Sunspot Literary Journal
Volume 2 Issue #3 © 2020 Sun Dogs Creations

Changing the World
Through Words and Art

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Table of Contents
Gone Outranks Broken Every Time / Samantha Madway / 1
Indelible in Absentia / Samantha Madway / 2
Alternate History / T.B. Grennan / 3
Uprising / Valyntina Grenier / 9
We Make This Wind It’s Wrath / Valyntina Grenier / 10
A Certain Perspective / Marjorie Tesser / 11
Gary Copeland Lilley’s Recipe / Susan Landgraf / 23
Elephant in the Room / Susan Landgraf / 24
On No Account Should You Shout “Fire!” / Mary Byrne / 25
An Origami Girl / Charlene Stegman Moskal / 46
Come Live with Me and Be My Love / Michele E. Reisinger / 47
Chasing the Dragon / Kathy Hoyle / 48
Still Life with Poppies / Chukwuma “Chuks” Ndulue / 80
Five Major Ideas with Flat Design / Susan Landgraf / 81$100 for 100 Words or Art 2020
In These Uncertain Times / Alice Dillon / 83
Willow Widow / Karen Walker / 84
Time a Grand and Final Judge, Grow Bravely in Love /Church Goin Mule / 85
Guernica / S.T. Brant / 86
Tilting Towards Self-Annihilation / George L Stein / 87
Rescue / Charlotte Wyatt / 88
Keep Those Hard Times Away / Benjamin Malay / 89
Red / Jacqueline Schaalje / 90

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Resident Light / Louis Staeble / 91
No Rest for the Weary / Craig Anderson / 92
Contributors / 93
Cover: Time a Grand and Final Judge, Grow Bravely in Love /Church Goin Mule

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Gone Outranks Broken Every Time
Samantha Madway
All systems firing, frenetic, watching metill the countdown clocks in at
single digits andI detonate,tick-tockbirth a blast area,
auto-irradiate.

Inner peace apostate,transfixed by all that powder on my plate,stage whisper mirror, mirror, on the floor,
who’s the saddest and is there more?
Morning opens,different level ofworse, follow my nose, embrace the accursed.
Another disaster, another pyre, anotherincident report in my file.
Didn’t we already arrest you?
None of this is new.
And I’m repeating the very worst part, eternal false start.
But I can still deploy all the right lines,
swear
I too feel The Change
this time. (I do, I really,
really do, and now
I’m fine.)
But I’m just pacing, craving, prearranging, plotting
my next mistakes—
all I amis what I chase.

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Indelible in Absentia
Samantha Madway
you never brought flowers,
but still broke my vase
I made you make me cry
you ran my mind across a washboard, later
reminisced about the day we went antiquing
I said lessyou were the mudslide, but I caved me inI lost an extra winterwatching the floor
you kangaroo courted me, smiled atseeing me chased for days by your screams
I said lessyou accused me of being nothing
more than a metaphor
I said this isn’t what I’ll remember
because you made me promise to forget2

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Alternate History
T.B. Grennan
Here’s how it finally happens.
At thirty-two, you’re working at a tech startup after years
with nonprofits and publishers. Getting used to wearing t-shirts to theoffice instead of button-downs, to being among the oldest employees
instead of the youngest. And then one day, you’re asked to takesomebody’s picture.
Your boss likes profiling new hires for the company blog, but
this one is just a year out of school and doesn’t have a headshot. (On
LinkedIn, he’s using a photo from a college costume party.) You
arrange to meet him by the elevators. The light’s good there; the wall
has your company’s name written in foot-high letters.
He’s waiting when you arrive, sunlight hitting him at an angle,
hot and bright. Shirt open to the third button; chest hair peeking out.
And suddenly you feel it. In your chest. At the top of your head andthe back of your testicles. A shudder, an electric charge. Your
hormones flickering like neon.
You take a dozen pictures. His eyes half-closed in the first few,
like he’s sleepy or drunk. The fifth photo comes out perfect—it’s theone you end up using—but you just keep snapping away. The two of
you chatting now, joking about startup life and the company’s kickballteam as you move him in front of the window, his white shirt blurring
into the gauzy curtains.
His gaze grows softer with each picture, his smile brighter.
And when it’s over, you sit down at your desk, waiting for the monitor
to warm back up, and wonder what just happened, what it meant.
At first, the attraction feels like a fluke. But it’s still there when
you see him again, see him week after week for a year, for two years.
In meetings and happy hours. At company parties and a season’s worthof kickball games. Until there’s no way to pretend that the sparks inyour chest are any different than the ones sent up by the girls you
pined for in high school.
So you mull things over. Let your eyes linger on men the way
they always have on women. Accept the erotic flashes you get, theconfused yearning. Trying to give yourself permission to be whatever3

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it is you are. And when a different coworker casually mentions she’s biduring a coffee run, you find yourself wanting to say, “Yeah? Me, too.”
You start seeing a therapist and eventually the topic bubbles
up. She’s surprised you haven’t told anybody; you’re surprised how
easy it was to tell someone. A few weeks later, your girlfriend brings
you to the Bowie exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and as the two of
you take in the kimonos and knee-high boots, you decide that this is
the time. Back home, you close the bedroom door and, after anagonizing prelude, you say it. She laughs with relief: “Oh, thank god!
I thought something was wrong!”
You tell your male best friend over beers and your female bestfriend over breakfast sandwiches. You tell coworkers one after anotherafter another. The process easier each time, though always a little
hard.
Until here you are. Still figuring things out, but comfortable,
finally, with yourself. Appreciating your lack of guilt or shame or
angst—which could be luck, or chance, or maybe just what coming out
in your thirties feels like. Thinking back, now and again, to all theother times you could have figured things out. All the other lives you
might have lived.
PETWORTH — 2012
You’re twenty-nine and in Washington, DC for the week, helping out
at your nonprofit’s profoundly dull annual conference. Forcing smile
after smile. Answering endless questions about where, exactly, thebathrooms are. And when it’s all over, you crash for the weekend witha college friend who works on Capitol Hill.
Your first short story has just been published and your friend
takes you out for a celebratory drink—then drags you along to a fullday of Oktoberfest happenings. A German-themed brunch. A
temporary Bavarian biergarten on a blocked-off street. A combination
canine parade and pageant dubbed “Dogtoberfest.” And finally, as thelight wanes, you descend into the DC metro and emerge three minutes
later in Petworth.
The house party is in a newly gentrifying section of theneighborhood. And as it winds down, you find yourself on the front
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porch, drinking a Märzen and chatting with a bright-eyed government
administrator who’s been watching you all night.
He went to grad school in West Virginia, and because it’s the
only thing you know about Morgantown, you bring up theexperimental transit system that the Nixon administration built there.
He nods, says he loves the PRT. Raves about the convenience, thespeed, as his free hand flits between the railing and your forearm. Then
starts talking about his boyfriend, implying that they have an open
thing. And asks about yours.
“Girlfriend,” you say.
He purses his lips. Like he’s been there. Like you’ll get throughit, too.
BLASPHEMY — 2011
You’re twenty-seven and walk into your favorite bar in Brooklyn(formerly a lesbian dance club, formerly an autobody shop) wearing a
faded Scott Pilgrim tee. Alone for the night, because your girlfriend
decided—as she often does—that she didn’t feel like coming out.
Surprised, as you push your way to the bar, how packed the place is on
a winter Monday.
You drink one of the best double IPAs you’ve ever had andchat with two graying men who are sipping wine at the table next toyou. It takes a minute for you to register that they’re a couple, andanother minute to realize you’ve accidentally crashed the bar’s queer
night. CONFESSION, it’s called, the iconography all crosses and sexylesbian nuns. Both men are lapsed Catholics—one’s Irish—and feelsomewhat leery about the theme, but the electropop and disco
eventually loosens them up.
They buy you a drink, buy you two, and talk about gay
marriage and their ex-wives and Ancient Greece until midnight. They
excuse themselves, joke that they’re getting old. Squeezing your hand
as you shake goodbye.
You’re waiting in line for the bathroom when a guy in anincongruous tank top tries to strike up a conversation. “Love yourshirt,” he says, running a finger slowly down your chest, tracing theoutlines of the illustrations. “You’re so, like, artistic.” And you thinkboth how handsome he is and what stupid shit he’s saying; wondering5Sunspot Literary Journal

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suddenly if this is what it feels like to be a girl getting chatted up in anightclub.
Across the bar, the promoter—a chubby woman with a halfshaved head—fawns over the DJ, who’s tall and blonde and incredibly
cute. The DJ’s obviously queer, but she’s just as obviously notinterested. Watching them reminds you of yourself, of the way youwere in high school.
Then it’s the last song of the night, and that song is “Dancing
on My Own.” You close your eyes, the synths drilling into your head,making your body move. And then you’re dancing with your arms
above your head, feeling drunk and happy and free, the song’s beautiful
melancholy filling you up. When you open your eyes, you’resurrounded by a knot of queer men and women, all of you swooning
there, moved almost to tears by the music and the crowd and the
feeling.
And as the little bells finally stop chiming at the end of thesong, the promoter hugs you, thanks you for being there. Says, “I loveit when my gays come out.” And instead of correcting her, you justhug her back.
CASTLETON — 2000
You’re seventeen, spending two weeks of your summer vacation in acinderblock dorm room. It’s July and you’re attending a governmentrun arts program located at a state college best known for being
mocked in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Every high school in Vermont gets to send one student here—
except yours, which sent a half-dozen. Which means that you’ve got
friends here, but also that you’re surrounded by bright-eyed kids fromnowhere towns breathlessly proclaiming that, wow, they never knewthat anybody else cared about music/painting/writing/sculpture/
whatever. “I never knew anybody else liked french fries!” yourclassmate deadpans at the dining hall, dipping one in ketchup. “Thisplace is opening my eyes!”
You’re an aspiring fiction writer stuck taking classes with agaggle of wannabe slam poets. They’re writing confessional lyrics
about their angsty relationships and difficult fathers; you’re working
on a dark comic epic where someone hijacks a medical transport flight.
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In your free time, you’re corresponding by letter and payphone withan adorable girl from home who you’re beginning to suspect justdoesn’t like you like that.
All that means you’re spending a lot of time in your dormroom, typing and deleting and typing some more. In the mornings
before breakfast, in the free periods after lunch. Before bed, while yourroommate—who’s here to be an actor—strips down to shorts andnothing else to practice his lines.
“People think I’m gay,” he tells you practically the minute you
arrive, “but I’m really not.” You nod. Okay. Good to know.
He’s a pretty decent actor, and there’s a matinee idol vibe to
him—the floppy hair, the slender, muscular chest, the smile that seems
to explode out of him with the curl of a lip. A little slow on the uptake,a little dull. But handsome and friendly and perfectly nice, as long as
nobody mentions the G-A-Y thing. The two of you aren’t close, andthough you talk before bed and do the nod of acknowledgement when
you see each other in the dining hall, most of your time is spent apart.
You’ve got hijackings to plan and a girl to pine after; he’s got lines tomemorize.
Which is why you’re surprised how you react when a friend
from high school tells you that she thinks your roommate is cute. She’squiet and shy—except when she’s on stage—and this is the first timeyou’ve ever heard her express interest in a boy. But instead of teasing
her, or asking follow-up questions, you startle yourself by saying,“Yeah, I think so, too.”
WILLISTON — 1998
You’re fifteen, and it’s summer in Vermont. You’ve never had agirlfriend. Never kissed a girl. Never done anything more than accept
a pity slow dance from a friend of a friend. But you’re getting paid $50
to carry boxes in and out of a couple office buildings, so you’ve got thatgoing for you.
The day begins in a hidden office above Evergreen Eddy’s
Wildlife Grill, a three-room setup where the walls are stained a sickly
gray with grease from the burners downstairs. You make a half-dozen
trips, carrying empty filing cabinets and desk drawers and computer
monitors so big that you can barely fit them in your arms. Trying not7

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to trip on the carpeted stairs. Trying not to brush up against the rancid
wallpaper.
Then you’re in the passenger seat of your father’s massive new
SUV, a company car from his new job. The kind of vehicle where youpractically need a stepladder to get in. Classic rock on the radio. A hot,humid wind blowing in through the open window, sunlight painfullybright as you come around curves. Your dad is talking about thecompany, a tech startup building a device that lets you check youremail on the TV. “They’ve got the device down to a pack of cigarettes,”
he says, “and it just keeps getting smaller.” Smiling now, like he can’t
quite believe it.
The new building is down the road in a Williston office park.
And when you arrive, it’s just an empty shell: exposed pipes, exposed
wires, drywall still being installed. You’re introduced to the other
employees, most of whom are in their twenties—one’s a former
Olympic snowboarder. You meet the CEO, who’s gruff and friendly
and drinks a half-dozen gold cans of Caffeine-Free Diet Coke over thecourse of the morning; he’ll later leave the company under ambiguous
circumstances.
The foreman of the construction crew has brought his son
along, too, and the two of you are put to work together. He’s sixteen
or so, taller and skinnier than you. Blond and serious, dressed in apreppy style you know only from movies. The two of you carry oldpipes and debris out of the office, making room for new desks andcubicles. He chats happily about sports and other things you don’t careabout. But even though he’s not much of a conversationalist, you lookfor reasons to keep talking.
But eventually the back-and-forth fizzles out.
The last time you see him, he’s standing near the door to theoutside, the afternoon sun streaming in, lighting him up. You don’t
remember his name, or where he’s from. But you remember what helooked like just then, remember it to this day.

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Uprising / Valyntina Grenier9Sunspot Literary Journal

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We Make This Wind It’s Wrath / Valyntina Grenier

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A Certain Perspective
Marjorie Tesser
Annie steps inside the studio, a light-filled barn behind the Arts
Center, and a familiar aroma hits—like bread baking with a lower,
rough note, the tang of turpentine and solvents. She recalls the aromasof the paints themselves, each color different, with an unaccustomed
lift, a stirring. Not one familiar face, although the Arts Center is justthe next town over from Annie’s; she’d half-thought she’d run intoanother mom from the PTA or someone she’d met through work. But
no. Her classmates look like college kids.
Annie takes an easel in the back. A girl dressed in a white
strapless sundress (not very practical for painting) gallops in on coltish
bare legs. “You’re new,” she says to Annie. “You haven’t studied with
Tim, have you? We all have. I’m Phoebe.”
The night before, and then again that morning, Annie had
reminded Celia that Madison’s mom would drive her to and fromballet. She’d warned Skyler not to attempt any new skateboard tricks,
and asked Jake to check in on his siblings, from his part-time job at themusic store. She packed her new expensive art supplies and thought
about what to wear for class. She’d be going straight from work, inwhat Matt calls her “girl reporter” outfit (his little joke; Annie takes
photographs and write brief profiles of local businesses—bakeries, hairsalons, real estate offices—for a glossy promo magazine). She nolonger had her old college painting clothes, faded overalls worn overa stretchy tube top; anyway, those days were long gone, so she stuffedjeans and an old shirt of Matt’s into a tote. He’d encouraged her to takethe class when she’d been accepted. “It’s just eight weeks, you shouldbe able to work it out. You’ve been saying for ages you want to getback to your art.”
The teacher appears in the doorway, and the students, who’dbeen setting up, or chatting, or checking their phones, look up, pocket
their devices, and watch him cross to the front. Tim Caine is in his
mid-forties or so. He’s dressed like the male students, in worn jeans
and a V-neck t-shirt. Hair spiked jauntily in front but thinning at the
temples, bit of a Dad bod (though she’s no one to judge). Annie’s only
seen a couple of his paintings “in person” but she’s checked him out on
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the internet. Tim is a wonderful artist. His works are representationalwith a twist, the narratives hard to pin down. He’s represented by two
galleries, one in Chelsea and one upstate in Hudson, and has had arespectable number of solo shows. Annie feels lucky to have gotten
into to the class, on the strength of an old group of sketches she’dworked on the first year Celia was in school.
Tim Caine waits while everyone quiets down. “So,” he says,“we gather here to make art. Your art, whatever that is, and we will
help each other make it better.” The girl Phoebe waves her hand; Caine
frowns and gives a quick shake of his head and continues. “I will help
you make it better. We will engage in an investigation, an inquiry, ahoning. Hopefully each of you will end up with a few pieces that havestretched your capabilities, whether or not they prove marketable.”
He’ll provide a focal point for each session, a still life set-up—as hetalks he arranges some fruit in a bowl and places it, along with a metalwatering can, a vintage man’s wingtip, and the skull of a small animal,
upon a drape of iridescent greenish cloth—or once in a while a model,
but students are under no constraint to paint it, and should follow theirown inclinations.
It’s been twenty years since college and Annie’s barely picked
up a brush. She sticks to painting the still life Tim Caine had set-up.
The other students all seem to be doing something different. Chatting
during a break, Annie learns that they’re actually not college kids, but
are all post-grads; a contingent had studied under Tim in the Bard
MFA program and followed him here; Maria and Niles, the guy withthe huge Afro and striped suspenders, had gone to, respectively,
Cooper Union and RISD before studying with Caine. Annie waits afterclass to talk to Caine. After each of the other students has had alengthy chat, she gets to say, “I’m so glad to be in the class. I saw yourwork at my town library exhibit. It was wonderful.” Tim shrugs. “Justa favor for a friend,” he says, turning away. “I usually don’t bother withthose things.”
Just a couple of weeks into the class, Annie already can see that eachof Tim’s students has developed a signature style. Quinn Reynolds, theboy with the dark hair who reminds Annie of a young version of Matt,
does stick-figure people and shiny robots on fields of mottled white.
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The one called Jinx paints big rocks. Phoebe Klein’s work, mythicalwinged creatures in nursery hues, reminds Annie of Chagall and alsoof Lisa Frank (Annie recalls a notebook she’d loved in middle school).
Maria Vega paints abstracts with super-saturated color; a smoky blue,
a deep, ferrous Rothko red. The rest, three voluble young guys Annie
secretly dubs “The Art Squad,” produce socially-aware, hard-edged
propaganda pieces, indistinguishable save that two of them work big,
the third, Niles, only in miniature. This is an Advanced Class; thestudents are expected to know what they’re doing. These kids consider
themselves serious artists, the ones to be famous in a few years’ time.
Annie had thought that herself, back when she was their age.
Now, she’s just happy to be back in the studio again. Tim puts
on music (last time, vintage jazz, this week, cowboy songs) and Annie
sketches and mixes and paints. Her body remembers the old gestures,and her mind, usually a running litany of worries, reminders, andconcerns—work, the kids, Matt—becomes a neutral contemplative
blank. She notices how painting differs from photography, the only
thing close to art she’d been doing lately, not just in the execution, but
in the way you see. Taking a photo, you’re aware of the interplay oflight and dark, and the arrangement within a frame. With painting,it’s more about depth, breadth, and choice, what to omit and what toshow, and how; the opportunity for the symbolic. The once-a-weekclass is her own creative time, which she realizes she’s not had in any
structured way for the past seventeen years, since the birth of Jake,then Skyler, and then, when they’d thought they were done, Celia.
In college, Annie’s work had incorporated black scribbly lines,
vivid blocks of deep color and painted slogans: her heroes wereBasquiat, Holzer, Kruger. Now, it’s emerging differently. Annie,
tentative, is sparing with her brush but works toward interpreting the
subject so that it’s minimally indicated, barely recognizable.
Sometimes her pieces end up having oddly focused moments ofrealism, an unexpectedly-detailed flower or piece of fruit, or a hand,
mid-gesture.
Tim moves around the class, gesturing at one canvas or
another. Those who take his advice invariably get a better painting out
of it; those whose work is praised, preen. Annie watches closely as hecritiques the other students’ work, especially when what he’s
suggesting seems counterintuitive. She tries to see as he sees, the13

