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CONTENTS

Play

Errant Souls

This Is the Train the Queen Rides On

Two Poems

Diabolique d'amour

In Ophelia's Garden

Followed

Dear Aunt Gwenda:

Threads

A Half-Lizard Boy, A Reptile Man, and An Unjaded, Shiny Something

Two Poems

A Static of Names

Son of a Bitch

The Fabricant of Marvels

The Juniper Tree

The Film Column

Two Notes

Crimson-lady at the Auction, Buying

Zines & Bookesque Objects

At Uncle Ogden's House

A Message from the Welcomer

Swimming

Music I've Been Listening to Lately

Those Writers

* * * *

Lady Churchill's

Rosebud Wristlet

No.18

cover

Emily Wilson

writer types

Back

Made by:

Gavin J. Grant

Kelly Link

Jedediah Berry

Michael Deluca

Erik Gallant

Fiction Workshop at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Spring 2006

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, No.18 June 2006 (The Ethereal Issue). ISSN 1544-7782 Text in Bodoni Book. Titles in Imprint MT Shadow. Since 1996 LCRW has usually appeared in June and November from Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060 info@lcrw.net lcrw.net/lcrw $5 per single issue or $20/4. Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply.

Printed by Paradise Copies, 30 Craft Ave., Northampton, MA 01060 413-585-0414

Play

David J. Schwartz

Amy: Pretend I'm Jack.

Tommy: I want to be Jack.

Amy: We're both Jack, and we're going to the giant's house for dinner.

Tommy: I'm bringing bean soup.

Amy: Yes, but the rabbits ate all the beans and got tummy aches, so their mother brought them some cats—some cast—

Tommy: Caster oil?

Amy: Yes, she gave them that and then she scolded. She said, “You can't eat the beans or you'll end up in a pie."

Tommy: I'll bring a pie to the giant's house. A baloney pie. But the giant ate it all up and now there's just potato salad.

Amy: There's deviled eggs, too.

Tommy: The goose ate the deviled eggs because she said they were hers. And we tried to eat the potato salad to be polite, but it was poison.

Amy: And the giant started to cry because he's sorry.

Tommy: He's a baby giant.

Amy: Yes. And he cries and he cries and the table gets washed away and we have to climb on some stinky cheese so we don't get drowned.

Tommy: I like cheese.

Amy: This cheese is really stinky. Nobody likes it except for wolves.

Tommy: Uh-oh. Now there's a wolf that comes and finds the cheese.

Amy: Is he a good wolf or a bad wolf?

Tommy: He's bad. He says he's going to eat the baby, unless if—

Amy: Unless if we get married. Except we can't because we're both boys.

Tommy: I'll be the girl. I'm Alice, but I don't wear a dress.

Amy: OK, we have a wedding, and the wolf says I pronounce you. And then I die.

Tommy: How did you die?

Amy: The ring cut my finger. Also, the Queen did it.

Tommy: OK, I killed the Queen, and she told me there's a magic horse that can find you.

Amy: I'm in Hell.

Tommy: Right, but the horse can find you if I feed it lots of mushrooms. So I tell the baby to find mushrooms but not to eat the toadstools because they're poison.

Amy: I'm having tea with the King of Hell. He's in love with me.

Tommy: You're married to me. Besides, you're both boys.

Amy: I know. He's in love with me and he lets me call my parents to tell them I'm dead and don't worry.

Tommy: Anyways the baby comes back and he ate so many mushrooms that he turned into a horse.

Amy: Is he still a giant?

Tommy: No, he's a baby and a horse. I have to carry him and ride him at the same time.

Amy: Is he fast?

Tommy: He's really fast, and he makes snorty noises. He takes us to the underworld. There's a cat that guards the underworld.

Amy: It's a dog.

Tommy: It's a cat and a dog and a pig in one animal, and the cat and the dog fight all the time, and the pig eats everything. He eats the horse, but me and the baby get past him.

Amy: The King of Hell wants me to torture, but I said I won't.

Tommy: Who does he want you to torture?

Amy: The Pope. But I said I won't because of morals.

Tommy: What's morals?

Amy: It's little people that talk in your ears and tell you what to do. Like Bugs Bunny.

Tommy: OK. I'm in Hell, and I find you, but there's a monster.

Amy: Is it scary?

Tommy: It's a dragon with red teeth from all the blood. The blood's because he didn't brush good and his gums fell out.

Amy: He wants to eat the baby.

Tommy: Yes, but the baby tells me how to kill it. With poison. Now you can come home.

Amy: I want a divorce. I'm in love with the King of Hell.

Tommy: What about our baby?

Amy: I don't like the baby. You're the mom.

Tommy: OK, we're divorced. I'll marry the Wolf.

Amy: We'll have a double wedding. The baby does the ceremony. I'm the King's husband and you're the Wolf's wife and we live across the street.

Tommy: Across the river. We live in a castle and you live in a castle.

Amy: But you can't come over because the King thinks the Wolf is a blowhard.

Tommy: I can't come over because the Wolf won't let me leave. He goes out every day to hunt rabbits and locks the castle behind him.

Amy: All the doors inside are locked, too.

Tommy: No, just this one closet.

Amy: I'm coming over for a visit. I knock on the door.

Tommy: I can't hear you because we're in the attic. The baby knows how to pick locks and he opens the closet and there's seven dead grandmas in there. The Wolf poisoned them all.

Amy: Oh, no.

Tommy: There's Grandma Rabbit and Grandma Horse and Grandma Ostrich and Ugly Grandma and Fat Grandma and Grandma Mushroom.

Amy: That's only six.

Tommy: I know. There's Hairy Grandma, too. She has so much hair that she used to knit tomato blankets out of it.

Amy: Throw down the hair!

Tommy: I know. The baby cuts off Hairy Grandma's hair and ties it to the doorknob and lowers it out the window and he climbs down first. I'm coming down after, but you have to promise not to look up my dress.

Amy: You said you wouldn't wear dresses.

Tommy: The Wolf made me. You have to promise.

Amy: I promise.

Tommy: OK, I made it down.

Amy: Let's hold hands. I don't like the King of Hell anymore. All his friends are dead.

Tommy: Uh oh, the Wolf came back and ate the baby.

Amy: Oh, no!

Tommy: I thought you didn't like the baby!

Amy: Is the Wolf going to eat us now?

Tommy: He can't because the baby was poison and he grew into a giant again. The Wolf died.

Amy: Let's be friends.

Tommy: OK, but next time I want to be the boy.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Errant Souls

John Schoffstall

"Don't play outside on windy days,” Jorge's father said. “Your soul might blow right out of your body."

But youth is careless, and Jorge was young, so it happened that one dreary evening in November, in the raw, wet time when the etheric winds howl across the heath, Jorge felt his soul tear loose from his flesh.

Jorge's soul welled up in his throat, ballooning like a spinnaker, choking him, filling his mouth so that he couldn't breathe or speak. It squeezed out of every opening in his frame, through his nostrils, his ears, his sex, blinding and burning him, until he thought he would suffocate. He flapped his hands helplessly and hopped up and down. Tears sprang from his eyes.

Then, pop! his soul tore free. He glimpsed it momentarily in the near-darkness, a thing pale and translucent. Caught by the wind, in an instant Jorge's soul was carried away, cartwheeling over and over like a pillowcase blown off a clothesline. It caught on a bramble, then on a fence, but broke free each time, until it was lost in the dimness of the approaching night. The cold etheric wind that blows out of the lonely places between the stars tore through Jorge's flesh like a hagfish boring through the body of a cod.

Jorge ran back to his house and threw open the door, yelling, “Father! Father!"

Father understood immediately what had happened. “What were you doing outside?” he demanded.

"Father, my soul is gone, the wind blew it away!"

"What were you doing outside, when I told you not to go?"

"Father!"

"Which way did the wind take it?” Father asked.

"Toward the wood,” Jorge said.

Jorge's father put on his long leather coat and took his blunderbuss from above the mantle. He slung a powder flask over his shoulder, and hung a carbide lamp made of iron around his neck. “We will get it back,” he said.

"Father, what is the gun for?” Jorge asked. His father did not reply. “Father, please don't hurt it,” Jorge said.

"Why do you care if it is hurt?” his father asked. “A soulless boy cannot love anything, or care for anything."

They walked east towards the town of Abalia, on the muddy road that passes by the cathedral and the factory. Father walked with determination, his boots squeaking in the mud. He shoved his lagging son forward with the flat of his hand, so that Jorge stumbled several times.

South of the cathedral and the road, a weedy track entered the wood. Father's carbide lantern swung as he walked. Its light, pale and flickering, multiplied the trees a thousand-fold and made them seem to move. Leaf mould covered the path, releasing the sulfury stench of decay as their boots sank into it.

Deep in the wood, dense trees stopped the wind and the air was quiet. In an open space they came upon a ruin, tumbled marble columns, broken blocks of pediment and entablature half sunken in moss and weeds. Nave and naos were open to the starry sky; grass forced its way up through their stones. Over this midden a flock of ghostly souls floated and danced. Some chanted thin, mathematical melodies that sounded to Jorge like the clicking of a train's wheels over railroad track. Others engaged in games too complex for him to fathom. Jorge saw his own soul there: its haughty features resembled his. His father approached Jorge's soul, readying his blunderbuss. “Return to my son,” Father said. “You should never have parted from him. Neither of you can survive alone."

"I am content here,” Jorge's soul said. Its voice was a whisper, an echo, the buzzing of cicadas. “Death is preferable to being joined with Jorge again. I never liked him."

Father raised the blunderbuss to his shoulder. Jorge heard the click of the sear and the tumbler, and his throat tightened. “Return to my son now,” Father said, “or I will return you to my son's flesh by force."

Jorge grabbed his father's arm. “No, Father,” he said. “Please don't."

"You cannot live without a soul, son,” Father said. He lowered his gun. For the first time his voice softened. “Look there. That's the soul of Vinne Grabbe, who drank, and beat his wife, and lost his employment at the factory. These things loosen a man's soul from his frame. Vinne Grabbe was sent to Houses of Correction after he broke a man's skull in a fight. When they released him, he wandered outside in the wind, and his soul blew away. He died of a fever. Do you see how thin his soul has become? It will disappear soon. And look there: that is the soul of Ivy Tabi. She foolishly went out on the heath when the wind was high, and her soul was torn out of her body. Afterwards, she threw herself off the cathedral tower."

Jorge stared at the soul of Ivy Tabi, who had been just fourteen years old, as he was now. He shivered, but said nothing. Father raised the blunderbuss again. “Join again with my son,” he said to Jorge's soul, “or I will fire, and you will be injured, and I will stuff you back into my son's mouth."

"I care not,” said the soul.

Jorge saw his father's finger tighten on the trigger. He leaped, grabbed the gun, and forced the muzzle down. It went off with a roar which deafened him, and the hot blast of black powder from the pan and the touchhole burned his cheek. The shot went harmlessly into the ground. Jorge's soul looked on impassively.

"Idiot boy,” his father said. He raised his right hand, and Jorge believed Father was going to strike him. But then Father recovered himself, and his hand fell. “Do what you please,” he said. “I have done all that is required of me, and I'm done with you.” He tramped off, away from the ruin, leaving Jorge in starlight with only the souls.

Jorge said to his soul, “I saved you."

His soul said, “You did that for yourself, not for me."

Jorge made his way home by starlight. His footstep was light, and he whistled tunelessly as he walked, quitting only when he approached his house. It was dark inside, his father was abed. He went to his own room, undressed, and crept beneath the cold sheets. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt free. His body felt weightless, and his world full of possibilities. His soul had been something stolid and heavy, a thing of dull piety like his father's, critical and aloof. Now he was free of it. He could do anything. What would he do?

* * * *

Each morning the children marched in single file to school over the lumpy cobblestone streets of Abalia, a hundred boys in gray flannel uniforms, a hundred girls in gray pinafores and starched shirtwaists. One morning, a few days after he lost his soul, Jorge said, “I'm going,” to the boy in front of him, and walked away.

He wandered the streets of the city for the rest of day. It was more dreary than he remembered: endless narrow alleys that smelled of tobacco smoke and cooked cabbage, dingy stone buildings with mansard roofs that cut off the light, turning every street into a dim slot canyon, making it dusk when it should have been day. He came across a lonely little park with a pond, in which black swans swam listlessly and pecked at each other. Playing hooky, he thought, ought to be more pleasurable.

He had little appetite, but he was bored, so he bought food from stores anyway, until he realized that it was easier to steal it. Jorge was agile and fast on his feet, and shopkeepers rarely chased him far for the theft of a sweetmeat or a piece of fruit. But in the late afternoon, as the setting sun stained the buildings and streets blood red, the provost marshal and his men saw him and gave chase. When they caught him, the provost's men beat him with their truncheons. They tied his wrists and hobbled his feet, and made him stumble behind the provost's horse all the way back to Jorge's home. There they called for Jorge's father to come out. When he did, they beat him, too, for having such a feckless and thieving son.

When they had gone, and his father had recovered a little, he beat Jorge himself with a switch, cursing him all the time.

Jorge lay in bed that night. Every movement hurt, so he lay perfectly still. Although he was in pain, the beatings meant nothing to him. Pain as punishment is intended to instill fear, but Jorge was beyond fear.

He would go to classes at the Institute tomorrow. He would not steal again. But these resolves had nothing to do with the beatings. Contrary to his expectations, he had not enjoyed his day of freedom, or the stolen snacks. Jorge found himself beyond fear, but also beyond joy.

He had not anticipated this. He thought, and thought, and realized that he could not think of anything that would give him pleasure. Not food, nor exercise, nor reading books, nor the warmth of a fire, nor the company of his friends. Jorge could do anything he pleased. But there was nothing he wanted to do.

Every day at the Institute Jorge received instruction with Abalia's other boys and girls. They sat ranked by age on oak benches, in a hall three stories high where every voice echoed. Hamartiology, Apologetics, Eschatology, Rhetoric, and Polemics were their daily course of study. These subjects flowed together in Jorge's mind like rivers of gray mud. At lunchtime he had no appetite, and frequently gave his food away. During exercise periods he participated as little as the instructors would allow. He never studied. He failed tests. The superintendent of the Institute called Jorge to his office and scolded him, but Jorge paid no attention. He was adrift in a passionless void, untouchable, isolate.

During mass each Sunday, Jorge stood in line to receive the Host, listening to the crowd cough and gossip while they waited. When it was his turn, he briefly went down on one knee, and the cassocked priest laid on his tongue a sliver of flesh, the body of his Savior. It tasted like raw meat, blood, and fat. For a few minutes, until he chewed and swallowed it, it connected Jorge to the Godhead.

God and Jorge never had anything to say to one another. Their mystical communion mediated by the scrap of host was more of a mutual embarrassment than anything.

* * * *

Every night, after Jorge returned home from the Institute, he sat in a chair in his room, staring at nothing, until darkness fell and he crept into bed. By early summer, his color, never healthy, had turned corpse-like. His hair was thin and lusterless, his lips red and cracked. The skin stretched tightly over the bony bridge of his nose. He ate little.

It occurred to him that his body was failing by degrees, that soon, within weeks or months at the most, he would die. It was this realization that finally prompted him to act. Even a castrated man for a time retains, out of habit and custom, some traces of carnal desire. Deprived of his soul, Jorge still retained the urge to live, perhaps out of mere habit, or perhaps because that vital impulse arises from the flesh, not the spirit.

He dressed himself one night and took his father's carbide lantern.

Father was sitting in a chair by the fire, drinking hard cider and reading a book of moral philosophy. “I am going to get my soul,” Jorge said. His father did not reply.

Jorge struggled towards the wood, through the moist, cool air of an early summer night. He felt as if there were a steady headwind, pushing him back. Each step was an effort he could barely make. Each step forward was a battle won and lost in a war against himself.

In the forest glade, souls danced above the rubble. Jorge's soul seemed to him fainter than before, and the starlight shone through it. It danced in complex mathematical arabesques with the other souls, a canon or fugue of pale lights flickering in the dark glade.

His soul paused in its dance. “What do you want?” it asked.

"We need to join again,” Jorge said.

"No. Go away."

"I have found I cannot live without a soul,” Jorge said. His body felt too heavy for his muscles to support, and he fell to his knees in the moss and weeds. “I am failing, I am dying. I desire nothing, I need nothing, I want nothing. My body cries out for a reason to live, but I am empty inside. You must return to me, or I will die, and then you will die."

"But you hate me, don't you?” his soul said.

Jorge was silent.

"Going out on that windy night was not an accident. You wanted me gone, you've wanted me gone for years. Why do you want me back? You hate me."

"I want to live,” Jorge said.

"You are a weak thing,” his soul said. “And now you're afraid of death, and you want to take back your decision."

"I hate you because you are cold. Because you made me incapable of joy. Because you mistake cruelty for strength. Because you're like my father."

"And you still want to rejoin with me?"

"I want to live,” Jorge said. “Please...” Pleading with his own soul for his life was the hardest thing Jorge had ever done, not painful, but infinitely difficult, like running in hundred-pound boots.

His soul was unmoved. “I prefer to die, and so should you,” it said, and moved off to rejoin the dance.

Jorge fell forward into the wet moss and lay there a long time.

A girl's voice said, “I will go with you, if you will have me."

Jorge pushed himself up with his hands. A soul floated in front of him. “Who are you?” he asked.

"I am the soul of Ivy Tabi,” the soul said.

* * * *

And so they left the glade of wayward souls, Jorge and Ivy, a human boy and a flicker of light, of warmth and feeling, that vanished when the glare of the carbide lantern shone across her. They clung together as they walked across the heath so that Ivy's soul would be not be wrested away by the breeze.

"I wanted to love Ivy,” her soul told Jorge. “But as she became older, we grew apart. When we spoke together, there was no understanding between us. She was overwhelmed by the world. She felt crushed by its cruelty, grief, and loneliness. I understood those things, but I also understood joy. She thought me shallow, and was ashamed of me. Eventually she came to hate me, and she went out on the heath one night, and though I clung to her, I was carried away."

When they arrived at Jorge's home, Father looked at them suspiciously. “That is not your soul,” he said.

"My soul refused me,” Jorge said. “Ivy's soul offered to be with me."

Father spat into the fire. “I have never heard of such a thing,” he said.

At the Institute the next day, Ivy sat by Jorge in class, a faint flicker in the pale cold light of the classroom. She said nothing, but Jorge found her presence reassuring, and he was able to pay attention to his studies for the first time in months. At lunchtime the other children glanced at Jorge and Ivy curiously: they had never seen such a thing before, a boy keeping company with the errant soul of a girl. One or two of them got up the courage to come over and ask, “What's it like?"

It was not like having one's own soul, Jorge discovered. There was still a deep ache in him, an emptiness. It was not as good as being all of a piece, but it was better than being alone. As they sat at lunch, or walked home over the heath in the evening, Ivy told Jorge little stories of her life, her dreams, a boy whom she had been in love with once, the petty cruelties others had done her. Jorge had always been smart in a bookish way, but bad with people, stumble-tongued and prone to offend by saying the wrong thing. Ivy taught him when to speak and when to be silent, and how to give comfort or ask a question without giving offense. Sometimes at night when they lay together in Jorge's bed, he felt that she was almost part of him. He imagined her voice was his, played on a different instrument, and that her thoughts were his reveries. As he lay on the verge of sleep, she sometimes seemed to slip inside his flesh, nestle close to him, knit with his sinews and bones, almost as if she were his real soul.

When other children asked him, Jorge tried to explain what it was like. A boy named Olen Thorey said to him, wistfully, “I wish I could be like that."

Jorge shook his head, and said: “I think it's better to have your own soul, if it fits you.” But he noticed that there were many children who felt ill at ease with the souls with which they had been born.

As summer passed, and then fall, Jorge lost his sickly appearance. His appetite improved. He took more interest in study and sport, and made friends more easily than before.

Then one day the class proctor told him Ivy could not stay with him in class. “It's abnormal,” he told Jorge. “The Institute Governing Council has been talking about it. They don't like it.” Jorge fretted, but nothing could be done, so Ivy started waiting for him in the hall outside during class time. Jorge began to notice that when he and Ivy walked through Abalia, adults whispered and shook their heads. Some wagged their fingers at them.

In late fall the superintendent called Jorge to his office again, and berated him. “You cannot keep company with a soul not your own,” he said. “It's unheard of. It's unnatural. Send her back to wherever you found her."

Jorge shook his head. “I can't do that,” he said. “I won't do that. She's my friend."

"It's abnormal."

"I don't care,” Jorge said stubbornly. “She's my friend."

"Are you disobeying me?"

Jorge was silent.

"You are a bad influence,” the superintendent said. He removed his pince-nez, breathed on them, and polished them on his handkerchief as he spoke. The skin surrounding his eyes was pale as bone. “The tutors inform me that they have overheard other students talk of letting their souls blow free, and exchanging them for others'. Where could they have gotten this abhorrent idea but from you? If you continue to consort with that girl's soul, you will no longer be welcome at the Institute. The Margrave of the city has this matter on his desk as we speak, and if he decides against you, you may not be welcome in Abalia at all."

Jorge and Ivy stayed away from the Institute the next day. They wandered together across the heath, avoiding other people. The sky was the color of a bruise, the air raw and damp. Clouds hid the tops of the Berge des Mondes, and a November snow whitened the mountains’ lower slopes. A cold wind whistled through the gorse and bell-heather, and over the stony banks. Jorge held Ivy tightly. “Must I leave you?” Ivy asked.

Ivy had changed since she had been with him. Instead of an inchoate smear of light, she now resembled the ghost of a girl, with delicate misty features, skinny shoulders, and shadowy hair and skirt that fluttered in the wind. Jorge squeezed her tightly in his arms. “Never,” he said. “Never."

When they arrived home at dusk, Jorge's father said: “The provost marshal and his men were here. The Margrave has made you outlaws. You must leave within a day, or Jorge will be jailed and Ivy banished or exorcised.” He pointed to a bulging pack on the floor. “Take that. I have packed your clothing, some food, and half my coin. I can't protect you from the entire town, Jorge. I do not approve of Ivy, but you are still my son, and I would not have you imprisoned or slain."

Jorge embraced him, and said, “Father, thank you."

Jorge and Ivy set forth after night had fallen. “Before we go,” Ivy said, “We should warn Olen Thorey."

