Sunspot Literary Journal
Volume 2 Issue #1 © 2020 Sun Dogs Creations

In Lovely Blueness / Anton Franz Hoeger

Changing the World
Through Words and Art

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Table of Contents
In Avalon We Continue / Haolun Xu / 1
Holidaze / D Fulford / 2
They Say / D Fulford / 4
The Swimmers / Anton Franz Hoeger / 5
Is This the Ritz? / Doley Henderson / 6
After the Journey / Esther Sadoff / 15
Paradises / Lara Chapman / 16
The Point Is / Candice Kelsey / 17
Shilo Inn / Tessa Ekstrom / 18
Untitled Zone Plate Photo 1 / Robert Oehl / 19
Untitled Zone Plate Photo 2 / Robert Oehl / 20
In Defense of My Stories / Roeethyll Lunn / 21
Self-Portrait / Josie Del Castillo / 23
Mom / Josie Del Castillo / 24
The Other Margot at the End of the World / Zach Sheneman/ 25
Bright Lights Big City / J. Ray Paradiso / 42
Elected and Necessary / Valyntina Grenier / 43
Out to See / Valyntina Grenier / 45
Must Love Bernie / Kimberly Diaz / 46
If I Were a Fish / Walter Weinschenk / 48
Sea Vision Part 1 / Ernst Perdreil / 49
Sea Vision Part 2 / Ernst Perdreil / 50
Ladybug Eclipse / Ernst Perdreil / 51

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Rumble / Pasquale Trozzolo / 52
Forever Dream / Ping Wang / 53
The Eternal Shine Room / Ping Wang / 53
The Demolition / Lenora Steele / 54
HC1 / Alan Lyons / 57
Slices of Life / Susan Bloch / 58
Incomplete / Nam Nguyen / 65
Tonight I Can Write / Diana Raab / 66
Afterimage Man / Silas Plum / 67
The First Giant / Silas Plum / 68
Leaving the Farm / Elizabeth Gauffreau / 69
IN 204 photo / Nina Wilson / 94
A Glimpse / Debbie Robson / 95
Chebyshev Spectral Overcast / Ryota Matsumoto / 96
Recursive Topography of Uncertainty / Ryota Matsumoto / 97
Review of Idiot Wind: A Memoir / Neal Lipschutz / 98
Face to Face 1 / Jack Bordnick / 100
Face to Face 2 / Jack Bordnick / 101
Contributors / 102
Cover: In Lovely Blueness / Anton Franz Hoeger

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

In Avalon We Continue
Haolun Xu
No, I don’t think I’m ready yet,even with my body refusing to regenerate stating that this isa warning, a lamp lit against the cramped spaces of possibility,
Spring filled the air with the sound of infants. I forgot the
shrillness, their bicuspid throats still those of a bicuspid. I think they
are most realistically our parallel to dinosaurs. Blameless, pure, unable
to grow hair.
I haven’t forgotten the season of pollen, and they haven’t
forgiven me,
the pressure of both light and degeneracy tumbling into thesmallest crevices. I can find the seedlings underneath my fingernails.
I cannot exclude myself from the ceremony of earth.
But I can try. I shower five minutes later than the rest of myfamily. I sleep three hours more than the rest of my friends(Only I can give myself the nickname Farmland, but just fortoday) I reflect on the decorum of the natural order. This is a newsocial rule, because I am not close to myself anymore, but I am formal.
At night, I peer out of my night-dark room, and into the blue
lights of the world. I take my fingers and replicate the pollen. I pretend
to weave honey to the dawn. When I wake up from this, I am legally
purified, by an invisibility I dreamed visited me the day before.

1Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Holidaze
D Fulford
We were never sans xmas quirks and messy like
Reverend Bob’s passive aggressive requests forroot beer tale-telling of mountain crags andspamming the night with German expletives
we just hoped he would never hug Mom again
ill-conceived boner package in tan polyester
all the pets snagged on Grandma’s oxygen lines
while she beckoned us claws sharpened to whispera pithy reminiscence or insult, coaxing smiles
or telling me she hated my hair choices, tattoos
sometimes Pop would show up for a few minutes
soused weepy, feeling in the way needy andMom, then, never sat down the entire long night
bustling in gravies, chopping, sipping Coronas
the expensive bourbon or cheesecakes Casey brought,
and you, without question, would be late soeveryone would have to wait too long drinking alittle too much snacking showing off for each other.
You’re gone, now, so it’s easy to keep on feigning
we’re all vexed your belated throws the evening
cadence into tailspin of memory and Mom sits too
much, Pop and Grandma died, Bob’s German now
2

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

tucked into mothball-painted thrift store suits, Casey
still brings cheesecake cooks the ham and even though I
quit drinking years ago I’ll raise up at 7:00 because
Mom sent your letter saying we’d think and drink
to you right now and instead of the dark place you
today live we all pretend you’re late, as ever, but
we know you’ll be there when you arrive.

3

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

They Say
D Fulford
They say that everyone who alights at life’s doorstep
will somehow influence it—this takes varied forms
depending on who you are and what you need fromthe moment and the other, too, who might blow indiscretely, supplicating or maybe they tiptoe acrossyour face in steel-toed stilettos of ardor and it will be
all you can do to tell them you need some time to think.
You, brother, never asked permission came screaming
into my life abreast your mellow twin and from the very
moment we met were akin but wildly dissimilar as
siblings habitually are, and though I did not enjoy theinborn knowledge of your distresses roiling internally
your own twinges I also never assumed you would be theone to knock everything down with a mere swipe of hand.

4Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

The Swimmer / Anton Franz Hoeger

5Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Is This the Ritz?
Doley Henderson
Viv always said I was never the same after the crash. It was snowing
like billy-o when we left the dinner party, we couldn’t see a damn thing
through the windshield. Wipers scraping back and forth, the oldstation wagon poking its way out onto the autoroute.
Big fat truck came out of nowhere, right at us. I sailed straight
through the windshield—no seatbelts of course, it was the ‘50s—andcame to, lying on the highway. Stockings in shreds but still had myshoes on so, thought I was fine. Jack was trapped under the steering
wheel. Hours later, there I sat in the ER, holding my head with twentythree stitches, while they rushed him to surgery. The great doctor
needed all their attention. I don’t know who I was supposed to be.
Now here I sit, parked with the old-and-sick-and-tired-andstupid, waiting for I don’t know what, the next bus, maybe. It’s called
Sunrise. Sunset, more like. The end of the road. I’ve been around theworld. There’s nowhere left. Jack’s gone, Viv’s gone, friends all gone.
No more martini lunches, just the odd splash of wine. I think it’sdealcoholized, no zizz. And they keep bringing new people to my table.
The other day, it was someone from Winnipeg. “You two will have somuch in common,” said Matron. I took one look at the polyester leisuresuit and got very busy buttering my roll. Winnipeg tried valiantly
anyway. “How long have you been a resident?” Bla-bla. It’s dullsville,
where’s the glamour?
Viv and I thought we were royals, handed to the wrong
parents at birth. Meant to be leading a much fancier life. Twins wewere, born twenty minutes apart. Spent our lives finishing each other’s
sentences. Had our own language, punished Mum for not returning us
to our proper family. Poured milk on her newly waxed floor, then flour
on her Oriental rug. Poor woman, couldn’t keep up, four kids in three
years, out there on the prairie, in a boxcar, while Father ran therailway. We were just as clever as the boys, older too but only girls,
so they got the degrees and we dabbled in art and music. That’s how
it was. None of this women’s lib business.
6Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Those smelly, noisy brothers, always busy with their little
science projects. We ignored them most of the time. One day, we foundthem burying the poor old cat behind the shed. Turns out, he’d been
hit by a car, so Bob crossed some wires, started up the Ford, andeuthanized him with the gas fumes. Then Tim practiced his dissection
and suturing skills. He was set on being a surgeon but Father insistedon engineering. They both married beneath them, in the end. Bob got
the butcher’s daughter pregnant, just by looking at her, apparently, sothat was him then, done like dinner. And Tim was snared by somedietician, who cooked his goose, I guess. Spent all that time measuringinstead of tasting. Couldn’t, for the life of her, produce a proper mealor kids. Said it wasn’t her fault. Nonsense, it wasn’t Brother’s.
And poor old Viv had that nearsighted fellow all hot andbothered. He gave her a string of pearls and proposed. Mother put an
end to that—not an RC, it wouldn’t do. Never had another serious
beau after that. Sad, really but then she had more time for my girls.
“You spoil them with those sloppy kisses,” I’d lob. “You mock themwith those arched eyebrows,” she’d return. Fifteen love, neither of us
ready to concede. So, we shared them, just like everything else. I gavethem life and color and she gave them love and cookies.
All those years, Viv did the running monologue, yackety-yack,life of the party, while I sprinkled the conversation with bon mots.
Madly gay over cigarettes and cocktails. Players, in the blue tins. The
girls used the empty ones for crayons. Crown Royal, in purple velvet
sacks, with gold string. Made tidy ballet-slipper bags. The otherdancers frowned behind their patent leather. Not their fault, theirmothers had no imagination or style.
Formal ball season, those were the days. I was a vision incerise satin, off-the-shoulder, cap sleeves, evening gloves, kid leather
with pearl buttons. I’d scan the horizon for the smoothest dance
partner. Jack had that boyish charm but two left feet, so that was a
total loss. He was busy anyway, fending off the women who slid by,batting their eyelashes and wiggling their derrieres. I’d raise mycigarette for a light or wave my glass for another rye-and-water andsee which handsome fellow would spring forward. The PM swept into
St. Andrew’s one year and asked me to waltz. Told him my card wasfull and he laughed. A lot shorter than I thought he’d be but quite light7

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

on his feet. Devilish smile under that little Nero haircut. Smoked
Gauloises.
Paris was our theme for the oyster party one year. I painted a
Moulin Rouge mural. Everyone wore berets and the latest French
styles. I was a broken-down ballet dancer in a black leotard and tulle
illusion, Jack a bartender with fake moustache. Viv came as an artist’s
model, in a fur coat and bare legs. The girls sneaked downstairs, luredby the laughter and tinkling glasses, hid under the coats in the front
hall. Their little secret, they thought. We pretended not to notice, thenlater Jack found them asleep and carried them back to bed.
Don’t be shy, I’d say to the girls, always make a statement.
With AY and the Group of Seven, we’d talk about having an eye,knowing when to add just a touch of color. Splash of orange in a sea ofgreen, like a dash of curry on a bed of peas. “Stop before it’s too late,”
I’d say to Mum, as she overworked her sad, little landscapes of Lake
Winnipeg. Her only pleasure I guess, after years of nursing the Cree,
finally saying yes to Father, and raising her own little hellions. We
were cute though.
My eldest brought me this hideous blanket the other day. I
loved the soft fleece but hated the shade, so I said, “Whateverpossessed you?” She was all hurt. “But you loved that orange pillow at
home. It’s the same.” “A hint of color, dear, don’t overdo it.” She quietly
tucked it under the green one at the end of the bed, and slipped backout the door. She’s gone all funny, living with that old coot. What was
she thinking, shacking up with someone her father’s age? He can becharming and funny, then suddenly, he’s all depressed and angry. It
was the war. PTS they call it. XYZ, for all I know. Wasting her life,
could have been anything she wanted, I told her. She replied, “I am
who I want.” Like a Dorothy Parker line but not as clever. A wilting
lily, that one. What’s the matter with those girls anyway? Not a shredof me in any of them. One’s with Methuselah, the next with another
woman, and the last with no one at all, just her kids. Not a proper
marriage among them.
I had strings of suitors, U of T and McGill, busy playing thefield but Jack won me over, with his big grin and rugged profile. I
slaved over his oil portrait in intern whites. Quite a good one, actually.
Mum loved watching him gobble up her pies. His own maman was a8Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

terrible cook and a hypochondriac but his papa was pleasant enough,a GP. It was wartime, so a simple wedding, then off to Quebec City,
waiting for the call. Suddenly, there I was, pregnant and alone, himself
shipped overseas.
We studied the newspapers for months and months, found the
odd photo: trim nurses with wounded servicemen, everyone smilingbravely. How desperately far away it all seemed, as I spooned morepablum into Baby. Years later, I’d tell the girls, if they were everworried, I’d say, “Stop your nonsense, it’s not life or death, put on somelipstick, and press on regardless.” People don’t know how to cope
anymore. No sense of perspective.
Jack was a medical officer, safe in England, I thought. Turns
out, he was up to his waist in the Atlantic on D-Day, flagging downtransport for the wounded on Juno Beach. Had to leave the rows ofdead soldiers on the sand where they’d been mown down, fresh off theships. Lost his tin hat and his LST, what with the tides and wind andchaos. Spent days crossing the channel back and forth, collecting therest of the wounded. Seems to me, that’s how he spent his life, taking
care of other people’s families, while I held the fort, easing the girls’
pains with Midol and crushed ice. “The shoemaker’s children,” I’d say
to no one in particular. His patients loved him, especially the little oldladies. A million friends all over the world. Never missed a reunion,
medical, fraternity or D-Day. Chatted up the Queen Mum over there
one year. Lovely smile, he said. Well of course I was jealous. The roadnot taken, so sure I was meant to be royal.
Jack’s bedtime story about LST-541 crossing the English
Channel, “up-and-down and up-and-down” was the girls’ favorite. He
would grab the mattress and roll it from side to side. They’d squeal indelight, afraid but excited, with no idea what he was really talking
about. It sounded fun, a big adventure, not the living hell it must havebeen. His friend Bud was in The Great Escape camp. Wasn’t chosen totunnel in the end, but they consulted him on the screenplay.
The drama queen, my middle one, arrived for my birthday,alone, thank God. The staff sailed in with a big, fat, gooey cake. WhenI looked suspicious, she announced to the room that I was ninety-six.
Well, I had to shush her that fast, before anyone turned up a hearing
aid. “One never reveals one’s age, my dear.”9Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

No manners. My pearls of wisdom, fallen on deaf ears, all those
years. Must be that American’s influence, the so-called “wife,” sheknows that grates on my nerves. No sense of restraint, those people,
living their lives out loud. In my day, they were discreet. That hair!
Looks like a mistake, shaven down the sides and floppy in the middle.
“What’s that supposed to be?” I asked her one day. She snapped rightback, “At least I don’t need a man to define myself.” Viv said her sharp
tongue was my fault. “You never picked her up when she cried.”“Nonsense,” I’d say. “Crying develops the lungs.”
That all-girls high school maybe was a mistake. We thought
it was the solution after that business with the math teacher when she
was twelve. Grabbed her bottom, she said, so I raced down to theschool. He denied it, of course. They say he was in the Navy. All thosemen in tight quarters. She did have an active imagination, though.
Always so physical. Couldn’t sit still for five minutes, constant motion
from day one. Little legs, going like sixty on her tricycle, racing down
the sidewalk. When she was really on my nerves, jiggling and rattling,
I’d tell her to run around the block a few times. Jack would take her tothe park and they’d smack a few softballs across the field or slap somepucks around the rink. Never had any trouble with the other two.
Happy as Larry, they were parked at the kitchen table, squishing little
sculptures from flour-and-water paste, with a dash of food coloring.
When I looked up, the inmates were all singing “Happy
Birthday.” A sea of white-haired widows, hardly a man in sight. We
outlive them, of course. The one at the next table suddenly lurched tohis feet, saluted me, then slid back down, muttering. Poor old soul, in
his own little world, not a single visitor. They tried pet therapy onhim, a black Labrador. Well, he shed and panted and drooled. Sniffedaround my lap too, until I shooed him away. Revolting thing.
Jack could be a little unglued too, from time to time. He’d get
all sad and serious when anything was broken or needed fixing. Neatand tidy to a fault, ever the dedicated surgeon in his OR. One day, I
found him quietly sticking together chips from an old teacup. “Oh, takea small loss, why don’t you?” I said. “But it was Mother’s,” he moaned.
“Part of the Crown Derby.” “Well, its little gold swirls don’t line up
anymore,” I zinged and thought to myself, I’d be happy if the rest of
the set broke, too.
10

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Suppose I was hard on him but someone had to be practical.
Too close to his mother, no siblings to share the load. She let me know
I was never good enough for her one-and-only. A real piece of work,
she was. Drifted around, all Sarah Bernhardt, hand to forehead, nofocus. At least I did volunteer work. Years of running the Red Feather
campaign and the women’s auxiliary at two hospitals. In charge of theChristmas parties, up to my eyes in glitter and glue. Got high on thefumes, just like those hippies, I suppose, felt all queer. The Age ofAquarius, whatever that was. One day, I said to the girls, “I’d like totry some of those funny cigarettes, that marijuana stuff. Just to see
what would happen.” They looked alarmed and disappeared into thewoodwork.
Mahogany it was. “Just sell the damn thing,” I waved over atJack’s pride and joy, the Chris-Craft that never worked. He shook hishead, hands at ten and two, turning the steering wheel back and forth,and grinned up at me. “She’s a beauty, sleek and smooth, rides thewaves so proudly. Just needs the right touch. Reminds me of you.”
Then he patted the red leather seat beside him and his big hazel eyes
went all moony. There I was, left with a mouth full of teeth. It took
me back, I must say. Quebec City, the final farewell, after so many false
starts. Same sad eyes but the brave smile that said, “this is it.” Donned
his officer’s hat, straightened his tie and jacket, and stepped out into
the war.
Loved his boats the way he loved his girls. Didn’t mind that I
couldn’t produce a boy, just three girls, after six attempts. When the
son-and-heir died, seven months in utero, I was lying in a Catholic
hospital bed, on Christmas Eve. Crosses on the walls, everyone
tiptoeing, clutching their rosaries, praying to Saint this-and-that. I
thought I’d never make it. Then, in marched Jack’s best man, the sixfoot heart surgeon, straight across the room, just like that.
He put his foot up on the windowsill and stared out at thesnow, twinkling in the moonlight. “Oh, Holy Night,” indeed. “Poorlittle bugger never had a chance. But you’ve got three healthy girls.
That’s more than most.” He turned, and patted my blanket on the way
out. Well, that was all the bedside manner I needed. Pulled myself
together and never looked back. Besides, most sons of doctors never11

