Sunspot Literary Journal
Volume 4 Issue #1 © 2022 Sun Dogs Creations

Changing the World
Through Words and Art

Sunspot Literary Journal

Volume 4, Issue 1

Table of Contents
Hair / Candice Kelsey / 1
Activation of a Sleeper Cell Poet / Karen Poppy / 2
The Red Sea / Bianca Giglio / 4
Hartsong / Erin Birdsall / 6
How radiant, how fearful to behold / Kate Strong Stadt / 26
In This World Love / JJ Chen Henderson / 27
Negative Capability / Roeethyll Lunn / 29
My Father Built a Raft / Ron Pullins / 32
Another Dream About Death / Ryan Mattern / 33
Editor’s Prize: Hope on the Horizon / Lindsey Morrison Grant / 34
Graffiti Reimagined / Linsey Morrison Grant / 35
Pick Me a Color / Travis Stephens / 36
The Sound Cicadas Make / Garrett Candrea / 37
Nobody’s Princess / Meg Hurtado Bloom / 56
Something In the Water / Federica Santini / 60
We Haven’t Eaten / Christopher Bowen / 62
Waiting for the Commands / Jose Varghese / 63
Inception
Winner: Bowl City Splash Page / Dave Sims / 65
Runner-up: Orpheus Far from the Abyss / Meagan Daine / 66
Finalist: This Summer I Hear the Gun / Noah Ruiz / 67
Finalist: Eye of the Sun / Evelyn M / 69

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Finalist: Spiderland / DS Higdon / 70
Finalist: Naiads / Janna Urschel / 71
Culmination
Winner: Ad Lucem Aeternam / HR Harper / 72
Finalist: Blue Mustang; Red Rose / Jeanne Wilkinson / 73
Finalist: Final Crises / Haylee Millikan / 74
Finalist: Motion / Noah Ruiz / 75
Finalist: for want of parchment / Claude Clayton Smith / 76Contributors / 77
Cover: Melting Demon Gravel Pit / Christopher Paul Brown

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Hair
Candice Kelsey
I like the moments when my hair is almost dry / wading away fromdamp / the lingering between private / & public self / between
familiar, naked, wet / a body / & unfamiliar, clothed, dry / a shapeentering the world / like a yawn / or the evidence of birth / each of us
once a newborn swathed in womb-remnants / wet / no stopping thenurse from toweling our head. / Why are we so quick to rid ourselvesof life / of the signs of struggle / that first quest for light / to findbreath’s rhythm? / Today the sun dries my hair / doing what it does
/ every day / we rarely notice how it keeps us / in its bounty / while
pushing us into the day / dry & proper / pretending we are ready toenter this world / until we find reason to wash again— / I like themoments between past and present / this chrysalis mind / between
water & earth / where Time loses power to the baptismal / amniotic/ heavy rain / sweat / like the pulse of a dishwasher / the sound of me
not on my phone / the skip in my breath as I see a fox by the garden,
just waiting to be a poem / & I remember Roland Barthes once said
The author enters into his own death, writing begins. / We live but
we don’t / sometimes we can’t. / Like my student’s father / whosuffered post-COVID psychosis which drove him to Clarks Hill Lake
/ where he left a note / & tied a car battery to his chest / I imagine
him wading out, half wet for a moment / —his hair / I can’t stop
thinking of it.

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Activation of a Sleeper Cell Poet
Karen Poppy
If I tell the true story of how I came back to writing, no one would
believe me. So trauma tells me, whispering, You will never be believed.
My writing pushes back against trauma, against doubts. It
also celebrates its own reawakening after almost twenty years ofcreative silence. My writing tells me, and others: you are not alone.
For this, I give thanks to generous writers who continue toinspire me through their bravery and nurture my spirit. I have also
thanked the very people who traumatized me, which must have
perplexed them. Doing so also perplexed me and still does. Why
should I thank them?
They did wrong, and I reacted as a hunted animal, running
fast on the course of my own adrenaline, words filling pages insimultaneous action of distancing and bringing myself too close. I
wrote about that too, in a poem published in my first chapbook, Crack
Open/Emergency: “We avoid the shards, but/Some cuts arenecessary./For we work close/To the pain./Closer than anybody.”
In this close interaction with pain, kind human connections
saved me. First, though, kind human connections gave me support todistance less from the pain.
Through it all, I wrote and wrote, and I continue to write.
As if pages could create a barrier between me and those whohurt me. As if pages could provide me with understanding of what they
did to me and why. As if pages could reconcile us, we who never had abond other than shared social circles and personal interests. I initiallythought that we had the bond of mutual human decency, but given
their actions, this expectation proved unfounded.
They, with power and prestige. Their feeling that they could
do anything and get away with it. They laughed at me, their temporary
quarry.
One day, I may write exactly what happened. It is my story totell. The other option often holds more sway. To keep writing, as I do,
and let them go to their fates. My prediction is, one will be briefly
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lionized and the other will become a biographical footnote. Then they
will fade into oblivion. By contrast, true poets and poetry are
immortal.
The wise voice says, either way, keep writing—and never rely
on outcomes.

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The Red Sea
Bianca Giglio
i.
there is sea water everywhere
it’s in my memories
in my nightmares
it’s streaming down the road
carrying flowers with it
and sashes that read our deepest condolences
it’s carrying her butchered bodyout to the oceanand everyone can see her heart
but no one can see her hands
her hands—the butcher
her body—the lamb
her heart—just another dried field
just another abandoned buildingii.
sorry about the messthat’s what her next of kin told me
when there were boxes everywhere
when they were just trying to find a home
someplace more than temporary
someplace that smelled like them again
as it so happens, that’s just what i’ve been
trying to find a way to tell them all this time
without making them relive everything:4

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i’m sorry about the messi’m sorry the couch was white
i’m sorry we didn’t scrub harder
i’m sorry about the blankets, the pillows, the missing remote
i’m sorry if you could still see the stains
the yellow spots where you know blood used to bereally, there’s only so much a spray bottle
and a roll of paper towels can do—
this i know theoreticallythe enormity of the red sea is too great
and the pain ran deeper than the blood anywayiii.
mary, marysea and rosary
how does your garden grow?
with lampwork beads
and apple seeds
and the graves all in a row

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Hartsong
Erin Birdsall
Mam is doing it again: waiting at the kitchen window above the leaky
tap, staring down the side of the mountain to the line where the bog
kisses the first slender birches of Tully’s Wood. She is listening forsomething I can’t hear, untouchable as her own dead mam’s crystal.
The chipped blue mug in my hand clinks as I set it down on
the counter, and her head jerks. “You’re using your sister’s mug,” shesays.
“All the other ones are dirty.”“But it’s hers.”“I was making some tea. Don’t make a fuss.”“That’s your sister’s mug, so. Katie’s coming home tonight. I
can feel it. No reason to treat her things like Father Aloysius alreadysaid the words at her grave.”
Back it goes, sitting in a circle of dust.
“You’ve never been much for sense. Even at eighteen years ofage. Not a feather of sense in that great odd head,” she mutters, andturns toward the window.
With Mam, there are three things I can’t do.
The first is use the blue mug.
The second is talk about my Da. When I do that, she pulls at
her hair and presses her thumbs into her bottom teeth and doesn’t talkto me for days. Once in a while she’ll be so upset that she’ll forget to
go to town to do the shopping, so when I was younger, sometimes the
only thing left were the beers in the fridge. That second rule wasn’t
hard to follow, when breaking it meant I’d starve.
And the third thing I only tried once ten years ago, when I
was eight and Katie was ten. Mam chased us round the house and beatus raw with a copy of Finnegan’s Wake when she caught us. To this day
I don’t like reading anything longer than two hundred pages. Trying
to follow my runaway sister into the wood wasn’t worth the bruises.
They never stopped Katie though. That was only the first time
my sister disappeared—over the years she’d wander back and forth6