Olen Thorey's house was a quarter mile away. Jorge went around to Olen's bedroom window and rapped on the pane. After a moment, Olen pulled back the curtains and threw open the casement. The wind fluttered his nightshirt.

"Olen,” Jorge said. “You told me once you were unhappy with your soul, and wished to exchange it for another."

"So?"

"We've come to warn you. You mustn't do it. The Margrave has outlawed Ivy and me. They will do the same to you."

Olen scowled. “All the more reason to do it now,” he said. His voice was fierce and longing. “There are a lot of others who want to swap their souls, too. If we all do it together at one time, they can't banish us all.” He leaned out the casement. His dark hair blew around his face. “The wind is up. Tonight we'll meet on the heath and do it.” He clambered onto the windowsill, then leaped to the ground.

"Olen,” Jorge said, “I told you before: I don't think this is the right thing for most children."

Olen shook his head. “I've made my decision,” he said. “I'm going to tell Thad Whishaw and Ruby Njalbus.” He ran off into the darkness.

Ivy squeezed Jorge's arm. “We should do something,” she said.

"I don't know whether we can,” Jorge said. “Oh, Ivy, I don't know how this is going to turn out."

"We have to at least try,” Ivy said.

Jorge and Ivy walked through town towards the heath. In the darkness they heard whispered voices, running footsteps. Children dashed across the road, from house to house, rousing their friends. Children emerged from side streets and alleys, giggling to each other, swinging lanterns. A cold, bright moon had risen, and the etheric wind tore through the children's flesh and tugged at their souls. A crowd of two hundred or more children converged on the center of the heath, on the high downs, where the wind blows most strongly.

Jorge said, “Surely most of the children in the town are here."

"I think many of them are unhappy with themselves, but don't know why,” Ivy said.

Jorge and Ivy ran from child to child, trying to convince them to stop, to wait. A few listened to them, but most brushed them off. “It'll be fun,” some of the children said. Or: “You don't know how unhappy I am. I hate myself. I want to be someone else.” Every child had a different reason. None seemed to recognize the danger. “I almost died,” Jorge told them. “I think I would have if Ivy hadn't joined me. It's better to make peace with your own soul if you can."

"You're just jealous,” they said. “You and Ivy did it, and now you want to stop us from doing it? How boring."

The wind gusted, making the gorse and bracken tremble, hissing through the branches of the bent junipers. Some of the children shrieked. Then, as the wind increased, their souls began to tear free. Pale souls squeezed out of their fleshy prisons, oozing out from beneath fingernails, from nostrils, mouths, ears. The children screamed as the wind ripped their souls out of them.

When the souls finally broke loose, they flew away, first by ones and twos, then dozens at a time. It seemed to Jorge as if a dandelion had released its seeds, or a milkweed: a cloud of pale moonlit shapes erupted from the mass of children and tumbled across the heath, carried by the wind. Behind the cloud of blowing souls, the children ran yelling, chasing the souls here and there.

Some of the children found souls for themselves quickly. Some did not. After a few minutes, most of the souls were gone: taken, or blown away. A few collected in eddies in the wind, against a copse of trees at the bottom of the downs. Jorge could see them flickering in the moonlight, spinning slowly like leaves in a dust devil. Other souls had blown into the trees, or had been lost in the night. The children's shouting voices became less happy and more anxious. Some dashed over the heath with increasing desperation. A few, like jilted cotillion dancers, stood with stiff unease and stared around them.

"I think most eventually will find souls to be with,” Ivy said. “But not all.” She put her arms around Jorge's waist. “I wish they hadn't done that, Jorge."

"In the morning,” Jorge said, “the adults will discover what happened. They'll blame us. If we stay, the provost marshal will hunt us down."

"Where can we go?"

"Out of the high country, down to the lowlands and the coast. They say there are cities there bigger than a hundred Abalias. Maybe people there will like us better, but even if they don't, it might be easier to lose ourselves in a crowd than in a little town like this.” Jorge shrugged Father's pack into a more comfortable position on his shoulders. He took Ivy's hand, and they set off down the slope.

"It's strange to be a fugitive,” Ivy said. “In stories, sometimes fugitives are the heroes, sometimes they're villains."

"Which are we, Ivy?” Jorge asked.

"I don't know,” Ivy said, which was not the answer he was expecting. She let go of his hand, and went skipping ahead in the darkness. She turned and beckoned him. She seemed almost solid, now, like a living girl. In the moonlight, her hair blew about like the surf spray on shoals where ships founder, but her smile was brave and guileless. “I don't know,” she said, “but I want to find out."

[Back to Table of Contents]

This Is the Train the Queen Rides On

Becca De La Rosa

(Do you believe in trains?)

Mr. Gorman

In Helsinki airport he spills scalding tea on his arm, and when he finally finds a chemist he realises that he does not know the Finnish word for salve, or the word for ointment, or even the word for burn. His baby daughter Ella is not impressed with his attempts to demonstrate what happened through an elaborate game of charades, although the shop assistant becomes very excited. In the end he steals a packet of butter from the nearby cafe to smear on his burnt arm and hopes no one will notice.

Ella's rag-doll gets abandoned in the confusion. She screams and screams. “I'm dreadfully sorry,” Mr. Gorman says to several bystanders, in English, “my wife just died."

They find an old cat in the train station, sleek and well fed, sitting on a bench and licking its paws. Ella squeals in delight. “Oh Ella,” Mr. Gorman says wearily. “No, darling, he doesn't belong to you. Leave the poor cat alone. Do you want some chocolate?"

The cat, whose collar reads Prospero, follows them around the train station with an indulgent air, as if he is humouring them, and slips past the ticket inspector when they finally board the train. He curls up in the middle of the bunk in their cabin and closes his eyes resolutely.

For Mr. Gorman the journey lasts much longer than four hours.

When the train derails, he just drops his head in his hands.

* * * *

(Do you believe in cats?)

Prospero, The Cat

My dear fellow, someone says.

Light walks out of the shadows, a path to follow. Prospero does not hesitate. He says, I am a cat: unseater of darkness, destroyer of solace found in small things, hunter and supplicant. I am a cat: unwatched listener at doors, glint of eyes in the night. I am wise and wary. I land on my feet.

And the someone says, Then follow me.

* * * *

The Odd Man at the Window

Who has white hair and white hands and a neat white suit, and stands watching.

* * * *

Darling Bettina

She carries nothing but a notebook and pen, tucked under her arm, and a Finnish phrase-book that is quite unnecessary because it seems that she can speak the language perfectly. Her passport fits into one jacket pocket. The other is stuffed with bill-notes and a handful of coins. Her name is Darling Bettina but she would like you to call her Tee.

The sleeper train from Helsinki to Rovaniemi cost almost as much as her honeymoon would have. The bus to Inari will cost even more. On the back of a cheap postcard, bought days ago in Kuovola, she writes: I am a bitch and a whore and I hope you hate me for this. She sucks ink from the tip of her pen, tears up the postcard, and takes out another, identical. Neddy, she writes, I am so sorry. I don't know what's the matter with me.

But all of that is a lie.

She buys a cup of bittersweet coffee, stamps the snow from her boots, and finally, hastily, writes: I had to go. I took the violin and the money. You are a lovely man, which is true.

There are some things you know by heart and some things you tease out of air and light as if you are carding wool. Darling Bettina takes out the violin, chestnut brown and glowing, and plays to miles of Finnish snow.

* * * *

(Well, do you believe in fairy tales?)

Ring Around the Roses

Sun bakes the stone hard and hot. Roses wrap around it, notch fists in its spine, like arms. The tower has been here for a long time. Maybe there is a princess at the top. Maybe she has a long, long braid of golden hair, the colour of nasturtiums, of egg yolks, of cornfields. Maybe, if you ask her nicely, she will let you climb.

The tower has been here for a long time. There are notches in the stone, homes for the pigeons who sing curdled, rhythmic songs. There are places where the tower is worn a different colour. It is definitely a tower. There are stairs, a thousand. There are bats. Bats live in towers, you know. There are chinks for windows. Oh, if we know only one thing, we know this is a tower. There are turrets and balustrades. There is soap. There is never enough soap when your hands are dirty. There is a sink, metallic. There is a dim mirror. There is a folding door. The toilet flushes with a noise like a bird flapping its wings, like a bird flying, like many birds flying away from the tower when the princess lets down her long golden hair. Maybe she will let you up. Ask nicely.

* * * *

Lady Christina Annabelle Lucinda Davenport-Raleigh the Fourth

She smokes very thin cigars. She wears gold spectacles on a golden chain. She is not sure in what order all her names should go (although she knows there are a lot of them). She is thin and greyish, like one of those fast dogs, and she is pure-bred. She is purer than you.

Lady Christina Annabelle Lucinda Davenport-Raleigh the Fourth knows she is a lady-in-waiting to someone, although she does not know who, so she smokes a skinny wand-like cigar, and waits.

* * * *

(Do you believe in changelings?)

Baby Ella

Ella is happy now. The movement of the train feels like a cradle, rocking. She sucks on Prospero's tail (he does not seem to mind) and thinks of her mother, who had red hair, red lips, and wore long red dresses, and who left a long time ago. Was it a long time ago? Ella does not care for time. She listens to her father crying softly. It sounds like wind blowing, like leaves rustling, like trains.

* * * *

Our Narrator, Anonymous but Golden-Tongued

Is wise and tricky.

Is long like a snake, glass-eyed like a cathedral, winged like a dragonfly.

Is witty.

Is clever.

Is cleverer than you are.

Is beautiful to look at but not to touch.

Is not Prospero, not Caliban.

Is maybe Ariel.

Is made of glass, of snow, of gold, of wind, but not of iron.

Is listening.

* * * *

Some Music from the Chestnut Violin

Darling Bettina plays and plays, until the tips of her fingers swell and bleed. Her blood drips into the belly of the chestnut violin and makes the music sweeter. She does not think of Neddy. All that seems very far away.

The violin is second, third, fourth hand. Neddy's mother bought it at an antique store in Brighton. She hung it over the mantelpiece in a shadow box; firelight caught its gloss. Neddy brought Darling Bettina over for dinner one night, three years ago, and she stared at the violin trapped in its frame over the mantel. (Neddy's mother had noticed, that night, how pale and wide Darling Bettina's eyes could be, in the firelight.) Darling Bettina visited Neddy's mother again, not long after, to show off the glittering diamond ring on her finger, and then to discuss cake and cathedrals, and to try on the heavy wedding dress that smelled of mothballs and other people's promises.

The chestnut violin had belonged last to a one-eyed jazz musician who found it in a taxi underneath a pile of shiny tulle netting. It had been left there by a ballerina with black hair, who had received it as a present on her eighteenth birthday from a mysterious man in a red leather jacket, who had stolen it in the park, from where it sat on the ground beside three small children with crystal-coloured eyes.

The day before her wedding Darling Bettina broke the shadow box, and stole the violin, and ran away.

And now she is playing, playing, playing.

When glass crashes and all the lights go out she almost doesn't notice.

* * * *

A Riddle

What is fast as a train, strong as a train, bright as a train, light as a train, cold as a train, bold as a train, shrill as a train, sharp as a train,

but is not a train?

* * * *

An Answer

A train, of course.

(Do you believe in fairies?)

* * * *

This Is the Train the Queen Rides On

No black horses, no white. There are metal wheels instead. No will-o'-the-wisp, fairy-lanterns, ghost lights bobbing. That is what electricity is for. No pale kings and princes (although the man in white, the man with one white glove and one bare hand, has very fair skin).

But there is music, the rhythm of wheels and the wail of a chestnut violin.

And there is an engine-driver with silver hair and an enigmatic smile.

And there is the servant and there is the master.

And there is the changeling.

And there is the queen.

* * * *

The Engine Driver with the Silver Hair and the Enigmatic Smile

The fire flames hotter than hot, because he feeds it on the finest words, torn from the strangest books, the kind that crackle when you read them, the kind that weave odd music long after they are ash and dust. He smiles because the fire is hot and his work is good. He sings a song that sounds a little bit like flames licking over old paper, and a little bit like a fat man singing, very out of tune.

This is the train the queen rides on. He is the engine driver. He knows where things go when they disappear, and he knows what comes at the end of snow and frost.

"Burn, burn,” the silver-haired engine driver sings, smiling enigmatically.

* * * *

(All right. Do you believe in ghosts?)

The Queen

Red. Red. Red.

* * * *

The Glassblower

Anyone who knows about anything will tell you it is impractical to have a glassblower blowing glass aboard a train.

Anyone who knows everything will not speak to you at all.

The glassblower makes vases and bowls. They are all the colour of snow. He tries to make them red and blue and green and gold, but they all come out the same. He makes snow-coloured wine glasses, platters, goblets. After a while he grows more adventurous. He tries to make a dragon, but it comes out shaped like a train. When he looks closer it almost seems as if there are tiny glass people inside, waving at him, snow-coloured. The glassblower makes glass disks like biscuits and eats them absently. The crumbs stick in his long white beard. His beard used to be red once, he thinks, although he really isn't sure. After he is finished eating he carefully stamps each bowl and vase and glass with his seal, a mark in the shape of a ladder or a section of railroad tracks.

The glassblower makes a glass rose. It ends up looking like a wheel. Perplexed, the glassblower turns it. There is a crash, a flicker of lights. Everything is still. The glassblower smiles. In the dark, the stamp on his hand glows red-hot; the stamp of a ladder or a section of railroad tracks printed into his skin, which is the colour of snow, which is the colour of everything.

* * * *

And There Comes a Crash from the Dining Carriage

And there comes a shriek from the wheels, and all the lights click off.

And someone screams, although it might not be a scream at all, but a cry of recognition.

And there really aren't many passengers travelling to the Arctic Circle on Christmas Eve this year.

And it might be nothing but the northern lights.

And then again, it might not.

* * * *

Illumination

There is no light in the train but the light of his pale skin, the light of his bright eyes. He wears all white. He bows to them, lifts a delicate hand, and beams.

"Lost,” he pronounces.

No one speaks.

"Follow,” he says complacently, and so they do.

* * * *

In the Olden Days

There were dancing days and wild music. There were forests of trees fluttering with paper lanterns and ribbons, and the folk danced and the lights danced and the stars danced, far up, as if they were spinning on a great glass wheel. There were songs. There were wells and hills. There were dishes of milk left out at dark, and loaves of bread on fences and beside cornfields, and gifts of trinkets, spinning dolls, pretty baubles. There were fights and truces. There were wild nights. There were stories.

Now, there is mostly snow.

* * * *

What They Brought with Them

One violin, chestnut.

One silver bell on a cracked leather collar.

Crumbs of glass caught up in a white beard.

One wife. One mother.

* * * *

What They Left Behind

One rag-doll, eyeless, drooping.

One dictionary of Finnish phrases.

Three torn-up postcards.

One packet of black cigarillos.

Soap.

Eight suitcases, two backpacks, one snakeskin purse.

One glass dragon, train-like.

One last look over his shoulder.

Everything.

* * * *

What the Fire Ate

A fiancé, a handful of years, a handful of words, some dreams.

(Tell me: what do you believe in, then?)

What You Should Believe In

In dragons. In cats. In fairy tales. In fairies. In changelings. In masters, servants. In ghost-lights. In ghost-music. In ghosts. In glass. In roses. In snow. In golden coins that are made from snow, and that will return to snow when the song ends. In songs that never end. In engines. In stories. In gods, monsters, demons, shadows, dreams. In trick-doors and secret passageways. In clocks that run backwards and dandelions that tell time. In secrets. In magpies. In ravens, crying “Nevermore.” In wells, hills, holy places. In towers. In queens. In disappearance.

But you should never believe in trains.

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Two Poems

Jenny Benjamin-Smith

The Irishman Washes The Floor

She sat on a stool,

Her black-booted feet perched

At the stool's base,

And waited for her son-in-law,

The Irishman,

To work his way across the linoleum

On hands and knees with a dishrag.

His scoot and shuffle had a determined,

Quiet method, square by square

He worked his way to her waiting hand.

Without looking he handed the rag up to her,

And she dipped it in the bucket of lye and

Rung it out, leaving just enough damp

For him to begin his next section of floor.

This Irishman made the first mistake

Of being Irish, not Italian, and meeting

Her daughter during the war

In Denver, Colorado.

They worked in the infirmary,

And Mac saw her while he made a plaster cast,

Charmed her until they married.

So after years of her scrutiny and his efforts to make

His mother-in-law like him,

Maybe love him,

He won her

By washing the floor.

She did not coo over Mac's work, but sat

Like a satisfied bird atop a high wire

With no expectation for the day.

While looking down at his work,

She decided, at that moment, to send him

Five dollars every birthday.

* * * *

Inception

I have decided to hunt down my dead grandmother, the why and how escape me.

It's an animal pull to find the dark den I came from, to find her side of the hill, how it meets the vastness here.

She was a mystery, I thought, just mean, but as I want children, I begin to understand her meanness, a woman surrounded by men.

Her father insisted on a new life, her marriage.

A shadowy chest of home sat inside of her like a cancer, motherless.

So I have begun to see her, her eyes on fire, behind my own.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Diabolique d'amour

Scot Peacock

I was chosen as a volunteer from the audience by Pepperghost the Conjurer. Although being the center of such exhibitions does not usually appeal to me, I was insistent in this case, waving so flamboyantly that the conjurer could not possibly ignore the spectacle I was creating on the main floor of the Folies-Magique. I would have done anything—even trample the people seated in front of me—to stand upon that Paris stage where the devilish Beatrix, Pepperghost's assistant, handled her submissive charges.

Beatrix played her part to the hilt. Two red devil-horns poked through her long black curls. The spade-end of her slender red tail rose like a dagger above her bottom as she bowed (whether in obeisance to Pepperghost or greeting to me it was difficult to tell). Climbing to the stage from the orchestra pit, I saw, for an instant, into the black round holes of Beatrix's eyes—while her tart smile to the audience plumped with mischief, the trembling ingenue within her pulled down the blinds. Then the hot stage-lights came up, a blend of yellows and magentas, and a haze materialized from the molten sheen of her red satin leotard.

Pepperghost loomed over me. “Prove to me you have a heart,” he demanded as Beatrix retreated.

I was stunned by the ferocity of his request. The expression of shock on my face prompted the audience to laugh. The conjurer's bulk was enormous—when he stepped closer to me, with his opera cape fanning out, he became an imposing black wall that I could not see around.

"Do you have a heart?” asked Pepperghost testily.

"Yes!” I replied nervously.

"Prove it!” he said.

"Just listen!” I cried. The audience applauded.

"I do hear something,” he said. “Perhaps your watch—running a little fast? No, you'll have to show me."

"That's impossible,” I said.

"I'll prove you wrong,” Pepperghost countered. “Tonight, I'll serve you your heart on a platter.” Savoring my shock, he added, “I promise to put it back when I'm done.” Then the bleak house known as Pepperghost thumped upstage toward the audience and doffed a stovepipe hat. There was Beatrix again, from behind the conjurer, reaching to take my hand.

She led me downstage to a bright yellow cabinet decorated with astrological symbols. “Now remember,” she whispered, “what I said at the cafe—the pain is just an illusion.” I wanted to embrace Beatrix right then and there, but Pepperghost's voluminous cape swept between us—she vanished, for a moment, behind a giant wing of black silk—then reappeared, poor docile little devil, being carried by the waist, in the crook of Pepperghost's arm.

The conjurer opened the cabinet and heaved Beatrix inside. The audience murmured as he locked the door; he secured it again with a chain threaded through cast-iron eyes embedded in the thick wood panels. Next, Pepperghost turned to me—indicating a chair placed a short distance away, he ordered me to sit.

I sat without protest, my stomach in knots. The audience now enjoyed a full view of my chalk-white profile while I stared, in dread, at a yellow side-wall of the cabinet. As Pepperghost delivered a bombastic speech to the audience, in which he elaborated on the evil trick to come, I recalled my first flirtation with Beatrix, only two hours before the show:

* * * *

"I see you're looking at me,” she had said with a grin. “Perhaps it's because of the way that I'm dressed.” She was wearing a skirt as well as a cloak, but the devil costume was smoldering under her clothes.

"Red gloves, black cloak—a startling combination,” I replied. “And, I see, red stockings and slippers, an unusual choice for the evening."

We stood at a railing along the rue Lamarck, on a butte overlooking Paris. Behind us, at an even greater height, was a forest of great white pillars (the foundation for a Sacre Coeur still under construction).

"My uniform,” she said. “Not of choice. But it flatters me, don't you think?” She plucked the devil horns out of her purse and arranged them in her hair—"You might say temptation is my trade. That's why I'm talking to you."

I thought to check my pockets for cash.

"No,” she said, stopping my hand. “Quite the opposite."

* * * *

"—is she a woman in devil's dress?” Pepperghost cried. “Or a curvaceous demon with a pretty face? My assistant, ladies and gentleman, lied to me on her resume!"

The bright yellow cabinet in which Beatrix was confined began rotating slowly on its axis. A heaving Pepperghost (that seedy dwelling on lifts) waved a magic wand and exclaimed: “Look into Beatrix's Closet to discover her true identity!"

The conjurer was addressing me, foremost. I was the first to see her pass. The back-wall of the cabinet, made of glass, exposed the cruel suffering of Beatrix. Wrists tied to a cast-iron eye in the ceiling, mouth stuffed with a Pepperghost handbill—both blinds shot up in the dark holes of her eyes and she wept like a heavenly creature.

Smokeless flames began licking Beatrix's feet. The cabinet's interior filled with a sickly glow. I bolted off my seat to save her, but Pepperghost warned me back down with his wand, which was spritzing a shower of voltage. “Ladies and Gentlemen, look!” the conjurer said. “Observe Pepperghost's sleight of hand!” Dollops of blood dripped from his fist to the stage-floor. Flowing along a recessed plank, the blood collected in front of my chair.

Beatrix rotated away from me. I heard gasps from the audience, one after another. Pepperghost laughed, from the deep pit of a madhouse. I hadn't the heart to fight him.

* * * *

Beatrix had taken me to her favorite Montmartre haunt, the Cafe Cardinale. “Is this a successful seduction?” I asked. A bit of froth from her café au lait was stuck to the end of her nose.

"If I can tempt you into a little white sin,” Beatrix replied. She patted her nose with a napkin. “I don't know what a hero is anymore, nor the consequences of ‘goodness'—if you wish to possess me for at least one night, then please help me kill a magician."

