, Author at Post Road Magazine

The Diptera

Douglas Mac Neil

Dear God,

I have thought about writing to you for some time now. The problem I keep coming back to is that you are omniscient. You have read this letter before I have written it. But I think also, that you knew Saint Augustine’s Confessions before he wrote them down, before he made them. In the world of the flesh, sometimes the need of the restless heart overrides the intellect of the brain. Beyond the needs of the heart there exists a place in my mind where I feel that you have been waiting for me to write this letter to you, and it is with this in mind that I do write to you. I have so many questions, but that is not why I am writing to you. You have heard my questions. You have listened to my petitions in my days gone past. As you listen to them in this very moment. And I know that you will hear them in the days that have not yet dawned. And I am so grateful for that.

Today I am sitting here in this Jesuit house by the north Atlantic thinking about you in all I see, in all I hear, in everything I touch, and in everything that touches me. I am here on a spiritual retreat. The entire world is waiting with bated breath for better days in 2021. We are more than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic. The political turmoil within the nation seems to be coming to a breaking point. In it all I am getting older, but I am not sure if I am getting wiser? This January the 17^th will mark the 30^th anniversary of the first Persian Gulf War. To mark this anniversary, I am taking a vow of silence to last from the beginning of the conflict to the end. It is a total of six weeks of silence in the dead of winter in New England, in the midst of a pandemic. God, what am I thinking? Part of this journey in silence and memory has brought me to this retreat. Here is a house transformed in contemplative silence. The voice of Father Bob at Mass is the only human voice that I hear each day.

Seasons of darkness are in full bloom. The ground blanketed in white is resting under the gunmetal skies that flow unceasingly over the earth in this revolution of winter, and I have come to you for help. I knew this day was coming but how it dawned took me by surprise. It is the month of my father’s birth, now passed from this earth. It is the month of my parents wedding anniversary. This year it would have been 57 years, if Dad had not died in March. Mom, trapped in her small apartment in an elderly public housing complex for the poor, marked the absence of the anniversary alone. And in all this season of darkness my mind returns to the war, to my youth, and to the journey in faith that you have witnessed. Arriving to this destination, I am consumed by a poverty of spirit, broken in grief, stricken and trapped in depression, and circling defeat in the self-imposed isolation of silence. And if it ended today, how would I end?

It amazes me, God, how I have been so convinced at various times that I was right, that I was making the right choices, and that I was doing the right thing. Only to later find out that I was so wrong. Wrong in my thoughts, in my ways, and in my choices. It has been 39 days since I have spoken to anyone outside of work. I was going to start my vow of silence on the anniversary day when the war started, but you brought me to silence on January the 12th to coincide with the anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti. As always, you were right. I will never forget the feel of the ground moving under my feet on that day. Nor, will I ever forget the sound as thousands of voices started to cry out to you. If I had not been running out of a building at the time that sound would have frozen me still. The thing is that it not only echoed across the island in that moment, but it continued through the night a chorus of terror, prayers of pleading, screams of grief. Natural destruction unfolding in front of me, around, and under me. Balanced against the designed destruction through the war all of those years ago, and I have not forgotten how you delivered me out of the fires of Kuwait and how you have held me safe ever since. In my thoughts right now, it is occurring all over again. And all I can offer it is the silence of my voice in contrition for the suffering my eyes have seen.

And as we enter into the season of Lent, I think of how Jesus was driven into the desert after hearing your voice, God. Days of temptation and silence repeat. I recall how I lost myself in a desert all those years ago. And now silence is returning to me. In the quiet, I meditate on those desert days in a winter war. I think of the path of Christ and where I have found it and lost it. It is a choice of faith and I have chosen to believe. It is in my belief, in this faith, that I have found the only true comfort that I have ever known. God, I do not know what is right and what is wrong anymore. I fight the doubt that breathes in my chest. Knowing the sideways spin of the world in sin and my hand in it all. I continue to wander this world searching for the redemptive moment, knowing I will never find it. The conflict in the human journey leaves no one untouched. Knocking on the door of the church, God, hear my heart, pity this sinful soul who has been so right and so wrong in so many ways, and please, God, hear my prayers that seek understanding and forgiveness for all these failings of mine.

Last night as I wrote, this fatigue was overtaking me. I made my bed in the Jesuit House. A single bed on a simple frame with a crucified Christ over my head. With ocean waves breaking in the near distance, I found sleep.

God, this morning I watched the sun rise over the eastern shores. The play of light and noise in the waking dawn of silence is really something to behold. In the last week, I struggled about coming here. The anxiety of traveling has risen, and I can’t suppress it. I thought about the quote from Hunter S. Thompson: “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” I thought about it when I was driving here, wanting, desperately wanting, to turn around, but I am taking the ride. Sitting this morning in a solarium, I watched the waves move to the shore, noticing some rolling in softly, quietly, and disappearing. I watched others form in the distance, raging towards the coast. The sea rose blue to white with an aqua green crushed between the waters, coming apart at the height. And I think of you, God, in all of this. I see the waves moving in visible motion. The clouds currently in imperceptible motion. The sun rising over the planet spinning around it, time passing, and where am I in it all? I feel like I am perceptually moving in it all. But under and in what direction am I traveling and to what destination? God, am I on the right course? Am I doing the right thing?

Watching the waves in the solarium, as I was eating breakfast today a fly landed on the table directly in front of me. We are far into winter, and I have not seen a fly in sometime. Like many people, I have an aversion to them, with a default reflex to try and swat it and kill it, but not this time. The Diptera stood on the table rubbing its front legs together and then washing them over its head. The visit lasted for all of one to two minutes before he took flight. The faint buzz, the sight of this insect, brought my mind back to Basra. In the marshlands of southern Iraq, we had found them, or rather, the Diptera had found us. I would never have been able to understand the power of this insect without that experience. Thousands upon thousands, likely hundreds of thousands of them, populated and controlled the marshes. At night, if you were brave enough to enter the tent in the red light of war, you could see the ceiling was covered with the Diptera and it was moving. The sound was not a buzzing, not a humming; it was an operated chainsaw with an amplification of madness and soon the sound of fear enveloped me. As they covered the tent, so too did they cover my body. I recall trying to eat one of the MREs, and as I removed a spoonful of food from the package, ten flies were on top of it. I shook the spoon, shook them away, and brought the spoon rapidly to my mouth, but not before two or three of them had returned and landed on the spoon. I ate them. It was unavoidable. At first, I tried not to. I tried to separate them with my tongue and then I tried to spit them out. That effort only made me feel sick. With the next bite, I shooed them away with my other hand, but they returned by the time the spoon made it to my mouth. I placed the food very close to my mouth and tried to cover the food with my hand, but it made no difference. They are on it, crawling on my hand and on the food package, and getting inside of it. I started to eat faster and the next bite the same thing, until I just started chewing and swallowing. Worrying, irrationally that they would lay maggots in my stomach if I did not kill them in my mouth, I started chewing them thoroughly. And God help me, I asked for you to help me in those moments as I ate them, and as I kept on eating them. And I recall how the nausea would lessen with each day. At night, if I could sleep, and we tried, I often woke with them walking across my closed eyelids, crawling into my open mouth. I would wake up spitting them out, slapping my face, screaming, especially when they were crawling on my ears, but it made no difference. Ten seconds later more were landing on my face. We stayed in the marshes for weeks. We stayed until we no longer heard them, until we no longer saw them, till we no longer tasted them. I think now that it was one of the first acts of penance for our part in the war. We consumed the Diptera that fed off of us. It was a special kind of hell in this world, manifest in the burning oilfields of Kuwait and now in the plague-ridden marshes of southern Iraq. The bill of violence was coming due. My body nourished by the tasteless, dehydrated food as my soul filled like an empty shell in blackness that lies beyond description. And this morning, this simple, beautiful creation of yours, God, brought me back to the marshes of Southern Iraq. And I was reminded, and I remembered, and for that I am so grateful.