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from home. She got in a fair bit of trouble with Mam and the local
guards for being in and out of school, at least the first few times—
before the whole town labeled her a lost cause, before Mam “went awaywith the fairies” and started having those strange dreams of hers. At
first, I hadn’t minded Katie leaving. I thought Mam would eventually
let me drink out of whatever mug I chose. But no, that’s Katie’s mug.
She’ll be home soon. Mam got quiet when Katie was gone. Everything
was quiet, then.
I open the cupboard, find a different mug, grab some milk andtwo bags of Barry’s, and put the kettle on. I make two cups, one forme, one for Mam. Out the window, a deer leaps across the bog. We
watch as it disappears into shadow.
I am seven. Da says that’s the age of wisdom, whatever that means. I
am on my Da’s knee and his white whiskers scratch my face. He is
showing me the picture of the brave warrior Oisín on a snowy horsewith Queen Niamh standing beside him with all her pretty golden hair.
I wish I had her golden hair instead of plain old brown. I love the Good
People. They are all so beautiful and magical and the forests are so
thick and green and alive. My Da’s voice swells up like the sea, like all
the Atlantic is inside his belly.
But then! Oh, my darling! The girth around Embarr’s great
white breast snapped! he says. And he snaps his fingers right then andhis dark eyes pop open wide. I squeal, What happened next?! What
happened to Oisín?!
And Da says, I’ll tell you! The magic girth fell clear off
Embarr, and poor Oisín fell to the ground of the motherland, where
all his three hundred years caught up to him in one moment, and hewithered up and died right then and there!
My Da crams his eyes tight, crumples onto the rug, making agreat boom as he goes, and shivers up into the tiniest ball he can, which
isn’t very tiny because of his great belly. I jump onto him and he grunts
and chuckles and winks at me. You’re getting too big, my Norrie, hesays, as he takes me in his arms and carries me to my bed.
I ask him if I can be one of the Good People, too? Like Niamh?
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Runs in your blood, my girl! On your mother’s side, of course,that’s where you get all your oddity from, your mam. Don’t tell her I
said it, though, or she’ll beat me, he says, teasing.
I heard that says Mam, laughing and walking into the roomwith Katie. She’s in a good mood. Mam lays Katie down and kisses us
both goodnight. I wait until Mam leaves, and then I pull on Da’s face,burying my head in his scratchy cheek. His breath smells a little
funny—sour.
And I ask him, are those stories real?
He thinks for a moment and says that in the Kingdom theyare. Real as God.
Good, I say. I want them to be real. He kisses my head, turns
off the light and closes the door. I turn onto my side toward Katie’s
bed and the window that looks out upon the field in the back of thehouse. My sheets are soft. I can hear Mam and Da talking soft
downstairs, something about the hunt tomorrow morning. This timeof year Da wakes up early to go bird-hunting in the wood. Mostly hegets pheasant or duck, sometimes a goose. But he sells the meat to thebutcher. Mam likes the extra money, says it means we get something
nicer for Christmas. I wish it were Christmas already. I pull my duvet
up to my chin and look past Katie, out the window.
The dark of Tully’s Wood and the field and the sky are all thesame dark, but the mist glitters, glitters like Tír na nÓg, and for aminute Niamh is in that mist and somehow I am Niamh too and we’re
all made up of the same thing, the same magic. And then a shadow
slips across the fog, like one of those silvery little minnows in the river,and my sister becomes very still. Though I can’t see her eyes, I know
they are watching the shadow run as closely as mine. Normally I’m
asleep by now, but Katie likes to stay up late. She’s always been thatway, up and about at strange hours. Maybe it’s because she was bornat midnight—they say those people can see the Fair Folk clear as dayeven when they’re in disguise. Katie’s pale hair shines, falling likewater off her thin shoulders. She rolls over to face me, eyes glinting,and says to me, Nora. We forgot to pray.

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I grab a beer out of the fridge. Mam is still staring out the window.
Her hands are shaking—they always do unless she’s drinking. I takehold of one of them and she doesn’t tug away. Remember what you’ve
learned, Nora: if you push too hard, too fast, she’ll shatter. Be quiet.
Let her come to you. Mam’s muttering now, a kettle over heat. I can’t
make out what she’s saying, but I do catch one thing: —dreams—“Dreams, Mam?”
She starts like she didn’t know I was there, even though I’ve
been holding her hand a while now. “Strange dreams I’ve had,” shemurmurs. “Lots of animals. Gave me a fright.”“What kind of animals?”“Slippery slidey fish. Ravens, pecking. Those foxes. Red andblack and white, witch familiars. And deer, always deer, antlers out tohere, out to here … Matthew, he ….”“So Da was there?” I ask, testing my luck.
“No … yes. I don’t ….” she says, her voice petering out. Hereyes cloud over, harden.
“Was this like the other dreams you used to have?” I ask.
“No. In this one, he was alive.”
She pulls away and starts down the hall. I follow her. “Mam,”
I say, gently as I can, “You can talk to me. Please.”“I can’t,” she whimpers, pressing her fingers into her mouthand shaking her head. “I can’t!” I put my hand on her arm to comfort
her—a mistake.
She wrenches her arm away and pushes past me so hard that I
hit the wall, beer sloshing out of the bottle and spilling all over mytop. I stand there, dripping. My face is hot, tight.
I can tell that Mam knows what she’s done by the way her
spine caves in as she faces me. At least she knows that I’m there, thatI’m real. She won’t look at me. “You’re the same, you and him,” shesays flatly, gazing instead at the beer stains on my shirt. “Living in afairy world. Always making up stories to make everything soundbetter than it is. You’re liars. Both of you. And … and … you both leftme here,” she moans like a wounded animal, moving toward thestaircase. I wipe my hand across my cheek and my mascara comes withit.
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Volume 4, Issue 1“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Katie was the only
one leaving you. Da, well, it wasn’t his fault. And I never left you, notonce,” I say, voice cracking. As she stands in the stairwell, she raises
her eyes to meet mine. There’s a trace of something there, behind theempty blue—what, anger? Pity? I can’t tell.
“God … I loved him. I did, I swear it,” she croaks.
I don’t know what to say to her, so all I can do is down what’s
left in the bottle and wonder whether Katie—or I—will ever be homeagain.
Me and Katie and Mam and old Auntie Maeve and Auntie Margaret
and Cousin Terry have seats in the front row pew. It almost feels likethose times when we take the drive to Killarney and my Da reads his
poems out loud at the pubs and we sit up front. All the same people arehere—the old barkeep who tells good stories, the quiet women who
sip at their drinks and gossip in the back, the fat men who watch
football and scream at the telly. Auntie Margaret says they’rescuttered and people in that state shouldn’t be in a church for Godsake.
I wish we were in the pub. When my Da reads out loud there, Mam
always buys me chips and I suck the salt from under my fingernails.
Mam once said that us eating chips together and watching Da reading
his poems at the pubs under those dusty lights was her kind of church.
I want chips right now but they don’t serve chips in real church so I
ask Auntie Margaret if we can go get chips after this and she says
Fwisht. Now stop swinging your feet all around like a hooligan and be
a big girl, pet.
Mam doesn’t say anything at all. She holds Katie’s hand andstares ahead. Her eyes are red and swollen. Cousin Terry hands her ahanky. Terry is almost seven years older than me and two times asloud. He leans over to me and his breath smells like mints and stale
smoke. He whispers Oi, Nora. Old Auntie Maeve’s arse is about thesize of California, don’t you think? He smiles and it’s funny and I know
I should laugh because he’s trying to make me laugh but I can’t
somehow. I don’t want to be here, and I don’t understand why I haveto wear my black frock. We normally don’t sit so close to the front—10Sunspot Literary Journal