* * * *

During Beatrix's second revolution, the small flames leapt like piranhas. Singe-holes appeared in the red devil suit, revealing parts of her body. The smokeless fire did not turn her skin to cinders—in fact, it barely pinked her. Nevertheless, Beatrix, writhing, weeping, struggled in mortal terror (pouting inside the dark holes of her eyes, she implored me to honor our deal).

Pepperghost squeezed my heart in his hand. Blood squirted as if from a sponge. While I lurched back and forth in my chair and my temptress was tortured by fire—while Pepperghost sprayed my blood in the air—the auditorium shook with applause.

"A platter, please,” Pepperghost ordered. A stage-hand rushed one out. The mess was then placed upon my lap. “And you said it couldn't be done,” he said.

Making a grand show of consulting a large gold pocket-watch, Pepperghost asked, “Say ... who do you think she'll be when she's done?” Inside the rotisserie of Beatrix's Closet, now beginning a third rotation, a senseless martyr to forgotten morals dangled by her wrists. Fire had devoured the devil costume leaving her naked and prone, but every inch of her flesh had been spared and was virtually unmarred. Before my Beatrix rotated away from me for a third (and final) time, she raised her head and, for the good of the act, prepared her most tragic expression.

Beatrix, martyre, was a smash. The audience ate it up.

Pepperghost bowed, to theatrical depths, but then experienced difficulty lifting his mass. I stood up and staggered like the wretch I appeared, as the applause lapsed, then thundered louder. “With my angel dead, I have nothing to lose!” I yelled, so that I could be heard to the upper balcony. I managed to kick the behind of Pepperghost as hard as I would a stout door that had been twice-locked. Although some conjurers would prefer to die before relinquishing a trick, I'll disclose my secret: start the ball rolling and let gravity do all the work.

Pepperghost, that collapsed house of cards, landed among a dozen splintered chairs in the orchestra pit. As applause dissolved into a shocked silence, I dropped weakly to my knees. Walking softly, Beatrix—beatific—knelt down and stroked my brow with red satin fingers. Two devil horns peeped from the black curls of her hair. Her tail pointed up at the ceiling. Her painted lips left a big red kiss on the cheek of the creditor she had vowed to repay. As I held tight to the seismic warmth of her body, I sobbed repeatedly how much I loved her—judging from the breathless quiet inside the Folies-Magique, my performance impressed the silent houseful of witnesses.

Then, capricious as thunder, the audience exploded into an ovation. “Bravo, my love, bravo,” Beatrix whispered, leaving a red smirk in my ear. “Now let me go so I can change into something a little more innocent—meet me at the Cafe Cardinale,” she said. She fidgeted, then broke out of my arms. As I caught hold of her tail and yanked her back down to my lap, the black round holes of her eyes grew vast. “A loophole?” I asked—Beatrix tried to speak but I didn't wait for an answer. I stopped her mouth with a lie-stealing kiss. The blinds came down abruptly.

* * * *

We had paused on a curve of the rue des Saules, not far from the Folies-Magique. Above us, barely perceptible against the night-sky, raced the blades of a windmill.

"Have you ever been imprisoned inside an invisible room?” Beatrix asked. “Or been spoon-fed by a hostile hand?” Trembling hands straightened the horns on her head, in preparation for the night's performance.

* * * *

"We have a deal,” I assured my Beatrix. The windmill blades spun like mad.

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In Ophelia's Garden

Stephanie Parent

"They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be."

—Ophelia, Hamlet, IV.V.44-46

I will teach you to grow this garden, but the knowledge will cost you. You won't be able to avoid the thorn bushes; on your arms a web of scratches will bloom, delicate as Queen Anne's Lace. Your fingers will bleed and your bare feet will grow tough as leather. Unprotected by your thin cotton dress, your neck and shoulders will blister under the sun. Your hair will slip free of the knot atop your head, growing longer and catching on the thorns, weighing you down like thick coils of rope. Your voice will become too parched to sing, to call out for a fairy godmother or a lover. You will be too tired to attend the balls, the weddings and the christenings.

* * * *

Rosemary: remembrance

Once an old woman taught me how to grow a garden.

Mother had sent me to gather wild rosemary, so we could sprinkle the leaves on our risen bread loaves before baking them. But the rosemary I found wasn't wild; it grew at the edge of a garden, a garden I'd never noticed before, though I could have sworn I'd searched every inch of these woods. One whiff of fresh rosemary, sharp and pungent, and I can remember everything about that day: the way herbs and vegetables and flowers crowded every inch of the clearing, leaves in a hundred shades of green, plump crimson tomatoes, luscious violet and cream and orange petals. And this was a year when our village's farms were nearly barren, ravaged by drought and starving deer and rabbits.

That day, I didn't notice the cottage, although I'm sure it was there. I learned later that the house had a way of blending into the trees.

Never one to fear trespassing, I clipped my handful of rosemary and turned back toward the woods. Then the woman appeared in front of me, out of nowhere, like one of the trees come to life—long silver hair, limbs brown and cracked like branches, eyes bright green and still young somehow. I knew the rosemary was hers, and I thought she would punish me for taking it; replace my head with that of a sheep, perhaps, or lock me in a dungeon, or demand my firstborn child as payment.

But she smiled. You've found my garden, she said. Not everyone can find my garden. Then she stepped aside, and I seized my chance for escape. I tore through the woods like a wild thing, not caring if branches scratched my skin and tangled in my hair; I was never so glad to return to the dull familiarity of my father's bakery.

Next week my mother sent me for more rosemary. I searched and searched, but there was no clearing in the forest; the garden and the old woman were gone.

Do you really want to become a witch in a gingerbread cottage, or the old hag who locked Rapunzel in a tower? That's how you'll be remembered, you must know, if you grow this garden. The world doesn't know what to make of women like us. We are dangerous and wise, they all say, so we must be evil.

* * * *

Pansies: thoughts

I was hopeless as a baker's daughter. I would over-knead the dough as I daydreamed, and then, preoccupied by a novel or penny dreadful, I'd burn the loaves. It only got worse as I became older.

In my defense, it wasn't easy having Angela as an older sister. That Angela is so gentle, so sweet and charitable, the mothers would gossip. Did you know that a fairy blessed her for her kindness, and now every loaf of bread she bakes becomes twice as large?

And the girl is quite pretty, too, the mothers of young men would add. How I'd love to have her as my daughter-in-law!

What the gossipers said of me was not so kind. First, I was simply scatterbrained, clumsy, a dreamer. But then I grew older. I became a slut.

You see, all the thoughts that had distracted me as a child—the fairy tales, imaginary worlds, elves and pixies and witches—all that changed. My thoughts transformed into desires, a great need opening in me, like a thousand pairs of wings drumming and pounding against my insides. And when I was alone, I would open my mouth and the winds would come flying out—fuchsia and sky blue and crimson-patterned butterfly wings, paper-thin and so delicate; slick purple-black raven feathers; the whirring motors of ladybugs and fireflies, so small they were almost invisible; the shimmering white of doves and angels—each pair different, the wings as limitless and enthralling as anything I could imagine.

Perhaps you would rather be remembered as a drowning girl, drowning in flowers and vines, forever beautiful and pure?

It is unbelievable, the stories people make up to explain all the lost girls, the ones who went missing and the ones who didn't turn out as expected. Did you know that once, they said, a young girl turned into an owl? She was the baker's youngest daughter, and one day, they say, on old beggar woman came into the bakery, and the girl was rude. The old crone was, of course, a fairy in disguise and as punishment she turned the girl into an owl.

A story is always better than the truth.

* * * *

Fennel: flattery

On my evenings to tend the bakery, I developed a habit of closing early, shutting out all the customers—even, once, a starving beggar woman.

At twilight, I wandered the village edge where the trees became thicker, the atmosphere darker. The midsummer air was so damp and heavy, like fingers pressing into my skin; the heat brought out the heady odor of wood and soil, the delicate hints of honeysuckle and gooseberries.

Of course I would allow the smells to envelop me; of course I would follow the trail of scent into the trees; in this wild and mysterious place, so strange and yet so familiar, I would unearth the roots of my desire.

Soon—as you have probably predicted—my time in the woods was transformed. Instead of bark and slippery leaves, my hands roamed the taut, muscular angles of a man's body; instead of honeysuckle nectar, my lips melted into kisses. All the wings I had imagined were pouring, now, from my mouth to his—but only so he could return them to me again, stronger, darker, and brighter.

* * * *

Columbines: disloyalty

When you're young and naïve, people say, you may believe you're in love; but really, they say, the young don't know what love is.

I loved Carl. I loved the way he smelled, like sweet maple and bracing pine and sturdy oak. I loved the way sawdust coated his fingers, the way the dust emanated from his pockets, and sometimes even from his sand-colored hair. I loved the scar that traced its way up his left arm, from the saw he had dropped early in his apprenticeship. His skin was so strong, skin that could survive being split open and emerge even more beautiful.

I loved the feel of his body, solid as wood beside mine, when we were alone in the forest; when he pinned me against the broadest oak tree and slipped inside of me. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be molded, shaped, transformed by him, like one of his beautifully carved vanities or dressers.

But I was wrong about Carl. I didn't know him at all. One day he looked away when we passed on the dirt road. He didn't meet me in the woods at night.

News travels fast in a small village, and within a day or two, I learned that Carl was engaged to marry.

Some of the lost girls will come to your garden, asking for the unthinkable, thinking they have already reached the pit of their despair. They need abortions.

It falls on you to add to their misery: you must give them herbs that cause them great pain; you must guide them to the edge of death and back.

The lost women will leave, searching for an old home or a new one. You, however, will have to stay, watching them go, realizing what you have become: the witch in her enchanted garden.

* * * *

Rue: regret

Not much time passed before I was back where I'd started, wandering alone among the trees; but now I was stopping to retch, every few minutes it seemed, and clinging to branches to keep from falling.

And that was when I found the garden for the second time. The old woman, looking just as she had when I was a little girl, was waiting for me.

Inside the little wooden house, the kitchen was crowded with herbs: golden feverfew and lavender blossoms lined one wall; masses of tiny pennyroyal, thyme and marjoram leaves dangled from the ceiling. Above the cacophony of smells, I picked out lemon balm and peppermint, so sweet I could almost taste them—they'd been freshly ground, I realized, as I noticed the mortars on the table.

The woman hung a cauldron of water from the hook over the kitchen fireplace; then she pulled a bunch of rue from the wall, so quickly that she seemed to know its location by heart. You can pick out rue by the blue tint of its leaves, she said, and by its bitter smell. She waved the herb before my face, and I drew back involuntarily; the odor was enough to set my stomach heaving again.

You must measure three pinches of rue, each the width and thickness of a thimble, between your thumb and forefinger. She dropped the three pinches into a teacup. Rue is a poison. Any less than three pinches, and it won't be strong enough to kill the fetus; any more, and it might kill you. She ladled hot water from the cauldron into the cup. It takes only a minute or two to steep. A single pinch of rue, she continued, also taken as a tea, is a remedy against decaying eyesight. And planting rue at the borders of your garden helps keep away the insects.

You don't tell this to all the women who come here? I asked, shaking like a frightened child who has been caught stealing rosemary.

No. She smiled as she handed me the cup. Survive this, she said, and I will teach you everything I know.

A life inside of you does not die quietly. But you already know that, so I will spare you the details; suffice it to say that two weeks after the first cup of rue, my womb was empty, and I was well enough to accompany the old woman outside as she tended her garden.

One day, when I've taught you all I can, it will be time for me to leave. I have tended this garden for so long, and there is so much more out there in the world.

I know, I seem so weak that I can barely walk from one end of the garden to the other. How will I travel?

But I must go. I tell you I will be back next year, by the time the roses bloom, to see you again.

I won't come back. But sometimes, when the roses bloom, you leave your window open at night and let the scent drift through your dreams. Then you hear a strange sound—who, who—and you open your eyes. Illuminated by the moon, you see the regal sweep of an owl's feathers; the bird is hovering outside your window, and its deep, dark eyes stare as if they recognized you.

You wonder if I am nearby, watching you, as you turn over and go back to sleep.

* * * *

Daisies: infidelity

At first, I am so exhausted from growing the garden—alone, now that my teacher has left—that I cannot think beyond the aches of bone and muscle. Then, slowly, the loneliness creeps up on me, a cancer that spreads through my body and threatens to consume it.

But always, at the moment my solitude becomes too much to bear, the garden opens itself to the world, and I have a visitor. Often it is a girl, seeking a love potion or the antidote to overzealous love; sometimes a child with a cough and a chill, who has had visions of his own death; sometimes an old man or woman whose body refuses to work as it must.

Oh, but sometimes it is a traveler, a man who—like me—left the home that was no home for him long ago. He needs a good meal and a warm bed; perhaps he has hurt himself and must stay a few weeks, while I bind his broken bones or make poultices for his wounds. He offers me stories of far-away places; I offer him my naked body; and for a few days we assuage each other's loneliness.

Yet he is always a wanderer, as surely as I am a gardener. The bones heal, the wounds close, and I am standing at the edge of my garden again, watching him vanish into the woods.

After years spent tending your garden, you will wake one morning and wish to see your reflection. You will dig a hole in the soil, both wider across and deeper than you are tall, and you will line the hole with flat stones you have collected. The pond will fill with rainwater, and beside it a willow tree will grow, even though you did not plant one. You will grasp the fragile tree trunk as you lean over the water, peering at your wavering reflection. One moment, you will see lines around your eyes and mouth, like the lines that have begun to crisscross over your hands; then, when a sunray hits the water, you will see yourself as young and more beautiful than ever: hair shimmering and blowing in the breeze; eyes shining, the brightest blue; lips as fresh as a flower that has just been plucked.

* * * *

Violets: faithfulness

Then one of the travelers comes back, bringing a bouquet of wild violets he has gathered. He says that he has found marvelous new seeds during his travels, and that he thought of me and my garden, and had to bring some back to me. He looks tired, but handsome and kind; the lines of his face soften the darkness of his eyes. When we kiss, I feel like a girl again, dreaming of fairy tales as I wander through the woods.

He cannot stay forever—he is a traveler by nature—but when he leaves I know he will be back, bearing violets and seeds from across the world.

I dream of the day a girl will stumble upon my garden, searching for rosemary, or perhaps for wild laurel blossoms, or the tiny sour-sweet raspberries that sometimes grow in the woods. She will look like the daughter I never had. She is coming soon—I can feel her presence on the wind, I can smell her in the herbs and blossoms. I will recognize her the second I see her, I am sure of it. I have faith.

One morning, when you step outside to water the first violets of spring, you hear a strange splashing from the pond you have built. Then you see an owl—a small one, not a baby but not full-grown either—hovering just above the surface of the water. One of its wings is beating furiously, enough to keep it from drowning but not enough to propel it to dry land; its other wing seems to be broken. How cruel, you think, that the owl had to fall just at that spot. You want to save it, but you cannot reach it from the shore; the pond is deep, and you never learned to swim.

But the owl is fighting so valiantly. How could you not help it? So you step into the pond and gasp—the water is cold as death. Another step and the hem of your dress is soaked; a third, and the water hits your knees. The pond is dirty as well as cold, and your body parts disappear one by one: now it is your thighs you can no longer see nor feel. Then your stomach. Your chest. Your shoulders. Your neck. Your mouth. And the owl is still ahead of you, just out of arm's reach.

Finally you are submerged completely, blind and frozen. Yet the sensation of water surrounding your body is somehow familiar, and you are no longer afraid. This feels like coming home, you realize: you have been drowning your entire life.

Then you feel half-frozen feathers against your fingers, and at the moment you grasp the bird, its body goes limp. You turn and walk out of the pond, pushing with all your might against the water that clutches you, pulling you down, begging you to stay with it forever. You hug the owl against your chest, thinking of air, of sunlight, of the bird's faint but sure heartbeat against your own.

You carry the owl through your garden, both of you such fragile things, broken, but still able to heal.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Followed

Will McIntosh

She came wandering down the sidewalk like any other corpse, her herky-jerky walk unmistakable among the fluid strides of the living. She was six or seven, Southeast Asian, maybe Indian, her ragged clothes caked in dried mud. Pedestrians cut a wide berth around her without noticing her at all.

I thought nothing of her, figured the person she followed had ditched her in a car, and she was catching up in that relentless way that corpses do. I was downtown, sitting outside Jittery Joe's Coffee Shop on a summer afternoon. There were still a few weeks before fall semester, so I was relaxed, in no hurry to get anywhere.

I returned to the manuscript I was reading, and didn't think another thing of the corpse until I noticed her in my peripheral vision, standing right in front of my table. I glanced up at her, turned, looked over my shoulder, then back at her. Then I realized. She was looking at me with that unfocused stare, with those big, lifeless brown eyes. As if she was claiming me. But that couldn't be. I waited for her to move on, but she just stood. I lifted my coffee halfway to my mouth, set it back down shakily.

The woman at the next table, dressed in a green hemp dress, her foot propped on an empty chair, looked at me over the top of her paperback with thinly veiled disdain. When I caught her eye she looked back down at the paperback.

I lurched to my feet, the metal chair screeching on the brick pavement, my barely-touched coffee sloshing onto the table, and retreated down the sidewalk.

I ducked into the anonymity of my parked car and lingered there, tracking the corpse in my rear-view mirror as she lurched toward me. Maybe it was a mistake, a misunderstanding—maybe she'd walk right past me. My Volvo Green was a fuel-cell vehicle, dammit, the most efficient I could afford, not an energy pig like most corpse-magnets drove. How could I have hooked a corpse? I cracked my window, waited to see if she would pass.

I heard her little feet scuffing the pebbly pavement as she drew close. She stopped three feet from my door, turned and faced me. Her face was round and babyish, her chin a tiny knot under her slack, open mouth. She was so tiny.

I started the car and pulled out, almost hitting another car. As I drove off I saw my corpse in the side mirror, lurching down the sidewalk, patiently following whatever homing device the dead used to track those they had claimed.

* * * *

Every few minutes I pulled back the curtain to see if she was coming. And then there she was, walking along the side of the road with her head down. She turned up my driveway, stubbed her toe on the thin lip of asphalt, stumbled, regained her tenuous balance. She struggled stiffly up the three steps to my front door and stopped. I dropped the curtain, got up and locked the dead bolt.

I phoned Jenna.

"I have a corpse,” I said as soon as she answered.

"Oh my God, Peter.” Jenna said. There was a long pause. “Are you sure?"

"Well Christ,” I wailed, “she's standing on my fucking doorstep. I'm pretty sure she's mine."

"I don't understand. You don't deserve a corpse."

"I know. Jesus, I can't believe it. I just can't believe it."

Jenna consoled me by ticking off the evidence, all the ways I was not like other corpse-owners. Then she changed the subject. I wasn't in the mood to talk about university politics or how-was-your-day minutiae, so I got off the phone after making plans to have dinner with her.

I tried to distract myself by turning on the TV. I checked the stock market. The Dow was up almost three percent, the NASDAQ two. I switched to the news. The president was conducting a press conference in a field of newly-constructed windmills, on her decision to pull out of the Kyoto III accord. “We're doing everything we can to curb global warming,” she said to the cameras, “but we will not bow to foreign pressure. The American way of life is not negotiable.” Blah, blah, blah. Even with the news cameras picking the best angles a few hundred of her corpses were visible, cordoned from her by a phalanx of blue-suited secret service agents. The corpse of an emaciated four or five year-old black boy, his distended belly bulging as if a kickball was hidden under his skin, wandered through a breach and headed toward the president. He was swept up by an agent and returned to the crowd. But gently—the administration didn't want to give Amnesty International any more ammunition.

I tried to take solace in the president's corpses. She had eighty or ninety thousand, piled twenty deep around the White House gates, more arriving daily. I had only one.

I flipped through the channels. Strange how most TV shows depicted the world as corpseless. Nary a corpse to be seen on the sitcoms, cop shows, interactives—all those people, walking the streets, working, cutting up with friends, and not one of them followed by a corpse. Had there really been a time when there were no corpses? I could hardly imagine it anymore.

I pulled back the curtain, looked at her standing motionless in front of my door. I couldn't help myself. I wondered if there were clues on her to tell me who she was, or how she died. Some sort of evidence that the cosmic actuarial table that sent her to me had made an error.

I went to the door and opened it. She came in, her bare feet tracking dirt onto the hardwood floor.

"Look around,” I said with a sweep of my hand, “I don't have that much stuff.” I gave her a tour. “Solar power, fluorescent bulbs.” I pointed out that all my furniture was used. She didn't look, only stared up at me. “I try to buy locally-grown food. I voted for the One World party.” Nothing. I scanned the room for more evidence.

"What did I do?” I asked her empty face. “Tell me what I did!"

She'd been a cute kid. I pictured her laughing, running, playing hop-scotch on the sidewalk like my sister used to. I pictured her drinking brown water out of a dirty metal cup, lying in bed, dying of typhoid or dysentery. Maybe her family couldn't afford a bed—maybe she'd died on a straw mat on the floor in the corner of a dirt hut. I let a familiar indignant anger rise in me at the injustice of it.

She was so completely silent standing there. Unmoving, not breathing. She's going to be with me for the rest of my life, I thought. How could I possibly stand that?

I sat in my recliner in the living room. She stood in front of me, at arm's length, and stared. I took a good look at her. Skinny legs with bony knees. Very brown feet. Long black hair littered with leaves and twigs. Her red, mud-caked shorts had a single front pocket. I reached over and, flinching at the stiff, cold feel of her flesh, felt around in her pocket with two fingers. There was something in it—I fished it out. It was a button, a shiny new button. Gunmetal grey with veins of teal snaking through it. I turned it over; it was cool and smooth, unmarked—the kind of thing a little girl might carry around if she didn't have any Barbies to play with.

I lifted her dirty hand by the wrist, turned it palm-up, put the button in her hand, closed her cold fingers over it, and gently lowered her hand back to her side. The button clattered to the hardwood floor.

* * * *

"Is she there?” Jenna asked. I nodded. My corpse stood outside the restaurant door, staring in at me through the plate glass. I should have picked a restaurant farther from my house so I could eat before she reached me. “Just ignore her,” Jenna whispered.

An elderly couple opened the door to leave, and my corpse came in, ignored. As much unseen as ignored—not like a lost dog but like a block of wood, or a wisp of autumn wind. She came and stood in front of me, staring, a pretty button tucked in her pocket. Jenna kept eating as if nothing had changed, though she examined my corpse out of the corner of her eye. I forked a half-spear of asparagus in lemon butter into my mouth, chewed and swallowed, felt it lodge in my throat.