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spaces, the colors, the forms. He spends a good deal of time with the
Squad guys, then Maria, until Phoebe clamors for his attention, andthen back to Maria. Annie waits for him to comment on hers, but
perhaps he’s idea-ed out by the time he gets back to her part of theclassroom. He gives her work a glance and a nod or once in a while alittle shrug. She tries not to take it personally.
One week, Tim has arranged for a model, a Rubenesque older woman
whose luxuriant folds of skin are echoed by those in the thick red
drapery she’s posed on. Annie is scrutinizing the subject, deciding on
her approach, when her hip buzzes. She slips her phone out of her
pocket to check; it’s a text from Madison’s mom, Lori. She looks up to
see Tim’s scowl, and quickly steps out to the hall. Lori is stuck at Ninja
Warrior class with her younger son. Can Annie pick the kids up fromballet? I know u have class, but u can leave, right? But luckily, Anniereaches Kaitlin’s mom, who will save the day. Annie ducks back intoclass with a little half bow and a mouths a Sorry.
“A reminder, guys. You all know the rule—absolutely nophones in my classes,” Tim takes the opportunity to state, and Annie’s
cheeks warm.
A few days later, Annie is taking a short break between work
assignments, lingering at her local coffee shop, The Bean Tree, for ten
minutes with her latte instead of rushing back to her desk. She sees agirl in line with hair like Phoebe’s, platinum tipped with purple andgreen, but this one has on a baggy sweatshirt and patched jeans, unlike
the girly stuff Phoebe wears. She turns and it is Phoebe; she gives
Annie a little wave and walks over.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” she says to Annie. “Comingfrom someplace special?”“No, just my job; I work around the corner from here.”“That sucked when your phone buzzed in class. Tim hates
that,” Phoebe adds.
“I noticed,” says Annie. “My daughter was stuck and needed aride.”“You have kids? That’s so cool, I love little kids. How old?”“The boys are seventeen and thirteen and Celia’s eleven.”
Phoebe’s eyebrows go up and she looks closely at Annie. “I didn’t
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realize you were . . . you had kids. Wow.” Annie’s often mistaken foryounger; she’s petite and slender, and her hair style, unchanged sincecollege, seems lately to have come back into vogue.
“Do you live around here?” Annie asks, to change the subject.
“Nope, I’m up in Peekskill. I’m just stopping in at The Crafty
Fox to pick up some supplies,” Phoebe replies. Her fingers idly playwith the end of her ponytail. “Tim recommended it.” She says his namelike she likes the feel of it in her mouth. “You should have stuck aroundafter class last week. We were having such a great conversation we
took it to the Wayfarer and continued over drinks. It was awesome—
Tim hung out with us all night.”
Annie has noticed that at the end of each class the three Squad guys
and Phoebe cluster around Tim. They interrupt each other to pepper
him with questions—What was his take on a recent article inHyperallergic? How did he feel about a show a bunch of them had gone
to at a gallery in Beacon? Should they apply for a residency at Haworth
or Charrington? They’re all fluent in art-speak and display insider
status by employing the latest buzz-words, speculative, rupture,transverse, each gunning for his attention, his wisdom. They clearly
understand the benefit of having a mentor to give them a helping hand.
Annie gets it. In college, her senior advisor, Benoit O’Reilly, hadapproved of her then-style of painting. He’d became something of amentor to her, recommending her for a group show and an Art
Department prize. His mentorship of the good-looking guys in theclass was of a more intimate sort, and he’d cycled through them,dispensing favors and close companionship.
The students here hang on Tim’s every pronouncement.
Annie, who hasn’t been up on the gallery scene, who doesn’t evensubscribe to art magazines anymore, would have liked to have beenpart of these conversations, but isn’t confident or knowledgeable
enough to venture an opinion or formulate questions. After the secondclass, she’d lingered, but didn’t push herself forward, and finally left;
at her age, she’d felt ridiculous acting the acolyte. And the following
week she’d been half embarrassed, half piqued at being chastised forcell phone use. Anyway, she usually has to get back to check on what
her own kids are up to, or finish an interrupted work assignment, or
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Volume 2, Issue 3pull together dinner for the family. Matt’s stuck at the office late mostnights and somebody has to hold down the fort. Annie has noticed that
Tim isn’t in any hurry to escape; he seems to enjoy the conversationand perhaps isn’t immune to the admiration.
One week, the Squad is more interested in arguing about an
exhibit they’d seen over the weekend than in getting down to paint.
“It’s pandering!” says Brian, one of the guys who works big, of the newshow by an artist they’d previously all admired. “Sad,” says Niles, theminimalist guy. “He used to do good work. Now it’s decoration.”“I thought it was kind of modern,” Quinn said.
Tim runs his hands through his hair, which makes the spiky
front part stand up like a feather. “Okay, you all want to do this? Right.
So tell me. What is art?” He takes the time to look at each student inturn, his eyes narrowed.
“Making,” says Jinx.
Phoebe speaks up. “Nope. That’s craft.”“Statement,” says Brian.
“Nuance,” Niles puts in.
“Design,” states Quinn. The third Squad guy makes a rude
sound.
“Imagination!” Phoebe.
Maria raises her hand. “To me, it’s the intersection of
intelligence and emotion.”
It’s seeing, thinks Annie. Seeing and sharing. And maybe
having what you saw be seen.
But Tim is already on it. “Art,” he says, “is two-headed Janus.
It acknowledges the past and gazes out toward a future. It’s a marriageof the personal and the universal. It’s primal—beauty and horror,
creation and ruin. A window, a microscope, a mirror. But bottom line
. . .” and he gazes over the heads of the listening students to some pointin the far distance, “it’s what someone else will pay for.” The Squadnods sagely. Maria slowly shakes her head.
Phoebe looks crushed. She puts such stock in Tim, Annie
thinks. But it’s more than that. Each week she comes to class with an
expanse of skin exposed. A plunging neckline over which peek twin
half-globes of small, high breasts, or a crop top revealing a milky plainof stomach. Annie finds herself remembering her own first job at thead agency. She’d get plenty of attention when she wore skimpy clothes
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Matt). But Annie knew from experience that it can backfire, the subject
considered an object, fun to flirt with but passed over for advancement.
Annie thinks about saying something to Phoebe, but stays mum. It’s
her right to wear what she likes.
“Tim, help!” Phoebe tosses her long platinum hair, ends tipped
purple one week, pink and green the next, like the pastel creatures she
likes to paint. She flutters curled, super-long black eyelashes (false?)
and employs an inelegant giggle, a series of short snorts, at Tim’s
every bon mot. Phoebe contrives to call him to her easel several times
each class. “Tim, look!” She sounds like a kid going high on a swing,
seeking parental approval. Annie feels sorry for the girl, dangling
herself like ripe fruit without garnering so much as a nibble. There had
been one or two times in her own past she’d paraded before indifferent
reviewing stands; she recalls the pre-meeting excitement, therationalizations. She’s glad her youngest, Celia, hasn’t reached thisstage. Tim smiles politely at Phoebe, but his gaze drifts. Toward
Maria.
Maria is the one whose work he notices. He acts the firmtaskmaster, chiding her on a misplaced brushstroke, a too-easy or
expected shape. She seems to be nothing but professional with him,
nodding and taking instruction and executing under his watchful eye.
But Annie sees that blue, assessing eye travel to the girl’s rich darkhair, to the small hollow at the base of her long throat in which nestles
a tiny silver crescent moon on a thin chain, visible at the deep V of her
faded chambray work shirt. He always finds a way to circle back to
Maria’s easel. Once or twice he lectures from that vantage point, hislarge hand resting lightly on the girl’s ballerina-straight back.
Unfortunately, Annie has to miss one class entirely, but it can’t behelped. Just as she’s about to leave work, she gets a call from the school
nurse. Skyler, chronically ill with diabetes, had practically passed out
in Science. Annie rushes to the school; one look at his pale face, hairplastered to his forehead with sweat, and she whisks him right to the
ER. Annie is relieved to see a nurse she recognizes from a period before
Sky was diagnosed, when he’d been repeatedly hospitalized withsimilar symptoms; in such a situation, it’s always nice to have someone
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who sees you as a human, rather than a case. Annie spends the better
part of the afternoon in the cubicle with Sky as he naps fitfully, while
she alternates worrying and idle wondering what Tim had set up forthe class to paint. She texts Matt, who’s in a meeting, says his away
message. At last they get the test results. It turns out, to her relief, tohave been a minor episode, and Sky, by then feeling better, doesn’t
need to be admitted. They can go home.
In class, Annie is trying not to find Tim irritating. Cynicaldefinitions of art aside, he loves to tell long, name-dropping stories
about the art scene back in the day. Worse, he offers the students gemsof advice from the perspective of the wise elder, about the pressures of
having a family—he has one middle-schooler, a super-gifted kid. “Thesweetest thing in the world, being a parent. Wait till you kids
experience it. But it’s relentless.” So hard to keep the kid adequately
stimulated. How difficult to balance going to openings and art events,
which he has to for his job, his career, and being there for the soccer
games, the science fairs. How tricky to juggle art’s irregular income
with the influx of bills, inexorable as the ocean. “When you’re older,
you’ll see,” he says sagely to the class, and Annie, likely several years
his senior, feels invisible.
During a slow afternoon at work, Annie browses on thecomputer and chances upon Tim’s social media profiles; she finds his
pictures from college and his first gallery show. He’d been handsome
then, golden, athletic, the type she’d have gone for when she was thatage, before she’d met Matt.
The next time she sees him, she acknowledges to herself that
Tim is still a good-looking man. Then he starts with another of his
anecdotes, starring Damien, or Cecily, or Cindy, or Takashi, artists
whose names make the students perk up like puppies shown a treat.
Annie rolls her eyes and glances over at Maria, who appears absorbed
in her work. Hair gathered up in a messy bun, her work shirt paintspattered and a streak of blue on her cheek and she still manages tolook elegant. When she was that age, Annie hadn’t had Maria’s
confidence, her composure. “All right, enough of that. Let’s get backto work kids,” Tim finally says.
Annie finds herself curiously unsettled on the mornings when
she’s to have painting class. She packs a nicer shirt and takes more carewith her eyeliner. One night she has a strange dream. She’s with18

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someone; someone’s hands are on her, not Matt’s. She wakes, still in
the glow of the dream, to Matt in bed beside her, gently snoring,cocooned in the quilt.
Annie gets to the studio earlier than usual and finds Mariaalone there. The girl turns to Annie. “So how ‘s the class going foryou?” Annie, happy to be chatting with the usually reserved Maria,
answers quickly that she’s had so much fun. “Yes, quite a teacher, ourTim,” says Maria. “He can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but he’s areally good painter. And he definitely takes an interest in his students.
The personal touch,” she adds, with a little smirk. Does Maria know
Tim’s interest in her may be . . . more than professional? Were they,
possibly, seeing each other? If so, there wouldn’t be anything wrong
with that, right? Maria’s young, but an adult. Annie hopes she’ll go on.
But Phoebe bounces in, calling out, “Guys, I had the best idea for apainting. Wait till you see what I’m doing today!” Annie feels a small
prick of disappointment as Maria turns back to her own easel.
Too soon, the final session arrives; class is ending for the summer. The
others will be off, interning in galleries or for arts organizations,teaching in summer camps or waitressing or bussing at a beach resort.
For Annie, it’ll be the usual, working and trying to make sure her kids
are productively occupied; maybe a family week at the shore, if Matt
can get away. Phoebe, to everyone’s surprise, has won a fellowship toa prestigious art institute on the Pacific coast. “Yay, you! But to behonest, I’m jealous,” Niles says, as he hugs her. “Everyone wants to be
the one to get picked.” Tim himself has been awarded a residency in
Wisconsin and has proclaimed himself eager to go and paint cows, eat
cheese, and drink beer. He’s set up a still life for the last session but foronce Annie isn’t going with it. She doesn’t even bother sketching, but
picks up her brush and begins whisking pigment on, filling the empty
white.
She works quickly, with her customary light hand. She renders
the hard-edged precision of Quinn’s canvas of battling robots, theromantic lyricism of Phoebe’s dancing unicorns, Jinx’s photo-realist
phallic stones, the Art Squad’s revolutionary slogans and ironic
depictions of crushed plastic water bottles and rude cartoon
characters. Actually, she’s come to differentiate among them; the tall,19

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ex-quarterback-looking guy who styles himself Brian Orange (néOrenstein) does stuff that’s inventive, a cut above the others’. And in
the center, like a heavenly queen surrounded by lesser saints, Annie
paints a woman, using the most economical of brushstrokes, renderingout of the air a river of hair, the delicate flared nostrils, dark eyes andcurve of the lips, the long throat, the tiny points of nipples beneath thechambray shirt, soft from many washings. Annie paints her bathed inlight. Tim makes his way around the room, critiquing and kibitzing.
Annie doesn’t watch for him; her brush flies, layering tiny
embellishments of the main figure, each feathery incursion elucidating
more of its beauty, setting it in the canvas as a jewel, un-ignorable.
She feels a prickle at the back of her neck, hears a soft intakeof breath. It’s Tim, behind her. His eyes on her painting, transfixed by
the figure. “You’re doing something interesting here,” he says, quietly.
“That central figure. It looks like . . .” and he trails off. He’s in lovewith the girl, Annie thinks. He can’t even say her name. Phoebe jumps
over to see what’s going on. “Annie, this is amazing. Maria, she got
you perfectly!” Maria rises and weaves her way to Annie’s easel in theback. Annie sees the line that etches itself between the girl’s brows,
the tight downturn at the corners of her pretty mouth. “I don’t know,”
she says. “I’m pretty sure my boobs aren’t that big. Right, Tim?”
Something twists in Annie’s stomach. “Maria, I’m so sorry, I didn’tmean . . .” Maria gives her a crooked smile. “No worries!” but Annie
still feels terrible.
Later, when everyone’s packing up and saying goodbye, Annie
dawdles in hopes of apologizing again, but Maria’s in close
conversation with Brian. The two of them stroll out together, and it’s
too late. Annie is gathering her things when Tim, surrounded as usual
by students, looks up and says, “Um, Anna? Can you stay a minute?
I’d like to speak with you.” Annie waits, wishing she could vanish.
What could he want? She’s afraid she’s going to get scolded for
objectifying Maria. That’s what it looked like, right? But she doesn’t
think she had been; she was just seeing, trying to see her in a certain
perspective. After the students finish an interminable round of“goodbye” and “have a good summer” and “catch you in Beacon for the
Kramer retrospective,” after the last of them has trotted out the door,
Tim motions her forward.
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Volume 2, Issue 3“Anna. I wanted to talk to you,” he says. “You’ve been doingsome good work lately. Your painting is strange. Intense.” That isn’t
how Annie would have described her style. Interesting. He rests a big
hand on her shoulder. “So. An artist I know, a friend, gives a summer
class down in Soho; two days a week, a six-week session, extremelycompetitive. He’s offering a fellowship to one of my students who’ll doit as a work-study, come early and stay late to assist in the studio.
Might you be interested? To work with . . .” and he drops a name thatmakes Annie catch her breath. Tim goes on, “I’d planned torecommend . . .” he surprises her with, “. . . Phoebe, but she got the
Sandhill fellowship. But today it hit me—how your work has
progressed here. How much you’ve gained from my instruction, theclass. So I thought, hell, why not Anna?”“Thank you, Tim.” His name feels awkward in her mouth.
Even if it sounds like it was something of an afterthought, he’d chosen
her. Annie tamps down her rising excitement, calculating. How could
she manage to fit in two days a week down in lower Manhattan withher job, the kids? What if there’s an emergency and she and Matt areboth in the city?
“Wow, thank you so much. It sounds wonderful,” she stalls. A
chance to work with an artist whose work she’s admired forever, agenius, really. What would that experience let her see? How might her
own style, whatever it was, articulate? She’d have to take more controlof her work assignment schedule. Celia could go to camp; maybe a daytrippers program for Sky? Jake would be home the summer before
college, able to be called on if Sky needs help. Come summer, Matt
might even have more flexible hours . . . .
Annie becomes aware of Tim’s hand, still on her shoulder, thewarmth and weight of it. Has the pressure increased, or is it her
imagination? Is this the price of being seen? After another second of
pretending it’s not there, she shifts her feet and the hand is quickly
retracted. Tim raises his arms, palms facing Annie, as if in benediction
or to show blamelessness, like perps when they’re caught orcontestants in TV baking contests when they’re told time’s up. Anniebacks up another step; gives him a steady look.
“Yes,” she says. She allows herself to feel a little thrill. “Yes,
I’d love to.” She has the sudden impulse to press on further with the
day’s painting, maybe scratch some scribbly lines into the canvas or21

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add more vibrant color. Maybe something she hasn’t even dreamed of
yet.

