Sunspot Literary Journal
Volume 2 Issue #2 © 2020 Sun Dogs Creations

The Bridge / Hediana Utarti

Changing the World
Through Words and Art

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Volume 2, Issue 2

Table of Contents
Open House at a Paper Mill / Jennifer Judge / 1
Drive / Jennifer Judge / 3
Looking for Love: To-Do List of a Lake Monster /Marilee Dahlman / 4
Miscellaneous / Samantha Schlemm / 6
Swimming Lessons / Virginia Watts / 8
Kitchen Closed / kerry rawlinson / 12
Wooden Muse / kerry rawlinson / 13
Unrequited by the Sun / Stella Hayes / 14
Saguaros / Ann Howells / 15
Heat / Rayne Debski / 16
Burning / Robin Bissett / 19
Tristness / Gabrielle Vachon / 20l’etrangete / Alena Marvin / 22
Discrete Infinity / Cassandra Moss / 23
Villainy 04 / Nicole Foran / 41
Villainy 09 / Nicole Foran / 42
Trevor in Tenby / Penny Jackson / 43
Salvage / Mickie Kennedy / 44
Quilted Landscape / Christina Klein / 45
The Tower Bells / Alli Parrett / 46
A Life in Four Operations / Kim Waters / 47
The Man Who Misspelled God / Mekiya Walters / 49
The Jellyfish / River Elizabeth Hall / 69

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Single Word Contest 2020 / 71
Aloha / Stephanie Launiu / 72
You’re Mine You / Valyntina Grenier / 74
Burning / Olga Gonzalez Latapi / 75
Self-Quarantined / C.W. Buckley / 76
The ‫ ה‬Meanings / Omer Wissman / 78
Viral / Claire Lawrence / 81
Ubuntu / Ethel Maqeda / 82
The Meaning of Free / Hannah van Didden / 85
Contributors / 88
Cover: The Bridge / Hediana Utarti

Open House at a Paper Mill
Jennifer Judge
I was embarrassed of it all then—the Hane’s pocket t-shirts, the steel-toed bootsthat smelled of leather, sweat, andsickening sweet paper pulp.
My father’s world waswhite and beige, dull steelof machinery, the color of gloom,
miles of life walked away on concrete.
I saw it once, open house
day, families crowded into lookout rooms,
paper cups of orange
drink and powdered-sugar donuts.
Outside, tractor trailers held
their loads of trees, long pines,
all their limbs removed, just
waiting to feed these machines.
After 25 years, I try to wear
his life like a badge, likehis suffering has earned me
an identity, working class status.
The dumb luck of prosperity:
my grandmother writes to say she
is so happy that we have what they
could never get—the house of our dreams.
That’s the hope of immigrant life—
black lung and alcoholism,
poverty and welfare checks—
it ends up here: new cars, college degrees.
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We can’t surrender it all
to future generations and smile.
The shoulders we stand on
ache with a knife-digging hurt.

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Drive
Jennifer Judge
1.
My daughters will never be babies again—
the dresses long gone, the dolls mildewing in boxes.
I watch old videos—a younger self lifts the slight toddler heftto hip, spider legs cling instinctively as a closed fist.
Mommy, a apple, a apple, a apple, again and again and again,a kitchen we don’t own anymore, a voice I don’t recognize.
2.
In a dream, I am in our car. I am trying to steer,
but the rain is so hard, washes the windshield to gray.
I cannot see, no matter how hard I peer into it.
I am in the passenger seat.
I realize that my husband is in the car,wheel useless in his hands. I am forced to steer.

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Looking for Love: To-Do List of a Lake Monster
Marilee Dahlman
1. First things first, brush my matted hair. Braid a tadpole
necklace and pin a frog behind one ear.
2. Float in marshy shallows and forget cold crash and white bite
spray, drowned descent and forced rebirth from skin to scales, all inturbid shades of gray and green and waxen blue.
3. Scour lakebed for fossils. The diplodocus is almost complete!
That missing rib, I’ll find it yet, buried in sands from ages past. A
beast’s need for union is such a timeless quest.
4. Search sunken tin pan freighter for ruffled shirt with button
cuffs. Lie in shoal and watch the cove, where a dirt path winds andsoft-skinned stroll. Drift away, but sense the shore vibrations still:
dancing violin, coupled laughter, clinks of glass.
5. Afternoon nap in western bog.
6. Find a mate. Cast a line or throw a net?
7. Twilight cruise near the beach, smell the flesh with every
breath.
8. Lure a lady from the path . . . wail a siren call and spew a lentic
scent! Spy her in starlight, moonlight, gaslight glow; she’ll sense mysoul, my other half. Listen now, it’s safe to step! Tread through muddy
cattails and spreading ferns, slip-slide slick lichen stones, and wade
into wavy warmth . . . .
9. Hooked you! Seaweed bound, lasso round. Grind your heels,kick up sand, through clouds of silt and salty tears I see you yet! Don’thide beneath an algae bloom or I’ll drag you to a deeper gloom. We’ll
build a bed of snails and burn it bright. Be my slimy bride, in veil ofrotted sail and clanking rusted anchor chains behind. Webbed feet,pointed teeth, cool blood reborn, another spiny savage with red heartpumping deep.
10. We’ll tumble through splendid years, embraced in wet blissful
paradise, until rough green gods with seismic squeeze mold our home
to mountain. Perched on peak, caged by icy crystal ocean, we’ll bet on
bobbing arks while glaciers creep.
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11. I’ll spot an emerald spec as the floods recede, follow me, we’ll
flop on down. Finned creatures crawling, pine needles pricking, we’ll
find a pond and dive again, forever to swim a murky heaven and ride
this world’s smooth blue-green spin. Together.

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Miscellaneous
Samantha Schlemm
Every Monday, she wrote the list of spelling words, looping whitecursive on the board as we spilled into the room, scrawling powdery
white chalk across a sea of green as we copied them down cockeyed
and tilting on ruled lines. By then, the Word of the Week—the extra
credit word that made my grandma whistle and say, “That’s a doozie,”
the five-dollar word that Miss Tighe posted the definition beneath tounlock its full power—was already pinned to the yellow paper-covered
corkboard.
This is the room where I must have learned words like pedantic,
ostentatious, or connotative. Miscellaneous. That’s the one I remember.
The way it rolled off the tongue, each syllable dancing to the next. Miscell-an-e-ous. A word to describe the random, the indescribable which
now could be named, to cover an entire category which had never been
open to me before. Even though it was the longest word our fifth-gradeclass had come across, studying how each letter came together,memorizing how each sound kissed the next was easy. It tugged at me.
It curled up in my lap, a nuzzling kitten that purred its syllables, single
notes in a melodic song, and it hummed, a stir fry that sizzled on thestove, a harp that plucked a chorus of notes together in one
miscellaneous jumble, a jumble that opened my childish eyes. A jumble
that scared me because I wasn’t ready to grow up.
Lately, my days feel miscellaneous. Before the coronavirus
shooed us all into quarantine, there was always wake up, go to work,
come home, make dinner, go to bed. Now, there’s wake up, work at
home, head to the kitchen to make tea, notice the dishes are still in thesink from the night before, unload the dishwasher, fill it back up, pourhot water through herbal tea leaves that smell like someone squeezed
an orange into my mug, sit and work, resist looking at social media,
more tea, work, give in and check Instagram, spread Nutella on toast
for lunch, notice the laundry needs folding, answer the door for a
package, get back to work, call and reschedule an upcoming weddingrelated appointment, work, work, realize it’s after seven, make dinner,
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watch TV, sleep. I think about how we’re lucky, my fiancé and I, we’relucky to have jobs we can do from home, we’re lucky to be healthy,
we’re lucky to have this time together before we get married—if we
can get married this summer. I feel at ease. I feel stressed. I feelsomething I can’t quite name. As the weeks at home drag on into the
double digits, I think about Miss Tighe and how she knew the world
wouldn’t always be a place you could categorize, a place where every
thought, every feeling, every experience had a name. Sometimes,
things are just miscellaneous.

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Swimming Lessons
Virginia Watts
Of course, it was a privilege to take swimming lessons at thecommunity center. I never had to swim alone there. Never a private
lesson. Always a group lesson. Sixteen of us middle schoolers doing
the same drills, attempting the same skills. I could never breathe rightfor him. That rotary breathing required for freestyle. I cheated. I had
to. And he always caught me, even when he turned his back on mybody slicing through the rippling, chlorinated waves churned by themoving arms and kicking legs. Even as he retraced his steps to theother side of the pool, something he did constantly throughout every
thirty-minute session, he knew how I would react when he caught meagain. Pacing the pool deck, pacing the pool deck, he kept catching me
and catching me and catching me.
She was young, my daughter. An undergraduate.
Inexperienced, yes, but so smart. I knew and I know how brilliant she
is, how clever and funny, and how much does the average woman ofnineteen, as she was at the time, how much does the average womanof such a new age possess in the column of life experience and how
much self-determination can any person truthfully claim without morelife experience than that?
I didn’t like anything about the windowless women’s locker
room in the basement of the community center until I disliked thebasement pool even more. Then I dreamed of climbing the ladder,
grabbing my towel and scurrying back there, pool water dripped onto
floors always colder than it feels inside the pool. The locker room, at
first, made me gag. It reeked of bleach. Long, dark hair coiled in theshower drain. Coppery growth along the shower curtain hem like an
old man who has dipped his white beard in beef stew unaware. A brightmenstrual pad tossed carelessly into an open trashcan, no coat for her
shoulders. Band aids reproducing, multiplying. One fleshy circle
wiggling up between my toes.
Something made me think of my old swimming teacher as Isoon as I saw that guy’s bare chest, smooth and muscled, blood8

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cascading over a mountain of a shoulder. Adonis swathed in ebony ooze
chiseled against a blurry backdrop. A black-and-white photograph fromsocial media. He looked too good to be good. It was fake, the blood. A
play or something. It doesn’t matter at all. What matters is she met him
in a class. It doesn’t matter that this guy from my daughter’s class had
a name I had often used when writing fiction stories, but it was a tadcreepy and I never use that name now. There were things he said to her
in class before what happened, happened, that were dismantling anddemeaning and as accurate as guided missiles launched to belittle her,to set her up, but that’s all hindsight now.
The swimming pool was startlingly opulent for something
erected underground beside the furnace room and janitorial supply
closet. High ceilings. Pillars worthy of a Grecian temple, inlaid mosaic
tiles and two enormous stained-glass windows high above the poolthat delivered light to people jogging around a balcony track.
Pounding steps and squeaking sneakers mostly drowned by the
baritone boom of his voice, his shrill, silver whistle. The echoes that
deafened and deafened and deafened. Take your mark! Pull! Pull! Pull!
Kick! You aren’t kicking! KICK!
There had been no previous lunches for my daughter with thisguy from her class, no preliminary walks, cups of coffee, dinners out
or movies. There had been nothing before and there would be nothing
after that one time she was with him alone.
In rotary breathing, when you turn your head to the side, you
are supposed to open your mouth and take in the air of the world. Then
you close your mouth and put your whole face, and here I mean yourwhole face, back down in the water and blow your guts out. In a poolcrowded with bodies that’s a lot of carbon dioxide to ask a stagnant
ditch to handle. Don’t you think? And don’t you think it’s very logicalto wonder whether when you roll your head to the side and open yourmouth, you might miss the air completely and drag only water into
your alveoli? I did try to master rotary breathing. I tried very hard.
The harder I tried, the faster my heart beat. Vice grips descended andclamped around my ribs. His voice the dark charm that spun the cranktighter and tighter. Eventually, my lungs didn’t want anything to dowith air anymore. Find some other way to oxygenate the blood you need. I
sputtered and spit. Gulped and choked. Halfway across I had to stop9

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swimming, tread and float. LANE THREE! WATTS! MOVE! MOVE!
MOVE! EVERY TIME! Gasping, I’d start in again for the other side.
That guy tore my daughter. Ripped her. Multiple tears. Madeher hurt and bleed for three days. I worried her heart would be unable
to work the same way it had before that night. Find some other way tooxygenate the blood you need. But thankfully, there is goodness alongwith evil and that never came true. A promised car ride to a restaurant
swapped last minute by him for an excursion to his apartment.
Probably the moment right there she could have refused. Hindsight.
In some ways, I wish she had been drunk so details would be blurry,
but that’s not how it went. The access to his apartment a narrowcorridor, the inside modern, clear-surfaced, impersonal, as if the space
had been leased furnished and decorated, and he never changed or
added a thing. One abstract painting hung centered on the wall above
the living room sofa. His bedsheets were black. And let me be clear.
She let him, even though it wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t knowwhat would happen. She didn’t know what to expect. She didn’t knowwhat to do. He was the size of a grizzly. When she didn’t want to kisshim at first, she felt the shape of his fingers come up around her throat.
What was he was capable of? Frozen in a slow-motion moment in time,
she let it play out as he repeated this phrase in her ear: I could do thisall night.
WATTS! STOP SPUTTERING! WATTS! NO FULL
BREATHS! NO BREATHING OUT! ONLY BREATHE IN! STOP!
WATTS! WATTS! NO FULL BREATHS! ONLY IN! ONLY IN!
WATTS! STOP!
But I didn’t stop. I kept coming back, trying to do what hewanted me to do as he yelled louder and louder, paced faster and faster.
I skipped breakfasts and lunches, unable to chew, lost sleep the nights
before, trembled in the back seats of station-wagon carpools. Mothersof friends asked, Do you have a fever? Never opened my mouth. Never
told parents how terrified I was of / him / his echoing voice / hisshocking whistle / his massive chest. Never told them I was terrified
of swallowing so much water I’d die trying to do something I didn’t
want to do in the least. If I had told them, I am sure they would haveallowed me to quit, but I felt too silly and irrational and smaller than a10Sunspot Literary Journal

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little pink circle band aid, so I kept going back, the stained glass in thebalcony like church windows with no choir of allies peering
benevolently down. Those gemstones of color, sapphire blue, ruby red,
emerald, and topaz waiting for me to launch myself back into the water.
Brilliant birds perched on dark tree branches with green and yellow
leaves, some of them just spreading their wings, ready to take flight.
My daughter sought medical treatment the following
morning. Upon examining the ravaged condition of her vagina, thedoctor in Montreal asked repeatedly if the incident had beenconsensual, urged her to have a discussion with the police “anyway,”
tried to persuade her to see a therapist at the very least. My daughter
refused. The doctor scheduled subsequent appointments to see her
again, repeated these pleas, resorted to scheduling more and more
appointments not entirely medically necessary. My daughter stopped
going to see her, began ignoring her calls and her messages, desperate
to gather distance from the incident and move on. She will always
remember this fellow woman with eternal gratitude, her face, thesound of her voice, her kindness and compassion, how she tried
everything she could think of to help her. Of course she should havelistened to the advice. Hindsight.
I know what you are thinking now. These stories are starkly
different. They are. My swimming coach wasn’t really trying to drownme. My daughter’s story is the opposite. But there is something
excruciatingly the same about the young girl and the young woman.
Both of them holding off too long, not believing enough in their own
instincts, their own power. My daughter is the daughter I dreamed ofand hoped for. I have been steadfastly proud of her in all the momentsof her life. After that night, she grew stronger than before, as the life
behind us does for all of us, and then, she went further. She istriumphant. She soars. Of course, she is the clear victor transcending
the depth and dark sheets. She’s not looking back. She has no reason
to. Nor do I.

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Kitchen Closed / kerry rawlinson
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Wooden Muse / kerry rawlinson
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Unrequited by the Sun
Stella Hayes
I stare into the sun without protective eye gear,
Gearing up for high risk
The doom taking me on a carpet ridecircling around loss’s motion

It receives me in a half-hush,
Like when you decided that love couldn’t support air
The sun is as bright as the sun,
Arriving at a close
an eye to shun the sun beneath a closing eyelid
What if we feed spoonfuls of sugar to each other under the stare of the sun?
We would go to dig the fields, sowing our dreams for the next generation
The deflating atlas filling up with sun rays
Children at play with decay,
If silence had a sound, it would sound like loss without a heartbeat
A ghost moving in for good,
Time, a strand in travel

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Saguaros
Ann Howells
rule rock-strewn mountainsides,
godfathers, padrinos,
towering some fifty feetas they survey their domain.
No sissy succulent could survive here
where daytime temperatures
reach 120 degrees.
But saguaros flourish; May’s flowers
lead to June’s red-fleshed fruit.
Upstarts, young ones no taller
than a hitching post, dot the terrain
among scattered cholla, organ pipe,and ocotillo, like stumps
after cutting saws thin the forest.
They must reach fifty years, you know,
and some approach a hundred,
before they sprout those stubby arms,pose like mugging victims, hands up –though some are one-armed,
and a few wear ringed appendages
like Elizabethan collars. Erect.
Taciturn. Seemingly omniscient.
Like Grandfather they are
self-made and self-sufficient.
Sharp spines and thick-ridged skinprotect. Well-adapted to hardship,these crusty old hermits
may even prefer it.