Mine was not the only corpse in the establishment. There were about ten, actually. Two stood by the bar, their eyes in shadow under the dim light of stained-glass lamps, their filthy rags out of place among pressed pants, white shirts, polished wood and chrome. An attractive, well-dressed thirty-something couple had three of them hovering around their table, like their own personal waitstaff. One was an old, stooped Asian man, another a twelve year-old black girl, the third a five year-old who could have been my corpse's long-lost sister. Jesus, they must be living like complete pigs to rack up so many corpses.

The door opened as another couple left. An infant corpse crawled in, her back foot just clearing the door as it closed. She was nude; her jerky crawl reminded me of a turtle's. She made a grunting sound as she labored across the floor, stopped in front of the already well-attended couple, plopped onto her butt, stared up at the woman. The woman kept eating her paella, one of the restaurant's specialties. The man said something and she laughed, covering her mouth.

Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw my corpse glance down at my plate. I jerked my head around and looked at her intently. Her eyes were glazed and fixed on my face.

"What's the matter?” Jenna said. “Don't stare at her,” she hissed, as if I had picked my nose. “What? What is it?"

"I'd swear she just looked down at my plate,” I said.

"Do you want to split a dessert?” she asked.

I wondered if I had imagined that quick, furtive glance. Probably. “You go ahead and get one, I'm pretty full.” I put my fork down, my blackened salmon hardly touched.

* * * *

When I got home I sat at the kitchen table and wrote a $3000 check to the World Hunger Fund. I usually sent them $50 or so. Three grand hurt, but I could afford it. Looking up, I was startled by a face staring in through the kitchen window. Her face. Until now she'd stood facing the windowless front door. Evidently she could learn. She stared, unblinking. She never blinked—I guess I'd noticed, but it hadn't fully registered till now.

As I worked the check into an envelope I found myself holding it so my corpse could see it. I wondered, was the little girl still in there, aware of where she was and what was happening, or was she just an empty shell?

I tore up the check and wrote another, for $10,000. That much I could not easily afford. I walked it to the mailbox. It was a beautiful night; the moon was full, the crickets and cicadas deafening. Two houses down and across the street, the corpse of a tall, scrawny black man squatted, peering with one eye through the lighted crack of a drawn shade. My corpse came around the house, pushing through the waist-high grass and native weeds (another testament to my green sensitivities, another reason why this corpse was a mistake), and met me on the way back. She followed me to the front door. I closed it in her face.

I got up early the next morning after a mostly sleepless night. I pulled up the shade, and there was her little round face. She was just tall enough for her nose to be above the bottom of the window frame.

"Shit.” I thumped my forehead on the molding, fought back a hitching sob. I had really hoped I could buy her off.

"Get the hell away from me!” I shouted through the closed window before yanking the shade back down.

While I showered I pictured my corpse waiting patiently outside the window. Why couldn't it have been a man—an old man with no teeth? Fall semester loomed. My first class was in five days. I couldn't imagine teaching with a corpse staring at me.

* * * *

None of the students had corpses, so mine was the only one in my 10 a.m. class. The students politely avoided looking at her, even though she stood barely three feet in front of me, her head craned to stare up at my face as I went over the syllabus.

My hands shook from exhaustion and nerves as I held the syllabus. I'd been a wreck the night before, had four or five drinks to staunch my anxiety, took forever to figure out what I would wear. I debated whether to dress down—a T-shirt and jeans—to demonstrate that I was just a regular guy, that I lived simply and didn't really deserve a corpse. But would the students see through me, think I was being pretentious? I'd finally pulled out a pair of black jeans and my white shirt, the shirt I'd been wearing the day my corpse had shown up, actually. Smart casual, the sort of outfit I usually wore.

Things got worse as I started to lecture. I tend to pace back and forth as I talk, and as I did she shadowed me, taking two small, lurching steps for every one of mine. The scuff of her little feet on the linoleum floor set my teeth on edge. Bare feet scuffing on dirty floors made me nuts, the way some people go nuts at the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, or the feel of cotton balls. I stopped pacing.

I kept losing my train of thought, stumbling over words. I made eye contact with one of my new students; she quickly looked down, pretending to take notes, though I hadn't said anything important. I was barely saying anything coherent, let alone important.

Without realizing it I found myself looking right at my corpse, as if I were lecturing to her. She stared back. I forced myself to look away, at the blank white wall in the back of the room, realized I was pacing again, and she was pacing with me—scuff-scuff, scuff-scuff, jerking along like ... like what? Like a dead child.

I let the class out early and headed to my office in a fog—exhausted, hungover, wondering how I could possibly make it through my one o'clock class. She did her best to keep up—I could hear the scuffing behind me.

A surge of anger tore through me and I wheeled, pointed at her, opened my mouth to speak. Her gaze flickered to my chest for a split second, then back up. This time I'd seen it, there was no doubt. Her eyes had dropped and almost—not quite, but almost—focused.

"I saw that!” I said, stabbing my finger at her. I was in the hall outside my office, confronting a corpse. Jack popped his bald head out of his office, took in the scene, pulled his head back inside.

Embarrassed, I wheeled and headed into my office, leaving the door ajar, allowing her to follow. I stared down at her.

"Tell me what I did!” I shouted, leaning down and pushing my face close to hers. “I'm a good person! I don't deserve this!” I wanted her to focus, to look at me, to listen to what I was saying. I saw the little pinkish-grey dollop dangling from the back of her throat. Below that, darkness.

I yanked the onyx Buddha statue off my desk and hurled it over her head. It crashed into a bookshelf, shattering a framed picture of Yankee Stadium, scattering a half-dozen textbooks.

"Jesus! You okay?” Jack called. I hefted my computer monitor over my head and slammed it to the floor at her feet. It split partway, popping and sparking. Then Jack was on me; I hadn't seen him come in, but he was behind me and had his arms wrapped around my chest.

"Calm down, calm down!” he shouted.

I struggled, tried to yank free. I'm not sure what I would have done if I'd gotten free. I truly hope I wouldn't have brought the computer console down on her head. I gave a final, violent tug. My shirt ripped loudly.

"Shhhh, shhhh,” Jack said into my ear. “You're okay, it's okay, shhhh.” I started to cry. Jack held on until he felt me relax, then loosened his grip, kept his arms around me for a moment longer, let me go.

Jack and I didn't know each other very well; it added to the surreal feel as I stood in my demolished office, crying. Through a blur of tears I saw a button lying on the floor by my corpse's foot. In a daze I knelt and picked it up. It was her button—grey, with veins of teal. Unmistakable. How had it gotten out of her pocket?

"I think the shirt's a total loss,” Jack said behind me a little sheepishly. I looked down at my shirt. There was a long tear along the seam under the arm, and the front flapped open—three or four buttons had popped off.

I guess you never look at the buttons on a shirt, even if you button them a thousand times. The buttons on my white shirt were gun-metal grey, with veins of teal. Quite unique. They weren't as bright and new as my corpse's button, because they'd taken a few turns in the dryer.

Gently I lifted her hand and turned it over, ran my finger over her tiny palm, over the pads of her baby fingers. Rough. Not the fingers of a child who had spent much time playing hopscotch.

"Is everyone all right?” Maggie, from down at the end of the hall, stood in my doorway. Behind her two more of my colleagues craned their necks, trying to see what was happening. There was rarely excitement in our department; maybe an irate student once in a while, but never shattered glass or exploding computer monitors.

"Everything's fine,” Jack said. He was a good guy, I realized. I was still down on my knees, staring at the button, my eyes red and tear stained. The crowd dispersed, trailed by two corpses.

Jack squatted, put his arm around my shoulder. “You okay now?"

I nodded.

"I'm not gonna say I understand how you feel, but it must be awful."

I nodded.

"If you ever want to talk, just knock."

I nodded a third time. He patted my back and left.

It was nearly time for my one o'clock class. I kept a sweater in the bottom drawer of my desk for days when the A/C was cranked too high. I pulled the sweater over the ruined shirt, and, as my head popped through, I thought I caught my corpse glancing down at the button lying at her feet.

I stooped and retrieved the button, slipped it into her pocket, next to the other, shinier one.

I went around the corner to the bathroom, held the door open for my corpse when it started to swing shut on her. I washed my face and combed my hair, her watchful eyes reflected in the mirror.

I yanked a couple of paper towels from the dispenser, wet them under the faucet, knelt and wiped the worst of the dirt from my corpse's chubby cheeks and forehead. I tried to comb some of the debris out of her hair, but it was hopelessly tangled. I shoved the comb into my back pocket and plucked the biggest chips out by hand. I glanced at my watch. Time for class.

After retrieving a stack of syllabi and the class roll from my office I headed into the airy central lobby, up the double flight of stairs, steadying myself with the silver metal handrail. Halfway up I turned and looked back. My corpse was struggling up the second step, her legs too small, and too stiff, to make the climb easily. I went back down, wrapped my arms around my corpse, and carried her up the stairs.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Dear Aunt Gwenda:

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

I am house-hunting. Why does every house I go into smell of pie?

Best, F.R.

A: Did you know that the earliest English pies were called coffins or “coffyns"? Don't quote me on that, I got it from the Encyclo-Viswanathan aka Wikipedia. If you do quote me, you are so busted.

Anyway, everyone loves pie. Perhaps this is a new strategy of house-selling. Who wouldn't want to live in a house that smells of pie?

However, you haven't provided enough data to answer this question. Maybe you are a pie-a-phobe. Maybe the type of pie you reference is foul-smelling; there's no way to say. Do all the houses smell of the same pie? My theory:

It is you who smell of pie. Not the houses.

Dear Aunt Gwenda:

I am soon to be married, yet my two stuffed raccoons, Ricky 1 and Ricky 2 still sit on a box at the foot of my bed even though I now have a lady friend to take their place. Do you think they are jealous? Should I turn their loving yet sad, glassy eyes to the wall? Am I too old to have stuffed raccoons?

Conflicted

A: Oh, my dear Conflicted. Thou art also clueless.

You shouldn't be pledging the troth with anyone who would engage in matrimony with you. You have stuffed raccoons. You have named them. You let them sit with their dead glass eyes peering at you all night long and you're not creeped out by this? Clearly, your true life partners are staring you in the face.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

How come you and Aunt Abby are never seen in the same room?

A: Because she smells like pie. Next.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

My college blows. Should I blow it off and move to Alaska?

A: Definitely. What the world needs now is not love, sweet love, but a new Jack London. Go find your Charmian, then build your Snark.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

Bird flu zombies are knocking on the door. What should I do?

A: You're testing me, right?

Because I know that you have prepared for this day, for this very eventuality. I know that you have two giant steel drums filled with clean drinking water and a charge wired to blow the door. You set the charge and the BOOMBAMEXPLOSION stuns the zombies for that crucial 20 seconds you need to strap on your apocalypse kit and begin rolling the drums toward the door. You roll, roll, roll your drums un-gently over the bird flu zombies, further stunning and partially flattening them. The effect lasts just long enough for you to get a decent head start. But wait! You've left behind your recently slain loved one, conveniently positioned near the door, and the smell of fresh blood lures the bird flu zombies in. You are free to escape the brutish fate about to befall your beloved's corpse.

Don't forget your N95.

Make for the last remaining Kenny Rogers Roasters. It's located in the largest strip mall in North America; I can't be more specific for obvious reasons. It is there, and only there that we can defeat the bird flu zombie army.

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

My science fiction writer has been looking pale and uninspired lately. I don't know what's happened, but I'm hoping that you can help me find a way to re-animate it. Ideas?

A: Twenty-five thousand volts. Not a volt more or less.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Threads

E. Catherine Tobler

Where the river met the lake and the clouded sky was obscured by skeletal tree limbs, the geese gathered and this winter, they had brought gypsies with them.

Ours was not the common wintering ground for either group; both tended more south, but a day of sleet and snow forced them to seek shelter among the trees. The lake, a half frozen puddle of slush, served both, for drinking and bathing alike. The gypsies heated their water in large black pots, whereas the geese took the more direct approach and simply waded in.

I imagined the gypsies here in the summer, wading in as the geese did now, without a stitch of clothing in the warmer water, and felt my own cheeks warm. There were many young men among the travelers; they hauled buckets of water to the black pots, the latter guarded by old women in bright shawls.

Three dark-skinned girls whirled together in a circle, bound by hands, magenta headscarves brilliant under the dreary sky. They broke apart like petals scattered under wind and fled through the encampment of wagons.

"Daughter, come away from there."

My mother, bundled near the fireside with the family Bible in hand, gray-striped cat in lap, met my gaze as I looked over my shoulder. A scattered pile of unread letters sat upon her chair-side table. Mother seemed as cold and dreary as the day and I wondered how else she might wither during father's absence whilst he fought the war. She had once been a woman of warmth and care, but no longer.

I spared one more glance at the girls, two lost but one stepping high up a ladder and into a wagon. With a flop of flowered fabric, she vanished entirely. I took my leave of the frost-traced window, joining Mother near the fire to take up the ball of rough woolen Margaret had been winding earlier.

"Leave that."

The wool was struck from my hands. It fell without a sound into the hearth basket. I looked at my mother, but she had returned to her reading, lips silently moving as she worked through another chapter. I had no such book to occupy me. Taff, bored in his own right, leapt from my mother's lap to strike at a loose piece of the colorless wool. I dragged it along while Taff pounced and growled. Sewing was forbidden me, but play was permissible.

Taff and I played until we were both bored with the string. He returned to my mother's lap and I left the solar, seeking Janette in the kitchens. I found her with floured hands, placing dough into the ovens. The trio of bright-scarved gypsy girls squatted outside the kitchen door. Janette could not allow them inside without my mother's word—a thing she would never give—but the girls were close enough to be warmed by the hearths and to breathe the scent of Janette's fresh bread.

Their faces were dark and smooth and this close I could see the fine needlework that decorated their headscarves. Small flowers with curling leaves edged the fabric in every color that I might imagine. Tiny birds plucked ripe blackberries from laden branches and indeed made a game of it, seeming to toss the berries from chocolate beak to orange beak. When each girl stood close, the game among the birds became even more apparent; each scarf was part of a story.

The girl nearest me dared to grab at my cuffs. Her hand was crooked, fingers curling in on the palm, and I stepped back in alarm. Her grip was nimble, though, for she caught my hand and held the cuff for the others to see.

It was the intricate blackwork they admired, geometric squares marching around the pale fabric, and as I listened to them whisper in a language unfamiliar to me, I wondered if it was as intriguing to them as their scarves were to me.

Janette offered each girl a loaf of bread, for we had plenty to spare, and with the warm loaves in hand, the girls turned to go. I looked after them, my longing to follow them surely revealed in my eyes for Janette clicked her tongue.

"She won't let you go. She'll say no daughter of mine will be seen with gypsies. It's one thing for we servants to rub shoulders with them, but you—your shoulders are forbidden.” This was followed by Janette's approximation of a wink, her eyes as poorly coordinated as the rest of her often was.

"Why is it that what is forbidden is always what we seek?” I watched the girls grow smaller, until they vanished around the eastern edge of the house, where the dark pines grew so dense they seemed one massive tree.

"'Tis sweet the fruit grown on another's tree, for he has done all the work for me and thee."

The child's poem didn't answer my question, though, for today I felt it went beyond that. “Do you wish you could run to town on any day of your choosing?” I asked Janette. She and the other servants went to market on a day of Mother's choosing, and they were always supervised. “What if you went on a Wednesday and alone?"

Janette's cheeks flushed with color, as though she too pictured young gypsy men bathing in the summer lake. She slapped a ball of dough upon the counter and began to shape it. “The fish would not be fresh, and there'd be no telling the condition of the leeks."

A laugh escaped me and I pointed a finger at Janette. “There's no telling because you've never been on a Wednesday. If you went, you might find treasures beyond your imagination—"

"Now, Joan—"

"I wonder what Wednesday's fish does taste like,” I murmured before stealing a heel of bread and escaping to the fire to toast it brown.

Janette offered no speculation as to Wednesday's fish, but it was still on my mind as I stole from the house that evening and headed toward the gypsy camp.

My mother's birthday would soon be upon us and I had nothing to gift her with. In my childhood, I might have gifted her with a pomander, a simple enough thing to make, but now such crafts were forbidden. Still, I held tight to a scarf of indigo silk with the hope it might soon bear a story of birds and berries. My mother would have once taken delight in such a thing; perhaps she could again.

The gypsy encampment, with its wagons, mules, and tents, was ablaze with light and even some of the youngest children were still awake, nestled in an elder's lap or bent over a shoulder to avoid wriggling fingers which sought ribs to tickle. The evening was cool, but the sky above clear; no chance of snow, only hard stars above the dry, yellow plain.

The three girls who had visited Janette's kitchen earlier that day were clustered around a small fire, headscarves not in evidence, hair brushed back into long and gleaming tails. The girls looked up at me, three pairs of similar dark brown eyes, but three different smiles. The girl with the crooked hand came to her feet and pulled me toward the fire. Again they took up my cuffs to admire the work.

"Can you teach me this?” she asked. “I do not know it."

I shook my head. “I don't know how.” They stared at me in silence. “I did not make it,” I added. I didn't know who made my gown.

Two of the girls spoke in the rapid and unfamiliar language they had used earlier at the kitchen. The third silenced them.

"Forgive my rude sisters, lady. They are surprised. We thought all ladies studied needlecraft."

"Not in my house. It is forbidden.” I held out the silken scarf. “Have you more of the work I saw earlier? On your scarves."

The girl was reaching for the fabric when a voice from the nearby wagon stopped her.

"Cantu."

Cantu withdrew her crooked hand. A flurry of the strange language followed and Cantu, shadowed by her sisters, seemed to shrink. They withdrew from me and the fire with frowns, and went one by one to the wagon. Cantu looked back at me before she vanished inside and closed the door behind her.

I crouched beside the fire until the winter air began to chew at my cheeks. I stood and crossed to the wagon, wanting to knock, but resisting. Instead I loosely tied the scarf through the door handles and when I chanced to look back as I left, I spied Cantu's crooked hand reaching out to tug it free.

The summons came two days later. Janette and I were in the winter kitchen ironing when Cantu arrived. Cantu made no bones about it, I was to go with her, and though Janette shook her head, I followed the gypsy girl and her bright headscarf through the camp. I could not spend another moment in the house, waiting for father to return as mother did. The air was cold after spending the morning with a warm iron and it robbed me of my breath. Cantu, having been in the chill all day, didn't slow.

She brought me to the wagon covered in flecks of green paint, where she and her sisters had gathered two nights prior, to the door where I had tied my scarf. The doorway was rough and dark like Janette's best soup. I faltered, but Cantu gestured to the door.

"She waits."

I looked at the small girl, feeling half that size myself. “She?"

"Sani. She has your scarf.” With her crooked hand, Cantu lifted the door latch and drew it open. “She won't bite—hasn't got the teeth for it."

That was little comfort, but I stepped into the wagon, starting when Cantu closed the door sharply behind me.

The wagon was narrow, but did not seem to lack for space. Amid birdcages and baskets of buttons, spools of thread and saucers of beads, a bent woman sat as though she were queen. Yellow, waxy candles illuminated the small space, throwing light onto silver and gold threads and fabrics the color of earth, sky, and water.

A pair of embroidered gloves were folded upon a shelf stacked with fabrics. I reached for the gloves before I realized it. Green vines heavy with ripe grapes the color of a sunrise sky twined around the wrists, darkly garnet birds almost hidden near a small jeweled button. They were fighting over the button, I realized.

The woman cleared her throat and I withdrew my hand. I turned to her, to Sani, and felt that I should bow, but once I caught sight of the indigo silk in her hands, I forgot to make any such gesture of respect. The spice in the air, thicker inside, made my head swim.

Sani offered the silk back to me and I took it. It had not been decorated in any way. I clasped it to my chest, trying not to feel the disappointment that welled up inside of me.

"I will not embroider that,” Sani said and reached for what seemed her current piece of work. It was a lazy circle of herbs, rosemary stalks tied with glistening red ribbons.

"I—I was foolish to leave the scarf behind,” I said. “I never meant to demand ... that is, I—"

"I will not embroider it,” Sani repeated, “but I will teach you to do so."

The stab of surprise in my belly was akin to the feeling I had when I saw the first geese of the season. Something there made me catch my breath. Sani studied me, her mouth crooked with her smile, as though she understood that feeling all too well.

"My tribe have been granted sanctuary, so that we need not travel in the coming storms. You may learn alongside my daughters."

Sanctuary? Had my mother granted such? Before I could manage any answer, there arose a cry outside. A flapping of wings against the wind rolled over everything and I fled the wagon. The old woman did not move. Outside, there was a rush of gypsies toward a young man who held a bow.

Cantu grabbed my hand and pulled me along, pushing through the crowd to view the felled body. A goose lay at the young man's feet with an arrow through its breast. Cantu touched the resting body and I found my hand also upon it, against the still-warm neck.

Cantu drew my hand back as the young man hefted the prize and showed it to all who gathered.

I returned to the gypsy camp the following day. My mother took no notice; she stayed in with her Bible and Taff, and continued to await my father's return.

Cantu took me inside their wagon and Sani introduced me to a variety of threads and fabrics that I had never before seen.

"Your first piece will not be your silk,” Sani said. “It will take some days to learn the technique; a little while longer to learn the stitches.” She handed me a piece of ivory lawn.

I set myself to the task like nothing before. While I thought of gifting my mother with something beautiful, I will also admit to loving the work. It was forbidden to me and I desired it like nothing else.

The needle pricked my fingers countless times, but Cantu showed me how a cool cloth eased the pain. We laughed as I could not manage to complete a simple chain stitch. Sani smiled softly while Cantu cheered as I finally did finish it.

The work was crooked and the threads were not pulled evenly; it looked rather like a flower that had been mangled by a crow, but I was more proud of the single flower than anything else I could put my name to. I stroked the four cobalt petals and my pricked fingers spread a streak of crimson blood across them.

Even as winter's snows piled upon the ground, I went to Sani's wagon. With her and Cantu, I began to make my way across the fabric and soon they allowed me to stitch upon the indigo silk.

