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Life’s a Mystery

25 July 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Ale Malick

My friend and I were on a barge, crossing the wide river, when the deadman’s telephone rung. He shouted spools of embarrassing self-defense into the phone, which was tiny in his chunky, rubbery hands. There was a whole world on the other end of that call which we couldn’t engage with, but to which he had much to say. Us, the people on the barge, were nothing to the great expanse of life that existed out there, somewhere, for him. The barge, packed tight with passengers as it was, meant I could smell his sweat and catch droplets of his spital. But we were not there to him.

Without a pause in his tirade, or even completing a sentence, the man threw his phone with as much power as an aging, obese, wheezing, suited man could do. We all watched it fly, then drop quickly into the muddy swollen swell. It had rained for days, and the river stood higher than it should have done.

I didn’t see him fall. I was still watching the ripples the phone had made. But my friend saw him go, though even he couldn’t say if he’d done it on purpose or if the force of throwing had toppled him. The man hit the water with much more impact than the phone had done, and he didn’t stay afloat any longer than it. We watched the spot in case he reemerged and swam to shore. But no one went to help him, it was impossible. In this current, the deadman was going to stay dead.

The excitement brought benches free, which my friend spotted, and we sat down for our sandwiches. He began to talk, which was unusual for him. The deadman’s sudden exit had inspired it I think. “I was in India once, long before we met of course. On a crowded street, waiting for something, but I can’t remember what. A crackle across the road gave me a focus. A bird had landed on the electricity lines and was being electrocuted. It fell after a couple of seconds, stiffly to the floor. A poor looking man, the poor of a poor city, walked over to him with a cup and fed the dying bird water. Touching of course, but in amongst all the poverty I’d seen, children begging, crippled and diseased bodies, dirt, dust and roaming wild dogs, he chose a bird to care for.”

The captain started shouting instructions about being ready with our bags. We were docking. Time had gone already. My friend never explained why he told his story right then, and I could never know if the deadman was killing himself or saving his phone.

I did ask him, but he only said, “Life’s a mystery.” Like he didn’t know himself why he’d said it. He hailed us a taxi and we moved on to something new.

Ale Malick has been a lecturer, playwright, actor, stand-up, elevator operator, labourer converting a Soviet army barracks into a factory. He writes for ROUTE magazine, on all things Route 66, and has been shortlisted for a HarperCollins anthology. He won an international award for his novel Pizza with Jimbob & Twoforks.

Barry and friend, photo provided by author

Polio

23 July 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by David Blumenfeld

August 1, 1944

I’m almost seven. Mother tells me she’s going to have a baby. I think: That’s why her belly has gotten so big. Smiling, she says how nice it will be to have a little brother or sister. I’ll be the big brother. I feel grown up and hope for a boy.

October 3, 1944

Mother returns from the hospital with baby Barry, a fair-skinned, blond, blue-eyed boy with a tiny, button nose. In our family, only Bubby Rebecca, my paternal grandmother, has blue eyes and everyone says that’s where baby Barry’s eyes came from. I wonder: Do eye colors come from relatives? How? But there isn’t a single blond in our family and Barry is a tow head, whose yellow-white hair is like a gold and silver crown. A flaxen-haired babe has miraculously been born to a dark-skinned, eastern-European Jewish family! Friends needle Dad that someone else got into the act. I ask myself: What does that mean? But Dad adores his blue-eyed baby. Does he adore him more than he adores me? Me, who was here first? Aunt Gert and Uncle Murph, who have no children, treat Barry like their own child, the one they want but, for some reason, cannot have. As the years pass, Barry becomes even more beautiful: the bright-eyed, good-natured, golden-haired child loved by all.

Summer, 1951

Every parent and every child old enough to read the daily paper or see newsreels in movie theaters lives in fear of polio, the crippling disease that typically strikes the young, especially in the summer. It has even struck President Roosevelt, though the press keeps it hidden. Newsreels show physically stunted young polio victims with crutches and leg braces trying awkwardly to relearn to walk. Worse yet are those who lay prone, encased in an “iron lung,” or early respirator, a huge box that covers them from neck to foot, leaving them immobile, imprisoned alive in a metal tomb. I shudder and pray to God neither I nor anyone I care about will suffer such a horrific fate.