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Heat
Rayne Debski
You are thirty-five years old and you know better than to open theenvelope that feels like a strip of hot metal in your hand. The return
address is from the federal prison in Pensacola. You don’t have to open
it to know it’s from Inmate 607439. You do know that if you read it, theletter will sear your heart. Just holding the envelope, you remember thecleft in his chin, the feel of his breath against your neck. If you read it,
you will long for something you shouldn’t, and you may risk everything
you’ve achieved in the last eight years —career success, a fiancé who
adores you, an upstanding reputation in the community.
Your fiancé Marc doesn’t object to the nights and weekends
your career requires, makes excellent paella, and sends roses to yourmother on her birthday. You nod your head at the litany of his virtues.
Yes, yes, he is a good man. But his love wraps around you like a shroud.
You check your phone. Marc will be home any minute.
Words sit like sparks on your tongue. You crave talking tosomeone about 607439, the same way you used to jones for his fingers
snaking down your stomach. Maybe you should call Joy, your bestfriend, and tell her you’ve received this letter. She’ll tell you to burn it
and flush the ashes in the toilet. She’ll remind you of the years oftherapy, the money you spent on lawyers to clear your conscience andget a divorce. You won’t remind her that she arranged the blind datewith the man who became 607439, that she was the maid of honor atyour wedding, and that she never told you about the deception thatsimmered behind his sea blue eyes.
You sneeze from the lemon polish your cleaning lady uses.
You don’t recall asking Alexa to play Bob Marley, but his voice fills
your living space. Your hips sway slowly, and you’re on yourhoneymoon in Jamaica, making love on the beach, so in love—or was
it in heat—that you ignored the sand fleas and land crabs making their
way along the shore. You swallow the longing for his arm around yourwaist, for trips to rain forests and mountain peaks. You remember how
he sent you to shop in island bazaars with a wallet full of cash. A sweet16

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and generous gesture! And then you discovered he did this to keep you
busy while he arranged drug drops on remote islands in the Keys. You
laugh bitterly at your naivete.
Your phone dings. Marc will be late; the gym is crowded, andhe wants to finish his routine. He says don’t cook dinner, he’ll bringhome Thai. You tell Alexa to shut up.
You sit on the sunporch and hold the letter to your nose thesame way you held 607439’s shirts when he was in Columbia on
business and, worried that he would meet a violent death, tried tobreathe him into you. If you call your mother, she’ll tell you to shred
the letter. Whatever you do, she’ll say, don’t tell anyone about him,
especially Marc. This has been her mantra since 607439 was
imprisoned. She refuses to believe that you knew what 607439’s
import business entailed, and after a while you willingly participatedin it. In an escalating voice she’ll recite the sins of 607439: how he used
you to transport cocaine; how he spent his nights away from you; how
he blackened your eye when you flushed away his stash. She’ll bringup her cousin, the state senator who arranged for a plea deal if you
turned state’s witness, and whose influence kept you out of thenewspapers. She never hesitates to tell you any of this should the past
inadvertently come up.
You’ve told Marc you were married to a man who was adeadbeat and disappeared after the divorce. Marc promises not todisappoint you. He listens to your opinions, introduces you tointeresting people, and shares your love of foreign films. He is acompetent, considerate lover. He believes the body is a temple thatshould never be tainted with anything stronger than alcohol. He says
people who do drugs are idiotic for damaging their brains. You nod as
if you agree with him. He works out, runs, drinks kale smoothies, andavoids desserts. You don’t tell him that for several months thesmoothies you drank were made with psilocybin mushrooms; thebrownies you baked were seasoned with hash. Your mother is right.
Don’t tell anyone in your new life about your old one. What happened
was years ago and has little bearing on who you are today. You repeat
this to yourself whenever the hankering for excitement and adventure
make you want to take a plane to South America and explore theAmazon.
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Volume 2, Issue 2Your phone dings again. Marc is almost home. You know theletter from 607439 is telling you he’ll be released next month. For
years you’ve listened to his voicemails about the things he made inwoodshop, the books he’s read, the stories he’s written, the fights he’swon. You’ve treated them like messages from the dead and never
responded. But you know he’s being released because you’ve kept acalendar and marked off the days of time served. You hold the lettertightly. No matter what happens in your new life, something inside
you resists letting go of the old one.
The front door opens. Marc juggles the bags of food in one
arm, and with the other pulls you to him. His muscles are taut, strong.
The letter is folded in your pocket, a piece of lit charcoal pressed
between you. You spoon the red curry duck into bowls. While Marc
pours glasses of pinot gris, he talks about his day, his ebullienceunshakable.
The heady scent of ginger and garlic unsettles your stomach.
He tilts his head, his eyes soft. “Are you okay?” His concern rattles
your heart. You want to tell him about the heat against your hip.
“You haven’t tried the curry.” He trails a finger down yourback, igniting an unexpected shiver of desire.
You take a spoonful of food, inhale its tomatoey aroma, thenlet it sit on your tongue. His fingers travel along the waistband of yourpants. The sweet and spicy flavors of the curry unfold. You swallow,
surprised at how delicious it tastes.

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Burning
Robin Bissett
She was always burning, especially in the evening, when the sun began
to set and her thoughts refused to slow.
We walked down to the lake, sat on the edge of the dock, anddipped our feet into the still water. I wrapped my arm around hershoulders and pulled her close to me. She shivered, goosebumps
sprouting along the edges of her round arms. This time was, at least,
more peaceful than the others.
Once, she had held me at gunpoint and demanded I take off
my mask. At first, I had laughed along with her, then cried, thenscreamed, saying over and over. Baby, I’m not wearing a mask. Afterlanguage failed us, I finally grabbed my blue pocket knife and sliced
open the right side of my forehead. Do you see now?
Later, facing the mirror, I applied Neosporin and dabbed atmy thin wound with a damp paper towel. She came up behind me andwrapped her arms around my stomach. Head wounds may bleed
profusely, and those of the heart seldom heal without leaving behinda scar.
Another time, she had come into my office, demanding I stop
working on my laptop and listen to her interpretation of her mostrecent dream. I had nodded, eyes flickering between my computer
screen and her violet-tinted face. She threw her bottle of water at me.
It splashed all over my keyboard and the artificial life that sat atop mylap sparked one last time and died.
Now, I see her, running head on into the flames that threaten
to swallow her whole. If I could take the pain away from her, absorb it
into my own body, swallow the harvested toxins and clog up my
bloodstream, believe me, I would. But, I cannot, so instead I let her
rest her head against my right shoulder as we watch the light, a warm
egg yolk, fall into the lake.
For now, me and the setting crimson sun, we stay beside her, thankful
for the breaths of fresh air we catch in the midst of the brightest burns.

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Tristness
Gabrielle Vachon
I am the brunch spreadon this beachside restaurant in Florida.
My mother spills syrup on my
tongue and asks me why I am so sad. Shelaps up my nervous sweat with big
delicious bites.
She uses the word: triste.
In French, it belongs to themimes, and their frowning affectations
Tristeness smudges an upside-down
smile on a clown’s boorish red lips
Old movies about the war are triste
Painting a gazebo blue overlooking the sea
is peak triste, it is the address on the mailbox
My mother drinks me, a large pulpy glass of orange nectar,
like she pressed me herself between the palms of her manicured hands
Like the Sun first pressed me into jet fuelwhen I stepped foot in the sunshine state
I ran miles and miles on the beachwith my bikini top falling down,
but even the sand scratching my nipples could not convince
me my breasts weren’t gifts to this world
I told the snowbird her husband was gay,and laughed so hard to match her wails that I could not believe
my lungs never ran out of air
Mania never runs out of air,like my spine never runs out of coconut sunscreen appliedin the shape of a toothy grin between my shoulder blades
Alas,
I watched one too many episodes of TLC’s excellent programing in the
hotel room,and the 6$ minibar skittles weighed my tongue downtill it was numb and sour.
The sailor’s rope in the lobby décor rung round and round my throat
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like an untimely umbilical chord. I wept until the ocean spat me back out, and thefoam carried me to the early bird special,where my mother rips into my ribs like bacon.
I say to her, while she swirls my hipbones in gummy fruit jam,that I am not sad, but simply depressed.
What’s the difference, she asks, triste is triste.
I cannot see her through the Aunt Jemima in my eyelashes.
The waves of the ocean pounding onto the shore remind me I will neverescape its currents

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Volume 2, Issue 2l’étrangeté
Alena Marvin
Who else could have glittered under the sun
Like a diamond?
Across the garden, among the browning roses,
With those poor big eyes that burned.
His hair a web of cornsilk, he beckoned,
So I followed.
Into the orchard, where the shade and tall grass hid every sorrow,
Silent, he pointed upwards.
I wondered then if it happened often.
He shook his head.
The sky like a bruise, the sun low in the valley, it was thenThat I saw what he cried for.
An oddity, only now visible.
Our hearts, pounding.
He shone like the stars, yet he was hidden from the world,
But that was what he prayed for.
The tall steeple, beyond the green hill,
The blue cornflowers.
When will I get my chance, I asked,
To be a ghost like you?
I’m not a ghost, I’m from outer space.
I nodded, as if I’d known.
The pendulum rushed over the sea,
Our eyes swung lazily,
And my hand fumbled over his
In the flickering shadow of the eclipsed sunset.
To see him cry was stranger than to see him at all.

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Discrete Infinity
Cassandra Moss
You wake up at 5:34am, rain dribbling down panes, the room
shadowed by the dying of the night. What am I? is your first thought.
In the bathroom, the overhead bulb above, your face is caught
in an elucidation of itself. You realize your features owe you nothing:your forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks, mouth and jaw are unwavering, but
their wholeness is inadmissible in the examination of what theconsistently reoccurring patterns of yourself are, or if they are at all.
Later, at work, in the midst of a complicated disciplinary
hearing for an employee in the Distribution Department, you glimpse
a look of mortification on a colleague, as if mere ontology appalls her.
You don’t know if it’s intended for you or not, though you suspect it
is. Why wouldn’t it be? You feel that everyone susses you out
eventually. It’s your instinct to placate, to plead mutual humanity or,
if not, leniency towards yourself for your lack of human qualifiers. At
some point, you must have had the basics of a person, but over theyears they dried up, calcified, and disintegrated. So, you smile at her
now, thinking how you’ve heard she has a comatose brother who’s
been going on, hagiofied and inert, for nearly seven years. It has to bemiserable for her. If you were her, you’d feel it’s you, not him, who’s
been wronged for it’s you, not him, who’s aware of the pile of timestacking up behind you as the one in front declines. You picture her
sitting by the fleshy slab reading out global events, commenting on
the terrible turn of the world, pausing every so often to wonder how
she and he came to be where they are, what precise alchemy was
wrought to render these conditions of existence, at once astonishing
and wholly explicable, only to be disturbed by the duty nurse on her
rounds, inspecting for boils while stating it’s a shame there’s not thebudget for waterbeds for all, even the vegetables. As you continue to smile,
you hope the action is connecting to a quantifiably genuine feeling ofsincerity inside yourself. But it’s impossible to tell. We’re in the sameboat, you want the smile to say. I may not have suffered a family tragedy
and I may not have to waste the last days of my youth swallowing the instant23

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coffee of the high-dependency ward, but there is a sameness to you and me. We
are alike in that we, along with everyone else, are sinking and unsure we everlearned how to swim.
It’s a shitshow for sure: too many people, yet also too few. This makes
you feel agitated by the entire idea of company and spending your hours
in it. How is it you’re to behave? What is it you’re to say to demonstrate
your authentic self? Your valid nature? Making matters worse is thefact that there’s not a single clean, flat surface to be found in these toilets.
You’re in a cubicle sweating slugs because you ran as you were alreadylate for the gig after being surrounded by men in religious garb on aCentral Line carriage. Their white robes and square hats were an affront
to your duplicity: abiding secularity swaddling a tiny squirming
spirituality when what right have you to either if you aren’t willing tocommit to anything? As the men’s chatter softly commandeered theparticles between and in amongst you and them, a harrowing began inyour skull, spreading down along your spine, awakening the squattersin your nervous system who began to, yet again, demand a greater
standard of living. You think of the endless intoxication of belief as you
shove your housekey into the powder: to live the life of an ecstatic,
reason sacrificed to intuition, whereas your reasonableness has you
resorting to several key bumps to raise your expectations like a cretin
hoping to be accepted into the normal household of a normal family, bugeyes masked, balding scalp wigged: an ad hoc disguise pulled from anembedded sense of ordinariness, the façade always about to fall even as
the man and wife of the house are setting you up with the blondest sonof their richest friends.
A man-child is at the back of the pop-up bar emitting
something slow somewhere between a song and a rap, an unattended
keyboard to the left of him providing backing and a vulgar
fashionableness troubling the stage. It is precisely when this evening
is just going to get on and start that is most on your mind as you’repressed into the back of a strange body by the toing and froing ofvarious friendships behind you.
You notice your crowd in a corner, unaware of being observed.
For a minute or two you watch them and wonder who they are without
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you. Do they retain unmistakably unique, immutable traits for eachand every interaction they’re involved in? You know you yourself canbe easily swayed by the moods and idioms of any given consortium.
One person from this group could silently observe you with anothergroup and not know if the person captured by their senses was thesame as the one they’d conversed at length with, offered up secretthoughts and confessed terrible acts to, or if who they thought they’dknown was an apparition with a similar face to the stranger they werecurrently staring at.
Ordering a pint, you tap your card on the wood, somesplashback hitting your handbag, a vintage hand-me-down from anaunty who is neither sister nor friend of either of your parents, rather
an antipodean passing through the northern hemisphere who you met
in the carpark of a club and then went on to a party in a squat with.
An easy bond was formed with the older woman as she told you thatnight: I thought I chose not to have kids but maybe it was the other way
around. Thinking about it, I would’ve liked to have been an aunt, but I’ve justnever had the connections.
A presence is felt to your right and your turn your head to see
a guy you met once at a house party who was a friend of a friend of oneof your flatmates. Neither of you were meant to be there. Your flatmate
had no one else to go with and couldn’t bear being seen alone so said
if you had nothing else on you may as well come along. In the cramped
kitchen, fixing yourself another vodka and soda, you were searchingfor a lime when he walked in with a bleeding finger due to a rogue
shard of glass from the last get-together snuggled in the settee
cushions. As blood ran out of the wound and onto the chrome sink,
you imagined him liquidating in front of you. The blood could keep
coming. He could faint, his life abandoning him. And all the while itwould’ve been in your power to do something, but you chose inaction
as you felt you were a spectator of a particular series of events that had
to happen to maintain this version of the universe so that it was
distinct from another one where you jumped in and saved his life.
But, as it happened, in yet another version of the universe thatis the one you are currently living in, you did nothing and he didn’t
die. After applying some pressure, the bleeding ceased. My girlfriend
thinks I’m on a stag in Dublin, he said. You asked him why he wasn’t.
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Been a bit worried I was developing a stomach ulcer, he replied. You waitedfor more detail. When none came, you didn’t push but kept thinking
you really should have as that would’ve been an intimacy that would’ve
bound the two of you together forever. Instead, over the following
couple of hours, your conversation stuck mainly to social
generalizations, only now and then flirting with the intensely personal
before giving way to glib carnality.
Now you don’t know if he’s seen you, and, if he has, if he’srecognized you or not. That night was four years ago. To you it
could’ve been last week due to your mental cognition seemingly being
so out of sync with the officially documented passage of time: a year
can take double or more to catch up with you in respect to your coming
to terms with it, that is with its effects being fully integrated into yourthoughts. That was a night which let you know you regret what
doesn’t happen, not what does. When you return to it now, it’s the
comforting buzz of the dimmed halogen lights as you undressed in acomplete stranger’s bedroom that you most clearly recall.
Ruminating on the idea of going over to the guy, who’s
definitely called Paul or Tom, to test your perception of the experienceagainst his, you absently answer Jen and David, the friends standing
next to you, that you think the music has so far been shite. Afterwards,
when you’re all out of the pop-up and on the way back to someone’s
rented accommodation, you question your choice of ‘shite’. You could’ve
used the generic ‘shit’. It is perhaps because of these particular listeners’
sensibilities that you went for the more regional option. As the night
wears on in the form of another party, you fixate on if the words you say
are in any way representative of who you feel you are at your core, ifthey could be argued to put forth the mulching of inner sensation, thecoagulations that form what is taken for your unique entity, the one
being, one body. Whilst you know ‘shite’, ‘shit’, ‘wank’, ‘rubbish’ and so
on run along a continuum, you were urged to choose the more colloquial
option to express a locality, an alignment with a specific tribe. You don’t
always do so. Yet with this group, it seems to matter. You don’t wantthem to think of you as unspecific, nondescript. You want an identitythat can exist in some minor way in the margins.
But if your word choices are somewhat calculated rather thanautomated, then what does that make you? A calculated being is a26