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Mam’s never liked it here so she likes to sit in the back where no one
will notice if she leaves in the middle of Holy Communion. I wish I
could spit the wafer out—tastes like paper. Right now I really wantchips, more than anything. Salty salty chips. Aunt Margaret gives
Terrence the evil eye ’cause he’s still leaning and he sits real straightagain.
Now Father Aloysius is up at the altar and everyone getsquiet. Katie likes to listen to Father Aloysius. He’s very nice in an oldway, especially when he came to visit us at home last week. Once hevisited school and everyone got to go into the assembly hall and listen
to him talk about the Sacred Heart of Jesus and how the church andour school were named after it. There was a picture of Jesus and hisheart was glowing and he looked very loving and sorta like my Da but
skinnier. Katie sat still as always and I remember Sister Agatha saidin front of the class that Katie was the best listener she ever saw. She
rang home to tell Mam so, and Mam took us out to the pub that night
and got us all chips.
Then Father Aloysius starts to talk about my Da and how heloved God and he loved all glorious green creation and he was a true
man of Ireland. And then he starts to say something about how the
Lord is mysterious, that it was a shame Matthew Malone had to go as
he did, especially with his poor Mary and Katie and Nora left behind.
He was a true poet, and we will miss him dearly, but now he is in
Heaven, the poor downcast soul, and he has no need for sadness or
pain any longer. I liked that part. And then he opens the golden bookat the front near the coffin and reads a Psalm out loud that’s about
hearts and downcast souls and brooks and tears and panting. How
could a heart pant? Is that the same as when it beats? Father Aloysius
is not explaining anything and now my eyes and hands fidget because
I want to know what he’s talking about, so I ask Terrence and he says,
No idea, he’s just telling a story.
And now all I can think of is my Da telling me stories about
Oisín and Niamh and reading his poems out loud and the salty chips
from the pub that make me so thirsty. My mouth is watering. But thisisn’t a pub, it’s church and they don’t have chips. Mam’s eyes are tight11

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Volume 4, Issue 1and staring at her knees as she holds Katie’s hand. She’s not listening
to Father Aloysius.
But Katie is, and even though her cheeks are wet, she issmiling. And now she’s giggling, actually, and loudly, too, so people
can hear. She is making a holy show of herself. Old Auntie Maeve
crosses herself and Auntie Margaret and Terrence’s jaws drop. Father
Aloysius stops and stares, but not in a mean way. He looks tired. My
cheeks are hot and I slide down a little in my seat. For the first time, I
wonder whether Katie is mad. Only mad people laugh out loud at theirown father’s funeral.
Katie had always been odd. Brilliant, but odd. For example, in her thirdyear, Katie asked Sister Estelle if she could play the cello for the annual
Sacred Heart Christmas Charity Night. My heart dropped into mybowels. Charity Night was the biggest event of the school year. There
was a performance and an auction and all the money raised went tocharity, that year to child cancer patients. I’d wanted Charity Night tobe my thing ever since my art teacher, Sister Catherine, had asked me
to use my “artistic gifts” to create some paintings to sell at the auction.
Which was the first time I’d ever been noticed, for anything, ever,mind you. Katie didn’t need Charity Night—I did.
Sister Estelle, who was ever the diplomat but who might havebeen confused, as per usual, as to who she was speaking to, said yes,pet, why don’t you come to auditions in two weeks, Monday, after
school in the sanctuary, and I’ll decide then. Right then I crossed
myself and prayed to God, our Holy Mother, and Saint Cecilia that she
was terrible.
But I felt guilty for it. In the confessional the next week, I told
Father Aloysius about my sin of covetousness and he told me thatcoveting was dangerous and look what happened to Cain. But he said
the Lord has forgiven thee, and now for your penance, my child, say
three Hail Marys. So I did that, and I guess the Hail Marys did theirjob because instead of covetous, now I felt confused, because I realized
something—Katie didn’t play cello. At least, not that I’d seen. I don’tknow why it took so long to occur to me that I’d never heard her play12

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the thing, not once. Unless she practiced at a friend’s house? But no,
Katie didn’t have any friends. Had Mam secretly paid for lessons? But
no, a family like ours couldn’t have afforded it. How, where, when did
Katie play? I’d heard her humming something around the house, but
she was always quiet, and even when I could hear it, the tune was
unrecognizable. And that’s when it hit me: Katie was about to make anabsolute eejit of herself. And though Charity Night might be all mineat the end of it, she’d take me down with her.
By that fateful Monday, word had gotten around school, somuch so that at auditions, I knew that at least half of the so-called
Charity Night auditionees in the pews fully intended to leave once
they’d watched Katie make a fool of herself. I’d tried to make an excuse
not to be there, but as Mam never picked us up until six anyway, it
was a lost cause. So instead I huddled in the back pew, smudging the
pencil in my sketchbook with my sweaty nose, pretending none of it
was happening.
Still, that afternoon I heard Sister Estelle call Katie’s name,watched her wander up to the red-carpeted chancel to the great celloshining under the blazing sanctuary lights. What will you be playing
for us, Sister asked. Oh it’s something I’ve written myself, Katie said.
Her answer reverberated down the aisles, which went dead silent.
Except that, two pews ahead of me, Sinead Dunn and Charlie Navangiggled, whispered to themselves. Ignoring them—or oblivious?—
Katie picked up her bow like it was a magic wand and she was castingsome sort of fairy spell and then I knew it was over for me and Charity
Night.
The sound that poured forth—it was alive, heavenly, bothstrange and familiar. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
It was as if the cello knew that the whole world was terrible andwonderful at the same time and only Katie would ever be able tounderstand it enough to conjure its music. Her song came out of
nowhere.
But at least I was still better than her at art. Katie couldn’t
draw to save her life, though of course Mam put up her stuff aroundthe house. Art was the one class Katie failed in school, and publicly,too. Apparently the assignment was to draw something from life, but
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when Sister Catherine saw Katie’s drawing, she chided her in front of
everyone that it clearly didn’t follow the assignment. And then forsome reason my sister took the paper from the nun’s hand, ripped it inhalf, and threw the pieces at her, then ran out crying. I don’t knowwhat exactly she drew but Jenny Grady said it was some sort of giant
angel with antlers.
After the art class incident everyone talked about Katie. Theireyes darted back and forth and they got quiet when she walked down
the hall, her white-blond hair swishing back and forth. A mad genius,
they said. They said she was hysterical, but she never looked it. She
always smiled, always laughed, was always so polite to the Sisters, wholoved her, except Sister Catherine. She listened. She never did anyone
harm, at least not on purpose. Never let any of the rumors touch her.
And it was funny, because when she ran off all those times, it wasalmost like she was more “there” than when she actually was, because
for weeks afterward the only name Mam and I’d hear was hers. Poor,
mad Katie, born at midnight, run off again into the wood.
I hated her, especially when she left.
But I hated them more for talking about her.
Mam was right: Katie comes bursting in the door right before dinnertime. It’s the first time I’ve seen her in weeks. Her longest absence yet.
“Mammy,” Katie says, and hugs her—in the embrace, Mam’s
brittle face softens and her shoulders unwind. And then to me—shegrabs my hand and whispers, “I’ve missed you.” Before I can stopmyself my mouth wobbles and I smile all the same and say, “I’ve
missed you too.”We set the table together. I do the plates, Mam sets out thesilverware (plates break too easily if she drops them), and Katie
arranges the glasses for beer and the mugs for when we have tea after.
Mam watches out of the corner of her eye as Katie sets down each mugin its place. Purple for Mam, green for me, and blue with the chip in
the corner, of course, for herself. Mam smiles, sets the fork and spoon
down with careful precision, begins to sing something familiar I can’t
remember. She has a nice voice when she’s lucid, though she gets all
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bothered when you tell her so. This is her at her best nowadays,
singing in the kitchen, happy at the sight of the three mugs on thetable in their right spots … well, three out of four, anyway. Mam
bustles over to the stove, stirs something. Thankfully her cooking
skills haven’t left us quite yet—she always shows off when Katie comeshome.
“Are you hungry, Katie dear? I’ve made a lovely curry, yourfavorite,” Mam says.
“Yes! I could tell as soon as I walked in. All my favorite spices.
Smells grand.”Mam smiles. She’s a new woman.
It’s these times I barely know what to make of her—she’s
unrecognizable to me. She even bows her head and closes her eyes
when Katie prays over the meal. After the Amen she and Katie chitteraway about nothing at all—some movie Katie had seen lately? Mam’s
juiciest tidbits of gossip from Auntie Maeve’s latest weekly visit? I try
to listen but lose track. It’s always baffled me. How do they talk somuch about nothing at all, and so little about … everything? Da and I
were alike in that way, shite at small talk, far more at ease tellingstories than asking questions-“Nora,” Mam hisses.
“Em, sorry?”“Katie asked you a question. Pay attention.”“I asked, how’s school going?” Katie says, blowing on the bite
she’s about to take.
“Oh, grand, yeah,” I say. Since when has she cared how school
was going for me?
“That’s it?” Mam looks at me hard. Funny how she never has
a problem with my brief answers unless her beloved eldest is home.
“I mean, I don’t know, it’s alright. Classes are fine. I’m gettingby,” I say, breezily as I can. “Can one of you pass the chips over here,
please?”“Oh come on, tell me more! I know I’ve been out two years
now but I need you to keep me updated! How are your friends?”