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

amount to much. He might have been an artist, though, and that would
have been something.
We could have painted together at the lake. It was Grand
Hotel most of the time down there. Never a dull moment. Friends
would come from the city for the weekend. Everyone dressed in old
plaid shirts, let themselves go. Steaks on the barbeque, lots of cleverdrinks. Late one night, there was a huge racket in the hallway. The
girls jumped out of bed. “It’s all right,” I called, “It’s just Mr. Pricefalling down the stairs. Probably needed the bathroom and turned left
instead of right.” His wife hauled him back into bed and silence reigned
once again. Next day, there he was, sleeping it off in the hammock, never
the worse for wear. His avoir du poids must have cushioned the blow.
Well, those sailing races were something. Dotty, old Leslie
was the Commodore, not quite up to Tuesday but he got the job done.
We’d tow the Enterprise down the lake at half speed, the girls all
nervous in the back seat. Who would win this week? That handsome
fellow in the Y Flyer or one of the Brody family, as usual. The
daughter was pretty swift at the helm. Everyone jockeying for positionat the start. My hands would be all stiff and cramped, clutching the
sheet. Those were the days before jam cleats. Jack would jibe neatly,
just as the cannon fired and we’d slide out, ahead of the fleet. Our finest
hour, his grin ear to ear, as we flew along the course, shrouds singing
in the wind. “Always keep them guessing,” he’d laugh, his tanned faceand crisp, white collar profiled against the blue sail.
Nobody dresses anymore. The girls flew me to Toronto thattime for Swan Lake, Karen Kain’s farewell. It was gorgeous. There wewere, front-row-center, tears streaming down, flinging roses onto thestage. I could have died right then, it was heaven. But we stumbled out
into the lobby and the scruffiest people were standing around. Armyboots and crinolines, jeans with holes, tacky little outfits. What’s
happened to a sense of occasion, basic black and a string of pearls? It’s
all gone downhill.
Viv would fit right in, with her funny little ankle socks andrubber soles. Lost her marbles, most of them, crazy as a loon, after thatcyclist knocked her down. It was her own fault, jaywalking like that.
Couldn’t get her to smarten up. She gained all that weight, eatingnothing but ketchup. They gave her those psych tests, asked her to12Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

draw a clock. So, she drew a fancy Swiss one, said that was her flying
over the cuckoo’s nest. Touche! I tried to get her interested in walking
again but she said she didn’t like the wind in her ears. Made her
nervous. “Well, you’re not going to fly away,” I told her, “besides, I’ve
given away your broomstick.” She looked at me all queer. Finally, she
had her own head injury.
Well, my youngest came to see me, with this cloudy looking
drink. I took one sip and almost gagged. “It’s a London Fog, Mum,”she said, “Earl Grey, like the olden days, in Nana’s good cups.
Remember, after school?” She’s always so cheerful, that one, despite
the sad divorce, a real Pollyanna. Everything’s a nursery rhyme. And
that hugging business with her kids, far too clingy. Surprised she could
tear herself away from them long enough to visit. “Nonsense,” I
clucked, “milk and sugar ruin it.” “I love you too, Mum.” She smiledand squeezed my hand. “Not so hard, dear. Brittle bones.” I’m forced
to remind her that I’m not one of her workout pals. Looks like a
racehorse, all sinewy and strained. “What happened to that nice round
face?” I asked. “I finally lost my baby fat,” she laughed.
I wasn’t always so frail. All those years skiing in Switzerland.
Then, suddenly, my bindings wouldn’t release and I was sliding down
the Jungfrau. They hauled me to the hotel in a toboggan, wrapped likea mummy, in some rough old canvas, couldn’t understand a word theysaid, all in Schweizerdeutsch. Well, Chevrolet coupé was all I could
manage. A shot of cortisone and back in the game, we used to say.
Thank God, it finally kicked in when they taped my ankles. Jackinsisted we fly home for x-rays and casting but I didn’t want to ruin
the party. Besides, every night, I was carried into the bar, in the armsof a big, strong lederhosen. Swiss fondue indeed. Best time of my life.
Feet were never the same but who needs rotation? It’s forward motionthat counts.
Always walk into a store as if you owned it, I’d tell the girls.
Holt’s is the worst. Those little salesclerks, with their nothing salaries,
sneering at me, in my Aquascutum and Liberty scarf. Just because I’m
not wearing my mink today. I have a purse full of credit cards. can taketaxis everywhere, and stay in a hotel, if I want, any night of the week.
It’s all those years travelling the world, one has a certain savoir-faire.
Ne Plus Ultra—that was Jack’s beloved whiskey—from the13

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Highlands. Humble beginnings, though, he’d remind me. Born in asmall town, buried in a simple pine box. “No one is any better thananyone else,” he’d say, “It’s not right to put on airs.”
Even so, you must always show you’re a lady. What’s this
dropping into a chair that you girls do? Letting go, as if you were cut
off at the knees. Would it kill you to ease yourself down gracefully?
You may well laugh but one day, you’ll remember, especially with girlsof your own. Let’s see if you can do better. Don’t tell them how
gorgeous and smart they are. You don’t want them all full ofthemselves.
They say I’m seventy-eight pounds. That doesn’t sound right.
I was always one hundred twelve and five-foot-two. What do theymean four-foot-eight? Maybe it’s metric. I just don’t seem to have theenergy for meals. But I wouldn’t say no to a dry martini. Tanquerayof course or Bombay Sapphire. Is this the Ritz? Well then, yes, very
dry. Can you just pull up the blanket a bit? Not that awful orange one,the green. Where are those girls when I need them? Never visit, neverphone, never write. They grow up and have their own kids and thenthey’re no good to you anymore. That’s it, right up over my ears.
Hmmm. Yes, with a twist, on the rocks, lots of rocks.

14Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

After the Journey
Esther Sadoff
My hands are two pilgrims
praying and everything
becomes an oily skin of water.
When push comes to shove,
everything collapses into water.
Forgive my bones as I press
them back into the ground.
Forgive the ridge of my spine
floating in the side of a tree
downing sheets of rain.
The words in my head will
hum like bees without me,tiny orbs of water tucked
behind their eyes.
This ship will sail on,
its captain crashing about
in the waves and neverknowing the journey is done.
Some days, a fleet of boats
will congregate like fishin a column of light,
looking for a westerly wind,
and taking off again.
My smile, like the sun,will hang from an
unbreakable string.

15

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Paradises / Lara Chapman
16

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

The Point Is
Candice Kelsey
for Michelle McNamara
I sleep witha knife under my pillow
fingers gripped on the camel bone handle
ready for anything
I sleep with that knife
perhaps you should have one
under your pillow too
we could be weird and knifey together
we could cringe when the housekeeper finds it
we could both feel safe finallyfighting each other’s demonsprotecting each other’s bodies
burrowing each other’s fears
like termites in the wooden beams
like mice beneath the floorboards
like cancer in the marrow
I know you probably won’t but
still under my pillow sleeps a knife
that can speak for both of us—
Shine a light in my face at 3:00 am
Golden State Mother Fucker or some copycat killer
and you’ll bleed the rageof a thousand sleepless women17

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Shilo Inn
Tessa Ekstrom
If his breath didn’t smell so bad
I could disappear into this moment
Turn this bed into the ocean
Try to drown in it.
I could get lost in the small parts of my mind
Where old memories reside
Or use the sharp edges of the blinds
To carve forgiveness down my spine.
Put my trust in a glass jar
Watch flowers and bees and
The secret life of your daughter
Rot beneath my feet,
Paint pictures with my menstrual blood and other fluids.
But his breath reeks with a liar
That begs me to build bonfires in his skull
A hymn so deep, deeper than my hymen knows
And I am wrung out by the fire,
A heat with the desire to determine
The roots of entire weeks of my life.
But the burn can only hold so many shots
Of whiskey before a quiet and retrospective
Fight or flight leaves nothing but the wish
That I was anywhere but at this Shilo Inn.

18

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Untitled Zone Plate Photograph 1 / Robert Oehl

19

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Untitled Zone Plate Photograph 2 / Robert Oehl

20

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

In Defense of My Stories
Roeethyll Lunn
Because of some of my works’ subject matter and strong adultlanguage, at first, I was reluctant to even submit some of my writings.
I do not readily desire to “cuss” or include “nasty talk,” as my family
members say, in any of my work in order to attract attention to myself.
I fear that this would have repercussions that would not be favorable
to me. My desire is that my accounts will travel well beyond the realmof just a juicy or colorful story and that they will also capsulate a time,a people, a milieu and a cultural experience. I want to transgress thepetition that stood between the black and white races of people during
a time preceding that period which our federal government labeled as“Desegregation of the Southern Portion of the United States.” I want
to expose how days were spent and how lives were lived by a group ofpeople that was “Jim Crowed” into living in areas that weresequestered on the far end of towns and on the back sides of rural roads
in areas such as Grove Street, Black Street, The Bottom, Black Bottom,
Sugar Hill, The Hill and Shanty Town.
A story to a writer is like a Tithe. It is a gift from God. But it
is not for you alone. You are merely a steward. Therefore, you must
cough it up! Put it away from you! Get that hallowed thing out of yourhouse! If you ignore it or try to withhold it within you, it will curse
you and your life.
My redemptive force came when I thought of a big, red womanfrom Johnsonville, South Carolina, named Mabel (pronounced “May
Belle”) Melvin. She told me that as she was driving home from work
one day, she saw her husband riding a strange young girl in his car.
She tried to catch them, but he outran her. Mabel said that she went
home, got his pistol, and then drove straight to her husband’s bestfriend’s house. She placed the nose of the weapon to his friend’s temple,
cocked it and said, “Tell the story!—cause I know you know every
word.”
Sometimes I feel as if a gun, held by all of the “colored women”
who had to endure, is cocked to my temple and all of them are saying
to me, “Tell the story.”
21

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

They were the colored women who: baked biscuits and sweet
potatoes for their children when there was no meat; who fished allmorning in a pond that they had walked miles to get to, and thensometimes had to fry fatback and make grits to go with it when they
couldn’t get a bite; who went into woods, wet with dew, in the spring,to pick huckleberries to sell by the quart to rich white ladies who lived
in Southern small towns in houses that had sat for over a century on
well-kept lawns or to the other white people who were the only ones
selected to work in factories downtown; girls who gleaned field peasfrom between corn or cotton stalks in the fall because the crop “didn’t
do good” that year; the girl who cut her own umbilical cord when her
twins aborted because there was no money to go to a doctor andbecause there was no one else around to help; the woman who, for thesake of all of her other children, said nothing all afternoon to the otherfield hands that she worked with, because she’d left her kitchen during
noon hour (where she had been hurriedly preparing their meals) to go
through the house to look for the knife that she liked to cook with,
only to discover her husband, in his and her bed, molesting her oldest
daughter, who was not his.
So with the encouragement of those girls, Langston Hughes,
who left word to all aspiring black writers to write about the black
man “and don’t prettify it” in order to pacify a black or white readingaudience, essayist/columnist Roger Rosenblatt, who told me that I
was “a natural storyteller,” and Poet William “Kit” Hathaway, whogave me a letter of encouragement on one of my worst days atSouthampton College and told me to “try to have this story published”
because that particular writing, in his opinion, can be compared to thatof Zora Neal Hurston’s. I will tell my stories. I will tell them in thevoice of my youth and in the volume of my experiences.

22

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Self-Portrait / Josie Del Castillo
23

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Mom / Josie Del Castillo
24Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

The Other Margot at the End of the World
Zach Sheneman
On one particularly unbearable night in The Still, the other Margot
admitted that the only reason she got clean was because it’s impossible
to find smack in the multipocalypse. We burned rubbish in an adjacenttenement, tried our damnedest to keep warm as a frozen tempest
enveloped the streets. We shivered against the woolen fabric of theformer occupant’s Afghan. As the physics of the universe broke
down—as reality morphed into impossibility before our glassy eyes—heat evaporated immediately into coldness, the shivering lick ofwarmth dying but a kiss away from my chapped lips. Untold months
had passed since I’d felt anything more than cold; and yet, that samenight, the other Margot peeled away, removed Chad’s old UCLA
sweatshirt, let the chill grace her bare shoulders.
“You’re a fucking furnace,” she said. “What is biologicallywrong with you?”In the feeble firelight, I saw the needle burns for the first timerunning up both arms. I didn’t need to see the ones I knew ran down
her legs to etch them with electric clarity in my mind. She spied me
gawking, instinctively scratched the insides of her elbows. She groundher teeth, glared into our makeshift hearth, sniffed so hard the loneremaining stud threatened to dislodge from her flared nostril. She
never took her hand from her arms.
I didn’t know what to say. I settled on, “I’m pretty sure I
ruptured my hymen when I was barrel racing at the Madison County
Fair.” It was an equivalent revelation in my mind. The other Margot
stayed silent, lost in thought as she stared into the embers. I worriedover how to bring her back from the wound I’d opened, but she
wrapped back into the blanket, clasped my arm, curled into me.
“When you’re dying long enough,” she finally said against thecrackling of the flames, “the strangest things start feeling like living.”
I didn’t know what she meant and I didn’t pretend like I did.
Later that night, she spoke about her addiction for the firsttime. She’d never had any illusions about what she was doing to herself
Before. She’d started with the intention of never stopping. She thought25

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

she’d die high and only came up short when every drug dealer in theentire city had succumbed to the Great Quake, the tsunamis, theIlluminati bombings, the Second Coming of the Multitudinous
Christs. She thought she’d die, too, sweating out poison in her
apartment all alone. She never explained why. I suppose she didn’t
have to. There was a darkness there, just beneath her punctured skin,slithering around her organs like a tapeworm. She was unnaturally
experienced with endings. She knew more about death than I everunderstood about life.
My mom was the first person I actually knew that became a victim of
the multipocalypse. She didn’t die; at least, not in the conventional
sense. She was in the middle of a lesson on valence electrons—on
volatile elements and inert gases and everything in between—when
she, the janitor, and two dozen students disappeared in anticlimactic
silence from their respective outfits. I was halfway through a shift at
Kozlowski’s Collections when my paternal grandma finally overcame
the overburdened communications satellites. “Your mother has been
Raptured,” she said, an absolute accusation. She was, like my dad had
been before he died, devoutly Christian Reformed, and had always
viewed my mom’s atheism as a calculated affront on the entire
Christian religion. I pulled off my headset with my grandma still on
the line, choking back sobs as I ran to the fourth-floor women’sbathroom and wept openly on a tampon-clogged toilet. I stepped out
an hour later, but only after I’d attempted to reapply my eyeliner withmy hand shaking so violently that I came back to my cubicle looking
like Marilyn Manson after a grand mal.
Back then, before shit really hit the fan, every loss was fresh,
every death unparalleled. The Rapture took more lives than the coastal
flooding before it, which killed more people than the sudden sinkhole
pandemic had in the weeks before. After the Rapture, everyone lost
somebody close enough to them that the calamity that followed felt
almost tedious to endure.
All to say, then, that my mom would have loved and hated theabsurdity that followed. It stuck to the script of any genre show I’dseen on Netflix—the armageddons both natural and manmade:innumerable comets on a crash course for Earth; the bees and the frogs
26

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

and the coral reefs and the Amazon all fucking off into the sun;Kashmir and North Korea and, quite inexplicably, Luxembourg, alldisintegrated in a thermonuclear hailstorm. I remember one
particularly bad strain of infectious disease that ran down the entire
West Coast from Vancouver.
“What happened to Angela in HR?” I asked a coworker. “Shewas just here Friday. I borrowed her hair tie.”“She’s gone,” he shrugged. “Whole family came down with
Ebola. Heard it was pretty gruesome.”
I tried my damnedest to think about my fallen comrade, tofocus on my ill-fated sister-in-arms, but all I could worry about was
the prior Friday’s hair tie. My skin itched the same way it did
whenever someone talked about head lice. That was back when there
were still jobs, still coworkers, still the thinning expectation thatthings were going to turn around. That was the moment I started
becoming numb to all of it—to shock, to empathy, to every stab ofgrief.
With as strange as things became, I could only laugh that mymom, the lifelong atheist, rotted in someone’s Heaven somewhere,
apparently bare-ass naked. Not long after she started crashing on myfuton, I asked the other Margot about where she thought her parents
might be. “Court-mandated marriage counseling,” she said reflexively,
lashing black paint onto the easel she’d stolen from the longabandoned art studio four blocks down on Lakeside Boulevard. The
paint hit the canvas in razor-thin lines and spread out a smidgen, thepaint bleeding out from each stroke as if she’d cut the canvas with abullwhip. I thought about my scientist mom, long removed from thisabused and lifeless lump of clay, and then I watched the other Margot
make Jackson Pollack goth art with forty shades of darkness in mycluttered apartment. Mostly, I thought about valence electrons—
about unstable elements—about colliding in the chaos and nevercoming apart.
The night we met, the moon exploded. It shattered in the way a
Faberge egg might if dropped from a sufficient height—detonated into
a trillion glistening shards of stale rock and 1970s moon rover parts.
The nebulous cloud of lunar dust scattered a few rays of red light from27

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

the dying sun across all of creation, drenching my corner of the
apocalypse in ruby glitter like some sort of demonic disco ball. I faced
the night sky a few moments into the mayhem and watched it fracture
in silence. It should have been tragic, maybe even beautiful. I found it
a bit underwhelming.
She stood at the foot of a weathered fountain at the center ofMonument Park, the neighborhood hangout Before for drug dealers,hookers, and the homeless. For a moment, I saw her as a hobbit’s
shadow in the crosshairs of my flashlight, but as my eyes adjusted, Ibeheld her as she truly was: a four-foot-nothing Joan Jett wannabe
comprised of an amalgam of punk haircuts, a face full of cheap metal,
and absolutely no capacity to choose a single color with which toaccentuate her black hair.
“Hey,” I called across the way, wincing at the warbled soundof a voice I hadn’t heard in weeks. “You going to kill me? I’m notnecessarily against it, but I have a few ground rules about facialdisfigurement and cannibalism we’ll need to hammer out first.”
Her gaze snapped from the murdered moon to my gangly
Slenderman silhouette in the distance. She said nothing. As I shuffledcloser, I watched as she held herself and shivered. I considered walking
away, seeking heat in my bed under the fourteen blankets I managed
to accumulate in my looting. Twelve months into the various ends ofthe world, it was both easier and safer to leave everything to die at its
own speed.
“Hold on,” I muttered, fishing out a strike-anywherematchbook from my back pocket. “There’s bound to be something toburn in this apocalyptic shithole.”
I shone my flashlight around the park until I found an
overturned trash bin still surrounded by a smattering of its previous
contents. “Come help me with this,” I grunted, struggling to lift thesteel receptacle from the frozen dirt. “It’s heavy. All five of my meals
today consisted of Town House crackers, so, you know. Not a lot of‘go’ power right now.”
Tiny Joan Jett hesitated, sized me up as I cursed and kicked at
the rubbish strewn about.
“Look, I’m pretty sure like, one hundred and five percent ofserial killers are men, so I think the statistics are in your favor here.”28