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being after all as I am myself you say to yourself. But there’s a divisionof one self into two: the acting and the directing. The subject ‘I’ islocated in the director, whilst the reflexive ‘myself,’ the object, is anactor, well-studied, yet requiring constant reassurances from thedirector that the way her hands dangle by her sides accurately
resemble real hands on a real person really dangling as said person
goes about her existence unnoticed. The actor receives scripts fromintermediaries, confers with the director and then sets about assessing
their context and meaning, scrutinizing the dialogue, marking
intonational rises and falls, writing out the subtext as text to ensure athorough understanding of motivation, and then committing all tomemory to give the sense of spontaneity, just as she was directed to
do so, to hide the acting so that the performance is, ultimately,
believable, which perhaps may prompt a critic to write ‘X is
unrecognizable as Y; every movement and gesture of X’s as Y utterly
convinces: X is Y,’ which results in the actor being self-satisfied
because audiences were persuaded that they were spending time with
Y despite clearly looking at X’s face and body. The actor, buoyed byher success, starts to feel like a pro, like she had it in her all along andhadn’t ever needed the director’s help. But the director observes more
keenly than anyone on the outside and knows that X is not Y, that X
is pretending, producing an imitation of Y as only Y is Y whilst X
forever remains X. The director tells the actor she is complacent,warning her that one day she won’t be so lucky: there will come a time
when her techniques become visible and spectators will despise her forher failure to convince them that she really is a different person fromthe one she actually is. But all the director can do is watch as it
happens. Consequently, as the savage notices mount up, the old actor
will be replaced by another seemingly newer and more flexible one
who is once more eager to take direction from the ever-same,
irreplaceable director.
With the music accelerating, you abandon Laura and theconversation you were half-engaged in while perched on the arm of amulti-stained chair to get up and dance. Opposite you, David’s zonedout stare causes you to think of what your colleague’s comatose
brother’s face must be like at this moment. Slack and infantile, you
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with your colleague. Has there been an occasion when you have had todismiss something in her presence? Yes. What language would you
have used? You would’ve wanted to sound professional. You would’ve
wanted to sound like a person who has dialectical opinions rather thanviews copied straight from another source. You wouldn’t have wanted
your colleague to feel uncomfortable or embarrassed, so you’d havefollowed her lead and only sworn if she’d sworn. And you don’t recall
her doing so. Instead, then, in order to convey criticism, you would’ve
applied words such as ‘terrible’, ‘awful’, ‘dismal’ and perhaps ‘rotten.’
The last one especially seems a thing you’d never utter as it carries noaspirational properties for you, no markers of a class that you’d want
to claim as your own. At least, that’s how it sounds in your accent, or
rather, the accent you adopt for matters conducted within the higher
echelons of your job. In another, more glottal, iteration of your speech,‘rotten’ is stripped of its nobility and can slum it like a child of industry
moving out from rural placement into urban internment. If you said‘rotten’ now, it’d be the urban mill child. But if you said it with yourcolleague, who you suspect comes from the sort of soft money thatprioritizes a private education over intercontinental holidays, it’d be
the child of the mill owner.
As one song shuffles into the next (a tune you can all joyously
sing every word of), it occurs to you that an authentic self executes
thought with an essential vocabulary. And when you conceive ofauthenticity, you can picture everyone except yourself as you are aperennial outlier. Yet at the very same time, you disregard any such
notion of authenticity as essentialist nonsense, something for only themost fragile minds. Though also, in yet another concurrent stream ofconsideration, you question what you can really mean if you suggest
there is no faithfulness, no truthfulness, no continuity in all of anyone’s
experience ever. Do you mean that the atomic and subatomic levels areconstantly up for grabs at every moment of every single person’s time
alive?
You feel a rush up your spine as you move your limbs. Yourskull, such a manageable lump of bone, rocks back and forth to thepulses from the speakers and the image of your auntie from Australia
on the toilet floor in a gastro pub too upscale for vomit comes to yourmind. She is leaning back against the door, her legs spread, pink Docs
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peaking under the stall walls, and, though her makeup is smeared andsome sick is loitering on her chin, her face is a picture of mature grace,of lessons well-learned. I’ve seen that bloke behind the bar on Tinder. The
fit one. How old do you think he is? We were a match, but he never got intouch and neither did I. But maybe I should’ve instead of going with all thosebogens. Who knows what would’ve happened? We could’ve really hit it off. I
could be staying here. I could have a whole life for myself here instead ofmoving on again. But, then, he’s a fucking child, isn’t he? Twenty-three, I
reckon. That’s my minimum age. My maximum’s thirty-four because I’m justnot going there with anyone older. Not to knock, but blokes my age and above
are feisty as fuck. From above, sitting on the toilet, you continued tolisten to her calm explanation of her sexual preferences, and you
watched her intensity, the focus and determination of her desires, andconcluded that she was an absolutely fine human being. The image
lingers, slowly fading into nothing as you dance, your heart pounding,a lukewarm can in your hand, drops of cheap, frothy beer falling
sometimes onto your bare legs and sometimes onto the old camel lino.
Your head is a barely liftable weight when you step out of thebasement flat and into the light of day. But it’s also of zero mass andthat contradiction equally delights and scares as you ogle the scum on
the pavement by your foot. Both states cannot be true. Yet here youare experiencing the two of them at once. It is almost 11 a.m. You takeone long, final drag on your vaporizer and begin the stumble to thebus stop. It’s only thirty-five minutes at most and then a five-minutewalk, but the thought of you managing the whole journey toeventually get back to your bed where you’ll slip under the covers forthe rest of the day and speak to no one makes you feel truly, truly
heroic.
On the 393, several women are wearing bright floral patterns
and matching hats. They are chatty and lively. You figure they’re on
their way back from worship at one of the small evangelical churches
nestled in between chicken shops. You recall the men on the tube fromlast night. All these believers in transit. They have a destination andyou don’t. You want to ask these women what they prayed for thismorning and to whom they prayed. However, you feel filthy. You’rehigh. You’re secreting all the dirt of the night out through your almost
29

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Volume 2, Issue 2translucent pores. They must despair at the sight of me, you think. To
observe your ungainly, dilated pupils and long, regulated, heavy
breaths must be a sure sign to them that they’ve chosen the right path.
Yes, but when I rest my forehead against the cool porcelain of the toilet later,sighing in relief, I will have purged all of my impurities.
Then there is a sequence of days and nights, weeks and months inwhich you continue.
One evening, you are talking to your mother on the phone about the
Alaskan moose you’re planning to adopt for your father’s sixtiethwhen, midway through the conversation, you come to be hyperawareof your language again. But, this time, you feel you have no idea how
actual people speak, offering up only a poor, lifeless imitation. The
actor’s struggling to turn exposition into emotion. Listening at themonitor, the director’s racking up the number of hours to be spent in
the edit trying to salvage something even semi-relatable to an
audience. Your words feel unfit. They are a lead nib in an infant’s
mouth. You recall such a classmate, Liam McNamara in the infants,
forever sucking on a pencil, labelling the circumference of a rectangle.
The teacher corrected him to perimeter, but he kept saying Miss
Epstein, the circumference of a rectangle is two by four centimeters. He had
the concept, you think, but not the lexis, and without that he couldn’t
legitimize his thoughts and that would not do in the world he wasgoing out into. The one you are now fully in.
Your conversation is proceeding as follows:
Mother:You:
Mother:You:
Mother:How do you know which moose you’re getting?
You select one from a group. They have profiles
with statistics.
Profiles?
There’s a picture and then it tells you their name,how old they are, who their parents were, what
breed they are, their weight and height.
And how do you know the one you’ve picked isthe one you get?
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You:
Mother:You:
Mother:You:
Mother:You:

Volume 2, Issue 2

Why would they lie about that?
No, but you can’t actually check, can you?
You can go to Alaska.
And would you be able to recognize the moose
from the profile in person?
I mean . . . do you have any other ideas of what toget him?
Oh, he’s a right so-and-so to buy for.
It’s better than a book. And he likes nature. And
he’s sixty. And he doesn’t want anything. Whatis there he could really want anymore?

You sound machine-like. A smart machine, but a machine nonethelessas your speech has been stripped of idioms and therefore of familiarity,of regionality, of nationality, of humanity. Instead, you have a series ofsophisticated algorithms that can mimic human speech perfectly solong as language is accepted as essentially literal and disembodied, as
an autonomous system of information transfer in which a lexical item
is either a function of grammar or neatly corresponds to the thing it
denotes. Then, you suppose, you are a passable person. Of course, if
you really tried, you could throw in something figurative, somethingembodied. ‘Swings and roundabouts’: that’s a thing that people say.
Your mother has just said Why don’t you get him a book about moose to see
what he makes of them? Mind you, he might be a bit underwhelmed by anotherbook. You could reply: Swings and roundabouts, innit? The crux of themetaphor, you reason, is that the equal pros and cons in the experienceof two different amusement rides are the equal advantages anddisadvantages in outcomes produced by two different choices. It
strikes you to apply an individualizing variant:You:
Mother:Rollercoasters and . . . Ferris wheels, right?
Yer what?

You sigh and say you may as well get the moose and the book onmoose too, say goodbye, and hang up.
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The possibility dawns on you that ‘roundabouts’ doesn’t referto amusement rides, but to the things on the road that are driven
around, in which case the metaphor must be about driving. But what
are swings? Sharp turns? A car can swing left or right. So maybe if
you’d said Reverses and intersections, right? your mother would’ve
understood you to be using vernacular to convey that whatever you
choose for your father’s birthday is of equally little consequence tohim.
It sounds strange to you, it all sounds strange, and you thinkback to the playground of your primary school where there were
swings and what everyone did actually call a roundabout which Liam
McNamara used to push as hard as he could, the other children
clinging to the rail in fear as it spun, until he stopped and let one footdrag against the ground to slow the wooden circle down.
The problem, you surmise, is with these scripts. The director
can’t direct and the actor, no matter which one it is, can’t act without
a decent set of lines. Where does this dialogue come from? Who issupplying it? How are you ever to know when to say what to whom?
You are in the middle of a dream about Paul or Tom in which the twoof you are at a funeral. It’s a humanitarian service. The turnout isdecent, indicating a well-loved person, though you don’t know who it
is. Paul or Tom gets up to give a eulogy. He espouses all the virtutesof the dead individual. You begin to feel anxious, like something’s not
right, a thing that is concealed, yet very, very important. Now you areat the reception afterwards. The atmosphere is convivial enough andPaul or Tom is sitting next to you at the back of the room. You put
your hand on his thigh and lean into his face. His expression becomesdarker, his features rougher. He is scared. You attach your mouth tohis and feel his fear, so strong it has a sickly scent that turns yourstomach, and you continue not in spite of, but because of it.
As you wake, the dream is vanishing and a melody isemerging. It is from one of the manchild’s songs from that night at the
pop-up bar. Over a 60-66 BPM, the refrain the migration of our souls tohome plays over and over in your head. His nasal whine conquers like32