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Volume 4, Issue 1“Haven’t seen any of them around lately, have we?” Mam adds
lightly, sipping at her already-near-empty pint. She’s in fair form
tonight. I ignore her.
“Well, what have they been up to?” Katie says.
“Talking about you. Amal and Sinead and Charlie, David andEmma, all of them.”
It gets deadly quiet for about half a second. We’re all sitting
there, chewing in the silence. Then Katie laughs, “How pathetic,” but
she stops when she sees my face.
“Yeah. Well. Leaving Cert’s coming up in June, anyway, andthen they’ll be gone. So. It doesn’t matter. Pass the chips, please?”
But Katie can’t take a hint. “Leaving Cert. That’s right. Have
you decided where you’re going to school? Where have you applied?”
Christ, not this. Mam turns toward me, lazy and sharpish all
at once. By her look I can tell she slipped a little something extra into
her beer glass when I wasn’t looking. Soon she’ll start slurring her
words. I try to find the words before Mam has a chance to speak, but
she beats me to it.
“Pet,” Mam, says to Katie, gripping my shoulders and shaking
me a little, like I’m a doll she’s showing off to her real daughter. “Thisis where you need to talk some sense into your sister. The Natch …
National College of Art and Design is a fine instish … inshitution.
They don’t take just anyone--”“Mam,” Katie says, eyes wide. She looks at me and I know she
knows she’s made a mistake. I focus on the wall behind her head, settle
in.
“What?” Mam says, waving her hands about. Her tremor isgone. “She’s fine! She’s grand. Grand, I mean! I’m only … it’s not likeshe’s M-Michelangelo, that’s all. It’s not a bad thing! I just don’t knowwhat they’ll want with cartoons? Or what a decent employer will wantwith them, is all. That’s all. That’s all. Jesus, what would a wan likeyou do in a place like Dublin anyhow? Likely make a right tit ofyourself. But anyway, anyway, doesn’t matter, they won’t take you--”“Mam!” Katie yells. She’s pale. “That’s enough.”16

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Mam blinks, saying nothing. Her chair screeches as she getsup, pours herself another glass. She totters to the parlor and turns on
the telly, where she’ll sulk for the rest of the night.
Meanwhile, Katie and I start doing the dishes in silence. I
wash, she dries, and out the window the light slips beneath the woodsin the valley, from golden to dusty blue. “I’m sorry,” she says, after awhile. “I didn’t know she’d go after you like that--”“It’s fine.”“You know she didn’t mean it--”“She did. But it doesn’t matter, anyway.” I lower my voice to awhisper. A smile creeps up onto my face, though it feels wrong there.
“I already got in.”
“Brilliant,” Katie’s smile lights up her face. “I always knew
you’d get in wherever you wanted to go. Your art is class. Always has
been. Why haven’t you told Mam?”
I stare at her as we switch washing and drying duty.
“You’re joking me. You heard her, didn’t you?”Katie frowns and catches my eye. “Don’t listen to her. She’s
not right, in the head I mean. Touched,” she murmurs. I laugh, andKatie’s eyebrows furrow. “What? Am I wrong?”“No. I don’t know, it’s … that’s what they said about you at
school, when you left. ‘Touched.’ Just sounds funny, coming from you.”“Right. Well, like you said, you’ll be gone to Dublin soon
enough, won’t you? You’ll make new friends. Hopefully ones who
don’t gossip so much,” she says, rolling her eyes.
Plates clatter, slipping heavy in my fingers as I set them in thedrying rack, harder than I mean to. I grit my teeth. “I said I got in. I
didn’t say I was going.”“Of course you’re going.”“How can I? You said it yourself! Christ, look at the state ofher. Unlike some of us, I can’t run off so easily, now, can I?”
Katie’s pale cheek flushes slightly. Good.
“You think it’s easy for me?” she says. She brushes gentle,
soapy circles on a plastic plate like it’s bone china, staring hard at her
hands, past them. “Maybe you don’t remember much. But I do. I
remember what Mam was like before, back when she laughed and17

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talked and told jokes. Before both of them started drinking so muchand then Da died and fucked everything up,” she says, articulating the
F in ‘fucked’ like it’s a gunshot, a wound I can feel.
“That’s our own father you’re talking about--”“He was a good man, Norrie, don’t get me wrong. I just …
after he was gone, things changed.” Katie looks over through the
kitchen to the parlor, where Mam’s watching the telly. “I just couldn’t
stay. She … broke,” she whispers.
As if I didn’t know, as if I didn’t have to pick up her pieces
every single day. “Yes. Well, that’s grand for you,” I say. Katie’s mouth
opens, but nothing comes out and she turns back to the sink. The backof my throat feels dry, like there’s not enough air in here, so I go to
the fridge and grab a beer, and in the silence between us, broken onlyby the sound of the running tap and my sister’s scrubbing, I drain thebottle to the last drop. And then I pour a whiskey. And I down that
too. And then another.
“Katie. Tell me. Why do you go to the woods? What are you
doing in there?”“Why do you need to know?
“I’m worried, aren’t I? You keep leaving more and more, forlonger and longer, and--”“Well I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”“Why can’t you tell me? You don’t trust me?”“It’s not time yet.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I open the window and,
together, we look out at the wood for a while, the fog that hides thetrees, the trees that hide one another, the black night that hides
everything. Katie is silent, and her mouth works, deciding. She pulls
me close, whispers. “Look. Someday soon, I’ll show you, maybe. Once
I know, once I’m sure. I just … I need time. But that’s all I can say.”Her eyes flicker toward the dark sky outside and stare past it, as if they
can see whole galaxies beyond. Touched, indeed.
The deer were there long before we ever were. They came and went,and came and went, like ghosts in the bog. Da always said there was18