My stitches were careful and even, this time. I longed to share the experience with my mother—the thought of her alone in the house bothered me, but she would not budge from her chair. I took comfort in the friendship of Cantu and Sani; they seemed to enjoy my company and certainly the sweets I smuggled from Janette's kitchen.

When winter began to ease and Cantu looked forward to leaving this place, I began to feel the pain in my hands. In my shoulders as well. It was difficult to straighten after I spent time working on the scarf. I dug my knuckles into my back to ease the muscles and Cantu smiled at me. She offered me a pillow, pressed between my back and the chair, but it only lessened the pain momentarily.

Walking home, with the calling geese in the sky high above me, I noticed the many older women in the gypsy camp. They were bent to their tasks, most of them taking advantage of the day's warmth to practice their needlecraft in the sun. I saw then, illuminated in that gold light, their hunched backs, their squinting eyes. Within their bent hands they held bundles of threaded beauty.

I wanted to ask Cantu, but there was no need. I saw with my own eyes the changes wrought upon her by the craft. Her sisters who did not stitch did not bear the marks Cantu did. Cantu held my hand one evening as we listened to an older woman speak of the love we should place into our stitches.

It was more than love, I decided as I massaged oily orange cream into Cantu's swollen knuckles. Something else went into every stitch placed, something I myself had begun to give up.

Yet I persisted, and became careless.

My mother, though lost in thoughts of Father, maintained a knowledge of the household. As I returned from a day's stitching, I found my mother sitting in the kitchen, awaiting me. I curled my pin-pricked fingers behind my back and looked around for Janette.

"I have sent your shield to her room. Where have you been these long hours?” When I did not answer, she said, “Show me your hands."

I curled them tighter behind me, despite the pain.

"Show me!"

I showed her. Mother grasped my hands and drew them near to look upon the ravaged fingertips, to stroke the forming calluses. She straightened my fingers until I cried out and pulled my aching hands out of her reach.

"I never wanted this for you.” She looked at me, touched a hand to my cheek. “These things are forbidden for a reason, my daughter."

"I have come to understand that,” I said.

My mother rose slowly from her chair, to root through a lower drawer of a rarely used cabinet. She returned with a pot which held the same oily cream I used on Cantu. Mother motioned me to come to her and I did, allowing her to work the cream into my hands. Her touch was gentle this time, my fingers straightening as they warmed.

"My mother used to stitch,” she said, “and I watched her vanish, bit by bit into the cloth and thread. I vowed I would never become what she did, vowed that my daughter would never.” Her thumb pressed against the tip of my middle finger hard enough to make me whimper. “I forbid you to return."

"What would you have me do, Mother? Spend my days waiting for Father as you do?” I envisioned myself as my mother, by her side, growing as gray as the days around her. She awaited word, but truly wanted none, otherwise she would have opened the post upon its arrival.

She dropped my hands and wiped her own clean before leaving me alone in the flickering firelight. I wiped my hands and sought the contents of the old drawer, discovering a wealth of needlework that must have been made by my grandmother's hand. She had made the usual samplers, but after, deeper into her years, her work took a turn toward shadowed images, of women walking into the woods, of a glimpse thrown over a shoulder half caught in stitches.

I felt anxious in my very bones. Perhaps it was the same for the geese, the way they know it is time to leave a place. Something in the warming wind, the bluing sky, the shredding clouds.

Leaving was not a simple thing. I wondered if the birds would long for this landscape once they left, or if it was something banished to distant memory. They would come again, in another season, but would I?

I tried to say goodbye to my mother, but she turned her papery cheek away from my kiss, as though I had already gone. I snatched the stack of letters from her table, meaning to scatter them into the fire if she never meant to read them, but the sight of my father's handwriting upon one made me stop.

I cast the others aside and dropped his into her lap, against Taff's gray head. It lay untouched as I left the room, my vision blurring.

I tried to imprint the house upon my memory, the way it sat near the river, in the flowing shade of willows during the summer, in the rough yellow grasses during winter. Its square gray walls were solid, the windows narrow. The chimney likely needed cleaning.

Still, I knew there were things I would forget. Cantu's hand gently gripped my own as the gypsy wagons rolled out of the valley. The geese soon followed.

Over the coming months I came to add beads to my indigo silk, and though the needle continued to bite my fingers, I kept on. It was difficult to sit with a straight back, more comfortable to hunch over the work and hold it close to my eyes. My closing hands made the perfect shape to hold the fabric as I worked, my tongue perfectly familiar with the delicate vein of thread between my teeth.

It was many winters before we chanced to travel through the land of my childhood again. Many seasons of stitching, of following birds in flight, of blushing and ceasing to blush at young men bathing in summer-warm lakes.

I stepped from my own wagon, painted indigo by Samson to match my first silk, onto the hard, yellow plain and looked upon the manor house. It appeared smaller and grayer than I remembered, its edges now indistinct against the horizon. I stretched my legs, my back, and caught Sani's knowing eyes upon me. Perhaps it was not chance that brought us here to rest.

That evening I folded my silken scarf, now fully adorned with the story of my first year's journey, and placed it within a muslin bag. This I took to the kitchen door, to Janette who cried to see me. She clasped me in her arms, smelling ever of flour and yeast, and I gave her the scarf.

"Give this to my mother,” I said and fled before I gave in to the tears that wanted to come.

I woke in the early morning hours to the sound of geese low overhead. I watched them alight upon the field, some stepping onto the frozen lake, each stride carefully taken. Geese, too, know that ice can give way.

My mother came to me at evening as the amber sun broke through tattered gray clouds, much as I remembered her, quiet and small, but she now brought with her a sense of peace rather than melancholy. Her face remained smooth, her eyes bright. Around her neck, she wore my indigo scarf.

In one hand, she held a letter which I would later learn spoke of my father's battlefield death; a good friend had brought his heart home and Mother had buried it beneath the rusting sundial in the garden.

In her other hand, she held a scrap of fabric. From my grandmother's collection or not, I took it to be a sign of hope. It was faded and fraying, perhaps once blue now gray, but enough of it remained.

I guided my mother to the steps of my wagon. She tucked the letter in her pocket and touched my lined face. She chuckled at the round spectacles which perched on my nose.

"My Joan,” she said. “How it has changed you—and how it has not.” She pressed her fabric into my gnarled hands; it was warm as though it had been worn next to her skin.

"Can you teach me this?” she asked.

Above us geese circled as if on strings, blown by the cooling wind. Full winter would soon be upon us. I carefully held my mother's hands within my own, fabric nested between.

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A Half-Lizard Boy, A Reptile Man, and An Unjaded, Shiny Something

Matthew Lee Bain

Summer sweat runs like a fever: sweet and sick; saline licks of forehead drips; eyes and bees sting; rain is less than a memory, and a memory is more than a flood. When my skin starts to crisp and crack—turn to scales and shed—I remember a half-lizard boy named Me, Luke, a dad named Him, a full-grown reptile man—cold-blooded and all—and a momma named Her, a jewel, as pretty as sunshine and not a lizard at all. Momma was an unjaded, shiny something with too many layers. She could say things like, “Pick me the stars, reptile man, they wanna wear me.” She would say things like, “Can't you do something, reptile man? something beautiful and shining? for me? a something that would twinkle?"

And Dad would say things like, “You have enough stuff that sparkles, don't you?"

"Something...” she'd mumble, “please,” and start to cry a little.

"Don't start this with me now, don't cry ... I, I'll buy you something, just stop crying! Stop that!” But the reptile man never understood that what she wanted he couldn't buy, and what she longed for, he couldn't give. Other times she'd be quiet, like library people, and wash dishes or clean; she made things shine. When the great king reptile scuttled to work, Momma and I would tell stories and play games. She'd tell stories about the amber moon and of how it would be stolen by thieves during the day and about a place past the moon, where there were:

"Insects made of emerald, that never would bite, people made of crystal, that never would lie, nights made of onyx, that never would frighten, and skies made of sapphires, that never would fall..."

And I asked and I wished that there could be dinosaurs!

"Yes! Yes! Yes!” she said. “Big ones—like our reptile man—made of topaz, that never would yell.” After that, we'd play lizard games: I would scurry on all fours, or elbows and knees, while Momma would try to catch me. But even then, I'd squirm free; but even then ... Dad would come home and chill us with his cold blood. He couldn't help it, he was born a reptile.

"Stop it, Jewel! The floors are dirty ... why do you have him crawling around? Why!? Can't I trust you to take care of my boy? Can't I? Huh? Trust you at all?"

"He's a lizard because of you! I'm only teaching him to shed his skin!” And if Dad would get real mad, she'd start screaming. The same word over and over:

"Cold! Cold! Cold! Cold! Cold! Cold!” until Dad and I wanted to crawl away because she was too bright, and jewels aren't supposed to scream.

Then one day, right after the fourth of July, I decided that I would get Momma some twinkles. But even then, I didn't understand what she really wanted and needed ... even then. Every day on the roadside and every night on the roadside, I'd see the shines and twinkles in the gravel. There were pretty things like Momma liked, right at the roadside, right there. I thought they'd wear her. They could be seen every day and every night; why didn't my body get them? The moon liked them, the sun liked them, I liked them, and Momma would like them. Going outside that day, I told Momma that I wouldn't go far and lied a little because lizards and boys shouldn't play by the road. But I had to.

The sun wore me and made my old, once-white, now fever-yellow undershirt stick to my back. Barefoot on the cooking strip of jet road, I scurried off into the gravel while cars zoomed by. Gravel was cooler but meaner. I tiptoed to there! And there! Where I found an emerald! A ruby! A sapphire! A diamond! I caught them as quickly as I could, and they made my hands itch like chigger bites. Before long, I had a bunch and Momma would like them all. Cars were zooming, my feet were angry, my hands were itchy and wet, and sweat was coming out of my head. That's enough, I thought, and began to stand up, when there—running from the house—was Momma, running to me!

"Momma!” I called. “You ruined it. My surprise.” She stopped three feet in front of me and put her hands to her faceted face; she had lapis lazuli eyes and sapphire swirls smeared around them that dripped down her face and onto garnet lips. I held my hands up to show her the precious things, and I was holding on tight because I didn't want to lose any and because they were small. And my hands were soaking wet, and ruby-red drops and sticky strings were running between my fingers and onto my toes, so I thought maybe I was dropping rubies at first. Momma's garnet lips opened, and words as sharp as diamonds came out:

"No! No! No! Nooo! Nooo! Nooo! Nooo! Noooo! No! No! No! No!” A car stopped, and someone got out. Momma kept screaming the same thing, “Nooo! Nooo! No! No!” I put my wet, full hands around her and tried to cool her down with my half-lizard skin. She hit the big person, who swore and said he'd “call the authorities, you crazy bitch!” Momma had turned to stone, and I had, too, because I was touching her. Then the police came and couldn't understand. And the king reptile came home and found us, as we were at the roadstead, with policemen who wanted Momma to be worn by their bracelets, but she didn't like silver.

"Maybe if they were crystal,” she said. Dad made everything freeze; Momma and I turned to sapphire glaciers. Dad made the policemen go away with negative temperatures, which summer had never seen. Dad got Momma and I to shift back to a silent jewel and a half-lizard boy. We went home.

After I washed my hands and the gems that I'd found, and put the gems away, some doctors gave me stings and strings. The doctors wanted to take my jewels. I screamed and cried ‘til Dad put the roadside jewelry into a baggy and took us home.

Momma left for a while because the reptile man took her somewhere. Sometimes he took me there to see her, and she wasn't very shiny and was always tired. She cried about missing the stars and the moon and the onyx night, the shiny things. At home I had a keeper who fed me while Dad was away. But she wasn't beautiful like Momma, and the sun didn't like her she didn't like the moon, and she wasn't good at dealing with half-lizard boys.

When Momma came home, her lids were lower, she kept busy and slept a lot, and she didn't know very many stories anymore. She didn't want me crawling or scurrying, as was my nature, and she was not as vibrant. Dad said she was better now—safer now—but she was dull and opaque, instead of shiny and twinkly. Why? On another day, she told me that Dad had taken her to a place where they wore away her shiny coating, and she hoped that I'd never have to go there. She was so different. I'd wonder why and cry, and sometimes I'd quietly wake her in the middle of the night—so Dad wouldn't hear—and take her to a window, so that she could remember the stars, and moon, and night, and other shiny things. Momma would smile, but her lips weren't garnet; her eyes weren't lapis lazuli. I kept asking her about the place with emerald insects that didn't bite, and crystal people that didn't lie, and onyx nights that didn't frighten, and sapphire skies that didn't fall ... and topaz dinosaurs—big ones—that didn't yell. She asked me over and over if I would care if she went there. I said I'd be happy and shiny if she was happy and shiny. She told me that she loved me more than brilliant shining anythings, and I said I loved her that way too.

Some time later I found her sleeping on the bathroom floor with a little brown empty in her hand and her favorite water glass all spilled and broken. Her eyes were wide and lapis lazuli, her lips were open and garnet, and her skin was pearly. And even before Dad got home and screamed unlike a reptile and called lots of people over, I knew. I knew she'd gotten to that other place that she loved. And I loved her then and now and was and am happy and shiny because she is happy and shiny—there.

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Two Poems

Sunshine Ison

The Posthumous Voyages

of Christopher Columbus

The mark of a mediocre captain, or a blessed one, is that his journey ends with death. His body fixed in earth, now unshaken by waves. Not so, Columbus.

First, dug up in Valladolid and carted to Seville.

A long haul in the hold to Santo Domingo. Then packed up with the other treasures and sent to Cuba in 1795.

Last, in 1898, turning tail from the Americans and going home to a dwindled Spain, a half-rotted Odysseus arriving to no grand welcome, bones clinking loose from all this wear.

Focal-hand dystonia—a disorder common to factory workers and musicians, whose fingers map a series of motions again and again, until the index, say, loses its ego and can no longer act separately from the thumb. The hand will play its scales, will twist its screws, no matter what. Amidst rat-nibbled biscuits,

Columbus dreams about the seamstress who holds him fast, who even in her sleep stitches the hemispheres together, and he is her needle.

* * * *

And If They Are Not Dead,

They May Be Living Still

In the forest near Chernobyl, men no longer go to hunt.

Left alone, the animals are lethargic, wander indolently like an idle boy in an old aunt's parlor.

They forget their own names.

The doves and swallows did not come back.

Marya Akimova tells her children the same stories her grandmother told her, stories that did not make much sense when she was young.

But her daughters listen without questions, nodding sagely as if these were things they already knew.

She tells them of Baba Yaga, the witch who lived in a house with chicken legs, about boys who were also wolves, and rabbits with brazen eyes like giant copper coins, about magic fish that didn't look like fish, and babies born and abandoned.

At night she climbs into bed and lets down her hair, says aloud to the place beside her where her husband used to lie,

"I don't know, I thought those were tales of olden times, things that were gone and would not return. I said to my grandmother, we are beyond all that. But I don't know.

Maybe we are walking in circles on a long road.

Do you know,” she says,

"men do not even hunt in the forest anymore."

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A Static of Names

Peter Bebergal

"Love is not insects and flora. There is no taxonomy for it.” This was one of the last things Charlotte said to me before she died.

The room was difficult to be in. Charlotte could tolerate very little light, and a humidifier, with its own sickly sort of wheezing, kept the room tropically moist. Normally she did not speak much, but when she did, it was to list my faults, as if in her final moments she wanted to make sure nothing was left unsaid. But on this night, she laid bare the faulty quality of my love. She was not cruel. I did not feel picked on in any way. It was simply Charlotte's way of telling me what she thought I might want to correct should I decide to marry again.

Species. Genus. Family. Order. Each thing assigned a name according to its properties. There is no more elegant way of classifying the world. And Charlotte was right. I saw the duties toward love as layers, each a greater part of the whole. And the greatest of these was this: sitting with your beloved as she wasted away into the nothingness, the phylum making its way back to the kingdom of the void.

I know that Charlotte believed that I saw her as just another precious thing in my specimen cabinets, something to simply understand, to give a name to all its categories. Charlotte, of the species wife, of the genus woman, etc. But she was wrong. At least she was wrong in degree. You can only love something by understanding it, and to understand it, you must know its name. And so I believe, finally, that Charlotte didn't comprehend my love for her.

For almost as long as I can remember, Charlotte was unwell. My most vivid memory of her in those last months is seeing her from a distance, lying in her downy bed, surrounded by great swaths of blankets and mountains of pillows. She would smile at me as I stood just outside her room, the air thick with steam. On the bedside table there was an old radio she kept on with the volume very low. It was mostly static, but there was the faint sound of music struggling to maintain its form. I would bring books to her and sometimes, if she allowed it, I would lie with her. Charlotte's hair was long tendrils of brown curls she let flow around her head. I would tangle my fingers in it as I laid with her, taking clumps of it to my nose and inhaling deeply the strange yet comforting smell; a mix of perfume, camphor, and sickness.

My specimen cataloguing was still keeping me very preoccupied, but I did the best I could to attend to Charlotte. I never knew which day might be her last, and it was as if I was trying to organize my own work as quickly as I could so when the dreadful day came, I would be free to mourn. But this was impossible. Each fern, each seed pod, each beetle, required a careful system of classification: Arthropoda; Hexapoda; Insecta; Pterygota. There was always an infinity of names, each cross-referenced, indexed, and finally sorted into cabinet trays that lined the walls of my study. As much as I hoped this latest project would end before Charlotte did, it didn't come to pass. And so on that tempestuous July evening, I confess that I was thinking more about the nameless dragonfly on my desk than of what was about to come.

On the evening that Charlotte died, a fierce summer storm was only helping to ravage my heart as she took her final labored breaths. I had been reading to her from a child's book of verse, something she loved very much near the end. The simple rhythms and images were a balm to her, the mix of fevers and medication making it hard for her to concentrate on anything too complex. There was not much else I could do except sit by her bed and keep her company, and by extension, keep myself as far away from the unbearable loneliness I knew was imminent. After she had given me what was to be her final lesson on my character in what was left of her voice, then a raspy gurgle, I got up and went to the window. I watched the trees whip around the dark and purple night as I thought of what she said. When I turned back to give my defense, she was unconscious, her body rising and falling, each breath as though it was being driven by the storm. I stood there watching and listening. It was all I could do. And for a moment, in between the terrible inhalations, I thought I could hear something calling to her, calling her name, as if to prepare her place in the beyond, to properly situate her in the invisible order of things and away from me forever.

When it was over, I made all the necessary preparations. There was a small funeral which I expressly asked be done quickly and without much fuss. I managed as well as I could. The sadness was something I could easily name; but I could not pin it down, could not dissect its inner qualities and set it in the proper compartment of my heart. Rather, it fluttered wildly, like a butterfly in the killing jar.

I soon found myself back in my study, examining my specimens, marking them, giving form to their genus, their species—their final and perfect name. But I found myself distracted by a feeling of unease. That sound of Charlotte's name from the aether rang in my head like a small bell.

Then, one night in September as I was eating my dinner, I felt the ominous quiet of the house. I had just finished dessert when my spoon inadvertently tapped against the tea cup with a quiet ting. The sound reverberated in the room. A word flashed in my mind, nonsense at the time, but with perfect clarity. “Zingel.” I said it out loud, quietly, and then even quieter still, until it became a murmured chant. I felt as though I was falling into a sort of hypnosis and a slight panic rose in my chest. I quickly got up from the table and fled the room.

I went outside on the landing and I breathed deep the cool pre-autumn air. The sun was fading at the top of the hill and the reddish light seemed to be bouncing down the street like a child's ball. I felt my panic subside, but the strange word remained lodged in a tiny recess in my mind. I sensed it as though it was alive.

I began to spend more and more time alone with my work. I had a deadline for the museum—a perfect excuse. However, the truth was I dared not stop to mourn. I could not let go, and so believed the less I thought of Charlotte, the less real her death would be. But the ache of it pulsed inside of everything and I could not leave the house, afraid that the very wind would carry her name. Certain things began to remind me of her, things that were inconsequential: the familiar rustling of paper, the flint of a match being struck, the clink of a glass. And I would think for a moment I heard something else in these minute details of the house.

Another night, over dinner, I was again alone at the long table, the quiet of the house started to form into a dense reality all its own. Eventually, unable to stand it any longer and having barely touched my food, I left the room. As I walked down the hall to my study, I became aware of my footsteps on the floor and in my mind, strange words called out, “Crathen. Cruthen. Creethen."

Each day these incidences grew in frequency. One Sunday afternoon I was in the living room reading the newspaper, trying to take a break from my work. My foot was pressed up against a small, round, padded ottoman. It slipped under my foot and moved a few inches across the wood floor with a slight squeak. Involuntarily I yelled out, “Phwist!” That same evening while washing my hands, the sounds of the water, something I'd rarely taken notice of before, boomed in my head, “Shister! Slaster! Floost! Floust!"

* * * *

About a month from the evening of my first outburst, I was in my study looking at some plant specimens that Charlotte had pressed for me. She had often helped me as she had a peculiar gift for preserving the plants so that they appeared still imbued with life. It was impossible to look at them and not think of her. I felt a terrible anxiety. I was always neat and organized, but the room appeared as if someone had been looking for something in haste. Papers were strewn about, books open on chairs and the floor. As I looked at the ephemera of my work, I realized I hadn't seen any of my colleagues in some time. There used to be many visitors, even in the final days of Charlotte's life. My work was always consuming, yet I considered myself a genial man. But now I felt the weight of my isolation and what seemed a private voluntary exile from my known world.

An intense déjà vu came over me and I felt again the immense and living quiet of the house. A chill ran through me and I began to think of all the strange words that were haunting me. I began to jot down some of the words in a notebook. No longer merely echoes in my head, I saw them as real things that could be noted, made record of. Looking at them in this way, they almost seemed to tremble on the page, as if filled with some animate force. They reminded me of something so familiar that I needed some distance to recall what it was.

Each of these words I had written down was a designation for something unseen, some invisible property that I normally would never have noticed. Why would I notice them now, unless Charlotte's passing has opened some kind of window to the aether. And then it came to me: the words were names. Names of a type of thing belonging to another class, another kingdom. They were the names of all species of the spirit world, every kind of poltergeist, soul, daemon, angel. There was no known taxonomy for them. They were the invisible specimens of the supernal, and I would make it my new task to classify them.