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an undercover agent of the state raiding a house of illegals, withultimate purpose and scant sense of decency. Accompanying thisinvasion is an internal atmosphere of unease as if you’ve done
something wrong that everyone will eventually find out about.
On checking your phone, you see there are ten minutes before
your alarm. Looking up at the spears of light the blinds have let slide
onto the ceiling, you think back to after the pop-up when you weretalking to Laura as you were sitting on the arm and she the seat of thesame multi-stained chair. I was just thinking that there are some people you
mostly like, but there’s a little bit you despise. And it’s so rare that you’re withpeople you totally like, you know? And that’s you people, she said. Yeah, you
replied whilst feeling inadequate for probably liking the people andthings you like the most about sixty percent tops, and even though
you knew Laura’s words were hyperbolic, you felt hollow for being
unable to apply the same rhetoric to your response. You felt Laura feelyour hollowness. You wanted to express yourself, to represent the, attimes, overwhelming feelings you have for the company you were in,but your technique was all wrong. The director was screaming at theactor, whose woodenness didn’t even bother her anymore as she’d got
all she could from the industry and would’ve rather been relaxing by
the pool than faking conviction for someone else’s vision.
Whilst the drugs had laid waste to Laura’s barricades, it seems
they forced yours to contract, raising unassailable walls around yourmost vulnerable part, which would never find escape, so you
disengaged from the process of trying to verbalize what you felt as
there was no way to say what comforts nor distresses you about theexperience of loving people and needing them to believe that you do.
At this moment, it makes you resentful. Why does Laura get to feel thingsand express them? you think as you watch the sunlight ripple from a
passing double-decker rattling your windowpanes.
Leaving the house five minutes later than you should, you lookup and see a middle-aged man in white briefs and a bowler hat standing
in the gateway, turned to the hedge, with a lighter in his hand. With
incredible calm and deliberation, he shifts and fixes his fleshy whitegaze on your face. You are at a loss. There’s a meeting at 9. You ask if
he needs any help. He is silent. Gently pushing past him, you say
Excuse me and make your way to the bus stop.
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During the meeting, as a voice intones obstacles to overcome
and aims to achieve, you wonder if the man was intending to set fireto your hedge and if he’s succeeded or not. Under the table you search
for news of fires in your neighborhood and see nothing. You search forsightings of a man in his underwear and a bowler hat and find nothing.
In the group chat with your flatmates you start a message about yourencounter then decide against it, unsure if you really saw a person or
if he was a phenomenally convincing hallucination.
Before you can tune back into the voice, a picture of a moose
comes through. The caption underneath reads: ‘Alfred deep inthought.’ The enormous brown animal, with its ludicrous headprotrusions, is standing in a green and orange field. There issomething in its stature and gaze that suggests an intense seriousness
about its state of being. Either that, or sheer gormlessness is easily
mistaken for solemnity. Since receiving his birthday present, yourfather keeps you regularly updated on the progress of Alfred. As
opposed to contributing to the nihilism of his increasing years, as you
had thought it might, the adopted moose has, conversely, brought
about deep investment in the miracle of life. You imagine yourself at
sixty: you have no head, torso or limbs, rather you’re an abstraction of
accumulated time whose potential has shrunk from a planet to a ballbearing. What would a moose mean to you? And, perhaps more
importantly, there is the unnerving question of who exactly you willknow then who’ll think to acquire a large North American mammal tolift your spirits.
In the afternoon, you have to get your colleague with thecomatose brother to sign off on a report. Her desk is empty. The manon reception says that she had to leave early due to a family emergency.
You wonder if her brother has woken up or died. The latter option
leads you to imagine a painful smile ripping her mouth open like thering-pull on a silky aluminum can of cava, only then for her grief andmortification at herself to stifle it until, inevitably, a new, sharper
vision of the future can no longer be suppressed.
On the way home it takes you a while to realize the bus hasbarely moved in ages. You’ve been drawn into the center of yourphone: news of wildfires, earthquakes and floods; a new insomnia curerecommending sleep suppositories; politicians’ threats; TV shows you
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have no idea how to watch; kittens; people without homes dying;recent definitions of longstanding sexualities; the latest tech; yourfriends’ achievements; lists of anxiety symptoms devastating your life;
outrage at a famous individual who expressed opinions even someserial killers would deride; more kittens; and a selection of men for you
to scroll through, with you trying to remember as you swipe left andright that these appearances belong to people who are probably, much
like yourself, stuck on their commute and distracting themselves fromthe twin terrors of not having a clue who they are and knowing exactly
who they are.
Accidentally, you swipe right on a man posing with a tiger
because your attention is taken by the glut of flashing blue lights up
ahead. You assumed it was just traffic for traffic’s sake, but there seems
to have been an accident. The tiger guy was a match. You are
disgusted. The next face staring back at you from your phone looks
stricken. Even though there’s a smile, it appears nervous,
uncomfortable, apprehensive about the unstoppable thing that’s justabout to happen. You project a whole life with this man and play out
the scene when, after many years, after your friends’ kids have left theirhomes, he reproaches you for ruining him so you finally say that you’ve
never trusted him, that when he smiles it’s like he’s acknowledging
past collaboration with an alien evil that’s coming back to terminate
all life on Earth. To that he simply appraises you from head to toe, tuts
disapprovingly, and walks out of the door.
Looking up again, you catch sight of figures in high-res vests
huddled around the same spot. The passenger beside you coughs,
hacking something up and snorting it back down. He’s probably
sixteen or seventeen. You doubt your existence will have registeredfor him as you’re just someone older. It’s thirteen years since you were
his age. Thirteen years since you were at Helen Kerr’s house party
standing in the kitchen concocting a drink from gin, rum and brandy
with Chris Jones, Mark Johnson and Sean Scanlon. There werebrownies on offer. You ate a whole one, unaware of how strong it was.
Right when it started to hit, Liam McNamara came into view in the
hallway. He’d gone to a different secondary school and you hadn’t seen
him since the juniors.
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Not recognizing you, he approached and started speaking toMark Johnson. Their dialogue seemed to exist separately from yourreality, which had its own clammy microclimate, creating a humid
haze, landmarks obscured. Spoons was shite mate, no one there you heard
him say before he realized who you were, surprised at what had
become of the child he’d known, stunned even. You weren’t really sureif the sounds you made were words that fit into sentences that could
be understood, but it appeared the both of you had become engaged inconversation. Back in the day he kept saying, implying your childhood
had taken place in another era when everything was different. It was
only five years ago you said and he replied yeah, fucking years ago. And
maybe he was right: that was then.
Concentrating on that/then on the bus, you try to see yourpast self as someone else entirely. You try to picture your layers ofexperience as shed skins hanging up in the wardrobe as you’re off
galivanting in a brand-new epidermal sheath, flitting from scene toscene as a changed being, a different creature from the ones who’ve
come before. But you don’t feel changed. What you feel, as far as canbe discerned, is like the skins aren’t shed, rather they keep
accumulating on the same set of bones, getting heavier and heavier yet
further and further away from your skeleton so that although you’reconstantly carrying around their weight, they’re also at a remove fromthe mainframe of you now. Because as much as the stoned person
talking to Liam McNamara and the impressed person listening to your
Australian auntie and the detached person watching Paul or Tom
bleed into the kitchen sink and the unimpressed person in a pop-up bar
are united as one by a lack of progress towards any point of life, to thatthing that drives others to mold their desires to it, causing them to let
go of the attitudes and activities they used to have and do, to move onto their legacies, surrendering to an urge to pass themselves on in
genes and values, as much as this is the case, it is also true that when
you revisit a memory of yourself you fail to conjure anything morethan a one-dimensional avatar who’s incapable of complex emotional
states: you know that as you were talking to Liam McNamara you
were freaking out due to the brownie, wanting him to like you but
super anxious about all the eyes on you, about speaking at aninappropriate volume on some delicate matter like Helen Kerr’s dad’s
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academic papers on sterilization, but, other than that, of your quotidian
inner-life from that period you have absolutely no insight now, so thatit can be stated that you’re the proverbial goldfish, swimming roundand round its bowl, whose basic integrity never alters despite beingcaught in a continuous act of forgetting.
Going back to your phone, you search for Liam McNamara.
He’s remained in a ten-mile radius of your primary school. In his
profile picture he’s clutching two small children, their cone-like heads
a familial identifier. On his face, a beard and three deep lines above hisbrow make him appear like you never knew him, as this is an adult andnot a child nor an adolescent. The boy next to you hacks up andswallows again. The noise emitting from his headphones is as thougha group of captive particles is manically scratching through its
container in a futile bid for freedom. You focus on his youth: there are
mild acne patches and a developing jaw line, but, mainly, there’s a total
unawareness of what awaits him all over his nonchalant confidence.
Knowing that he will age, just like Liam McNamara, and mostprobably succumb to the forces of change elusive to you, feels utterly
devastating.
Notification of a series of messages from Jen slides down fromthe top bar. You open them and read:- Not gonna make it tonight- My job is the worst!
- Sorry!
- Claudia’s insisting everyone stay late even though
she’s gone home
- Fracking knot
- *fucking knob
- Still on for Friday tho- Gonna get fucked up- CANNOT WAIT
Following the last message is an emoji of a round yellow face withlopsided eyebrows, the left eye significantly narrower than the right,
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poking the patch of red on its right cheek. To reply you use a roundyellow face in the throes of laughter with tears coming out of both
eyes. After that, you send a GIF from Eisenstein’s Strike of Tsarist
police shooting workers, to which Jen responds with three laughing
faces rolling on the floor.
The bus lurches forward, providing a fuller view of theaccident. Behind the crouched high-res vests there’s a mangled bicycle
halfway under the front wheel of another bus. In front of them, an
ambulance. Your movement is halted again. At this moment, themelody of the manchild’s song comes back into your head, though hiswords have been replaced with the circumference of a rectangle, which, as
you don’t know the rest of the song, has no alternative but tocontinuously loop, its minor to major shift irritating and inescapable.
You look back down to the round yellow faces on your phoneand consider if they represent one individual experiencing a range ofemotions or if they’re separate individuals defined by the one emotion.
The regularity of their face shape and color suggests a consistent
wholeness, the same person’s features transformed in correspondencewith their inner state. But how do you know there is internalconsistency between each one? You don’t have any evidence proving abase set of reoccurrences ensuring that the inebriated emoji isessentially the same self as the one rolling on the floor laughing.
Except for color and shape, there might be no unifying factor between
them. In a way, you think it’s more manageable if they are separate
beings with one feeling each as the alternative has a kind of seedinessto it like a raw, naked creature has been laid out for you to drool over,devouring all of their moods, attitudes and reactions, any notion ofprivacy robbed from them, a savage violation of subjective solitude.
Movement within your peripheral vision causes you to turnyour head to see a woman lying on the road, her neck twisted to theright, her blonde hair bloodied. Within no more than three or four
seconds she is covered with a blue blanket. Those eyes that were
staring directly into yours, you realize, were a dead body’s.
Towards the end of Helen Kerr’s house party, you and Liam
McNamara locked yourselves in one of the bathrooms for twenty-fiveminutes. Before you left, he told you that his next-door neighbor, achildminder, had just been convicted for the manslaughter of a three38

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year-old. It hadn’t surprised him because when he was little and looked
after there a baby had died from cot death. He remembered hisneighbor carrying the tiny body down the stairs, panicking, and thenthe mother arriving and beginning to wail, the sonic resonance of
which lodging itself in his four-year-old psyche in such a strident
manner that, in times of stress, he could still hear it now. You veryclearly recall thinking of this moment in the toilet stall with your
Australian auntie as behind her was a mosaic of graffiti, within which
was written What is existence if you’re not desired?, and you were takenback to exiting the bathroom with Liam McNamara and the contrast
between the weight of what he’d just said and the weight of being seen
by Claire Walsh and Susan Evans and this feeling of being desired andhaving others know it. These two weights seemed perfectly, if
precariously, balanced, in that as horrifying as knowledge of death andits certainty was, the pleasure of reciprocal passion observed turned
living into resistance.
An image of the fleshy, white man in his underwear andbowler hat comes back to you, his facial features of eyes and mouth
forming an isosceles triangle. There was nothing readable about him,no clue as to the why, what and how of him and his situation. You
wonder if he has any other expressions or if he is defined by one state:
blankness. He has perhaps gone from one event to the next in the same
unthinking, unfeeling fugue, unable to do or be anything different. You
try to see multitudes in him, all the possible permutations of a lived
life on the various contortions of his face. There is a person throughout,a constant singularity you tell yourself, yet remain unconvinced as every
instance of the man as anything other than blankness plays like acontrivance, a fake.
The bus pushes through the last blockage and moves forwards
to complete its journey as normal. Locked deep in the interior of thedead woman’s eyes it seems to you there was one last enduring
thought. After her heart had stopped beating, as her brain’s electricalactivity was ceasing and as the awareness of no return was fading, she
was left with the final, unanswerable, horrifying question: What am I?
You push the button for your stop and get up, staggering as
the bus judders and stumble down the top steps into the young man infront. Before you can remove your hands from his shoulders and39

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apologize, he says sorry, so you have to repeat the words twice for it
to have effect. He blinks and turns away. On your palms there remains
the phantom sensation of possession, the spectral pressure of contact
with another physical object. Stepping out into the early springevening, you succumb and sing along: the circumference of a rectangle, thecircumference of a rectangle . . . .

40

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Villainy 04 / Nicole Foran

41

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Villainy 09 / Nicole Foran

42

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Trevor in Tenby
Penny Jackson
He could only get one job, and that was calling the Bingo every Friday
night. That Welsh winter in Trenby was so cold that the air cracked
with rebellion every time he tried to breathe. The memory of Jamaica
drifted warmly over his skin like a ray of sun. The Bingo Hall was aroller rink during the day, the scent of teenage sweat still sour it was
only women at the Bingo, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, leaving ashy
smudges on his cards. They treated Trevor like a celebrity – no one
colored had ever been in their town. The women told him if you
touched a “wog” it brought good luck. Their fingers felt like fat rollsof pastry. Some even pinched his arm so hard that it left a blue bruise.
A few even touched his ass. One old woman, no teeth, spit spraying
from her lips: “Come on love, let me grab you again.” They winked at
Trevor, rolled their eyes, and wriggled hips forever ruined by children.
He could never remember the numbers called. If someone called
BINGO he wouldn’t bother to check. He remembered their words: If
you touched a wog the night was magic.
In his bedsit Trevor could not scrub hard enough. The water
was cold. The soap left a think white veil over his skin. To feel all thewomen’s fingers all over again. As if his blackness would turn silver
into their palms.

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Salvage
Mickie Kennedy
A stay of leaves,a coherence of tree and path.
Splice of salt among a stumble of stone.
The thrash of doors unhinging at the rust.
At the pry of youth a proxy of fruit.
The wound of absence proceededby the constellation of touch.
The slender killing of a deer.
Horsehair plaster succumbing to a century of leaks.
The disregard of hand-cut nails.
The punctuality of a porch dissembling at dawn,
the memory of one plank at a time.
The blue orchard rounded to the nearest acre.
Burn barrels along the rows to smoke out the blight.
A larder of bustle reduced to a rounded fist.
A bottle of the half-turned wine.
A summoning of cardinals.
An eclipse of reds and grays.
The dialogue of months
against a scatter of squirrel and moss.
What catches in the throat?

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Quilted Landscape / Christina Klein

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The Tower Bells
Alli Parrett
Doctor Cate comes into my room to sit with me like she does every
night before she goes home. She tells me not to use her last name—too formal for friends, she says. I’m delighted that she calls me her
friend though she’s only known me a few months.
Awful business being stuck in a bed all day. Not long ago I
used to have these talks with Doctor Cat while she walked me aroundthe church next to the hospital. Same one I got married in forty-six
years ago, then buried my husband in forty-two years after that. He
wore blue both times. Dying isn’t a pretty business, no matter how
hard we try. I miss him but am thankful he can’t see me this way.
The tower bells ring calling the end of Doctor Cate’s shift. She
squeezes my hand gently between her own and says she’ll see me
tomorrow. Though I’d never tell her, it hope it’s the last time I hearthose church bells.
The tower bells go off at the church. An end of the day for some. Forme, another reminder that I’ve missed the visiting hours at mymother’s hospital. I steal a look out the window evading notice frommy boss and wonder how she’s doing. She is hearing the same chimes.
It won’t be like this forever, I tell myself. My heart twinges.
I am still at my desk staring at the same report carrying out
new tasks at my boss’s request. My mother is still in her bed withnothing new on television, still complaining to the nurses. At least she
has Doctor Cate. She says she likes her. Sometimes, when there
weren’t a lot of people, Doctor Cate took her inside. It was where she
and my father got married, where they baptized me, where they went
to church every Sunday even after I stopped going with them. Whereshe buried my father three years ago. She stopped going after that.
Tomorrow I will have time.
The morning is still dark. The hospital’s number displays
itself across my phone. Doctor Cate gives me news I both hoped anddreaded for months. My chest twists like a dish rag being rung.
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A Life in Four Operations
Kim Waters
I Addition
It beginsin the classroom heatof a late August afternoon,a lead pencil lagging
on your tongue
as the numbers squelch
under your squint
because at that age
you’re growing flesh,gatheringwhat’s around you
and trying to make senseof a Cuisenaire box setof Panglossian colored columns.
II Subtraction
No longer satisfied
with what’s presented
on the paper before you,rebellion
kicks its heels inand like an unhung handset
in a public telephone booth
you’re an adolescenthovering in space,counting backwards
in a minor chord,
thinking you know best,
even though
what you’re left with47

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is less than before.
III Multiplication
With two x chromosomes
you’re going to needa bigger house,
more garage tools
and kitchen utensils
for the children
who have begun
to appearin your own image
and suddenly life
becomes a tic tac toe,a cross-stitch
with your family nameembroideredin the hallway.
IV Division
Finally,
it comes down to this,time reversing
in on itself,
downsizing
to a nursing home,belongings gone,a morse codeof dots and dashes,
the SOS of death
until you’re gone
and an obelus appears
in the partitionof your estate.
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The Man Who Misspelled God
Mekiya Walters
I’d never heard Paganino Paganini raise his voice before the day that
Gabiano’s letter came. Alessandro, his only son, had taken over the
printing business years before I came onboard, but Master Paganino
still involved himself when his health permitted, reviewing accounts andeditorial decisions, sometimes touring the workroom, reprimanding a
man or two for shoddy work or laziness; but he never spent his passionson us. He had a jagged face and a rigid spine and more commitment to
the ideal of mediocritas than any patrician, breaking fast each morningwith the same dry crust, the same handful of olives as a poor man,unmoved by the mercantile world’s vicissitudes.
And yet his voice rose now behind Alessandro’s study door,
and fell, and rose again, and all motion on the press floor slowed as thesound of unfamiliar fury drew us from our work—all but Lorenzo, thebattitore, who continued swabbing ink onto the block of type that heand I had just maneuvered onto our press’s carriage, his rhythm stoic
and unbroken, for he was hard of hearing.
It was a humid day in spring, a few weeks after the Feast of
the Ascension, when we and every other printer in Venice had set up
open-air booths in St. Mark’s Square. Meager profits, but that was how
the fair went every year. Since then, things had been looking up. In thefront room, elaborately clad men perused the catalog by the window
and the second-hand books in the shop’s northwest corner, somelooking over the unbound volumes heaped along the walls and on theoutdoor tables, shielded by an alabaster awning from the sun. A breeze
fingered the unbound pages, mixing the smells of Mercerie Street—
perfume and sewage and flowers and sea—and bearing them back to
us in the workroom, through the cracked-open door, along with thecustomers’ voices. We had our own damp miasma on the work floor—
sweat and moist paper and the mineral-sharp bite of tincture—as did
the slave quarters at the back of the shop: spice, shit, cooking oil, andwhatever garbage had been dumped in the alley the night before.
Alessandro’s study and the servants’ rooms were on the ground floor,49