September 14 – 16, 1951

Barry goes to a summer camp and after a few days, returns home with a violent illness. I try to read to him but he is too sick to listen. Mom and Dad rush him to the hospital, where they learn that he has bulbar polio, the most devastating form of the disease. The next day the family gathers at Grandpa Ben’s and Bubby Rebecca’s apartment waiting for news from Mother who is at the hospital by Barry’s side. After what seems like endless hours, Mother staggers into the apartment, her face bloodless and ghost-like, and collapses into a chair. “He’s dead,” she says, grimacing and clearly in shock. After a second’s pause, there bursts from the rest of us a wail the likes of which I have never heard before and, God willing, I shall never hear again. It says: Everything worthwhile, everything good and bright in the world, has vanished and can never be restored.

September 17, 1951

In the following days, Dad cries only briefly but looks as though someone has kicked him brutally in the stomach. Then he sucks it up and soldiers on, hiding his grief as best he can. Everyone fears that Mother, who has a history of mental illness, will collapse. But she does no such thing. She collects herself and, as if on autopilot, mechanically and with blank eyes, arranges for the funeral and for sitting shiva, the week-long Jewish mourning period when friends gather at the home of the bereaved family to support them. In the next few days, with a stolid and impassive visage, she does much else and makes many wise decisions. For more than a decade she speaks of Barry almost daily, visiting his grave at least once a week.

Years later, while rummaging through a drawer of old clothing in a room Barry and I shared, I find a little, neatly-ironed suit of his that she has preserved as a keepsake. I suspect that it is not the only such memento mori buried in the house to remind her of him. Polio casts a pall over my mother for the rest of her life.

1952

1952 sees the worst polio outbreak in U.S. history: 57,000 cases, primarily among children. In 1953, Jonas Salk successfully tests a polio vaccine and, despite some early setbacks, hope arises that someday polio will be eradicated. By 2020, the three most common forms of the disease are declared eradicated everywhere but in Asia and are endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet new strains of the disease are beginning to emerge and as we have learned, viruses that threaten one country, threaten us all. Caveat mundus: Let the world beware! May there never again be polio deaths like my brother Barry’s.

(Editor’s Note: On 22 July 2022, the New York Times publishes the story Rare Case of Polio Prompts Alarm and an Urgent Investigation in New York. “Health officials in Rockland County…urged the public to get shots as they investigated whether the disease had spread to others.”)

David Blumenfeld (aka Dean Flowerfield) is an 84-year-old retired philosophy professor and associate dean who only recently returned to writing stories, poetry, and children’s literature, which he abandoned in his thirties to devote full-time to philosophy. He is happy to have returned to a road only briefly taken.

petaled flowers with dew drops on close up photography — Photo by Anthony on Pexels.com

Places I Have Unexpectedly Found Tears

22 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Samantha Ashe

a spin class,
the final song
that one collective push
the recognition of each other
in this synchronized struggle

a Macy’s,
after overhearing an adult woman
refer to her mother as “Mama”
the softness of its sound
the summoning of sweetness
the remembering of my own

in traffic,
interstate 5 heading north
the woman by herself
a passionate steering wheel drum solo
head swaying
screaming the words
witnessing a spirit
unleashed

the bathroom,
in the middle of the night
the fifth ungodly night of no sleep
palms cradling my face
pleading to the sleep gods

in my daughter’s room,
watching as she tucks
each of her babies in for bed
the gentle timbre in her voice
the tactile tenderness of her hands
the hope
that maybe
she learned this from me

Samantha Ashe lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and daughter where she works as a personal trainer and fitness instructor. She spends her free time writing next to an open window or in the woods, chasing summits and sunrises.

a snow on a tulips flowers — Photo by Laurence Prestage on Pexels.com

Elegy to Winter

20 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Pete Zenz

I love you snow,
But for a while
You’ll have to go,
No more compile
And make way for
A time of glee
Your absence shores
The florist prix