* * * *

Every moment became a search for these names and I discovered them everywhere. They were in the crackling of a fire or the snap in a flickering of a candle. Creaks within the hinges of doors, and the steam of a boiling tea kettle. Sometimes, on a very cold morning, when the heat from within the house was just so, they groaned out their names in the crystals that formed on the windows. They were in the swirl of fallen leaves during a windy day and in the dial tone of the telephone. It was then I realized that since the moment Charlotte passed away, I had never been alone. A doorway had opened and the rush of the spirit world was falling in and I alone could hear them, and, more importantly, I could hear their names.

* * * *

I wondered where in this hierarchy of names Charlotte's own existed. So I concentrated even harder, trying to hear my wife's name in the press of a floorboard—Skark, the clanging of a radiator pipe—Toong, or even the ticking of the great clock in the hall—Ceekock.

I spent my days wandering the house, listening for sounds I had never been aware of before. When I turned on a light, I noticed the chain of the pull-switch rattled ever so lightly against the base of the lamp, calling out “Dededil.” My pencil sharpener made a small squeak when I turned its blades, saying “Eanther.” The house became a living conduit. Every small and insignificant detail alerted me to the spirits that resided here. I believed that if I could locate Charlotte, hear her name in the din of the mundane, I could locate her in the organization of spirit world and she would never be lost to me. Then I would be free and I could return to my life and the work that I loved. But I became fearful of every sound, afraid of the spirit hiding within and my own powerlessness to scrutinize them. As I formed the proper name of the phantom in my mind, another would soon reveal itself and I would have to keep listening. I did not understand their relationship to each other, to their place in the great taxonomy of the spirit world. But I kept listening, probing, dissecting every noise.

* * * *

December descended upon the house with its damp and its chill. The wind outside was an amplifier of the names of the spirits. One day I dared to enter the emptiness of Charlotte's sick room. There was a window that made a delicate whistle when the wind blew just so—Slewee. I listened again for my beloved, the sound of her name a possibility and a dread. I sat on the bed, her bed, and I closed my eyes and concentrated. I could feel the presence of the inexplicable forms that had invaded my home, but of her I could detect nothing. I began to feel foolish, wondering how much this was in my mind alone. I decided to seal the room up and never return. I had to let her go, and this would be the place to start.

I was getting up to leave when I heard a kind of hissing. I wasn't sure where it was coming from so I listened deeper until I could track its source. It was coming from Charlotte's radio. The radio had been on all this time, all these months; an ambient noise in the crevices of the silence. I was about to turn it off but instead I turned the volume up. A piano concerto, a lovely piece, with a swell of violins in the background, was being broadcast. It was difficult to hear, though, as the radio still did a poor job of receiving a signal. The music faded in and out with a chorus of static as an accompaniment. I decided I would take the radio with me.

I took the radio into my study. Even though I spent much time here, the room was becoming unkempt; dusty, gloomy, and cold.

The wind bumped against the large windows as if to say it didn't need a secret name to make itself known. I plugged in the radio, and, turning it on, found the station came in perfectly. A great wave of relief swept over me and I felt I had awakened from some terrible dream. The music became a barrier between me and all the other sounds of the house. I let it fill me, a perfect thing needing no taxonomy, no name, no classification.

As I listened, I opened a notebook sitting on the desk. I gazed at it and then, as I began to read, I felt dizzy. I was astounded by what I saw. I remembered writing them down, but I had not gone back and looked at the whole of my work. I felt as though I was looking at myself from a distance, seeing an obsessed and lonely man who had gone quite mad. There in the notebook was page after page filled with those terrible names; “Arabal, Astonel, Azmodum ... Berium, Bolion, Burdrial ... Caraton, Cealdon, Crotholon ... Drafton, Duurel, Darshon...” Name after name after name, written in my precise script, each letter like a seal, a banishment. My head was spinning, the music from the radio filling my ears as nonsense, my own illness now a clear fact in my mind.

Charlotte was dead and gone and this had been my dreadful mourning. I was just about to begin tearing the notebook apart, when the radio tuned out, and, for a brief moment, there, in the deepest part of the static, in the place between what is perceived and what is discarded by the mind as mere noise, I heard them. I heard the names and I comprehended them. And then I wept.

For I knew now there was no order to be made. The names were infinite, stretching forever into the endless space between frequencies, between worlds. I knew it was not Charlotte who had let them into our home, but me. I had been desperate to hear the name of my beloved, to finally convince her that I knew her true place in the order of my heart, and had discovered instead that in the ordinary details of our waking, every sound is a tension coiled around a secret name, belonging to no class, no order, no genus, except that of the dead.

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Son of a Bitch

Tsultrim Dorjee

When we sleep together

I hear—voices in the windows boots marching on scrap metal or a lit match in a hand—ful of pills. And the damn phone ringing. There's really nothing left to this town.

And it's every old bench. Where are my pencils? I want to draw you a picture of the back of your head, as you sleep in the arms of another man. Help me lift this box of letters, I'm walking out of these walls and holl—owed clouds into a sound;

that hasn't ended.

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The Fabricant of Marvels

Sarah Micklem

From Anticlimactic Folk Tales of the Isle of Abigomas, collected by Dr. Marcel Auerle

He was renowned in his day, was Zil, the fabricant of marvels. Children would disappear on their way to school in Lynka only to reappear days later in Lyslee hanging by their dirty collars from the fists of truant collectors, all because they wanted to peek at Zil's aviary of mechanical birds through the high barred window of his workshop. One boy came back to school with muddy trousers, claiming that he'd seen Zil sitting on the floor of his workshop crying, with his automata hopping about him just like real birds and pecking and twittering and cocking their heads to look at him through obsidian eyes. Each of his birds was animated by a special chirp. They did not live as long as real birds, for once they wound down, they could not be wound up again, but if you could have afforded to buy one and hold it in your hand you would have felt the beating of a mechanical heart—so rapid it was more of a whirring than a beating—and the little bird would have panted and sung its one song. Zil made birds of silver and of gold, but the costliest automata of all had the bright iridescent plumage of real birds, sold to Zil by hunters from the distant Keenwood, where songbirds could still occasionally be found in those days.

Zil dissected the songbirds with his blunt-tipped fingers and sharp-tipped instruments, but he never could find where their flight was hiding and his birds could not fly. Which may be why the boy saw him crying, but if you'd asked Zil, he could not have told you why he cried, for he'd forgotten. His brow was by then as furrowed as a walnut from peering through and over his spectacles. It seems he'd mislaid his memory—this man who had never mislaid anything, for his workshop was a marvel in itself, every tool of diminishing size from small to exceedingly small in its place of equal size, no larger and no smaller than required, so he could put his hand to anything he needed at once.

First he forgot to eat when he was working, and his wife would have to come into his workshop with fragrant soup to recall him to this necessity. Then he forgot that his wife was his wife, mistaking her for some sort of assistant. She found it irksome that she had to remind him so frequently that they had been married long enough for a white hair to grow all the way down to her waist. Next he began to forget proper names, even the name of his richest patron, who had purchased orchestras of birds for various festivities, with which to adorn cornucopias, carriages, and caryatids (and it was said the birds spied on the rich man's mistresses from perches atop their towering wigs).

Zil went to the slave market to buy a nomenclator to keep by his side at all times, whose duty it was to whisper the names of those Zil met in his left ear—or was it his wife who served as nomenclator? He quite forgot, and soon he had misplaced his nouns as well, so that he could not complete a sentence without assistance, but such assistance was not always at hand, for his wife left him when he failed to remember her name, which may be why the boy saw him sitting on the floor and crying.

Truth be told, Zil's memory was not mislaid, but stolen by a cunning thief. This thief ran off with his wife as well, it was rumored, and as the thief was Time (you will not be surprised to learn), I do believe it.

Although Zil the fabricant is gone, and his marvelous birds are gone, and his workshop was looted by boys and creditors before his last breath had left the room, if you looked for the street in Lyslee that used to be called Jewel Street and is now called Third Street, where all the buildings jut out over the sidewalks face to face like pugnacious brawlers, if you passed the greengrocer with the most perfect pyramids of lemons on a green barrow outside the window and went through the door with one broken hinge and climbed the stairs (none of which are the same height, so watch your feet!), and if you were then to sift the soft grit from the four corners of a dusty room, you might find an exceedingly tiny wrench, a golden gear smaller than the head of a pin, an iridescent blue feather, or an obsidian eye.

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The Juniper Tree

Angela Slatter

It begins with the tree.

Branches reach toward the sky; the tree is quite straight. Its roots, conversely, go deep into the soil and spread out, consolidating their hold on the earth, making their foundation unassailable.

It is the tree that watches over all. It was here before the people and the house, frosted brown and white like a cake; it will remain after they are dust and ashes. It watches and winds its way through their lives in much the same way as its roots wind their way into the soil; it is indelible.

The tree holds many stories, they lie in its trunk like age rings. Its memory is a long thing. Some years it sleeps, some years it wakes and watches and listens. Some years it remembers the lives it has given and tasted and taken...

* * * *

There was a woman, once, young and pale and very lovely. Her husband had thought a young bride ideal for the getting of heirs. A more robust girl would have been better, he knew, but her green eyes and dark hair caught him. There was nothing else for it but to make her his wife and pray there would be children.

* * * *

He loved her dearly; she was frail but this did not stop his efforts to plant his seed. The man spent as much time riding his wife as he did his horse and to far less effect—at least on the horse he travelled, conducting business and growing his fortune. His wife, however, seemed to be a barren field, a bad investment.

The juniper tree stood in the back garden. The wife loved its spreading branches and the whispers it made when breezes sang through its limbs and leaves. Of the many gifts her husband made her, her favourite was the simplest. A swing was hung from the strongest branch and on summer evenings the wife would sit and swing, dangling her delicate feet as she hung suspended above the ground, dress catching the air and fluttering behind her. The tree spoke to her and it was words of love she heard, before her husband collected her and took her once again to bed.

One spring, when her husband was away travelling, she told the juniper tree of her fears and doubts, of the rigours of her marital bed and of a husband who loved her sometimes too much and sometimes not enough. She leaned against the trunk of the tree, its rough bark smooth under her soft skin, its lower branches seeming to stretch and enfold her. She sank to the base of the tree, curled between the roots and slept for some time. In her sleep she dreamt of love without pain, of gentle caresses, of a lover who took time enough to ensure she was wanting and ready.

When she woke, there were small tears in her skirt and she was wet as she had never been with her husband. Confused, she retreated into the house, throwing uncertain glances at the tree.

She did not mention anything to her husband. When he was next inside, her she thought of spreading branches and the touch of bark, and clung to him, rising up to meet him as she never had before. He was surprised but pleased.

The wife began to glow and grow, and it became obvious that her husband had at last sewn fertile seed. They were happy—he would have his longed-for heir and she a respite from his attentions.

The wife grew still.

Her husband was travelling, increasing his fortune so that he would leave a comfortable legacy for his coming child. One night when they lay beside each other the wife said:

"If I should die, bury me beneath the juniper tree."

Her husband, startled by her turn of thought, but certain he would not have to fulfil his vow in the near future, agreed.

The child killed her. The daughter, pale skinned, streaked with her mother's blood, was handed to her father, who held the child tightly and named her Simah. The juniper tree flourished, new blossoms bursting forth, fed by the wife's fertilising form.

* * * *

The man was rich, and loved his little daughter, but he was lonely. A warm bed and an obliging, soft body were the only things on his mind. When Simah was five, he took a new wife.

Second Wife had a child of her own, a daughter not much older than the widower's little girl. Second Wife loved her daughter with all her heart and vowed she would love her stepdaughter just as well. She did try (in her heart she knew she had tried) but every time her husband slighted her daughter in favour of his, it grew a little harder. Each snub was a prick and her heart soon became a pincushion of jealousy. She began to take her hurt out on his child, in tiny ways at first, then in larger, more bruising ones.

Simah understood only that her presence angered her stepmother. She grew quieter, tried to shrink so as not to attract the woman's ire. Without conscious thought she began to dim, to fade, until she was a tiny voice that seldom spoke. She would light up only when her father came home or when she played with her stepsister. On the worst days, she fled to the back garden and hid in the branches of the juniper tree, eating its berries, her face turned to the sun and the wind, taking in for a short while the breath of a place where she was welcome.

Second Wife's girl, Marlechina, was fond of her stepsister, and tried her best to protect Simah from the worst of Second Wife's temper. She watched as her mother grew into someone she did not fully recognise. When Simah entered the room it was as if Second Wife darkened. Marlechina did what she could but, ultimately, she was a little girl, no match for the dark worm that curled inside her mother.

When her father was away, Simah was fed less than Marlechina; her clothes became old and worn in spite of her father's wealth; no new toys became Simah's while Marlechina's collection spilled from her room like a flood.

Simah's father loved her in the casual way men love their daughters, affection without attention. And her father, as fathers are apt to be, was blind when it came to his wife. The domestic sphere troubled him not at all—as long as his belly was sated with tasty foods and his bed was filled with an agreeable softness, he did not worry about what happened in his own house.

On one of his trips, the husband sent gifts home ahead of his arrival. A large box arrived. Inside it, Second Wife found a beautiful necklace for herself, a pretty ring for Marlechina, and for Simah, ribbons and the biggest doll any of them had ever seen. It was almost as big as the little girl and looked enough like her to be a sister, with dark curls and huge blue eyes.

The children held their gifts happily and Second Wife looked, the one to the other. All she saw was the size of Simah's gift compared to that of Marlechina's—she did not weigh up the value or even consider that her husband had thought carefully in order to give his stepdaughter a gift she would treasure. She saw it as yet another snub. As she seethed, her own daughter spoke: “Mother, may I have an apple?"

"Yes, in the trunk over there,” she answered. Simah, glancing shyly over the top of her enormous doll, risked a tentative request.

"Mother, may I also have an apple?"

Second Wife turned on the little girl, a refusal at her lips, then paused and nodded. Simah followed her stepsister to the trunk. The woman shadowed her.

Marlechina drew an apple from the trunk and skipped outside to watch the sun shimmer across the red stones of her ring. Simah leaned into the great trunk to reach one of the rosy red apples lying at its bottom. Second Wife grasped the lid of the trunk with both hands and slammed it closed.

The child's body dropped slowly to the floor outside the trunk, now as still as the giant doll. The woman opened the lid and stared at the child's severed head. Blue eyes reproached her.

Shaking, Second Wife picked up the body and sat it at the table, then plucked the head from the trunk by its dark curls. Using a long purple scarf, she wrapped the neck tightly so the head appeared to be connected. Only a little blood escaped from beneath the silk. Second Wife hid in the parlour to watch what might happen.

Marlechina skipped inside. She looked at Simah so still and pale at the table, her doll lying on the floor beside her.

"Sister, may I play with your doll?” Receiving no reply, Marlechina gently shook her sister, which provoked nothing but a head wobble.

"Sister, I would play with your doll.” Once again, she received no reply and she frowned at her sister's unusual perversity.

"Simah, answer me! I wish to play with your doll!” She reached out and violently shook the little girl's shoulder. This produced a more startling reaction—Simah's head rolled from her shoulders like a pumpkin dislodged from a windowsill.

Marlechina screamed, and her mother, watching from the parlour, charged into the room, demanding to know what had happened. Marlechina wept as she blurted out the story. The mother looked at the sad little body and its severed head and began to weep. Second Wife steeled herself—she was, after all, a woman who had decapitated a child.

"No one must know what you did, Marlechina,” she said. Marlechina shrank, fear and guilt frosting her veins. “Get me the biggest pot in the pantry. I will put this to rights."

Second Wife cooked her stepdaughter; she made a lovely stew, with plenty of vegetables and a thick brown sauce. Some of the meat she kept aside, to hang later in the smokehouse to dry. Marlechina stood beside her mother, weeping. Her tears fell into the pot; the salt of her grief seasoning the dish.

* * * *

When the meat had boiled from Simah's tiny frame, Marlechina took the bones and wrapped them in a cloth. She carried the sad little bundle and the doll to the back garden. She hid them under a thick pile of leaves at the base of the juniper tree, and ran back inside. She did not see the earth move and shift, the doll and the bones sliding into the dirt as if swallowed, taken to a place of safety.

The husband returned, his belly growling as the odour of cooked meat filled his nostrils. Second Wife piled the plate high with tender flesh and he ate ravenously, not noticing that his wife and stepdaughter did not touch the dish, nor that his own child was nowhere in sight. He ate and ate; the more he had the more he wanted and soon the large pot was empty.

When he finally pushed back his plate he looked for Simah.

"Where's my daughter?” he asked, picking slivers of meat from his teeth. Second Wife looked meaningfully at her own child, and he shook his head. “My own daughter."

"She has gone,” said Second Wife, her voice rough. “Gone to visit her mother's sister; she wanted to see her aunt."

The father grunted, disappointed and disapproving that his daughter had left without his permission, though a stronger imperative had begun to take hold. His belly filled with forbidden meat, he now eyed his wife's sweetly curved flesh.

He sent Marlechina to her bed and, almost before she disappeared from the dining room, he was on his wife as if he would eat her, too. Plates and pot were thrown aside as he lodged himself firmly within her. Second Wife thought her happiness complete.

* * * *

The woman grew round.

When her husband was home from his travels, she would draw his hand to her swelling belly and run it over the taut skin. She was kinder to her own daughter, gentle as she watched guilt swim in the child's eyes and dark shadows grow beneath them.

But she did not say, It was me.

She found herself thinking of the dead child as she rubbed her belly, blinking away tears and wishing things had been different.

Marlechina thought of her stepsister often. One morning as she played beneath the juniper tree, she heard the most marvellous song. Looking up, she spied a magnificent bird, plumed red and blue and gold. The bird sang and its notes began to sound like words:

My mother she killed me,

My father he ate me,

My sister she hid me,

Now my bones lie beneath the juniper tree.

A shower of colour fell toward Marlechina. She reached out, grasped the rainbow, and found coloured ribbons in her hand. The silk shone, glowing like gems in the sunlight. She looked up again but the bird was gone, only the ribbons in her fingers and the memory of its words remained.

She knew now that she hadn't killed her sister. She knew now that her mother had done it. And she didn't know what to do. She could only watch.

* * * *

The father, returning from an evening at the tavern, staggered into the yard. From behind the house he heard a song, beautiful and gloriously lonely. He made his way to the back garden and saw a wondrous bird in the juniper tree. It sang him a song like none he'd ever heard:

My mother she killed me,

My father he ate me,

My sister she hid me,

Now my bones lie beneath the juniper tree.

Alas, he didn't understand a single word. When she had finished her serenade, she shook her beautiful head and dropped him something that flashed in the moonlight.

It was a golden chain and it held, banded in wrought gold, a small bone, like that of a child's finger. The man took it to be a religious piece, the finger bone of a saint, a piece of jewelry picked up by the bird in its travels, stolen because it was shiny. He believed in religion, not magic. He hung the gift around his neck and looked up.

She was gone; she had seen his lack of understanding and disappeared.

* * * *

Second Wife, hanging out washing, heard the song. She did not understand the words but it sounded to her like the sonorous ring of funeral bells, and it struck at her heart with its pain and beauty. She thought of her little stepdaughter, of the way her head had rolled from her shoulders, and she felt pierced. Tears came unbidden.

The bird, glorious fair, swooped down and hovered in front of the woman. It drank in her pain and her regret, her loss, and saw the empty place where Simah could have resided had jealousy not taken hold. In the bird's beak appeared a juniper berry. Second Wife held out her hand and caught the berry as it dropped. With a flurry of feathers the bird was gone. The woman put the berry to her lips and swallowed, the bitter-sweet flesh and juice leaving their taste in her mouth long after the morsel was gone and she had returned to the house.

She began to crave the berries daily; they hung on the tree's branches, tantalisingly just out of reach, purple and lush. Second Wife stood, heavy and fecund, at the base of the tree and stared upward. The tree shivered and shook, and a hail of fruit fell upon her. She dropped to her knees and began to devour the berries.

When they were gone and her mouth was rimmed purple with their juice, Second Wife raised her eyes and the tree, sensing she still hungered, shuddered until she was once again showered with berries. This second feast sated her and she curled into the roots at the base of the tree.

The feasting became a ritual; no matter what she had eaten or how much, she craved the berries. In her final months they were all she ate, greedily sucking them into her mouth like a child at the breast, juice dripping from her chin. Gradually her hair began to darken and her eyes lost their blueness, hazing into green. Her skin, once golden, lost its colour even though she sat in the glare of the sun for hours at a time, consuming juniper berries. Her nature, once prone to blazing up, settled to a contented hum.

Marlechina watched her mother from a distance, from the windows of her attic room, fingering the ribbons in her hair, singing quietly.

* * * *

She gave birth beneath the juniper tree. She'd woken in the middle of the night, pains familiar and strangely comforting, rippling across her abdomen. From the garden she could hear—ever so faintly—the song of the bird. She slid from the bed, away from her husband's snoring bulk, and wrapped a shawl about her shoulders. Her feet took her where her mind did not think to go, a movement without thought but necessary none-the-less.

There was no sign of the bird, but the tree welcomed her. She sank to the ground between its roots, and felt the pressure of a child anxious to enter the world. The smell of juniper berries was strong as her waters broke. The child came swiftly.

Marlechina, in her attic room, woke to the sound of bird song. She looked from the window. The white of her mother's nightgown caught her attention and she left her room, swiftly and silently.

Second Wife looked up at her daughter and wept. She lifted the child.

It was the doll. Simah's doll, streaked with blood and birth fluids, still, hard, soulless. Second Wife sobbed.

The bird perched at the top of the tree. In its beak, a juniper berry once again. It dropped the berry into Marlechina's waiting hands. She knelt and gently squeezed the berry between the doll's ever-so-slightly parted lips.

There was a catch of breath; the doll gasped and moved in her mother's arms. Her flesh became malleable, soft and warm as she squirmed, growing rapidly before their eyes.

Marlechina lifted the child, and found her eyes open wide, deep and knowing. Simah's eyes. The child became heavier. Marlechina had to put her down and within minutes the baby was no more. Simah stood before them, naked, and exactly as she had been on the day of her death. Except for the little finger of her left hand, which was missing. The sisters looked at their mother, now almost bloodless, but smiling.

"Take care of your sister, Marlechina.” As the little girls watched, the earth beneath their mother's body opened and drew her down, to rest beneath the juniper tree.

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The Film Column

William Smith

Asako in Ruby Shoes

Dir: E J-young (Je-yong Lee)

Deltamac DVD, Hong Kong, All Region

Note: The Film Column often contains spoilers.

