vapor smelling like boiled milk rose from the foil. Alessandro told them that
the Chemical would open their minds to the spiritual. They took turns. Jared quickly felt the
explosive onset, mostly a head rush. The high is shorter than for heroin, one to two hours
instead of half a day. The flushing in his face was so intense it was almost painful. He held his
hands to his cheeks and rushed to the bathroom and drenched his face in ice water. He felt a
shortness of breath as if he had been running; his vision blurred and his skin tingled as if he
were being touched all over by a beautiful woman. He tried to pee but couldn’t. He leaned
over the toilet and threw up. All of it felt pleasant. Everyone lay about the couches and floor

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on pillows. Alessandro took pictures of them in various stages of somnolence with the Leica
SLR he always carried with him. Alessandro attended art school summers, and took stunning
photographs. Later that day, Jared played the keyboards, and guitar. Aaron played guitar, and
Alex played the violin. There was a drummer and vocalist as well. Like the Romantics, they
championed an alternative culture, criticizing frenzied pace of learning in the American public
school system. Yet they embraced technology wholeheartedly, and went to coding camp.
Their faces reflected the beatific visions they had experienced and the sense that they were
a special breed put on this earth to make life better for everyone.

After their arrest, Jared volunteered to go to jail for a month at the advice of his attorney
so the judge would treat him less harshly. The maximum prison sentence for this type of hate
crime was five years. Jared had to withdraw from college the first week of school. We made
haste to set up plans to have both boys attend separate residential rehab programs when
Jared was released from jail. They weren’t going to stop using on their own. We heard the
recidivism was high.

His jailors assigned Jared to the violent crimes unit, and placed him in a cell with a man
who torched a man’s face in a home burglary. I was in shock that Jared, never one to start
a fight, was sharing a cell with this guy. Jared told me on one of my weekly visits that the
cellmate kept making jokes about gay sex. Thankfully, the judge only added another two
weeks of jail, along with the maximum sentence for community service. Thereafter he would
have four to five years of community service to complete, roughly 20 hours a week of mind-
numbing grunt work. He would have to delay college and getting his degree.

I understood the sense they had of being special, of having new insight. Nor could I
criticize them for trying this drug. I couldn’t say well, why didn’t you look it up first on the
internet before trying it? I knew what it was like to be at a party with friends you knew all
your life and be presented with a drug you’d never heard of. Back in the day, my boyfriend’s
word was good enough for me.

Now that they had been outed, we discussed the drug scene. Aaron read Aldous
Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, and said he felt fentanyl would turn out to be as defining an
experience for his generation as hallucinogens were for mine. I went to university in Berkeley,
California, where even now the spirit of the ‘60s is still very much alive, albeit muted. When
I was there, in the 70s, the vibe was still a blatant Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. In a 2006
report in Wired magazine, many early computer pioneers were said to have been users of
LSD. Steve Jobs described his own LSD experience as “one of the two or three most important
things” he had done in his life. But no one I knew was doing opioids. The drugs out today are
a lot more potent than what I had access too when I was their age, and I had no idea how
much things have changed. The night of Jared’s arrest, I was in for a shock.

After Aaron had been in rehab for several months, and away from the drug, I asked if he
could find happiness without it. “I’m not mad at Jared anymore about what happened,” he
said, his face earnest. “I love my life now. I have purpose. I love the people I’m meeting, really
great people. And I’m writing like crazy. I’m working on a screenplay. It’s going to happen for
me, man.”

But the beatific visions that happened in the beginning lost their sparkle. Already he
experienced the psychosis, and the anger, and knew that if he continued, it would eat at his

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mental capabilities in a monstrous way. It was the dreams that captivated him, he felt cheated
without the dreams. I told him that Jorge Luis Borges says that modeling dreams is more
difficult than weaving a rope out of sand.

