Author: Editor (Page 54 of 70)

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Suspension

18 November 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Michele Annable

She’s so cold that her teeth smash together, and the wind creeps up her sleeves and pant legs like little ice imps. When she looks down, she sees the pink rosettes of her slippers. It’s a winter’s day. December, she thinks.

Who dressed her this morning? It was one of those women, always pushing her: “Here, take your pills, Joan. Brush your teeth.” That’s what started it, the constant hurrying when she didn’t want to. How simple it was, after all. Just push open the big glass entrance doors and walk right through. No one yelled. No one followed.

It’s very bright in the world outside. She has to hold up her hands to her eyes. The sun hits the salt on the road, shatters into rays of light. On both sides of the street, people are dressed in puffy winter clothes, like big colourful balloons. Everyone looks happy. The trees crackle as their remaining leaves turn in the wind. She wants to keep walking forever, as long as her legs will carry her, but she knows she should get off the road somewhere, to be safe. They will come after her.

A bright red hand floating in mid-air tells her to wait, wait, wait. She sees her small self in the window of a passing car. Face all scrunched up. Her eyes meeting eyes behind the dark glass. Frightened, she crosses the street against the traffic. Cars blare their horns, and she freezes in the middle. She scuttles across the busy road, her slippers sliding, and reaches the other side. The dark park looms ahead. There, only the treetops are brushed with light.

She knows this park. Knows that on the path ahead there is a suspension bridge she has been visiting all her life. As a teenager, shrieking with excitement as her boyfriend shook the cables at one end. He made her bounce and wobble as she tried to balance in the middle. As a young woman, she came with her kids, always so anxious about them. Later, she came with her seniors’ hiking group.

Inside the park and out of breath, she sits at the base of a huge evergreen, her back against the solid trunk. The tree whispers to her. “Where to? Where to now?”

Small knots of people move past her, stare and look away. No wonder. Look at the way she is dressed! They probably think she is a…what’s the word? There’s a word. She can’t get it. It slips away into the darkness of her thoughts like an arrow.

Her mind deserts her now, and she is like the tree, breathing in, breathing out. She has a sharp pain somewhere. Is it her stomach? Or her legs? A crow toes its way across the path, looking at her with one eye and then the other. He’s big and shiny and frightening. Her heart thuds.

“What are you doing here?” he asks in a hoarse voice. Terrified, she stumbles forward onto her hands and knees, then scrambles down the stairs onto the suspension bridge. This is the only way to cross the ravine.

She starts out, heel, toe, heel, toe, hands like claws clutching the cold steel railing. The swaying begins. She can’t catch the rhythm, her steps too slow, too heavy. She grabs the mesh with her frozen hands and gasps. Down below is the river. The rocks. The rushing torrent of water. Should she let go and let herself fall over the edge? Falling through the air, one last moment in the world. Air, water, rocks, body.

Halfway across, she looks back. Then ahead. She is suspended above the cold green river. Her mouth opens to call for help, then clamps shut. They would put her back in that place and she would never get out again. She takes one small step, then another, and she is across. Tears slide down her frozen cheeks.

Under a cluster of trees, she finds a patch of leaves and needles untouched by ice or snow, like a blanket. She sits and stretches her legs. Sees that she has lost her slippers, and that her feet are now purple lumps. She digs them deep into the soft needles, pulls her jacket tighter around her, closes her swollen eyes.

Slowly and almost imperceptibly, she feels vibrations passing into her from the tree, as if it were nurturing her. Bit by bit, her body ceases to matter. She remembers the things of her life that she has forgotten for so long, recalls them fondly as if saying goodbye. Husband, kids, love, sleep, sex, skin, ocean, sand, mountains.

She lies back and gives in to the enfolding warmth.

Michele Annable is a writer and teacher living in West Vancouver. She is an emerging writer with two short stories published in Room and Prairie Journal Online.

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Rain Drop

16 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Mary Padgen Michna

The after rain
waits quietly
in perfect balance
with infinite patience
poised on a pine needle.

It is the one
who holds back
you know
there is one
in every group.

One who saves
the best for last
to bring its balm
to anoint
the unsuspecting traveler.

Mary Padgen Michna always wrote poems. When she grew up, she was more comfortable telling someone else’s story and worked as a journalist. After retiring, her poetry has appeared in Bullets into Bells and the University of Pittsburgh’s online publication. She received an honorable mention in the 2022 Passager Poetry Contest.