I am trying to focus on the presence of you in my life, God. It is part of the reason why I am here in this Jesuit house. It is also a search for peace with the past, with the present, with the future. The capacity to focus in silence is difficult. My mind drifts. Until a simple fly brings me back into the heart of madness in the marshes of Iraq, and maybe it is okay. I think that it is okay. I keep rechanneling my thoughts when I go off track, but I fall back. As I think about it all, I see that you were with me in the marshes, as you were with me in Haiti. In all of this I look for you, as I have looked always for you. I see you in ways and places that are only visible to an eye of faith. I recognize the designer in the design. I hear your voice in the voice of man. I see blessings in deliverance, in perseverance, in tests of faith provided from you to me. God, as I close this letter I want to say thank you for not abandoning me in my hours of need. Tonight, I sleep with a less restless heart knowing that you are with me.

Douglas Mac Neil is an ER Nurse Practitioner and Gulf War veteran. This is his first published story.

Actaeon at the Movies

Eric Lundgren

A trenchcoated man staggers toward the marquee. The secondhand coat is only a slightly different hue from his mottled skin, rumpled and creased as parchment. He attends every screening at the revival house.

The same film twice a night, plus the matinee on weekends. Upon arrival, after flashing his monthly pass to the bored teens in the booth, he proceeds down the counter to exchange a few wrinkled dollars for the awaiting tub of buttered popcorn.

He arrives half an hour prior to showtime to avoid encounters. This is part of his arrangement with theatre management, which has deemed him an “unsettling presence.” But they are in no position to turn down the revenue from his monthly pass, paid on his behalf by a trust fund in Greece. Technically, by now, his picture should be enshrined with the other patrons of the theatre along the hallway leading to the art-deco ladies and gents bathroom doors. But if you’d seen him, you’d know why not.

It is a single-screen, neighborhood cinema of the kind that no longer widely exists. Figures from the margins of society take refuge here, while their compatriots stream the latest programs to their home plasmas. Its lobby is lined with period mod furniture and its walls adorned with smoked-glass sconces.

Some nights, it is nearly empty. He doesn’t mind in the least when management schedules a thorny subtitled art film or a bleak documentary. He’s happy to take in these obscurities ten to twenty times with a sparse assortment of film snobs, whose talk tends toward self-congratulation, with gestures and mannerisms that remind him of the philosophers strolling the agora in Athens. On such nights he can spread out.

Despite his best efforts, his chair, isolated in a short accessible row near the back, is always coated in a fine gray dust.

He’s grateful to be far from the screen. Even at his advanced age, his vision remains painfully perfect—unlike the heap of his numb, claylike flesh, assembled into a rough approximation of face and hands outside the trench coat. He can barely feel a thing anymore, but his eyes are two bright orbs, as sharp as they were that day in the forest long, long ago.

It is April in the cold northern city that he inhabits, and while the temperatures have warmed for his evening walk to the cinema, there are still residual traces of snow along the curbs. The residents of his neighborhood walk the streets with a light step, trailing their terriers, their beagles, their hounds and retrievers. The dogs look back at their masters, tongues askew, and strain at leashes to sniff the first signs of new growth, looking slightly crazed.

It is a “dog-friendly” neighborhood, and they are allowed inside more or less everywhere. Not the cinema, however.

Living here, he has developed a preference for winter. The cold gives a certain brittle integrity to his limbs. In the winter months, his back corner of the theatre is pleasingly chilly, and his sartorial choices give no one pause. If the brown nubs of his legs should collapse during the screening, he can massage them discreetly back into place without too much embarrassment.

Cruel April also brings the Hitchcock Festival, an annual tradition that stretches back to the limits of his memory, such as it is, and encompasses several theatres in the city, each playing different highlights from the master’s oeuvre. Some years he gets off relatively easy, if his cinema plays Rope or Shadow of a Doubt.

But this year it is a double feature of his two most feared films, Rear Window and Vertigo. He has been dreading them since the schedule was first announced, and for the past month, during previews, has been reminded of them twice every night, three times on weekends. Even the trailers can cost him a finger or two, which he must fish out of the bed of his buttered popcorn and reaffix to his hand.

This could be almost as bad as the Rita Hayworth retrospective. Don’t even ask.

The children on the street take furtive glances at him as he passes, tentatively, teeth gritted, toward the cinema in the lilac-scented evening.

He is not alone in the cinema—that is to say, alone among the mortals. The popcorn sellers, the moviegoers who come in, hand in hand or solo, for a nostalgic evening of immersion under the silver screen, are all a part of the temporal world where 7:00 PM or 9:40 PM are significant numbers to keep in mind. Likewise $8, the cost of a ticket (up to $12 for the Hitchcock Festival), and $6 the cost of a large popcorn. In the mortal world, these numbers must add up to a sufficient number to keep the theatre in operation.

The theatre has kept its prices low. He can only hope that the theatre’s financial mismanagement and strange scheduling choices will lead to it being condemned and shuttered. Now that a bronze plaque affirming the theatre’s historic status has been affixed to the side of the building, it seems unlikely. But he still dreams of release.

He and the others who share his condition.

For the usher is always waiting there when he arrives. She was captured well in Edward Hopper’s painting New York, 1939. Her downcast elegance and symmetrical beauty just starting to pale, very much in line with the surrounding décor of the cinema, she stands on the threshold, back to the screen, handing out programs.

No one seems to see her as they come in. Perhaps to mortal eyes she is nothing more than a rack, an inert container holding programs. No one thanks her for the program she places in their hands, nor responds when she tells them to “enjoy the show.”

He spoke to her once. He asked her quite bluntly what she had done in her past life to bring her to this place and fate. She stiffened immediately in her pressed maroon uniform, raised her eyebrows in alarm, sure signs that he had violated protocol. They would both likely be punished for this, but he had to know.

“I don’t remember anymore,” she whispered after a long pause. “But I think I was a cruel person who excluded others. That is why I am always outside, with my back turned to the show.”

He reached to touch her hand. Numb as he was, he could still sense the coldness of her skin. Behind her, the screen trembled with ghostly whiteness.

His existence is not all bleakness and repetition. There are the hours, after all, when the cinema is closed, and nothing is showing. At these times he obtains a sort of freedom.

He has tried to skip the screenings—this is also something he is technically allowed to do, although when he steps outside, a light breeze blows him in the direction of the cinema, and his much-reconstructed body finds it hard to resist. It has been years now since he last tried to avoid the cinema, and when he does, his circumstances turn against him in a vague but thorough way. His pipes clog, his mattress begins to sag, birds fly in through the open window, roaches scuttle across the floors of his studio apartment, the landlord starts knocking angrily at his door, etc.