***

Many of their classmates went to rehab as well. The result: ten deaths from overdose over a
handful of years. But you won’t hear about it, these families don’t talk to the media. Addiction
to opioids may have halted in my community after these deaths—that’s the scuttlebutt on the
street—but nationally it’s a crisis without letup. Addiction cuts across every socioeconomic
class in America, although the media likes to talk about it as a big problem in the Midwest,
people from rural outposts to major urban areas everywhere in the U.S. are dealing with it,
even in the tech centers.

Young white suburban Americans between 25 to 34 years old experience the highest rate
of opioid overdose deaths according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In urban areas, it’s blacks. Developed in the ‘60s as a painkiller of last resort, fentanyl has
surpassed heroin and prescription pills to become the lead in the opioid crisis and is now
the leading cause of overdose death in the U.S. Last year, more than 31,000 people in the
U.S. died after taking fentanyl or one of its chemical relatives, representing a 45 percent
jump in 2017 alone. No other drug in modern history has killed more people in any one year.
UN statistics shows that opioid use in the US is the highest of any country in the world, and
more than 50 percent higher than Germany, the second-ranked country of the twenty most
populous countries, and 2,000 times higher than India. And now suppliers are adding it to
heroin, molly, and cocaine, anything that comes in a white powder.

It’s not a problem in the EU, likely because the family unit is stronger overall and
people aren’t as frantic about climbing the career ladder, life is slower across the pond. But
this obsession with opioids is a totally different thing from what previous generations of
Americans lived through, including the opium that Chinese brought in the 1849 Gold Rush.
And the marihuana and hallucinogens of the 60s weren’t physically addicting.

Doctors in the U.S. meanwhile were prescribing opioids for every sort of malady. It
seems a natural progression that fentanyl started appearing on our streets in significant
quantities in 2013, produced in China. Remember the Opium Wars? Is this payback? Rather
than be a tool for enlightenment, fentanyl is a malignant shadow god that has its talons
firmly around the throats of our youth. It’s rare for anyone especially one whose brain isn’t
fully formed to escape its clutches intact. Currently there’s no surefire remedy other than
naloxone for opioid overdose, and it’s best to be trained in how to inject if the need arises.
Last year Congress finally passed legislation to provide treatment to people who need it and
cannot afford it.

Today, officials say the bulk of the fentanyl produced in China is funneled to Mexico,
where it is remaking the drug trade as traffickers embrace it over heroin, which is more
difficult and expensive to produce. While heroin is made from poppy plants that grow only
in specific climates and take months to cultivate, fentanyl and other so-called synthetics are
cooked from chemicals in makeshift laboratories in a matter of hours. U.S. border agents have
been intercepting increasing amounts of fentanyl. In January of last year, they reported their

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largest seizure ever: 254 pounds of powder and pills hidden in a truck carrying cucumbers
into Arizona, enough to kill every American.

In Infinite Jest Hal comes to realize that, “we are all dying to give our lives away to
something,” paralleling what Marathe tells Steeply about choosing one’s idols. By giving
himself over to addiction, Hal knows he’s avoiding some question or realization, and by
invoking Hamlet, the narrator suggests that addiction is an attempt to evade suffering, leading
to questions about the purpose of life: “… the questions why and to what grow real beaks
and claws.” The bird-like imagery alludes to the image of the shadow that Kate Gompert uses
to describe her depression. Which begs the question: Is addiction the best defense against
depression and insanity? Against failure?

The boys went to treatment in Southern California, selected from the Forbes list, and
very expensive. Nothing was too good for our boys, we just wanted them healthy. A year past
us by and from all reports they were thriving, the therapists said that Aaron was leading group
activities and doing well in his studies. Jared was also doing well, motivated and getting good
marks. The following year I wanted both boys to come home for Thanksgiving, though the
prospect worried me. On the phone, Aaron swore he was out of the drug’s clutches, making a
lot of friends on the sobriety circuit and actively seeking clarity. The director of the treatment
center recommended that Aaron come home, after all he reasoned, he would have to re-
enter the world sometime. I knew that Jared would do whatever Aaron wanted.