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Gary Copeland Lilley’s Recipe
Susan Landgraf
Keeping wickedness from your door
is magic you can count on:a haint blue bottle tree.
Fill the bottles with the blessed earth –stones, bones, old letters, and prayers.
Against the curses of certain
ancestors and practitionersof blame and shame this invitation
for ancestors that have your back.
If you don’t have an oak or pine,build a facsimile. Pour a shotof good whiskey and baptize
the ground under your tree.
Pour a second shot and bless yourself.

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Elephant in the Room
Susan Landgraf
She will adopt this white elephant,
this mended chair
sit for awhile and dream a mirrorthat doesn’t produce poisoned apples.
Seeing the horse-child reminds herof an upside-down question
under glass. It can’t speak.
It can’t wither or sprout.
Even under the brightest sun
and oddly shaped shadowsthe first word in her dreamwas “o.” The second “no.”There is this chair
her father madethat no one wanted
because of the memories.
She will put it, too, under glass
where the moths can’t go, where
except for the elephantit has lost memory.

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On No Account Should You Shout “Fire!”
Mary Byrne
And some rin up hill and down dale, knapping the chucky
stanes to pieces wi’hammers, like sae many road makers run daft.
They say it is to see how the warld was made.
Sir Walter Scott, St. Ronan’s Well
Clinamen
You’d cooked the dinner: a big fresh fish on a bed of tomatoes (doctors
would be pleased) in an earthenware pot on an outdoor fire.
Old friends and new (of whom I was one) cheered by wine andnewness and dusk, I didn’t know who lived where or with whom.
A muezzin sang out hoarsely from a minaret exotic against arich sunset.
Storks settled to sleep in their huge nest.
When you offered me more fish, I swerved from predicted
course, and things were never the same again.
History Recorded in Rock
After dinner everyone relaxed over cake and champagne. There wastalk of a son, freshly graduated in geology, now hunting for gold in
northern Canada. Outdoors on a warm July night, the candlelit
company was enthralled by memories. You had barely left us. Someone
asked if I could sense your presence still.
Each of us had a tale of yours: of the canoe that capsized, losing
radio and food a week before the seaplane was due back, of the intense
damp that made you light a stove in the tent at night so you could fillyour notebooks, of a hat with a net against flies, of Native American
cemeteries but no people as they’d moved south for the summer, of
how pre-sliced white bread was flown in regularly – until one day theseaplane couldn’t make the drop and it turned out the cook could make25

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wonderful bread; and of how you all had pedometers because the land
was so flat and wooded it was the only way to mark it out.
You laughed at the idea of such a summer, mocking yourself
who had up to then imagined all summers Mediterranean. You neverblinded us with science, you just smiled at our idea of old: “Old isbillions of years,” you said patiently.
Your green metal trunk was bumped and rusted, the paintmissing in many places. For field missions you filled it with things likethe rock hammer, the handheld loupe, compass, special pens formarking and the bags for carrying stones, knife, ziplock bags, plastic
bottles, and the all-important notebooks with the squared pages inwhich notes were made by firelight in smoke-filled tents. You’d given
up bringing medical gear and salves. All other bags were soft so they
fit easily around things and you could use them for pillows. The trunk
also contained tinned sardines, beans, toothpaste tubes a Russiancolleague had cleaned out and filled with jam. You could make a fire
anywhere, and once did so in a river bed just before a flash flood, thentold the story against yourself. Once, you forgot the barbecue grill andmade one by crisscrossing green twigs. When driving, you rarely
spoke, too busy reading the landscape. It spoke to you in voices we
couldn’t hear.
The young people at the table that night were happy. I foundtheir voices loud. I remembered that geology had only come into its
own a century or so ago. Each generation has to find out for itself, andthis will go on until there are no generations left.
The Lead-in
The cardiologist resembled W. C. Fields, shuffling amid a chaos ofmachines as elderly as himself. He asked you to describe how you felt.
You shrugged. The doctor looked at me: “He’s worse than theNormans.”
The radiologist was only slightly younger, his office pristine,
his secretaries noisy and efficient. He looked at your head, sat back in
his chair and studied you. “Nothing unusual for someone your age who
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The ENT man was young, decisive. When he put his camerascope down your throat and saw the way you trembled, he said, “Notanother millimeter without seeing a neurologist.”
Your Man Charcot
In the latter half of the 19th century, French neurologist Jean-Martin
Charcot transformed neurology and prepared the way for
psychoanalysis. Among the things he discovered was aneurodegenerative illness that attacks the motor neurons of the brain
and spinal cord, causing the brain to lose contact with muscles andleaving patients unable to swallow, talk or breathe. In another versionof the disease, trouble walking is often the first problem noticed. In
France it is called Maladie de Charcot (Charcot’s disease). In English it
is called a motor neuron disease (MND), specifically amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis (ALS,) which Americans call Lou Gehrig’s disease
after the legendary baseball player who died of it in 1941. Because it isan “orphan,” or rare disease, diagnosis can take time, in your case overa year. The disease attacks both young and old, all ethnic groups, more
often men over fifty. Average prognosis at first symptoms is usually
three to five years. Scientist Stephen Hawking went way beyond that,but some, like you, only get a matter of months. In all cases, the mindof the patient is unaffected, so they can watch and understand exactly
what is happening to them. The end is usually caused by respiratory
failure. The cause of the disease is unknown. There is no cure and notruly effective treatment.
Attic Insulation
It seemed a simple enough affair, to insulate the attic. It would makethe house warmer. The dormice wouldn’t be able to get in any more.
Sometimes a dormouse sat on top of our open bedroom door,
studying us, as if to say, “You people really disturb us, you know.”
They’d already wreaked havoc with the previous insulation – we didn’tknow if they’d eaten it or taken it away: first we heard them gambol in
it, then it disappeared.
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You said, “If they managed to eat it, they’ll survive the next
big global mess, like cockroaches.”
So I said, “Right, go ahead with the insulation.”
But first we had to redo the roof.
I get vertigo, so all I saw of the roof work was the guys in mykitchen. The older roofer complained about having cold feet. The
middle roofer just drank the coffee, a judgmental air about the set ofhis shoulders. He disapproved of chitchat but needed the coffee. The
youngest of the three had a cherub’s face and ears that pointed
upwards like an elf. He smiled all the time. The older man said he’dseen self-heating boots advertised. He wondered how long thebatteries would last. The middle man wondered if they worked onsolar energy. The youngest looked like twelve years old although he
was obviously old enough to be a roofer’s apprentice. He said nothing
and only spoke if asked a direct question. The others told us that he
was doing extremely well at school where he attended one week in
two, learning how to measure and calculate for estimates, how to mix
lime even on a cold day, how to arrive at a shade of pointing the client
would agree to. His smile wasn’t a social thing: I later saw him smile
to himself as he labored alone on some aspect of our roof on the coldest
day of the year.
After the roof, we got down to the insulation. Dismayed by thesheer volume of the material and the weight of the various things that
weren’t the actual insulation itself, I was utterly at a loss to imagine
how they would tack all these various layers onto our poor rafters.
“Might stop the roof blowing away during the next storm,”
you said.
It took huge amounts of brute force to manhandle all the stuff
off the trucks and up the stairs before sawing and hammering andinstalling. And I felt, in a very little way, the strength anddetermination it takes to make war, to fight beyond one’s own energy,
beyond tiredness and pain, to the death. It dawned on me that, in spiteof having a fair amount of brute strength myself, I didn’t have the kindthat some are made to, expected to, possess. This was why I would
always seek compromise and conciliation, would always hang backfrom the bigger things, stick to being evacuated, godhelpus as mymother would say.
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I felt very sorry for our dormice. In my very foxed copy of
Alice in Wonderland, the dormouse was always nodding off, beingbullied by the Mad Hatter and the March Hare who pushed his head
into a teapot, and by the Queen who told him to shut up. I wonderedif, once the insulation was over, it would be too late to get back to thatoriginal me, the one who read Lewis Carroll, was gentle and kind anddreamy and who, like the dormouse, would tell stories about girls who
lived in a treacle well and ate treacle and drew pictures of objects
beginning with M, and quite unlike the dormouse in the new film
version.
On No Account Should You Shout “Fire!”
Day is just discernible through heavy fog. Across from us a row oflittle houses, one a cheery yellow with a light in the kitchen: how warm
the coffee must be! How wonderful to ignore our grey side of the roadwith its over-cheerful nurses, its porters waiting in the night, its fire
instructions (On no account should you shout “Fire!”), its empty sitting
room, its notice announcing that someone hangs around to listen to
our grief, its bookcase of disparate books clearly abandoned in the little
rooms and bathrooms littered with notices (Don’t grab the grab-bar, it’s
not steady; Water 60 degrees – risk of burns), and its table of magazines
considering the misery of others: just how is Vanessa Paradis getting
on without Johnny Depp?
In the hall, an ambulance man’s jacket reads Ambulances
Malnuit’ (Badnight Ambulances). I wonder if he does the job becauseof his name, like the one who trims our hedges severely after a few
scoops of homemade apple-brandy and whose name translates as Bad
Drinker. Once, in Germany, I knew a doctor called Friedhof (cemetery)
and an insurance man called Leich (corpse).
We are here to see the neurologist. He has already guessed
what is wrong with you but has to examine you twice before
pronouncing, his computer converting your twitches into graphs andscreeches.
Finally both of you come back to his desk and the neurologist
announces some of the disease’s colorful names. He watches us
carefully to see if we realize just how bad this is. Your version will see
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you lose your ability to speak, breathe, swallow (you will walk to theloo and play Scrabble till the end).
You ask no questions, so neither can I. You’re relieved to put
a name on it. You smile as you tell friends on the way home.
Before and After Photos
We took a narrow winding road down to the river bed. You sat on arock watching the water’s green reflection on the cliff on the otherside. Electricity company warnings showed dramatic photos of thewater level before and after the dam released water. This might takeonly a minute or two. We were exhorted to flee as soon as the alertsirens sounded.
You did one of your Gallic shrugs and we got out the kind ofrough picnic you loved: garlic sausage, local fat cucumber with thickskin, flavorsome tomatoes. Where once you would have torn at thecrusty bread and drunk your rosé with gusto, you ate little and stared
at the water. Sometimes you dabbled your hand in it, as if amazed.
I took photos that day that I don’t need to look at ever again:
you so handsome in a black T-shirt with a work of art on the back,looking at me over your shoulder, the reflection of the water moving
over the rock in the background.
The Parallel Universe of Country Life
Robert Frost could take his time over a poem. He didn’t have
distractions like emails and internet – let alone Twitter – maybe a few
leisurely letters, and he could go about his country businessmeditating on a phrase or a theme he might tackle: a dividing wall, atree at his window. But life in the country has changed. Now I run
between universes – preparing classes, driving to classes, teachingclasses, feeding the cat, checking the stew on the stove, pulling ivy off
the garage roof, tying up the wisteria detached by a big wind – sending
an email confirming a review, confirming receipt of book for review,
starting review of book that is about nothing in my present. Feed thestoves, bring in more wood, brush cluster flies out of the attic, peel
apples for stewed apples, prepare fruit for jam. I do a lot of things while30

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stuck between two universes: headset on, I listen to news of otherplaces, to books being read. You make bread, call the roofer, theplumber, the electrician, the carpenter, the internet provider about
glitches since the last storm. I click on an article that looks interesting.
At the very same moment, the phone rings, someone knocks at thedoor, a tractor drives through the gate tearing a big branch off the pinewhich suffered during winter snow, my chair rolls two feet to the left,
following the slope of the floor. I give up trying and go to sort thingsout downstairs. Better than pretending one can write anything, evenin the country.
Search for a Lost Paradise
We talked about and planned the outing: Search for a lost paradise: bestof Austrian baroque, the brochures said.
We flew. North of Rome, villages snuggled against soft hills
in the sun. A dusting of snow over the Alps surprised us, darkening
Vienna by four. Bussed to town without looking around, we jumped abright warm train that dropped commuters all over a twinkling valley.
Late and cold we came to the Goldener Stern – reasonably
priced and very old.
Above us it loomed in river fog, monstrous, yellow,
unthreatened: Melk Abbey. We’d made it.
Frau X served beer to us, her husband and several of his peers.
A giant spaniel slept at our feet (it was cold out, but here we could
hardly stand the heat). Men like uncles of ours talked of cracks invaults, cement and plaster, and how much time it would take to pay
the bank back, after.
In time Herr X straightened himself and his apron to serve us
soup, then sauerkraut with knödeln.
On the landing later we passed another dog, porcelain andgrey, it watched over us all night.
Next day we climbed the steps through the great doors,
wandered from room to room, heads thrown back, nonplussed bychurch walls dripping gold, then on its great terrace we tried forpanoramic photos of the bend on the Danube. We pored over modelsof paradise (none of which was the one lost), watched videos ofmonasteries elsewhere – places to visit in other years – were31Sunspot Literary Journal

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disappointed with the cellars, linked arms through gardens in fog,
listened to Mozart’s Apollo and Hyacinth again and again, on special
earphones.
In the staterooms a jeweled monstrance in the shape of a treehoused the jawbone of St Colman – an Irish prince – and miniatures of
the instruments used to try and make him speak. On his way toJerusalem, his strange tongue and clothes had forced a halt: Was he aMoravian spy? A Danube pirate smuggling salt from Traunsee to
Bohemia? His Irish language and lack of German rendered him
steadfast under torture. Once hanged, his scaffold came alive, sprouted
leaves, his body incorrupt. The about-turn was abrupt: the Austrians
made him patron saint, his day October 12th.
At day’s end we reached the library of caged books, in room
after cosy room they lay, in ornate cases beneath baroque ceilings:
books about everything, going back centuries, collected by and formonks. Books.
Near the door the post, momentarily abandoned, of the libraryguardian, her own book open on a simple green table: the Austrian
equivalent of Hello magazine.
Back down the town, the lights were lit. A lone Romanian, theonly beggar we’d see, played accordion for the last of the stragglers in
the fancy boutiques.
You and I had ‘done’ Melk, and Paradise was still nowhere to
be found.
Hindsight
That time we ate in a five-star place in a tiny village in deepest
Normandy: we were exploring. You liked to drive and walk andexplore. Gourmet dining wasn’t really your style, but there wasnothing else within a huge radius. Deep France villages didn’t do fastfood. The place was empty, even on a Saturday night, the owner-waitersmiling but distant, the food all right but nothing special, you’d haveproduced a feast at home with less. I wondered if they were on the way
out, about to close, perhaps reheating yesterday’s leftovers. You said
nothing. I think now perhaps your illness had already begun, making
you more patient, less critical. The pall of silence in the high-ceilinged
room, empty of all but us, and we quiet too in spite of the wine, the32

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stillness of a green Norman evening, the lack of music in reverence tofood – Norman dining rooms sacred and somber as churches – thedécor old-fashioned, smacking of the 19th rather than the 21st century.
Looking back, all the silence and seriousness seems to me now apresage of the thing that was hiding within, waiting to activate andeat your life (mercifully fast, but too fast for me, for us), prevent you
making better meals than this, cut short our plans for years oftraveling, exploring, querying, puzzling, of enjoying simpler meals inplaces with no glass in the windows, a cold desert outdoors, atelevision high on a wall shelf replaying the moon landing in black andwhite to a room full of men.
Your Man Freud
It was you who introduced me to Freud, really, although I’d studied
him a bit, at college. Only later would I discover his connection to
Charcot. Freud had already been a medical doctor for five years, andwas still far from inventing psychoanalysis, when, in 1885, he came toParis to study with Charcot who was director of La Salpetrière, a large
women’s asylum on the left bank of the river Seine south of the Jardin
des Plantes, a city within the city.
Freud found Paris “magically attractive” but also “repulsive.”
It was Charcot’s work on hysteria and hypnotism, rather than his workon ALS, that interested Freud. Freud seems to have felt an outsider,
his initial enthusiasm for Charcot waning until he got invited to
Charcot’s house. On that first visit he wore a white tie and white gloves
and had a little cocaine “to loosen my tongue,” as he wrote to his
fiancée Martha Bernays. Freud was at La Salpetrière the same time as
Gilles de la Tourette and also met Alphonse Daudet who was a visitor
to Charcot’s house. Freud was nevertheless very ambivalent about thewhole Paris episode and swore Martha Bernays to secrecy about hisboredom during such outings, and about the lie that Charcot kissed
him on the forehead “à la Liszt.”