For a while he even audited a few extension classes at the city’s university. He took a course called “Classical Backgrounds,” intended mainly for retirees, so he could revisit some of the old scenes and characters. Memory lane. The professor, himself retired, who looked quite at ease in his slim-cut blazer, bounced past the chalkboard in his jeans and New Balance sneakers and expostulated:

“Think of Sisyphus, even! There’s that moment when he’s pushed the stone up the hill and it rolls back down yet again. You think he doesn’t draw that out a bit, stop to savor the moment?” And the professor mimed a man at ease, strolling down the hill to retrieve the stone, but mainly enjoying the hillside, the sun, the grass, the sheer aliveness.

He fit in well with the retirees. A couple people even asked him to join their book club. But he declined. He had conflicts.

What he does now in his free time is, he follows his nature. He hunts. Goodwill, Salvation Army, St. Vincent de Paul, Half Price Books. Being on a fixed income he must mind his budget. But every day he brings home little adornments for his studio apartment a few blocks from the cinema. He finds worn paperbacks on film history and theory on the clearance shelves.

He found a nice reading chair of pink velvet for $5. A lamp. He is on the lookout for a new trench coat but these are not frequently available in his size. Sometimes in the afternoons, he puts on 45 rpm records of 1940s popular tunes and dances around his room imagining that the usher is dancing with him. He sometimes dresses up as if for a party, but the scratches and fuzz of the records remind him it’s a party for which he is decades late.

From the film books he picks up an occasional useful scrap: Hitchcock, for example, used the green hotel neon in Vertigo because green light had been used on the British stage to signal the appearance of a ghost.

He doesn’t bring his penis to the cinema anymore. It’s always the first part to detach, and it is more of a distraction than anything. He doesn’t need it to process the buttered popcorn and small complimentary plastic cups of water the theatre provides to sustain him. He keeps his penis in a small glass display case on the windowsill, where it gestures grayly toward the light outside in a state of semi-erection. He spritzes it with water every few days.

If you were to ask him how many times he has seen Rear Window, he would say “about 300,” but this comes with a caveat—he has seen the first half hour of Rear Window about 300 times. He has read about the remainder of the film, the mystery that unfolds in the stage-set apartment courtyard backdrop, but this is not something he can experience firsthand in any way, much less “watch.”

The way Grace Kelly descends out of the darkness, pure goddess, with almost no warning. No matter how many times he sees it, he is never prepared for it. Her slow motion descent to kiss the hobbled Jimmy Stewart in his wheelchair detonates him, though sometimes a stray eyeball can still focus sufficiently to watch her circle the room, turning on three floor lamps in succession while reciting her name, “Lisa . . . Carol . . . Fremont.”

But that is all. At this point, one of his eyes is fixed on the ceiling of the theatre, which features a large trompe l’oeil rendering of the muses, and Apollo, and the skull of Zeus disgorging Athena, and other defining moments in the pre-history of cinema: these early movie theater designers were so grandiose! They’ve got little winged Mercurys up there, and cherubs strumming lyres, just throwing everything together haphazardly!

His other eyeball, unfortunately, has rolled several rows forward and now rests at the dirty heel of a young woman in flip-flop sandals who is flexing her foot in a repetitive motion which tenses the slim curves of her calf.

His “reconstitution procedure” involves a visualization of his own body sitting comfortably in his cinema chair. The work is intensive and slow. He must fill the stained and spattered trench coat gradually with the parts of his body that have gone astray. When the stitch job is complete, he recalls the eyeballs with an intense concentration that exhausts his will. Rolls them back up over his knotted legs, over each fold in the trench coat, up the ruts in his neck until they settle back into the dry sockets.

It is a shame because as cinema heroes go, he relates quite strongly to L.B. Jeffries, as played by Jimmy Stewart, the hobbled war photographer who must expend his voyeuristic energies on his neighbors while recovering from injuries received in the field.

Even Ovid had to admit: “But if you look closely, you will find that it was the fault of chance and not wickedness. What wickedness was there in error?”

But then at the conclusion of his tale, the exiled poet hedges his bets.

“The debate is undecided: to some the punishment is more violent than just, merely for seeing the face of a goddess, while others approve it and call it fitting because of her strict vow of virginity. Both can make a case.”

If only he had been turned into a tree or something, gnarled branches groaning in the wind.

Vertigo is a different story.

While there are moments throughout the film that cause him to collapse slightly, such as when Kim Novak wakes in her bathrobe and realizes that “Scottie” Ferguson (again played by the necromancer, Jimmy Stewart) has seen her nude after rescuing her from the water under the Golden Gate Bridge, the pivotal moment does not come until late in the film.

When Kim Novak reemerges, after being painstakingly reconstructed from the painfully Midwestern Judy by Jimmy Stewart, with the blonde bun, and the gray suit, in the green hotel neon through the window, and the full swell of Bernard Hermann’s score singing out.

The goddess moment.

So for a full two hours he is a more or less normal spectator, allowing the strings of his anticipation to be pulled taut, in the slow gradual and dreamlike build.

The experience of watching Vertigo folds back on itself, so it is impossible to say how many hundreds or thousands of times one has seen it.

He has read that at the end of the film, Kim Novak throws herself from the clock tower in fear, leaving “Scottie” i.e. Stewart trembling with fear on the heights, reprising his unprocessed trauma—one could see the film just beginning again from here.

We could say, with Ovid, that to some the punishment is more violent than just, while others approve it.

This is not to even mention the scene in Muir Woods, one of the most dreamlike in all cinema, where Stewart and Novak descend into deep time, the centuries written in rings on the severed and opened trunk of the sequoias, always green, ever-living. Kim Novak tracing an inch with her finger: Somewhere in here I was born . . . and there I died.

It comes to him at night sometimes, in his narrow studio bed, his punishment redoubled by his own subconscious. And in his bed, upon waking, he must reconstruct himself.

His surprise at seeing a more or less intact, recognizable human face in the mirror, rather than a Picasso assemblage of features jumbled together. The dogs had not really eaten his face, because there was not much meat there. Just scratches, really.

The thing was, he had just been going about his business that day, wiping the blood off his spear with the edge of his tunic as he took an afternoon walk.

The dogs were finishing off the stag that he and his buddies had roasted for lunch, and a few of them were already napping in the shade. Blanche and Wingfoot, always the closest of comrades, were getting comfortable side by side in the grass.

The light filtered through the trees prismatically to touch his skin. He felt warm, abundant, blessed. He followed the light’s spidery suggestions through the forest, going no direction in particular until the laughter of his buddies and the sated grumbles of the dogs feasting on stag guts faded away.

In its place, something sweeter and airier, like lyre strums. The water lapping at the edges of the reservoir, light tipping the little waves as they collapsed on the rocks. The musical, lilting sound of laughter and water splashing.

Nymphs! he thought.

With his hunter’s silent footsteps he crept to the water’s edge and positioned himself behind a large olive tree with trunk splayed at eye level. He saw blonde hair cascading over a creamy shoulder and a toothy giggling smile. Plump white swells of flesh glistening in the clear water.