The minute they came home we shared hugs, and friends stopped by in an endless
procession. Everyone trooped into the kitchen. I watched Aaron go through cupboards, saying
he wanted to find water bottles. I retrieved a couple for him. Aaron went to fill up, and in
the process, sprayed water on the floor. He swiped the spill, grinning at my bemused face;
his joy breaking out of him in waves of glee. “I don’t want someone to slip on this,’’ he said
as if he were the happiest person alive to be doing this chore, his eyes round and glowing,
his limbs vibrating.

“Just curious, what drug are you on, is it ecstasy?” It was hard to believe his joy stemmed
from sheer happiness at being home, the joy that lit up his eyeballs like a Christmas tree.

“No, not ecstasy.” He drank deeply from his water bottle and laughed like a child, with
that unadulterated sense of wellbeing before spraying another layer of water on the slick
wood floor, his laughter turning ecstatic, his spirit flowing effervescent like a bubbling stream.
He pulled out a clutch of paper towels and bent down again. As he moved, his limbs appeared
to shiver like the strings of a violin. “No, I’m just happy. I love you so much mom, and I’m glad
we’re here with you.”

“It’s not fentanyl I hope?”

He shook his head and Jared said nothing. In their code, the decision whether to admit
anything was his brother’s to make. I had my suspicions, but thought after a year of rehab,
they should know the drill: how to stay safe, and to avoid overdose. I put my hopes on their
good sense.

Aaron said he couldn’t wait to go back to Los Angeles with its young hipsters thronging
the streets and clubs. His energy was magnetic; we all hung on his words. Several hours
later, Aaron said he was tired and wanted to take a nap. Jared said he was tired, too. The

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next morning Jared found Aaron’s dead body; his twin asphyxiated. The sound of Jared’s ear
splitting wail pierced my soul, the sound of desperation and heartache. We held each other
for the longest time. Then the nightmare began anew, in a different guise, Jared fell into a funk
with bouts of sobriety lasting months. I could tell now when he was using, his movements
slowed and he spoke in a whisper, he had trouble getting out of bed, and complained that he
couldn’t get REM sleep, nor could he converse without a lot of pauses and trailing sentences,
his understanding was poor and he couldn’t finish a book. He dropped out of school and lied
about it. Several times he went back to rehab, and each time he got out, he vowed this would
be the last time he would use. The stress was unnerving, but I knew I would always be there
for him, and help him find his way. Then after a period of successfully staying off hard drugs,
and seemingly to have learned to manage without Aaron, he moved to the Bay Area and
found a job he loved and friends. Then the friend who had introduced him to fentanyl came
to visit, and was booted out by his roommate after threatening her, and acting psychotic.
Later I learned from his coworkers that a new girl had joined their team. She had just moved
to the U.S. from Mexico and announced to others that she was a meth addict. Jared became
her friend and he told the others he was planning to help her overcome her addiction.

His landlord discovered his dead body. The coroner said the meth was so strong it burst
his aorta. He died from massive internal bleeding.

In Infinite Jest, Gately takes Dilaudid to avoid “a terrible stomach-sinking dread that
probably dates back to being alone in his XXL-Dentons and crib below Herman the Ceiling
That Breathed.” Gately hopes to lose the feeling that he’s “under a storm-cloudy sky that
bulged and receded like a big gray lung.” Once the drug kicks in, “the sky stopped breathing
and turned blue.”

I wish I could talk with my boys right now, and tell them how much I miss them.

My work has appeared in a handful of literary magazines, print and online, including an
anthology by Riverfeet Press, titled Awake in the World, V.2. My work can be found in
Catamaran Literary Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Potato Soup Journal, Literary
Orphans, Cultured Vultures, and Citron Review, and will be appearing in the upcoming
summer issue of Juked. I was a finalist in Cutthroat’s 2016 Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction
Contest, and received honorable mention in GlimmerTrain’s Emerging Writers Contest for
2015 and 2016. One of my essays was a contest finalist in the creative nonfiction category in
the Spring 2019 Pinch Literary Awards. Years ago, I was a regular freelance contributor for the
New Jersey Regional Section of The New York Times, and several regional newspapers and
magazines, including The Cleveland Plain Dealer and Asbury Park Press, and received a few
awards for that work from the Society of Professional Journalists. After self-publishing two
novels I went for an MFA in creative writing from Bennington Writing Seminars in Vermont,
and have an undergraduate degree in literature from UC Berkeley.