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You Were:
French and Italian cinema; doing the tango to a scratchy vinyl of
Carlos Gardel; Leo Ferré singing Louis Aragon’s “Est-ce ainsi que leshommes vivent?”; Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam;” Boris Vian’s “Le
Déserteur;” Paris cinemas where you forgot everything but the film andnever needed to smoke, although you chain-smoked everywhere else;mover of mountains: on paper, tectonic plates and continents pushed
into each other, on field trips you hammered slivers of rock, licked thenviewed them under a loupe while a gang of kids imitated yourmovements in every detail, fascinated as I was by the magic of thegestures; rationalism and scientific attitude, frowning at anything silly
or unproved or impossible or emotional; readings in psychoanalysis:
Freud and Groddeck particular favorites, you couldn’t get hooked on
my interest in Jung; the garrigue: walking the Larzac plateau, stirring
up perfumes of wild thyme and fennel and rosemary, we slept outdoors
and studied the stars (if it was a test of me, I must have passed,
although I complained bitterly about having to carry water); Collioure,
where as a child you’d summer-camped for years in the old buildingson the port that have now become a military training center; Morocco,
where you felt at home from the minute you arrived; Béziers stories
about a saint who walked off with his head under his arm, and a man
who made soup of stones; words and phrases in Occitan which you
understood because your grandparents spoke it when they didn’t want
the grandkids to understand them; France Culture’s Les Chemins de laConnaissance when you would decide what to do with your day or what
to prepare for lunch; France Inter’s afternoon scientific program when
you picked a spot for a siesta, head in the shade, feet in the sun. Near
the end, you were like a happy child in front of a DVD of funnies put
together by your children and grandchildren, our entertainment waswatching you.
It Begins
A crossroads near the hospital in A, driving through the late-nightdesert looking for food, a bag of chips, a kebab, anything, before
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in your side, maybe gasping for breath, and the gastro man confiding,“If I’d known how thin he was I’d never have operated.”
Even talking to him in a dilapidated corridor was better thanthe outdoors emptiness of the sleeping provincial town.
I Thought I Was Strong
I hated words like feisty and gutsy (I liked gung-ho right enough), I
thought I’d do better than others in my position, expected I’d be loved
by you and yours, admired by neighbors and friends, so tough I’drefuse all offers of help, find time for my own work – headphones
pumping Patti Smith in the darkest hours “Because the Night”…,
thought I’d look after food, laundry, rising in the night, setting up yourfeeding tubes, wheedling you into accepting more liquid, taking yourmeds, finding lights and heaters to replace electric points thatmysteriously stopped working (you’d’ve fixed them, ni vu ni connu, now
the electrician didn’t return calls – I hated the artisans too), tending
stoves to keep you warm, hauling wood before dawn when you werestable and dozing, rushing to shops while other women held the fort,
forgetting essentials because I pored over shelves and fridges in thehunt for tempting morsels – “Just a little, not to lose the habit, thepleasure,” they told me – for you who used to feed the hordes so well,your glass-in-hand-French-chef antics in the kitchen.
I still pour your glass of rosé each time you agree to eat, youpretend to take a sip each time, I throw the rest down the sink, we hide
our sorrow from each other. At the local 8 à 8 they know cases likeours so well they sell half bottles of champagne at Christmas. You
drink a glass – after I threaten to syringe it down your tube – and I
polish off the rest. I’m surprised next morning to find lights burningin odd places, marveling at what a mere sip can do for someone in
distress.
Hysteria, Hashish and Orientalism
Effectively, it turns out that the most interesting aspect of Charcot ismore his interest in hysteria than his discovery of your disease. His
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he would smoke hashish and sketch weird and wonderful scenes. Youmight say this partly explains why it took him nine years to qualify (inall your years in Morocco you took no interest in hashish). I would
reply that medicine was a slow business then and anyway there were
only 400 medical graduates countrywide the year he did qualify. His
greatest strength was observation. He called himself a “visuel.” Freudconsidered him an artist.
Charcot had patients from all over the world, including theGrand Duke of Russia and the novelist Ivan Turgenev (whose
mysterious pains Charcot diagnosed as angina pectoris). Crowds flocked
to watch him hypnotize famous hysteric Blanche (Marie) Wittmann.
She was dubbed the Queen of Hysterics, but then it was an epoch forsuch monikers: Charcot was known as the Napoleon of Neuroses. I feelguilty using the term hysteric. Asti Hustvedt (Medical Muses, 2011)
sees 19th century hysteria reincarnated in today’s eating disorders andself-mutilation, CFS, MPD, and reads all of these as a metaphor for
women’s repressed position in society and woman’s image in thehistory of scientific discourse: “Hysteria, that bizarre rupture between
symptom and source played out on the female body has resurfaced in
our post-Freudian era in new but oddly familiar forms.” Charcot
worked with two other renowned hysterics, but Wittmann was madefamous by the young Pierre Aristide André Brouillet who painted
Leçon Clinique à la Salpetrière 1887: the scene from one of Charcot’s
Tuesday clinical demonstrations in which a fainting (?) and scantilydressed Wittmann is supported by a man, while two nurses hover
expectantly. A crowd of fascinated men watch, many well-known andidentified (one is Charcot’s son who will abandon medicine for polar
exploration), many have moustaches and beards like you, although
Charcot, who will be dead in six years, is cleanshaven.
Apparently Freud had a lithograph of this painting, whichhung in his Vienna rooms until he moved to London, where it was
installed over his famous couch. Today the original hangs unframed
on a wall of the Université Paris V René Descartes which is just up
from the statue of Danton at métro Odéon where you and I used tomeet to go to the cinema, and just down from the Café de la Sorbonne
where we’d meet when you were moving mountains and tectonic
plates on paper.
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Wittmann stopped having convulsions when Charcot died. A
fictional account of her life after Charcot has her working with Marie
Curie (whose notebooks will remain radioactive for another 1500
years, according to nonfictional reports). The real Wittmann did haveboth legs and one forearm amputated due to radiation, which may have
happened when she was assistant to a photographer who experimented
with radiation. She died at fifty-three from hemorrhaging. It is said
that twenty years after her death Wittmann’s notebooks werediscovered, but I can find no trace of them. I picture her writing aboutlove with her remaining arm.
I follow Brouillet down the rabbit-hole of the internet. Hestares at me intently from a self-portrait with a handlebar moustacheand beard. Your beard and moustache were modest affairs based onyour unwillingness to shave every morning and the impracticality ofshaving on field trips. Another of Brouillet’s paintings, The Exorcism,hangs in Reims and shows Arab musicians chasing a djinn from thebody of a child. Brouillet, a fervent orientalist, often traveled in North
Africa, and married a woman from the Jewish elite of Constantine. He
would die on the front, bringing help to Belgian refugees, on a freezingnight in December 1914.
Dead Horses and Things
It is said that artists’ supply shops in Paris run out of shades of grey
in winter, for grey is everywhere: sky, buildings, pavements, river,faces.
One such Sunday we slip into the Musée Delacroix on adeserted Place de Furstenberg. In the entrance hall two Englishspeaking ladies hover, crestfallen, clearly mother and daughter.
The mother: “De-la-croix all one word? Nothing to do withreligion? No crosses?”
The daughter (shifting from one foot to the other):“Apparently it’s not the ‘Musée. De. La. Croix,’ it’s Delacroix all-oneword – the painter.”
The mother hesitates. “What kind of painting?”
The daughter eyes a reproduction on the wall, shrugs: “Deadhorses and things.”
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They pass through the door into the greyness, abandoning
enough color to brighten any Parisian winter.
Later, you and I repair to a café in Barbès, full of men in winterdjellabahs, their hoods up, hands warming up wool sleeves. In
mismatching jacket and trousers – like a bachelor farmer in the city
for the day – the boss by the stove, the only source of heat, keeps
endless mint tea on the go while studying some far horizon beyond thewindows. You and his assistant exchange pleasantries in Arabic. Overmint tea and fresh doughnuts doused in sugar we discuss oursurroundings, the people, the cool outdoors, Delacroix’s visit to
Morocco and his amazing notebooks, anything to help us forget the
low winter sun creeping towards the grey horizon.
The Little Man in the Big Coat“Your” disease “progressed.” All shame gone, I ranted, bawled,harassed the doctors to a man – they were mostly men – who, asleep
at the helm, were awakened from time to time by an army of womennurses, secretaries, carers, dieticians who kept them informed.
“Like clerks in Dickens’ England,” I bawled at you. “They sit
behind their desks and write scripts!”
You said little, sunken into your pillows, twenty kilos down
and counting, your voice already hoarse, hesitant.
The only woman doctor we saw had arrived from Eastern
Europe to help make up for the shortage of doctors in rural areas. My
abiding memory is of her wringing her hands in a hospital corridor,
eight months into a foreign world. (“They’re a referral service in
Bulgaria,” a local practitioner said. I hadn’t the repartee to ask, “And
what, pray, are you?”)
In reply to my tirade, you looked at me from under youreyebrows and growled, with great effort, “Keep ridin’ ‘em like this,you’ll be pickin’ iron outta yo’ liver.”Amazed that you remembered my movie quotes from decades
earlier, I was more impressed that you managed a whole sentence. The
little man in the big coat in The Maltese Falcon took on new meaning,and I knew that I was weak and you were strong, the old you buried
inside that tired bony hulk.
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Somehow you communicated with carers and nurses, althoughby then your voice was almost gone. I left you all to it so am not sure
how you managed. They asked about your career, your travels. They
were delighted to find you on the internet: “He has loads ofpublications!” they said when they came down for tea. You smiled at
the thought of the fat roll of maps in the attic, not to mention the thesisthat moved mountains.
I wasn’t jealous, I thought I was strong.
I complained to the nurses, “I thought medicine was a
vocation,” I said, remembering family doctors in old movies. I referred
to a local practitioner.
“Should’ve become a butcher,” the nurse replied, “He could
stand behind his counter, chop up meat and ring his till!”
We laughed till I nearly cried.
But I saved my keening for the day you left that bony hulk,
and went, at peace from MND, and me.
Edith Wharton is Alive and Well
I stopped reading. Edith Wharton’s Morocco hurt – so much indolence,so many Lazaruses in grave-clothes. I got out of the car.
I could see no sign of you. “You stay and read, I’ll deal with
this,” you’d said, pocketing the car keys out of habit and heading off
with my passport and yours.
It was almost midday, Saturday, first day of Ramadan, alreadyhot. There wasn’t yet the razor-wire climbing the hills around Ceuta
to hold the harragas back from Spain and Europe. The only sign of aborder was a line of little booths where passports were stamped.
I approached the place I’d last seen you and inquired.
“Oh he’s here all right,” the official replied. His voice indicatedtrouble, possibly hatred.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
“He’s being taken away.” They wouldn’t say where or why,
told me to wait.
The sun climbed hotter. No fresh cars arrived. No one was visible, ingrave clothes or any other kind.
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After what seemed ages a small official in mismatching jacket
and pants appeared, you following. You indicated our car and you bothcame towards me. “We have to go back to Tetouan,” you muttered.
The man indicated we shouldn’t talk and got in the passenger seat,with you at the wheel. I got in the back.
As you drove, I tried to read over the man’s shoulder the
documents he was perusing. It appeared that a Frenchman, with asimilar first name and the same surname as you, had kidnapped hischildren from his Moroccan wife. This wasn’t uncommon, there’d beena famous case involving a Scandinavian sportsman.
At Tetouan I was turfed out of the car, again without keys or
passport, and you were swept into the Commissariat.
I contemplated setting fire to petrol from a pump at the filling
station next door to draw attention to my predicament. I wasn’t sure
I could carry it off – or even if that old cinema trick worked at all.
Luckily I had some loose change. I took a taxi to family friendsof yours. One of the young men of the family accompanied me to thepost office. We stood in line for a booth after giving the number at thedesk. I listened to a message saying the embassy was closed for the
weekend. There didn’t seem to be a contingency arrangement.
Your friends advised me to be patient.
I went back to the Commissariat and begged that they at least
return my passport. They refused. They were waiting for theCommissaire to arrive. He would make a decision.
Given the heat and Ramadan, I guessed he was in bed.
I remember little of the rest of the day. There was a lot of mint tea. I
had time to recall other trips to Ceuta, your amusement at my delightwith some very salty bacon and cabbage in a Galician restaurant.
As the sun dropped towards the horizon, the Commissairearrived. He immediately spotted the error. You were brought out, mild
as ever, smiling a bit now. The Commissaire apologized to us both –“A minor official hoping for promotion,” he said – and invited us todinner. We instantly refused.
As we drove across the border at last, into Ceuta, I asked you
to slow the car. I opened the window and spat on the ground, as I’dseen Moroccans do, completely forgetting my earlier dislike of Edith
Wharton.
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Rational and Irrational
By December even your spam emails are drying up. In an irrational
attempt to keep you close for a while longer, I research ALS. I become
adept at skimming through medical abstracts. I fill notebooks.
You always used the word go when playing French Scrabble,
for the Chinese game using black and white pieces called stones. This
often led to argument but go always emerged as a valid, an allowed,
Scrabble word. Only now do I see that a board game in which thepieces are called stones was an obvious notion for a geologist.
Can’t Hurt You Now
Late one Friday coming up to the shortest day of the year – when
primitive peoples in northern climes must have thought: Dude, thisthing is over – I have an appointment with the notary. Country roads
are busier than usual with what I imagine are happy people rushinghome to happy arrangements. The light is fading rapidly, it is that time
the French call between dog and wolf. If a deer were to cross the roadnow, it might be mistaken for something else, or not seen at all. A
murder of crows explodes into the air, cawing loudly.
Here is the very spot where your trouble started, not so longago: one late afternoon, two big deer burst out of the forest and ran
straight into your car on the driver’s side, denting it unmercifully,
blocking the door, exploding the window next to your ear. The deerran off, big enough to be unscathed. You continued to your destination– an important and successful interview. Arriving home that evening
you climbed out by the passenger side of the car and made light of thewhole episode. Yet you were never the same again, more silent, I might
have said mystified. Your hair grew whiter and stood up as if in shock.
It took almost a year to find out what was wrong.
In reply to a question posed by the professor of neurology, I
told him about the deer. He looked at me as if I were one of Charcot’s
hysterics. He repeated my words back at me: “The. Car. Was. Hit. By.
Two. Big. Deer.” By then you were unable to join the conversation –you had all of ten days left – but you didn’t indicate agreement either.
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You were still you, more on his – scientific, rational – side than mine.
These were our roles.
I still think a trauma like the deer might have triggered andaccelerated a quietly sleeping disease.

I arrive in the town. It is clogged. I am angry with Christmas lighting,plastic snowmen, idiotic Father Christmases climbing walls andchimneys.
The notary is no longer tanned and gung-ho. Now winter-paleand distant, he favors a modish quiff at the top of his head, somestatement related to the many car magazines in his waiting room. His
office is dilapidated, dusty, its ancient moldings in sharp contrast to
his glass desk, another statement. I sign another piece of paper
affirming your death, as if they are trying to make me admit it.
As I return to the busy street, a lone secretary leans over her
work in the only pool of light in the penumbra of the reception-area.
On the way home through the forest, I open all the car
windows, to give those deer the benefit of my mood. I scream alongwith Patti Smith. Can’t hurt you now.
Always Inevitable
I was jealous of your radio, of you wrapped into another culture andlanguage, immensely smug and sure of itself. (A colleague once bent
my ear about France having the best education system in the world –I and other adjuncts delivering it against all odds without tenure,bitterness our state of being, our être with no bien.)
You may have felt the same when I wandered house andgarden sporting earphones, listening to BBC or Russian novels,chuckling at American standups, applying the secateurs as
Raskolnikov planned his murder and Mark Twain mocked “the awful
German language.”
Now it is I who listens to France Culture on every radio in thehouse. It echoes through the garden, slightly out of sync with myheadphones.
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I pretend that you are here too – somewhere – listening –planning the next meal – working on your laptop – fixing a plug –puzzling over big things, like pain and suffering which, as Raskolnikov
said, are always inevitable for deep hearts and large intelligences,causing them great sadness on earth.
Eating Artichokes
It is April, the year advances quickly. I am a large still rock in the
middle of a fast river.
Each year I miss you not less, but more.
An appointment has been cancelled, I am eating lunch early. I
didn’t sleep much after the burning of Notre Dame.
As the artichokes cooked, I read David Foster Wallace’s“Consider the Lobster.” The artichokes on their plate now have astrange association with lobsters and a summer festival in Maine.
DFW discusses whether or not lobsters feel pain, describes how theyshrink backwards when you try to empty them into the boiling waterand how, when you manage it and cover the pot, they rattle the lid.
Some cooks flee the kitchen at this point.
I will probably never eat lobster again. The last time I did waswith you, in Al Jadidah, in a dining room open to the sea where birds
flew in and out. The patronne, in a striped djellabah more like a man’s,sat beside the cash desk. She had a little kanoun for tea, and called thetown by its old Portuguese name, Mazagan, now the name of a nearby
resort and golf course.
Then I made mayonnaise for the artichokes. I don’t often do
this, because you did it so well, adding the oil to the spoon before
dropping it into the bowl, because the secret of mayonnaise, you said,
is having everything at the same temperature. You added more andmore oil until the mayonnaise was pale and thick. I joked that it was
geological. In the kitchen there was often discussion about why
mayonnaise might refuse to take, and French rumors that it couldn’t
work if a woman having her period was making it or nearby. This often
branched into discussion of the patriarchy. Madame Saint-Ange – yourcooking bible – has four whole pages on mayonnaise, in French: thebane of my life as I tried to cope with Arabic in the street and Frenchat home, with memories of Sister Philippine and Kennedy’s French
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Grammar, and the excruciating subjunctive (“Elle s’est brulée la main,”said Sister Philippine). I still can’t remember the rule. One night on abook program, George Steiner used a past subjunctive and theaudience went “Oooooh!” because the French just dodge it.
You forbade a blender for the mayonnaise, and showed all myfriends how to make it. They still think of you when they do.
I peel off the outer leaves of the artichoke, select a fat one anddip it in my mayonnaise.
And I’ve got it right, finally, after all these years: plenty oflemon but not too much to drown the taste of the egg, the oil,pleasantly tart with just enough seasoning. You liked lots of pepper.
I don’t remember when I first ate artichokes with you. I recall
you making mayonnaise in a kitchen in Morocco, blinding sunlightoutdoors, a hibiscus-lined alley, a lemon tree where the chameleon
hunted, stepping and gripping cautiously, giving himself time tochange color, and his long toffee tongue when his stereo eyes spotted
an insect.
The pomegranates were small, unlike shop-bought ones. You
prepared them for us, adding rosé to yours. Pomegranates appear in
the Bible and in Greek mythology. You said Adam and Eve probably
ate a pomegranate, not an apple. Normandy made more sense forapples.
There was a tree with red flowers resembling bottle brushes.
No one knew its name, but everyone with access to the internet now
knows it is Callistemon.
All these things had been planted lovingly by an elderly
Frenchman who thought he was in Morocco forever, believing thatcolonial privilege could protect against age and fortune and change.
The avocados all ripened at the same time. You can only giveaway so many avocadoes or eat so many dips (although I know now
we could have added pomegranate to the dip). Giving things away waseasy in Morocco: you put things neatly near the dustbin and withinminutes they disappeared. Nothing went to loss. Shepherds grazed
their sheep in the green sward along the outside wall of houses like
ours, with watered lawns. I suppose shepherds still do that.
So there we were, in a past life, eating your mayonnaise. We
were young and handsome but we didn’t know it. We were funny andhard and cruel and nice. We had visceral likes and dislikes. Later we44Sunspot Literary Journal

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would drop the harder bits, when it was too late to make any
difference.