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Consider the Dawn

14 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Jayne Martin

For Ellie

A raspberry wave splashing
Onto a blank canvas of possibility
Sunflowers turn their faces to the east
Eager to sip from the rising sun
Knowing nothing of the indigo of sorrow
That weighs upon my heart
Taken much too soon
Your loss still a fresh wound festering
regret for all I could have done
better
I drown in the silence
Force myself to rise and step into the day
It is a gift, this life
Each moment
As fleeting as the flight of fireflies
I will be like the sunflowers
My face to sun following its journey
across a serene sky
One breath in, one out. Repeat
Trusting in the passage of time to heal
Bowing my face to the west where
The sun drops into tomorrow
As I await
The dawn of another day to come

Jayne Martin is the author of “Tender Cuts,” a collection of microfiction and “The Daddy Chronicles-Memoir of a Fatherless Daughter.” She lives in California, but dreams of living in Paris. Visit her at www.jaynemartin-writer.com, Twitter: @Jayne_Martin, Instagram: jayne.martin.writer, TikTok: jaynemartin05

Climbing a Hill in China With My Father

13 November 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Marie Look

I am about to climb a staircase up a hill in southern China with my father. A local has told us the summit is called Xianggong and that it’s the best view in the Guangxi region. It overlooks the Li River and the karst mountains that rise like shark teeth along the banks.

It’s a late November afternoon. There’s only a little time before the last bus back to Guilin and our hotel, but we don’t want to leave this hill unexplored. With naïve optimism, we begin. The stairs are steep, constructed of stone and wood and reinforced with metal. It’s humid, and my shirt sticks to me.

My father was born here sixty-seven years ago, on rural farmland in China. When he was seven, his mother sent him to the United States to live with a relative he had never met. He didn’t make it back to China again for decades, not until he was thirty-three, a little younger than I am now. Today we are both tourists in his native country, where neither of us can interpret the road signs or speak Cantonese with the locals.

The path uphill zigzags, and we can’t see the whole of it from any single vantage point. The level of exertion humbles us.

“Good thing you’re still hitting … the tennis courts … three times a week,” I gasp as we take the next turn.

“This is why you run … all those half marathons … right?” my father replies.

We discuss slipping our camera bags from our shoulders and resting. But we remember the bus, which will come soon and leave with or without us. So we ignore our screaming quads, our hearts beating in our ears, and we press on.

Some fathers and daughters have a favorite pastime they enjoy together. They take up cycling or become cinephiles or shop for vintage records. My father and I travel. We make discoveries, we collect experiences. But this trip is different from the others, in that we seek more than just a sense of place. We’re uncovering parts of ourselves in the local features, in this landscape that has remained unchanged since my father was born—possibly even since the time of his own father or grandfather. Who were they? Who are we? And if a man and his daughter manage to climb a question in the shape of a hill in southern China, what will it prove?

“What was your village called?” I often asked my father this while growing up in Oklahoma. But he couldn’t remember the name. Months would pass and I would ask him again, hoping for a different answer. I had so many questions about his origin story, which I understood to also be my origin story. Did he have siblings? How did my grandparents meet? What was China like? How many relatives still lived there? The details were always sparse. There were no stories handed down, no photos to pass around.

“I think it’s hard for him to talk about,” offered my mother, a Kansan with blue eyes and fair skin. “Or it’s possible he really doesn’t know.”

More discoveries await my father and me on this trip. The ancient city walls of Guangzhou, the hump of Victoria Peak, the stilt houses of the Tai O fishing community. But at present we’re chasing the bird’s-eye view of these limestone mountains, which for millennia have granted the tropical landscape around the Li a quality of otherworldliness.

Earlier, my father and I experienced the valley from the Li itself, aboard one of the ferries meandering southward from Guilin’s Zhejiang Pier to Yangshuo village. We stood on the upper deck, transfixed, as every bend introduced a perspective more compelling and timeless than the last. Fishermen on bamboo rafts. Serene-looking pagodas. Wading deer and buffalo. Over and over, we raised our cameras to capture it all.

Now, as we climb Xianggong, I feel every ounce of what I carry—especially my camera, a digital Canon EOS Rebel my father gave me several Christmases ago when I was still in my twenties. I call it my “big girl camera” because of its heft. It’s an expensive piece of equipment that requires responsibility, and I take good care of it. I know how to hold it, how to store it, how to clean it.