The snowman melts
And leaves his soul
And scarf of felt
And eyes of coal
Upon the ground
And dissipates
Without a sound
He ‘vaporates

The jutting veins
Of naked trees
Free from your chains,
Now budding leaves
Where once your hoar
Gathered like moss
They bear no more
Your cold emboss

The scent of spring
Is in the air
The birds will sing
And flutter there
But you’ll return
My frosty friend
Take your adjourn
‘Til summer’s end

Pete Zenz began writing five years ago after 35 years in food service. He has two self-published poetry volumes and a third manuscript finished; he has written a children’s story and a cookbook. Currently, he is working on a volume of children’s poems and a collection of holiday-based flash fiction.

King

18 July 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Margaret Kelliher

Sadie opens the door. The dog stretches and his yawn evolves into a whine. Sadie and the dog head towards the dollar store where she works.

Blue and gray clouds bruise the eastern sky purply-pink. The dog walks with his ears up, tail down. Always awaiting the enemy.

Sadie had been that for him once, briefly. One winter night, the steady hum of the interstate beyond the scrub-tangled chain link fence lulled enough for Sadie to discern a melody of low growls and whimpers. She stood still and listened, her trash bag poised over the bin.

There it went again, several yards beyond the halo of her floodlight.

Sadie approached, her phone lighting the way. A medium-sized dog with mottled black, brown, and white fur paced and whimpered inside the fence. Semi-trucks rumbled down the highway just beyond.

Someone dumped you here. You think they’ll come back, Sadie thought. A twig snapped beneath her feet and the dog stiffened, his legs locking and eyes meeting Sadie’s with a growl.

No helping you, is there? Sadie backed away and went to her house. She emerged a moment later with a plastic spoon heaped generously with peanut butter. Sadie crouched low and extended the treat. The dog’s eyes darted from the fence to the spoon, then approached with his tail down.

The first night, he tore up her doormat.

You’re a real twit, she told him. She bought a bag of dog food the next morning anyway. She knew her fair share of twits from working as a cashier at the dollar store, had built up a tolerance for them. Folks who didn’t understand that tax wasn’t included in the price. Folks who couldn’t fathom that some items cost more than a dollar. Folks who didn’t bother paying at all. The manager blamed Sadie for that last bunch. As if she wasn’t already distracted explaining county taxes at the register. All of them, twits, including the manager.

All except one, a beautiful man with dark hair and pale skin who wore a black coat with its collar perpetually turned up. Otherworldly. Secretly, she called the dark-haired man her prince.

The day after she found the dog, she discovered that he knew how to pull open door levers. When Sadie left her shift that evening, the dog emerged from behind the outdoor freezer that housed jumbo bags of ice. After that, Sadie didn’t bother trying to lock the dog in the house.

I should name you, Sadie says to the dog as they walk to the store this morning. But no name comes to mind.

An older gentleman whose flannel smells like the cigarettes and the woods that stretch behind the gas station at the end of town walks up to her register. He plunks down a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a bottle of extra-strength painkillers.

Three dollars, the man in the flannel declares. He rotates his lower jaw like he’s nursing a toothache.

Sadie rings up the items and points to the green numbers on the display that read $3.51.

Three items, three dollars, the man barters. Over the man’s shoulder, Sadie can see that the dark-haired man in the black coat has entered the store.

It’s a premium whitening toothpaste, and then there’s tax, Sadie says.

The man pulls out three crumpled bills and a handful of change from his jeans pocket. Sadie smooths the bills and places them in the drawer, then bags the items and hands them to the man. The man leaves, grumbling something about government-sanctioned robbery.

Sadie cranes her neck, looking for her prince, but can’t find him.

Later that night, Sadie sits at her kitchen table, sketching the dark-haired man. She colors him in with pencils she bought with her meager employee discount at the dollar store. In the sketch, he looks over his shoulder, his eyes glinting over the upturned collar. Sadie examines her work. For someone who has only taken a handful of art classes in high school, it’s not bad. Her prince has never come to her register, so she doesn’t know what color eyes he has. She debates between the blue and green before getting up to change into her pajamas.