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too. The Paganinis lived above us, and only with permission did anyof us ascend the stairs. I imagined that they kept their windows open.
Through the door to the front room, I could see Pietro, thecompositor, doing his best to maintain his composure, running adelicate finger down the ledger as a gray-voiced man I couldn’t see
struck him with question after question, quick as a jouster, not waiting
for an answer to each one before delivering the next: “How much will
the binding cost?” and, “How many days?” and, “You know, the prices
aren’t as good here as what I’ve seen in Bavaria.”
This was Pietro’s first time behind the counter. Alessandro
had pulled him from the work floor while he and his father retreatedto the study to look the letter over. This had never happened before.
My attention was still on Pietro when a thud came from thestudy. I turned. A savage yell, and then the heavy walnut door crashedopen and disgorged Alessandro, who stumbled into the nearest
press—mine—and jolted loose the paper I’d been securing to thegauge pins. A slash of crimson above his eye. He raised an arm todeflect a second projectile: a bone-sharp crack, and something rattled
across the floor. Alessandro clutched his arm. Enough flesh, I couldn’t
help thinking, to protect him from everything but a bruise. Over theyears his robust appetite and taste for wine had stripped him of his
father’s visage, softened his edges. He reminded me of a sea urchin I’donce found as a boy washed up on the Ifriqiyan shore, so thoroughly
encrusted in algae that its spikes were nearly hidden. Even then, I’dknown better than to pick it up.
Master Paganino stood in the doorway, emotion sewing up his
silver brows and rutted cheeks, looking like nothing so much as awooden pillar eaten through by termites, about the crumble. Had thebreeze from the street not abated, I’d have feared it would disperse
him. On again, off again since 1509, he had been ill, as if the defeat at
Agnadello, the loss of so much land from the Republic, had effected in
him an equivalent diminishment of spirits—but I’d never seen him
look so frail as he did then. Perhaps he knew, as animals do, that hewould be dead within the year. Or perhaps fury had blasted allthoughts, even those of mortality, from his brain.
“You’ve ruined us,” he said.
“For God’s sake,” Alessandro hissed, “not here.”50

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Even Lorenzo had turned to watch the drama, quick, dark eyes
following our employers’ lips, an ink-stained leather paddle forgotten
in each hand.
“Why not here?” Master Paganino demanded. “These men,
Alessandro—” and with a twitch of his arm, he brought us all into thefold, “—till their contracts expire, they’re your flesh and blood.”
Alessandro, terse, resentful, nursed his arm.
“You can lie to your betters,” Master Paganino pressed on,“hide from your peers, but don’t think you’ll deceive your servants.
They feed on secrets as we feed on bread.”
I glanced at Alessandro, expecting indignation—he thought
well of himself as a man of the people: what could his father tell him of
the working class?—but his pride had been shattered. I could see it in
the slump of his shoulders. I didn’t like witnessing this confrontation,
though I’d developed no great affection for either of the Paganinis
while in their employ. Like Master Paganino, my father had been a
frugal man, and pious as Abraham, and because decades had passed
since we’d parted, and his face had faded in my mind, it was the elder
Paganini’s that came before me sometimes when I tried to call it up.
Alessandro’s impudence irritated me as it irritates me to see a man tossa perfectly good crust in the gutter—a precious paternal resource
squandered.
“My son,” Master Paganino declared, raising his voice to makeus all his audience, “knows nothing of prudence. How many times,
Alessandro, how many times did I tell you—that book—that
goddamned book—”
Only a fool would have to guess which of our books he wasreferring to.
It was only then that I noticed Caterina in the doorway to theslaves’ quarters. A tall girl, sinewy, but something less than sturdylooking, and a few shades darker yet again than me. She’d once been
attractive, I imagined, or nearly so, but now her cheeks bore
pockmarks, and her hair had grown prematurely gray. She’d been with
the Paganinis longer than any of us, traveling with Master Paganino
when he visited Venice or Isola del Garda while his wife Christina
stayed behind in Toscolano to oversee the paper mill. Caterina was the
only woman in the house this year, for Alessandro’s Daria, too, had
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stayed in Toscolano to look after the mill and her mother-in-law. Were
it not for Caterina’s childlessness, she would most likely have beenejected from the household long ago. As it was, Christina tolerated her.
Master Paganino looked about to lay hands on his son again.
Then he swayed, barely managing to catch hold of the doorframe. He’dforgotten his silver-tipped cane.
In an instant, Caterina was at Master Paganino’s side, ducking
under his arm and taking his weight with a grimace.
“You’ve gambled away these men’s bread,” Master Paganinosaid, hardly aware, it seemed, of the woman supporting him. His eyes
never left Alessandro’s. “When they starve, who do you think they’llturn on?”I felt as if, halfway through stepping into a boat, a wave hadcome along and set it rocking beneath me.
Caterina leaned her weight into her charge, and like a horse
guided by a skillful rider, he acquiesced and shuffled toward the stairs.
I’d once overheard her trying to convince him to take a room on the
ground floor, but he’d refused. The ground floor was for servants, he’dinsisted, and Jews. Even Alessandro’s friend, the polyglot Jew with thelazy eye who came to stay with us last autumn, had slept on a bedroll
next to mine, despite the precious service he was rendering at no cost
but room and board. No exceptions to the household rules.
Caterina had relented, had not brought it up again.
We all watched them climb the stairs, Caterina’s whole frame
angling to bear Master Paganino’s weight. Only when they’d reached
the first-floor landing did Alessandro turn to us.
“Well?” he demanded. As if we were the ones obliged to
explain ourselves. A tremulous note rang in his voice. “His mind isgoing,” he said. “I can assure you, it’s not as bad as he thinks. He sees
mountains, I only see small stones. He hasn’t got the energy—but do
I look worried? No. You shouldn’t be, either.” His hand fluttered to his
forehead absently. He glanced at his fingers as if distracted, then wiped
the blood on the pleat of his giornea. “We only go hungry if we stop
the presses. Let’s not let that happen.”
He retreated into his study and shut the door.
Lorenzo’s eyes met mine across the bed of type. The sheet ofpaper that I’d let slip had folded over onto the inky bed. It would have52

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to be discarded. I removed it gingerly, carried it to the short stack ofrejects in the corner, and returned with a fresh one.
“What the hell’s going on back here?” Pietro’s head poked infrom the front room. He eyed the study door. “Is he in there?”Nods all around the work floor.
“Master Alessandro!” Pietro called. When no answer came, hecrossed to the door and rapped hard on the walnut with his knuckles,
ignoring the knocker in the shape of the Paganini family seal. “A
customer wants to speak to you, sir. He’s asking about prices. Whatshould I tell him?”
Lorenzo caught my eye and gave his head a little shake, as if
to dislodge water from his ear. I shot back something that would have
liked to be a smile.
“I haven’t got a clue where anything is,” Pietro muttered, tous, it seemed, “or how much he’s asking for it. And I can’t read his
handwriting.” He glanced at the door as if hoping to find instructions
scrawled there in a legible hand. “If he doesn’t come out, we might aswell close the shop.”“Should we shut the presses down, too?” This from Matteo,
the second tiratore.
“No,” I said.
There was no clear chain of command in the printing housebeneath the Paganinis. Normally in their absence, authority fell towhomever they explicitly left in charge. As a journeyman and firsttiratore, though, I thought I had a fairly strong claim to seniority. And
my gut told me that shutting down the presses would mean more thanhalf a day of lost profits—would mean acknowledging that something
had begun to shift beneath our feet, something none of us could
control. That our livelihoods here at the press were in jeopardy.
“You heard Alessandro,” I added. “Do you want to go
hungry?”Pietro jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “Do you want to get
out there and manage the mob?”“Close up the front, then,” I said. “We’ll keep the presses
running.”
Sometimes men want nothing more than to be given clear
instructions. This was one of those occasions, evidently.
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The creak of wood, the scrape of paper, the squalling ofungreased screws resumed. Lorenzo and I folded down the frisket andthe tympan, rolled the carriage under the till, and I took hold of the ironbar and heaved to turn the screw and drive the platen down so that the
ink would kiss the paper. In the background, Pietro attempted tomaneuver confused customers out of the shop, announcing that thebackroom had flooded, that we would need a day to clean up, maybe two.
He returned a few minutes later, looking a bit calmer, thoughno less haggard, and took a seat on the edge of the nearest workbench.
“What do you think he’s gone and done now?” he asked, his voice low
enough that it wouldn’t reach the study.
“God only knows,” said Giorgio, Matteo’s battitore.
Lorenzo made the sign of the cross, eyed me sardonically, andstuck out his tongue. I stuck mine out, too.
“Something’s gone wrong with the Koran,” Matteo said. “It’s
got to be.”I did my best to look as if I hadn’t heard, but anyone could
have seen the hairs on my neck standing.
Pietro, sardonically: “And what could possibly have gonewrong with that?”
From the beginning, Master Paganino had disapproved of
Alessandro’s ambition to print the Qur’an—never mind that it was
Paganino’s friend Gregori’s Kitab Salat al-Sawa’i that had inspired theenterprise, and that Gregori’s Arabic typeface had served as
Alessandro’s first model. Gregori had been the first printer in
Venice—in the world, as far as any of us knew—to solve the principal
problem in printing Arabic, that of joining up the ligatures. Alessandro
had always fancied himself a visionary, ready to shatter all the staid
conventions to which his father cleaved—also a cosmopolitan, at easewith Jews and Muslim, sheikhs and slaves—and Arabic printing was
the sort of thing he would have liked to put his name on. It galled himthat someone else had gotten there first. But Gregori only intended tosell the book of hours that he’d printed to Arab Christians in the
East—a niche market. Alessandro had hatched a grander plan.
Since I’d entered his employ, Alessandro had developed a habitof pulling me aside at odd hours—sometimes after the work was
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me about my upbringing in Ifriquiya, trawling for exotic details withwhich to enrich his vision of the world. He liked extracting stories
from travelers, too, and from his many business connections, and fromall this, he’d gathered that most Muslim households couldn’t afford a
Qur’an and depended on the copy available at the local mosque. He
understood that the book could not be printed except by hand, and that
this was an expensive undertaking, and he’d probably assumed that
this owed solely to the technical challenges of joining ligatures andjuggling a multitude of contextual letterforms. Maybe I should havecorrected him. But I was only a machinist. This wasn’t my job. And
anyhow, it had seemed possible at the time that I might be mistaken.
The Christians, after all, saw no sin in mass-producing holy books, andbesides, I’d come from the countryside, an olive farm on the outskirts
of Tunis. I knew little of the Eastern cities. Maybe Ottoman buyers
would take interest in a printed Qur’an.
Master Paganino didn’t trust Saracens, wanted nothing to dowith them. He’d already handed the reigns to his son, though, andwent months sometimes without leaving his bed. He’d had no choice
but to trust Alessandro. I’d done the same.
And so Alessandro had hunted down Gregori’s typeface andbought it off him in 1515. But he hadn’t been satisfied. The following
year, the Genoese Giustiniani published a polyglot Bible, partly inArabic, using a different typeface, which Alessandro had also moved topurchase; but this one, too, had failed to meet with his approval. In theend, he’d gone and engraved his own elaborate set of punches andmatrices, spending a small fortune on lead, steel, and copper, smelting
and chiseling all through the dawn and midnight hours, stomping
around the workshop in a short-tempered haze while discarded
prototypes piled up in waste bins. What flaws a man who read no
Arabic could have found in the first two sets, I’d never fathomed, but
at a certain point, one learned not to question Alessandro.
“He’s always been a gambler,” Matteo said. “And his father can
go on about prudence all day, but they caught him minting counterfeit
coins once.” He took a sheet of paper from the workbench and set about
securing it to his press. “In my opinion, the apple doesn’t fall far fromthe tree.”55

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Volume 2, Issue 2“That’s only a rumor,” Pietro said. “And Mamádo’s right. Let’sfinish the run, at least. No point speculating.”
Alessandro had always refused to call me by the Tuscan nameI’d received from my first and only master, an apothecary, years ago.
When he hired me, he’d insisted that I tell him my given name,Mamdouh. He hadn’t much appreciated my attempts to correct his
pronunciation, though. And so, I’d become Mamádo.
A second passed, and then another, and I realized that at themention of my name, uncomfortable stillness had descended on theworkroom. Nobody was looking at me.
“Once we’ve got something done,” Pietro said, “we can close
up shop, even if it’s a bit early. I could use a drink.”
My authority seemed to have slipped away as easily as it hadcome, yielding to an unspoken agreement that I should be excluded
from any further discussion of the Qur’an.
Work resumed. I understood my colleagues’ desire to mullthings over privately without having to guard their tongues, but that
did not dampen my frustration. In all my years as a tiratore, I’d spokenof my faith to no one except Alessandro, and then only under duress.
I had not held myself apart, even when the other men tossed backdrinks or mumbled prayers, though I hadn’t partaken, either. Mostdays, my fellow printers treated me no differently than any othertiratore. Still, they knew I wasn’t Christian.
“Should we be wasting our money on wine?” I heard Matteo
murmur to Giorgio at the other press. “If our salary’s in question?”“Have you got something better to spend it on?” Giorgio shotback.
“I have, as a matter of fact. I’ve got my family to feed.”
I tried to focus on the rhythm of the work, the resistance inthe bar. I felt a kinship with both, and neither. I agreed that wine
seemed foolish, but I had no family to feed. Which was to say that I no
longer knew if I had a family, or if they needed feeding. Which was tosay that I’d had a family, once, that I’d once fed them, and that as aconsequence, I was here. No idea if they’d survived the droughts or theHafsids’ ousting, stayed in Tunis or sought shelter among the
Amizaghs in the hills. Sometimes I wondered. Sometimes—but whatkind of workingman has time for such thoughts? Wasn’t I stockpiling56

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coins in my mattress, just in case? And wouldn’t I send that money
back to them if ever an opportunity came? Did any day contain enoughhours to do anything more? How many thousands of times had I
thrown my weight against the bar? How many tens of thousands oftimes had I raised the platen, rolled back the carriage, extracted theglistening, neatly printed sheets, and carried them to the workbench
to stack atop their fellows? How many millions of pages had theworkbench borne? On a good day, we could average three thousand,the evidence of our labor piling up around us. This day, though, was
not a good one.
For the first time in years, I began wondering how many morepages I would have to secure. I’d grown adept at ignoring the ache in
my shoulders, but I couldn’t prevent my mind from flitting to and fro,alighting on discomfort first, then curiosity, and then unease. I would
have food and shelter that night, and perhaps the next, but for how
many more thereafter?
Quite some time had passed since Caterina had helped Master
Paganino up the stairs, and no one had come back down. To distract
myself, I resumed a familiar habit: entertaining suspicions anddismissing them. Some women never could bear children, after all, nomatter what was done to them, and Master Paganino would be an
unusual man indeed if he’d never taken advantage of what was his. Yet
I found I had little difficulty believing that he was, indeed, an unusualman. There was something about the sheer indifference that heshowed her, unmarred by any trace of embarrassment orcontradiction—this from a man who’d built his reputation on
Christian books and narrow scruples. A Cypriot who used to serve thePaganinis had told me once how he’d entered Master Paganino’s roomand found him stretched on the bed and Caterina at the bottom of the
bedroll, his feet in her hands, working over the callouses with her
strange, stubby thumbs as he’d stared heavenward, utterly distracted
by nothing at all, his face blanker than paper. Caterina, for her part,never showed any outward sign of love or hatred, disgust or affection:
just a sort of ritualistic devotion, not unlike that of old women in
prayer, arthritic limbs creaking with the effort of prostration, unawarethat not everyone endured this pain.
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It would have been different with Alessandro as head ofhousehold—Alessandro, who never missed an opportunity to get his
hands dirty. More than once, I’d watched him strike up conversations
with riffraff and beggar-men, servants and slaves, pursuing one-sided
discourses with half-savage domestics ignorant of his language andindifferent to his company, and, when the objects of his interest
ignored or rebuffed him, becoming impatient and venting his anger onthem, or on whatever other unlucky man happened to be standing
nearby, with blows. I found so many of his habits irritating, and solittle in his nature to redeem him, and yet as night began to fall, mythoughts returned to him like blackbirds circling back toward achimney. Whatever had gone wrong with the Qur’an would land on
both of us, after all, and such circumstances have been known to effectbonds between men where none would otherwise exist. It was such abond, such a concern, that I felt forming then.
We finished the run just as the lamplighters came along
Mercerie Street, nimbly wielding their unruly poles. A Tartar boy, a
new slave whose name I didn’t know, came around the work floor,
scaling stools and benches to reach the lamps and light them. Lorenzo
and Giorgio took their beaters into the alley behind the shop to clean
them, while Pietro set about disassembling the type that he’d set thatmorning, removing the sorts one by one and rinsing them in a pan.
As tiratore, my responsibilities included ensuring that mypress was properly greased and readied for the next day’s labor, but I
struggled to concentrate on these tasks, my attention hovering by
Alessandro’s study door, which had remained shut all afternoon,
silence piling up behind it like dark clouds on the horizon.
I scoured the workroom, peering under benches until I cameupon the object that Master Paganino had thrown at his son: anoversized leaden sort, slightly deformed, but clearly an attempt at themedial form of ba’. Unlike the rest of the rejects, which Alessandro had
relegated to the waste bin, this one had been promoted to paperweight.
I carried the ba’ to Alessandro’s study and knocked, and when
no answer came, I pushed the door and found it yielding. I went in.
Alessandro sat with his legs stretched out beneath his desk, ahand over his mouth and chin, gazing into the middle distance. He
might have been sitting there for days or decades, a statue carved to58