I found this Korean/Japanese co-production by chance in a DVD bin in NYC's Chinatown. This was exactly the right way to discover Asako ... a movie full of playful and quirky synchronicities. The film follows two young, single characters in the parallel cities of Seoul and Tokyo. U-In in Seoul is a low-level worker in a generic city office. He delivers tax forms, tells people—through their mail slots—about new city garbage policies and gets his pinky finger (which has gone mysteriously numb) stapled to walls and shut in doors. Aya, in Tokyo, is practicing breath control as a method of suicide and thinks the international dateline will be a good place to kill herself, since no one will know if she did it “yesterday or today."

These characters walk a delicate line between eccentricity and perversity. Aya drops out of school and—when she doesn't receive enough of a refund to finance her suicide attempt—accepts a job as a webcam fetish model. U-In, stuck in the women's rest room when the men's room is out of order, ends up spending much of his workday there, listening to women pee while they speculate about his life. He also has a lively interest in internet porn (but no credit card!) and we see him awaken surrounded by wadded-up Kleenex, underwear around his ankles. U-in and Aya rise above these indignities, but only through total detachment from their lives.

The one bit of “color” in U-In's day is a punky-looking girl, who works in a baking class at the city center. Her hair—in just about the only example of deliberate individuality shown in the film—is dyed bright red. U-In is obsessed. He takes the girl's photo to renew her town ID, then keeps it for himself. When he finds “WanderWonderland.com"—a remarkably tame webcam site—he selects this red-haired girl as his ideal type and thus discovers Asako in Ruby Shoes.

The two stories in the film are slightly out of time sync (it is only after U-In finds the webcam site that Aya's story leads her to the “modeling agency") but the characters’ fantasy lives are exactly aligned. Posing on a sparsely furnished bluescreen set, wearing a red wig and rhinestone shoes (bought with her suicide fund), Aya becomes Asako. The mundane objects that have helped the characters temporarily escape—a picture postcard of Alaska, a pair of red shoes—combine and create a mythical persona who is strong enough to get them both to act and eventually (and very sweetly) to meet.

When I checked this film on IMDB.com I discovered that the male lead, Jung-Jae Lee has done several of these unlikely romances where the characters are separated by time (Il Mare), memory loss (Over the Rainbow), or other non-traditional obstacles. I don't know if these other films are as charming and sensitive as Asako ... but it definitely seems like a fruitful subgenre of Korean film for fans of quirky western romances like Better off Dead and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

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Two Notes

1. LCRW comes out twice a year. Should you wish a third issue, please send us a check for $500. That issue will be the Your-Name-Here Issue. It will also be numbered for our simpler editors.

2. A new literary award. We believe everyone is special (even those people who don't read—or write for—LCRW, but this award is not for them). Here is the press release: June 2006, Northampton, MA. LCRW and Small Beer announces The Eponymous Award, given to all writers on publication in LCRW of their writing. So, Bob Smith has been awarded the Bob Smith Award for Fiction Writing. Jane Smith has been awarded the Nonfiction Award. D.K. Smith has been awarded the Poetry Award. You get the idea.

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Crimson-lady at the Auction, Buying

Jeannette Westwood

She was my baby sister. I sold her, two years ago, to a friend. I already had seven younger sisters. Seven is enough, and I like seven better than eight.

I also wanted to auction off the next littlest, but the others wouldn't agree, even if I mentioned that we might get a brother. I wanted a brother, a boy to talk to, especially if he wasn't related to me. That would have been best.

This friend I sold my baby sister to at the auction—her name was Lily-white, and she had no sisters. We used to run together, feet slapping on sidewalk. Everyone said we were so fast, so pretty as we ran. When she left, she said that she would love my baby-sister as if she was a real sister.

I think my baby sister's name was Caramel-honey, but I haven't talked to my friend Lily-white for a long while so I can't remember.

When it was my turn at the auction, I stepped onto the platform and cradled my sister and bounced her so that she hiccuped and smiled. The crowd sighed. There was an old man who really wanted her, but my friend Lily-white wanted her more, and the old man finally switched from yelling numbers to yelling curses.

I was relieved; he hadn't seemed like a very nice man, but one of those funny people you sometimes see at auctions. They always end up in jail for something. I think they're called perverts, but I'm not sure. It's not something I can really ask anyone.

* * * *

He was my brother. I might have bought him, or maybe not. I'm not sure, I don't really fix all the details about this.

He was my age, maybe a year older. He had pretty hair, and he liked to run. We raced around the block together, once Lily-white had gone for some other place. He always comes into my life after Lily-white has left, because if he had met Lily-white then he never would have liked me.

A few years after he became my brother I turned sixteen. We were best friends by then. I told him about how boys still remembered Lily-white and wouldn't notice me, even though people had always said how we were so fast, how we were so pretty.

We were together one day. All seven sisters had gone to an auction with someone, I wasn't sure who. We were sitting on the couch, legs sprawled on the coffee table. All I could hear was breathing, his and mine, so loud.

I wondered what kissing was like, sitting next to my brother, alone in the house. I told him this, broke the silence. He laughed. I knew what I wanted to say but I wasn't sure if I really wanted to say it. I forced the words out. My brother agreed, and I practiced. He had done it before, but I hadn't. His lips were soft, and his fingers stroked my neck and face.

My brother and I enjoyed this practice. We did it often. After a long run, after a short sprint, on rooftops, in auctions, everywhere.

Sometimes I wondered what Lily-white was doing, but he was so wonderful that I dismissed her. I didn't even want to buy a second brother.

We loved each other for a while. We lived together above the auction at the cross streets. If we climbed out a window we could twirl and run across rooftops and play kissing games.

* * * *

I was myself, Crimson-lady, that runner-girl, that child whom people said had to grow up oh-so-quickly. Lonely too, with seven sisters, but all so young, so cute. If only, people said, if only something else had happened, if only....

They never finished their sentences, and I never finished them either.

* * * *

She was my sister, and she visited me one day so many years later. Her name really was Caramel-honey, and I wanted nothing to do with her. She was Lily-white—Lily-white, my friend who stole everything from me when I was young.

He was my brother, and he bought me one day. I didn't even know, but he had asked my sisters, so I was sold. He told me that he was afraid I'd leave him, and I told him that I'd never do that. He kissed me then. He didn't know I'd been planning, planning to leave, to look for Lily-white and figure out why she always found love and not me.

I spent nights with him, running, talking, kissing. Every day he said he loved me and I said the same. I hoped that maybe if I said it enough I could make it true.

* * * *

You were one of those many things I bought at the auctions. I told you all this, told you everything, even more than I told my brother. I told you all the possible names of my brother, who I would sell my sisters to, if I could; my theories as to why men stared at me, but not boys.

You hated listening, but pretended you didn't mind and I believed you. When I found out I cursed you and hated you, but again you convinced me, and again I believed you.

You were my love, but I couldn't kiss you. You were just never completely there. For a while I used to visit auctions to see if I could find something that would make you completely here, but there wasn't anything and I gave up, but still loved you.

At night, maybe under a moon and stars, I imagined you as you might have been. I made up a new version of my life, I made up many different versions of my life. Some were dramas, some thrillers, some romances. And others just strange. I like strange, like how I like seven a lot better than eight.

At night, I created new rules for everything.

If love could be eaten, I'd marinate chicken with it, have love and avocado sandwiches, carbonate it and drink it like a soda.

At night, I imagined how Lily-white would transfer her powers to me, and suddenly I'd be just like her except even better. Or I redefined love, redefined how it would be demonstrated and how I would know it was for real.

At night, I made up an ideal person, how I wanted my love to be for real. I saw later that my ideal love was my ideal slave, so caring, so obedient, interested in everything that interested me and so much more.

I told you all this, all this imagining. You laughed, but I still dreamed. My brother would roll over next to me in bed and kiss me, and I would embrace him, pretending it was you.

I came home one day from an auction. I thought my brother was out, so I talked, to myself and to you. I talked about how love was nothing; I had finally thought to look for it at the auctions, but it only came in human containers. Love, I said, was not so wonderful. If I couldn't buy it, it couldn't have much worth.

I said, I wish you were really here. I know you would be my love.

My brother heard all this. My brother owned me, and he, the one who had kissed me and said I love you, didn't love me anymore. I laughed when he stalked out from his room because his anger made all my theories of love reality.

I told my brother this too, and mocked him because I had found out first. I told him I loved you, but that you could never be mine. I told him how I loved to dream of you, how my true love would be.

My brother slapped me, and took me to an auction.

* * * *

I was Crimson-lady, that woman-girl who stood on the auction platform dressed in blood-red silks that streamed in the breeze. I fetched a high price. A young man bought me, staring and mumbling as he took my hand. He said he loved me, had loved me the moment I stepped onto the auction platform. I smiled back at him, but said nothing.

I kissed my brother good-bye. He kissed me back, and I smiled inside because now he thought he loved me again and wished he had never sold me.

I left him then, wondering if my sisters would want to buy me back, and if my buyer would want to sell.

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Zines & Bookesque Objects

For the Clerisy—Good Words for Readers. This zine has been going for years. This issue is Brant's second abcedary. He reads widely and writes about whatever catches his interest—from FHM magazine's Sexiest Women Poll to Oz to Interregional conflict, there's both a lot of good reading and a lot of good direction for future reading. $1?, #67, Letter-sized. c/o Brant Kresovich, PO Box 404, Getzville, NY 14068-0404

Leeking Ink. This is a zines which illustrates what zines can be. Davida looks back at her first ten years of making zines (she's also responsible for the review zine Xerography Debt) and provides a commentary on each of the previous issues. It's a hugely enjoyable issue and it's also great to read a zine that is ongoing even in the face of big life changes. $2, #30, 1/2-letter. Davida Gypsy Grier, PO Box 11064, Baltimore, MD 21212

An Inside Job (Dream Comics). Listening to other people's dreams (like the plural or omniscient voice) can be incredibly boring and unpleasant making the listener (or reader) want to gnaw off an appendage—their's or the teller's. Hob's are different. While there's no sense to some of them, most of the tales here are plotted and have a narrative energy to pull the reader through. Beautiful cover and a lovely range of drawing styles within. $4, #3, 1/2-letter. Graphesthesia, PO Box 40697, San Francisco, CA 94140

Make Something: An Anthology of Portland Zinesters. This was put together a couple of years ago by the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, OR, but I didn't pick it up until recently at International Books in Chapel Hill, NC. (Great little bookshop, worth dropping by to see the handmade zines—and counter-culture zines and just a few blocks from the Cat's Cradle, a good place to see a show.) It's a wide-ranging anthology of writing, comics, and cut'n'paste stuff. $5, 1/2-letter. POB 12409, Portland, OR 97212 or microcosmpublishing.com

Nation Full of Caesers by Scott Creney and The Sad Meal: Poems by DJ Dolack. These two issues of the zine are mini-collections of modern poetry published by the EFAI collection which is based in Brooklyn and Asheville and also distributed by blackocean.org. The first is letter, the second is a beautiful little 1/4-letter book. Poetry is hard to review, so go look at the website below and order a few issues. $6, Eye for an Iris #'s 12+15. eyeforaniris.com

The Giant Squid in Holiday Hijinx. This is an early tip for your 2006 (or, if you read this zine after that date, insert-year-here) Christmas list from the people behind Poor Mojo's Almanac(k). The Giant Squid is Poor Mojo's Dear Aunt Gwenda (among other things) and takes on questions such as: Does Santa exist? Would he burn up in the atmosphere at the speeds he'd have to travel to reach all those kids? Get a copy for any friends with squid or wacky leanings at poormojo.org.

100 Best Scottish Books of All Time. Start your pub arguments early and often with this near-comprehensive listing of novels, plays, poetry and short story collections. In a nice chance, the books are organized alpha by title. Also includes a second hundred books, short bios of the authors, and many break-out reviews by authors of some of the books they most enjoy. This sent by a friend from the Scottish festival in New York City in April—aka Tartan Day—an amazing event which was invented out of whole (plaid) cloth and is growing every year. See if you can get a copy at list.co.uk

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At Uncle Ogden's House

Fred Coppersmith

There is nothing under the stairs. I don't know why you keep making me repeat myself like this. There are no monsters. There are no bodies. There are no secret passages that lead to long-forgotten corners of the house where we have hidden away Uncle Ogden's magic books. There is nothing but a crate of old plumbing supplies, some dog-eared issues of National Geographic, and a faint but lingering smell, which in its distant youth might have been fondly thought of as mildew.

There is nothing in the attic. You know why I can't let you go up there. It isn't safe. You could trip. You could fall. You could swallow unhealthy pink specks of insulation. There is nothing secret up there in the dark. There is no pirate's gold, no treasure map, no magic mirror that, should you gaze into it long enough, will reveal your heart's most true and deep desire. There is just the dust, the dark, and some old tax returns from Uncle Ogden, who you know quite well never worked a day of his life in the circus.

There is nothing out back in the tool shed. There are rusty tools strewn about the floor, that's all. It isn't safe for you to play in there. Besides which, it's cold outside, and you could catch your death. No, not with a net. Uncle Ogden never caught Death with a net. I don't care if that's what he told you. He never kept the Grim Reaper tied up in the tool shed. There wouldn't be enough room. There are no hidden doors, no trolls beneath the floor, no mystic portals leading to another world of strange and secret islands of Uncle Ogden's mad design. There are just the rakes, a shovel, some rusty nails, and a pair of gardening shears that no one can ever seem to pry open.

There is nothing in the basement. You know perfectly well why we keep that door locked. There are no hidden tunnels beneath the house. There is no broken time machine leaning again the furnace. There are just some books stacked in boxes in a corner, an old computer that never worked, and most of all a missing stair that Uncle Ogden never fixed. Your mother would be quite upset if you ran down there and got yourself hurt. There are no ghosts moaning in the basement, and the knock you heard against the door was just the wind.

No, you cannot go to the moon. Now you are just being difficult. Only astronauts can go to the moon. Uncle Ogden was never an astronaut. There is no rocket ship buried beneath the back lawn, and there is no alien plot to keep you locked inside the house all day. I cannot help it that it is cold outside. Your mother promised us you would behave. The moon is made out of rock, not cheese, and it is a hard, dead, gray and lonely place. Is that really where you want to go?

Well I don't care. Uncle Ogden lied when he said he could draw you a map. He's never even been out of town. If you can't play quietly, then maybe you should go do your homework. Algebra isn't going to figure itself out, you know. Anyway, it's almost five o'clock and time for dinner. Once Uncle Ogden finishes building his robot army and chases down the last of the Martian ghosts that got loose last week when the sink exploded, we can all just—

What? Oh, don't look so surprised. You never asked me if there was anything happening in the kitchen.

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A Message from the Welcomer

Michael Emmons

Welcome, wayfarer. We hope you enjoy your stay in our lands. Whether you remain for a few moments or for the rest of your life, to help you adjust to life among our tribe, I have prepared the following guide to our history and customs. Please refer back to it as needed.

* * * *

Many foreigners call my tribe the Bird-Eaters, among other indelicate epithets. We call such foreigners the Fools. Among ourselves, we are simply the tribe, or, since we walk in the day as animals and birds walk in the night, we are the Day.

* * * *

Every member of the Day follows a calling, a compulsion unshakable. Before I became the Welcomer, I was a mountain tamer. I drove a silver-plated sports utility vehicle to the tops of mountains and monoliths to tame their wildness, to render them impotent.

Since my mother's death, my father has worked as a circle artist. He has spent every day of his adult life blindfolded, lying on his side in city squares with a chunk of charcoal in his hand, drawing perfect circles within perfect circles, his arm barely moving, his concentration adamantine. In this way he shows us perfection; he hallows our tribe.

My mother was a raincatcher. When I was seven, a troupe of Fool skeptics came to disparage the exercises she performed to increase her yield of water. She challenged one of them to a contest—the foreigner would stand in a storm with her jug aloft and unmoving, while my mother ran and leapt, smelling the ions in the air, the algae in the rain, thrusting her jeroboam skyward. By the time the Fool had filled her first jug, my mother had begun to fill her fifth.

* * * *

In my tribe we eat every bird we can charm from its daytime sleep, except for ravens. Ravens eat the eyes of other birds. Ravens learn the secrets of the other birds that way, they swallow the memories of flight and squabble written on the undersides. If we ate ravens, we would learn the other birds’ secrets, and they would never forgive us.

* * * *

In our tribe, nothing is more beautiful than the golden coil of a French horn. Nothing is more hideous than a radio tower on a hill, its red cyclopean eye scarring the serenity of the night, undoing its meaning. If the night is meaningless, the Day is irrelevant. And if you are carrying either object with you, keep it out of sight. I would not have my people overcome.

* * * *

My tribe loves some games: footraces, Mumble-dee-peg, Ringolevio, and horseshoes. Our least favorite game is Truth-or-Dare—our secrets are our own. We hate Lite-Brite and soccer. Etch-a-Sketch is an abomination; it is impossible to use it to create a perfect circle. Twister is too important to be played for simple amusement; it should be played only after political debates, to ensure amity between both sides. We are a hands-and-arms, legs-and-feet people.

* * * *

A house is a part of a person's body here, an enormous, immobile skull. The windows are the eyes, the door the mouth. One should never have light shining through the windows, as it suggests rage within the house and within the mind of its owner. And one should never exit the house improperly dressed; it makes a curse of you, it is the ethical equivalent of screaming obscenities into baby carriages. The windsocks that hang from either side of every house are the ears—avoid gossip, for your words will be stored in the tunnels and whorls of your enemies’ windsocks, and later used against you.

* * * *

My people's favorite writer is Mickey Spillane. You call him hard-boiled, we call him zero-gravity. You call him pulp, we call him a burning kite. You call him antiquated, we call him the poetry sung by the soldiers who fight at the world's ending. We consider Shakespeare to be a fine stylist, but he means far too much to you to mean anything to us.

* * * *

My tribe hates the Pacific Ocean more than anything else in the world. We hate it because we know that it is the one thing on earth more powerful than we. Every year we see if it has weakened or aged; we attack it with slingshots and arrows, with bottle rockets and trumpets and screams, and every year it survives the onslaught. We killed the Atlantic Ocean thousands of years ago. Its tide may still ebb and flow, fish may still wheel within its waters, but in every way that matters it is dead. We regret the destruction of its indigenous civilization in the resulting cataclysm, but we hope the distressed will understand it was a necessary act, that the world demands ideas of order, hierarchies of beauty and of strength.

* * * *

Before going into battle, members of my tribe bite the breasts of their fellow warriors, hard enough to draw blood. It reminds those who find such a ritual unpleasant how much worse life is about to get. For those who enjoy it, it reminds them of how sweet life can be, it gives them something to look forward to.

* * * *

He was Alexander of Macedon until he came to the borders of our lands, having previously claimed as his own everything touched by his hands and gaze. It was only after he halted his army, and led them in a long and circuitous path around our territory; after he radioed his pilots, and ordered them not to violate our airspace; after he left nine servile elephants at our gates to apologize for coming as close as he did, that he became Alexander the Great. Prudence was a cherished virtue then.

* * * *

In my tribe, we never sing. Singing is for the birds.

* * * *

We have heard that in other nations, men and women “re-marry,” after their spouses die. Such a practice seems eminently vulgar to us. Marriage is an irrevocable stamp up on the surface of reality; it transcends death, it transcends desire. When one's spouse dies, the world has chosen the pattern one's life is to assume. To accept such a destiny is to accept reality. Why debase yourself? Why revoke the significance of your life in the world's skein?

Our death rituals may frighten the uninitiated; please remain calm. When a member of my tribe dies, her loved ones gather in the deceased's house at night, turn on all the lights, and scream for as loud and for as long as we can. In this way we conceal the sounds and sights of the departed's body being consumed by the animals of the night. The people who keen loudest are often thought afterwards (inaccurately, I believe) to have loved the deceased most. At my mother's keening, I was astounded that someone screamed louder than I: the Fool raincatcher that my mother had defeated, then retrained, after I had welcomed her into our family.

* * * *

My tribe's restaurants are hospitable, our recipes simple: rice, lemongrass, butter, and kale. A scoop of vanilla ice cream nestled between doves. A bowl of Fritos and an erotic puppet show. Pears, and paring knives to peel them.

* * * *

The longer you stay within our lands, the closer the pattern of your dreams will mesh with those of your countrymen. Do not be alarmed if you tell a neighbor that you awoke longing for, say, a pouch of fur in which to succor your children, and they exclaim, “Yes, a pouch! A pouch with tiny nipples, from which my children took sugared milk!"

* * * *

Only Fools think my tribe watches ravens in order to tell the future. We watch ravens to track the movement of the invisible stars.

* * * *

I mentioned at the beginning of this guide that every member of my tribe follows a calling. If your calling has been to wander, friend, answer a new one. I am the Welcomer, and I am called to tell outsiders of my tribe, to welcome you all into the Day.

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Swimming

Veronica Schanoes

1. The House

Today Adam's parents took us on a tour of their house, which is now larger and more ornate than the gaudiest of Oriental temples dreamed up in the fevered imaginations of barely repressed Victorian fantasists. It is for Adam, and now, for both of us.

They take especial pride in the first floor dining room modeled on the courtroom of Louis XIV, the Sun King. There is a second dining room that is the whole of the second floor, simpler and rougher hewn and to my mind all the more cold, majestic, palatial. The tables stretch unto infinity, world without end and each place is marked with its own silver tankard. Leering, screaming demons are carved into the table legs, the backs of the chairs, the wooden rafters among which ravens soar jeering as if they can see into your very soul and are not at all impressed. And lounging on the table, wearing armor spattered with mud and blood, picking their teeth with sharpened slivers of bone and scratching their privates and flicking the dried or viscous secretions they find there at each other, are an infinite number of women, twice as large as I, toughened, leathery flesh spilling out between sections of armor. They are fat and thin, old and young, raven-haired and red-headed. And they are all, every one, glowering at me, glowering and smirking.

Adam has asked me to marry him, and I have said yes, because I love him and I want to spend the rest of my life with him; I want to raise our children together. The only problem is his parents. They are still building this house; they are crazy; they want us to come and live with them.