When she returns, the dog has snatched the blue, green, and black colored pencils and is chewing them to splinters.

You really want to end up back on the other side of that fence, don’t you? Sadie scolds the dog. He drops the pencil in his mouth and looks ashamed. At least the drawing is unharmed, she thinks, as she cleans up the mess of wood shards.

The next morning, the manager informs her that more products have gone unaccounted for. He threatens to let her go if she doesn’t catch the dollar store thief. In the very least, dock her pay. So, Sadie keeps her eyes open. Mostly she watches her prince, who turns and looks dreamily to the corners of the store, who delicately lifts items from the shelves, who angles away from her, those broad shoulders, those perfectly fitting jeans, long fingers pushing an empty shopping cart nearer to her, nearer to the door.

An empty shopping cart.

Sadie shouts. Her prince startles and bolts. The manager hears the commotion too.

The automatic doors whoosh open.

A lightning bolt of fur and claw springs from behind the ice freezer and topples Sadie’s prince to the ground. The dog’s teeth sink into the back pocket of the man’s jeans, who howls at the dog to get off. Deodorant, toothpaste, and a pack of razors all spill on the pavement from the man’s coat pockets.

Sadie calls for the dog to stop. The manager can handle it from here. The dog looks up at Sadie. Sadie looks down at the dog.

Thanks King, Sadie says.

King yawns and scratches his ear.

Margaret Kelliher lives on the south side of Chicago with her family and a cockapoo who thinks she is a big dog. She currently teaches composition and participates in the La Grange Writers Group, whom she would like to thank for helping her grow as a writer.

brown and red birdhouse — Photo by David Gonzales on Pexels.com

House Hunting

17 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Lana Hechtman Ayers

We’re looking for something spacious
as the interior of a poem,
so roomy you can get lost in its images,
hallways that roam along
to unexpected turns of phrase.

We’re hoping to find something close
to all the conveniences—
fresh air perfumed with meter,
trees that tousle their limbs
seductively in breezes,
hills curvaceous as villanelles.

We’re searching for a place that fits
our personalities—a kitchen of clean
steam and courtesy, delectable soups
and sestinas bubbling on the stove,
a bath where unsullied truth
freely flows from all the taps,
a bedroom that masters
the art of moon phases and meteors.

We’re seeking a home we can fill with
blankets, dog fur, cat fur, the enjambment
of too many books.
A home that will hold steady looks,
silly askance glances,
even a few cross words once in a while.

A home that weathers moods well,
the way streams wear every broken rock
down to pebble shine.

We don’t mind winding avenues
of rhyme, and have no preference
about windows, so long as they’re
always wide and wise.

We don’t care for one-way stairs,
though being able to stare at a view
of empathy is essential.

We want a home in which light
is as bright as the scent of lavender,
a home where the sound of rain
on the roof is our hearts’ sonnet
as our arms reach for one another
in the night.

And we want a home where the silence,
however rare, is always and ever holy.

Lana Hechtman Ayers, MFA, has shepherded over eighty poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in print and online in places such as Rattle, Snake Nation Review, and Verse Daily, as well as in her nine collections.

tree tunnel at daytime — Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.com

Fable of Love on Fire

15 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Alexander Etheridge

In another season, another world—
that lost moment, we ran into nights
of shudder and crucible, autumn

and oceans—our love
barely risen out of its roots.
We stepped breathlessly

into a century of summers.
We watched eternal changes
of the magic aster flower

and the magic aspen tree
in the temple of dawns, open on all sides
to white spangled light—

Just before black asteroids
crowded our sun. The temple columns
cracked under ice, and thorny vines

choked the roads.
As the trees crawled out
to drown themselves in the tide,

we began our dying
in the black burning plains,
our few seconds of love gone

into a child’s book of fables.

Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. His poems have been featured in Wilderness House Literary Review, Cerasus Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, and others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999.