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Shortlist Winner Nominees

LETTER TO STEPHEN

by Ruth Deming

It seems like forever since you left us, though it was only in 2014, when your various cancers
returned. Unlike me, you had so much to live for, though officially you were a retiree. All those
Letters to the Editor you wrote to the Inquirer, always hoping to make this a better world.

The debacle happened on November 5, 2019. It’s not over yet. A fleet of white Verizon
trucks that look like World War Two submarines line our street. I’ve taken countless photos
of them and their men for my blog.

Would you believe, Stephen, that I was out cold when the outage happened. Was
watching Doctor Daniel Amen instruct us on how to keep my memory loss to a minimum
and failed to hear the sizzle of the transformer that for days was the talk of the town.

When I awoke and looked out the front window, tree branches and twigs littered the
street. The back yard, though, was worse. It looked like those tornados you see in Mississippi
and Florida where people’s houses are smashed to the ground like pumpkins.

I went out on the back yard deck and stared at the destruction. The epicenter was right
next door at the Bill Adams house. I learned that his dead tree had knocked down four other
trees, which knocked down his white fence and nearly everything landed in his pool, covered
over for the winter.

Stephen, I am desperately trying to make this interesting, so you can see it, wherever
you are. My belief is that you reside in my head. I still have your B & W photo in my upstairs
office, a handsome man with a slight beard, John Lennon glasses, and a button-down striped
shirt.

Do you like coffee? I have made some Starbucks “Christmas” Coffee in my Chemex pot,
which is shapely as a woman. And I must confess, I have become clumsy. My sister Donna
confirmed this happens to her, too.

Every facet of my being was trying to get through the outage until the electricity went
back on. Our water was on, but it was freezing.

Fortunately, my gas tank was full. I drove over to the library, along with 50 other people,
and we spent time warming up. Warming our hands as if we’d climbed Mount Everest. My
black beret was jammed on my head.

Then from the library I drove over to the Barnes and Noble shopping center. Best Nails
was there.

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Should I?
I hadn’t had a manicure in over five years. You know how it is. The polish chips off and
you’ve got to get it redone.
This polish is, to use my new favorite word, spectacular.
Good Lord, how do you describe a color?
May, my handmaiden, said I chose a beautiful color.
Wine-colored perhaps and shiny as a mirror. No, not the mirror of Snow-White’s wicked
stepmother.
It wasn’t terribly expensive and I gave May a nice tip.
The world, after the outage – which I’m tempted to call “outrage” - was as beautiful as
ever. When Scott had three trees removed, I asked Willow Tree Service to bring two stumps
from his tall fir tree over to my bird bath. Oh, I wish you could see them, Stephano. “Courage”
en francais, for me to ask them.
More coffee please. It must be hot or it ain’t no good.
I am lonely, Stephen. My work here on earth is finished. At night, when I close my eyes,
often listening to WRTI-FM, the jazz station, I ask myself, “What on earth shall I do to be of
value to people?”
Of course I love beauty and often stand outside on the front porch at night staring at the
naked sky. What goes on up there? Often an airplane will wing its way through the darkness as
stars – those are unmoving – plugged in at the beginning of time – and constellations, all once
viewed by Magellan, Henry Hudson, The Lakota Indians, Susan B Anthony and Suffragettes,
and aesthetes like myself and boyfriend Scott.
The blue hair? My friend Rem drove the two of us to a Reading Philly’s game. I still have
the program – oops! – I almost said “pogrom” – on my kitchen wall, the Barnes Museum of
Cowbell Road.
These baseball games are mini-versions of the Philadelphia Phillies and offer
spectacular views from your seats. All sorts of fun shenanigans occur on the field between
innings. And there again is that vast sky that holds all of us, until death wraps us up in its
soft arms.
A woman with blue hair sat with her family on an aisle seat. Who knows? She may have
been a cancer survivor or simply an adventuress.
The very next day I visited the supermarket and the “hair” aisle. Sure enough, there
it was! An entire kit, including gloves, a bottle of dye, which you pour into another bottle,
smooth onto your hair in the downstairs shower, look down at the drain – and never think
about Janet Leigh in Psycho! – that scene only took 30 seconds - and watch the blue dye
disappearing down the drain.
Let me peek again at your photo, Stephen.
This is the first letter I’ve ever written you.
Your wife Arleen is doing well. We met on a bus trip to view Manhattan’s brownstones.
My legs were killing me at the end of the day.