In the ’90s, my family lived in Broken Arrow, in a house on Orlando Street, where my father would empty the contents of a brown, leathery bag onto his and my mother’s bed. Lying on my belly on their floral comforter, I’d watch him clean his own camera and help him organize the lenses, the film canisters, and the various cleaning cloths as he explained apertures and F-stops, ISO and granularity. Negatives could reveal pictures if you used the right chemicals, he told me. I marveled at the system of it all. Photography was a superpower—the power of supersight, of supermemory.

At last, my father and I—chests heaving, legs shaking—lug ourselves and our cameras onto the hill’s highest point. Thoughts of the bus evaporate. The sun at our backs throws the jagged mounds of stone into light and shadow for as far as we can see. White ferry boats dot the river, appearing toylike.

Click. A moment captured.

Click. A memory created.

Click. A question answered.

Then there are no significant words exchanged, no particular actions I expect to recall later. Just an indefinite moment of wonder at the sky above us and the earth below us, and my father and I standing in stillness between the two, catching our breath.

Marie Look is an emerging writer of creative nonfiction and short fiction. As a journalist, she’s contributed interviews, travel articles, and more to regional and national magazines. She studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma and creative writing through UCLA Extension. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles.

Happy 125th Birthday Miss Earhart

11 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Melissa Wold

Oh Pidge, it’s just like flying.
Amelia Earhart (july 24, 1897 – january 5, 1939)

Like Nike, were you fated to fly
from a box off the roof of Grandpa’s shed
into clouds of gossamer sighs?

Did your treetop view of birds in the sky
propel your wings of imagination to spread?
Like Nike, were you fated to fly?

In your Electra sleek and spry
from the ordinariness you fled
into clouds of gossamer sighs.

Your tenacity and daring mystify
those of us who live in fear and dread.
Like Nike, were you fated to fly?

Did you hear the hue and cry?
Your loss left the world bereft; grief bled
into clouds of gossamer sighs.

On an island unknown, bones petrify.
Your story’s end remains unread.
Like Nike, were you fated to fly
into clouds of gossamer sighs?

Melissa Wold is retired from a career in higher education. She writes with a group affiliated with Mobile Botanical Gardens in Mobile, Alabama. She lives with two rat terriers named Rocket and Spark Plug. They refer to her as their live-in help.

lightning bugs

9 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Caroline Randall

at the park, we sit at a picnic table beneath a tree, our faces disappearing in the wane of

daylight. the night is warm with a cooling wind and the scent of distant rain, but we are here,

beneath this tree, discussing the deer across the field and the amount of people still

in the park. we speak of lightning bugs and their absence, and as if summoned,

a single lightning bug glowed, then another, and another until I lost count of their

individual orbs, and i thought,

what kind of magic is this?

that led me beneath this tree?

that brought me to you?

Caroline Randall is a writer and painter living in Louisville, Kentucky. She holds an MFA and a BFA in creative writing from California College of the Arts and Spalding University, respectively. She currently proofs and edits court transcripts for a living.

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Haunted Lake

6 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Sheryl Guterl

Local legend tells
a winter tale:
A southbound stagecoach

took a short cut
across the frozen water,
hit a soft spot, and sank,

taking passengers,
luggage, and horses
to the bottom.

True or not, it’s reason enough
for mapmakers to name
this lake Haunted.

In an early September morning,
cooled night air
meets summer-warmed water.

Cotton-candy puffs
of fog roll over the lake’s surface.
Eerie, vaporized visions of pines,

cabins, docks, and beaches
come and go.
Spirits rise from the waves.

Sheryl Guterl claims these titles: mother, grandmother, former English teacher, former elementary school counselor, wishful poet, Albuquerque Museum Docent, alto, bookworm. Presently, she is cozied in a New Hampshire cabin, surrounded by water, birds, tall pines, and myriad critters. She will travel back to Albuquerque for the cold months.

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My Mother, Feminism, and Barbie

5 November 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Anna Stolley Persky

When I was about five or six-years-old, I asked my mother for Barbie dolls. I also wanted the Barbie Dreamhouse, which had an elevator. My friend had several Barbie dolls and a Ken doll, along with the Dreamhouse, and we would spend hours dressing the dolls and sending them up and down the elevator, only to change their outfits again and send them back up and down the elevator. We had to hide the Barbies and Ken if my friend’s brother approached us because he would pop their heads off, but other than that, I found my Barbie time to be tranquil and wanted to replicate the experience at home.