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something about them more human than he expected, so he didn’t liketo hunt them. One of them, a big stag, he looked at me like he could
read the very words on my heart, Mary, he’d told Mam one afternoon
that autumn when we were watching telly, I couldn’t shoot the beast.
And Mam said, You eejit, they’re just deer. And he said, God above, I
couldn’t shoot it. It was white! Mam laughed at that. You’re drunk!
she said. And then Da started yelling, I’m not, I’m not lying, it was …
like an angel! It, it was divine intervention, me leaving it where it
stood! Mam snorted. Really, Matthew. Don’t be daft, spouting that
nonsense around the girls. Nora’s only seven, for Godsake. They hearenough fairy tales from you and Father Aloysius combined. Jesus
Christ. Put down your drink, she said, rolling her eyes. Da shook hishead and covered his face with his hands.
Then Katie piped up about how she was reading her Bible andthere was some love song in there about a lady and a deer was there
too and Mam said, Katie pet that’s ridiculous, now fwisht, I’m watching
the telly. I giggled because finally know-it-all Katie got in trouble with
Mam. Katie pouted.
But Mam was never one for letting a matter lie. She yelled at
my Da again later that night and told him to get back out there
tomorrow and stop arguing like he always did and find that buck andbring it home with its insides out. So the next night he took his gun
and a six-pack of Fosters and into the woods my Da went.
He came out in a body bag.
“You shouldn’t have to be the one to take care of Mam,” she says fromthe doorway.
I am lying on my bed in the dark of our shared bedroom,
letting the cool, April night air wash over me from the open window.
The irony of Katie telling me this, of all people, staggers me intosilence. I don’t bother to respond. Instead I look out to the bog on themountainside, the trees beyond, the lake, the bright moon andtwinkling sky above it all—like a painting. The same square of earth
I’ve been staring at through glass since before I can remember.

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Katie enters, sits cross-legged on her bed, looking at me,
backlit silver.
“What about Auntie Maeve? She could help while you’re away.
Loves being the martyr, that one.”“Oh, and are you going to be the one to ask her?” I snarl.
“Because I won’t. But be sure to invite me along when you do, because
Lord knows I’d love to watch that play out, knowing how highly she
thinks of you, her mad woods-pissing truant niece.”
Katie stares at me in shock, and then we both dissolve intoweak laughter. It feels good to laugh. We lie there, listening to crickets
chirping, wind hushing over the heather. I can feel the silence reach its
edge, cresting, a wave on a cliff.
“Nora.” Katie turns to me again, and all at once I’m broughtback to goodnight kisses, forgotten prayers. “All I’m trying to say is… it’s not your fault, how Mam is,” she says gently. “Or yourresponsibility. You have to know that. We needed her. But she choseto drink--”“It’s not that simple,” I say, voice catching in my throat. I havea mild headache. The whiskey is catching up to me.
“Of course it’s not. I know that,” she says, after a moment. Her
voice sounds heavy, tired. “But what is simple is that you’re not theone who can fix her. I hope you know you deserve more. Art school, atthe very least.” She shifts and the duvet rustles. “I … I may have poked
around and found your drawings earlier.”“Illustrations.”“Illustrations, then. They were beautiful.”“Thank you.”“They’re of Da’s old stories, right?” The wind stills, exhales.
“Oisín and Niamh,” I whisper. “Diarmuid and Gráinne. The
children of Lír.”
Katie nods, looking up at the ceiling. “And Fionn mac
Cumhaill, and Sadhbh.”“I don’t remember that one. What’s it about?”“It’s a good one,” she says. “I’ll tell you.”
And then, there in the dark, the warp and weft of Katie’s voice
spins tales of the great hunter and dark druids, hazel wands and great20

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loves, deer women, lost children. I remember Da, and fall asleep
already in a dream.
We buried him in the Sacred Heart churchyard, like good Catholics
ought. He would have thought it proper. But Mam had other ideas.
One early morning a few days after the funeral, she ushered us down
the side of the mountain to the edge of the woods, where an old stone
lay next to a patch of gorse. Katie and I watched as she pulled ahammer and a chisel out of her bag and began carving into the face ofthe rock. We must have sat there for hours, watching her as bits ofstone chipped away, as dust caked in the sweat on her forearms. I
remember the cold, wet air seeping up the ends of my fingers and toes,
the gnawing in my empty stomach as the shadows of the trees changed
from rust to muddy blue to violet. Katie and I stayed quiet, holding
hands. It was nightfall when she finally backed away from it, finally
spoke to us. His body might be buried in the churchyard, but his spirit
won’t rest anywhere save here, she said. Read it, she said. And we did.
Matthew Malone, Man of God, Poet, Dearly Beloved. 1956-1999. It wasan unremarkable, moss-covered stone not nearly big enough for thesoul of the man lying under it.
“Nora … Nor.”“Hm, hm.” I roll over in my bed to face Katie. The clock
displays an unholy hour.
“Mam’s whimpering in her sleep. Can’t you hear?”Through the wall behind me, I can hear soft, unintelligible
whines, murmurs.
“Fine, fine. I’ll go.”My head aches from drinking. I step into her room. Mam isthrashing around, her sheets twisted around her legs like poison ivyvines. Moving over to her bedside, I whisper, “Mam. Mam. It’s only a
dream.” But she is still tossing, her neck taut and her body quivering,moaning like a banshee. I touch her shoulder. “Mam. It’s me. I’m here.”
I switch on the light from her bedside table. Too bright. She sits
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Volume 4, Issue 1straight up. I grab hold of her hand as she heaves in and out. “Want totell me about it?” I say, a little louder. I need her to wake up.
“In the wood,” she says, low and prophetical, eyes still shut.
She rarely speaks in complete sentences in these moments. Her thumbs
press against her teeth. “A ghost—she looks just like him.”“It’s okay, Mam. I’m here. There’s no ghost.”“He’s bound to come for her, out of those woods. Tied in aknot, tied in knot they are, don’t go … don’t let her go, Katie, my love.”
My heart skitters. “Mam. It’s me.”
She opens her eyes, which meet mine. “Katie. I want Katie.”
I stand there, frozen for a moment. “I know, Mam,” I say, andwith that I leave her, shutting the door.
When I cross the hall back to our room, Katie’s duvet iswrinkled and flat. Her pillow still has a dent from her head. She’s gone.
I grab my coat and sprint downstairs.
Mam can’t chase you with James Joyce now, Nora.
The dishes are dripping in the rack near the sink. After a split
second, I grab the blue mug and smash it to the ground, pieces
skittering over the ground like insects over a forest floor.
I step outside, and I run.
The air outside is wet and cool. I can smell the heather and the green
as my feet squelch clumsily downhill. It’s hard to be quiet on earth likethis. The silver mist glows, and I remember Niamh and her golden
hair and poor Oisín who fell to the ground and aged three hundredyears in an instant. My hair glitters with dew, and for a few minutes I
am Niamh again for the first time in ten long years. One of the Fair
Folk, running through the mist.
At the edge of the wood, I stop for a second to breathe, to catchmy bearings. I feel a bit sick, but that’s not important now. The houseis far, far up the mountain from here. Here are the first silver birches,
glowing under the moon, a patch of gorse, a large stone. I’m at myfather’s grave—the grave with nobody buried under it. It’s smaller
than I remember it. I haven’t been back in so long. I run my hand along22