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But, you know what, Stephen?
That is far far better than being dead, ya know what I mean?

Ruth Z. Deming is a poet and short story writer who lives in Willow Grove, PA, a suburb of
Philadelphia. Her works have been published in Mad Swirl, Literary Yard, ShortStory,net and
other writing venues. She runs New Directions, a support group for people with depression,
bipolar disorder and their loved ones. “Yes I Can: My Bipolar Journey” details her triumph
over bipolar disorder. A mental health advocate, she educates the public about this treatable
illness.

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THE
PHILOSOPHER’S STONE

by Hank Kalet

1.

The fear, always, is that blood is destiny, that the confusion I see in her eyes will be visited
upon me. I hear her repeat herself. I watch her obsess – over her phone, her bag, my niece’s
baby. I hear her tell the same stories, ask the same questions.

We’re watching television in the den, my dad asleep in my reading chair. Football had
been on, but with the big man asleep, I flip the channel, find an old favorite show of hers.
“How about this, mom, The Wild, Wild West?” (http://dai.ly/x3ixk7y) Victor Buono is chewing
up the scenery. Robert Conrad is all cool and bad-ass in his waistcoat, a cowboy, a spy, facing
off against another surreal sci-fi threat.

“I think I remember this,” she tells me, and she watches.
“That’s Robert Conrad, James West,” I say. “That’s Artemis Gordon. You used to love
this.”
She smiles. It goes to a commercial for My Pillow.
“That’s supposed to be the best pillow,” she says. My dad rouses. “They don’t tell you
how much it is,” she says.
She’s right. No price. A two-for-one offer but no price. She says it again, tells me again
that it is “supposed to be the best pillow for sleeping.”
Dad weighs in, reminds her that it’s just a commercial, that they are hyping the pillow.
“That’s what they always tell you,” he says. “They want you to buy it.”
The show returns. “Who is that?” she asks.
“Jim West. Robert Conrad. Remember?”
“Yes.”
“You loved this show when I was a kid.”
“Yes.”

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Back to a commercial, a skating sumo wrestler, a car ad, and the pillow again. “They
don’t tell you how much it is,” again and again until West and Gordon defeat Buono’s Count
Manzeppi.

2.

Alzheimer’s disease. Dementia. The mind in decay. I saw it with my grandmother and, now,
I’m watching it slowly take hold of my mother.

Mom began showing symptoms about a decade ago – forgetting names, confusing
dates, avoiding long conversations. We’d call, she’d answer and immediately put my dad on
the phone.

This is typical of early-stage Alzheimer’s. According to the London-based Alzheimer’s
Society (https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/documents_info.php?documentID=100),
most Alzheimer’s patients start with lapses in memory, with what might seem to be normal
forgetfulness. “In particular, they may have difficulty recalling recent events and learning new
information.”

Lost keys. Misplaced bags. The light on the stove. The hippocampus, the section of the
brain responsible for short-term memory, is attacked by the disease, which then spreads to
other memory centers as “proteins build up in the brain to form structures called ‘plaques’
and ‘tangles’. This leads to the loss of connections between nerve cells, and eventually to
the death of nerve cells and loss of brain tissue.” There also is “a shortage of some important
chemicals” that normally “help to transmit signals around the brain.” It’s like a short circuit
in the brain’s wiring, a misfire that shuts down certain functions – small things, at first, but
it can affect language and motor skills, the ability to follow simple processes (brushing the
teeth can become difficult), before expressing itself in fantastical thinking.