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

I doubt what I said actually made any difference, but the childsized woman shuffled over, extended her tiny hands, helped me toright the trash can. We tossed Five Guys bags and Styrofoam cups
back into it, and I wasted fourteen matches as I futilely attempted tostart the fire. I went to strike a fifteenth match, but the Monument
Park vagrant held out an outstretched finger. Within seconds, she
produced a Zippo, which she used to ignite an L.A. Times from eightmonths ago and dropped it into the fire. Through the sickly moonlight,
flakes of snow started to fall, and I groaned.
“I told my parents I was moving out of Nebraska to get awayfrom this nonsense.” I shrugged as I blew hot breath into my hands.
“To be fair, I’m pretty sure Nebraska is just the real-life Hunger Games
at this point.”
The stranger nodded, her shivering wracking her entire body.
After a few minutes of thawing out, she peered across the fire and in
my general direction. She said, “I’m Margot.”
I sighed. “Me too.” Somehow, even after a year of suffocating
in absurdity, this implausibility irritated me more than anything.
“What a crock of shit.”
We huddled close to the fire, passing the time with awkward
small talk and craning our heads to the heavens to watch the moon as
it fell to literal pieces. Once the feeling returned to my exposed noseand cheeks, we left for my apartment together. In the world Before, I
might have found it unsafe to bring a stranger home to sleep on myfuton and eat my gas station candy bars and drink my hoarded Dasani.
In the multipocalypse, though, we were likely amongst the selectliving few in a city that only months ago teemed with millions. The
world Before, I mused as I waved the other Margot forward down thesnow-kissed avenue. The wind whistled as we navigated the stairwellsof my abandoned apartment building, the broken moon obscured bybillowing snow. We didn’t speak a word as we trudged across the
newly minted tundra. The fire still burned when we left it to die.
It became apparent to me and any semi-rational human being in ashort manner of time that the end of the world was not singular or
anything less than positively ludicrous. It started with the Rapture,
which most people in America at least saw as absolute proof in the29

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

existence of the Christian God. Their self-assured spiritual swagger
was short lived; by the end of the next day, every major news outlet
projected live feed of the Norse God Odin in a brutal fistfight with
Kalki, the tenth avatar of Vishnu, onto every television on the planet.
This wasn’t the two Monument Park Jesuses getting into fisticuffs
over a pair of thong sandals, either. The two warring gods leveled city
blocks with conjured magic. Civilians screamed as they shielded theirbabies with their bodies and then liquefied in their holy light. The
desolation was shocking and appalling and absolutely total.
What had started as a sobering but natural reminder of thefinite nature of life devolved quickly into a demonstration insupernatural absurdity as a groundswell of gods and goddesses
materialized and terrorized the planet. Every god brought his
diabolical and über-powerful foil to Earth with him, flooding theplanet with countless demons and devils and trickster gods and titans.
The mighty Ahura Mazda could level the entire Persian empire witha flick of his finger. Instead, he preoccupied himself with mudwrestling his nemesis Ahriman, the Zoroastrian god of darkness.
I didn’t know Sekhmet from Imhotep before I met the other
Margot. When she began her occupation of my living room in myapartment, she brought with her the Jeopardy!-level trivia lodged inher brain from her community college World Mythology class. On therare occasions we caught word from passing refugees about the mostrecent holy heavyweight to blight the region, the other Margot filled
me in over a can of cold Chef Boyardee mini ravioli. She lamented that
we never seemed to get lucky with a party god like Bacchus, that wewere constantly showered in brimstone and sulfur and not winecoolers and dynamite sex.
I sometimes wondered what my heathen mom would havethought about this whole mess back Before, in the time preceding her
abduction by my dad’s God. I alternated on any given day between thehope of my making it into my own personal heaven and the despair ofwondering if I could have gotten into a better one. In The Still, I asked
the other Margot which god she was backing, what eternal life shemost desired to achieve. “If everyone was right,” she shrugged, black
paint dry at her fingertips, “then everyone was wrong.” I rolled my30

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1eyes and left her to paint alone. She had a knack for ruining everything.
I was also afraid her cynicism wasn’t entirely off the mark.
She was the one who first called it The Still. After nearly two years of
air inundated with screams and wails and smog-induced gagging, thepandemonium quite literally died out. Once the sandstorms stopped
raging and the acid rain cleared up, the tumult ceased. At first, thesilence was unendurable. In every moment, we anticipated something
more sinister lurking around each corner, so we camped out in myapartment for a week straight, taking turns peering throughbinoculars from the balcony and surveying the desolate hellscape
below. Once I finally found the stones to leave the apartment, I stalked
the city armed with a Cutco knife, a piece of lead piping, and somebrass knuckles I’d looted from a pawn shop. Not a mouse nor maggot
had survived the total desecration of the world.
That first night out alone in the city we sat on the five, feetdangling over the edge of the concrete barriers on the overpass, eating
spoonfuls of crunchy peanut butter and marveling at the other
Margot’s ability to see the gold flecks of the Milky Way for the firsttime in her life. The next morning, using old tube socks for mittens
and wrapping ourselves in some of Chad’s old Bruins sweatshirts, theother Margot and I sojourned out into the tundra of Southern
California and laid waste to each other in a snowball fight square in
the middle of Seventh Street. When the sun would set, we would watch
the light glimmer off the powdered down, a crimson glaze shining offof the snowfields that stretched from the city to the horizon. We tore
insulation from empty buildings and superglued the cellulose to ourwalls. Some nights we’d build a fire on the balcony and huddle
together for warmth; on others, we would lie under a dozen comforters
and tell stories about the women we were Before.
It was in The Still that I caught the candid whole of her in the
wavering sunlight. I would wake to find her wrapped in blankets in
her nest on my living room futon and reading de Beauvoir orVonnegut, overgrown eyebrows furrowed as she squinted through thesmudges of her glasses. The buzzed portions of her hair had grownout, the blue streaks faded to a twilight sheen over her sable locks.
Tangles of dirty hair framed her slight face, curled toward cushioned
31

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

lips. In the preceding weeks, her paleness had dissipated as the drugs
left her system. She’d also gained some weight, an inevitable result ofa Hostess Donettes diet that fortified her frailness with substance.
There was a fullness to her that wasn’t present when we first spiraled
into each other, a dimension gained from losing everything. The other
Margot was unbathed, disheveled, wild—and, quite suddenly, the kindof beautiful that transmogrified me into an anxious idiot.
I resisted my growing attraction to the other Margot because
I feared it to be a case of interest by proximity. It had been a fairly
sexless multipocalypse across the board, and I longed to be caressedby hands and kissed by lips and desired by someone as desperate forattention as I was. I could sense the tension from her when we passed
each other in the kitchen, when our glances collided from across looted
convenient stores, when we huddled together for warmth underPrincess Moana comforters. Eventually, I spent my time finding
awkward excuses to stay as physically far away from her as possible
without simply throwing myself off the balcony.
Perhaps sensing my trepidation, she leaned in one night
during a game of Uno, her breath hot in my ear. “You look like you
might need a little help,” she whispered, inching her delicate fingers
under my blanket and up the seam of my cotton sweatpants. I shiveredat her touch, bowed my head, shifted on the futon as every muscle in
my lower body seized involuntarily. My breath quickened as sheleaned in carefully.
“This is,” I managed, “new for me.”
She pulled back, cupped an icy hand against my hot-blooded
cheek, softened her gaze as she looked up at my face. In that moment,behind those endlessly dark eyes, she might have thought about it, too:
about the lovely convenience of our closeness, about whether our
chemistry was simply a product of supremest loneliness. She hesitated,started to pull away, and instinctively I pulled her face to mine—kissed
it—caressed its contours in all of its glorious coldness—pressedagainst her so aggressively that I nearly knocked her incisors clear outof her mouth. That night, the other Margot pulled me under a half
dozen blankets and would not come up for air until the whole of it was
no longer new for me. I suppose that, even Before, love’s always been
more than a little about proximity.
32

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Before the other Margot, there was Chad. Truth be told, there was astring of Chads preceding her, a line of utterly milquetoast andsmarmy young suitors, each Chad in the progression slightly Chadderthan the last. The final specimen, the ultimate Chad, was pleasantenough, someone I didn’t have to be embarrassed about when I
brought him around my girlfriends and inoffensive-looking enough toinclude in my social media pictures. We’d seen each other in some
capacity on and off for two years but only knew each other in strangely
superficial ways. He knew I could burp the entire alphabet, that myleft boob was smaller than my right; I knew he was afraid of the dentist
and had no concept of how to navigate a vagina. I dragged him on
occasion to work parties and he coerced me into paying for us to see
every unnecessary Transformers sequel. We settled for each other inblissful compromise, never demanding much of each other, orbiting
each other in periphery and possessing each other so we each could
have something to possess.
Somewhere between GMO-induced brain death and superSARS, Chad wound up moving into my apartment. Initially, I didn’t
mind; as the looting and rioting proliferated, it felt like a good thing
to have backup in an increasingly dangerous world. I quickly realizedthat our obligatory cohabitation was the greatest threat to oursurvival. No one had prepared me for the grotesqueness of living witha man—the pissed-upon bathroom floors, the body hair choking mysink, the inability to rinse a dish after eating from it—and yet we weretrapped together in an apocalyptic Roach Motel. Chad appeared
equally horrified to live with me, the audacious candor of my mere
existence as an actual woman annihilating his shallow construct of thefeminine mystique. His revulsion at my natural state—at my freedom
from having to impress him for any reason at all—satisfied me in ways
his dick never managed to.
We lived in discord until Jesus came. He landed a dozen timezones away in Jerusalem, but the infrastructure of the world still heldon like the last tenuous stretch of skin clinging to a nearly peeled scab,
so we still had internet. We watched the video postings every morningof whatever new lunatic had arrived in cataclysmic fashion while we
slept. Up to that point, our newfound awareness of the existence of33

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

lesser spirits and demigods had no effect on Chad, but the Lord Jesus
got to him. As Chad watched the sandaled Son of God descend upon
Golgotha to a cosmic light show that would make Pink Floyd blush, I
watched something change behind his eyes.
The first few nights after the Second Coming, Chad simply
didn’t speak. It was enough of a relief that I didn’t question theblessing. The dynamic shifted dramatically from bliss to discomfort
when I walked in on him praying before dinner, which felt somehow
more invasive than the time I opened his old apartment door to find
him in a compromised position involving Swordfish, a gym sock, and abottle of baby oil. After one night of scavenging, he brought back a
copy of the NIV nestled between a carton of cigarettes and an entire
dorm’s worth of Ramen. Soon after, he stopped going out altogether.
In short order, he started packing his bags for his last crusade.
“A few of the guys from the Y downtown heard that there’s aflight heading out from Vegas in a week and they’re taking everyone
they can to Jerusalem,” he informed me, stuffing a duffel bag full of
hair paste and Listerine. “Please come, Margot. I mean, this Jesus
thing is the real deal.”
I scoffed. “We haven’t seen or heard a plane around here forthe last two months. You think I’m going to strap myself in for amystery flight with poor man’s Captain Sully and the cast of Fury
Road?”
Against every one of my better instincts, I tried to get him tostay with me, but his mind was made up. I promised him that his“Jesus” was a false prophet, some standard-issue fraud taking
advantage of circumstance, but I was wrong. He was the real deal, theactual son of actual God, and he performed miracles beyond the scopeof my imagination. Unfortunately, Jesus was Catholic Jesus, and Chadgrew up Baptist. Catholic Jesus was not kind to his Protestantfollowers, calling pillars of fire down upon the poseurs amongst his
worshippers and turning an awful lot of people into salt. To further
complicate matters, Baptist Jesus did descend from heaven to Earth,although he arrived some time between Eastern Orthodox Jesus andPresbyterian Jesus. I doubt Chad ever made it to Israel and, if he did,was surely destroyed with all the rest of those gathered in the
supernatural carnage that ensued. By the time the videos stopped
34

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

pouring in and my internet sputtered out, a thousand Jesuses had been
at war with each other for weeks, fighting over whom so loved theworld the most.
I tried to hate him for leaving me alone, but I couldn’t blame
the man for acting in his own interest. Everyone placed bets when thescrews came flying loose. Chad put all of his chips on the most familiar
horse and rode it straight into oblivion. My theory was that thereckoning came for everyone but those that shared our name, thatstrewn across the husk of the world were a few thousand Margots
resisting the march of time. When I told the other Margot myhypothesis, she just laughed. She believed our perceived invincibility
had less to do with supernatural circumstances than it did with what
those circumstances forged us into. We were nothing at all before wewere poured together into the crucible.
In every end-of-the-world movie I’d seen Before, society went to shit
within days of whatever disaster befell it. In reality, the cogs in thewheel kept turning long after the car had died. Some hardnosed bluecollar unknowns kept the generators running even through supervolcanic eruptions, through fracking-induced earthquakes, throughJörmungandr and Thor tearing each other into pink meat. For me,
however, grinding on past the world’s expiration date became
psychically exhausting. I continued working at Kozlowski’s even as
the cubicles emptied around me and HR stopped trying to fill them.
Working for a collection agency was already the occupational
equivalent of a botched spinal tap, but trying to collect onwhackadoodles at the various ends of the world proved to be theepitome of fruitless. The fact that we still had cable at the office was
my sole motivation for going to work after the assorted divine started
climbing out of the woodwork. It was my window into themultipocalypse: the reports on the fissures and power plant
meltdowns; the havoc wreaked by magnetic pole reversal; the sudden
emergence of AI in Japan and the resulting conquest of Kyushu. The
Large Hadron Collider begat a tiny black hole that swallowed all of
Sweden. Millions succumbed to brain cancer developed over years ofcell phone use.
35

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

The night the New York Financial District succumbed to theepidemic of the undead brought on by fluoridated city water, the power
finally cut and the flat screen in the break room fwip-ped off. I thought
about ending it then. There appeared no point in protracting themisery of loneliness any longer. I knew some horrifying and absurd
death lurked around one corner or the next. I thought about raiding
the nearest pharmacy and washing down the remaining pills with afifth of vodka far above my paygrade before falling asleep. I studied the
texture of the primer on the ceiling in my bedroom, stored it in thepart of my mind that used to remember the face of everyone I used toknow. By the time the red morning light shone through my frosty
window, I was determined to see the cosmic freak show to its illogicalconclusion. The multipocalypse was going to devour all of existence
before it was over. I wanted to be there when it did. I wanted to perchat its maw and quiver at the darkness.
Underneath the surface tranquility of The Still, existence still
careened toward the end of its tracks. Time itself grew sick. Moments
repeated, skipped in place like a scratched CD, leaving the two of us
stuck on the same line of a joke or the same snark in an argument or
the same orgasm for what would normally register as seconds,
minutes, hours. I woke up once with a tragus piercing and a bottomshelf tequila hangover with no recollection of how I’d earned either. It
was a day the other Margot couldn’t recall either, despite the fact that
she managed to paint a twisted homage to Edvard Munch’s The
Scream, using my gangly likeness as inspiration. Entire swaths of ourlives went missing from time to time as if someone had hit the skip
button on a literal universal remote.
While gathering supplies one frigid afternoon, we found thetrash can fire we’d lit months before in Monument Park still burning.
We crouched behind a dead palm tree, craning our heads to see who
might have started it, but after finding the fuel comprised of the same
carry-out bags and Styrofoam cups I threw in the night we met, it
became apparent that our initial bonfire simply never died. It flickered
in slow motion, tendrils of flame swaying in a wind that did not blow.
I moved close to the rusted can, took off my makeshift sock-mittens,
held my hand up to the blaze—but felt nothing save the chill of the36

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

flurries falling from the sky above. The fire burned out of time withthe rest of the world, and I could not feel its heat.
In the subsequent weeks, we noticed the desynchronization oftime in all things. Tides waxed and waned on the hour; distantmountains ground to dust overnight; constellations burned out of thesky as we traced them with frostbitten fingertips. Scavenging became
increasingly difficult as everything from food to tools dissolved in ourhands. We awoke to find our clothes threadbare but the previous day’s
Cokes still carbonated. Life creaked on like that for some time, the twoof us weaving in and out of time for seconds full of minutes, minutes
full of days, days full of years. I fell asleep with her miniature body
curled into mine and woke up with her a decade later. We stopped
keeping track of time altogether as the laws of physics were purged in
the great dumpster fire at the end of the cosmos; all the while, the other
Margot and I made a home for ourselves, spending the prolonged days
exploring what was left of the world and the endless nights exploringeach other.
On one particularly tender evening in The Still—interlaced
together in our bed, the other Margot’s lashes fluttering against myneck, I murmured, “But really, how long have you loved me?”“For at least a day,” she said finally after a pause, “which is tosay, in this place, maybe forever.”I knew something was wrong when I woke one morning to a painting
hitherto unseen. With stunning luster and arresting beauty, the other
Margot had painted my old farmhouse in Norfolk, a hand-me-down
two-story gathering dust at the edge of the cornfield my grandfather
had sold to the Murdochs decades before my father was a tax credit. I
recognized the vantage point from a picture I kept on my bookshelf inthe living room, a photograph faded almost beyond recognition fromrapidly increasing age. Even with the source material diminished, theother Margot managed to capture the ripple of the cornstalks as abreeze raced through it. Her version of my childhood summers shot
phantom sears of sunburn up my back.
“When did you paint this?” I asked when she entered the roomwith two fists of perfectly preserved rice cakes. “It’s incredible.”“This last week,” she said. “While you slept.”37Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