My grandmother in one sentence

13 July 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Reena Kapoor

When she died I was well into engineering college battling my own confusions, resisting demands on my loyalty from family, country, love and looking ahead with such desperation that I refused to bother with any kind of history, even that which surrounded me protruding from the earth in every stone at the shallowest dig, brimming over walls of old buildings awaiting renovation, bubbling up in street corners among hawkers of food, color and cloth in of one of the most history laden cities of the world so much so that part of the city had been named “New” Delhi – even this naming was by now history – in an eagerness to cast off the old and tell the world we were new and arrived and secular and departed from our native soil and brothers and concerns and even this departure came back to haunt us years later but we didn’t know it then in the same way that I didn’t know she would come back to me later in life so when at the sight of her body a shaking sob broke through my worldly concerns and forward-focused attentions, I involuntarily reached out to touch her face, causing all the micromanaging elders around me to yell, “don’t touch the body” for now she was just “the body” and not the matriarch she had once been, which they didn’t like to admit she hadn’t been in over a decade since she was forced to live not on her own terms but those of her children within their rules and fences and with Alzheimer’s merciless dissolution of her identity, the same one whose sense and strength had built and rebuilt all our lives when the fates had come knocking to extract usurious debts which she could be held responsible for only as much as any woman in a society that made it a habit of heaping responsibility and duty and tradition and religious stricture without agency at her door can be, but which were now all paid or abandoned in this final departure so all her beneficiaries could pretend to pay one last homage to her glorious past and her sacrifice, iron will and fearlessness, except at that age I wanted no part of this remembering because I had heard this ancient history umpteen times and knew it would devolve into a multilevel contest of tears and grief that uselessly distracted me from my singular focus of looking ahead to places my life was going to go where no one would want to know my tired history or even more tiresome stories of why my grandmother was forced to flee Peshawar, her home, her mohalla, her town of generational soils and how a woman who was barely fifth grade educated in a language and script whose use was confined to a daily reading of her holy book so much so that none of her children bothered to learn it and I most certainly did not except for the recitation of prayers that she taught my sister and I as children called paath which literally means “lesson” beginning with Ik Onkar (there is only one god) which I strategically utilized before school exams even as I was slowly turning atheist, something I never told her, I don’t think, but now in my middle age as I look for my voice and myself in the universe and wonder what I will leave behind, she often comes back to me and when I confess my atheism to her and that I have no use for religion and don’t find bliss in the paath she taught me, although I do remember it all, she simply ignores my protestations proceeding on to tell me qissas from her time and her journeys and when I marvel at her refusal to be cynical until the end, her kindness even to those who came to steal from her, and her steadfast attention to dharma in the face of insurmountable odds she simply smiles saying these are the only paaths I need remember.

[Author Note: paath = lesson; qissa = story; dharma = duty or the right thing to do]

Reena Kapoor grew up all over India. Her poetry collection Arrivals & Departures reflects this wandering sensibility. Work has appeared in Tiny Seed Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Visible Magazine, Poet’s Choice and India Currents. EnActe Arts produced four of her plays in 2021. Visit arrivalsanddepartures.substack.com/.

before the sky

11 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Ken Cathers

you sit on the handlebars
I’ll pedal like crazy

we’ll be a great fabled bird
on a dirt road journey

hang onto the wind
my little one, hang on

nothing can
catch us now

we will be home
long before

the sky can open
and crush our joy
with thunder

Ken Cathers lives on Vancouver Island off the west coast of Canada and has spent much of his life working in the forest industry. He has been writing for several decades and has seven books of poetry. Several poems have appeared in Impspired (England) and the MacGuffin (U.S.).

The Greeting

10 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Leslie Dianne

I stop time
with words
and images
I shake
loose
sleepy syllables
and let them nudge
the atmosphere
I fill this space
with myself in another shape
and I am letting you know
that the
flicker of joy
that passes in the breeze
and tickles your memory
that gravityless pull that
makes you want to fly
is me
in a different form
greeting you
saying hello

Leslie Dianne is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, playwright and performer. Her work has been acclaimed internationally at the Harrogate Fringe Festival in Great Britain, The International Arts Festival in Tuscany, Italy and at La Mama in NYC. Her poems appear in Noctivant Press, Moida, Treouvaille Review, Constellate Magazine and elsewhere.

The Bluebird Word