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capture every facet of despair. The darkness in the room was nearly
absolute. An unlit lamp sat near at hand.
“Sir,” I said, placing the ba’ on the desk and taking a seat acrossfrom him, “if I may ask, in the event that there’s a problem—that thepress—” I couldn’t decide how to phrase the question. After a long
hesitation, I asked, “What will happen to my contract?”
Alessandro looked at me as if the act of recalling my namewould have taken more effort than remained to him. “I don’t know,” hesaid. “I don’t know what will happen to any of us.”This uncertainty, the cracks branching out through the floorsof the future—it occurred to me that this was more or less what
Caterina had been living with for years. Since 1509, at least, andprobably much longer. I couldn’t quite imagine Master Paganino everputting her up for sale, certainly not unless he fell into a truly
desperate situation, and yet I also understood, as every slave
understands, that this is the one way in which our masters can deceive
us. And themselves.
Perhaps I could consult her. Learn how she readied herself
each day for the unknown future. But no. She was one of those slaves
who’d made an art of bondage, who let slip nothing that the masters
wouldn’t want to hear, whether or not they were listening. Even if I
approached her as a fellow who’d once worn chains, I knew that I
would get no more from her than I could from a cobblestone.
“This mountain,” I said to Alessandro, “that you say is merelystones. What is it really?”
Alessandro rubbed his mouth and drew his hand down to his
chin. I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at me or into some abyss.
“Gabiano’s man’s been taken into custody,” he said. “The Sultan wants
his head. They’ve scheduled him for execution. And his ship’s been
scuttled. All the type and printed copies, all at the bottom ofConstantinople’s harbor.”
I shouldn’t have had to ask the next question. I should have
known. But the longer I’d lived in this city of Christians, the muddier
things had become. I’d been a free man and a slave in Tunis and in
Venice, a farmer and a merchant, a treacherous domestic and a loyal
apprentice and, finally, a trusted journeyman, and I’d encountered somany peculiarities along the way that I no longer felt capable of either
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surprise or intuition regarding what was right or natural for men.
These days, I needed things spelled out for me.
Besides, if I didn’t ask, my silence might arouse Alessandro’s
suspicions.
I heard my voice in the darkness: “Why?”“For blasphemy,” he said.
A weight settled on me, then—as if I’d lain down between theplaten and the paper. My mouth grew dry, and all through my body,an ache struck up its steady drum, part hunger, part fear, partweariness.
“The envoy’s Gabiano’s cousin,” Alessandro said. “He intends
to lobby for his release. He’s demanding that we send a thousand
ducats.”“A thousand?” Surely, any man worth such a sum should never
have been sent behind enemy lines. But perhaps not every coin wasmeant for Constantinople.
Alessandro nodded, grave.
A thousand ducats would ruin the press. A great deal had
already been spent on printing Holy Book. In addition to purchasing
the two sets of type and engraving a third, Alessandro had sunk a truly
magnificent sum into setting up a branch of his printing house inConstantinople—without, as far as I knew, ever securing permission
from the Sultan or any other authority. Now the raw materials for thatenterprise lay at the bottom of a Levantine harbor.
At the very least, I thought, he’d saved money on proofreaders.
“Mamádo,” Alessandro said, sitting forward suddenly, hopelighting up his face, “Mamádo—these Turks. You’re familiar withthem, aren’t you? They’re more or less your countrymen. Perhaps you
could draft a letter on my behalf, and Gabiano’s. Surely you could
reason with them more effectively than a Christian.”
I shook my head. “I know nothing of the Turks, sir. Theirhomeland’s nearer yours than mine.”“But you’re from Ifriqiya, aren’t you? They own Tunis.”“They took it four years ago,” I said. “I’ve been here for morethan twice that.”“No matter.” Alessandro waved away the minor
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worship the same God. Perhaps you can make them understand that
we meant no offense. Smooth things over.”“I know nothing of the arts of persuasion,” I said. “I’m just atiratore.”
In truth, I had no desire to get mixed up in these negotiations.
Far from lending weight to my words, I suspected that my being a
Muslim would invite the wrath that only a traitor can earn. I knew,
after all, or should have known that even if every line of type wasrendered perfectly—a standard that very few compositors had everachieved—God’s word still deserved better: the painstaking, handson, years-long labor of hunch-backed scribes and rubricators, theenduring human touch, the dedication and the sacrifice. And yet I’dgiven my labor to the Paganinis and, for room and board and a handfulof ducats every month, sanctioned their irreverent undertaking.
The Sultan probably wouldn’t bother sending agents as far
west as Venice in pursuit of a tiratore’s head. Probably. But it wasn’t
impossible.
“Please, Mamádo,” Alessandro said. “I shouldn’t have toremind you what this means for all of us. If the press goes under, yourcontract’s void. I can’t help that. But maybe you can.”His fears, of course, were rational—more rational than mine.
The future of the press was the immediate thing. All else was
hypothetical. But another, awful thought had squeezed into my mind:
that at any moment, Alessandro, possessed by fear and by the thoughtthat I might save him, would leap up and bolt the door, light the lamp,
place pen and stationery before me, and demand that I compose a letterto the Sultan. And I would not know what to do.
I’d never told him outright that I read or wrote classicalArabic—never lied. But neither had I corrected him. I’d learned thealphabet, of course, as a child, cross-legged on the floor of the kuttab
with the rest of the boys from the outskirts of Tunis, filling our tabletswith copied-out letterforms, but I’d been a poor student, always tired,mind occupied by matters of soil and sun and how to pack as many
olives onto a cart as possible without any escaping. My father had
shown me how to keep accounts and records, and I felt certain that if
Alessandro were to set an invoice or an order form before me, all theseyears later, I could have completed it with ease. But there’d been no61

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treatises on my father’s shelves, no poetry. In Venice, years after
leaving his drought-ravaged farm, I’d acquired a passing familiarity
with the Latin script, but upon gaining freedom from the Tuscan
apothecary, I’d sought apprenticeship with a printer not because I’dconsidered myself a man of letters, but only because their elaboratemachines, replete with bars and central screws, had looked, to me, likeolive presses.
When I’d learned, soon after Alessandro hired me, that he had
designs on printing the Holy Qur’an, it had dawned on me that hemight have brought me on specifically to help with this project. If I
proved useless, I might soon find myself back on the streets, replacedby some more knowledgeable man. And so I’d suppressed my unease,though deep down I’d sensed the disaster that mishandling the wordsof God might bring. Alessandro’s friend, the Jew he’d picked up fromthe ghetto who claimed to speak fifteen languages, though he begged
most days for food, had stayed with us during the Qur’an’s production,
standing over Pietro’s shoulder as he’d arranged the Arabic type inmimicry of the hand-printed manuscript that Alessandro had obtained
at auction, occasionally making corrections, pointing out subtle
distinctions between the letterforms. Once the first copy of each page
was done, it had been passed to me, and at Alessandro’s orders, I’d run
my eyes from top to bottom, right to left, and, only half
comprehending the intricate script, declared their work sound.
It came to me then that I, not Alessandro, was responsible forour situation.
“I wish he were dead,” said Alessandro. I could no longer see
his face in the darkness. “He could’ve had the decency to pass before
the letter came,” he added, “but no. He’s hung on for years just so hecould see me run the press into the ground. He knows I’ve got morevision in my little finger than he could ever dream of. He never could
stand it. He’s always wanted to see me fail. I bet he’s up there working
over a speech right now, dreaming of putting me in my place when I
go up to see him. Well—I won’t go. He can rot there!”
Quick as an insect, Alessandro flung the ba’ I’d recovered so
hard that stone chips from the wall behind me stung my neck and arm.
I flinched. “God will hear you.”62

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Volume 2, Issue 2“God can hear my thoughts, and his. He’ll decide who’s thebigger prick.”I imagined my own thoughts running into God’s ear alongside
Alessandro’s and his father’s—languages mixing, a muddied stream, aMuslim prayer wafting up from this Christian city like a lone white
dove amid a flock of sparrows—and it was as if a stopper had been
removed and all the Venetian words had gone swirling from my mind
and down a long, dark drain. I opened my mouth, and darkness, thickand bitter as tar, flowed in. Never before had I been so evacuated bylanguage, so full of night, as I was then. A single thought blossomed
at the center of my mind: that I must remove myself from the study as
quickly as possible, before I was called upon to speak.
But my limbs refused to answer.
Perhaps if I held my breath, Alessandro would simply go on
talking, requiring nothing but that I listen. Perhaps he would evenforget that I sat there, hidden by darkness, my presence increasingly
irrelevant to his soliloquy. I knew I’d already faded into thebackground as images of his father swam before him. Then again, henever really saw anything but his own reflection.
I lost the sense his words as my mind twisted around itself, aserpent snapping at its own tail. I could no longer hear anything but
my own echo.
When the lean season had come, when my father had realizedthat our debts had swollen too large and that we would not turn aprofit that year or the next, an agreement had been reached between
us, and we’d made a journey to the slave market in Tunis, a journeyfrom which only he’d returned. That morning has faded, dispersed likedust, but I remember the night before with vivid clarity. In my mind,
it’s the same night that we reached our resolution, though in truth, aweek or so probably passed. I still recall the way he watched mewithout turning to face me as we sat side by side against the earthen
wall of the family room, a dinner tray on the floor between us, ourfingers still glistening, trading a few words now and then, sounds thatmeant less than the silence between them, both of us knowing that wewere equals, finally, men. I’ve always felt certain that no matter how
desperate our family became, he would not have forced me into
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from. Perhaps from the look in his eye, the set of his jaw, half in shadow
as the lamplight flickered on him—but the eyes, the jaw, the silver
brows and rutted cheeks, are Master Paganino’s.
I’d entered Venice on a slave ship, knowing that my family
would live for months on the sum I’d fetched, and that all in all, I was
lucky: we’d done business with Venetian merchants back in Tunis, andI could survive with their tongue. From there I’d fallen into the handsof the apothecary, who’d done me a great service without knowing itby concocting illicit substances, which he’d peddled in the alleys. I’dreported his activities to the authorities, and the city had rewarded mewith manumission.
But with liberty had come a new disease. As long as I’d laboredin bondage, I’d found it possible to put thoughts of my family from mymind. Of course I missed them, but it was a simple, selfish yearning.
I’d already sold my flesh that they might eat: I owed them nothing
more. But once I apprenticed myself to a printer and started ferretingliras away, a strange and unexpected feeling—guilt, or one of its
toothy cousins—had begun to gnaw. All through the days and restlessnights, I’d told myself conflicting things. That as soon as I had a few
hours to spare, I would go to the harbor and find a traveler willing tocarry a message to Tunis. That I would wait until I’d saved enough topurchase property, then mount my own expedition. That resenting myfamily for what they’d done, hoping the Turks had enslaved them, ormaybe just run them off into the hills, could not be excused, and somust be atoned for. That no matter how I felt or what I did, we’dparted ways till heaven.
Yet as my years in the lands of the Christians piled up, as myown faith grew ever more confused, as I forgot which way was East,as I forgot my father’s face—my mother’s, brothers’, sister’s, too—as
the Traverse shrank before me, even the prospect of posthumous
reunion grew dim. I recalled the mendicant Sufis who used to shun themosques and preach instead in city squares, proclaiming that no coincompared to the treasure of God. My father used to echo themwhenever his children complained of hunger. But the droughts had
lengthened, and God’s treasure couldn’t purchase poultry in themarkets, and a false note had crept into his voice, a fearful one.
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myself to be a greedy man, but as years passed, I began to fear that,somehow, I’d gone astray, thinking of olives when I should have been
studying, sewing man’s coins, not God’s, into my bedroll. On bothsides of the sea, I heard men talk of poverty as if the purse weighsleaden on the soul, and the only way to Heaven is to cut them free. On
this point, it seems, if on no other, Christians and Muslims can agree.
And yet time and again, despite this consensus among holy men, I’dseen want lead only to baseness and misery.
But perhaps the fault lay with the men and not the principle:
my father, who’d sold his flesh and blood; Master Paganino, ready at
any minute to humiliate his son; and myself, of course, with myexcuses.
Then and there, in Alessandro’s study, I resolved that I would
correct the error of my ways. I would go in search of a religious
teacher. There were other Muslims in the Republic, after all. I wouldfind them. I would find out how they got along, would start to pray
again, would make a ritual of attending the public debates between themonks and Sufis. I would educate myself until I could scour every pageof the Qur’an and understand where I’d gone wrong—if not to secure
my place in Heaven, then at least to ensure that my punishment would
not be in vain. I would bury myself in scripture until I could debate
the most respected ‘ulamas, the most learned imams—until I could
write my own eternal sentence in Arabic if need be.
Then a knock came at the study door.
Alessandro raised his head.
Ochre light fell on the limestone floor around the shadow of awoman as the door creaked open. “Master Alessandro,” Caterina said.
“Master Paganino wants you.”
I couldn’t see her face because the light was behind her. I doubtthat I could have deduced much from it even if I had.
“Tell him he can have his business if that’s what he wants,”
Alessandro said. “I’m not going up there.”“He’s weak,” Caterina said. “He spent too much of his strength
today. He wants to see his only son before he sleeps. He’ll waketomorrow, God willing.”
A muscle worked in Alessandro’s jaw. He looked about to cry.
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Volume 2, Issue 2“I should go,” I said, rising from the chair. The heel of mysandal hit something on the floor—the ba’—and sent it rattling into
the shadows.
“Mamádo,” Alessandro said, leaning forward, elbows on his
desk, “Mamádo—” but then he stopped, as if he’d spoken without
knowing what he meant to say.
I felt drawn, as if by a powerful ocean current, toward Caterina
and the door, but I held myself there for a moment, suspended between
opposing forces, waiting for Alessandro’s command.
“Go,” he said, and put his head in his hands.
I left the study, slipped past Caterina, and went to my room.
Had someone asked me then, I could not have explained what
I was doing. I moved as if God Himself had taken hold of my limbs,
steering me to the corner and guiding the blade as I slit open the
bedroll and pulled out handfuls of coins without bothering to countthem, enough that despite my clumsy clutching, they ran through myfingers. I went back out onto the empty work floor. Stacks of black
paper lay on the workbenches alongside beaters and sorts left out todry on rough gray cloths. Caterina had just shut Alessandro’s door.
She looked like a tree growing up through the limestone, ancient andlightning-struck. I closed the distance between us so swiftly that hereyes widened and she seemed to shrink from me. I tried to press thecoins into her hands.
She wouldn’t take them. She looked down at them, then up atme, her eyes two blunted iron nubs. A hint of a curl crept along her lip.
I pushed the coins against her breast so hard that she
staggered half a step. A few of them clattered to the floor. She caught
my hands and accepted the rest, for the sake of silence, I think, eyes
flicking to the study, to the stairs, then back to me. For a few seconds
we stood like that. I could feel a vein in her cold wrist pulsing. Then
she turned and vanished into the slaves’ quarters.
I stood in the deserted workroom. A terrible exhaustion swept
down on me and stole the strength from my limbs. The flickering
lamplight breathed life into the grain of Alessandro’s door and set it
writhing.
I went back to my room, lay on my back, and shut my eyes,
but I couldn’t sleep. Pious, tempestuous thoughts assailed me. I
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shivered from head to toe, though the night was warm, shot throughwith a strange and zealous fury, certain that it would stay with me foryears to come, sustaining me—that soon I would neither eat nor drink,that I would grow hard and lean and certain where I had always been
opportunistic and not quite generous enough, and not quite kind. I
would reform myself so that no disaster like this would ever again havereason to befall me. Any other end to this turbulent day seemed
impossible.
How easily we deceive ourselves.
In the years to come, I would not find a religious teacher. Nor,I must admit, would I devote myself in earnest to the search for one. I
would move from press to press—the Paganinis’, in fact, did fold—and
here and there, when I found time between mechanical duties, I would
pray. But the passion that seized me that evening would dissipate as
quickly as it had come—as if it had been necessary for one thing and
one thing only, and, with the completion of that task, it was allowed
to fade.
Except that if my short-lived revelation really achieved its
purpose, then how to square it with what happened a few days later,when I retired to my room and found my bedroll stuffed again withcoins?
For a few brief hours, I let myself imagine a miracle. My gooddeed had been acknowledged and paid back in kind. The treasures of
man and those of God were not so different after all. So I told myself.
So I believed. But after some time, my mind began to clear, and I saw
myself, and Caterina, and the world once again for what we were. My
assaulting her with coins began to seem a very Alessandro thing to do.
To this day, I can’t explain why she returned the money.
Perhaps, all along, she was more a slave in spirit than in body. Or
perhaps her faith was simply stronger than mine.
Three months later, the elder Paganini died. Word reached methat he’d willed Caterina to one of his associates. I would never see her
again after leaving the press. I do not know if she was ever freed.
On Alessandro’s orders, all the Qur’ans not sent to the East
were burned except for two galleys. I don’t know what happened tothose. Nor do I know what befell Alessandro’s Arabic punches andmatrices. Countless men would have paid no small sum for them,67