But as he positioned himself for a better view, he discerned something in the background of the scene: a grotto, which Ovid refers to as “something not man-made,” with an arch-like entrance leading to a dark void in the rocky shore, a precursor of the theatres in which he has spent his long centuries.

It was then that the nymphs dispersed, revealing the naked goddess and her black stare of pure hatred that pierced him across the water, even at this distance. Looking down at his reflection, he saw not the splayed tree trunk but two stag horns jutting from his head at the exact same angle.

Behind him, his friends calling out his name, and closer, the barking of the dogs. It was no surprise to see Dorceus (Quicksight) and Dromus (Racer) at the head of the pack. But it was little Asbolos (Sooty) who took the first bite. Playful, the way they wrestled around the fire when he was a puppy. Until he felt the searing pain and saw the bloody hunk of flesh between Sooty’s teeth.

The eyes that had gazed at him with love and devotion now contained nothing but the black and immortal hatred of Artemis. Sooty grinned with his cute little crooked tooth through mouthfuls of blood.

Perhaps we have overlooked the organist. He takes the stage most evenings to play a few tunes before special events (i.e. the Hitchcock Festival). The organ is installed on a platform that rises out of the stage somewhat magically—a fine reward for those who have made it to the cinema this early. And he is always early. The old man wears red suspenders over a white shirt that seems large for him, that might ripple uncontrollably were it not for the suspenders. His thick glasses and bald pate gleam in the stage lights.

With great enthusiasm, he plays songs that no one recognizes—at best vaguely familiar to some of the older cinemagoers. The songs speak of people and places that have long vanished, and so it is better to let the sounds wash over you with a warm nostalgic glow without working too hard to place them.

He has seen no signs that the organist is in the process of training an apprentice, and it is hard to say who the cinema could find to replace the old man, as he seems to be the only one who knows how to operate the organ’s elaborate system of pedals, knobs, and buttons. If or when the organist dies, the organ will have to stay permanently concealed in the stage on its sunken platform, vibrating slightly with the memory of these old, forgotten songs.

Still, when the organist plays, he allows himself a few moments of happiness, even though he knows what is coming. So maybe the professor was not entirely wrong. He is descending the hill to collect the stone. He crunches his buttery popcorn in his gums and taps the nubs of his feet on the cinema floor, sticky with a residue of spilled soda. He looks over at the usher, her programs ruffling in the breeze from the lobby, her back turned to the spectacle as it always must be—swaying slightly to the music.

The old man turns around at the end of his performance, faces the audience through thick-rimmed glasses, and receives a scattering of applause. Latecomers are still making their way in. The organist stands weakly as the platform descends back into the stage, and when the old man waves goodbye to the crowd, Actaeon always feels he is waving to him.

As the organist descends out of sight, he wonders what the wrinkled hand has touched and what the deep-set eyes have seen. Then the old man is gone, the curtains judder and part, and the lights go down.

Eric Lundgren is the author of the novel The Facades, published by The Overlook Press and named a fiction finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. His work has appeared in Tin House, Boulevard, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Millions. He lives in Minneapolis and works for the University of Minnesota Press.

The Dog Doesn’t Die

L Favicchia

I had nightmares long after Father had drained the marsh, and it was a while before I could hold frogs again, afraid they may try to avenge themselves on me, bubble up through holes in my back, leave me always open. The Suriname toad gives birth this way, burying her young in her own flesh, releasing them through skin that looks like it would forever whistle if she walked through a windy forest in her aftermath, and I was always afraid of that kind of love. But my mother brought him to me, an admirably sized toad, one who had earned his place here but had fled to our grassy yard with the marsh filled and gone.

His face was half mowed away but still sputtering. My mom was too weepy with guilt to fully form words, but she trusted me at ten. I watched the abandoned lawn mower rolling by itself, the vibrations from its own popping motor carrying it slowly forward. I took the toad in my hands, an unexpected puddle, brought it to the garage and placed it in the straw-lined box where the one-legged infant chickadee hadn’t made it through the night—I had buried its soft, motherless body but left the box where it was. The toad tipped over and kicked its legs until I sat it back up, blood-damp hay matted to its missing face. Father’s small, agile hammer lay out in the open on his anvil.

My mother had corralled the mower, and it sputtered for a moment before remaining silent, leaving the front yard half pinstriped. The soggy remnants of marsh were left in limbo, too water-filled to ever cut, a protest against my father who had drained it, expunging many years of myths about drowned surveyors, of moaning slippery elms dropping branches upon wayfarers, of long, low groans and corn knives hidden beneath burial mounds, and many generations of leopard frogs. Sloped and dried, the water was slowly growing back beneath straw and forcibly planted grass that threatened to sink tires. It never wanted to grow there, and most of the seeds resisted germination, though a few were forced into life. I took the frog to the rocks by the black drainage pipe, set it on quartz and steadied my hand—it had no eyes to look at me.

Father was a farrier and spent most of his days making and fitting horseshoes, pounding steel, hammering it into something like a fingernail. It was a family trade—he had been raised to efficiently bend and shape iron with therapeutic effect, but he hated horses and, working with files, hammers, a forge heating steel white, and, of course, large, easily startled animals, he frequently injured himself.

He came home from work that day with a cauliflower thumb blooming in every direction with splintered nail and finger gut. He sat down on the couch complaining of back pain while our dog licked the sweat from his face. He didn’t get stitches. Instead he groaned in the bathroom as he sliced away the ballooned flesh with a dulled pocketknife and shoved the rest back inside, wrapping it hard with gauze to make the cells remember each other. He let the nail turn blood blister and was back at the forge the next day. He took me with him to the barn where I handed him horseshoe nails while he stooped under a large, chestnut mare frothing with sweat, the thumb of his free hand too swollen to pick the slender metal slivers from their small box himself.

He drew his hammer swiftly back toward his eye each time he landed a blow, driving steel into a space as wide as its own margin of error. The horse blinked. Swatted flies with coarse tail and stomped—Father punched its gut and swore, pinched its heel and forced its leg back between his. Told me to hold its head. I swatted flies away from her damp forehead with her long bangs. Tickled her beard, left untrimmed in the off-season. Father always startled everyone with the swiftness of his hammer, how closely and quickly he drew it back to his own face.

Father came home one day with his eye blown wide, iris silvery against scarlet. The pupil in that eye would remain forever dilated disproportionately, as if someone had hooked it and was always gently tugging. The hammer claw left a long scorch on his lower eyelid that singed everything away but a bright, pale lip. From then on his eyelashes grew inward, fine and see-through, but sharp into egg-white flesh.

On the way to an optometrist, Father glanced at me with that one, oblong pupil and I chanced a look back from beneath thick bangs that grew thicker every time my mom cut them, allowing titmouses and blue jays to carry away a little more chestnut to build their nests with. Father slammed on the breaks when the vehicle in front of us lurched and a deer, a large, antlered buck, burst through its rear window and tumbled lifeless, my father said, until it stopped just beneath our scorched brake pads, his trailer jackknifed. Father got out, said stay, and went to the small pea-green car.