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the etched surface of the stone, slick with moss and lichen, darkened
with time. The trees rustle.
And then, faintly—a song. I remember it, even all these years
later. Even through the trees and the thick of night, it’s like the songcan see me, guide me. I wind my way through the thin copse of birches
and pines into the more ancient thickets, the twisting, outstretchedarms of oak and yew, listening.
The dark of the forest envelops me, consumes my figure sothat it is merely a shadow among other larger, straighter, older
shadows. It’s otherworldly here. Tree roots weave through the earth,
the coils of sea serpents. Holly bushes prickle my skin as I swipe pastthem. I can hear the skitterings of creatures in the understory, feel thedamp of the forest floor seeping into my shoes as I walk in a half-mile,
and another. Though I don’t know how long it’s been since I started
walking—ten minutes? Twenty-five?—I can still hear the music.
Everything is still, wild, silent. I follow the song, the song thatbeckoned Katie, and now beckons me, and probably, in some way, allof us. Closer, and closer. It feels … golden, a golden thread ….
I’m down on the ground. I’ve stumbled, tripped over a branch.
I regret the beer and the whiskey. I swear to Jesus I’ll never drink
again. My palms and knees sting from scratches. I want to cry out, but
I catch it in my throat, because Katie can’t know I followed her. And
that is her, up ahead … at least, I think. It’s hard to tell what’s
happening. I can make out a clearing, and three figures. One has to be
my sister, I think the one on the right. But the other two people areshrouded in fog. Two men. No, wait, one man. The third figure isdifferent from the other two. Yes. It’s an animal … a deer. A stag.
But it’s enormous, at least six feet tall at the haunch and a rackof at least twelve feet. Bigger than any animal I could imagine, anddazzlingly white. It is spectacular, the most glorious thing I’ve everseen. And then it changes—stag to man. No, back to stag again.
Somehow I can’t tell the difference in the dark. I can’t, won’t move. My
hands are shaking, and I feel sick.
The shadow gets on her knees and inclines her head, almost
as if she were kneeling in the pew. Then she raises her hands, palms
upward, waits. The other two pull her to her feet. And now they’re all23

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walking together down the clearing, like a bride with one too many
grooms. Druids among Neolithic standing stones. Katie’s pale hair andteeth are luminescent with laughter. They’re singing the sweetest
music I ever heard in my whole entire life, better than Katie on thecello, better than any noise on earth or in dreams. The song fills,
empties, fills again. It’s the stuff of Fair Folk. Or else an angel chorus.
I try to speak, to sing, but my voice is gone. I only listen and wish I
could join in on this wild hymn. And then, it fades away, deeper anddeeper into the forest until they are swallowed up by the mist and theforest is black and blue and silent. A bruise.
The fog is thick and glimmering.
I paw at my eyes and I can’t tell what’s mist and what’s tears.
But somehow I know that everything has changed. I’m not going tosee Katie again. And now I am terribly, terribly alone, and I feel the
knife-twist of my stomach, the gagging hot wretch onto the forest
floor, the embrace of the wet earth as my cheek hits the ground,darkness.
The sound of water wakes me just before dawn.
In the green-grey morning light, I stagger to my feet. My
head pounds. I take stock.
My hands—red with cold and swollen with scratches. My
clothes—earth-stained and damp. I don’t know what time it is. Auntie
Maeve is supposed to stop by this morning. She’ll wonder where I am.
Where am I? I can’t see our house from here. I’m alone.
No Katie. No anyone. Only questions left.
My throat tastes sour, acrid … I desperately need to wash mymouth out. Right, yes, the water … let’s find the water. I can hear astream bubbling nearby, and about fifteen feet past the clearing, I findit. Looks clean enough. The water grips my hands with its fierce cold
as I scrub away dirt and thin traces of dried blood. It stings my palms,
numbs them. I scoop it up into my mouth, swish, spit, repeat until I
can’t taste the acid anymore. And then I begin to splash my face,gasping at its iciness, over and over and over again ….

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Until something is opening up in me, something clear andsharp and solid, an answer to a question I don’t remember asking, andnow the sun is breaking the sky open, and its rays pour down the sideof the mountain, through the branches, piercing the green-grey veil
like the first sunlight from the beginning of time, illuminating themist, golden, shimmering, alive.
I’ll be home soon enough.
But right now, I have only this holy sanctuary, the trees. The
stories, the memories.
These things are mine, and mine alone. And I am theirs.
I walk deeper in, and I don’t look back.

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How radiant, how fearful to behold
Kate Strong Stadt
To see the glory of the faceof my childhood God
is to blister and pant,wax wings in ascent.
To land,a man.

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In This World LoveJJ Chen Henderson
In this world, loveis undefinable.
Easier to just say it isa look.
An hour.
A phone call.
A kidney.
Bone marrow.
In this world, loveis overrated.
She longs
for the song
he humseach time
he rolls over.
In this world, love
may not even look likelove. How else
do you explain
his habitof lifting her
as weight?
In this world, lovehas no analogy.
But why,
as I break off
a rhizomeof lotus root,in its many lake-mud27

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smeared hollows,
I see the blanks
in my aging mother’seyes?
In this world, lovecomes witha price. This grief
makes medoubt
if I should’ve loved
my father without everbargaining.

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Negative Capability
Roeethyll Lunn
For me …
I had no idea that writing was a science. I thought that it wasa muse. I thought that it was some dark, phantom spirit (an Incubus)that periodically came to me in the night to wake me up and make me
submit to it. I usually had to play with him until dawn. If I attempted
to go back to bed, he would wake me again. He was in control and not
I. I suffered his presence because I was usually satisfied with his words.
I somehow had premonitions of his comings. Sometimes, he would hailme, ever so softly, in the day, in something that had filled me with awe.
Or sometimes, I would hear him hiss at me through the voices ofothers. Having him in my life made it difficult for me to get along withothers. He was my secret that they wouldn’t understand, so I hid him
in my daydreams. I’m in love with him. This week, in class, I foundthat he had a name. His name is Creativity. He is married also and hasother children. Her name is Negative Capability. She shadows me
during the day.
For Them …
The term “negative capability” was penned by the poet John
Keats in his “Letter to George and Thomas Keats.” John Keatsdescribes it as being “… the quality (that) formed a man ofachievement , especially in literature … (a time) when a man is capableof being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts ….” Being in this lost
condition still couldn’t contain creativity. “The artist’s sense of
beauty,” according to Keats, “overcomes every other consideration, orobliterates all consideration.”In other words, he is saying that creativity is an enigma. Some
mysterious presence that takes over the behavior of its disciples,
rendering them into a state of partial or full-blown insanity.
It is suggested that the artist should glory from a stance ofimperfection, indecision, and doubt. He should be aware of his lack and29

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live with it. He should allow this awareness to ostracize him into a
position of an indifferent observer of mankind. The artist is then freeof emotional involvement, thereby enabling him to give a true reportin his art based on true insight. Negative capability, according to this,is supposedly the byproduct of creativity. Creativity is another matter.
Opinions vary as to what causes creativity.
Sigmund Freud suggests that creativity grows out of acomposite of all the complexes that the artist receives as a result of his
having been mistreated as a child. He couples creativity with neurosis,
which in turn is why the artist may be subjected to deviant behavioral
patterns.
Carl Jung says in his article “The Poet” that what Freudsuggests could not possibly be. Jung says:“The personal aspect is a limitation … when a form of‘art’ is primarily personal, it deserves to be treated asa neurosis …. What is essential in a work of art is thatit should rise far above the realm of the personal lifeand speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man
to the spirit, the ‘collective spirit,’ and heart ofmankind.”Creativity, Jung goes on to suggest, is God sent. God chosethe artist to be a “collective man--one who carries and shapes theunconscious, physic of mankind … he is a ‘clinician,’ healer, teacher
and guide.” In his “Letter to George and Thomas Keats,” John Keatsattempts to ridicule his peer for being egotistical, “…seeming notaware that his audience could see that some of the ‘Poppycock,’ hadrubbed off on him.”
In conclusion …
The artist is a “clinician,” healer, teacher and guide? Umph! I
can agree with that. Even when both Jung and Freud agree that,
artists, without exception, are “narcissistic … undeveloped persons
with infantile and auto erotic traits.” I can agree with that … hence
Negative Capability. Although art is wearisome, isolating, andsometimes can lead to deviant behavior—like having to settle for justlooking out of a window and sacrificing a beautiful day, instead of30