As time frayed, choice days ran slower for me than it did forthe other Margot, only to snap back to the same pace further down theline. On unison days, time ran more or less equally for the two of us.
Sometimes we lived in synchronicity for days, weeks even, readingbooks and scavenging the ruins and watching the moon grind to fine
red powder. I suspected she hid many of the early days she spent alone
to spare me the guilt. On shorter divergences, I caught her with a new
cut on her hand or a freshly patched pair of jeans; on the longer jaunts,
her hair was two or three inches longer than it was the day prior.
When she sped forward, it was always while I slept. In The Still, I
never lived a day without her by my side. The other Margot, however,lived an entire life away from me while I remained suspended in ourbed, biding daunting swaths of time alone until I woke my very next
day to see her.
In the space between my awakenings, the other Margot
painted prolifically. Miraculously—perhaps mercifully—time left her
paints and canvases untouched even as most of the world atomized
erratically around us. On any given night, we kissed and clasped eachother tightly and I would wake to find another painting, three
paintings, twenty paintings of the world Before, each one
exponentially more skilled and more staggeringly picturesque thanthe last. When she ran out of canvas, the other Margot crafted murals
encompassing our apartment, the adjacent hallways, the face of the oldbrick building across the street. Her command of color shocked me,
enthralled me, reminded me of both a world that once existed and aworld that I’m sure never did. Time treated our slice of Armageddon
more kindly than it did the rest of the world, save the other Margot—
my Margot—who woke next to me with each passing morning moreacutely grey and weary than the day before.
“How long were you awake without me?” I asked her one ofmy years into this exercise—at least fifty of hers—as I stroked thewhite hair away from her craggy worry lines.
“Three years,” she whispered, voice hoarse, squeezing me astight as she could with her feeble hands.
I stockpiled as many resources as I could when I was with her,knowing full well that I could not stock enough food for years at a time
and that she could no longer brave the frozen desolation of the world38

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

outside alone. I fell apart one night stacking cans of pinto beans in thelinen closet, slumped to the ground as tears crept onto my cheeks andimmediately started to freeze.
“It’s okay,” she said, pressing my blearing eyes into her gaunt
thigh. Her voice was tender. “I mean it. You’ve done everything you
could. We’ve lived longer than we had any right to.”Maybe if I’d grown old, too, I would have attained her level ofserenity or achieved her sense of acceptance. Instead, I sobbed against
her diminished body and could not find the strength within me to stop.
“You can’t just stop painting,” I finally choked. “You’re just startingto get good.”
For the first time in what may have been years for her, theother Margot smiled. We huddled on the remains of our futon, tagteamed a Twinkie, dreamt of where we might have traveled together
Before. She said Nepal, or Bhutan, or some other place I could neverlocate on a map. I wasn’t paying attention. I stared at her, searing her
existence into every fold of my brain. We shivered against each otherlike that for one, two, ten nights. Eventually, I woke up and she simply
wasn’t there. Any note or trace of where she’d gone had blown to dust
some unknowable amount of time before. I lied in bed for hours andlistened to the wind whip across the barrens, to the waves of ice crush
against themselves on the shoreline. Outside my apartment, the world
died at a thousand different speeds, equally hurtling and crawling
toward oblivion. Inside of it, I died at the same pedestrian constant I’dmanaged my entire life before.
While the rest of us dodged the wrath of Ishtar or extraterrestrial
invasions, the other Margot spent most of the early days of themultipocalypse hallucinating on the sheets in her old apartment. It
took two full weeks, she once claimed, for her to realize that thescreams and the sirens and shelling of the world outside her bedroom
window were more than a side effect of the heroin occluding her mind.
Amidst the fever dreams of withdrawal, the other Margot occasionallyexperienced moments of blinding lucidity. She would wake in thecooling night, stagger between the abandoned rooms of her building,force down a spoonful of peanut butter, fight the sensation of it
creeping back up. She said she’d wander to the courtyard on the roof,39

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

stumble into the empty community pool, lie on her back and shiver
under the starlight. Above the clamor of the world cannibalizing itself
below her, she would stretch out a delicate, trembling finger and trace
the stars, whispering the names of those she remembered as the poison
licked at the edges of her consciousness.
On cloudless nights in The Still, she would point a steadierdigit at the heavens from our favorite perch on the freeway overpass.
She announced the constellations as she drew them, dreamily
describing the princess Andromeda and her vainglorious mother,
Cassiopeia, her hand deftly swaying against the deepest blue of thenight as if the sky were her personal canvas. She spoke of the Pleiades
and the goddess Demeter as if she knew them personally in a lifetime
where she very well may have. All the while, I absorbed her in her
fervent glory.
“Chaos to cosmos,” she murmured, galaxies inside her eyes.
In her absence, for a time, I traced the stars too, many of themstill obscured by remnants of the broken moon. I invented names forthem, connected the surviving stellar dots in the ever-darkening sky.
I drew the lines deliberately, taking great care to sketch the other
Margot as sprawling and megalithic and gorgeous to behold. In thetwilight of existence—in my final act of worship—I painted the last
goddess to grace the Earth.
On her longest stint alone in The Still, the other Margot took
up a grease pencil and drew the two of us together in front of a newmoon menacing at the horizon, her head nestled against my breasts
and my face buried in her dark hair. The strokes were black andheavy—some smudged lovingly, others etched with violent precision.
Last night, I pried the canvas from our bedroom wall, rolled it up,
trudged the four miles up the road to Monument Park. The toweringhigh-rises of before were mostly ash and dust, either pulverized intosome misbegotten shape or standing hauntingly unmolested against
the new skyline of decay. The avenues had disappeared, replaced onlywith fused layers of ice and snow. Comet and meteors cut vermillion
gashes into the void above me, the heavens always one fracture of timeaway from erasing the Earth from the cosmic record. As I approached
my destination, an anemic light appeared ahead in the obsidian
darkness. The trash can fire flickered on at the heart of the park,40

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

consuming the same debris I’d thrown in perhaps a thousand years
before. Shivers wracked my body as I stood before its uniform, heatlesslight. I slid the drawing into the impossible flame. I imagined thecanvas catching fire in another thousand years, the wind picking up its
ashes and carrying it across the fields of the dead. When it became
apparent that the sun was long past rising, I faced what I once knew
as west and headed for the wintry coast. The fire still burned when I
left it to die.

41

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Bright Lights Big City / J. Ray Paradiso

42

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Elected and Necessary
Valyntina Grenier
One woman operates the Da Vinci Robot
another woman oversees
its insertion and removalfrom my body
They deliver my cervix
uteruspoly cystic ovaries
endometriosis
Irrational fear conceived
a still life continuallyattempting to abort
primordial punishment
as crippling pain
I don’t want to bear thisI can feel myself slippingback to the day
another surgeon laid photos along the deskfrom my laparoscopy
I received them with a sense of violence
like being slapped with the replicated objectsof my wounded organs
It was strange
being alone with him
shocked to see
inside of my body43

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

I imagine being at the surface of my skin
My body doesn’t know
my psyche doesn’t desire
to make another person
I lay my hands over the most painful spots
to feel myself as the surface of a sea
minnows feeding on roots of pain/ healing
healing a healing body
My grinding figure
all those eggs
phantoms for a page
I blow my brain to bliss
I turn to facelemon and butter cream
chrysanthemums and carnations
The yellow ribbon
tied around the waist of the vasereminds me of shoulders
and evergreens44Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Out to See / Valyntina Grenier45

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Must Love Bernie
Kimberly Diaz
In 2015, I had two major goals.
1. To find a guy to partner up with for the rest of my life.
2. To get Bernie Sanders elected President of the United States.
But maybe not necessarily in that order, so I placed this ad on a
popular dating site.
USER ID: MustLoveBernie
HEADLINE: I Love Bernie but I Might Like You
MustLoveBernie is a non-smoker with a thin body type, Libra with
mixed color hair and a bachelor’s degree, nonreligious and a free
thinker. MustLoveBernie is looking for a relationship but seeking a
man for dating. Interests: concerts, movies, tennis, dining out,
traveling, bicycling and Bernie Sanders for President!
About Me:Right now I’m really focused on getting Bernie Sanders elected but I
like to have other kinds of fun too. And I really could not seriously
hang with anyone who is not committed to voting for Bernie Sanders.
In Florida, you have to be a registered Dem to vote for him in the
primary. I will ask to see your voter registration. GO BERNIE!
First Date:
Meet for a drink, talk to the bartender about Bernie Sanders, if we hit
it off, maybe dinner some other place, talk to the server about Bernie
Sanders, etc. . . . For more information about Bernie Sanders go to
www.BernieSanders.com. Or take me out . . .
Afterward, I received a few I love Bernie too messages, but mostly
angry ones. Are you looking for a date or what? You’re alienating half
the men out there. That’s okay, I said, I’m only looking for one.
46

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Then the unthinkable happened—Trump in the White House, I took
the ad down. Dated a couple of guys I met out in the real world. Noluck there either. Now as 2020 approaches, I have two major goals.
1. Get Trump impeached.
2. Get Bernie Sanders elected President of the United States.
Go Bernie!

47

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

If I Were a Fish
Walter Weinschenk
If I were a fish (and it may yet come to pass),
I would consign my soul to the water
And wear it like a linen shroud
That moves with me in cool continuum.
I would split the water with my lip
And, with my tail, I’d sew it up;
I’d venture forth as I see fit,
Silver in the morning,
Bloody gold at night.
But never would I break the plane
Of the silver ceiling overhead(Unless, of course, a fly flew by,
Low enough to snap it up).
For if I were to pierce that mirrored veil
For more than just a moment,
I simply couldn’t bear to see
A world that wasn’t meant for me,
A world too cruel for piscine eyes:
I’d be overcome by the sorry sight,
Upon the shore, of elderly trees
Enslaved by wind, made to dance,
Their limbs pulled back and snapped
Like whips, and I’d see, as well,
The desperate flight of fathers and mothers
Along the beach, screaming names
Of sons and daughters,
Plucking up children on the run
Before the rains arrive.

48

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Sea Vision Part 1 / Ernst Perdreil

49

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Sea Vision Part 2 / Ernst Perdreil

50

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Ladybug Eclipse / Ernst Perdreil

51

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

RumblePasquale Trozzolo
Like a ship at sea
She has a melody.
A low rumble
Echoing off waves
As if fog were in the air.
She pulses taking
Oxygen as she moves.
Barely glancing.
Hardly noticing.
As if alone.
First I was insulted, but
Who am I kidding?
This is meaningless
At its best.

52

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Forever Dream / Ping Wang

The Eternal Shine Room / Ping Wang
53

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Demolition
Lenora Steele
The filling station at Esplande and Inglis is coming down today. The
one with the turret that doubled as a taxi stand. The one with the
hardwood bench where a little girl waits for Daddy.
I am stood across the road with a little gang when the
excavator’s claw scrapes the cedar skin looking for a place to catch
hold , a place to begin. Its end has come.
He had a Brownie, my father, so my first six years are
documented with frills and frocks, gloves and curls; after he died noone could find it or no one wanted to. As if whatever was left would
not warrant any pictures. The excavator slows; I hear a phone, stalledon the landing I hear my mother at the foot of the stairs. Something
has changed.
Now!
The excavator lowers its bucket pulls back, quiets. I am six. I
don’t want to be in the way. I turn, go back to my room. Wait. But ittakes forever, what’s coming, so I am crouched now on the landing ina corner when the men come in. The scent of the oven’s bread explodes
when the draughts of January enter; the stretcher is catching in thedoor jam, a bitter cold is flooding the hall, the bread makes it smell likeany other day.
The gang has grown to a crowd. Extras, cast for effect; theypull their breath in unison. The belfry made this place a landmark.
They are telling stories. I move out of earshot. I can’t bear theiranecdotes.
I am alone as I watch the men struggle to get into Daddy’sroom, the place he hasn’t left now in weeks except on Christmas
morning when my oldest brother lent himself a human crutch andferried him to the living room. And there it is, one final picture; myoldest brother is behind the lens so he is not caught in the frame. Soon,
when it is over, he will quit his job in the woods and leave for Toronto.
He will send money home. The brother between us will turn sullen.
He will never reconcile the coming loss.
54

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

The motor fires up again. The crush of spectators stir as theoperator levers the bucket this way and that until it catches hold andsinks its claws through a wall, razing a century’s old labor. It’s
operator grows more sure of her target. The clapboards moan and likehuman skin after a burn, easily peel away. A part of the roof collapses,
the people cheer. The shattering lead pane can be heard above the din.
Cancer left him with part-time jobs—A Fuller Brush case,filled with everything a wife could want and then some and he’d wink
and to give my mother a break on her nerves my father would take mealong. I remember the women at their backdoors; molasses cookies andmilky teas and the way they smiled down on me like they knew morethan they should. Their hands felt like tiny prayers when they patted
my head. I loved those women in their aprons and their backdoors. I
planned to be just like them.
And we kept hens. And gardens. Sold eggs and carrots.
Charged with dusting the red soil off the root vegetables andcollecting eggs, I grew important. I became necessary but then not
really. When the time came, I was sent to my room. Goodbyes are notfor little girls. There are no words small enough to fit. At the hospital,
they said. Another day, they said.
The wrenching continues, the splintering wood, the breaking
glass, the moaning hemlock timbers. The crowd swarms and theengine roars with resolve.
It had a crinoline, the dress I was wearing when the hospitalcalled. There had been a mistake, only six, it could not be allowed. I
have to say I love you I said but no one heard.
They said, funerals aren’t for girls, little ones. Be brave, theysaid, for Daddy, they said . . . .
The operator, returned from a break, climbs up into her cab.
The engine revs. The onlookers brace themselves, take pictures. They
want to show their children, their grandchildren what it was like, what
this corner was before progress took hold. How this town once held
something different. How time cannot hold anything for long. They
want to say, we were there. And so was I.
He drove taxis from here, my father and sometimes long into
the night I would hear the back door open and my mother’s rocker
squeak as she moved to meet him in the entry. Some nights I would
55

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

creep down to the kitchen where they sat with tea and rice that he’dbring home from the Chinese restaurant right next door. Spoiled, mybrothers said but I didn’t mind for that made it so I could have someon a little Melmac plate.
The crowd flares up and the last standing wall is exposed andthere along the spent wainscoting, on a battered hardwood bench alittle girl, watches her Daddy lift his hat from the stand, wills him toturn, to notice, to wink.
And it’s down. A ruinous pile of timber and glass. The crowd
sputters and breaks apart. A bulldozer roars into motion.
There will be no taxis dispatched today.

56

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

HC1 / Alan Lyons

57

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Slices of Life
Susan Bloch
I’d like to say it began with the magic of yeast. That sour aroma takes
me straight back to my childhood in Johannesburg when I sat on theFormica kitchen counter watching Mom’s nimble fingers rolling andfolding the raw dough. She gave me a lump to work on too. I squished
it and prodded it and stuck my finger into it. Soon I was talking to it.
Telling it to behave itself.
Mom wore a pink-and-white checkered apron tied around herback into a bow; a sprinkling of flour dusted her black patent stilettos.
She often leaned over to kiss my forehead. For days after those kisses,
I didn’t wash my face. That was when it all began. My relationshipwith food and love.
Decades later I realize that when I write about food, I’m hiding behinda facade. I’m really writing about love—wanting love, losing love, andsimply loving.
When Dad, a partner in his accountancy firm, came home from work
after days studying figures, he poured himself a glass of Ballantine’s
Scotch and sank into his green-and-ochre floral armchair. I sat on his
lap breathing in the oaky fragrance. Ice clinked against the sides of his
cut-glass tumbler. He opened a hinged cedar flat-topped box, cut the
tip off a Bolivar Cuban cigar, slid off the paper ring embossed with apicture of a man wearing a blue jacket with gold epaulets, and placed
it on my thumb. Snuggling against his chest, I giggled under a cloudof cigar smoke. As a kid, these were the only times I spent alone withDad. Now, on those evenings I miss him, I pour myself a tot of single
malt, inhale the aroma, and imagine Dad’s arms around me.
In the kitchen, Mom allowed me to stand next to her on a stool with
my own piece of dough to knead, smell, poke, and taste. I didn’t know
then that I was absorbing the unspoken secrets of baking—how to
crack the eggs cleanly, separate the yolks from the egg whites, sift theflour to eliminate lumps and tiny mites, and knead the mixture to the58Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

right podgy consistency—pushing and stretching, pushing andstretching, until my arms ached and the dough softened. I copied herevery movement and measurement, learning exactly how thin to rollthe dough; how much butter, sugar, and cinnamon to brush over the
pale pastry; and how to twist it into a braid.
“Without the yeast, this would be like a brick,” Mom told me.
Her upper arms quivered while she worked. “The secret is to make themixture elastic.”
Mom would place the spongy lump of dough into a large bowl
and wrap it in a blanket to keep it warm while the yeast fermented
overnight. As if a magician cast a spell while I slept, the dough rose toa huge balloon, to be kneaded again. Mom showed me how to roll out
the dough to exactly the right thinness, spread it with strawberry jam,and sprinkle cinnamon, raisins, and cocoa powder on top. We rolled it
into a crescent shape, carefully lifted it onto a baking tray, brushed the
top with beaten raw egg to brown the crust, and popped it into a fourhundred-degree oven. An hour later the aroma of a moist, sweet,
brioche-like cake filled the house. We ate it warm with slivers of butterthat melted on the pastry. The babka took hours to make and no time
to vanish.
I had to eat all my breakfast before I went to school. Even though I
showered teaspoons of brown sugar and dollops of butter on top of theoatmeal, the thick goo would stick to the roof of my mouth and refuse
to slide down my throat. To Mom’s despair, it sometimes took me half
an hour to clean my bowl. Eventually, she gave up nagging. I got myway—munching Rice Krispies while I read the cartoons on the
Kellogg’s box. Snap, crackle, and pop tickled the inside of my mouth.
As a kid, my favorite birthday treat was to go to the Doll House Drivein Restaurant in Johannesburg. When the waiter clipped a tray onto
the top of Dad’s window, I breathed in the aroma of a grilled cheese
and tomato sandwich on white bread. My teeth crunched the crusts
and the gooey cheese stretched like spaghetti in long lines to my lips.
Dessert was mixed canned fruit salad layered with Wall’s vanilla ice
cream and decorated with swirls of whipped cream, chocolate gratings,
and a maraschino cherry with a stem. Using a long-handled teaspoon
59Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

and my lizard-like tongue, I licked the tall sundae glass clean. Even
though we had an abundance of fresh papaya, bananas, grapes,
mangoes, and passion fruit in South Africa, it was the sugary syrup
coating soft chunks of pineapple, peaches, cherries, and grapes thatmade me ooh and aah. Now my stomach sours when I think of eatingthat soggy, greasy sandwich, flabby fruit, and synthetic-tasting ice
cream. But I continue to celebrate my birthday with a grilled cheese
and tomato panini on focaccia bread—and a scoop of rum and raisin
Haagen-Dazs on warm apple pie.
When Mom baked a chocolate cake, she always left some raw batteron the beater and in the bowl for me to lick and scrape. It was as goodas the cake itself. Sixty years later when I bake, I stick out my tongue
to lick the batter at the end of the spatula. I close my eyes and canalmost breathe in her fragrance: Chanel N° 5.
My mother’s babka recipe was famous in Johannesburg’s Jewish
community—and that was saying something. There was fierce
competition as to who made the best apple pie, cabbage salad, andcheesecake. But there was no arguing that Mom’s babka was the best.
Now long gone, she is always beside me when I stretch and tuck the
mixture, whispering her secrets.
“A little more water, just a drop . . . don’t knead so hard . . .
gentle as you flip the dough.”
The dough sighs as I push it down. I hear Mom’s voice again.
“Now leave it to sit quietly. It needs peace, time, and a warm
place for the yeast to do its job.”
I am the only one in the family who can bake babka as delicious
as Mom. While I learned my mother’s feel for the perfect dough—springy and alive—everyone else only has her recipe.
When I married, my husband and I moved to Israel. The lemon tree
in our backyard gave us an endless supply of fruit. I made lemonade,lemon cream pie, lemon meringue pie, lemon soufflé, whiskey sours,chicken marinated in lemon juice and garlic, and I gave handfuls oflemons to neighbors. Now in my Seattle home, I have three lemon
60