Hair, silvered and frizzed, sat in shock at the wheel, over and over saying it’s still in the car, it’s still in the car. Father pulled her out, clammy and broken, and sat her on the gravely shoulder. When he reached back inside past the front seat for her purse, he saw the black hoof and muscular, blood-blown thigh. An ambulance probably came, but I’d only remember so many sunken eyes. That night I dreamed I met a buck in the marsh, staring at me with its many-tiered horns. It hooked the lowest bough around a mossy slippery elm and pulled the spiny antler from his head where it landed in beds of orange pine. He lifted it with his soft, whiskered mouth, extending his neck gently toward me, waiting for my open hand.

I spent the next day rearranging square-cut box nails of varying lengths that had jumped into the wrong drawers, pulling CU 5 slims from size 6 city-heads, and fishing Capewell 4.5 racers from Mustads. Years later my father would ask if I remembered organizing his trailer, saying that was his favorite story to tell his friends, what a good job I did.

Back then, my only companion was my dog, an old shepherd who would follow me around the yard as I placed acorns and leaves in the low crooks of trees. I believed deer would come to eat them and would become ecstatic when I’d return on occasion to find them missing, never suspecting the wind. But I was always careful to avoid the black drainage pipe. We went happily along like this, neither of us allowed beyond the old cow wall, careful never to cross its borders even in the places where rain and time had worn it down so that in one near-accidental step you could cross to the other side.

One day, sometime after the deer dream but vague, like all my memories, my dog and I sat at the base of the small hill I sometimes liked to sled down in the winter. He suddenly began barking at the knoll—an alarming sound from a silent shepherd with no job to fulfill anymore. I ran in time to see it, black-bodied and bull-headed, slinking through fresh grass clippings. It disappeared in a ripple before I could retrieve the blue plastic bucket I used to catch all my living things, but my dog still saw the ghost snake when I couldn´t. I followed as he chased it down to the patch of quartz by the raspberry bushes I was not allowed to pick, because they were dangerously close to the corroded mouth of the black drainage pipe, full to the brim with bees.

My dog let out a rapid series of pained squeals until he fell silent, out of sight from where I stood in the brambles. I threw my small handful of raspberries against the bleeding quartz to drag him to the house. I sat with my mother in the oak kitchen as she spoke softly to me, the loud, fruity wallpaper behind her; cartoon lemons, cherries, small bunches of grapes. But while she was talking and rubbing ointment on my one sting, my mind was still back at the black drainage pipe, crawling through on hands and knees, mud-sleek, until it became dark, until I could no longer feel my limbs, lured by the scent of honey, the mouth of the queen still thick with saliva. I dreamed I could go to where the pipe let out on the other side, of rebirthing myself from its slick black body far beyond the old cow wall, out of sight of the stained quartz.

The next day my father ripped up all the raspberry bushes and paved over their corpsed roots, a place for him to park his trailer. When he was finished and not looking, I surveyed the remains. Everything had been mowed away except for one tender stalk where the old brambles used to give way to the woods. One raspberry with only three small pods still clung to its easily startled stem. I took it to softer ground and buried it whole without understanding that not all things can be coaxed from the ground.

My father had never given me permission to forage through the woods beyond the old cow wall behind our house, but that day he let me so I could see where he buried my dog. He led me over the mossy stones, dried and crumbling flecks of mint green catching on worn corduroys. Stumbling through piles of forgotten leaves, clutching the sparkly pink guts of a hula hoop I brought to decorate his grave, I imagined families of deer ticks crawling up beneath my loose pant leg, over the rim of my sock and down to my warm ankle and blue veins.

Eventually my sneaker, bought floppy to grow into (though I never would), caught on something and gently nudged it up above the leaves—shiny like ivory or a tusk, it was a freshly-shed antler. Turning, seeing what I had found, my father rushed over to pick the antler up by the base—the rough, bony tendrils seemed to reach, like they had not yet forgotten the young velvet forehead they so recently fell from. My father held the antler mockingly to a corner of his forehead, his own receding hairline, at its toothy root. Suddenly no longer fearful of copperheads disguising themselves beneath the rust of displaced water and oranged pine, he ploughed through the leaves hoping to find another. For some reason words wouldn’t come to me, and I couldn’t say I wanted to go home to check my ankles. That antler had been sharp, not yet dulled by tree bark like the pair I encountered years later, still attached to their quivering body.

I’d eventually grown past the days of trying to leave treats for deer in trees, of believing that any good could come from that place anymore where everything else had fled. I’d grown anxious and quiet like my surroundings and drove nervously at night. Driving home one evening, I slowed to a stop as a family of deer crossed the street ahead of me—a mother, two daughters, and a son. They moved leisurely across the pavement but were close to the other side now. Only the large buck still remained in the road.

As I watched, I saw a sudden stream of light moving fast up the other side of the hill. The buck’s thighs and flashing tail were still passing over concrete and onto the grassy shoulder. My hand hovered trembling over my wheel but would not honk, though I would tell my family later that I had. The drunk driver rode fast and blindly and I had taken too long to decide between confrontation or the small, foolish hope that I was wrong, that the driver knew the buck was there and had everything perfectly timed to stop or to just miss.

The driver’s headlight caught the buck’s flank so hard that glass and fluorescent bulb tore away and violently split, flying through the air and hitting my windshield from the other side of the road. The driver kept going, seemingly unaware that anything had even happened, no doubt surprised later in a hungover haze to find his car destroyed, blood and fur matted to what was once his bumper.

Inaction was something else I had learned gradually, as gradually as the marsh gave up its fight. Though still damper than the rest of the property, the toads, frogs, water bugs, and twisting vines never returned. The yard was left instead as a soggy plot of slender, sparse grass next to a long, winding, concrete driveway that ran away from the woods.

After driving a little way, I would eventually decide to turn around, hoping not to find him there, or that he could be helped. Instead I returned to watch him die, larger than I ever thought he’d be, so close I could have touched him—I wanted to touch him, to soothe like a little ointment and a Band-Aid on a single bee sting. This I was right not to do, and it was right that I watch as shock-stricken eyes dulled, the stilling of rippling fur over ribs.

L Favicchia is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas and is the Editor in Chief of LandLocked. Their work has appeared in The Rupture, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Hobart, among others.

The Turn

Christina Craigo

8/22/18

The Turn happened on a Thursday, on October 7, a day when I was concerned about a finance exam, and where I was going to spend my winter break, and whether I could afford to do any of the internships that interested me. It happened to me because of other people’s circumstances, other people’s mistakes. It happened to me.

I opened the door to find Sandy, my housemate’s girlfriend, on the stoop. My own girlfriend, Elizabeth, was at her apartment, trying to study for the same finance exam, despite having one of those horrific colds we all came down with once or twice a semester. Sandy showed up to meet John, and we were making small talk when she got a text saying that a hot water tank had rusted out and flooded the restaurant where he worked. So he was held up. He guessed he’d be back around 7. It was awkward, but also diverting, a little racy, to be just sitting on a cheap couch with this woman whose blouse sort of—I guess it was designed without a lot of buttons or something. Like she’d been forced to choose between prim and hot, and she’d gone with hot. And I couldn’t help looking there, really quickly, but she noticed, and she let me know she’d noticed.