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going out into it—artists continue to behave as if they have a condition
that is equivalent to what drug addicts have called “a monkey on myback” or, in the case of artists, a word on their backs. I can agree withall of the theorists I’ve mentioned except Freud’s. Freud’s view is too
harsh, in my opinion. I don’t believe that all artists suffered fromparental mistreatment, just like I don’t think a person will necessarily
grow up to be a serial killer just because his mother stopped him fromeating his own dung. Every view had some merit, but none could
actually put a finger on it. No one knows what really creates an artist,
but they all agree (and I can agree with them) that an artist has
problems.
John Cheeves sums it perfectly for me in his work “Good-bye
My Brother.” Cheeves describes how it feels to have a family memberthat just can’t quite “fit in” in life. He says, “Oh what can you do witha man like that? … How can you dissuade his eyes in a crowd fromseeking out the cheek with acne, the infirmed hand.” Umph!
Southampton, New York
1999

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My Father Built a Raft
Ron Pullins
My father built a raft.
He built a lot of things. He came back from the war and built
a locker plant with rented drawers for freezing food and aslaughterhouse for butchering cattle, hogs. When they tore that oldplace down, they found its forty years of walls had filled with ice, selfinsulated, as igloos are, and quiet.
He dreamed of floating down the local river, a trickle except
in flood, flowing from our Flint Hills here in Kansas to the Missouri,
then down to New Orleans on the lazy Mississippi.
His raft, barrels soldered into columns and braced by two-byfours, covered then with plywood that was strong, and added an old
motor fueled by gas he had salvaged.
It tired him out, I suppose, those years of slaughtering, cutting
throats, the bleeding from the cuts, the creation of bacon, grinding
burgers, perhaps the incessant look of hunger on the faces of his
customers. This he did in years he spent unknowingly encased in ice,birthing then, I suppose, his long-lingering plan to escape. Down theMississippi. To New Orleans. With every throat he cut. With every
heart extracted.
One summer morning, then, at the local lake, to test the thing,
he floats the raft off a makeshift trailer. He stands atop the plywood,then pulls and pulls the motor’s rope, and pulls and pulls again, so say
they who watch him there, ineffectual effects as his raft drifts out, so
say those who happen by, those in support of father’s dream, until inthe middle of the lake the raft collapses in the center, caves in and takes
my father down, who with his motor sinks, and drowns, suicide by
dream, as I remember.
The truth is, he didn’t drown, of course. The raft collapsed,and he swam ashore, to begin another dream, so I suppose. It wasescape that drowned that day, both his and mine. He floats on me on
this vast and quiet lake. I will not break under the weight of his
regrets.
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Another Dream About Death
Ryan Mattern
The water here is all surface,shallow as this paper.
Its depths drown nothing.
To swim is to long,to freeze is to wait.
The waves unfurl onto a plyboard
shore. The oblong moon,
furious in new light,
yanks the tide from my feet.
The men hunting abalone
walk bentbacked and aching,
their buckets dragging behind them.
A shorebird circles
the same carve of bay
drawn by string,its poor watered wings.
I don’t know for how longa thing can be weary.

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Hope on the Horizon / Lindsey Morrison Grant
Editor’s Prize
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Graffiti Reimagined / Linsey Morrison Grant
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Pick Me a Color
Travis Stephens“Help me pick a nail color,”
she said
standing before a display oflozenges, of glossy oval
plastic tongues &racks of tiny bottles.
Pick the color of shred,pick the color of heartbreak,the exact shade of laughterin an overheated room.
Not the color of overheard
conversations
with other girlfriends,
of casual embraces &long goodbyes.
Try the shade of despair
or a reeling sense of shame.
Dab the laugh at own’s expense,
the faded shoes gone musty& too small.
The way a shared sweater fits best,
never jeans, maybe jacket.
Pick a color that says
only menot Lisa or Lizette, a teacher
the parents or
God forbid, a boy.
Pick me a color of want.
“Pink,” I said,“pink is nice.”36