There is some evidence that Alzheimer’s is hereditary, but it’s not conclusive and there
are other factors – environmental, dietary, etc. – that may play a role. But watching my mom
slip into the distance just as her mother did is hard to escape. I fear for the future – for my
mom, of course, and for my dad, who is her primary support, but also for my sister and my
brother, and for myself.

The question of heredity hangs over us, leaves me with an unshakable sense of dread
that only heightens the more general fear of aging and death that is present in all of us. Some
argue – as a professor of mine did in an anthropology class – that all religion is an effort to
combat this dread, to find a way to, metaphorically, at least, stave off death. Art, as well, he
said, and most creative work, functions to extend our lives beyond their natural end, to allow
pieces of ourselves to live in perpetuity.

This notion, essentially a version of “angst” as described by the existentialists, assumes
our fear of death is deep seated and potentially paralyzing – how can we function, make
decisions, etc., why should we, if the fact of our end, if not its circumstances, is foreordained?

There are moments when I feel the weight of this hit me, paralyze me, suffocate
me. I think it is at the heart of my own insecurities, my excess of caution, the variation

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Adelaide Literary Magazine

of obsessive-compulsive disorder that can send me spiraling down and out. I get stuck in
thought loops, illogical judgments about myself, and turn brittle and immobile. I have tools –
and meds – to help me address this, but the basic fear, the existential dread cannot be erased.

In the end, the only thing to do is accept this as our fate, accept the uncertainties and
certainties of our existence, and persevere. For Kierkegaard, this took the form of a religious
leap of faith; Camus, an atheist, answered the question by proclaiming a different kind of
faith – not in god, but in existence.

My answer: Family, friendship, love. Human connection. The sense of shared destiny and
travail, the understanding that we are in this slog together, ready to help one another down
the road. This doesn’t abate the fear, but it makes it more palatable – though, it keeps the
question of biology and heredity in the foreground, makes it impossible to ignore.

3.

My grandmother was a little younger than my mom is now when she came to live with us. My
grandfather had died a couple of years before, less than a year after my bar mitzvah. He was
always a strong man, in charge of both of their lives, a physical presence and no-nonsense
sort. That was how I remembered him, at least. He could be gruff, but I loved him dearly,
as did my grandmother. My grandmother was a softer presence, at least with me, and she
always would find some candy for me or would make me sweetened tea with milk and a little
treat in her kitchen. She would talk, tell me stories about my mother and her brothers, about
me, stories that my mom would later say were untrue.

My grandmother seemed content to remain in the background, to follow my grandfather’s
lead, to let him drive conversations, make the decisions. The last time we visited them in
Florida, she seemed as she’d always been – maybe a little more removed, a little forgetful,
though perhaps it is just my own faulty memory overlaying what I know now onto what I
likely didn’t notice then.

When my grandfather died, my grandmother was on her own for the first time, and it
quickly became apparent that she should not be. She would leave the stove on, burn food
beyond recognition, char the tea kettle – once she nearly burned her kitchen to the ground.
My mom’s aunt and uncle lived nearby and would check on my grandmother as often as they
could, but it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be enough. The situation grew dangerous and my folks
moved her into our house. She slept on the pullout couch in the den for a year or two, until
I left for college and she took over my room. She wasn’t the same woman I remembered –
more forgetful, certainly, but also angrier and more distant. She was rudderless. Her stories
lacked coherence, were more fabulous but went nowhere. She would escape out the front
door and head down the street clutching her pocketbook. I’d catch up to her, turn her back,
walk her home as she explained that she was heading to the bank or back to her house, that
she was going home. She was always “going home” – a few years after moving in with us, she
told my unsuspecting girlfriend (who is now my wife) that was just in New Jersey for a visit
and that she’d be leaving for Florida in a few days.

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