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An Origami GirlCharlene Stegman Moskal
expert at elusive
folds in on herself,
hides in the empty paper,
creates whatever
one needs to see;is a shape changer,a box, a bird, a basket,
both opened and constrained –illusory, absent, a cipher
who hides in blank spaces.
I never hear her walking,silent, sliding steps, soundless –tissue paper that floats on air;
there are no footsteps.
Her voice quiet, paper thin
she sings comfort songs
written for someone else.
She is secure in two dimensions
flat as the family photographs
sealed flat in a yellow clasp envelope.

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Come Live with Me and Be My Love
Michele E. Reisinger
Somehow, I acquired a dead man’s interrupted life.
His grey stone cottage, mid-forest. Books, a barn, blankstationery veined with mold. Curled edge photographs stacked likekindling in a dusty hope chest. They claim me.
A rusted horseshoe slumbered in the cook stove. I burnish itwith wire, secure its resurrected luck with a trinity of nails above thethreshold. His ashes, scattered within the orchard, coalesce. Wonder.
The locals say he lived sad and died fierce.
Me, too.
I lower onto our front porch stoop and caress its sun-warmed
face. Yes love, I say, as he approaches. Welcome home.

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Chasing the Dragon
Kathy Hoyle‘Con Rong, Chau Thien’
Vietnamese proverb: Children of Dragon, Grandchildren of Gods

TJ
That summer was one of the hottest on record. Mama’s radio piped
out Tammy Wynette, and she would sing along. Then afterwards shewould cuss, “Hell, Tammy, why you always tellin us to stand by that
shit-for-brains man?”
Mama sliced watermelon on the counter, but that was the firstsummer she didn’t two-step us around the kitchen table.
“It’s too goddamn hot to live,” she said.
Nothing but heat, crawlin out from under the porch every
morning, spreadin down past the hog field and the wiltin corn crops,
all the way out to the dyin pecan tree that sat on the county line. It
scorched our arms and left us parched and breathless. Mostly we justput on the hose and let the water soak us down or we had spittincontests under the shade of the haybarn roof. There was no hidin fromit. It sucked the air right out of our lungs, made the world slow downtill we were all wilted and sleepy, like belly-filled possums.
“You boys gotta stay cool an’ make sure you drink the water.
Gotta drink the water,” Mama said, wafting at her flushed cheeks withan old lace fan.
When we’d had our fill, she’d wipe the sweet watermelon fromour chin with a cold cloth and give us an ice cube each from the freezer
out back. Cal would try and fit the whole cube in his mouth, just likeus, opening his jaw wide and shoving at it with his chubby fingers andMama would flick him on the ear with a towel and cuss.
“God dammit, Cal, why’d you always gotta try and chokeyourself? As if I ain’t got enough on my mind without having to worry
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Me, Jacob and Richie would push our cubes into our mouths
as we ran past him, back out into the heat, and Cal would trail behind,
ice cube melting into the palm of his hand.
There were four of us that summer, Richie, Jacob, me and mybaby brother, Cal. I was always complainin to Mama ‘bout havin todrag Cal around, and she would always give me a look that would
freeze the sun when I did. In the end, Cal got to hang with us anyways,
even though none of us wanted a nine-year-old kid in tow.
Richie cussed about it.
“Why’d you gotta bring a baby? What the fuck we gonna dowith a baby?”
Jacob just shrugged and said, “One more won’t make no
difference, quit whining,” and Richie shut up, cos it was Jacob had told
him. I was glad. I fought Richie once, last winter, and still had a chunkof tooth missin that Mama said would need fixin up when I was older.
After Jacob had told him to pipe down, Richie sat in the yard chewing
his lip, looked like he was swallowing cuss words right down into hisgut. But he would never fight Jacob, we all knew it, Cal especially.
Jacob was smart, like his Pa, I guess. Mama said Jacob’s Pa
was the smartest guy she ever knew, went to one of those fancy
colleges and everything. I guess all that knowin was just too much for
Jacob’s Pa. He was kinda wasted in this place and maybe he knew
something about the next life that us folks don’t. Maybe he was needed
up in heaven. I don’t know why he did what he did. But Jacob don’ttalk of it none. He don’t like guns none either. He says he’s a pacifist.
That he don’t like hurtin no one nor nothin. I guess that’s just how mymind would be too, if my daddy had blown off the side of his head witha shotgun.
Jacob stood head and shoulders above all of us. Big and smart
together meant Richie knew Jacob could crush him into mush if hetook a mind to it. Richie never was the type to take on someone bigger
an’ him. I guess Richie was just like his pa too.
Anyways, once Jacob told Richie how things were gonna be,
Cal took to following Jacob like a dog on a leash. Mama never had toworry no more ‘bout where he’d be. Always sittin in Jacob’s shadow.
“Mary-Lee done got herself a pure angel when she got thatboy,” Mama would say, every time Jacob came to call.
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And Jacob was all good manners and yes Ma’am no Ma’am andletting Cal stick by his side, like a fly on a turd. I could barely stomach
it. Richie mostly stayed out on the porch, scuffing his heels against thetimber post, scowling at nothin in particular and Mama never reallypaid him any mind. But she sure did love Jacob.
Me? Well, I knew I was nothin special. Just plain old TJ. Or
Thomas Jefferson Scott, when Mama was hollerin ‘cos I done
something bad. Mama never spoke too well about my Pa. Mine was ano-good son of a bitch accordin to Mama. I got a letter once or twicea year with a New York stamp on the front, that’s about it. I still
remembered him, bouncing a wailin Cal on his knee in the kitchen,
fixin up the truck with Granddaddy. He was here, but he always
seemed to be somewhere else in his mind. He would stare out over theprairie and write and write in that notebook of his. Seems he wrote somuch about this place, he needed to find somewhere new to write
about. One day I’ll ask him why he left. And why he never came back.
One day, when Mama don’t need me to take care o’ her.
I like to write too, maybe I am just like him, a no-good son ofa bitch. I sure feel like it ever time I look at Mama’s worn face and her
sad eyes. But writin out all that happened that summer eases mesomehow. I can’t never make it right, but I guess if I can put it out on
the page, it don’t stay inside, eating up my guts.
That day we first heard about Cousin Willy, was a midmornin’ in July,and hotter than hell’s furnace.
“The phone done broke again,” said Mama, as me and Cal
wandered into the house after a mornin’s chores.
“Cousin Willy’s got the withdrawals. I saw Aunt Claire downat the store this mornin buying up all kinds of pills. She’s tried
everythin. Told her I’d be right on over. TJ, ride your bike out to Aunt
Maggie’s and tell her she needs to get to Aunt Claire’s soon as she
can.”Claire and Maggie were Mama’s sisters. They’d stuck by eachother through most things. Mama says ‘kin is all we got an’ all weneed’ but even so, I wasn’t fixin to get burnt to a crisp that mornin, so
I whined.
“Aw Mama.”50

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Volume 2, Issue 3“You do it,” hissed Mama, picking up her purse and keys,“Willy’s family and he’s ridin a tornado to hell right now boy, so git
gone.”
I sighed, no use arguin’ with her.
“Here take this,” she said, giving me an old soda bottle filled
up with water, “you make sure you drink it.”
Mama dragged Cal up from the table by his scrawny arm andI followed them outside as they hurried to the pickup. I’d heard ‘bout
the withdrawals from Richie. His Pa had ‘em when he first came back,but seems he took to hard drinkin just as well. I knew Willy musta
been in pretty bad shape to get Mama out into that heat.
Mama screeched off towards Willy and Aunt Claires, as
though the devil himself was on her tail. I stood there choking in acloud of dust, shading my eyes from the blinding sun.
Willy
You go right ahead and ask me why, Mama. Again, and again, you
keep askin me why. But when I tell you, it’s like you don’t hear me.
You just see what was and not what is. I’ll tell you again, Mama. This
time you gotta listen good. I gotta make things right. Unlock that
door, Mama … please. You out there?
You can put me in here, Mama, you can put a man in a box,
but you can’t stop his mind from seein.
I seen things. I followed a dragon, followed him down, down
into that shit-stinking water, followed him through hell. And you
wanna know what else, we came out of that water, him an’ me, we cameout together. I am him and he is me. I’m one of his children now. Me
an’ that dragon, we go together.
I got a chance now, a chance to make it right. ‘Cos there
weren’t nothing right about that place. Nothing, except that goddam
beautiful golden dragon.
When I go down with him, down into that place, Oh Mama!
It’s like the sweetest dream. The water ain’t so bad down there and thenoise, the noise it’s all gone cept for his voice, whispering, tellin me
what I gotta to do.
Gotta save the boy.
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Mama, please….
What you think is good ain’t good, what you think is bad ain’t
bad.
Mama?

TJ
By the time I reached Aunt Maggie’s, I was wrung through withsweat, panting like a fevered dog. Chester, Maggie’s son, was swinging
in a hammock wearing just his scuffed boots and a straw hat, blowing
sweet-smelling smoke rings up to the turquoise sky. Johnny Cash was
mumblin’ through a beat-up radio, hung up by a wire above Chester’shead.
Chester was kinda mean lookin, and creepy as hell, thin andwiry, like an old rattlesnake ready to strike. He had him these yellow
eyes that seemed to burn right through you. He always spoke real low
too, like his words were as thin as his body. Even though I’d known
him my whole life, I never once had a mind to spend time alone withhim. Mama used to say he and Willy were “like two peas in a pod,
always runnin’ around together” when they were kids. But seemed thatsince the war had turned Willy, Chester liked bein alone.
I shook him by the boot, and he squinted out at me.
“What?” he rasped.
My throat was dry from the ride, I guess, ‘cos the words stuck
hard to my tongue.
Chester was fixin’ me with those mean yellow eyes o’ his, whenAunt Maggie came out onto the porch, hummin and pullin at the thinstrap of her top. She looked up and threw her hand to her chest.
“Good Lord child, you gave me a goosebump. What the hell
you doin’ all the way out here? Come on, come on now, get in outta
this goddamn heat.”
I followed her through the porch door into the cool kitchen,glad to get away from Chester, and sat on the chair she’d kicked out
for me. Glugging down the ice water she handed me, I held fast while
she rubbed at my forehead with a cold cloth.
Aunt Maggie smelt like fresh lemons. She was always real easy
to talk to. I never worked out how she an’ Chester could be kin. She
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was the nicest person I ever knew, like she was made of springsunshine or somethin. Seems a lot of folks thought so too, well
menfolk, anyways. She always had some guy or other helpin her out. I
never knew Chester’s pa. Mama said she’d rather spit than talk about
him and Aunt Maggie didn’t seem to miss him none.
“Mama sent me,” I said, when she’d finally stopped scrubbin at
my head.
“Your Mama told you to ride on over here, in this?”I nodded. “Phone’s broke.”
Aunt Maggie picked up her purse and took out some dollars.
“Here. You give her this. Should be enough to fix it. Tell her
she gotta tell me next time. Those fuckers just cut you clean off, youeven miss one day.”
I took the dollars and stuffed them into my shirt pocket. She
lit up a smoke and folded her arms eyeing Chester, who’d wandered
into the kitchen wearing just the suit God gave him.
“Y’all might wanna cover up that peanut, boy. Damn thing
gonna shrivel up an’ drop off.”
Chester opened the fridge, drew out a cold beer and glugged
it down, smacking his lips and driving out a great belch.
“I like my freedom, Mama. I earnt it.”He sure was weird. I became awful interested in Aunt
Maggie’s tablecloth.
Maggie shook her head and blew out smoke.
“What in the hell did I raise?”
Chester ignored her and walked over to me. I looked up at him.
He stared me down.
“Well? You gonna tell us why your Mama sent you, boy or wegotta wait all day?”“It’s Willy. He’s real bad with the withdrawals,” I stammered.
I looked to Aunt Maggie. “Mama said Aunt Claire needs you,right now!”
I needed Aunt Maggie to hear the worry I had seen in Mama’seyes.
Her face turned pale as milk.
“Again? Goddam it.”She nodded to Chester who shook his head, and gave a low
whistle then went out back.
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Volume 2, Issue 3“TJ, you wait here,” said Aunt Maggie, “there’s ham andwatermelon in the fridge if you get hungry. Don’t ride home till aftersix, cos you gon’ fry to a crisp if you do.”Maggie went out back and got a cube from the freezer andshoved it into my hand. “Here. And you make sure you get plenty
water.”
Chester strolled back into the kitchen wearing cutoffs, pullinga Vipers T-shirt over his head. He plucked a cigarette from Maggie’s
pack on the table, lit up and nodded to her.
“Let’s go, Mama.”
Aunt Maggie grabbed her purse and ruffled my hair.
“Willy’s gonna be just fine, don’t you worry.” She turned to
Chester. “I don’t know why those bastards sent him back like that.
Ain’t no better than in a goddamn body bag. At least then he’d be somekind o’ hero and Claire could hold her head up in town.”
Chester slammed his hand against the counter, eyes blazin.
“You wanna help him or you wanna whine and bitch about what you
think you know, when you don’t know shit, Ma?”I held my breath.
Aunt Maggie turned and stormed out, the porch door
slamming behind her. Chester gave me one last scowl before hefollowed her outside. I sat for a second sucking on the ice cube, then I
pushed back my chair and wandered out onto the porch. I looked out
across Maggie’s farm wondering what the hell I was gonna do withthat long old stretch of time left before supper . . . then my eyes cameto rest on the wood.

Willy“Troop! Don’t you drink that water. That shit will kill you stone dead.”First thing I heard from Harvard when I got in-country. I
remember thinkin, if alls I had to worry about was the water, thenthings sure were gonna be a hell of a lot easier than I thought.
I was dumb as shit.
I mean, there was water everywhere in that goddamn place.
Ain’t like home, Mama, miles and miles of dust and dirt, ain’t likeanywhere I’d ever seen before. Seemed like most of the time, I could54

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hardly breathe. If we weren’t walking through water, leeches suckinat us, the water was rainin down on us. You talk about hellfire, Mama,
but hell ain’t fire, it’s one giant shit-stinking river of water.
And all that noise, burnin a hole in my brain. I needed to getaways from all that noise. The rain rapraprappin, bam, bam, bam, guns
popopin, and there ain’t nowhere to go, you just gotta move. Move!
Popopop! Move! Get down, troop, get up, troop! See, Mama, without
the dragon, it’s just noise. Guns, blades, and screams . . . boys like me,screamin out for their Mamas.
Y’all told to think of ‘em as gooks, as dinks. They don’t meana thing to nobody. But the dragon, he made me see. Made me see, we
all his children. Grunt like me ain’t supposed to ask why? Why wekillin? What the hell did we do it for, Mama? Ain’t nobody won nothin.
Y’all think Chester’s some kinda hero. I used to think so too.
Now I know, there ain’t no such thing as a hero.
I tried, tried to turn my mind to the killin. Chester, he loved
it. Got him a man’s scalp hooked to his belt like he’s some mean
motherfucker. I ain’t no coward, ain’t no pussy but you can’t just kill aman, or a woman, or a goddamn kid for nothin.
You go on point, rain ratatattin on your helmet all night long,just waitin and waitin, knowing either you or the man next to you
gonna die, and it’s just goddamn pot-luck if you make it back to thehooch next mornin. Chester had him a scalp, but all I had me was arabbit’s foot from Granddaddy. And I was scared, Mama. I ain’t never
told you that before, but I was so fucking scared.
Then I found Thùy Linh. And her voice, it was so soft, felt likea velvet cloth wrapped all around me. And her hands, her mouth, allover my body,“Relax, GI. Thùy Linh take care of you now. Take the pipe.
Close your eyes, lay back, I tell you story of sacred dragon.”
And Mama, I did, I lay down on that mat and I took that pipewith the golden dragon curled around and around it and I went
someplace so beautiful, it was like Jesus took my hand and gave me a
goddamn tour of heaven itself. For the first time I didn’t hear no
screams, didn’t hear that popopop, didn’t hear the blades coming
closer, ready to take those boys home in boxes.
See you can put a man in a box, Mama, but what you think isgood, ain’t good.
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You got to let me out, now. Open that door. ‘Cos I got achance, I got a chance to make it right. I see Thùy Linh’, I feel her
hands on me. Only now she ain’t soothing the itchin’ that’s crawlin’ allover me, Mama. And the dragon, he ain’t whisperin. All I hear is
Chester’s voice. Rising above all that noise. I see him pushin away thatfriend of Thùy Linh’s, the one with the long black hair and those realsmall titties.
Chester hissin, “I don’t want me no gook bitch.”Those yellow eyes of his, searchin’ that hooch till he found
what he wanted hidin’ in the corner.
And those words, Mama. I hear those words that changed
everythin between me n him…
“How much for the boy?”