It was the mid-1970’s, and my mother, who was just returning to work after having three children, was dabbling hard with feminism. Barbies, she said, did not represent our values. Barbie was a bad role model. Her body was unrealistic. Barbie, my mother said, was all about materialism. She cared only about her looks and fashion, maybe Ken.

My mother said she didn’t want me to become materialistic. She refused to buy me any Barbie dolls. I cried. My sister, five years older than me, comforted me, but didn’t relate at all. She had no interest in dolls of any kind, and also hated to dress up, which my mother made us do when we visited her side of the family. Sometimes my mother had the three of us wearing matching dresses embroidered with kittens. We even had matching brown tights.

But at Barbie she drew the line.

I kept asking for Barbie dolls. I longed to be handed a gorgeously attired Barbie with tiny high heels, still in her box, waiting for me to free her and undress her, then dress her again.

One afternoon my mother presented me with a garbage bag filled with naked hand-me-down Barbie dolls, their limbs tangled against each other, their hair knotted and matted.

“Here are your Barbie dolls,” my mother said. She then handed me a sewing kit. “If you want to dress them, you’ll have to learn to make their clothes.”

I didn’t touch them. I gave up on asking for Barbie dolls. I moved on to toys my mother wouldn’t find objectionable. But a simmering anger stayed with me. Even at that age, I knew that while my mother had made her point with dramatic flair, she had done so at my expense.

I grew up, went to college, then started applying to law schools. My mother asked me if I was sure I was smart enough to compete with all the young men in law school, and I remember thinking, ah there’s the mother I know, still one foot in and one foot out of the feminist movement.

After my first semester of law school, I flew from California to stay with my parents in their new house in Maryland. My mother led me on a tour around the house that she had decorated. We came to her study, and a giant glass-fronted cabinet filled with her latest hobby – collecting Barbie dolls. There were some traditional Barbies, dressed in pink or evening gowns, then one with roller skates, a cowgirl, a Barbie in a suit. Several of the dolls in her collection were from the 1970’s, some of them still pristine in their boxes. She’d also bought a tongue-in-cheek black market White Trash Barbie.

“You have to be f***ing kidding me, Mom,” I said, shaking, livid. “F***ing Barbies?”

My mother quickly reprimanded me, as she always did, for cursing. Then she asked me why I was so angry.

“You didn’t let me have Barbies, remember? They aren’t feminist.”

“I don’t remember that,” she said. “Or maybe I do. But that was a long time ago. See, they have career ones now.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I hate your dolls.”

My mother’s face crumpled. At that time, I loved to try and make my mother cry. If I succeeded, I felt happy and then overwhelmed with guilt. She started crying. I apologized, but for years, she couldn’t mention her Barbie collection without igniting in me a seething fury. Maybe she mentioned it to see if I would still get angry, and I responded in a sharp, spiteful way to see if she would still get upset. Maybe we needed to know that we were still connected enough to elicit emotion from each other.

My sister was unfazed by the Barbie collection. She told me in private they were ugly, but she didn’t care what our mother collected. She had plenty of leftover anger from our childhood and failing to meet our mother’s conflicted expectations, but none of them involved dolls.

“You were my real live baby doll,” my sister said to me years after our mother passed away. “Why would I want anything else?”

After about ten years, my mother sold off most of her Barbie collection, doll-by-doll. Each time I visited her, there would be a few less of them in the cabinet.

I inwardly celebrated their quiet disappearance. I said nothing to my mother for fear that my response would somehow change her mind, produce a rebellion against me, convince her to start collecting them again. It wasn’t long after that that I had my own babies, twins, to dress in matching outfits, but by then my mother was too weak to hold them.

Anna Stolley Persky, a lawyer and award-winning journalist, lives in Northern Virginia. She’s pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at George Mason University. Her fiction has been published in Mystery Tribune and The Plentitudes. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Pithead Chapel.

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Dear Anthony

4 November 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Alison Sanders

A week later he was still numb with shock, and as he stood staring at the kitchen floor Anthony searched for signs of her there – a crumb from a bagel she’d toasted, maybe a strand of long, brown hair. He found nothing, and the fridge hummed loudly, and he wondered how long he could go on in this empty house.

He’d stopped crying. He’d turned off his phone, ignored the knocks at the door. He wasn’t hiding, exactly. He’d simply gone silent – bewildered and hurt, like a child slapped by his mother for the first time.