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perhaps even enough to let the press limp along for a few more years,
but I doubt that they ever went to auction. Alessandro was an all-ornothing sort of man. He never printed another book. His father’s will
named him sole heir to the estate in Toscolano, but as no rumor ofdisaster there has found its way back to me, I can only imagine that
Daria runs the mill now.
Hour by hour, day by day, I train myself to do the work before
me as I did those first few months in Venice: to finish tasks and takemy pay with no thought squandered on the past or future. I know only
what is in my hands, beneath my nose, or on my tongue. To quiet mythoughts, I count the pages, count the pages, count the pages passing
through my hands, but morning after morning I toss the last day’s
numbers out like swill from a chamber pot and start anew. Morning
after morning, day after day, the world shrinks a little more, a little
less space in the mind for burdens. My employers are pleased, but theirpleasure means nothing to me. I know that what I’m striving for ispossible, for I did achieve it once, though under different
circumstances: chains around my body, swaddling clothes around mymind, serenity in knowing that I could neither owe nor be owed.
A free man, but I’m learning, day by day, to be a slave again.
Once in a while, though, something happens—a wanton
thought, a careless word, an odor wafting on the street—that catchesat my memory as rough-hewn brick might catch at a thread from an
old wool coat. Like the last thing Alessandro said to me, the day heordered the back stock burned, servants flowing like ants around us,
bearing equipment and stacks of black paper, dismantling our lives. He
leaned on one of the presses as I’d once seen his father lean on Caterina.
His eyes alighted on me as I passed and followed me until I hesitated,turned.
I, for one, have never learned to expect the tactlessness thatmisery brings out in men. Somehow, I always imagine that pain will
conjure decency, not spread itself like plague.
For my simplicity, I have no excuses.
“You’re lucky,” Alessandro told me, “not to have a father.”
Then he turned and vanished into his study, pulling the door behindhim.
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The Jellyfish
River Elizabeth Hall
On top of what had been the last President’s desk lay a dead jellyfish.
Gravity had pulled it into a widening, gelatinous puddle. Visible on
the desk beneath its transparent body was a blurred and torn briefing.
The only visible words remaining were “Martial Law.”
Eve looked around to see where the lonesome sea creature hadcome from and spotted a broken window that overlooked theovergrown lawn. Bonfires burned at intervals along Pennsylvania
Avenue, and smoke hung over the quieted city. A single snowflake
flicked down from the heavy clouds and then another. When she
turned back to the jellyfish, she thought that it looked curiously larger
than before.
She walked the perimeter of the Oval Office and found a
broken, framed picture of the last First Family. Someone had driven
their heel through the glass, obscuring the last President’s face, but
his smile peeked out below. His bleached teeth hung suspended in a
flaccid grin. She hoped he had glass in his eyes wherever he was, andtossed the photo back into the pile of broken objects.
She turned back to the jellyfish and it was suddenly as big as
the desk. Across the room, the plaster had been torn from the wall,
revealing the old nails, boards, and supports. She considered theancestors that built the older portions of this white house. How theirbodies had been forced to assemble its skeleton, plaster it, paint it—
knowing one day, inevitably it would be razed. How joyful, how perfectit was that their offspring should tear it down to the studs together.
She hoped wherever they were that the satisfaction of this moment
could find them.
She approached the jellyfish for a better look. Startled, she
could see that it was very much alive. Within it, a beating red heart
was visible deep in its center. She put her hand on her own heart andnoticed it was beating in unison with the heart of this being.
The snow began to spit harder out on the lawn. Someone
coughed loudly and Eve jumped, realizing she was no longer alone. A
very disheveled-looking white woman stumbled over a curtain that69

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had been ripped from the rods as she entered the room. The woman
startled as she took in the scene. She stood still, eyes wide for quite
some time. They looked at one another. Neither one said a word. There
was nothing left to say. Only work to be done.
The jellyfish had grown even larger. The smell of salt andseawater filled the room. They stared together, hands over their hearts
as though pledging allegiance, as though singing the former national
anthem, even though they had both forgotten the words.
With wonder, they watched as inside this swelling, jelly-likewomb, the tiniest new life form curled around its own steadily beatingheart, floating peacefully in its own little sea. Then, in silence, they
continued gathering anything that would burn.

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Single Word Contest 2020
For Sunspot's 2020 edition of the Single Word contest, authors andartists were asked to select the single word they found most importantto the world. A number of responses focused on large issues like theglobal COVID-19 virus and racial inequality. Other entries turned tofaith and cultural elements that impact community and, by extension,
our world. We're honored to present a number of finalists, therunners-up, and the winner of this year’s contest.

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Aloha
Stephanie Launiu
Single Word Contest 2020 Finalist‘Live Aloha’ is a common phrase seen all over Hawaii. It’s on t-shirts,
bumper stickers, posters, in store windows, and in many public andprivate places. It’s an important reminder that Aloha doesn’t just mean‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ or ‘love’. It is a universal principle that is meant to be
lived. Aloha is the single word that is most important in today’s world,
and if each of us were to ‘Live Aloha’, the world would be transformed.
The indigenous people of Hawaii, the kanaka maoli or Native
Hawaiians, had no written language. All of their knowledge waspassed down orally from generation to generation for thousands ofyears. When the Christian missionaries arrived in Hawaii in 1820, they
worked closely with the natives to put their oral language into writing.
Even with the best of intentions, a written language designed byforeigners will never completely capture the intimacies and emotionsof a society’s history, religion and culture that are entwined into alanguage. And so it was with `olelo Hawai`i – the Hawaiian language.
Ancient Hawaiians used the word Aloha whenever theygreeted someone and when they parted company. So, the missionaries
thought that it was a way to say hello and goodbye. The Hawaiians
also used Aloha when they presented gifts and when they became
emotionally close to someone. So, the missionaries thought that Aloha
also meant Love. What exactly does Aloha mean? And why is it so
important in the 21st century?
The word Aloha is a combination of two words – alo and hā.
Alo means ‘face’, ‘front’ or ‘presence’. Hā is the breath of life that theancient ones believed came only from Akua or the Creator. When ababy is born, it is the divine hā that brings that soul to life and leaves
a portion of divinity within each of us alive today. There are no English
words that can properly translate Aloha, but the closest meaning
perhaps is that you and I are in the presence of God. In the word Aloha,
we meet each other humbly as equals.
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So, what would the world be like if we all knew and believedthat the Creator was present and watching us? I think most of us
would become the best versions of ourselves.
What would the world be like if we could recognize the sparkof divinity in even the rudest person on the subway? Or the homelesswoman with the shopping cart clogging up the sidewalk? Or the rude
driver who just missed hitting your car while cutting in front of youon the highway?
If there were more Aloha, national leaders would think twice
about declaring war in the world. Decisions about war are madebehind closed doors, and not with the humbleness that Aloha requires.
Aloha is a partner of diversity, because when equals come together,prejudice and discrimination fly out the window. If we knew theCreator was present and watching us, how often would violence of any
kind really occur? Domestic violence, random shootings, and small
inhumane acts like purse-snatchings. Don’t you think Aloha would
make these acts rarer than they are today? They’re often so common
they don’t even make headlines anymore. The cruelty of social media
can be erased with Aloha, so that cyber and in-person bullying areconquered by kinder days while keeping the miracle of technology.
The political and racial divides that have come to characterize the
21st century can be tamed with more Aloha in the world, while those
who struggle for human and civil rights could experience more
victories with Aloha beside them. If Aloha were widely recognized
as a universal principle, the Me Too movement would not beneeded.
Aloha is about the dignity and equality of being human in animperfect world. Akua may be watching us, but he’s not controlling us.
So those ‘Live Aloha’ signs that I see everyday in Hawaii remind me
that we are in charge of our futures. Living one day at a time, with
Aloha . . . .

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You’re Mine You
Valyntina Grenier
Single Word Contest 2020 Finalist
A person of many solitudes
they give valediction
they give from instinct infinitesimal selves
they keep pained expressions out of the household
they disregard infinitesimal selves
Unceasingly they aren’t public
unending under unending another not subconsciously
They aren’t alike parallel to some center
They aren’t unalike from some surface equality
They stay
They unberth haters w/ difficulty
They wake apart/ untethered/ boundless
They forget waking apart and then they begin
They make w/ infinitesimal selves
They aren’t stable tethered
They aren’t wild apart
They are revealed
They yes longer possessionless
Equanimity became a nest
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Burning
Olga Gonzalez Latapi
Single Word Contest 2020 Finalist
burn the pink petals within the clouds as paws made of woodand velvet tongues lick whiskers on my face because all the
future accidents of the world scratch the heavens as wooden
demons made into cats destroy firehouses full of spirits
looking at pianos full of scrunchies made of flesh from flowers
burnt to a crisp just as pillows of heaven leave chests tobecome mist75

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Self-Quarantined
C.W. BuckleySingle Word Contest 2020 Finalist
The good news is, we’re all sickYour scent in scentless rain
Incurable obstacles to cut off on the way to Bartell or the bus
Morning biker spreads a county fair petrichor
In the way, virally entangled
Alfalfa and manure, Spring round-up on the ranch
We are in respiratory distressWork from home
Wash your hands
Ferment steeps through Pike Place Market bricks
Particles arrayed like a halo or crown
I am your face
Don’t touch me
The boy skunks of peanut butter and pot
Enveloped virus
Old man smell, dog and sweated wool
I am medicatedA tang of forbidden grapefruit
I am vulnerable
Isolate me
Fish in a midnight dumpster off NE 75th
I translate into protein in your host cells
A positive-sense, single-stranded RNA strain
In the absence of wine: lavender and ammonia
Your mantle entwined in formline design
Our Lady of Seattle, Undoer of Knots
Denature me
The smell of burning wax
I am a lingering coughCover meMay I never be far from my people76Sunspot Literary Journal

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A hearty crock of onion and cumin chili
Let them never claim me as their own
We are not well, and have been infectious all along77

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The ‫ ה‬Meanings
Omer Wissman
Single Word Contest 2020 Finalist
The above written fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet presents several
facets which make it uniquely important, now more than ever. These
include its use as greeting, then in questioning, as defining/honorific,
in laughs and breaths, the latter related to the biblical function, which
in turn is linked to its most zeitgeist context, which I term themeaning equation. This letter is pronounced as a letter “hey”, thestandard greeting of our times. In Hebrew it is written identical to acommand to be. In critical theory, Althusser put forth his concept ofinterpellation, turning and saying something to some other which
positions him in a particular role within the systems of society.
Althusser used the example of a police officer turning to a citizen,
bringing him within a law & order mentality. The hey greeting, as
common in my native Israel as it is in English speaking countries, has
dethroned, symbolic of globalization and global turns to the rightwing, our Shalom (peace) greeting. To me, if not for Althusser, any hey
greeting in Israel turns the interpellated subject as well as his
interpellator into objects in globalized hyper-subjectivity, whose parts
greet mainly to maintain their place in national-global
Wittgensteinian language game, saying in subtext we care nothing foreach other but are linked as similarly essential to the hyper-subject ofsociety. This unspoken edict tempts me to contrast it, discussing
utilities of this letter in questioning, wherein it is put at beginnings ofsentences to present a question polite yet emphatic. The sound of suchphrasings calls to mind the very current mood communication
modality of passive-aggressiveness. But I suggest we disrupt this rote
play to call upon the role of this letter as our “The”, in order toquestion everything we think believe and take for granted. In English,
this might be expressed as a move from “I am depressed” to “The I isdepressed” through “The I is the Depressed” and finally “The I is thedepressed?” Thus achieving a critical distance which allows one to
doubt if it is really he who feels depressed, or a more global I role78

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which has become the depressed part of subjects such as him. In thissame position of our “the,” I’d like to explore a rather new Israeli
Hebrew turn of phrase, translating as “This is one the best X if not*The*.” Such a colloquialism goes so far as to eventually omit the X
object which was set out to be defined in honor, and leaves merely ourneed to restore aura to the singular instances, in a world of digital
reproduction and the love of swiping. This leads me to the letter as put
into play in a “Ha Ha Ha,” an exaggerated non-laughter rebelling
flagrantly against the cultural need to always be amused. On the otherend of this spectrum stands this letter as pure breath, of meditation,
relaxation, of deep being beyond quotidian, and of course also as
exhaled cigarette smoke. This letter of deliberate conscious breath ismore than a concentrated pause of our rat race. It is the first and finalutterance of crystallized living language, before and after all words, inbirth as at death. What letter then more suited to denote in the Old
Testament, the Hebraic holy bible, a name of god? But god uses a nifty
trick, attaching to the letter an apostrophe, calling upon the believer
to say not ha or hey but something quite different, “My Lord”. This iswhat I call a meaning equation. It started out in this sacred religious
text as a way of saying to the faithful, you can never know the one true
name of god, and more than this, you can never grasp with humanfaculties the full nature of this god who grasps and encompasses all
being, the way a breath allows all language wings. This line of thoughtsheds an interesting light on the meaning equation X=X’, or verballya variable which is equal to that variable modified, something of thesame but a bit different nature. In the light of the above interpretationof the divine meaning equation, our more earthly and even atheist
concern with a search for meaning seems to become, in my eyes atleast, exposed as a lost cause, a chain of signifier variables which leads
one nowhere, or rather, to his start as lonely, non-apostrophe x. People
still are trying to make sense of existence utilizing such equations,
Stating I am me the lover of Y, or I am me the father of Z. But all theseattempts at redefinition of terms appears to me doomed to fail, as
requiring to be replaced with an identity question, I=?. As long as
subject X has not consciously found out his identity separate from thevarying roles of this or that X’, he cannot take on any social-subject
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thyself, leading to all manner of friction, tension, explosion even. An I
has to use his question to find out who he really feels himself to be, inorder for him to not take on things he does not really want andtherefore will struggle to bear, choosing in its stead to make a life true
to the admittedly partial understanding of his own identity, notinterpellated by society into a function equation too large or narrowfor his authentic identity. In such a way we may do away with azeitgeist of imposter syndrome, endless YA moratorium,
broken/cracked homes, toxic polyamor, depersonalizationderealization, and a general malaise of feeling, meaning lost in theeverything-is-not-what-it-seems way of X’ problematics, solved
superficially b identifying with variable fictional characters, more thanwith real & dear as a self-determined, true-to-self solution of I equaling
constant Y. So, ask not where in the world is Waldo, but why is
Waldo’s I there, and more importantly, should *The* Waldo I be the
There?