TJ
I filled up an old soda bottle with water and set off.
Whenever we visited Maggie’s farm, Mama had always saidno ‘bout goin to the wood. She said we would have to be done withchasin the hogs and chickens out back ‘cos she couldn’t trust us not tofall down the ditch and be dumb enough to drown. Trees. A great
clump of cool, shady cottonwoods, magnolias and oaks, all sat beyond
Maggie’s farm. The wood had always been off-limits, but here I was,with no Mama to stop me, freedom fizzin in my gut. I was gonna go
see what I could find.
It was cool, almost damp, like stepping into a whole different
world. I could breathe for the first time in what felt like months. I left
my bike flat down in a clump of ferns and picked my way across the
spongy ground under the cool shade of the trees. Birds were singin
overhead as I kicked at leaves and pulled up a clump of switch cane toswipe at the flies. I could smell that real sharp stink of wild garlicmixed up with sweet magnolia, and I found myself hummin as I walked
through the shady wood. It sure felt like I was on an adventure, justlike Huck Finn.
It was the noise that stopped me. Trickling water. Maybe acreek that lead to the ditch Mama was always warning us about? But
something else too, kinda like a motor running, but high and whiny,56

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the pitch all wrong. I ain’t never been what you’d call real bright, so I
walked towards it. I came to the edge of a sloping, mossy bank andlooked down. At the bottom was a pool of dark, sludgy water and all
around, there were frogs. I could feel a vibration underfoot and thatsound was so goddamn hypnotic, it drew me closer n’ closer. Man, they
were ugly suckers. All brown and lumpy, amber-eyed and slashmouthed, slick and squelchin in the mud, and I ain’t exaggeratin when
I tell you, they were bigger than my granddaddy’s hand. I reeled back,falling straight onto my butt. There were so many of them all hollerin
out that weird noise. I ran. My breath caught in my belly. Hearthammering. I was scared, but kinda excited too. I couldn’t wait to show
Jacob and Richie those ugly-ass toads. I ran all the way to back to mybike, pushed it through the trees and jumped on, ridin out into theburning sun.
Mama and Cal got home long after the sun was settin. Mama flopped
onto the couch and wafted her face with a fan while I ran to fetch her
an iced tea, sure to make it just how she liked it, with extra lemon. She
looked like all the cares of the world were beating down on her
shoulders. When I asked Cal about what happened, he said he didn’tknow ‘cos Mama had thrown him out at granddaddy’s on the way to
Aunt Claire’s. He had rabbit’s foot curled in his hand.
“Granddaddy says its lucky.”“Not lucky for him when Mama finds out he let you at his
shotgun.”“She won’t find out,” said Cal, stuffing the foot in the pocket ofhis shorts, “me and Granddaddy know how to keep a secret.”
Cal held that rabbit foot close all night long, strokin his cheekwith the fur.
Next morning, Mama found it stuffed down the side of his bed.
“That man and his goddamn guns,” she hissed, whipping up
the foot and tossing it in the trash, “I told your grandpa, over and over,I don’t want my boys near any goddamn guns. Jesus H Christ, My own
Pa.”
Mama was so angry.
That was when she said Cal gotta stay with me, instead.
Guess I was right. A rabbit’s foot ain’t so lucky after all.
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Willy
It burns. Shit, Mama the truth, it’s burning a hole in me so big that nomatter how I look at it, I can never fill it. Not with praying, not withdrinkin, not even the dragon can stop the burnin.
Mama, I gots to tell it, so I can breathe easy again. I thinkmaybe if I tell it, if I do somethin, maybe the dragon, he might set me
free.
Mama, what I did out there, that ain’t the worst of it…
I shoulda stopped him. I know what he’s doin’. I seen that boy
runnin round town with Chester’s stink all over him. Ain’t nobody tostop it but me.
All that hate, it sticks in my throat like that shit-stinkin
swamp water and its’s choking me up, choking me up and I’d be happy
to take my last breath, but the dragon, he weaves his way through it
all, he always finds me no matter what. And he takes me down, down
away from the noise and the guts and the blood. He’s the only one cantake me, Mama. He whispers, oh, I can hear him saying, Willy, now you
can be something more, someone better.
Mama, I hear you out there, don’t think I can’t hear Y’all. I
hear Aunt Maggie and Aunt Sarah. Y’all think you know what’s goodfor me. But what’s good ain’t good, what’s bad ain’t bad. You think you
can stop it? You can’t stop the dragon, Mama. Only the truth can stophim.
I hear Chester out there too. I knowed that voice my whole
life, it’s like when we speak, we are ringin the same bell. He is my kin,but he ain’t like no brother no more. I hear him. Mama, don’t you let
him in here, don’t you dare.
Jesus, Mama, I’m so goddam cold, they’re all over me. Rats,runnin all over my body.
Mama, please…
TJ“Toads,” said Jacob, peering through his glasses over the edge of theslope.
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Volume 2, Issue 3“Huh?”
Richie had a stick, mottled with moss, and was swiping at the
air with it.
“Let’s go down and kill ‘em,” he said, grinning as he hopped
and jabbed. He caught Cal in the side with the stick and Cal fell to hisknees, tears threatening.
“Baby,” hissed Richie, catching a look from Jacob.
“They’re cane toads,” said Jacob, stepping back from the edge,“not frogs. Don’t normally get ‘em here. Must be the heat that’s
brought ‘em. I read about ‘em once. They kill all kinds of bugs ncritters, to help the crops grow.”
Richie started to slide down the slope toward the pool, stick in
hand, face full of menace.
“Get back Richie, you goddamn idiot!” shouted Jacob.
“Why?” shouted up Richie grinning, “gonna kill me somestinkin toads.”“Richie, I mean it, get outta there. They’re poisonous,” Jacob
hollered down the slope.
Richie dug his nails into the mossy bank to stop himself fromsliding down. He was stuck a halfways up and a halfways down. He
looked down at the toads then back up at me Jacob and me kneelingon the edge.
“I mean it Richie. Get your ass back up here!” shouted Jacob.
I held out a hand as Richie crawled to the top. He grabbed it
and I yanked him back over the edge, losing my balance when I took
his weight. We tumbled to a halt by the log where Cal was sitting.
“Goddamn idiot,” I said, giggling at Richie as we rough ntumbled a little more.
Jacob came and parked on the log next to Cal, took therucksack from his back, unpacked cans of soda, and handed them out.
“You sure are a dumbass, Richie,” he said, shaking his head.
Cal sniggered, and took a can from Richie.
I popped the top off the soda and slurped it down.
“Got any smokes?” asked Richie popping his own can open.
“Sure, like you smoke,” snorted Jacob.
“Do too. I tried it last week, Chester showed me how. I smoke
all the time now.”59

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Volume 2, Issue 3“Chester?” I asked, “why’s he hangin’ with a scrawny ass kid
like you?”“Cos I ain’t a dumbass like you, TJ . . . . He’s pretty cool.
Showed me his medals and somethin else too.”“Yeah? What?” asked Jacob“Aw, you wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”“What’d he show you?” whispered Cal, eyes wide.
Richie smirked. He had us eatin from his hand now.
“Chester got him a gook scalp. Keeps it in a jar. He donebrought it over to my house and showed me. Still got gook hair an’
blood an’ everythin.”“Fuck you Richie, that’s a downright lie,” said Jacob, shaking
his head.
“Ain’t no lie!” shouted Richie, “I saw it true. An’ Chester, hesays I’m in his unit now. Gave me two dollars, just for takin a grocery
bag to some buddy o’ his.”
Jacob shook his head again“You sure are dumb, Richie. Chester got you runnin aroundfor him. You gonna end up in real trouble. Chester’s a mean-ass snake.
You should stay the hell away from him. If you had a Mama, she’d tell
you that straight.”“Oh yeah? Well I got Pa, and he says it’s just fine! Him andChester got big plans.”
Richie walked over to the edge of the mossy bank and swiped
at the air with his stick. We all left off a him then, knowin the only
plan Richie’s pa had was to drink himself to death. He had a medalfrom the US Army hangin on his wall, but he never had no job, andRichie’s mama left bout three seconds after his pa came back from Nam
to go and live with some guy out in LA.
Cal was leanin back in the grass next to me eyes closed. I wasstaring up and the wisp of cloud floatin over the yellow sun.
“Goddammit those calm toads sure do make the worst noise,”said Richie, breaking up my daydream.
“Cane toads,” said Jacob sitting up and shading his eyes.
“How they poison anyways?” I asked, “do they bite?”“No,” said Jacob. “Glands.”“What’s glands?” I asked.
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Volume 2, Issue 3“Well, they got these bumps full of poison right behind theeyes. If you touch ‘em you get poisoned. Some folks say, if you lick ‘em,
it makes you higher than a cloud. But mostly it can kill you stone
dead.”“Jesus. Cousin Willy would make a soup outta those guys,” Ilaughed.
“I’d take a lick,” said Richie jumpin up and swipin at a clumpof fern with his stick. We all laughed.
“Quit it now,” he scowled, “I would. You yellow bellies
wouldn’t dare. But I would. Chester told me what it’s like. He said it’s
like you swallowed a rainbow, all colours an’ music and warm inside.
Like the best dream you ever had in your whole goddam life.”
Cal’s eyes were wide as he jumped down from the log, puffing
out his chest.
“I would do it too,” he said, “I ain’t no pussy.” Then he scowled
at Richie. “Ain’t no baby either.”“Siddown, Cal,” I said, grabbing his arm. “You ain’t to go near,y’hear. Mama would strip the skin from my hide if she knew I’d evenbrought you out past Maggie’s farm, let alone getting all rainbowed
up on some crazy toad juice.”
Richie clutched at his stomach, laughing so hard, “Ha ha! Babylick the toad, baby lick the toad.”He pulled his mouth into a hard, thin line and cuffed Cal
around the ear. Cal steadied himself but when Richie jumped forward,
Cal lost his footing, staggering back and falling into a patch ofstingers.
“Get up, pussy,” said Richie.
Jacob pulled Richie away. I put out a hand for Cal, but hepushed himself up and shoved me away. Angry patches of red werespreading across the back of his thin legs and Cal couldn’t hold backthe tears this time.
“You always spoil it, Richie,” Jacob said, quietly. “Why you
gotta be so mean?”“You hate him too!” Richie shouted. “You said it. Said it was
just until his mama can take him back and all we gots to do is ignore
him. He ain’t one of us. He ain’t never gonna be one of us.”Richie’s knuckles were white around his stick as he pointed
and jabbed it toward Cal.
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Jacob had turned beet red.
He turned to Cal, “I aint never said I hated you.”
But Cal was already gone, stridin toward the clearing, arms
wrapped tight around himself, tears coursing down his cheeks.

Willy
You let him in, Mama? Why?
Alls I see now is that dragon. The water it’s so blue down here.
Dragon scales shimmering like sunlit glass. It’s so quiet Mama. Let
me stay here. Wait now? There’s something I gotta do?
I’m swimmin, Mama, swimmin through that water. I’mfollowing that dragon’s tail, swirling and curling around and around.
The colours, like rainbows, I’m swimmin through rainbows Mama,
don’t never wanna come up.
Shhh now, Mama, no more noise.
Shh now, Mama, stop hollerin.
Y’all can leave me now. It’s peaceful here, Mama. So quiet.
Don’t cry. Shh now.

TJ
Mama looked dead tired, her face all creased and pale, with darkhollows for eyes, like one of my comic-book ghosts.
“Ya’ll gotta take care of yourselves for just one more day,” shesaid, setting out bowls of oatmeal.
She splashed milk into the bowls and slammed down spoons.
Some of the milk had spilt onto my shorts but Mama was angrier thana wasp in a jar, so I kept my mouth tight shut.
She was slammin and bangin, opening and closing, the cooler,
the cupboards, the porch door. We’d barely finished, when she
snatched up our bowls and slammed them into the sink. She almost
scrubbed them invisible, and all the while, she was muttering.
“Goddamn Willy. Always had shit-for brains, always full o’ thegoddamn jitters. Claire shoulda sent him on up to Canada. Even when62

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he was a little kid, he couldn’t cross the road unless he was hangin’ off
Chester’s shirttail. What goddamn use was a boy like him to the
Army.”
Seemed like Mama was workin’ herself up to blow. I sat at thetable, too scared to move. Cals eyes were wider than a racoon. We’dnever seen Mama so spittin mad. She banged those bowls and knives
and spoons onto the drainer so hard I thought they might smash clean
through the counter.
“And now lookit! Like a goddamn horror movie, hollerin, eyes
poppin outta his head, sweatin an’ shakin, three of us holding him
down. In this heat! Where’s the army now? I ask you? Cos they sureas shit ain’t takin care o’ him. Thank the sweet Lord Maggie had thegood sense to bring Chester. Only one to get Willy calmed. Chester
always had to look out for that boy.”
Mama was breathing real hard.
“Mama,” Cal whispered. “Is Willy sick?”
Mama whipped around from the sink.
“Sure is. Oh, he’s sick alright and lemme tell you boys now. I
ever see or hear about you takin’ them mind-bendin drugs, you better
hope you die right there n then, cos I will whip you into next spring if
you ever touch that shit, you hear me? They can put a man on the
goddamn moon, but they sure as shit can’t fix our boys once they’ve
broken them.”
Mama looked like Reverend Johnson, eyes all bulging, an
ungodly demon swelling in her chest. I almost peed my pants.
Cal trembled a little but held fast. I think he always knew, deep
down, Mama would never take a whip to him, but I wasn’t so sure. A
memory still burned deep, the day I told her she must have driven
Daddy away on account of her bein so mean, and she hit me with thehog bucket so hard, I thought I’d lost an ear.
Mama picked up her purse and took my chin in her hand.
“You’re a good boy, TJ. You’re the eldest and you need to takegood care of your brother again while I’m gone. I know it ain’t what
you wanna hear, but I can’t take him. Claire done some readin bout
how to help Willy, she says this’ll be the worst day. Then it’ll be done.
You understand? I’ll be no more than a couple hours. You drink thewater.”
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Volume 2, Issue 3“Don’t worry, Mama,” I told her, proud to have her trust me.
I pulled Cal to me and put an arm around Cal’s bony shoulders. “Ialways take good care o’ him.”
Mama smiled, then kissed us both on the top of our heads andrushed out leaving only the faint scent of her lavender cologne.
I let go of Cal’s shoulders and he sat down on the kitchen chairand began picking at the welts on the back of his legs. They’d scabbed
to a crisp in the heat.