There was movement outside the kitchen window and Anthony saw it was the mail carrier. The young man wore sunglasses and pleated shorts, and he strolled up to the mailbox at the end of the driveway, inserted a tidy handful of envelopes, then continued on to the next house, eyes on the stack of mail in his arms. A car drove past, and the mailman glanced up, gave a small wave. It all seemed so casual, so efficient. So indifferent. Anthony had to look away, back to the kitchen floor. How dare he, he thought. How dare that man deliver mail like it’s any other day? And how dare the person in that car just drive and wave and live their life? How dare the sun shine, how dare the earth spin.

He realized he hadn’t checked the mail since the accident. This was a Thing Which Must Be Done. There were things like that – tasks which took all of his energy, all of his strength, every ounce of willpower he had, but he knew he had to do them. The hardest was walking out of the hospital and leaving her there, knowing that as soon as he left they’d pull a sheet over her face and roll her to the basement. The thought of her alone in the dark made him howl inside. How could he leave her? But he knew he had no choice. He’d stared at his feet, willing them to move, left – right – left – right, down the hall, through the sliding doors, out into the terrifying cruel sunlight. Then there was getting out of bed a few days later. It took hours to convince himself. Hours of staring at the ceiling and willing himself to move. But he did it, eventually. He got up. He rubbed his face, which felt puffy and soft in his hands, and he drank a glass of water. There were just some things, he knew, which still needed to be done.

He stepped out into the soft evening light. In the mailbox he found a small stack of envelopes. He carried them inside and placed them on the kitchen counter, then took a step back for a moment and watched the small pile. What stirred in him was not just exhaustion from having just completed one Thing Which Must Be Done, but also a growing dread. It was the realization that her name might be on some of that mail, and the fear of what would happen in his heart if he had to see that. He couldn’t do it. He stared at the stack and for a moment all he could hear was his own breath, shallow in his throat.

But the envelope on top was addressed only to him. In slanted block letters. After a pause he eased it open. It was a thick card with a watercolor painting of a tree on the front. Inside were handwritten words, in a shaky scrawl which leaned to the right as if blown by a strong wind: “Dear Anthony, We’re so sorry for your loss. May God wrap His loving arms around you. Love, Bill and Connie Matsumoto.” Matsumoto? For a moment his mind was blank. The old folks in the little grey house down the street? He barely knew them, other than casually waving as he drove to and from work. He tried but couldn’t recall the last time he’d said a word to either of the Matsumotos.

But now he pictured them together, wearing their matching sneakers with Velcro tabs, driving to the store, for him. He imagined them shuffling down the card aisle to the SYMPATHY section, choosing a card, for him. He pictured Connie sitting at her kitchen table, with a ballpoint pen gripped in her tiny hand, writing those words. And he pictured Bill – his bald head like a speckled egg – placing the envelope inside their mailbox, raising their little metal flag. For him.

He reread the note, and held that card for a long time, staring at the tree on the front. After a while, emboldened maybe, he flipped through the rest of the envelopes. They were all addressed just to him. And so he opened the next, and the one after that, and in between each he paused, and at some point he found his face wet with tears. He stacked the cards neatly on the counter and placed one hand on top, and in that moment he was overwhelmed with such gratitude he could hardly breathe. This world. It could be so cruel, so vicious, so unfair. And then, suddenly, so kind. So beautiful it could break your heart.

Alison Sanders‘ work has been published in Stanford Magazine and is forthcoming in Seaside Gothic. She lives in Santa Cruz, California and is working on her first novel.

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Sweet Moon

2 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Ursula McCabe

This morning I sliced into a cantaloupe
with ripe musky aromas.
Orange flesh unfolds as I split
the pock marked rind.
Opening up this soft melon
releases an aria of river floating times.

Years ago I rafted down the Salmon River,
an Idaho primitive wilderness area.
We returned home in a panel van
with too many people and a leftover cantaloupe
that had gone uneaten.

Six of us had drifted down the old river
through canyons with 100 foot basalt walls.
Rainbow trout practically
jumped in the boat, pink membrane mouths
puckering up as we slipped barbless hooks
out with our slippery fingers.

After churning rapids tumbled rafts
we warmed ourselves around campfires.
Flickering orange sparks skipped up to the stars,
where a fat round moon looked down.
That moon was as sweet and soft
as the cantaloupe I’m eating right now.

Ursula McCabe lives in Portland Oregon. Poems can be found in Oregon Poetry Association’s Verseweavers Anthology, Piker Press, The Avocet and Academy of the Heart and Mind.