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

houseplants that are full of blossoms and only one lemon. Just like thesong, “Lemon Tree”—the fruit is very pretty but impossible to eat.
The onset of the Yom Kippur War on October 6, 1973, took thecountry by surprise. After twenty-four hours of not eating anddrinking, family and friends gathered in my Tel Aviv home to breakthe fast at the end of this holy day. Guests whispered a little too loudlythat the roast chicken tasted bitter and the turkey sweetish. While wecomplained about the mundane, the air raid siren shrieked. A few
minutes later there was a loud knock at the front door. Without
waiting for an answer, a soldier strode in and announced the names ofarmy reservists. They were ordered to report for immediate duty.
Husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers packed underwear, razors,
shaving cream, and toothbrushes. We had no idea that Egyptian
troops had already crossed the Suez Canal. Tanks advanced toward
Jerusalem. Only four hundred miles away, we women laughed when
we realized that my friend Abby had left the gall inside the chicken,
and I’d sugared instead of salted the turkey.
Three days later, while children played hopscotch in a deserted street,
we learned that one of our friends, Udi, had been burned alive in a tanknear the Suez Canal while trying to block the Egyptian invasion.
There was nothing left of his body to bury except for his identification
necklace.
I baked a babka and took it with me as we sat shiva—a sevenday mourning period—with Udi’s family. The room was silent. The
only sounds were chunks of babka being ripped off the loaf andmourners swallowing. Eyes closed as if to shut out the bad news thattrickled our way. No one spoke until we recited the Mourner’s
Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.
When my marriage dissolved, I moved to London where I met mysecond husband, John. I loved the smell of whiskey but only developed
a taste for Scotch when John held a glass to my lips. I took a sip and
my tongue tingled. Soon a glow filled my belly and I took anotherlarger sip. We married soon after.
61

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

On vacation in Barcelona, John introduced me to Spain’s famous salt
cod dish. In a side street, in the shade of Gaudi’s Crypt, he leaned in tosmell the succulent fish resting on fragrant samfaina sauce, gleamingwith green peppers, onions, tomatoes, courgettes, and aubergines.
John took a mouthful of the delicacy, leaned back in his chair, kissed
his fingertips, and chuckled.
To celebrate our first wedding anniversary, I prepared salt cod, hoping
it would remind him of our weekend in Barcelona—the weekend heproposed. I followed the recipe in the River Café Cookbook, written by
the chef of the one-star Michelin restaurant. After soaking the fish fortwenty-four hours, I grilled it and placed it on top of the simmering
sauce. The cod was tough, skin burned to ash, and it tasted like oldshoe leather. I tossed it in the bin. Instead, we ate vegetable omelets
filled with the sauce, along with a toasted baguette and French butter.
We drank a jug of sangria made from a bottle of Spanish rioja, sugar,
Calvados, slices of lime and lemon, and chopped peaches and apples.
John’s kiss tasted of tomatoes.
When John contracted mesothelioma, he took morphine to ease thepain. He lost his sense of taste. As asbestos fibers sucked and destroyed
the pink linings of his lungs, it made no difference to him whether hewas eating kedgeree, duck breast with cherry and port sauce, or dayold pizza.
John hardly ever complained. Not when he was in pain and not when
the nurse bruised his arm, when she tried again, and again, to draw
blood from his shriveled vein. But he did complain at his last supper.
The night before John died he asked me to prepare a special
meal for him—grilled Dover sole with lemon butter, new season peas,
and mashed potatoes with chives.
“The fish is dry,” he said after the first bite. “And the peas are
soggy.”He only ate a mouthful of his favorite dessert—mille-feuillefrom our local French patisserie—and pushed it away.
That night, I knew that he’d die soon. I died too.
62

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

For years I didn’t bake a babka, not even when the kids begged andbadgered. When I finally did, I was still overwrought and thekneading overthought. I hadn’t realized I’d lost my sense of touch andsmell.
A bruised Granny Smith apple, a moldy piece of cheddar, a can ofHeinz ravioli, and a bottle of cheap Riesling became my evenings’
staple diet. It didn’t matter; it was hard to taste anything anyway. I
struggled to search for a deeper meaning in my life, understand “whatit was all for.”Unexpectedly, I was offered and accepted a job to work with a team to
set up supermarkets in India. The local cuisine—chickpeas in tomato
sauce, creamy black lentils, chapatti, curried vegetables served withgrated fresh coconut, tandoori chicken, Alphonso mangoes, sugar
sweet bananas, and salted lassi seduced me back to the pleasures of
eating.
When I lived in Mumbai, I was invited to join Rabbi Gabi and his wife
Rivka for the sabbath dinner at their home. On a warm September
evening, we sat in the front courtyard and feasted on hummus, falafel,
pita, finely chopped vegetable salad, and barbequed chicken seasoned
with familiar Middle Eastern flavors: zaatar, sumac, garlic, and onions.
Their two-year-old son, Moshe, clapped his hands and giggled as heran around in circles. I felt at home—the language, the culture, thefood. Under the light of a full moon, Moshe finally flopped asleep on
his mother’s lap.
The Mumbai Massacre began close to midnight on November 26,
2008. Earlier that evening I had dined at the Taj Mahal Palace hotelwith my boss. Over a feast of potato samosas, lentil soup, curried
vegetables, garlic naan, chili crab, saffron rice, and fresh coconut, we
discussed the structure of the leadership team. While we savoredcreamy kulfi ice cream and drank spicy chai, a group of Pakistani
terrorists edged their way on a dinghy through fishermen’s boats andlanded at a dock near Mumbai’s commercial center. A few hours after
we left the restaurant, the hotel’s lush Persian carpets and ionic63Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1columns were burning. From my apartment, I could see yellow andcrimson flames leaping up into the dark sky and a charred smell filled
the air.
What a difference a few hours could make.
Rabbi Gabi and Rivka Holtzberg, my new friends, were slaughteredby the terrorists. Moshe’s Indian nanny, Sandra Samuel, lifted thebaby boy off his dead mother’s chest, ran down the stairs, and into thestreet. She saved his life. Moshe ate nothing for hours—no cookies, no
ice cream, and even refused to sip chocolate milk through a straw.
Moshe’s grandparents, Rabbi Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg, cameto Mumbai to collect their grandson and take his parents’ remains backto Israel. The city was in lockdown, and the Israeli consul’s apartment
was filled with embassy folk sorting out visas, flights, and counselingsupport. I made cup after cup of Nescafé with UHT milk and an endless
number of kosher canned tuna mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread.
A fishy smell lingered in the hot, humid air.
Although I hated oatmeal as a child, I’ve learned to enjoy eating plain
oatmeal for breakfast. To keep my glucose levels down, I add no sugar,
no butter, nor honey. Yet I scrape and sometimes lick the bowl to get
the last scrap. No one nags me to hurry up, or tells me I have to eat itall.
How my tastes have changed.
Intoxicated by its earthy scent, everyone loves the smell of my babka
browning in the oven—the crust embracing the soft, sweet belly. Now
three generations later, my kids and grandchildren have fun kneading
their own dough in my kitchen. When freshly baked babka appears on
our brunch table, chatter ceases as cinnamon bursts on our tongues.
Hands, big and small, reach for second, and sometimes third,
helpings. Mom is there with us in spirit. I imagine John’s lips on mycheek as he hovers, and when he thinks no one is looking, he snatchesa slice.

64Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Incomplete / Nam Nguyen

65

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Tonight I Can Write
Diana Raab
(After Neruda Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines )I thought he would be with me
until our end. I had to say goodbye
to him who rests, now, six feet above,
six feet below a night we only knew.
I wanted to be who he awakened toeach morning, not who he waved
goodbye to across our oceanor those stars which lit only
our shadows.
He named me to her, his wife:
she tied his hands, in prayer
behind his back, resigned, exhausted
to what was to be his fate.
I am left an orphan by a love
which promised to give—
shattered now—rich only withimagined memories, the oceans
and its stars my only light.

66

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Afterimage Man / Silas Plum67

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

The First Giant / Silas Plum
68

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Leaving the Farm
Elizabeth Gauffreau
Maggie’s house was the last building standing on a farm in Vermontthat had not been worked since Calvin Coolidge was president, thebarn taken down when she and Tom bought the property, the various
outbuildings, afterthoughts to the barn, now gently collapsed onto
their shallow foundations and covered with vines.
Across the road stood a small hay barn, open in the front andclose to the road. For years, the barn had received no maintenance, itsrough boards weathered gray, its tin roof streaked with rust, yet it had
stood straight and sturdy all those years, keeping the hay dry throughthe winter. It was not until Tom’s death that Maggie noticed signs ofdeterioration, boards coming loose, the tin roof peeling back at thecorners.
No one knew she was alone in the house, alone and a widow. Her niece
did not know, her neighbors did not know. None of Tom’s family
knew. Overnight, Maggie had become a different person, a person
without Tom, a different person for the rest of her life and no one knew.
The coroner knew. He had come and taken Tom’s body away.
One of the men who came with him had stripped the soiled bedding
and taken it with him to be disposed of, opened the windows to air theroom. The windows were open still, two hours later, the dank
November chill now settled throughout the house.
Maggie herself did not know how long she had been alone. She
and Tom had gone to bed together at ten as usual, talked for a bit, readfor a bit, kissed goodnight. He had died in his sleep. Peacefully, so shewould say when she finally roused herself enough to make the phone
calls, having no way of knowing it had been otherwise. If it had beenotherwise, she had not awakened, and he had died alone.
She wondered if the house looked any different, now that there
was a widow living in it instead of a couple, just as it would have looked
different if she and Tom had been a family, with children and a large
mongrel dog. Was the yard suddenly unkempt, chokecherry bushes
covering the downstairs windows, the driveway overgrown with69

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

weeds? Was the paint peeling, the wood rotting, the shingles on theroof tattered and useless against the rain? She herself must be different
now, too, the unfathomable emptiness inside her manifesting itself in
her face, her eyes, her legs, her hands. Would she recognize herself inthe mirror now? Would she dare look in a mirror now?
She had to make the calls. There were so many people to call.
It was not right to withhold Tom’s death from them. But she could notcall them now. How could she call them without knowing how Tom’s
funeral would be staged? They would ask about the arrangements, andif she had nothing to tell them, Tom would be disappointed.
Tom expected it of her, to stage his funeral for maximum
impact, to stage it as he himself would have staged it, so that each
person in attendance would take home only one image, the defining
moment of the scene. The moment when all in attendance celebrate alife lived to its fullest and ended at a fitting time. The moment when
the widow takes solace in the discovery of how many of his students’
lives her husband had changed for the better. The moment when thewidow realizes that she never really knew her husband at all. The
moment when the widow acknowledges for the first time that she istruly alone.
Would the scene be melancholy, tragic, suffused with irony?
Would the weather be sunny, overcast, raining? Would the defining
moment take place in the church or graveside? Would the mourners
be dressed in black or in their ordinary clothes? Would the casket be
ornate or plain, open or closed? Would there be flowers? Would awind be blowing? Would the mourners be leaning on one another forsolace or standing apart in their grief? Would their heads be coveredor bare? Would the minister have a deep voice or a reedy voice? Would
he wear vestments or a suit? For that matter, would the minister be a
man or a woman? Would there be music, poetry, elegy, eulogy?
She did not know. Above all, the funeral could not be ordinary.
Tom would be so hurt if his funeral were ordinary.

Betty Archambault guided her LTD slowly down Snyder Road, the tiny

container of aspirin Norman had sent her out to buy at nine o’clock at night
because his arthritis couldn’t wait until the drugstore opened in the morning
tucked into her coat pocket. The car felt unsteady on the icy road, and Betty
70

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

drove with both hands tight on the steering wheel, the radio turned down toan indecipherable rise and fall of background noise.
Two feet of snow had fallen since morning, and the village crew had
given the road their customary lick and a promise. While they had cleared theworst of the accumulation by noon, they had not put in another appearance
until nearly four o’clock, when Johnny Erno roared past Betty’s house in thevillage truck with his brother Jimmy standing in the back tossing out random
sprays of dirt as he struggled to keep his balance.
The LTD skidded, and Betty sighed as she eased it back into thetracks left by the few cars which traveled the road. Even after living on Snyder
Road for most of her life, driving it in the winter made her nervous. The snow
leveled the landscape so that she could hardly tell what was road and what
was ditch and what was her own front yard.
As Betty approached Maggie Sebastian’s house, she thought she saw
a light in one of the upstairs rooms. She looked up at the house as she passed
it, but the car skidded again, and she could not be sure. Her rearview mirror
showed nothing but the faint red glow of her own tail lights. By the time shereached her house with Norman’s aspirin, she told herself it had been a trickof the light, headlights flashing against window glass. The Sebastian house
was empty.
Maggie awoke with a feeling of anticipation so strong she had to open
her eyes to ground herself in place and time. She was lying comfortably
in her own bed, crystalline winter sunlight glittering through the barewindows of her bedroom, the house perfectly still. Her nose felt cold,and she took her hand from under the covers to touch it. As she slipped
her hand back under the covers, its spotted skin and graceless shapequickly dispelled the sense she had had upon waking of being a young
woman about to set off on an adventure—a young woman who, before
the day was out, would have suddenly, inexplicably fallen in love.
Maggie was not one for summer romances. A summer romance wasdistracting for the participants, not to mention annoying for any
unfortunate observers. Maggie had no time to be distracted when she
played summer stock, not when there were lines to learn and props to
obtain and, most of all, atmosphere to absorb.
71

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Nevertheless, that summer, in the three short months before
she was to begin a graduate program in drama in the fall, Maggie
developed such a crush on the man who played George that she could
not stand to be in the same room with him. Everything about him
flustered her: his fine, handsome face, his soft, faded clothes, his lithe
body, his sardonic humor. He had a beautiful speaking voice, an actor’s
voice, deep and warm and charmingly disingenuous. When it was her
turn to paint flats with him, she would work with her head down, nevertaking her eyes off the brush in her hand, dreading the moment hewould speak to her, leaning back on his heels and smiling.
The first time he spoke to her, he asked the usual questions:
Where are you from? What do you do? Where did you go to school? and when
she answered with three rudimentary facts of her life, he appeared assatisfied with her answers as if he meant to make use of them some day
in a context which had nothing at all to do with her, his smile making
creases in his face, just below the eyes, the muscles of his arm
undulating beneath the skin as he passed the paint brush back andforth across the canvas.
The next time he spoke to her, to comment upon theirdirector’s infuriating lack of temperament during a rehearsal, shethought perhaps she had imagined it, pulling his wonderful voice fromhis throat herself, to linger warmly in her ear as she prepared for bed
three hours later, wondering as she stood at her makeshift closet, threehooks and a clutter of wire hangers, if she dared wear her favorite
outfit that summer, a peasant blouse, full skirt, and sandals, in front ofhim.
At the first cast party of the season, held at the pretentiously
quaint cottage where the director was staying, Tom threw himself at
her feet (she was sitting on a chaise lounge on the patio nursing a glassof rather bitter red wine and he plopped himself down on the foot ofit) and announced, “I failed boilers.” Maggie gaped at him and drew
her feet up.
Tom reached for her hand and took the wine glass from it.
“That’s usually my best line. Piques their interest and all that.”
Maggie tried to think of a clever rejoinder. “I’m not muchinterested in boilers.”
72Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1“Neither am I. That’s why I failed the course.” Tom grimacedand handed the wine glass back to her.
“Oh.” Maggie clutched the glass by its stem. Tom had madeno move to change his position on the chaise.
“I changed my major to English,” he said. “My father was
terribly angry. He thought I would become a teacher. Those who cando, those who can’t . . . you know.”
Maggie inched her legs into a more comfortable position, amere six inches from Tom’s hand. “I tried teaching for a year after I
graduated from college. My mother told me no good would come ofit.”“No good would come of it,” Tom intoned, his voice dipping
low on ‘good.’“That’s right. No good came of it. The children told theirparents they were frightened of me.”“Why would children be frightened of you?”“I’m not sure.” Maggie paused. “They were too frightened tosay!”
Tom threw his head back and roared, reaching forward to
grasp her ankle, where his smooth burning hand remained, for a mere
moment or the rest of her life, Maggie could not say.
Maggie lay in bed a few minutes longer, waiting for the feeling ofanticipation to return. Now that the furniture was gone, the room hadtaken on a different smell, which in her exhaustion the day before she
had been unable to identify. For forty years, her bedroom had had its
own distinct smell of winter: a musk of cedar, wool, and furniturepolish. But now, the room had taken on the smell of the house itself, ofwood and plaster, the way the air outside took on the smell of baretrees before it snowed.
Having movers in the house had tired her terribly, and she had
spent most of the previous day in bed, reading and napping, relievedat last to be left alone, free of the movers’ questions and this? and this?
and this too? and free of Betty’s hustling her out of the drafts thatswirled into the house as the movers carried out a mattress, then abureau, then a cardboard wardrobe filled with summer dresses.
73