Willy“Do it Willy, fucking do it, man. He ain’t one of us, he ain’t nevergonna be one of us.”
Moonlight on metal. Chester’s yellow eyes, brighter than allthat fire lightin up the sky around us, my heart, pounding like it mightpunch straight outta my chest. He looked more alive than any person
I ever saw, laughing real hard when I drew that knife across Harvard’s
throat. I see it over and over Mama, Harvard, fallin face first into the
mud and Chester’s boot on the back of his head, twistin and twistin
until the mud and the blood and Harvard all became one rain soaked,
shit-stinkin lump of nothin.
“Eat dirt motherfucker. We don’t take no orders from no pussy
college boy.”
I was strung out, Mama, is all I can tell you. Took mesomething made my mind swirl and my heart pump. Voice in my headsaying, It’s okay, it’s okay, do it, Willy. Do it for the unit.
Harvard was a short timer too, been crossing off the days on
his calendar, and I killed him. He never got to see his girl back homeand he ain’t never gonna go to that fancy college of his.
Mama, I killed one of our own men and that ain’t the worst of
it. I did it and it can never be undone. I could maybe even learn to livewith a thing like that if I had a mind to, I could convince myself that I
done right, that it made it easier for all of us. Those suits, they was
gonna stop the boy bringing in the bag, and I knew, Mama I knew, I
couldn’t face another night in that rain, with the noise, and the blades,
without those two dollars’ worth.
“I ain’t no pussy,” I told Chester, “I ain’t no pussy.”
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I’m ashamed to say it, Mama, I cried. And Chester, he told
Harvard.
“Let the kid through. Give these goddam men what theyneed.”
But Harvard, he stuck fast. Scared to break the rules that somesuit put in place. Some suit that never walked one goddamn step incountry.
Harvard was just a dumb college kid. Playin at bein a hero. All
that blood bubbling outta his throat. It wasn’t my fault.
But the boy. God forgive me, Mama He was just a kid. He had
a name, Binh. Chester had him runnin for him and the kid was too
goddam scared to say no. That night, the whole sky was lit up like the
goddamn fourth of July. Binh musta known his village was gone. But
he sat by Chester, head down, with that sack between his knees. He
never moved, not one inch.
They threw Harvard’s boots on the fire. Got it goin real high.
Then Binh brought it out of the sack. A King Cobra.
They were chantin my name and Chester’s too. Willy!
Chester! Willy! Chester! Yayayaya! Screamin an hollerin like a bunchof goddamn Red Indians. Chester took that huntin knife o’ his, grabbed
that motherfucker and sliced it clean open. Tore out that snake’s heartand shoved it in his mouth.
There was so much blood, Mama. So much blood. It was rainin
blood that night. Chester’s mouth, dripping with it when he bit
through that snake-heart, and the boy holdin that dead cobra withblood all over his hands. Harvard’s blood on my knife and the fire andthe noise, chanting my name Willy! Willy! Willy!
Mama, it’s in my head. Ever goddamn day.
I watched them. Watched them disappear into the darkness,
Chester’s arm slung around those thin shoulders, and the boy’s tears
shinin in the firelight.
And I didn’t do a goddamn thing. Just sat by that fire andpuked all over my own goddam boots.
Thùy Linh gave me that pipe, Mama and I sucked on it like it
was goddamn air for livin’ … and the dragon, he came, and he carriedme, down, down, down.
God forgive me. I shoulda stopped him.
Don’t you let him in here no more, Mama.
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TJ
Aunt Claire was wrong. It took more than a day to get Willy straight.
Mama said it was like the Devil himself done took hold of Willy, andshe and Aunt Claire and Aunt Maggie were praying so hard, theirknees were as raw as skinned hide.
Mama would come home every night and fill the washbowl
with ice, drag it out onto the porch. and sit with her feet in it till thesun went down. I asked her bout Willy how he was doin.
“That boy spittin up all kinds of stories. Won’t let nobody near
him now, not even Chester. Claire says she got God on her side. She
gonna fight every day to get her boy back. I just pray she’s right, ‘cosfrom where I’m sitting, God got too many other things he needs toattend to.”Seemed to me like Willy wasn’t fixin to get better any timesoon, but Aunt Claire believed the Almighty would pull him through.
Mama said the waitin was unbearable.
“Like waitin for death or salvation and you ain’t sure which
one’s comin first.”
I would make Mama her iced tea and Cal would sit next to her
on the on a little wooden stool that granddaddy made. I’d longoutgrown my stool, so I helped Mama best I could, by making sure thechores were done and the hogs and chickens were fed. It seemed like I
was doing all the hard work, comin back to the house with sweat
drippin down my neck, while Cal got all the hair-strokin and Mama
hummin sweet songs into his hair.
I kinda liked Willy. I thought it sure was nice of my Mama
and Aunt Maggie to try and help him. He sometimes gave me a dollar
here an’ there, and once he took me and Cal to a movie, but that was
before Nam, before he ended up with his head like a box full of jigsaw
pieces.
Sometimes, I lay next to Cal in bed and said a prayer for Willy.
I would ask God to make him better, so Mama could come home, andwe would get her to ourselves again, before school started. Cal said
that was prayin for us and not Willy and that was a selfish kinda
prayin. I felt bad after that and gave him a dead arm for making me
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feel that way. Then I felt bad again, when the bruise spread gold andgreen above his elbow and Mama asked him what happened, and hesaid he slipped on the hose water. Cal could make you feel bad aboutmost anythin.
With Mama over at Claire’s, we could do as we pleased, so
every day, we took an old corn bag filled with jello sandwiches androde our bikes, out past Aunt Maggie’s, to the toad wood. Jacob andRichie were usually close behind and in the cool shade of thecottonwoods, we hung a rope that Richie had found in his Daddy’s
pickup. We took turns to swing across the ditch, our hearts in our
mouths, for fear of fallin down, down, down, into that nest of toads,
eyein us, all menace and hate, in the ditch. They seemed to get bigger
each day, some as big as alley cats, but as Mama says, boys sure arestupid. We would whoop and holler as each one of us made it to theother side. Even Cal got so good at the swinging, he joined in the jump,letting go of the rope midways across and hurling himself onto thebracken on the other side.
One day, we built a hooch, Richie was CO of the unit of course,
but we all knew it was really Jacob and eventually Richie let up on Cal
a little ways, since Cal was the best at tyin knots and lightin a fire fromthe magnifying glass Aunt Maggie got him on his last birthday. Jacob
said that Richie must never, ever get a hold of that glass, otherwise
we’d all be burnt like sinners, cos Richie got no sense at all. Cal wasalways careful and built a good fire, with rocks all around, to stop it
spreadin, and he made sure it was all doused out every day before
sundown, just like Grandaddy had taught us. Cal said, when he grewup, he would live all alone and cook rabbit on an open fire and sleep
under the stars. Richie said he probably would, ‘cos he wouldn’t haveno friends, ‘cos nobody liked him, but Cal just laughed, and Richie
went and hacked at a tree with his stick for a good while after that.
Richie sure was set on catchin him a toad. Ever day he would
sit at the top of the slope, giving those ugly critters the stink eye,thinkin of ways to do it. He tried his daddy’s old net for fishing, but it
had too short a handle. They were too mean and slippery for a snare
wire, lowered down on a piece of old rope, and the rocks we threw justseemed to plop into the creek, scattering the toads every which way,causing ‘em to holler even louder.
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Volume 2, Issue 3“One day, I’m gonna get me one of them suckers,” said Richie,“an’ I’m gonna make Cal lick it and then I’m gonna slice it’s belly open
eat its heart. Chester told me if you eat the heart of something you
catch, you take on its power. I’m gonna be the biggest, meanest critterin town. An all you pussies gonna bow down to me!”“Sure, Richie,” I said, laughin, and Jacob chuckled, his backresting against an old tree stump, head tilted toward the sun.
“You wait, pussies. Chester told me I can be king of the world
if I want to!”
“Ha! and my Mama told me I could fly me a rocket like Neil
Armstrong,” chuckled Jacob.
Richie scowled at Jacob then turned to Cal. Seems his belly
was full of vinegar and he just needed somewhere to spit.
“Baby,” hissed Richie, as Cal sloped off to his spot on the log.
He took a few steps toward Cal, swinging his stick to and fro.
“Hey guys,” Richie shouted, his voice echoing through theforest, “how long you think till Willy’s better now?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. Aunt Claire thinks he’s through theworst.”
Richie had that sly smirk on his face. He was itchin for trouble.
“So, your Mama’ll be home real soon, then?”
All the while he was snakin closer and closer to Cal.
“I guess so,” I answered, standing up. The air got real cool andI swallowed hard.
Richie stopped in front of Cal who was fiddling, head down,with a blade of grass.
“Well goddamn hallelujah!” shouted Richie, right in Cal’s face,causing him to jump up like a scolded cat.
“That means baby here, can go back to his Mama and we canall go back to bein how it should be. No Fucking New Guys. No
goddamn babies!”
Richie jabbed Cal with his stick, but Cal stood fast, his little
hands curling into fists.
“I told you I ain’t no baby. You quit sayin’ that, Richie.”
I ain’t never seen Cal like that before, eyes black with temper.
But Richie was outright laughin now“Pussy boy, baby boy,” he sang, darting around Jacob, who had
hurried over to stand in front of Cal.
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Volume 2, Issue 3“Shut up, Richie!” said Jacob, giving Richie a shove.
“Leave him, Richie,” I said, moving toward them, but mywords came out kinda stuck and my legs seemed to be filled with sand.
Richie turned on me like a rattlesnake.
“You shut up. You hate him. We all do. You gotta drag him
around cos your Mama says so, you dumbass.”
He spat on the ground and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“I ain’t no pussy!” screamed Cal and ran at Richie, his little
fists balling into his back, cuffing his head and ears with all he had.
Richie turned and shoved Cal away. Cal staggered backwards
but Richie strode towards him again with the Devil in his eyes. Maybe
I shouted out? Maybe Jacob tried to pull Richie back. I don’t know.
That moment seems like a blur, like a picture that ain’t quite in focus,
me and Jacob, frozen in time.
Richie took Cal down with one blow. Smacked him hard, righton the side of the head and Cal folded to the ground as though hisbones done turned to mush. Richie gave him a kick in the stomach forgood measure and Cal whimpered but made no mind to move.
“You’re a baby,” Richie hissed, then glared at me, “and you’rea pussy, ain’t both of you a pair o’ dumbass pussy boys. Your just likeyour no-good Pa, a pair of goddam yellow-bellies.”
I came unstuck and ran at him then, rage burning in my throat,but he was ready. He caught me a good one in the gut and the air
rushed outta me. I curled over, panting hard, throat stingin, and Richie
kicked me hard in the ribs.
Jacob yanked him away, pushed up his glasses, and squared
right up to Richie. Jacob was shakin so hard, his fists balled up realtight. Richie sucked at his teeth for a moment then it seemed like thefight just drained clean out of him. He stuck out his chest, shook hishead and picked up his stick. I heard the swish and whoosh as hewalked away, hacking at the ferns, as he made his way out of the wood.
Jacob helped Cal up. He spat out a little blood, then staggered
as if a hard wind were blowing at him. Leaning against a thick oaktree, he took some deep breaths. I was down on the floor, tryin to catch
some breath. I looked up at the sun, burnin through the flickering
leaves, then closed my eyes against the glare. I felt the vibrations of
the toads through my body, their dull hypnotic drone soothing thepain in my gut.
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Volume 2, Issue 3“I ain’t no pussy.” Cal broke the silence.
I opened my eyes and sat up, pulling my knees tight to mychest.
“I would lick that toad and see the rainbows, and I would fightRichie again,” Cal said, “Any goddamn day or night. I ain’t scared ofhim.”
Jacob made his way over and pulled up me and Cal. The threeof us slowly wheeled our bikes home, the hot sun beatin down on us
the whole way, with Cal in the middle, and me and Jacob righting him,
whenever he stumbled.
It was almost dark when Mama came back from Claire’s. When she
saw Cal’s face, she let out a noise I only ever heard from a cow, keenin
through a birthin.
“My God, baby, what happened to you?” she asked, scooping
Cal up tight.
“You were supposed to take care o’ him,” she snarled at me. I
backed up to the counter and steadied myself.
“Goddamnit, TJ.”
Mama pushed Cal down onto a chair and came at me.
I took the beatin, made no attempt to cover myself. Mama ran
out of steam, pretty quick. She shoved me away and I leant my faceagainst the cooler. I never told Mama that Richie had got me real hard
too. I guess Cal had some pride, and I had a mind to let him keep it.
Nobody wants to fess up they got a beating. Not even to their own
Mama.
I looked on while Mama bathed Cal’s jaw with an ice cloth,then she rubbed some arnica on the side of his head, where the swelling
was pretty bad. She soothed and crooned, until finally he fell flat out
asleep in her arms and she carried him up to bed. A low rumble ofthunder shook the house. A storm was comin.
I lay on my bed listening to the tap-tap-tap on thewindowpane. The rain had started. A sharp flash of light lit up thewhole room, then another deep rumble shook my bed. I began to count.
One one-thousand, two one-thousand, waiting for the next flash. The
door opened, and Mama peeked around the frame, her face pale in the
dusk-light.
70Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 3“I’m sorry,” she whispered, careful not to wake Cal.
“Me too,” I whispered back.
“C’mon,”’ she nodded, and I crept from my bed.
She let me sit with her on the couch till real late, snuggled up
warm and tight watching a cop show on T.V. Outside, the thunderyelled, and the lighting sparked.
Willy
Bambambam! Guns popopop. Get down! Get down! I can’t breathe.
Mama get the pipe! Please, I’m beggin you. Make it stop make it stop
It hurts so bad itchin’ it hurts so bad. I’m so cold so cold I can see thatfire flashin outside I hear them guns, Mama.
Let me out!
I hear you I know you’re out there Mama. Let me out. I’mscared. The noise. Get down, troop get down troop move! Move!
Move!
… need to save the boy. Save the boy Mama please Rats
everywhere.
So cold.

TJ
The lemon-pine perfume from the purple sage drifted through theopen window. I winced as I turned over, the bruisin on my rib wastender. Richie was right, I was a pussy. I shoulda socked him hard.
Shoulda got him first, before he even got to Cal. Like I said, Cal always
made me feel bad. I’d dreamt all night bout how I woulda done things
different. Now, eyes full of grit, I knelt up on my bed and looked outof the window. The clouds looked bruised, like their bellies were stillfull of thunder. It was spittin rain. I watched as a mockingbird sat on
the fencepost, singing out an early morning hymn to me, just like he
was in church, or something.
“Sure is dark out there,” I said, keeping my voice low.
I yawned and rubbed at my rib. I poked my head through thewindow and let a little rain fall on my tongue. It felt good to suck in71

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some of that that cool air. I looked up at a cloud dragon forming in thesky.
“Look, Cal. A dragon,” I whispered.
Cal was silent.
I sighed.
“Cal, I sure am sorry ‘bout what happened.”
It hurt my gut to say it. But I was just as mad at that fool
Richie as he was. And I took a whipping off Richie AND Mama for it.
“C’mon, Cal,” I whined, sore at him for being so stubborn.
I turned and looked across at his bed. His sheet was rumpled
up against the wall. Cal’s old bear was limp on his pillow, one eye
squinting at me, but there was no Cal.
A twist of worry curled in my gut. I slid the window shut andmade my way across the landing to Mama’s room. She sat up when I
creaked the door open.
Rubbing her hands through her hair, Mama glanced at theclock. “What?” she croaked.
“Cal’s gone,” I said and gnawed at a hangnail as Mama
stumbled from her bed.
“What?” She made her way across the landing and into ourroom, staring blankly at Cal’s empty bed.
“Cal?” Mama called, yanking at his bedsheets.
She looked under the bed and in the wardrobe then she went
all around the house checking each room faster and faster like aspinning top, until she was red-faced and breathless. She shoved meout into the yard. Rain pounded my face. The storm had turned again.
I shivered as Mama shouted from the porch door.
“Check everywhere, I mean everywhere. You don’t come backtill you have him!” Then she disappeared, leaving the porch door
swingin in the wind.
I did as I was told. I made a real show of checkin the yard andthe barn, the hog house, even inside the pickup. I wanted to look like I
was helpin Mama. Wanted her to think it wasn’t my fault. I was
drenched through and breathing hard when I finally came back into
the kitchen. Every cupboard was open, boxes and buckets pulled out
onto the linoleum. I stepped over the debris and peeked into the den.
Mama was heaving the old couch from the wall to check behind it, all
the while shoutin for Cal to quit hidin. Looked like everything we72

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owned had been pitched across the floor. A crack of thunder shook thehouse and I turned to Mama, shivering in my wet shorts and T-shirt.
Mama lifted the phone from the kitchen wall and jabbed at the
buttons. She waited a second, then I retched a little, as she smashedthe receiver, over and over, against that wall.
“Goddamit! Goddammit! I paid, you motherfuckers, I paid it
yesterday.”
I put my arms around her as she slid to the floor, the fightseepin from her body.
I knew there was no place in hell good enough for me, but I
fessed up anyway.
“M-, M-, Mama,” I said, teeth chattering with cold.
She looked up and I wiped her hair from her face.
“I think I know where he is.”By the time we got to Maggie’s farm, Mama was no longer crying, justreal quiet, her lips a tight thin line, her knuckles white on the wheel ofthe pickup. She screeched to a halt as Chester came onto the porch,fixing his cap over his dirty blonde hair. He sucked on his stokie andsquinted at me as Mama ran past him up the steps shouting.
“Maggie! Maggie!” she pushed open the door and disappeared
inside.
I got down from the pickup and waited. I’d only told Mama tohead to Maggie’s. No more. After that, she’d grabbed me by the collar
and threw me in the truck.
I knew Mama would get to it soon enough, but I sure wasscared by now. I knew I would get a whoopin when I told her I thought
her baby was wandering the woods all alone. That he was maybe evenrollin around high like Willy, after licking the meanest ugliest critter
she would ever see. Only thing I couldn’t get to thinkin straight was
why he would go alone?
Chester walked over and rested a hand on the pickup door. I
pushed myself back as far as I could. He leaned in real close and blew
smoke in my eyes. I coughed and tried to get by, but he pressed me
hard against that door, yellow eyes narrowin.
The grey clouds parted, and the sun streaked through blinding
me. I put up a hand to cover my eyes.
73Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 3“Seems like ever time I see you there’s some kinda trouble,” hesaid.
I hung my head.
“Why you here, kid?”
I looked up at him.
“I need to go tell Mama--”
He gave me a shove“Why you here? Willy shootin’ his mouth again? My Mama’s
already done enough for him--”“No. No sir … its Cal.”“Your daddy done come and took him? Goddammit. Thoughtthat piece of shit was gone for good.”
I shook my head. Chester leaned back and pulled on his
cigarette and squinted at me then turned as Mama and Maggie camerunning outta the house.
They stopped in front of me and Chester, Maggie was tugging
at her bathrobe, Mama’s face was white with worry.
“Well?” she asked, “you said Maggie’s.”
I looked down at the ground. I wished Jacob was here. Maybe
I wouldn’t get whooped so hard if she knew Jacob had been to the woodtoo.
“He ain’t here, Sarah. Why would he come here?” asked
Maggie. “Do you know what the hell’s going on?” she said, turning to
Chester.
“I don’t know shit,” said Chester. “Spit it out dumbass.
Where’s your brother?” he asked, shoving me in the chest.
The clouds were slidin across the sky thin as a whisper andthe sun was rising higher now, seems like it was hottin’ up ready toburn me like the sinner I was. I pointed, out across Maggie’s backyard
towards the woods and heard Mama gasp.
“Shit,” said Chester. Then he set off, faster than a rabbit froma gun.