Another text from John: not 7, maybe 8. Maybe she shouldn’t wait for him. But she texted back that she would; she didn’t have anything better to do. Communications major. I thought of excusing myself to get back to my studying, but my papers were spread out on the kitchen table, so I’d have to gather them up to take them in my room, and then I guessed I’d have to shut the door. Maybe I could swing it without being rude, but there was no way I could do it without seeming like a gigantic nerd. And nerd/non-nerd status was something that mattered.

So I poured her a beer, and we talked some more, and somehow her glass got knocked over and broke. We had to clean it up, and her blouse opened even further when she was leaning down like that, and just after we exchanged glances about it, and I got the distinct impression that she’d be able to keep a secret, she noticed I was bleeding. I’d only had one beer, not even, but I felt drunk as she held my hand in both of hers and rushed me to the sink, and I hated—hated—the loss of that drunk feeling when she ran to the bathroom looking for a band-aid. When she got back, as she laughed at what a mess I’d made of myself again, I knew something was happening to me. The gravity of the Turn was apparent, but I had no way of interpreting it.

She rinsed away the blood, and turned the water off, and the smile dropped off her face all in a millisecond, and she raised my hand and lowered her face and kissed the wound. When she looked up again, there was blood on her lips—she didn’t lick it away, just left it there—and the way she trembled as she blotted my hand and opened the band-aid showed we both understood and accepted what was coming. And when she looked up again, of course my hands were in her hair and on her neck; it seemed as if they had to be, and I wondered very briefly if I were carrying the bug that had made Elizabeth so sick, and then there were tears streaming down Sandy’s face for some reason, and I managed to unbutton that blouse.

We didn’t hear John until he was right beside us, screaming, but even then we wanted only to finish, and I actually pushed hard inside her twice while he hit at my back and shoulders and pulled insanely at my hair.

Then Sandy was sitting up on the kitchen table and pulling her clothes around her as if someone in the room had never seen her naked before, and I was still all momentum, with (I knew) a stupid expression on my face, and John was screaming his disbelief that he couldn’t leave his friend and his girlfriend together for one hour and trust them not to debase themselves. I remember my finance textbook falling to the floor—silently, somehow, under his screaming—and a piece of paper following it down, also silently.

Debase. Some days, I miss John nearly as much as I miss Elizabeth.

I had just shifted to wondering if there were any way news of this would not make it back to Elizabeth, when Sandy began screeching at John that she loved me. The first time it came out, so shrill, I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right, but then I was on alert, and by the second time, all my hair was standing on end, for real. That’s a thing that happens. She said she’d loved me for months, and she’d tried to talk herself out of it but couldn’t; we were meant to be together.

I knew that if I opened my mouth, I’d vomit.

When Elizabeth confronted me, the next day, her eyes were red and her face was puffy. She said something like, “So I heard from John that you and Sandy have had a thing all semester. You could have said so. Why did you waste my time? I’m a big girl. You could have said, and spared me this.”

The last thing I heard from her was, more or less, “I’ll admit it is some consolation to know you have feelings for her, and you’re not just a complete dick who cheated on me and fucked his best friend’s girlfriend for no reason whatsoever.” When I think of this, it’s the word “consolation” that tears at me. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say it out loud since.

If I hadn’t been so keen, still, to get back inside Sandy and finish, just finish, that I did so at the earliest opportunity, and if Sandy’s parents hadn’t already scheduled a visit seven days later, maybe I could have found a way to tell all of them that yes, in fact, I was a complete dick, that I’d fucked her, fucked them all really, and myself most of all, for no reason whatsoever. But there I was meeting Sandy’s folks, wearing a goddamn jacket and eating a goddamn steak that I knew someone else would pay for, and loving the way Sandy’s dress fell across her chest in the low light of the restaurant, and I decided I had no idea about anything. I had no idea whether I was a complete dick or not.

Here’s the thing: the possibility of not being a complete dick was very, very appealing. In fact, in those days, not being a complete dick was so attractive that it stood out as the most important aspect of the story.

But. After a year or so, sometime after the wedding, I realized that things hadn’t been right since I was with Elizabeth. I’ve read about people who don’t feel alive, and it’s something like that, but not quite. I’ve been living without her for seven years now, and I know I’m alive, but everything else is off, not quite real. I’ve told myself it’s silly to put stock in an idea like this. Of course things are right, and real. The house, and the city, and the bank—all of it—is how it should be. Are my folks less real than they were when Elizabeth was around? Doesn’t make sense. Nevertheless.

If I’d been studying at Elizabeth’s place that evening, the Turn wouldn’t have happened. My life would be on track today. If the hot water heater hadn’t failed just when it did, if the restaurant owner or the restaurant owner’s landlord hadn’t “deferred maintenance,” I’d be living my real life now, not this alternative life. If the whole thing had happened just a few years earlier, John and Sandy wouldn’t have been able to text. He’d have called the landline in our apartment, and we’d have been reminded that he was a living, breathing human, and not just some abstract, misspelled words on a tiny screen. If Sandy and John had planned to meet at her place, if there had been no beer in our fridge, if Sandy had worn a T-shirt, if I hadn’t washed the dishes earlier in the day and it had been a good sturdy bottle that got knocked over, maybe even if I’d been studying in my room instead of the kitchen when she arrived, I’d be living my real life now. Maybe in some other dimension, I am.

Maybe in that other dimension, I have Elizabeth in my life. I have John. I’m in a real city, not a city near where Sandy happened to have grown up. I have John’s connections—and his Dad’s connections. Which means I have a real job, and I’m not sitting in a damn bank every day, staring at the weird carpet in the weird silence, and the highlight of my days isn’t bowing and scraping before clients who have a net worth of a couple hundred thousand dollars. And I have kids that feel real, and feel like my kids.

Sandy wanted to name our second daughter Maya, and so I looked it up, and found out one of the things it means is something like this feeling I have about my life. The world we see is an illusion. So I agreed, and now every time I say her name I’m reminded. She’s cute; the girl is, believe me, a wonderful kid. It’s too bad she isn’t real.

So I’ve been thinking for months about how to take a second Turn, how to jump from this unreality back to reality. And I’ve done a lot of research, intensive research, and I’ve gotten some expert advice. I’ve trained myself—mentally mostly, but also physically. At night in the basement. And I’m nearly ready. I thought it would be a good idea to document all of this, because if you take the long view, it’s a big deal. Really big.

I wonder what will happen to this notebook? Probably it will stay behind, or disintegrate. I guess we’ll find out.

9/17/18

Well. I had intended to write much more frequently, but I’ve been super busy. People who don’t have a scientific-spiritual practice would probably be shocked by just how much time and effort it requires. I’ve been working with an amazing guru, a teacher, who’s got the most incredible breadth of knowledge. He’s Native American I think, but he’s been all over the world, studying everything from Hinduism and Sufism to Zoroastrianism, and Theosophy and The Fourth Way of course, and he’s distilled all of those teachings and made them his own, set a few things straight that were crooked in the other systems. He has a lot of clients, students, patrons, like me, all over the world. I could put down some of their names, but I’m sworn to secrecy.

He’d surely be a millionaire if he didn’t do so much bartering. Etan prefers not to handle currency. Like, right now, he’s spending a few nights out in my shed. He says the energy is exceptionally good here (maybe for astral travel; he won’t say), and anyway Sandy had started scolding me about all the cash I’d been pulling out of the ATM.