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Maggie reached for her bathrobe and shuddered as she got outof bed. The room was painfully cold. She turned on the warmer lightin the bathroom and chose wool slacks, a turtleneck, and a thicksweater from the closet. As she waited for the bathroom to become
warm enough for her to dress, she stood by the window looking out atthe beguiling radiance of sunlight on new snow.
Later, sitting on the window seat in the study with her
breakfast, Maggie wished she could fix herself a nice fire in the woodstove. She had not built a fire since Tom’s death, and the stove hadremained cold, its stale smell of ashes fading as the weeks passed.
Looking out the window to the end of her driveway, she noted without
alarm that she was snowed in. Tommy LaRose would more than likely
come to plow her out before the afternoon light faded. He generally
did her driveway at the end of his regular rounds, after the others, theones who had children to get to the bus stop and jobs to get to.
As she looked back into the room, the empty bookshelves gave
her an unexpected jolt of sadness. She had not gone through Tom’sbooks after he died, keeping them on the shelves where he had leftthem, until she went through her own when she made the decision toleave the farm, a few passed on to relatives, some donated to theCollege, most to the public library. The only book of hers that she heldback for the remainder of her time at the farmhouse was a thickanthology of women poets.
The travel mementoes that had been scattered among thebooks were gone, too, given to the Sebastians—the kylix from Greeceto Tom’s brother, the bright wooden menagerie from Mexico to a
grandnephew’s son, the dish of mismatched pewter buttons offorgotten origin to Tom’s sister. For a brief moment Maggie regretted
having given them away. Their absence reminded her of all thosesummer trips abroad with Tom and her inability to stop herself fromenvisioning the forest reclaiming the farm because they weren’t there
to stop it. They would be standing by a lake in Switzerland or
watching a play in London or taking photographs in Rome, andsuddenly she would see before her eyes the approach to the farm as
though coming upon it from the road, and the pasture would be gone,
the meadow gone, their driveway gone, maples and pines and brambles
74

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

growing there instead, all access to their house blocked, the houseitself unrecognizable, a lichen-covered mass under the trees.
Setting her breakfast tray on the floor, she leaned back andrested her head against the cold window glass as she looked out the
opposite window, her vision unable to see past the for-sale sign
hanging askew in her front yard, its painted yellow post having beenbarely driven into frozen ground.
The telephone rang, and she rose without hesitation to answer
it. She was, she quickly assured herself, neither a misanthrope nor adotard. If she could get to the phone without falling and risking brokenbones, she would answer it. If not, whoever it was could call back.
“Mrs. Sebastian?” A female voice, ingratiating and overly
familiar.
“Speaking.”“Mrs. Sebastian, Maggie, this is Carol, Carol Rollins. I’ve been
trying to call you all morning at Brookfield Commons, but there wasno answer. I had no idea you were still at the house. We have aprospect.”“A prospect for what?”“For the house. A prospective buyer.”“I see.”“He’s already ridden by the house with me, and he seems
interested, very interested. He’s eager to see the inside. I have every
expectation that once he sees it, he will offer our asking price.”
Carol, a thin blonde in her forties, struck Maggie as somehow
feline, her voice in particular. As she gave Maggie a synopsis of theprospect’s financial status, Maggie envisioned a cat with a dead bird inits mouth: carrying the bird into the house, laying it proudly on the
carpet at her master’s feet, looking up expectantly for praise—but
meeting only revulsion.
“I’d like to bring him by today, if possible,” Carol continued.
“What time would be good for you? It’s best to do it while it’s stilllight; before three o’clock would be best.”“I’m sorry, I can’t do it today. I’m right in the middle ofsomething, and I can’t be interrupted.”“Oh, but you won’t be! You just make yourself scarce, and I’ll
show the house.”75

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1“Yes, of course, but today is simply not convenient. Why don’t
I give you a ring tomorrow to set up a time? Good-bye now!” Maggie
hung up before Carol had a chance to say anything else and, shaking
her head at how much of the morning had passed, made her way
through the empty living room to the spare room.
This room was now filled with cardboard boxes, the packing
tape peeling off, brittle with storage and age. Jack Archambault had
carried all of the boxes from their storage places—from the top shelvesof closets, from the shed next to the kitchen and the loft over the
garage—and arranged them so she could begin at the door and work
her way to the back of the room, going through each box and disposingof its contents without having to lift anything heavy.
As she stood in the doorway, she recognized some of theboxes, easily visualizing their contents and the day she had packed
them. The others she would stumble into unprepared. She wondered
if she would find anything of Tom’s, throwing back the flaps of a box
to reveal a jumble of wire, model train pieces, and chunks of quartz,
the sort of junk a boy would keep in the bottom drawer of his bureau
and a man would keep in a box in the garage so he would never forget
what it had been like to be a boy.
The first box she opened contained fabric, some stainedtablecloths she could throw out, and a picture her grandmother had
painted. The fabric would go to her niece Gwen, even though Gwen
hadn’t sewn in years. Maggie packaged the fabric securely in brown
paper and enclosed a note: The rose print is from Austria, one-of-akind, according to the shopkeeper we bought it from, Tom hagglingin German out of one side of his mouth and grumbling in English You
don’t sew! out of the other. The red cotton is from Guatemala—it’svegetable-dyed, so it will bleed. The green gingham my mother Marybought before the First World War and never made up—it is only
thirty-six inches wide, so watch your layout!
The painting, a vase of flowers on white velvet, would also go
to Gwen. Maggie’s grandmother, Gwen’s great-grandmother, haddone the painting the year before she married: it had hung in her
bedroom all her life. Maggie wrapped the package and addressed it
without telling Gwen that for the last thirty years, the painting had
remained packed in a box in a closet because it was not very good. It
76Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

was the sort of thing that young, well-to-do Victorian women did forlack of something better to do, and Tom in particular thought the top
shelf of a closet was the appropriate place to keep it.
The telephone rang as Maggie was carrying the two wrappedpackages into the kitchen. She hesitated only briefly before deciding
not to answer it and returned to the spare room to break down the box
she had just emptied before taking it to the shed.
When the telephone stopped ringing, Maggie thought sheheard the sound of an engine straining. She looked out the kitchen
window but couldn’t see anyone at first, the smooth expanse of whitesnow unbroken except for the for-sale sign. The engine sounded close.
As she continued to look out the window, she saw a jeep at the end of
the driveway, pushing at the hard bank of snow the village plow had
left. That would be Tommy LaRose coming to plow her out now thatthe snow had stopped. He seemed to be having a hard time of it, andshe wondered why. He didn’t usually have that much trouble, evenafter a big storm.
Looking more closely, she saw three people sitting in the jeep.
She watched as it backed up and strained forward, making only small
progress against the snow bank. As she continued to watch, the jeep
finally broke through and quickly pushed the rest of the snow to theside. It backed up again and began inching its way up her driveway,
clearing as it went. When it reached the study window, she saw who
was driving: Jack Archambault. His parents were the two passengers,
Norman in the front, Betty in the seat behind him, leaning forwardwith her hand on Norman’s shoulder.
It did not surprise Maggie to see them. One of them must haveseen her light on last night. She sighed. She should have expected it.
Well, at least they had not brought the sheriff. And since they had
come, she could ask Jack to take the packages for Gwen to the post
office.
The jeep stopped, and the three Archambaults came stomping
through the snow to the ell by the kitchen. Maggie greeted them atthe door. “Well, hello. What brings you out today? You didn’t have toplow my driveway. You know Tommy LaRose does it.”
Betty peered anxiously into the room. “Are you all right,
Maggie? What happened? I didn’t mean to just up and leave you here.”77

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Maggie closed the kitchen door behind Norman, who had
lagged behind his wife and son. “You didn’t. I have a few things left tofinish before I move. It shouldn’t take me much longer.”“But I thought you was leaving the day the movers was here.
You had it all planned out.”
Norman was looking uncomfortable, already making motions
to his wife that he wanted to leave. “Is there anything we can do foryou, Maggie?” he said. “Is there anything you need?”
She picked up the packages on the counter and held them out
to him. “Why, yes, Norman, now that you mention it, there is.” Jacklaughed at this, but Norman stood impassive, his farmer’s mouth set
in a thin, firm line.
“What is it, Maggie?”
She opened a cupboard by the sink and took down her purse.
“I just need these two packages mailed, if you wouldn’t mind.” She took
a bill from her wallet. “Twenty dollars should be enough. Please insure
the larger one for two hundred dollars.”
Norman made no move to take either the money or the two
packages.
Betty took the twenty-dollar bill from Maggie’s hand andreached for the packages. “I’ll take them when I go to town.” Shetucked the twenty-dollar bill into her purse. “Maybe you should staywith us while you finish your things, and I could help you.”
Maggie shook her head. “No, thank you, that’s lovely of you
to offer, but I’ll be fine.”
Norman nodded once and cleared his throat. “We’ll be going
then.” He opened the door, and Jack followed him out to the jeep.
Betty stayed behind. “I didn’t mean to just leave you here. I
thought somebody was coming for you. I had no idea there was nobody
coming for you.”“There are things I need to do,” Maggie said.
Betty nodded. She turned the collar of her coat up before
reaching for the doorknob. “You shouldn’t be staying here alone.”
Maggie folded her arms across her chest as Betty opened thedoor and cold air scuttled across the room. “I know.”78

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1Standing at the window watching the jeep back out of thedriveway, Maggie marveled at how easily and naturally the truth had
slipped out of her.
Over the next week, the weather stayed clear, and Maggie wasinterrupted by at least one telephone call each day, sometimes two:from Carol Rollins, from Brookfield Commons, and of course from
Gwen, pleading with her not to stay in the empty house alone in a
misguided attempt to organize the past for the future. After the secondor third day, Maggie tried leaving the receiver off the hook, but latethat afternoon the sheriff appeared at her kitchen door. She invited him
in, assured him that she was all right, and sent him to the post office
to mail a package. Betty Archambault stopped by twice withcasseroles, which Maggie gratefully accepted. Her task was taking
longer than she had originally anticipated: after she emptied each box,
wrote an explanatory note, packaged its contents, and took the empty
box to the shed, there was another box to go through, and another,and another, and another.
Now she had found a box of silver—chafing dishes andcandlesticks and serving spoons, wedding gifts to an untold number oflong-dead brides. She had to carry each piece to the kitchen, rub off
the tarnish, decipher the monogram, and polish the piece to a shine
before she could decide who should get it and begin writing the notes
and wrapping the packages. She had just begun working on her greatgrandmother’s serving spoon, the silver worn thin and fragile fromyears of use, when the telephone rang.
“Mrs. Sebastian, Maggie, I need an answer. We don’t have anyother nibbles right now. It’s very difficult to sell during the winter.”Wedging the phone between her ear and her shoulder, Maggie
reached for a towel and wiped her hands, staining the towel pink andgray. “You’re calling about the prospect.”“Yes! Are you ready for me to show the house?”
Maggie took the receiver down from her ear and wiped thetowel over it. “When did he want to come?”“Any time, Maggie! We’ve just been waiting for you.”79

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Maggie set the towel down on the counter. “I suppose you
could come this afternoon. In fact, you probably should, before it
snows again. We’re due for another storm.”“That’s wonderful!” Carol said. “Mr. Webber will be sopleased. Will one-thirty be all right? How’s the road? I haven’t beenout there in a couple of weeks.”“The road is fine. You shouldn’t have any trouble with mydriveway either. I shall expect you at one-thirty, then.”“One-thirty it is!”
Maggie went back to the serving spoon and thoughtfully
rubbed the bowl. The sale of the house was her biggest decision, andif she continued to put it off, someone else—Gwen, or more likely,
Gwen’s lawyer—would make the decision for her. Even so, she didn’tknow how she could bear another showing. The peering eyes, the mud
tracked across the floors, the intense discussions of Williamsburg
colors.
Maggie set the polished spoon on the counter. “Tom,” she said
aloud, “it’s not our house anymore. Just remember that.”
It was after three o’clock before Carol and the prospect pulled
into the driveway in Carol’s black Jaguar. Carol got out first, herscarlet coat bright against the snow. The prospect emerged from thecar in a camel’s hair coat, with a paisley scarf tossed around his neck.
His head was bare, his hair carefully blow-dried. His fingernails, when
he graciously extended his hand to Maggie in greeting, would bemanicured.
Maggie stood at the kitchen door watching Carol gingerly
pick her way through the snow in leather boots with three-inch heels,
her gloved hand grasping the prospect’s arm. When they reached theell and stood stamping the snow from their feet, Maggie noticed thatthe prospect was wearing boots—rubber boots with leather tops from
L.L. Bean.
“Maggie, this is Michael Webber from Hanover.”His pants were right, gray wool with a sharp crease, but to gowith his camel’s hair coat and fine wool scarf, he should have beenwearing lawyer’s loafers or wingtips safely encased in black rubbers.
“How do you do, Mrs. Sebastian?” He extended his hand andshook hers before she had a chance to offer it. She looked up from his
80Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

feet and withdrew her hand. “Fine, thank you, Mr. Webber. I’m glad
you could come on such short notice.”
He smiled. “Not at all. Thank you for having me. I’ve beenvery eager to view the property.”
View the property? Who would call her house the property? Whowould come to her house dressed like a lawyer with L.L. Bean bootson his feet? She flashed a look at Carol, the carrion real estate agent.
“Well, now!” said Carol. She took off her gloves, loosening
each tight leather finger before pulling the glove over her knuckles.
“Well, now! If you need to get back to what you were doing, Maggie,
I’d be happy to show Mr. Webber the house.”
Maggie made no move to leave. She turned to Michael
Webber. He had loosened his scarf, she noticed, but he had not
unbuttoned his coat any further than the top button. “This is the
kitchen,” she said. “The floor, the moldings, and the ceiling beams are
original to the house. Everything else is not.
“All the appliances convey,” Maggie continued. “Tell me, Mr.
Webber, are you married? Does your wife like to cook? My husband
and I used to cook lovely meals in this room.” She took Michael
Webber’s arm. “And right through this doorway is the dining room.
It has a built-in china cabinet”—she pulled the doors open andclosed—“and a delightful view of the woods. You’ll notice the patio
through the French doors here—or maybe you won’t—it’s buried insnow. But once summer comes, you and your wife can dine al frescoon the patio and barbeque for your friends and colleagues. Or, Mr.
Webber, are you more of a family man? With children, Mr. Webber?
And what you’re really looking for is a big eat-in kitchen and a den for
the television and wall-to-wall carpet for the little ones to play on. Tellme, Mr. Webber, is that what you’re looking for?”She abruptly stopped speaking and looked out the Frenchdoors at the yard. The mid-afternoon sun cast a cold pink light overthe snow. She felt light-headed and strange, as if she were no longer
in her own body. Carol’s voice buzzed behind her. I’m sorry . . . so sorry...
Maggie spoke as Carol continued her apologies. “If you will
excuse me, I have work to do. I’m sure Mrs. Rollins can answer any
questions you have about the house.” She left the room as quickly as
81

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

she could, gathering up her silver polish and rags and taking them into
the spare room, where she shut the door firmly behind her.
As she lifted another newspaper-swathed bundle from the boxof silver and set it in her lap, she could hear Carol and the prospect
leave the dining room and go back into the kitchen. A door creaked
open and closed; Maggie had neglected to show him the pantry. Then
Carol’s heels sounded across the living room, each step leaving a tiny
indentation in the hundred-and-fifty-year-old floor. The heels pausedby the fireplace—fieldstone hearth, original mantle—and again by oneof the windows—original muntins, original glass. They continued out
into the hall, paused again by the closed door of the spare room, andresumed past the bathroom, up the stairs, and into the study. Maggie
wondered why Carol was bothering to go through with it. She knew
as well as Maggie did what Michael Webber was after, and it wasn’tpine floors, built-ins, or fireplaces.
After she heard their footsteps creak up the stairs to the oldwing, where the bedrooms were, Maggie continued to hear their
voices, but no more footsteps. They must be discussing price. She
reached for a clean rag.
Tom had found the house one hot summer night in mid-July. They
had just gotten back from a trip to Scotland, and even with all thewindows open, the air in their Hanover house was unbearably close.
After changing their clothes and unpacking their bags, they ate a late
supper and left town.
Tom drove with no particular destination in mind, crossing
the river into Vermont. Coming on an unpaved road, which looked thesame as the other unpaved roads he had already passed by, he said,“This looks good,” and turned.
Woods lined both sides of the road, and the air felt cooler thanit had in town. There was a smell of water beyond the trees, and theypassed a sign for a summer camp. Cabin lights glimmered through thetrees, and they could hear the distant sound of girls singing. Tom
slowed the car, pulled as far off the narrow road as he could, and turned
off the engine. The girls’ voices sounded young and clear carried on
the night air with the smell of trees and water.
“‘Simple Gifts’,” Maggie said.
82

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1“What?”“‘Simple Gifts’. The song they’re singing.”“Oh.” Tom leaned his head back on the seat, his angled profile
sharp. “Yes, you’re right. You must have gone to summer camp when
you were a kid.” He fingered his chin. “We all did, I suppose.”“Yes, we did.” But not like he thought, not like that at all. Not
the rented cabin in the Adirondacks, middle class cousins spending
two weeks tanned and disheveled, wrestling on the grass, swimming
at will, while their mothers fretted over lunch and their fathers sat on
the porch with their shirt collars off and books turned over their knees,on vacation. “I went to Girl Scout camp.”“Girl Scout camp?” Tom’s hand came down from his chin.
“You were a Girl Scout? How Fascist of you.”“I know. I loved it.” The uniform, the salutes, the songs, thepledges. “I loved every bit of it. I was an avid Girl Scout, a fanatic Girl
Scout. I even won an award from the President.”“Of the United States?”“Yes. I went to Washington, and he presented it to me. I havea picture of it, of Calvin Coolidge shaking my hand. Haven’t I shown
it to you? I was very impressed with myself.”
Tom shook his head. “Uh uh. How about Calvin Coolidge?”“Oh, he was impressed with me, too.”“I’m sure. I meant were you impressed with him?”“No, not really. I think I made him nervous. I was bigger thanhe.”Tom smiled at that, and his hand went back to his chin. Even
after twenty years of marriage, Maggie felt a quiver of insecurity passthrough her. In middle age, Tom’s body had turned tough and sinewy,
while hers had softened, broadened. She had never been slender; evenas a young woman she had had a healthy, sturdy body, with large
breasts and thick ankles. Sometimes, in the summer, when Tom sat on
the edge of the bed in his pajama bottoms before turning out the light,
she would look at his belly for signs of thickening or sagging and feela twinge of betrayal.
The girls were singing a different song now, one she didn’t
recognize. Tom said, “I wish I’d met you sooner, when you were stilla girl.”83