Adam's mother has the third floor and his father the fourth. Each has a bedroom, a study, a den, a bathroom, a dressing room. On the third floor his mother has a bird room. It is vast, with a brilliant skylight. There are ice floes for the penguins and gum trees for the kookaburras, saltwater for the seagulls and peaches for the peacocks. The air is full of whirring brown wings, the smell of feather mites, and falling feces. They shriek and fight and peck each other until the blood comes. And all the time, Adam's mother and father chatter as though their words are what speed the birds through the air.

I love them. I do not mind their madness. After my own family's distance and isolation from one another I find soothing their unnatural chatter and loopy non sequiturs, their inability to allow a pause in the cosmic monologue they are both eternally engaged in delivering. Their fluttering talk floats through my inherited solitude and becomes a blanket covering me, preventing me from levitating indefinitely and steadily away from all that is human and recognizable.

I stare up and further up, and on this day Adam's parents’ words feel no longer like a blanket warming me but instead like white noise, white water, water running into the sink as I stand trying to fumble under the dishes for the sponge and the water level is rising, the water is rising and drowning out the music on the stereo, the water is rising and the waves are rolling in and I can no longer hear words; all I can see as I stare up is a blur as feathers blend into leaves but up and further up is the ceiling because we are still in the terrible house. It is not a house at all, but a beast, a god, a toad-like Moloch-Baal squatting in the heart of Brooklyn devouring the offerings of labor, love, and material bounty my future in-laws offer up; they offer up their retirement, their sweat and dreams, in an orgy of joy and devotion. And see how it grows, fatter and fatter with each passing year, feeding on human life.

On the fourth floor is Adam's dad's model room, in which they plan each floor. The model is almost the entire size of the room, and leaves us only some inches to stand. Adam tells me what a glorious playhouse this was when he was a child. He thinks he can still fit through it if he crawls. And he does, easy as pie, so to show willing I go in after him. I am little more than halfway when I get stuck in his father's dressing room and no matter how I turn I am wedged in so tightly and painfully, with my arm out one window and my foot resting up in the chimney that I can barely breathe, let alone get out.

As I lie uncomfortably, twisted and all out of proportion, I envision layers of the house falling in upon me. There are voices outside—perhaps Adam whispering words of encouragement but the water is rising and I cannot hear him. I wonder what will happen if I can't get out. Will I be shut in this box forever while the water rises and the waves roll in?

I cannot shed my skin, but I manage to inch off my skirt, which slims me down enough to slither out on my belly like a snake, and then I am out, standing in my underwear, but there is no shame in it. I put my skirt back on and examine the Ferris wheel on top of the model while Adam steadies me.

Years ago, so many years ago that it is long, long ago, though not far away at all, so many years that it is once upon a time, so long ago, and besides, the wench is dead, so many years ago that I have never been sure how old Adam's parents are, whether they grew up in the last century or the one before that, when land in Brooklyn was undeveloped and cheap, they bought some and began building. Perhaps originally their plans were modest, who can say? And who can say when they went mad? They adopted Adam long after they completed the first two stories, and his earliest memories, so he tells me, are of being taught how to hold a hammer, how to use a wrench, how to spread cement for bricks.

I love Adam. But I do not wish to be consumed by that house.

I do not wish to raise my children as little builders, always anchored, dragged down to the sea-bed by some ever-growing weight in Brooklyn, a mass distorting space and time, energy and light. I do not wish to be sucked into this collapsed star, no, not even if it means that I could travel in time, not even if it means I could live forever.

"Of course we're nowhere near ready to finish the roof,” his parents tell me. They speak spontaneously, in unison, in harmony, one voice rising in pitch as the other falls. “But we plan to cap off the building with a Ferris wheel—an old-fashioned one. We keep making offers to the owners of the Wonder Wheel—we've already worked out how to reinforce the walls and foundation to take the weight because the water is rising—they won't sell so far but you never know. We remember when they built the Wonder Wheel. We were teenagers in love and we were already wizened and gray, even bald. We were little kids playing on the beach as the waves rolled in and we were thirty-year-old construction workers, but we were never lost, not for one moment."

I imagine the Wonder Wheel atop this behemoth of a house, turning steadily in wind and rain and sun. It is not an unpleasant idea, but then, out of nowhere, I imagine the wind rising, the sky above Brooklyn darkening, and rain bombs being thrown down onto the borough, and out of the black roaring sea of the sky comes a lightning bolt striking the wheel, crackling around and across the circle, hub and spokes, which turns black and flies into pieces, shooting shrapnel in all directions and the water is rising.

I open my eyes and see that the model Ferris wheel is burnt and smoking and in pieces on the floor.

Adam's mother and father sigh. “Yes,” they say. “Yes, well, that does happen, and more often than you'd think. Adam, go downstairs and fetch the broom, please. We can put this back together tonight after you children leave..."

After we clean up the scorched earth of the model room, we go upstairs to the carnival floor, the floor that Adam's parents are giving to us. There is a room of bumper cars with flashing strobe lights and a disco ball and loud jarring electronic music as cars speed back and forth slamming into the walls and one another and more than once we have to jump out of the way when a garishly colored car heads for us like a battering ram.

Also on that floor is the room with a huge hand-carved carousel in the center whirling around and around as its internal organ howls out Petula Clark's “Downtown.” I wonder whether we could reprogram it to play something else, but doing that would mean going near the clown faces carved on the trunk. I remember my mother taking me to the carousel in Central Park when I was little, and part of the thrill was spinning around so close, but just out of reach of those scary clowns jeering at you and I think that was when I began to understand the pleasure, the eroticism, of being just a bit frightened. But I never had to go within reach of those clowns and I will not go near these, not so close that they could reach out with their wooden tongues and painted mouths and get me, drag me into the carved wood where I would be frozen trapped in a sharp relief of terror forever and ever. And trapped in wood, I would someday burn.

The next room is not quite finished; it's the one they are currently working on; it's the one they have set aside for me, they tell me, and perhaps someday it will make a good nursery, or perhaps a university, an anniversary, an adversary, an anursereversary. It does not yet have a name.

"We're still working on this,” they say. “It's quite tricky, working out how to make these stick together, but well worth the effort, we think you'll agree..."

And I can see that it must be tricky, for instead of bricks and mortar, the walls are built of layer after layer of plastic mannequins, the kind found in shop windows everywhere, from Strawberry's to Macy's. They lie on top of each other, fixed in place by Crazy Glue and their own plastic flesh melted together by a blowtorch. Impossibly smooth and stiff limbs stick out of the walls like swimmers reaching for shore. And this room is not yet finished—a wall and a half remain to be done and cold winds rush in from the open sky outside.

"Plastic repels water,” Adam's parents continue to explain, but I have stopped listening. Plastic does indeed repel water, but when I look closely at the wall I can see tiny drops of water in the corners of the mannequins’ eyes. They look like the eyes of a baby doll I had when I was very young. She was called Tiny Tears. She was small with a head of short black hair, and she had been my mother's before she was mine. Her eyes opened when you picked her up and closed when you put her down. She came with a little plastic bottle that you could fill with water. Then you would fit the tip of the bottle into her little open mouth and nurse her, and then the water would leak out of the tear ducts in her little eyes, and then you would comfort her. Tiny Tears. These weeping mannequins remind me of her, little Tiny Tears, my mother's doll, and my doll, and perhaps someday my daughter's doll.

Later that night I dream about the house.

In my dream, Adam and I and two tiny weeping babies are living in the Wonder Wheel on top of the house, climbing from one car to another whenever we need to move into or out of a room. The babies love it, swinging from one steel bar to the next with the greatest of ease, like little orangutans, but not I, I slip and lose my grip and then my balance and then I plummet, falling down and down and down until I stick. I try to sit up but I can't move, I'm glued down and I only realize where I am when I see Adam's parents lowering a mannequin smeared with Crazy Glue down to me. I try to yell but my mouth doesn't open because it's made of plastic, so I can't prevent them from gluing me into the wall of mannequins. My eyes begin to leak tiny warm tears that roll down my face and my feet and gather into a puddle that swells and I wake up with a sound between a gulp and a sigh as the water is rising and the waves are rolling in.

I watch Adam sleeping next to me until the sky turns from black to royal blue. I realize what I have to do.

I will blow up the house.

Then I lie back down and sleep peacefully through the morning.

* * * *

2. The Plan

It is important not to hurt anybody. I would never hurt Adam's parents, not if my life depended upon it. So I must make sure the house is unoccupied when my fuses reach their ends. I do not want to hurt anybody at all, just the terrible house, only the beast of Brooklyn.

I want to kill the house, but I will not. No. To kill the house, to destroy it completely, that would be too terrible for Adam's parents. Their beloved older child, their life project, the house they began back when they were newlyweds, or young teenagers, or perhaps infants—think how it would hurt them to lose their house completely. All their love, all their work, the luxury of their sweat, and sweet Adam's work as well—no. I can't destroy the house entirely.

I will hurt nobody and I will not destroy the house. All I wish to do is to cripple it a little. Scorch it a bit. Nothing that will not heal. Make the upstairs uninhabitable. Not the downstairs. I do not wish to make Adam's parents homeless—then they would move in with us. I just want to make them unable to house us. Adam and I have friends we can impose upon in the event of an emergency.

I can make an emergency.

So. Not to hurt anybody. Not to destroy the house. This will be easy. I have resources. I can get a small bit of explosive and a timer. Oh yes. That is not difficult at all.

And it will have to happen on our wedding day. During the ceremony. How else can I ensure Adam's parents will not be in the house? Adam and I are staying at the hotel the night before and the night after the wedding. The night before in separate rooms, so that the bride does not see the groom before the wedding. No. The other way round.

Yes. Just a bit of explosive on the top floors. On our wedding day. During the ceremony.

Yes.

* * * *

3. The Wedding

It was easy and slightly disorienting, for I had not expected such—what shall I call it? Enthusiasm? Excitement? Co-operation?—from the house. Poor thing, it is as trapped as I am. But no longer. Soon we will both be free.

I'm afraid I got a little carried away, but only because the house was so happy, so helpful. It wants to end. I can feel it. Yes.

It was easy. I slipped out of the hotel at three in the morning. Nobody saw me go. I was too careful for that. I took the subway, slipped my key into the lock, and let myself in. At first I was very careful, anxious lest I wake Adam's parents, but I soon realized I could clatter up and down the stairs as loudly as I liked. We had formed an alliance, the house and I, and it was taking care of me, enveloping me in silence, taking care to muffle my noise.

I started on the top floors, placing bits of explosive in the jeering mouths of the clowns—I knew that the house would protect me, would not let them get me. I put explosive in the reaching, grasping hands of the mannequins and in each careening drunken bumper car, each one nestling lovingly against my shins, waiting its turn. I left a large chunk of explosive in the center of the model, and then I realized that I'd gone farther than I had planned, that I had not wanted to hurt the lower floors on which the people soon to be my in-laws lived, but there was no going back, the house wanted this, and I could only go on.

On the third floor I held out my cupped hands and the birds flew about me taking bits of explosive in their beaks and brushing me with their wings to say thank you before flying off to place their contributions at the weak places in the walls. On the second floor I approached the dining hall timidly, but the valkyries bounded over, shaking the house with every step for they are large as life and twice as natural. They snatched me up on their shoulders and carried me around cheering “Huzzah, huzzah” and throwing me up in the air again and again until finally I must go, really, I must go now, and they took the last of my explosive and each put some into her tankard and then I really did leave.

I took the train back to the hotel, I was back in bed by five-thirty and no living soul the wiser, except, perhaps, the house.

And the rest of the day has been a flurry of kisses and bridesmaids and white tulle and now, here I am, walking down the aisle, looking at the moist smiles of all my friends and family, thinking of the house in Brooklyn, now only minutes away from freedom, until I see Adam waiting for me, and I feel such a surge of joy and contentment that I think of nothing else.

The justice of the peace first asks Adam to take his vows. We keep catching each other's eyes and trying not to giggle. And then I take my vows, and as I say “I will,” the air is filled with a terrible cracking, a joyful shuddering and we all look up, and the top of the hall has vanished so we are looking up into blue sky.

First come the birds, pinwheeling in reckless gyres, the birds of flight holding up the penguins and ostriches and even a dodo, saying farewell before they rush away in a sudden burst of squawking and crapping. And then the valkyries ride through the air on their motorcycles, waving swords and screaming full-throated battle cries. They blow me brief, loving kisses before revving their motors and howling off into the distant blue.

And finally, finally, the air is filled with falling mannequin parts, plummeting down soft as snow. I do. They are falling all around us. I do. They become true snow as they land, piling up in haphazard drifts and sliding across the floor of the hall. I do. They're already up to my waist I do and I see Adam leaning over I do and he begins to pat the snow together and make a fort or perhaps a house like my great-grandmother used to build on the Lower East Side when she was growing up I do and I understand. He is not angry, and this will be our life together. I do. He will build up and I will knock down. He will put up buildings and I will blow them apart. He will set the wood and I will strike the match. He will make the fort and I will kick it over. He will make a tower of blocks and I will send a plastic truck smashing, flying, rolling, crashing into it. I do. And one day we will change, and he will tear himself to pieces and I will collect his limbs, his torso, his head, his penis, and put him back together again. And we will live in a Ferris wheel, going up and down forever, together and together and together I do I do.

The snow melts, turns to warm saltwater I do which rises just over my head I do I do. Treading water, I turn and see Adam, whom the waves have carried some distance from me. He is bobbing along, looking somewhat confused. I do. I gather my skirts around me and I swim towards him, the warm water carrying me along smoothly. I do. The water is rising, and I am swimming.

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Music I've Been Listening to Lately

Eric Gallant

Destroyer's Rubies is an ecstatic rock record drunk on language. From the off-putting opening lyric ("Dueling cyclones jackknife / They got eyes for your wife and the blood that lives in her heart") it's clear that something strange is afoot. As if to confirm that suspicion, an abrupt tempo shift immediately follows the above lyric, launching us into the song proper. And we're off. Buckle up.

Main Destroyer, Dan Bejar, regularly veers his songs into the realm of the indecipherable ("Gut yourself! / It's a one-man job on the altar of the Beast / To make it legal, Wilhelm's bride goes bulimic at the feast"), but he generally maintains a toehold in reality. Vivid images and scenes flash like shiny lures: “Don't worry about her / She's been known to appreciate the elegance of an empty room / Look, I made you this broom."

Repeated listens reveal an extensive network of connections, with birds of prey, priests, hopeless artists, mythological figures all popping up repeatedly. Then there's all the nods to other bands and songs, from “Losing My Religion” to Led Zeppelin. Poetry types will undoubtedly grin when they hear “100th of a wet, black bough” pop up in a refrain. Who knew Ezra Pound rocked so hard? No surprise that Destroyer has inspired their own wiki for following all the cross-references.

A curious aspect of a collection of songs so overstuffed with words is the regular use of Oktoberfesty la-la-la choruses. Sometimes it feels like a breather between the onslaught of the verses. It also keeps the songs catchy. These aren't folk songs, more invested in the power of the words than in a good tune. No, these are hook-laden rockers with killer melodies that get stuck in your head. You might not think this possible after the first listen, but keep following those lures and you eventually find yourself happily belly-up in Destroyer's rowboat.

* * * *

Brazilian Tropicalia is getting a lot of love these days, with a snazzy new compilation CD out on the Soul Jazz label, an exhibit at the Barbican in London, and a reunion tour from Os Mutantes. Don't be put off if you hear a group of cooler-than-thou hipsters talking about it: it's a bandwagon too joyous to resist. And with music retailers like dustygroove.com selling once hard-to-find albums at normal prices (as opposed to the $30+ on amazon), there's no reason not to dip your toes into some of the great late ‘60s stuff by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Jorge Ben, and others. After all, Veloso and Gil were arrested and exiled for recording this music. The least we can do is listen.

The basic sound of Tropicalia is the collision of Brazilian bossa nova with rock. Throw some wacky Beatlesesque studio experimentation into the mix and something truly special comes into focus. It's smart psychedelic rock that, unlike much of the psychedelia recorded at the time, doesn't sound dated.

My personal favorite at the moment is a 1972 release by Gilberto Gil called Expresso 2222. It was Gil's first studio album following his return from exile in London, and it is possibly the most genuinely happy music ever recorded. Gil's vocals are astounding throughout, singing one moment in a rapid-fire, rhythmic style way down in his low register, before effortlessly exploding into a graceful, soaring falsetto. The song “O Sonho Acabou” actually made me laugh out loud, not an easy thing to accomplish across a language barrier. The excitement in the music is simply irresistible.

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Those Writers

Matthew Lee Bain is twenty-nine autumns old. His avocations include the study of psychology, German (language and culture), and philology. In his free time, he enjoys strength training, viewing avant-garde cinema, and rolling around on the floor while screaming in agony. His vocations include writing fiction and poetry; he is a freelance daydreamer of dark fantasies.

Jenny Benjamin-Smith has had poems published in the New York Quarterly, Poetry Motel, Wisconsin Review, Iowa Woman, Columbia, and Crab Orchard Review. She has poems forthcoming in the South Carolina Review, Chelsea, The Baltimore Review, Hubbub, and Carquinez Poetry Review. She teaches literature to high school students in Milwaukee, Wisc.

Peter Bebergal is the co-author, with Scott Korb, of The Faith Between Us (forthcoming, Bloomsbury), and is an editor at Zeek.net. He lives in Cambridge, Mass.

Gwenda Bond wears an N95 mask while posting about books and writing at her blog, Shaken & Stirred (gwendabond.typepad.com).

Fred Coppersmith finds it difficult to write about himself in the third person. He writes stories, and sometimes things that aren't stories—and sometimes, late at night, things that are caught in some weird place in between. As luck would have it, he lives in New York.

Becca De La Rosa lives in Ireland and is studying English at university. She refuses to apologise for this. Her fiction has appeared most recently at Strange Horizons.

Tsultrim Dorjee lives in Southern New Hampshire where he is a student at Vermont College. He received his Tibetan name from Lama Pema Wangdak, and works as a crisis line operator for a peer support center. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Awakenings Review, Puckerbrush Review, Sacred Journey and Red Owl.

Michael Emmons was born and raised in Missoula, MT, where he now lives. In 2004 he graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in English. This is his first published story.

Erik Gallant lives in Northampton, MA.

Sunshine Ison works in Mexico, is writing a book on beauty pageants, and next year will be working in Vietnam.

A 2003 Clarion graduate, Will McIntosh has sold stories to Interzone, Futurismic, Abyss & Apex, Albedo One, and Challenging Destiny. By day, he's a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University.

Sarah Micklem published her first novel, Firethorn, in 2004. She is currently working on the sequel, Wildfire (Scribner., 2007). She lives in New York and Indiana, where she teaches at Notre Dame University. “The Fabricant of Marvels” is part of a series of folk tales from the nonexistent island, Abigomas.

Famous Novelist is working on his umpteenth Great American Sleep Device. His “story” here was written in 1972 and is published in an attempt to pull in more readers and to pay for his coffee this week.

Stephanie Parent is a recent graduate of Franklin & Marshall College, where she majored in English and Women's Studies. She is working as a piano teacher in Baltimore and on a young adult novel. She hopes to attend graduate school in England soon.

Scot Peacock is a senior editor in the academic reference field. His works of weird romance, published in such journals as The Suburbanite and Pluto's Orchard, are few and far between. A novel about a ghost and his mother will remain unfinished for years.

Veronica Schanoes is a writer and scholar whose work has previously appeared on Endicott Studio, and in Jabberwocky, Trunk Stories, and LCRW. Her poem “The Room” was recently published by Papaveria Press. She does not like cats.

Ma-tsu and John Schoffstall were out for a walk, when they saw some wild geese flying past.

"What are they?” asked Ma-tsu.

"They're wild geese,” said John.

"Where are they going?” demanded Ma-tsu.

John replied, “They've already flown away."

Suddenly Ma-tsu grabbed John by the nose and twisted it so that John cried out in pain. “How,” he shouted, “could they ever have flown away?"

"Well,” said John, “a bird's wing is arched, so that air takes longer to pass over the top than the bottom. Through the Bernoulli principle, this creates lift, enabling flight. Muscular activity provides forward thrust. Birds’ bodies also have a number of specializations for flight, including hollow bones that decrease their weight relative to other vertebrates, and a streamlined shape. Birds in flight will rapidly out-distance individuals on the ground, eventually disappearing from their view behind trees or other landscape features. Thus, the birds were able to fly away."

"You're never going to achieve enlightenment, are you?” Ma-tsu asked.

"I just think birds are cool,” John replied. “I'm hungry. C'mon, let's get lunch."

David J. Schwartz lives with a guitar named June in Chicago. Cyberdavidjschwartz lives at snurri.blogspot.com, but is moody. His stories and poems live in The Third Alternative, Say ... Talebones, and Strange Horizons, previous issues of this publication, and others. Han kan norsk, men ikke saa bra.

Angela Slatter is a Masters in Creative Writing student at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. Her flash fiction has appeared on Antipodean SF and she ghost-writes finance articles to help pay the bills. She can often be found pushing papers around a desk at the Creative Writing & Cultural Studies Discipline at QUT, putting her admin-nerd skills to good use.

William Smith makes spanky new books and sells dusty old ones. Find him at trunkstories.com and hangfirebooks.com.

E. Catherine Tobler climbed mountains in her youth, in a bright yellow coat, with shoes that were red, yellow, and blue, and made her feel like a clown. She endured. Writing, she decided, is not that much different. In addition to other markets, her short fiction has appeared in SciFiction, Strange New Worlds, Mota 3, and Would That It Were.

Jeannette Westwood is seventeen years old and has attended the Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers. She likes paper-mache cats. This is her first publication.

Emily Wilson finds stories inspire her and enable her to create more than she could on her own—she loves to collaborate. She believes that with all our powers combined we can fight for justice much more easily, and wear really fun outfits—perhaps matching, in fluorescent colors.

Visit www.lcrw.net for information on additional titles by this and other authors.

Table of Contents

Play

Errant Souls

This Is the Train the Queen Rides On

Two Poems

Diabolique d'amour

In Ophelia's Garden

Followed

Dear Aunt Gwenda:

Threads

A Half-Lizard Boy, A Reptile Man, and An Unjaded, Shiny Something

A Static of Names

Son of a Bitch

The Fabricant of Marvels

The Juniper Tree

The Film Column

Two Notes

Crimson-lady at the Auction, Buying

Zines & Bookesque Objects

At Uncle Ogden's House

A Message from the Welcomer

Swimming

Music I've Been Listening to Lately

Those Writers

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