When I met him, he told me he’d been waiting his whole life for me. I asked him how he could be real, here, in the middle of this unreal world, this world that was created as a result of others’ mistakes, how he could have waited for me, and he laughed and laughed. He told me I had much to learn. He’s just incredibly astute and wise. Sometimes he sounds like fucking Yoda. I’m not kidding.

9/19/18

Today, Sandy found Etan in the shed—or rather, she found him shitting out in back of the shed. Thank goodness I was home when it happened. After a very long argument, she calmed down, and despite not understanding anything about my practice or how important Etan is to it, she’s allowing him to stay in the garage for one week, max. That way, he has access to the bathroom through the kitchen. But she dug out the baby monitor and set it up in the girls’ room again, and just now decided that wasn’t good enough; she’ll sleep in there on the floor with them. After failing to talk me into sleeping on the floor. Like I said, I’ve been super busy. I’m exhausted. Sandy just has her job, and you know, making dinner. I’ve got a space-time recalibration on my plate.

Sandy is not a spiritual person. But then, she’s only a thing in a dream I’m having, a dream I need to wake up from. Etan is clear about that; he puts a lot of emphasis on my waking up. He gets it.

9/24/18

Things are coming along. My practice has been developing rapidly, since I’ve had a teacher so close at hand: I’m stronger, more disciplined, more focused. Sometimes I’m so aware of the dreamlike nature of this world I walk through, it seems as if it could all fall away, like one of those big, background paintings in a theater, to reveal the reality behind it. Sometimes, there’s even a twitch at the edges of things, like it’s about to go. I’ve been working with Etan on how exactly to make the shift, and he’s with me, only he says I’m not quite ready to absorb it yet. It’s okay though. I have a couple of weeks. So exciting.

Absorb—I like that.

9/25/18

Sandy relented; Etan can stay in the garage a while longer. No particular end date, and he can use the washer and dryer. She says, “The guy’s a fuck-up, but I’ll hand it to you—he’s an entertaining fuck-up.” I think even Sandy can sense a hint of his extraordinary presence, his wisdom, but she’s uncomfortable saying so. Right. Back to work.

10/7/18

It’s late. It’s almost October 8, in fact. I have a lot to write.

I had planned to be in the basement by 5:30 or 6:00 this evening. I had planned everything. I was going to be meditating, facing east, on the sofa cushion. The couch is the one I had in college, so it’s a pre-Turn sofa cushion. I hadn’t told Etan about the whole plan, or even the importance of the date, because I hadn’t ever told him how Sandy and I got together. I mean, I had asked him about it dozens of times—cause and effect, the sequence of things fitting together, and so forth. But it had been abstract. And he’d been saying, still, that I had much to learn, things like that. Anyway, I’d decided to try this thing—the ReTurn, I’d been calling it—without him. I’d just tell him I was practicing, like any other Sunday evening. I could absorb it, or not. I could always try again next week.

But. Sandy had taken the girls to their grandparents’ house for the day, because she wanted to, I don’t know, get her hair cut or something. And then around noon, she called to ask if I could go and get them. Because she wanted to get a drink with a friend. I said no, of course, but she insisted. She said she couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that—had a drink with a friend—and to be honest, I couldn’t either, and so finally I said yes. I calculated what I’d have to do and when, and called my in-laws to let them know when I’d be there to pick up the girls.

On my way over, I stopped to get the big amethyst cluster I’d ordered from the rock shop on 12^th Street. It was gorgeous, and I could just feel the power rolling off of it. I had them wrap it in bubble, and I put it in the trunk so the girls wouldn’t ask questions. I pulled away from the rock shop five minutes early.

But. When I got to my in-laws’ place, right on time, the girls weren’t ready. They were out back in the creek, for God’s sake. We’re having this Indian summer, and they had their pants rolled up and they were in the water, splashing some neighbor’s dog, instead of there on the porch waiting for me to pull up, like I’d imagined, like decent kids. Like real kids. So I had to put a stop to all that and get them moving, which didn’t make anyone happy. My mother-in-law frowned a lot as I rounded them up and got them into the car.

Then. Once we were on the road, Nora said she was hungry. The grandparents had fed them lunch, but that was hours ago, and they were ready for dinner, and what was for dinner?

I texted Sandy, and she texted back that whatever I wanted to feed them would be fine. The nerve. Give Sandy an inch, and she’ll take a mile. She mentioned some things in the freezer, but of course she didn’t know about the space-time fix I needed to get to. I texted that I’d take them out, and told the girls, and they yelled happily because they thought that meant we were going to Richardson’s.

Richardson’s makes a great burger, and I liked the thought of that. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, because I’d been training intensively, and hadn’t figured food into my timeline for the evening. But Richardson’s would take an hour and a half, maybe even more, on a Sunday. It was the best place in the city to go with a family. And it wasn’t on our way.

So we drove through the golden arches instead. It was so much cheaper than Richardson’s that I ordered more than we needed, and the girls and I stuffed ourselves, so we were burping and droopy when we arrived at the house. I figured I’d clean up all the packaging the next day—if and only if I existed in the same dimension with the car full of McDonald’s cups and wrappers the next day. I parked outside the garage, knowing Etan was living in what used to be my bay, and herded the girls out of the car. I retrieved the amethyst, carefully set it down on the driveway while I closed the trunk, and followed the kids into the house. Since both hands were busy with the amethyst, I pushed the door closed with my foot. The girls veered toward their room, and I made for the basement, to put my time crystal into place and get started.

In the kitchen, I was happily surprised to see that I’d left the door to the basement open. I didn’t have to set the amethyst down; I could just keep going. It was only when I was halfway down the stairs, and I heard a kind of murmuring, that I realized something was up. I came off the last step and turned to see Sandy’s bare back, rising and falling, with a pair of naked legs stretching out underneath her, toward me. On that couch, the cheap, relict couch.

For a—you know—climax, to the story that was “my” “life” after the Turn, it was all very calm. I followed my breath. My stomach hurt a little, and I wished I hadn’t overeaten. I considered throwing or dropping the crystal, but I could feel it radiating energy between my hands, and I felt I had to respect that. I stood there, four or five feet from them, for what seemed like several minutes, considering how I ought to be angry; I ought to be acting like John had acted eight years earlier. But really feeling only curious about what all this was doing to the space-time continuum, and bloated.

I cleared my throat. And at last Sandy stopped moving.

She turned around, and as she did so, I saw past her to the face of the man underneath her. It was Etan, of course. Of course, somehow. Of course. My eyes met his, those deep black eyes, and after a tiny flutter of wondering whether he’d done this on purpose, to liberate me, I understood that he was ashamed.

Then my eyes met Sandy’s, and I saw that she, too, was ashamed.

I found I had nothing to say. I turned and walked back up the stairs, the amethyst’s power billowing in waves behind me. I carried it out to the driveway, and opened the trunk, and put it inside. Off to one side this time, leaving room for a suitcase.

Back in the house, I found Nora and Maya in the kitchen, squabbling over cups and straws. (The angel cup, with its fat pink straw, was the most desirable.) I swung the basement door shut quietly, and asked the girls if they had any homework. They thought this was hysterically funny, and I realized it was possible I’d never once wondered that, or asked them that, before that moment.