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1“Why? Don’t you know enough about me already?” The girls’song continued, high and sweet and out of reach. “I was very selfrighteous. And athletic. It’s a bad combination in a girl.”
Headlights flashed in the rearview mirror just then, and Tom
pulled back onto the road. After a few miles, the trees cleared, andMaggie smelled hay. It smelled good, strong and musty. Crickets
chittered in the tall grass on both sides of the road. An owl hooted
from an unseen tree or fencepost. There were no human sounds
anywhere, no houses, no lights, just their car, the engine loud andsteady, the tires crunching gravel, the heavy chrome bumper
deflecting stones, the headlights cutting two small swaths through theimmense summer darkness.
“There’s a house over there,” Tom said, slowing the car andpointing through the windshield. “Do you see it?” He eased the car toa stop. “Let’s go look at it.”“How do you know no one lives there?” Maggie said. “You
don’t want to go nosing around some farmer’s house in the middle ofthe night. You could get shot.”“No one lives there. No one’s lived there for years.” He opened
his door.
Maggie got out of the car and slammed her door, loud enough,she hoped, to wake whoever was in the house so that he would not betaken by surprise. As soon as they had stepped away from the car andstarted toward the house, she knew Tom was right. There was no
driveway, just grass and weeds. Her canvas espadrilles were soon filledwith stones, her skirt wet with dew. When they were about halfway
there, close enough to see broken windows—not all of the glass Carol
had pointed to was original—and a collapsing front porch, Tomturned back. “I’m going to get a flashlight. So we can see inside.”
Even in the dark, Maggie could tell the house had not been
lived in for years. Tom returned and played the flashlight over mottled
wallpaper, crumbling plaster, and a crust of bird droppings on thefloor. When they had looked through as many windows as they could
reach from the ground, Tom clicked off the flashlight, and they headed
back to the car. “Let’s live here,” he said. “We can come out tomorrowin the daylight and find out what town we’re in; then we’ll check the84

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1records to see if anyone owns the place. I’ll bet we can get it for backtaxes.”
Maggie had agreed without hesitation. They had lived in thesame house in Hanover for fifteen years, within walking distance of theCollege and the shops, the same house the other faculty lived in: three
bedrooms, oak floors, kitchen updated every ten years, wallpaper andpaint done every five. A box hedge in front and a clothesline in back,where the neighbors couldn’t see it.
Maggie heard footsteps above her head; the stairs creaked. The
footsteps came closer, followed by a rap on her closed door. She rose
stiffly and opened the door on Carol’s thin, satisfied face, Michael
Webber standing several paces behind her, buttoning his top button
and arranging his fine paisley scarf around his neck. “Did Mr. Webber
see everything he wanted to see?” Maggie asked her.
Carol was drawing on her gloves. “Yes, thank you, we’ll be on
our way now.” She drew Maggie aside and said in a stage whisper, “Ishould have an offer for you in a couple of hours.”
Maggie whispered back, “Don’t bother. I’m not selling.”“I’m ready to see the rest of the property now,” Michael
Webber announced.
Maggie frowned and said to Carol, “I thought you showed him
the entire house.”
Michael Webber interjected before Carol had a chance torespond, “Yes, she did, it’s very nice, but I came to see the property.”
Maggie gestured toward the nearest window. “There it is.”Michael Webber’s smooth brow creased slightly as he turned
to Carol. “You said this property includes fifty acres in addition to thethree around the house.”“Oh, yes,” Carol said, “it does. Wooded.”“I’ll need to see the acreage before I can make an offer.”“Indeed,” Maggie said. “And how do you propose to do that?”
He looked down at his rubber L.L. Bean boots with the leather
tops. “Don’t you have—?”
She shook her head. “Not in the winter. There’s no way to getback there. You’ll have to wait until spring.”
85

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Both Carol’s and Michael Webber’s eyes widened at thethought of their profit melting away in the spring runoff. “Don’t you
have—?” they cried in unison.
“There was an old pair of snowshoes in the shed,” Maggie said,“but the movers should have taken them.”
The three of them marched single-file into the shed. The
snowshoes, simple bear paws, were still there, hanging on a nail on a
stud. Michael Webber looked dubious. “Where are the bindings?”
Maggie pointed to two crumbling rawhide laces draped overthe nail. “It was nice to have met you, Mr. Webber.”
She went back into the kitchen, locking the door behind her.
Standing at the kitchen window, she watched the shed door open onto
the ell as Michael Webber tried to exit the shed with the snowshoes
laced to his feet. When he had gotten himself to the driveway, hestraightened his back, tucked his scarf inside his coat, and set off for
the woods, blond hair whipping around his head, camel’s hair coatflapping, arms and snowshoes flailing. Carol Rollins stood forlornly inthe driveway next to her Jaguar waiting for him to return, his hands
cold but still limber enough to prepare a purchase offer.
The following day, Maggie awoke at first light and could not
go back to sleep. She tried closing her eyes and breathing deeply, but
her irritating wakefulness did not pass. She could tell by the muted
quality of the light in the room that it had snowed the night before.
Waking to the dull light of snow had always given her an odd feeling,a kind of restlessness that brought with it the sense that something
was about to happen if only she could articulate it in time.
She got out of bed and went to the window. An expanse of newsnow stretched from her house to the edge of the woods. There had
been another storm. The room was unimaginably quiet, as if the snowthat encased the house were muffling its customary creaks and groans.
She was snowed in.
Looking down from her window, Maggie felt her throat
constrict, and she had the anxious feeling that she could not remember
where anything was under the snow. Tom used to have a garden—a
big one covering nearly half an acre with corn and tomatoes andzucchini and rows of herbs for cooking. The garden had gone to seed
after his death, but, still, she should know where it was. She should be86

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1able to trace the outline of dried stalks and withered vines andcrumpled weeds which marked its place. Yesterday she had been so
confident as she pointed out the patio to the prospect, Michael
Webber, but now she could see nothing but the smooth snow,
obliterating everything.
Beyond the patio was a swimming pool, its protective coveralso buried in snow, its location evident only by the mound made by
the pump house. She and Tom had installed the pool for swimminglaps when they both developed arthritis. As she stood at the window
looking at the pump house, remembering the sun sparkling off theclean blue water and the feel of the water under her and over her andagainst her skin, she knew she would never swim in the pool again; herbody would never feel that way again.
She did not want to go. She spoke aloud in the empty bedroom.
“I do not want to go.” There, she had said it, and, she supposed, Tom
had heard it. “I do not want to go.”It had been the sensible decision, to sell her house and move
to Brookfield Commons. She was old, damn it, and there was no
denying it. She was eighty-five years old, and although she did not feelas though her body were falling apart, it had lost its strength; there
was a fragility in the core of her bones that she could sense with every
move she made, whether walking across a room, or getting up from achair, or turning over in bed.
Leaving the farm was the sensible thing to do, but she did notwant to go. She would be living in town. She would never again havean unobstructed view from her window. There would always besomething in the way: a telephone pole, a building, a parked car. There
would be no fields, no woods; the air would be filled with noise, traffic
and plumbing and querulous voices, and once she left her house, she
could never go back.
She would have to take her evening meal in the common
dining area. She would have an assigned seat. There would be planned
activities: crafts and greenhouse gardening, poetry classes taught bysome woman from the DAR. The thought was too much to bear. She
turned away from the silence of her window to the silence of her
bedroom. “How am I going to get out of this one, Tom? Can you tellme that, Tom?”87

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Tom gave her no reply, so she dressed and ate a little
breakfast, still waiting to hear his voice, perfectly modulated and alittle sardonic. I’m afraid not. You’ve caught me fresh out of ideas, baby.
After a second cup of coffee, which she knew she shouldn’t have, shewent into the spare room to work, the absence of Tom’s voice
reverberating softly inside her head.
Maggie sat on the window seat in the study wrapped in a hundredyear-old Hudson Bay blanket. The blanket, still thick and tight against
the cold, smelled strongly of old wool and, faintly, cedar. Outside theblanket, the air in the house was cold enough to stiffen the skin of her
face. Outside the house, the temperature was twenty below zero, thebright snow immutable under the cold winter sun.
Maggie had finished going through her things, and the spareroom was now empty, the door closed, the empty boxes carted away,
the floor swept clean of the unidentifiable detritus which falls fromboxes that have been stored for a very long time.
The tarnished silver and yellowed linens, smudged vases andorphaned lengths of tatting, which had seemed so meaningful twomonths before, were gone. The special things, the things with stories
behind them, Maggie had mailed individually, to family members she
thought might appreciate them, the stories, if not the items
themselves. But some of the things, most of the things, while still
usable, had no stories, no significance associated with them at all, andMaggie had boxed them all up together and called Gwen to come andget them, Gwen accepting out of a sense of obligation, Maggie
supposed, to store them in her attic, until her two children acquired
attics of their own. Gwen arrived in her large station wagon with her
husband, clucking over the puddles of melted snow they left on thefloor as they carried the boxes out to the car, exclaiming over the
farm’s isolation and pleading with Maggie to leave it at last.
Maggie did not know what to do, whether she should remain
as she was, unmoving inside the blanket, conserving her energy,
conserving her warmth, or whether she should throw off the blanket
and move around, walk from room to empty room, to generate warmth
herself. For the first time since she had moved her furniture out, herhouse felt empty and cold, all traces of Tom gone, and few traces of88

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

herself left, just her winter clothes, some food in the refrigerator, anda thick anthology of women poets. She would leave no legacy, norecorded performances, no writing of any consequence, no plays, nopoetry, just a few articles published in academic journals and hundredsof letters, if any of the recipients had bothered to keep them.
An odd feeling passed over her, like the shadow of an immense
cloud overhead moving majestically across the ground, blocking out
the sun where she stood, only to continue advancing, leaving her
behind to stand in the sunlight once again. When the feeling had
passed, she looked out the window, at the hard, packed snow of her
empty driveway, the bare brittle branches of the trees which borderedit, the truncated piece of road which fronted it, the half-buried hay barnwhich faced it, and wondered if her staying in the farmhouse wereindeed folly, as Gwen believed, the self-indulgence of an old woman
who had the financial wherewithal to do as she pleased, regardless ofthe consequences to herself or her family—or, even worse, affectation.
In Vermont, the beginning of February was when hard winter set in,when the Norman Archambaults took each armload of wood for the
furnace warily, eyeing the woodpile with increasing trepidation, whenthe Betty Archambaults approached the pantry, the mason jars oftomatoes and green beans, with the same wary eye, just as their sons
who worked construction watched their savings, praying the weather
would break before the money ran out. And she knew none of it, nor
had Tom during his lifetime, their relationship with the land only
aesthetic after all.
The weather did not break for a week, and Maggie spent mostof that time wrapped in the Hudson Bay blanket reading. It felt goodto read poetry by herself in her empty house, and she marveled that
she had existed for so long, days, weeks, months, years without
reading the poem which at that moment she was reading.
At the end of each poem, she paused to look out the window
and consider what had prompted the poet to write the poem, what
experience, prosaic or profound, what feeling, fleeting or sustained,
what image, intense or barely perceived, and to wonder how the poet
had felt when she knew the poem was finished, to imagine her laying
down a pen, cranking a piece of paper out of a typewriter, leaning backin her chair and exulting aloud to an empty room.
89

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

As she read, Maggie slowly began to feel herself again, to feelTom’s presence in the house again. The house did not seem as empty,
the prospect of spring so unimaginable. Maggie heard the sound of acar engine in her driveway. She was not surprised to see that theengine belonged to Carol Rollins’ black Jaguar. Maggie had not heard
from Carol in days, after she had refused to sell her property to thedeveloper from Hanover. She was in for it now, she supposed. Poetry
was no defense against a real estate agent.
Carol’s coat today was a blazing royal blue. The high-heeledboots were the same. The briefcase, a feminine white leather, was also
the same. Maggie opened the kitchen door before Carol had a chance
to knock. “Hello, Carol, won’t you come in.”
“I took a chance on coming out here without calling. I hope
you don’t mind.”“No, not at all.”Carol stepped inside, and Maggie closed the door behind her.
“Let me take your coat,” Maggie said. “We’ll have to talk standing at
the kitchen counter. I have only one chair.”Carol tugged off her tight leather gloves more quickly thanMaggie would have thought possible and handed Maggie her coat.
When Maggie returned from hanging it up, Carol had her briefcase
open, a neat pile of papers on the counter in front of her, and a Mont
Blanc pen balanced delicately in her thin, manicured hand. She lookedup, smiling, as Maggie entered the room. Maggie stood next to her,also smiling, and ceremoniously placed her clasped hands on the
counter in front of her.
“I thought now would be a good time to assess where we arewith the sale of your house,” Carol said, gesturing with the pen, “to see
if you want to make an adjustment to the price or have any work done
before the spring buyers come out. Although that’s still a couple ofmonths away, of course. Now, I believe Michael Webber is stillinterested in your property, if you would like me to contact him. I’m
not sure where he would stand on price right now, but I would
certainly be willing to discuss it with him.”
Maggie nodded and said, “Nice pen. Mont Blanc?”

90

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1“Yes, it is, thank you. I received it as a gift. At a closing, as amatter of fact. Now, what do you think about my approaching Michael
Webber?”Maggie did not respond, watching as Carol fiddled with thepen. Then she said, “I wonder what kind of poetry someone would
write with a pen like that.”
Carol looked down at the pen in her hand, nonplussed.
“As for your contacting Michael Webber,” Maggie went on,“it won’t be necessary. I’ve decided not to sell.”Maggie watched as the pen slipped from Carol’s hand androlled across the counter and onto the floor, where it continued to roll
until it reached the baseboard on the opposite side of the room.
“As you can see, the house has settled some,” Maggie said.
Carol retrieved her pen from the floor. When she resumed herplace at the counter, her face was flushed. “I don’t understand. You’vebought into an assisted living community. You don’t even havefurniture here. You signed a six-month listing!”“True,” Maggie said, “however, since I’m not going to sell thehouse, the listing is moot.” Maggie picked up the pile of papers,
straightened their edges once, twice on the counter, and replaced themin Carol’s briefcase. “So! There we are. I’ll get your coat.”
After Carol had pulled away in the black Jaguar, the tires
spinning petulantly in the snow, Maggie fixed herself a cup of tea andwent into the study to sit on the window seat, where she could have alittle chuckle with Tom and look outside for a harbinger of spring,
however slight.
What would she have to do to get her furniture moved backto the farm in time for spring? she mused, blowing gently across the
hot tea. And her clothes. She had to get her clothes back. She couldn’t
very well wear wool through the summer, now could she?
Come spring, she would plant a little garden, just a little one,a corner of the one Tom had abandoned, the corner closest to thehouse, with tomatoes and herbs and Bibb lettuce. She would have thepool cleaned, and keep it blue and sparkling throughout the summer.
Although she no longer trusted herself alone in the water, she could
sit out on a chaise by the pool and wait for the handsome young man
who played George to throw himself at her feet.
91

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Who would have thought it?
Epilogue
Maggie looked out the window at the leaves of a maple tree. From herpropped position on the bed, she could see into the crown of the tree,
where heavy black power lines twisted through the leaves andbranches. Judging from the dark green of the leaves, she thought it
must be summer, but she could not be sure. The window she waslooking through did not open.
If it were indeed summer, Gwen’s children might come aroundfor a visit, with their spouses and young children, staying for an
awkward half hour or so before escaping back to the suburbs whence
they came. Maggie turned from the window and said aloud, “Thesuburbs whence they came.” She listened closely, reconsidered the fullstop, and said it again, this time with an ellipsis: “The suburbs whence
they came . . . .” A very nice line. Tom could not have said it better
himself.
Gwen came regularly, the last weekend of the month, herspeech halting, her hands smelling of soap. She would not enter theroom without something to leave for Maggie, a box of flavored teas,scented hand lotion, the latest New Yorker. Sometimes her husband
came with her; more often he did not. Betty Archambault also came tosee her once a month, until Norman passed away, when she began
coming every week, after Sunday mass.
For quite some time, Maggie had been aware of a need to moveher bowels, which she finally acknowledged as futile to ignore. She
managed to get her legs out of the covers and sit up but was unable
maneuver herself off the high bed to stand on the floor. She tried one
last time, cursing herself for being so fearful of a fall, reached over toher pillow, and pressed the call button. Within moments, an aideappeared, who shouted as she approached the bed, “What can I do foryou, hon?”“For a start, stop calling me hon. I don’t like it.”
The aide laughed as she always did, and said, “Sure, sweetie,
what can I do for you?”
Maggie sighed. “I need to use the bathroom.”92

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1“You want a bedpan?”“No. I just need help getting off the bed.”“Okay, sweetie.” The aide helped Maggie off the bed and led
her to the bathroom, with Maggie trying and failing to shrug the aide’s
hand off her shoulder. “Okay, sweetie, there you go.”Maggie made no move toward the toilet. “Could you please
shut the door?”“Sorry, sweetie, can’t. If you call for help toileting, I gotta staywith you. Sorry, hon.”“Please.”The aide turned around but left the door open. Maggie
lowered herself onto the toilet and closed her eyes.
Once back in bed, pillows arranged, covers tucked, handpatted, Maggie heard a voice crying from down the hall. “No,” it cried,“no, no, no!” The voice paused, gathering enough strength to shout,just once, “I don’t want to!” before it resumed crying “no” once again.
Maggie was unable to determine whether the voice belonged to a man
or a woman. The voice was cracked with age and distorted bydesperation, and her own hearing had dulled. There was no pattern towhen the voice would cry out; it did not seem to be tied to any of thedaily routines of the place, the giving of medications, the changing of
bed linens, the serving of meals.
The voice stopped, resumed, then stopped for good. Maggie
looked out the window as the leaves of the maple tree swayed to asilent, unfelt breeze. She had become accustomed to the tree’s slow,
random rhythms and could watch them for hours, the leaves’ shapeand movement evocative of pleasant things just beyond memory.