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Viral / Claire Lawrence
Single Word Contest 2020 Runner-Up

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UbuntuEthel Maqeda
Single Word Contest 2020 Runner-Up

Ubuntu is a Nguni1 word derived from the philosophy “Umuntu
ngumuntu ngabantu” (a person is only a person through and because ofother people). In other words, we can only be fully human when we
acknowledge, accept, appreciate and nurture other people’s humanity.
In practice, Ubuntu fosters group solidarity, compassion and respect
for others and encourages and enables individuals to continually
expand their circle of humanity to embrace and celebrate diversity.
Growing up in a township in a small Zimbabwean city, I wascontent that my humanness was complete and affirmed by my friends,
family and the community around me, although my world didn’t
extend beyond a thirty-kilometer radius until I was nine. Ubuntu forme then meant respecting everyone, especially my elders, and sharing
food, home and clothing with the less fortunate. The Shona saying
Avirirwa2 (dusk has surprised him/her) was one I heard often then. It
meant that strangers could knock on any door on an evening and ask
for shelter for the night before carrying on with their journeys. They
then became an aunt/uncle, a relative for life. Ubuntu also meant you
weren’t to stare or point at people that looked any different to you ormake them feel different. We played netball with a feminine boy wecalled mainini, a term of endearment meaning “mother’s young sister,”and didn’t think anything of it. It has apparently become unacceptable

1

Nguni people are the Zulu, Ndebele, Xhosa, Sotho, Swati, Phuthi,
Nhlangwini, Lala and Ngoni speaking peoples of Southern Africa who share asimilar culture, traditions and beliefs.
2“Avirirwa” and “mainini” are Shona words. Many Zimbabwean children
grow up in multilingual households.
The Shona people of Zimbabwe share a similar worldview to that of Ngunispeaking people and other African cultures.
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as the boy became an adult and someone decided that his femininity
made him subhuman.
Nobody is born with ubuntu . . . these are communally acceptedand desirable ethical standards that a person acquires throughout
his/her life, and therefore education also plays a very important rolein transferring the African philosophy of life.3 Family, community andschool education all played a role in the development of my ubuntu.
Just before the end of the War of Liberation from colonial rule in 1979,
I turned seven and the tips of my fingers could finally reach my ear
over my head. This meant I could start school. This extended myunderstanding of my circle of humanity to include children from othervillages and communities, from the mining communities around thecity whose families were usually migrant laborers from Malawi and
Zambia. I became aware that the world was a much bigger place, notjust peopled by black people and white Rhodesians; that there wereother Christianities, other religions, other ways of thinking and being.
I began to understand that people from the same clan could support
different political parties, that not all black people were agreed on what
independence from colonial rule meant. I learned that some black
people had fought on the side of the Rhodesians. Ubuntu is about
accepting such painful truths.
In the following year or two after I started school, an uncle,
who I hadn’t been aware existed until then, came home from exile, aplace I didn’t know existed either, and brought me a beautifully boundand illustrated copy of The Arabian Nights. As I gradually to read, I
became enthralled by the tales of peoples in far-flung places, who in somany ways were so alien yet in so many other ways were also familiar.
By the time I reached secondary school, the insatiable appetite to
explore as many different ways of being as there are in the world hadso taken over my life that I had read everything I could lay my hands
on. I also learned about the importance of being a good listener.

3

M. Letseka, “African philosophy and educational discourse,” in, P. Higgs,
N.C.G. Vakalisa, T.V. Mda & N.T. Assie-Lumumba (Eds), African voices in
education (Juta: Lansdowne, 2000), p 186.
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At twenty, when I travelled beyond the thirty-kilometerradius and went to university, my understanding of humanness was
further enriched by meeting people from other parts of the country
and the world. I lost my first family member to HIV/AIDS, moving itfrom my science textbook to real life, and I fell in love with a Japanese
boy called Ken. I also continued to be interested in literature,geography, history and politics, and to feed my appetite by reading,
travelling and meeting new people at every opportunity. My education
not only broadened my view of what it means to be human, but also
allowed me to embrace my Africanness with pride, to appreciate andcelebrate human diversity and to negotiate my way throughencounters with people who hold on to differences and make them thebasis of their relationship with other people. I have been called amonkey a few times.
In today’s world, ridden with war, displacement, poverty, anddisease which put our Ubuntu to test, it will do all of us good toremember to be kind, considerate, and compassionate. Ubuntu is about
the common good of society, with humanness as an essential elementof human growth.4 By deduction, anything that puts the life andwellbeing of others in jeopardy is anti-human. It means, in thesechallenging times, not hoarding food, toilet roll or soap. and notdisregarding calls to practice social distancing or self-isolation.
Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu!

4

Elza Venter, “The Notion of Ubuntu and Communalism in African
Educational Discourse,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 23. 2-3 (2004),
149-160 (p. 149).
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The Meaning of Free
Hannah van Didden
Single Word Contest 2020 WinnerAn exploration of the word in a selection of its nuances.
Definition* of “free”

Sample sentencea. [chemistry]
uncombined, unpaired.

New research is finding that free
radicals may actually be good for you.

a. excluded.

Rich in polyphenols, fair trade dark
chocolate can be enjoyed guilt-freewhen eaten in moderation.

a. gratis.

The child’s meal comes with a free toy.

a. [of trade] open.

The free market is often touted as abenefit of capitalism.

a. liberal (not miserly).

The businessman’s free nature extends
only to his mates.

a. void of something,usually undesirable.

The despot is free of moral burden.

v. to be rid ofsomething.

In crossing the border, they thought
they would be free of any further threatof attack.

a. permitted to take aspecific action.

Because it appeared to be within theletter of the law, the decisionmakers
believed they were free to act without
considering broader humanitarian andethical obligations.

a. without direct cost to
the recipient.

The center offers free meals,
entertainment, and accommodation.
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Definition* of “free”

Sample sentence

a. wild.

Flitting from branch to branch, the tiny
bird was free.

a. able to act withliberty.

The woman fled from her home so that
she might be free.

and easya. unrestrained.

A sad longing accompanied therecollection of her grandmother’s freeand easy hand when it came to butter
on fresh-baked bread.

a. able to act inaccordance with one’s
own will.

While they were, in principle, free tolook for work, the community
prevented them from having safe andmeaningful employment.

a. [of speech] frank;
fairspoken.

The commentators continued to castinsults and slurs, arguing they had aright to free speech.

v. to liberate.

The medical professionals sought tofree the man from conditions thatadversely impacted his health.

a. liberated; not limitedor controlled.

The woman wants her child to knowwhat it is to be free.

v. to make available fora particular purpose.

The man frees the rope from the post
for a use known to no one but him.

a. [of nations] not
subject to foreign ruleor despotism.

The girl longed to be accepted into afree country, not knowing that in sucha place she would still be unable toleave the house alone without being
held accountable for what might befall
her.

a. no longer confined or
imprisoned.

Far across the ocean, a grieving mothersays, “Finally, he is free.”86Sunspot Literary Journal

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Definition* of “free”

Sample sentence

a. noble; joyful.

The woman’s free spirit sees her greet
each day with smiling hope.

*Definitions based on information from The Shorter Oxford English
Dictionary (3rd edition, with revisions and addenda, 1966), theCambridge English Dictionary, Oxford Living Dictionaries,
Etymonline, National Center for Biotechnology Information.

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Contributors
Robin Bissett received her Bachelor of Arts in English and Minor in Creative
Writing from Trinity University in May 2020.
A fourth generation West Coaster, C.W. Buckley lives and works in Seattlewith his family. He writes about precious things, and what their loss means
for us all. His writing explores geek culture, conscience, faith, and fatherhood.
His work is forthcoming in the anthology Undeniable: Writers Respond to
Climate Change. He is a contributor to Washington Poetic Routes, and appeared
most recently in Dappled Things, Timberline Review, Camas, Image Journal, andCatamaran Literary Reader. He is the author of BLUING, a chapbook from
Finishing Line Press. You can follow him as @chris_buckley on Twitter.
Marilee Dahlman grew up in the Midwest and currently lives in
Washington, DC. Her other stories have appeared in Cleaver, The ColoredLens, Five on the Fifth, Metaphorosis, Timeworn Literary Fiction, and online at
The Saturday Evening Post.
Rayne Debski’s stories have appeared in national and international
publications including Mslexia, The Summerset Review, Fifty Word Stories,
REAL, Blue Earth Review, and Necessary Fiction, and have been selected by
Liars League NYC and other professional theatre groups for public readings.
She is the editor of two anthologies published by Main Street Rag Press.
Nicole Foran (MFA, University of Cincinnati) is a mixed-media artist andeducator based out of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her work investigatesmemory, moral reasoning, and identity. Nicole’s work is exhibitedinternationally, and she has upcoming solo exhibitions in Wyoming andMichigan. Several of her pieces are to be included in small group shows in
California and Wisconsin. When she is not in the studio, Nicole is snuggling
her two Boston Terriers or going on hikes with her family.
Olga Gonzalez Latapi is a poet and MFA candidate in Writing at California
College of the Arts. Although her writing journey started in journalism, she
is now pursuing her true passion: exploring the world of poetry with a mighty
pen in hand. Her work has been published in Teen Voices, Sonder Midwest,
BARNHOUSE (Box of Parrots), iaam.com and The Nasiona magazine.
Originally from Mexico City, she currently lives in San Francisco.
Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre artist living in Tucson, Arizona. Her
visual art and poetry have appeared in Lana Turner, High Shelf Press,
JuxtaProse, Sunspot Lit, Bat City Review, and The Impossible Beast: Poems of88

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Volume 2, Issue 2Queer Eroticism, Damaged Goods Press. Her double debut poetry chapbook
Fever Dream / Take Heart, Cathexis Northwest Press, 2020, features paintingsfrom her LGBTQIA+ series Cloudshow | Utopia. Find her atvalyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.
Russian-American poet Stella Hayes is the author of One Strange Country(What Books Press, forthcoming in 2020). She grew up in an agricultural
town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing
degree at University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in
Prelude, The Indianapolis Review and Spillway, among others.
River Elizabeth Hall is a poet and naturalist. Her poems have recently
appeared or are forthcoming in Cirque, High Shelf, Into the Void, and Tinderbox,
among others. She was a semifinalist in the 2019 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins
Poetry Award.
Ann Howells edited Illya’s Honey journal from 1999 to 2017. Publications
include Under a Lone Star (Village Books Press), So Long As We Speak Their
Names (Kelsay Books), Painting the Pinwheel Sky (Assure Press), Black Crow in
Flight (Editor's Choice, Main Street Rag), and Softly Beating Wings, winner ofthe William D. Barney Contest (Blackbead Books). Her poems have recently
appeared in Chiron Review, Slant, and San Pedro River Review.
Penny Jackson’s work has been published in The Edinburgh Review, The
Croton Review, The Gideon Poetry Review, Story Quarterly, Real Fiction, andothers. Honors include a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, The Elizabeth
Janeway Prize in Fiction from Barnard College, and a Pushcart Prize. She isalso a playwright and a film writer.
Jennifer Judge’s work has been published in Rhino, Literary Mama, Gyroscope
Review, Blueline, Mothers Always Write, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Every Pigeon,
Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Rockvale Review, Juniper, Under the Gum Tree, and
The Comstock Review, among others. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize,
Best New Poets 2018, and Best of the Net 2018. Her work was also selected
to appear in a Jenny Holzer art installation in the Comcast Technology
Center in Philadelphia. Her first collection of poetry is due out in early 2021
from Propertius Press.
Mickie Kennedy is an American poet who resides in Baltimore County,
Maryland with his family and two feuding cats. He enjoys British science
fiction and the idea of long hikes in nature. His work has appeared in American
Letters & Commentary, Artword Magazine, Conduit, Portland Review, Rockhurst
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Review, and Wisconsin Review. He earned an MFA from George Mason
University.
Christina Klein received a Fullbright Fellowship in 2018. She received her
MFA from Florida State University in 2017.
Stephanie Launiu is a Native Hawaiian lifestyle and cultural writer who lives
and writes on the Big Island of Hawaii. At the age of sixty, she went to college
and earned a Bachelor's Degree in Hawaiian Pacific Studies from the
University of Hawaii. She loves nothing more than to write about theseislands.
Claire Lawrence is a storyteller and visual artist living in British Columbia,
Canada. She has been published internationally, and her work has been
performed on BBC radio. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications,
including Geist, Litro, Ravensperch, and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She wasnominated for the 2016 Pushcart Prize. Her artwork has appeared in Wired,
A3 Review, Sunspot, Esthetic Apostle, Haunted, Fractured Nuance, and more. Hergoal is to write and publish in all genres, and not inhale too many fumes.
Ethel Maqeda is a writer originally from Zimbabwe, now resident in
Sheffield. Her work is inspired by the experiences of African women at home
and in the diaspora. Her work has been published in various issues of Route57, the University of Sheffield’s creative writing journal, Verse Matters (Valley
Press, 2017), Wretched Strangers (Boiler House Press, 2018), and Chains:
Unheard Voices (Margo Collective, 2018).
Alena Marvin is a young woman seeking the spark to light her imaginative
fire. The twenty-year-old aspiring author is just about due for a quarter-lifecrisis, and she uses that chaos to fuel her creativity.
Cassandra Moss was born in Manchester and grew up just outside the city.
She studied English with Film at King's College, London. and subsequently
worked in the film industry for Sister Films, Working Title, and Vertigo.
Since 2009, she has been an EFL teacher. After moving to Ireland, she
recently completed an MPhil in Linguistics at Trinity College, Dublin. Hershort fiction has been published in Succour, 3am Magazine, Cricket Online
Review, Squawk Back, And/Or, The Passage Between, and Posit.
Alli Parrett is a prose writer and hold a Masters in Creative Writing from
University of Glasgow. Though she was born in Illinois, she’s spent much ofher adult life in the Pacific Northwest and Scotland. She lives in Seattle with90Sunspot Literary Journal

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her husband and two dogs. Her work has appeared in Issue 42 and Issue 43
of From Glasgow to Saturn, The Write Launch, and Crab Fat Magazine.
Decades ago, autodidact & bloody-minded optimist kerry rawlinson
gravitated from sunny Zambian skies to solid Canadian soil. Fast-forward:
she follows Literature & Art’s Muses around the Okanagan, still barefoot, herpatient husband ensuring she’s fed. She’s cracked some contests (e.g. Cago;
Fish Poetry Prize) and features lately in Synchronized Chaos, Spelk, Tupelo
Quarterly, Across the Margin, Yes Poetry, Pedestal, Reflex Fiction, Riddled With
Arrows, ArcPoetry; among others. kerryrawlinson.tumblr.com @kerryrawli
Samantha Schlemm is an emerging writer and graduate student in the MA
in Writing Creative Nonfiction program at Johns Hopkins University.
Hediana Utarti is a sixty-year-old API immigrant who came to the US in
1986 to study political science. Although she graduated, she felt her life had
more purpose in her current work at San Francisco Asian Women’s Shelter(sfaws.org).
Gabrielle Vachon is a fulltime hair and makeup artist in Montreal andToronto, as well as part-time writer to soothe her soul (just kidding, heranxiety is Submittable’s whipping boy). She has been published in Cosmonauts
Avenue, Maudlin House, and Corvus Review, and has been an invited reader at
Slackline Series. She holds an Honors English Literature degree from
Concordia University, and lives with her beloved husband Justin and puppy
Lola in Montreal.
Hannah van Didden writes where the story takes her—usually somewhere
dark but truthful; often beautiful. You will find pieces of her scattered aroundthe world, in places such as Tahoma Literary Review, Crannóg, Southerly,
Breach, Atticus Review, and Southword Journal.
Mekiya Walters is a recent graduate of the University of Arkansas’s MFA
program and lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Kim Waters lives in Melbourne, Australia. She has a Master of Arts degree
in creative writing from Deakin University. Her poetry has appeared in The
Australian, Shanghai Review, Going Down Swinging On-line, Verge, Offset 16,
Communion 5, Tincture, and Antithesis.
Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found or upcoming in
Illuminations, The Florida Review, The Blue Mountain Review, The Moon City
Review, Permafrost Magazine, Palooka Magazine, and Streetlight Magazine,
among others. A finalist in 2020 Philadelphia Stories Sandy Crimmins Poetry
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Contest, winner of the 2019 Florida Review Meek Award in nonfiction, andnominee for Best of the Net 2019 in nonfiction, Virginia resides near
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Omer Wissman; a serialized CNF; thirty-six-year-old multidisciplinary
artist; degrees in psychology and music; published in most Israeli magazines.
Born someplace where people go for sickness unto death, Rescued away to
the nearest town, where he developed such neat capacities as object
permanence, crying out every drop of vodka he’d drink, and the art of loving
and hating a person at the same time. A few years ago, fell in love withwriting, and the rest remains to be.

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Volume 2, Issue 2

Writing a New World
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