Embarrassed, still feeling my breath in my body, I saw them. The slight asymmetry around Nora’s eyes, Maya’s bangs a mess because she’d cut them herself, the pale blue stain circling their mouths because of the nasty candy their grandmother liked to buy for them.

I told them to wash their faces and brush their teeth, and repeated myself until they did. I told them to get into their pajamas, and I helped them agree on a story they’d both like to hear, and I read it to them. I regretted not putting them in the bathtub, but decided not to worry about that. It all felt very natural, and right. I felt grounded. When I tucked them in and kissed them good-night, they smelled good, and seemed drowsy and happy. I told them I’d see them tomorrow—not in the morning, but in the afternoon.

As I switched off the light in their room, Maya sat up and asked, as if it had only just occurred to her, “Where’s Mommy?” I told her Mommy was home, just busy, and she would look in on them soon.

And then I gathered some things from around the house, and I got into my car, which smelled like dirty peanut oil and salt, and I drove away.

Toward my real life.

Christina Craigo, MFA, MBA, was brung up in West-by-God Virginia. The decades since have featured making, exhibiting, and teaching about art; traveling to India with support from the Fulbright Foundation; writing grants for nonprofits; and a sustained involvement with Buddhist teachings and meditation. Her work has appeared in Exposition Review, Hobart, and Eclectica. She’s currently seeking representation for her first novel and developing a second.

The River + Landscape as Interior

Supritha Rajan

The River

It remembers everything.

White tufts the cottonwoods shook free.
Leaves that papered its face with gold
and vermillion eyes and in their afterlife became
wine-red cargo the light
at every depth cycles through.
How a sky of barely moving clouds
each day made legible the history
of its evanescence. Impossible
to lie still with the future’s repeatable knowledge,
for such stillness not to be the condition of
its flight from shadow from sun-glare from
night after night in the panic of privacy
turning from one bank then the other to say
I know you’ll mock me for saying this,
but each day I reach rock bottom.
Impossible to speak and not sound like
something else—the night’s whistle midsummer
or the song a child sings to herself as she strings
purple butterflies. Its real voice resembling the force
of pleasure troubled neither by rocks nor reeds nor driftwood
but its recollection of them—the phantom
body its body here outraces, there in a flush
will release—what rowing across its back we name
current, meaning now a moment foreclosed
of promise, now a moment weighted with promise.
The tempo of regret a cool backwash
of moonlight and asters and marsh marigold eddying
in then out to the sea its muddied mouth refuses
to change into saying my bed armored with smooth stones,
my willow curtains, my shards of blue—the recurring
landscape it knows itself by and so
will not leave. Impossible to contain
a body everywhere entered by light, mint-orange flesh
that daily drinks itself to remember itself
as the body that never once was its own.
Purple and porous, a small sea within the possible
sea, some part already tastes of salt, some part
(even in the rehearsal of not knowing) knows
it will soon be lost to the mouth through which
it enters and exits.

Landscape as Interior

Bird-space. Wingbeats
of October flight.

Autumn’s crisp perfume
barely descending.

There is a lake before me
too thick with algae

to mirror anything.
A vaporous tissue

veils the distance
while a worn music slides

off nature’s varnished instruments.
Slowly, in the slowed

rhythm of even regret, I step
into the mired surface.

Leaves shelve then
reshelve along the banks to form

tomorrow’s wrecked residual.
Under a layer of lily pads and molten leaves

I crouch and hug my knees
like a morose child, attuned

to a low-murmuring acoustic,
my hair flowing up

like blanket weed
as I observe through

squinted eyes
the progress of formless

flow. Mint-green
understand

not only the color
of regret

but also the body’s light
deconstructed and

into further light
decanting.

Supritha Rajan is presently an associate professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her poetry has been awarded Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in such journals as New England Review, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, New American Writing, Bennington Review, Conjunctions (online), Washington Square Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, and elsewhere.

Massachusetts+October

Tawanda Mulalu

Massachusetts

… you too, you said with the breath of my lungs. There is only this bed.
Another one of your hairs appears. I am despite decay, whispers this
thinning abdomen. Quietly, a planet’s plates shift. A haunched forehead
wrinkling my father’s face. And another face behind his neck. I will

grow similarly. Meanwhile, your hair lines here again like another fold
in my bedsheets. Finger it. Pluck. Throw. Another shows. Move on.
Fail to. Relent briefly— and your hairs summon you a little. Disappear
you. Someday, I sweep them off the floorboard. Again not tonight.

Fine then. A glass of water shines there on my desk. Drink this and fill
my throat with dreams. Or space for dreams. Or less cold thirst for
this body to vessel long enough for dreams. To live through rivers. No,
not with these human limbs. But I am a different kind of swimmer,

he says crassly, and wet, hoping your skin will return. Come back. Please,
my throat won’t shape stone into life. I labor to cough while your hairs
thin away. And drink another glass. Attempt more breadths of sleep. Dark
wakings minutes before this new sunlight reminds me where. Disappear

you here again. Consider the naming of this place. Who they took it from.
How we once nearly named each other here. November, I am thankful
for the suffering of other nations. How we grasp at solidarity against your
pale kind. I cannot touch your skin. I can only hope for renewal through

erasure of memory. Practice this here. Read another page to. Wake. Drift.
I need you too, I wish your hairs would whisper. Eventually, my ears
will perch towards other imaginations. Even if the only music outside is
the slower injury of crisping leaves. Their patient reds. Time and its

fidelity. Another person
greeting myself.

October

Your windows are wide with it.
This morning I am skin. Every-
where I migrate I am skin. Your
bed now. I approach a new face

from within you: to not be so
consoled by eugenics but by
your freckles. No, I can’t break
old soil into breath. Your street

blooms red, says the trees are
sleeping. I watch these rottings
of selves, thrown dark through
your mothy curtains, browning

cautious from speckled yellow
to mulch. How dare those leaves,
I age as bare as an African mask.
You could not know that I was

once so painted. That I try break
faith with a rainbow. Or broker
my pores against your nails, our
warm exchanges of hierarchies

of our colors. My favorite is red.
It is too well-suited for what is
beneath me, for what is desired
beneath me by tie-noosed white

foreskins of America: O Mitch
McConnell’s neck, everyone is
beautiful if you try. Please listen:
I will open my mouth for you

if you try. I promise I must try.
But love, this must be our last
whirling dance before the moon
sinks into shore. I remember her.

The blue shirt that smelled of her
that I lost on the airplane. Before
your freckles. Before migrations.
The old library where I first met

her breath, or where I last knew
her face. I don’t remember where
her grave is. Where it is, there must
be two dry seasons without reds.

Must be that orange light against
that loom of purple. Must have
carried her into that sky. And I am
home. With you. Your windows.

Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana. He is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Nearness, winner of The New Delta Review 2020-21 Chapbook Contest judged by Brandon Shimoda. He has served as a Ledecky Fellow for Harvard Magazine and the first Diversity and Inclusion Chair of The Harvard Advocate. His writing has received support from Tin House, Brooklyn Poets, the Community of Writers, and the New York StateSummer Writers Institute. His poems are published or forthcoming in Lana Turner, The Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere. He mains Ken in Street Fighter.