93

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

IN 204 / Nina Wilson

94Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

A Glimpse
Debbie Robson
I read once that a woman walking in
her local park encountered a pixelated
fall of light separating her from the other side—the rest of the park, people and the houseson the street. Suddenly miniature stars
imploded and fell, the filament drapery
twinkling and revealing a slightly different
but not completely other world.
Familiar houses in unfamiliar colors,
strange cars, the fabric of people’s clothes
unrecognizable. People going about theirbusiness in a completely natural way despite
her observation. Another dimension it seems.
But had she crossed over or merely glimpsed?
I’m glimpsing all the time. No torn curtain
just old houses that call to me and turntheir normally implacable faces my way.
Front doors, brick porches, windows, eaves
a grinning fenestration. Oh yes, my paintwasn’t always peeling. You see he’s twentyone again, leaning on the porch with his
slicked back hair and tight jeans. Her skirt
ruffles as she leans to kiss him. Frangipanis
reappear in front yards, curtains billow
from paint stuck, card-boarded windows.
Young people, three abreast, run laughing
down that overgrown path to a backyard.
And my house on Cypress Street has
reappeared and with it a new alternative.

95

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Chebyshev Spectral Overcast / Ryota Matsumoto

96Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Recursive Topography of Uncertainty / Ryota Matsumoto97

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Review of Idiot Wind: A Memoir by Peter Kaldheim(published by Canongate, August 2019)
Review by Neal Lipschutz
This readable memoir of being down and out (and eventually restored)in mid-1980s America has an unusual publishing history. As recounted
in the book, its writing can reasonably be said to have been about
thirty years in the making. Its appearance marks the full-lengthauthorial debut for an enterprising seventy-year-old.
The moniker “Idiot Wind” is borrowed from a 1974 Bob Dylan
song title and wailed refrain. To Peter Kaldheim, the idiot wind is asiren call to immediate gratification and a weakness of will. For him,
it’s a gust of addiction and self-destruction. It blew through his Ivy
League education and promising start in book publishing. It knocked
down a marriage and transformed him into a small-time New York
City cocaine salesman, one so fond of his own product that itflummoxed any attempt at profit or even solvency. If Mr. Dylan’s song
lyrics more broadly nod to the misconceptions created by popular
culture and the corrosive cult of celebrity, it’s of no moment. Mr.
Kaldheim successfully adopts the phrase for his own purposes.
The story told is of one man’s fall and redemption, though Mr.
Kaldheim concedes some guilt about past actions and broken
relationships won’t completely fade. Indirectly, it’s also a paean to thevastness of the American road and the reinvention and second chances
buried in those open spaces. Those opportunities may harken most to
the collapsed with the already established skills and erudition enjoyedby the author, who understands his predicament and has a keen senseof the world around him. Throughout his travails, Mr. Kaldheim
invokes the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” as a cosmic marker
to his own journey. He states his admiration of great writers known
for their alcohol consumption as well as their art. “By romanticizing
their excesses, I suckered myself into believing I could do the same . .
. .”After scamming a cocaine wholesaler in the winter of 1987,
Mr. Kaldheim exited New York to escape the gangster’s wrath, asking
a Greyhound bus clerk in time-honored tradition to put him on a bus
98

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

as far as his meager dollars would allow. That’s followed by his
hitchhiking odyssey across the nation. The goal is to get to San
Francisco, where an old friend has dangled a job in construction.
When that opportunity fades while the author is already on the road,circumstance leads him instead toward the Pacific Northwest. There’s
a double past tense in this journey for the current reader. The US of
1987 was a far cry from the post-World-War-II years that set thestage for the highs and lows of Keruoac’s “On the Road” characters.
The saga of writer as down-and-out misfit with thumb in the air hadby the mid-1980s already run its course, though Mr. Kaldheim doesbring it new life as a next-generation fan of the beats. Read now, in anage of social media permanence and virtual as well as physicalexistence, the distance between coasts doesn’t seem nearly as great andthe ability to simply disappear and wind up three thousand miles away
as a new person is seriously hard to fathom. One small example of thevery different time: a homeless Mr. Kaldheim has to track down a place
he can receive mail and then await references to arrive courtesy of the
US Postal Service when he applies for a job.
Nothing truly outrageous happens to Mr. Kaldheim as hetraverses penniless across America. That fact enhances the book. The
path, while certainly difficult and at times scary, feels real. It’s nodoubt trying on his soul and his soles (he hobbles through most of his
travels in ill-fitting boots). Interspersed with the road narrative are
glimpses of the author’s earlier life and a rehashing of another nadir,time spent in jail at Rikers Island that led to a split with his parents.
But little is written about the author’s inner throes as he shakes his
previous constant thirsts for cocaine and alcohol. Once on the road, hedoesn’t seem tempted to indulge, even when in the company ofregularly swilling down and outers. Except for a long ride with ajudgmental Vietnam veteran (to whom the author is generally
sympathetic and ready to lay blame on himself for the fraught
relationship), Mr. Kaldheim is regularly the fortunate recipient of thegood will of a fellowship of the road. Whether its advice on
successfully hopping freight trains or managing the generous shelter
and welfare systems of Portland, Ore., the author usually finds a
helping hand. Even potential enemies—train brakemen and police
officers—are less than heavy-handed. And then there’s the American99

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

West, in its natural beauty and boundlessness, offering an aweinspiring landscape for the author’s personal transformation.

Face to Face 1 / Jack Bordnick100Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Face to Face 2 / Jack Bordnick101Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Contributors
Susan Bloch’s stories have won prizes in the Traveler’s Tales Solas Awards
and received notable mention in Best American Essays 2017. She has been
published in a variety of magazines and literary journals such as The Forward,
Entropy, The Citron Review, STORGY, Pif Magazine, Tikkun, and HuffPost.
Jack Bordnick’s sculptures incorporate surrealistic, mythological andmagical imagery—often with whimsical overtones—aimed at provoking
experiences and self-reflections. He seeks to unbalance rational minds, andthe predominant imagery deals mostly with facial expressions of both livingand “non-living” beings, and things that speak in their own languages. The
result is textural, metallic and mixed-media assemblages that have beenassembled, disassembled and reassembled, becoming abstractions unto
themselves. Bordnick invites you to come and enjoy their stories.
Lara Chapman is a fine art nature photographer, writer and university
professor based out of West Palm Beach, Florida. Lara’s photographs earned
several awards and distinctions and can be found on the walls of galleries andmuseums throughout the East Coast of the United States as well as Florida’s
west coast. She has published three photography and poetry books to date.
When she is not teaching or photographing nature, she loves to spend timewith her husband, Patrick, and two children, Nathan and Benjamin.
Josie Del Castillo is a Brownsville artist pursuing her MFA from the
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She has exhibited throughout thestate, and most recently in galleries in California, Chicago, San Francisco, andNew York. Del Castillo’s work consists of a series of self-portraits as well as
portraits of others whom she perceives as reflections of herself and a sourceof human inspiration. Personal and emotional connections are often
symbolically made to capture the essence of her subjects. Self-worth andpersonal insecurities are common themes. Much of her work often deals withthe subjects of mental health and anxiety, self-esteem, and growing up in the
Rio Grande Valley. Instead of emphasizing the dark connotations of mental
health issues, Del Castillo challenges and confronts these themes throughvibrant and colorful depictions of her subjects. Many works include MexicanAmerican cultural iconography and people raised in the Rio Grande Valley.
Kimberly Diaz studied Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St.
Petersburg, Florida. Her work has appeared in the Montana Mouthful, Eckerd
Review, Fleas on the Dog, and is forthcoming in a couple of anthologies. She iscurrently working on a collection of creative nonfiction and maybe a novel.
102

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Tessa Ekstrom is an emerging poet in Portland, Oregon, who is pursuing a
BS in biochemistry. Her work has been published by Prometheus Dreaming andBlue Literary Magazine.
Devon Fulford is a writer and English instructor at Colorado State
University. While most of her prior publication history has been ineducational writing, she has been honored with poetry, nonfiction, andfictional publication credits in Aurora: The Allegory Ridge Poetry Anthology,
Inklette Magazine, the Same literary journal, Handbasket Zine,
Foundpolaroids.com, and others. Fulford resides on the front range of the
Rocky Mountains with her partner Levi and their chocolate Labrador, The
Walrus. In pockets of spare time, she can be found hiking with her family andriding her Triumph Street Twin motorbike.
Elizabeth Gauffreau is the Assistant Dean of Curriculum and Assessment at
Champlain College Online in Burlington, Vermont. Recent fiction
publications include Dash, Pinyon, Aji, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, andEvening Street Review. Recent poetry publications include One Sentence Poems,
Smoky Quartz, Medical Literary Messenger, The Ekphrastic Review, and Pinyon.
Her debut novel, Telling Sonny, was published by Adelaide Books in 2018.
Learn more about her work at http://lizgauffreau.com.
Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre artist living in Tucson, Arizona. Her
visual art and poetry have appeared in Lana Turner, High Shelf Press,
JuxtaProse, Sunspot Lit, and Bat City Review. She has poems forthcoming in
The Impossible Beast: Poems of Queer Eroticism (Damaged Goods Press). Her
double debut poetry chapbook, Fever Dream / Take Heart (Cathexis
Northwest Press, 2020), features paintings from her LGBTQIA+ series
Cloudshow | Utopia. You can find Grenier at valyntinagrenier.com or on
Instagram @valyntinagrenier.
Doley Henderson is a Toronto writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her
work is featured in The Gaspereau Review, The Sunlight Press, The New Guard
online journal BANG!, Blank Spaces, Prometheus Dreaming, and The Write
Launch. Her novel Sea Change has been accepted in The Writer’s Hotel fiction
conference in NYC, June 2020. Henderson enjoys telling a story with rhythm,
texture, a strong voice, wit and grit.
Anton Franz Hoeger was born 1956 in Munich, Germany. Although mainly
self-taught, his artistic roots go back to the Wiener Malschule, where he wastaught by a master student of Professor Ernst Fuchs.

103Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Candice Kelsey’s debut book of poetry, Still I am Pushing, releases March 6th
with Finishing Line Press. Her first nonfiction book explored adolescentidentity in the age of social media and was recognized as an Amazon.com Top
Ten Parenting Book in 2007. Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, The
Cortland Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other journals. A finalist
for Poetry Quarterly’s Rebecca Lard Award, Kelsey’s creative nonfiction was
nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She is an educator of twenty years’
standing, and is devoted to working with young writers. An Ohio native, she
lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.
Neal Lipschutz’s book reviews have appeared in a number of publications.
He has also published short fiction in several digital and print publications.
Roeethyll Lunn is a lifetime learner and educator. She has a BFA in
Broadcast Media from Morris College, Sumter, South Carolina, and an MFA
in English and Writing from Long Island University, Southampton, NewYork.
Alan Lyons is an artist from Scotland specializing in drawing and painting.
Landscape, nature, and human involvement in it are of ongoing concern tohis practice. The color and material of oil paints or acrylics allow him to
explore their organic or inorganic makeup.
Ryota Matsumoto is an artist, designer, and urban planner. Born in Tokyo,
he was raised in Hong Kong and Japan. He received a Master of Architecturefrom University of Pennsylvania in 2007 after studying at Architectural
Association in London and Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow
School of Art in the early 90’s. His art and built work are featured innumerous publications and exhibitions internationally.
Nam Nguyen is a multimedia artist who explores the unexplored.
Robert Oehl’s art is very personal. He’s tried to put aside vanity and intent,
and let the photographs create their own subject and narrative. His diaristic
self-portraits are self-deprecating, vulnerable, raw, humorous, and histrionic;
they are, for him, self-examinations of identity, as well as raw material for a
personal mythology. Oehl is a process-oriented photographer using a variety
of rudimentary tools. He uses simple pinhole and zone plate cameras
requiring long exposures. Images produced with these cameras arecharacteristically dreamlike, dark, softly focused (grainy), and seem better
suited to a past era. In a predominantly digital world, Oehl’s process is totally
analog, employing film, paper, and chemical manipulation.

104

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

A confessed outsider, Chicago’s J. Ray Paradiso is a recovering academic in
the process of refreshing himself as an experiMENTAL writer and street
photographer. His work has appeared in dozens of publications online and in
print. Equipped with cRaZy quilt graduate degrees in both Business
Administration and Philosophy, he labors to fill temporal-spatial, psychosocial holes and, on good days, to enjoy the flow. All of his work is dedicatedto his true love, sweet muse and bodyguard, Suzi Skoski Wosker Doski.
Ernst Perdriel was Born in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) in 1974 and lives in
Eastern Townships region, Quebec, Canada. Focusing on recycled art,
designer and horticulture, Perdriel’s mission of life is to transmit the passionof the cultural and environmental heritage through arts, lifestyle, and sharingof knowledge. The artist has created with the waste of human civilization
since 1995. The scale of the creations goes from the 2D format to interior
design and landscaping.
At age twelve, Silas Plum won the East Coast POG tournament. The prize
was five hundred POGs, small collectible cardboard circles, each with an
identical red and blue design on the front. From that moment on, he became
obsessed with the question of value. Why were these important? How could
anything not necessary for survival be worth more than anything that was?
Does artistic sentiment have value? The POG’s are gone, but the questions
remain. Through assemblages of defunct currency, discarded photographs,
and long-forgotten illustrations, Silas Plum challenges the idea of objectivevs subjective value. He believes strongly in the tired old maxim that the true
value of an object is more than the sum of its parts, that the gut is a truthteller, and that the Aristotelian notion of learning-by-doing is the best teacher
around. Judge his worth at silasplum.com.
Diana Raab, PhD, is an award-winning memoirist, poet, blogger, speaker,
and author of ten books and over one thousand articles and poems. She’s also
editor of two anthologies, Writers on the Edge: 22 Writers Speak About Addiction
and Dependency, and Writers and Their Notebooks. Raab’s two memoirs are
Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal, and Healing withWords: A Writer’s Cancer Journey. She blogs for Psychology Today, Thrive
Global, Sixty and Me, and PsychCentral and is frequently a guest blogger forvarious other sites. Her two latest books are, Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step
Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life, and Writing for Bliss:
A Companion Journal. Visit: www.dianaraab.com.

105

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

Debbie Robson has been writing poetry since the 1990s and has performedsome of her poems on radio, at Sydney poetry events, in the Blue Mountains,and more recently as part of the Women of Words project in Newcastle.
Esther Sadoff currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she teaches English
to gifted and talented middle school students. She has a bachelor’s degreefrom Sarah Lawrence College where she studied literature as well as a Masterof Education from The Ohio State University. Her poems have been featured
or are forthcoming in The 2River View, The Bookends Review, River River,
SWIMM, and Marathon Literary Review.
Zach Sheneman obtained his BA in Writing from Grand Valley State
University. He resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan with his wife and two sons.
His work has been published in The Pinch Journal, Glass Mountain, andHippocampus.
Lenora Steele’s short prose and poetry have been published in periodicals in
Canada and Ireland such as Event, Cranog Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Room,
Wow, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review. Other works have beenreprinted in Monitor Books’ An Anthology of Magazine Verse and Harcourt
Canada’s Elements of English 11. She lives where the tidal bore brings the sea
upriver twice a day in Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Pasquale Trozzolo is an entrepreneur and founder of Trozzolo
Communications Group, one of the leading advertising and public relations
firms in the Midwest. In addition to building his business, he also spent time
as a racecar driver, grad school professor, and magazine publisher. Now withtoo much time on his hands, he continues to complicate his life by living out
as many retirement clichés as possible. He’s up to the Ps.
Ping Wang is a fashion photographer and art director based in New York.
He graduated from School of Visual Arts with a Master’s Degree in Digital
Photography. Ping specialized in combining fashion and fine art with his
unique aesthetics. His love for surreal and metaphysical art has inspired him
to do special works. Ping’s artwork has exhibited in the US, France, China,
Japan and Australia, among other places. In 2016, Ping was awarded theEmerging Photographer of the Year by Photo District News after competing
against tens of thousands of photographers worldwide. In 2018, his work was
been awarded a Gold Winner of Fine Art Portfolio by the Tokyo
International Foto Award.
Walter Weinschenk is an attorney by day but spends as much time as
possible as a writer, photographer and musician. Until a few years ago, he106Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

wrote short stories exclusively. Now he divides his time equally between
poetry and prose. His writing has appeared in the Carolina Quarterly and The
Esthetic Apostle. He lives in a suburb just outside Washington, DC.
Nina Wilson is a graduate of Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She lives inIndianola, Iowa with her family. She loves history, especially early English
history, photography, traveling, fishing, and camping.
Haolun Xu is twenty-four years old and was born in Nanning, China. He
immigrated to the United States in 1999. He was raised in central New Jersey
and is currently studying Political Science and English at Rutgers University.
Transitioning from a background in journalism and activism, he spends histime between writing poetry and the local seashore.

107

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1

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 digitalquarterly editions are produced per year. In 2019, Sunspot released one print
volume with selected work from the digital editions. Barring solar flares, thenumber of print editions will increase as the journal grows.

Support Sunspot Lit
Today more than ever, literary journals are forces of change in the world.
Sunspot Lit is funded entirely through private means. Every donation, evenones as small as a dollar, makes a difference. Take a moment to drop a few
bucks into the Sunspot magnetic field flux. Your donation helps ensure that
this phenomenon lifts every voice into the stratosphere.
A PayPal link on the website makes it easy to send a tip, donate
enough to publish the next digital edition, or go supernova and fund the next
print edition. Please visit https://sunspotlit.com/support for details.

Advertise in Sunspot
Classified ads are available in quarterly digital editions and special editions.
Spread the word about your books, gallery events, writing and arts contests,
residency programs, awards, workshops, and more. All classified ads are also
posted on the website’s classified page. Ad rate: $150 for up to 25 words; $5
for each additional word.
Print ads are available for all editions. Print ads are black and white
only, with digital ads available in color. A full page is $850, a half page is$450, and a quarter page is $295. Buy two ads of the same size for the same
issue or for two sequential issues to receive a 10% discount. Set up three ormore ads and receive a 15% discount.
Sunspot’s groovy graphic designer can set up your ad to yourspecifications. Flat rate of $325, and the design is yours to use multiple times
in Sunspot or any other magazine.