Willy
Mama I… are you there74

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It’s okay, Mama.
It’s me Willy.
I’m so tired, Mama.
I know what you done was to save me.
I know I done broke your heart, Mama.
I gots to go,
Can’t stay here. You know that.
Chester gon’ get around to killin me someday
Ain’t no doubt
gon kill me kill mekill me
I thought I could do somethin bout him.
But see
how see how my mind
it don’t work rightSee how I’m all broken.
Tiny
tiny
piecesTJ
We buried Cal in early fall. Reverend Johnson spoke quietly. Aunt
Maggie and Aunt Claire held onto Mama while she keened for her
baby.
The sun had lost its heat and the leaves were fallin across
Maggie’s yard when we all got back to her place. Jacob had gone onhome and I was scuffing my heels against the porch, not knowing what
the hell I could do to help fix Mama’s heart.
I sat on the steps and slowly read the letter Pa had sent. He
said he real was sorry he couldn’t come to bury Cal. That he was fixin
to write about what happened to men like Chester and Willy. He’dbeen working hard to find the truth about the war, and he was gonnatell folks what really happened. I hated him then. I knew nobody cared‘bout that goddamn war. He shoulda come. Shoulda come and said
goodbye to Cal.
I wandered into Aunt Maggie’s kitchen wipin the tears off ofmy cheeks. The counter was filled with home cooked pies and at least
four pots filled with stew we’d never eat. Folks from town had called75

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in and out all day long, and now the last of them had gone, it was justAunt Claire and Aunt Maggie, sittin at the table with Mama. She wasstarin at nothin but the wall, her hands folded in her lap, and she wasstill wearin her church hat.
“TJ. Sweetheart,” said Maggie, her voice soft as ice cream,“Come and sit down, I’ll bring you some water.”She stood up and pulled out her chair for me. She wanderedout back to get some ice and I sat down next to Mama. I put my handon hers and squeezed. She pulled it away and tucked it into the foldsof her black dress.
I looked to Aunt Claire who was scowlin at something behind
my back. She was angrier than a wasp in a jar.
“Jesus Christ, have some goddamn respect.”
I turned around to see Chester grabbin a beer from the fridge.
He was naked ‘cept for his vipers cap and boots.
Mama looked across at him frowning under her the shadow ofher hat.
“This is my home, Claire,” hissed Chester, drunk and full of
the devil, “I can do whatever the hell I want in my own goddamn
house.”
Maggie came from out back. She slammed the water onto thetable in front of me. The ice cubes rattled in the glass.
“Chester! Jesus H Christ! Put some clothes on. Go on now.
Git.”
Chester walked right on up to her and pushed his face into
hers. “I told you before, Mama. I like bein’ free.”He smirked at her then nodded in my direction,“Besides, TJ here been side-eyeing me all afternoon, trying to
get him a look at what a real man got, ain’t that right, TJ?” He winked
at me and my cheeks flamed like hot chillies.
Aunt Claire stood up and narrowed her eyes. She spoke real
quiet.
“You better take yourself on outta here, Chester, I mean it.”Chester swigged at his beer. His was swayin back an’ forth,slurrin and mumblin. He looked at Claire and narrowed his eyes.
“How’s Willy, Claire? Couldn’t make it out here, huh? Not
even for the kid.? Y’all give him my love next time you visit.”76Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 3“Get out!” screeched Aunt Maggie, rushing at Chester andshoving him hard. Chester stumbled. Aunt Maggie looked over atAunt Claire who was standing now, holdin on to that table like she
might faint. Chester wandered toward the door, chuckling to himself.
Maggie came towards Claire,“Claire, I’m sorry, I--”“He ain’t worth it, Maggie,” whispered Aunt Claire. She wascryin kinda hard now.
“He ain’t worth me an’ you--”“Oh hey, TJ!” Chester interrupted, he was leanin by the door
fixin me with those yellow eyes, “you come on over anytime now.”
I felt the air seep outta the room.
Chester winked again and cupped his hand around that corndog o’ his and started wavin it around, laughing like he’d just told theworld’s best joke.
Mama was out of her seat like a streak of lightenin, lettin out
a roar like the fiercest dragon I ever heard.
My glass fractured on the kitchen table. One half lay belly-up
against Aunt Maggie’s fruit bowl. Ice water dripped onto the shoes I’dshined up for church.
Aunt Claire grabbed at me then, tryin to pull me into her, it
seemed. I buried my face in her black dress, my heart poundin like ajackrabbit … ’cos it was too late. I’d seen it. Seen it all.
Aunt Maggie, leanin over a screamin Chester, his hands
pushed between his legs,
Mama, white with rage, the other half of that jagged glass inher shakin hand,… and blood. So much blood.

Willy
Help meneed to find me someways to getting wired up right again.
Dragon he done left me
Mama.

left me all alone in the water
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PopopopVolume 2, Issue 3bambambam

Take me to that fancy clinic you and grandaddy been savin for,Mama.
See if them suits can’t fix me.
Rats

comin

TJ
We ride our bikes over to the new arcade in Gainesville. Jacob is king,his high score flashing bright, at the very top of the list of names.
Sometimes, we buy cokes and candy and sit on the wall at theskatepark, watching older kids flip and spin. They bust some real coolmoves. We never go to the woods by aunt Maggie’s, we never talkabout toads and no one ever talks about why Chester left town.
Sometimes we see Richie at school, but he hangs with a new
crowd now. Older boys with greased hair and a likin for cars andswiggin booze.
These days Mama sits on the porch sipping iced tea, gazingout toward the county line as if she’s expecting someone, or somethin.
Ain’t no talking to her and ain’t no getting close. I watch TV alone.
The black suit I wore in the courthouse hangs in the wardrobe, next
to Cal’s good shirt and pants, his church clothes. Mama said I ain’t totouch a goddamn thing. Cal is gone and there ain’t no bringing him
back but sometimes, when Mama is sleeping, I lay on his bed and he isthere. I can smell him. I can feel him. I can hear his breath in my ear.
I tell him he’s the bravest brother anyone could have.
They said he would have been confused. A blow to the headthat hard, the swelling, it most likely would have made him woozy. He
still rode all the way out to the toad wood, though. There werescratches on his legs and back. They said he musta fallen so manytimes. But seems Cal was determined to get there.
They asked us over and over. Which one of us did it. But if you
don’t say, if you bite your lip real hard to stop the words spinnin out,
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em take Richie too. So, we stuck tight and sweated it out in those blacksuits with the bible burning our palms. I know I’m going to hell.
Probably Jacob and Richie too. I see it in Mama’s eyes, every day. The
way her mouth slams tight when I try to talk to her, the way Aunt
Maggie and Aunt Claire only look at me side on.
But Cal? He’s some place good. Some place real sweet, where
Mama will go too, to stroke his hair and sing her songs. Just as soon
as it’s her time.
They said when Cal licked the toad, he would have taken in somuch of that poison as to cause him to hallucinate. When Jacob
explained to me what that meant, I was real happy. I like to think Cal
did see rainbows when he took his last breath, in that cold wet ditch,covered in those mean-mouthed cane toads. I like to think he heard
their strange, hypnotic song, lulling him to sleep, soothing the pain in
his head, from Richie’s blow. I like to think he was surrounded bycolors and music and felt so warm inside, like it was the best goddamn
dream he ever had.
I sure do like to think that, cos, in the end, Richie was rightabout Cal all along . . . . He was just a baby.

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Still Life with Poppies
Chukwuma “Chuks” Ndulue
Trees are more vicious
in their lean, the whinnies
of road dogs, more menacing.
You offered a swollen hand,on a corn moon night andthe night turned in on itself.
Summer is gone now.
No more beach front
swilling, or casual palmistry.
The forecast is cloud-cover,dry embraces, looming hours,
square shouldered shaking.
We count telephone poles,
plan discount pyres, talk of life
under a skimmed layer of creosote.

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Five Major Ideas with Flat Design
Susan Landgraf
1. Equal Surfaces
Skin, sermons, songs.
Ideas lined like trees.
Watch for birds and the next
full-color catalogue to come.
2. Buddhist Space
Everything is here.
Eggs and the wombs that hold them.
Eggs and snakes to eat them.
The mouths of bullhorns and trumpets.
Pockets with keys and coins
and their owners whose mouths
choose joy or fuck.
3. Constructed, measuring space
Rulers and lines with scales
and mathematics. Tools of the creatorlooking inside the void. There angles,
there the idea of door in a context
of walls and rafters where a woman’s breath
can steam the windows.
4. Light
Cataclysms – leaves burnished, griefbrought out and laid to dry. Peachon the sill. Shadows struck dumb.

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5. ExpressionisticallyTime on fire.
Space an iceberg, double-minded,
sequoias the same and mountains.
Space shouts out dimensions
through the telescope,
an invented eye.
Footnotes:
There is no equal surface.
A Buddhist Space holds air space.
Breath is always in a context.
Headstones throw shadows.
You can’t breathe fire.

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In These Uncertain Times / Alice Dillon$100 for 100 Words or Art 2020 Winner83

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Willow Widow
Karen Walker$100 for 100 Words or Art 2020 Winner
A willow grew unbidden in my backyard, flattering me with shade.
But the roots that crept under the fence proved insatiable. The
tree’s slender silver leaves sympathized, agreeing that virgin soil anda fresh spring should have been enough, and pointed which way thewind now blew. A conspiracy of branches, each one as thick as a man,soon blocked my view.
I cut the willow down when green shoots—curly-headed likemy little one—appeared all over the neighborhood. Until I findanother tree (this time choosing wisely at the garden center), baby andI will plant flowers around Daddy’s stump.

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Time a Grand and Final Judge, Grow Bravely in Love /Church Goin Mule
$100 for 100 Words or Art 2020 Runner-up

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Guernica
S.T. Brant“Staring” 1
Staring at Picasso’s Guernica, Wondering What Turns Life to Art
The bull’s a bull, the horse a horse. I’m dumbfounded at the locking ofideas into things. Break the things apart. Find the stable, pull out thebolt, Yeats says. What’s fascinating will rise from the shapes of freed
ideas. The Galateas of the mind, through the marriage of their will,
incarnate these shapes. Guernica’s a place—also an idea that took ashape: intellect in form. Guernica is not a canvas. A place: not a place
upon a canvas, not shaped to match the canvas shape, but that canvas
is a canvas named Guernica. We must keep these separate.

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Tilting Towards Self-Annihilation / George L Stein
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RescueCharlotte Wyatt
Do I miss the burnt-sugar smell of the red-tail’s meal? Those pinkintestines tossed like streamers from white rat pelts splayed across theground? People who know me now cannot believe I scraped sundried
entrails from concrete. “You worked in a shelter?” they ask, andimagine what? Gratitude? Affection? That bird was broken-winged,
miserable and afraid. So was I, because he could not confirm any
happiness in the life we forced upon him. Would memories of flightoffer solace or suffering? It’s been years; he must be gone. I still thinkof him. I still don’t know the answer.

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Keep Those Hard Times Away / Benjamin Malay

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Red
Jacqueline Schaalje
Through the window where I sleep
Mars is a tab.
My mind has puzzled over otherthings since.
I thinkof a boyfriend, long
ago, shoving in my blank.
I couldn’t tell (you) whether
he and what we did thenwas something lost or stained.
When his red cabbage headbumped away in goodbye,
I turned up
the car window, sealed
the edges, and zippedon the freeway. He still looks
for me online. Still cross?
He wants his fluffy
bunny and I’m still hankering
after his cabbage hands.

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Resident Light / Louis Staeble
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No Rest for the Weary / Craig Anderson

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Contributors
Craig Anderson is an award-winning artist whose work is represented byprivate and corporate collections nationwide. He is a signature member of the
San Diego Watercolor Society and has served as a juror in a number of art
exhibitions, and is in demand for live demonstrations and workshops. He
works exclusively in transparent watercolor. Craig believes that art is atimeless expression of the beauty that surrounds us: a fossil of some piece ofreal life that existed in time and space, a real, living, breathing thing.
ST Brant is a teacher from Las Vegas. Publication credits include Door is aJar, Santa Clara Review, New South, Green Mountains Review, Another Chicago
Magazine, La Piccioletta Barca, Cathexis Northwest Press, and a few others. You
can find them on Twitter @terriblebinth or Instagram @shanelemagne.
Mary Byrne is the author of the chapbook A Parallel Life (Kore Press) andthe short story collection Plugging the Causal Breach (Regal House, 2019). Hershort fiction has been published, broadcast and anthologized widely. She wasborn in Ireland and lives in France. https://twitter.com/BrigitteLOignon
www.marybyrnewriter.com
Church Goin Mule is a southern outsider artist. You can find their work
online at churchgoinmule.com, and on instagram @churchgoinmule.
Alice Dillon is a fiber artist from Worcester, Massachusetts. Her roots infiber art trace back to receiving a sewing machine as a gift in middle school.
Alice began actively identifying as an artist in college when she taught herself
how to embroider. Her works range from highly detailed to cleanly linear.
Alice has recently become interested in repeated linear imagery, which bringsa modern androgyny to a classically feminine medium. Alice is a graduate of
Clark University. She is one of ArtsWorcester’s 2020 Material Needs Grant
Recipients, and is utilizing the grant to create life-sized, full-bodyembroidered portraits to be exhibited in 2021.
An LGBTQIA+ multi-genre artist living in Tucson, Arizona, Valyntina
Grenier’s work has previously appeared in Sunspot, Gaze, High Shelf Press,
Lana Turner, JuxtaProse, and Bat City Review. Her tête-bêche chapbook Fever
Dream / Take Heart was published by Cathexis Northwest Press, January
2020. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier
T.B. Grennan was born in Burlington, Vermont, and currently lives inSunset Park, Brooklyn. He received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the
University of Virginia and his fiction has been published in Brokelyn, Digital
Americana, White Stag Journal, The Seventh Wave, and Construction Literary
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Magazine, as well as Spaces We Have Known, an anthology of LGBT+ fiction.
His nonfiction has appeared in TIMBER and the Indiana Review.
Kathy Hoyle writes short stories and flash fiction with bite. She holds a BA
(hons) and an MA in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in a variety ofliterary magazines including Spelk, Ellipsis Zine, Lunate, Virtualzine andCabinet of Heed. She has been both long and shortlisted in many competitions
such as The Exeter, The FISH memoir prize, and the Ellipsis Zine Flash
Collection Prize. She is powered by tea and biscuits.
Susan Landgraf has been awarded a $50,000 Poets Laureate grant from theAcademy of American Poets. Two Sylvias Press published The Inspired Poetin 2019. More than 400 poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore,
Margie, Nimrod, and others. Books include What We Bury Changes the Groundand Other Voices. She is Poet Laureate of Auburn, Washington.
Samantha Madway is working on a collection of interlinked poems and flash
fiction. She loves her dogs, Charlie, Parker, and Davey, more than anythingelse in the universe. Though technophobic, she attempts to be brave by
having an Instagram @sometimesnight. If the profile were a plant, it
would’ve died long ago. Her writing has appeared in Linden Ave, High Shelf,
Sky Island Journal, Aurora, mutiny!, Clementine Unbound, SLAB, and elsewhere.
Benjamin Malay works in a variety of mediums to create deeply personal
images of people and places, embracing imperfect memory and fleeting life.
Influenced by patterns of the natural world, he is most inspired by the
spontaneous use of available materials. He is the sole proprietor of a fine art
framing business in Seattle, Washington.
Charlene Stegman Moskal is a teaching artist with The Alzheimer’s Poetry
Project under the auspices of the Poetry Promise Organization of Las Vegas.
She is a visual artist, a performer, a voice for NPR’s Theme and Variations aswell as a writer. She has been published in numerous anthologies, magazines,
and ezines, most recently in Southwestern American Literature, The Nervous
Ghost, Sky Island Journal, Sandstone & Silver; an Anthology of Nevada Poets andOther Worldly Women. Her second chapbook, One Bare Foot is published byZeitgeist Press.
Chukwuma “Chuks” Ndulue is a writer/teacher and author of the chapbook
Boys Quarter (Ugly Duckling Presse). His work has appeared in BOAAT,
Muse/A Journal, Tinderbox, PANK, Brooklyn Poets and other publications.
Michele E. Reisinger’s fiction has been featured in Light and Dark Magazine,
Prometheus Dreaming, 34th Parallel, The Mighty Line, and TulipTree
Publishing’s 2019 anthology Stories That Need to be Told. She studied English
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and Political Science at Pennsylvania State University and received an MA in
English Literature from the University of Delaware. She lives near
Philadelphia with her family.
Jacqueline Schaalje has published stories and poetry in the Massachusetts
Review, Talking Writing, Frontier Poetry, Grist, among others. Her stories were
finalists for the Epiphany Prize and in the New Guard Competition. She hasreceived support and/or scholarships from the Southampton Writers
Conference and International Women’s Writing Guild, and One Story andLive Canon workshops. She joined the Tupelo Press 30/30 project. She
earned her MA in English from the University of Amsterdam.
Louis Staeble, fine arts photographer and poet, lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.
His photographs have appeared in Agave, Blinders Journal, Blue Hour, Conclave
Journal, Elsewhere Magazine, GFT Magazine, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Four
Ties Literary Review, Inklette Magazine, Light: A Journal of Photography,
Literary Juice, Paper Tape Magazine, Qwerty, Revolution John, Rose Red Review,
Sonder Review, South 85, Tishman Review and Your Impossible Voice. His work
has been shown in The Black Swamp Arts Festival 2016, 2017 and 2018 aspart of the Wood County Invitational. Web page: staeblestudioa.weebly.com
Instagram@louiestaeble.
George L Stein is a writer and photographer in the New Jersey/New York
metropolitan area with interest in monochrome, film and digital photography,
urban and rural decay, architectural, street, and more generally, art
photography and digital manipulation. His work has been published in
Midwest Gothic, NUNUM, Montana Mouthful, Out/Cast, The Fredericksburg
Literary and Art Review, and DarkSide Magazine.
Marjorie Tesser’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Anomaly, Drunken
Boat, Exoplanet, SWWIM Everyday, and others. She coedited three
anthologies, most recently Travellin’ Mama (Demeter Press, 2019), and is
editor in chief of Mom Egg Review. She has an MFA (fiction) from Sarah
Lawrence College, where she won the 2019 John B. Santoiani Prize fromAcademy of American Poets.
Karen Walker writes short fiction and flash in Ontario Canada. Her work
has appeared or is forthcoming in online magazines and anthologies including
Spillwords, Reflex Fiction, The Brasilia Review, Commuterlit, and Blank Spaces.
People say Karen is fun and frustrating, and her chicken lasagna is pretty
good.
Charlotte Wyatt is a recent graduate from the University of Houston’s MFA
program, where she was an Inprint Fellow and a recipient of the Inprint95

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Donald Barthelme Prize for Fiction. Her fiction may be found in Joyland, andher interviews of other authors are in Gulf Coast and Electric Literature.

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Writing a New World
Sunspot Literary Journal believes in the power of the written word. Fiction,
nonfiction, poetry and art can speak truth to power with the power inherent
in all human beings. Our mission is to amplify every voice.
Four digital quarterly editions are produced per year along with one
print volume. At times, Sunspot will produce special editions. These might bedigital only, print only, or both. All will be filled with the same quality
content being created by today’s unique voices.

Support Sunspot Lit
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Sunspot Lit is funded entirely through private means. Every donation, evenones as small as a dollar, makes a difference.
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