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The Sound Cicadas Make
Garrett Candrea
There’s a simple pleasure in this, childlike and dumb but also
comforting, reassuring, how they sound like it says on the box: bang,snap. Sometimes pop. The minutes seem to falter, stagger, to do things
such things as minutes are incapable, to ramble, some restless hour inthe night when he steps out back to throw bang-snaps off the deck.
He throws them one at a time, pausing between each, thinking,call it contemplating, the little orange sparks flashing against the dark
and how it doesn’t matter what you call them. He removes anotherwhiz-bang from the pack, all sawdust and cigarette paper, the feel ofthese between his fingers, and the other times and other places.
He’d once said to a client, Get rid of them.
They hit the driveway below making the light they make andthe sound and it is otherwise quiet out here near the edge of town,
wind sifting through the pines.
He’d once told the boy, or was it the son, to make a wish.
He’s standing barefoot in briefs and wrinkled tee and this is
not unusual but something he does when he can’t sleep, when he’s beenroused awake by a dream that has for hours left him lying there in his
sweat in the basement pullout, staring where people stare while theywait for their alarm to go off.
Brittle and soft and fine and flimsy. Call it distraction. Call it
procrastination. He holds between his fingers one of the whackers,
something else they’re called by some other sound they make.
He remembers the last time he’d gone up to his son’s room, tothe door with the splintered dent that’d been punched into the woodamong the Ian Lundy quotes scrawled out in black marker. He
remembers the empty trash bags in his hand and how he’d gone inthere intent on filling them with clothes for the needy but instead sat
in his son’s computer chair and placed one over his head and used his
belt to cinch it shut at his throat. Whop or boom. Call it pathetic. It
wasn’t until he’d begun to feel faint that he’d realized that wasn’t what
he’d wanted to do, not like that and not at all, so panicked that his
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fingers fumbled with the buckle and he had to tear the bag open at his
mouth, gasping for air. When he finally got the belt loose he chucked
it across the room. At first he was gasping, then he was crying. Thenhe began to laugh, the torn bag still over his head. He was thinking ofsomething she would have probably said, something so simple andcrass but in that dry tone she liked to use—it had him gasping for air
all over again and he felt crazy but at least he was aware of it—youdumb idiot.
For thinking that was the answer. For even having consideredit. For blaming himself. These were all things his support group had
said when he’d told them about what had happened, what he’d tried todo, the faces arranged in a circle and staring at him in soft reproach. It
was not his fault, they’d told him. He’d done the best he could, they’dtold him, these mothers and fathers sitting in a church basement who
had likewise lost a child to overdose. But it was all of it just words,
hollow syllables, the same boilerplate phrases they liked to exchangewith each other week over week, allowing themselves to be convincedby the stock mantras. They never knew the truth of it, and he hasn’t
been to a session in nearly six months.
Now, on the deck, in the cool night, he shakes the rest of thewhipper-snappers into his hand and chucks them over the rail. It only
takes a second: the crackle and glitter of orange light.
He’d once said to the kid, It’s different when you’re the one
doing it.
All this a dull sound somewhere.
Come morning he’s sitting in the living room with the TV on
while pale colors play wearily on the walls. As in things remote, things
separate, aloof. There’s less than an hour of sleep behind his eyes andhis alarm will go off any minute now, the drowsy light gathered at theedges of the blinds tells him this, reminds him of this, of lazy times
lying beside her in slatted shadows, times when they both had the day
off and could waste away in easy languor while the city shifted andcreaked beyond the window. How young they were then, two years
out of college and living happily in a fifth-floor walkup in Queens, castiron radiators and a fridge that curdled milk before its expiration date.
The good times always get left behind, those dusty mundane moments,
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how they used to stare up at the water-stained popcorn ceiling talking
about their future by wan streetlamp light.
Sound flares in the TV’s speakers, this is laughter, somethingelse, words. Words in cadence or by rote or doesn’t matter, detached,
how the speakers are the making the sound of two people speaking,with all the words seeming incidental. But it’s the repeated phrase thatmakes him realize what he’s watching, pay attention—is all time is all
the time—a commercial for batteries adapted from a well-known skit
out of Ian Lundy’s Paper Caravan, and how this would have set her off
on a rant, using words like defile or desecrate or look how lazy.
You can be dramatic, too, he says, barely aloud, then turns theTV off before the punchline. He begins to haul himself up but stops,
sits there a moment. It’s bleary what he sees but it’s himself and only
himself, his chiaroscuro features in the black screen, and he’s smiling—
the slight tension he feels at the corners of his mouth is a smile. He’s
imagining what she might have had to say about this and it makes him
laugh but only briefly because there is nothing funny going on here.
In truth it would have worried her. She would have stared at him with
her lips in a straight line, fill in the blank. She would have tried to makelight of the situation. She would have said he was turning completely
mental, using an accent he would have and would now only be able toidentify as British. But she wouldn’t have laughed because it would
have deeply worried her, what he’d thought he’d seen—his son’s face,
could’ve been.
His phone begins to make the sound of someone strumming a
guitar, which is his alarm, which means it’s 7:00 a.m., and he heads forthe kitchen, still in his briefs and tee.
Laminate flooring, plain white walls. She’d wanted parquet
flooring but he didn’t and after she died he effaced the color from theaccent walls throughout the house, rolling white over the geometricpatterns she’d painted freehand in vibrant hues of blue and yellow andit was not something he’d done out of spite but just something to do,some easy mindless task to make those first days go by. That wasseventeen years ago but still there are times when he can’t dosomething so simple as heat up a cup of coffee without phasing out ofreality for a few moments.
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Coming up behind her where she stands at the stove amid
smoke and music and crackling grease and how the music sounds like
this, like sweat and the taste of it on her neck and her low soft moanin the shape of a smile as he places his hand on the boy taking shapeinside her, and she’s telling him that she so desperately wants coffee
she believes it might be worth the risk, ha ha, and how all this is a dullsound somewhere.
A dull chink as he places an enameled cup of day-old coffee inthe microwave, 7:06 so says the numbers in garish green, alone, smile
fading from his lips. This is how he remembers her, how she exists,
not in the choregraphed moments framed for display on the dining
room sideboard but lurking in mundane tasks—how memory canconspire with a grief so abiding that it draws out of from even the mostordinary motions a moment from the cherished past all slurred colorand sound and mood.
He shuts the microwave door and sets the timer. He watches
the cup spin slowly in the sallow drone.
Years ago he’d said to a client, Get rid of them. He was what they used
to call a Senior Streamline Advisor and he had liked that job because
it sent him places, gave him a good excuse to be away from home,staying in comped hotel rooms where he could do his parenting
remotely.
He still works for Telos Consulting but no longer as afieldman, something else he was once called, and father and husband.
Now he holds the title of Interdepartmental Buffer Analyst and largely
sits in a cubicle where the hours are perforated by the mundanities ofwhich they’re comprised: meeting invites, email pings, the long trillingof his phone. This is all white noise, and so too the memory.
How the client had been staring at him. They were sitting at
a large conference table with eighteen empty chairs and the client
stared at him and said, Get rid of them?
Fire your team, he’d told the client. Get rid of them.
They were seated perpendicular to each other with the clientat the head of the table, a bulky man with dandruff on his shoulders
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and a ruddy face that began to blink at him. It appeared as if he’d neverheard those words in that order before and was still piecing together
their meaning. He wore a clip-on tie and regarded a spot on the wall
as if for further council, a second opinion.
The client had said, Meaning what?
Meaning they’re no good. Or they’re mediocre. Whatever you
want to call it. The issue is not time management or resource
management. In fact, from what I’ve observed, all of that is being
handled quite well. Efficiently, is what you want to hear. Your project
managers are doing a great job, the best they can with what they have.
And that, unfortunately, is the problem, what you don’t want to hear.
What you need is not an increase in recruitment efforts, but areworking of the process itself. You need more stringent standards.
In truth the client had been a boutique ad agency, Patina
Media, operating out of Buffalo. The bulky man was just who he’dinterfaced with. He waited for the bulky man to respond but all thebulky man did was stare down the length of the table, eyes narrowed,
as if trying to see something far away.
It’s like this, he’d explained to the bulky man. Say I have a canof red paint. And then I go out and get, say, five more cans of the same
red paint. And then I empty the contents of all the cans into a vat. The
paint doesn’t get any brighter, there’s simply more of it.
Before he knows it the workday is over and he’s standing in
the elevator on his way down to the lobby, staring at his reflection in
the door. The door is of brushed steel and his reflection is little morethan a dull sheen smeared over the metal, but still there’s something
in its bearing, its demeanor, grim and humorless and somehow angsty.
He is alone in here, a figure in a button-down and pair of chinos witha backpack slung from one shoulder. Think of the kid. Think of the kid
walking home alone from the bus stop, his schoolbag decorated withpithy Ian Lundy phrases written in Wite-Out. The elevator hums inthe shaft, digital numbers tracking the descent. He steps closer to thedoor but nothing comes into focus. But, then, maybe. Maybe this iswhat his son might have come to look like.
The door slides open with a simulated chime not unlike thetrain’s, how time lurches, fidgets, with shapes and colors scrolling past,41

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shapes of homes and trees. It was Queens and then it was Peekskill, ina home with a master bedroom, already making decisions about how
they’d raise the child growing inside her. Watching the late sun glint
off the Hudson River, he remembers a joke she’d made. Some call it
parenting, she’d said. Others call it indoctrination.
On his way home he stops off at the gas station for some morebang-snaps and a tallboy. He’s already had one on the train ride backbut can go for another. He takes one out from the row of fridges
thrumming along the back wall and sets it on the counter. The
attendant here knows him by face and calls him My Friend.
“How are you doing, My Friend?”
He doesn’t tell him the truth. He removes from a small display
rack six, seven, make it ten boxes of whack-pops while a small fan
oscillates beside the register, stirring a stink of sweat and coffee
grounds.
“You like those lots, My Friend? Pretty Fun, huh, My
Friend?”He nods and smiles but doesn’t tell the attendant, whose nameis there on a nametag he’s never bothered to read, that he used to buy
these for his son when his son was just a boy. He doesn’t tell him that
he and his son used to go out on the driveway in the dusk sometimes
to chuck great handfuls of them at the pavement, and how those wereabout the only times they shared a smile. He doesn’t tell the attendant
how his son’s laugh sounded not only because this would be a strange
thing to share, but because he can’t. He doesn’t remember. Or thesound of his voice. How these memories have become just as estranged,with no sound save the bangs and the snaps and the crackling orange
light.
He collects his change and takes the paper bag off the counterand tells the attendant to have a good one. Outside the evening is cool,
the last colors failing in the sky and the shadows all gone from here,
figures standing at the gas pumps. He’s nearly back to his car when hehears something that makes him stop, a hissing sound loud and taut,and he stands there with the paper bag in hand, watching across the
lot a woman inflating a bicycle’s rear tire at one of the air pumps.

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He remembers the first sound his son had ever made. He
remembers the sound of the machinery, the frantic beeping and how
they pushed him out of the room and carted his wife away down thehall while nurses had to hold him back. He remembers the look on the
doctor’s face, and he remembers his son’s final sound. He remembers
the cicadas and the muffled thump in the ceiling and then the steady,lazy drone of the cicadas.
It’s his phone that brings him back, vibrating against histhigh, a text message from his father. The limited preview of themessage displayed on the screen reads:
Have time . . .
He doesn’t bother to read the rest.
Bang:
The father, the man, the father said to the son, “Come here.”
The son was sitting on the couch watching cartoons and helooked over at the father but did not move, six years old, feet justtouching the floor. The father stood there in the doorway. He had theson’s shoes in his hand. Then he didn’t. They went tumbling over thefloorboards.
“Put them on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
He watched the son slip his shoes on and tie them, each in turn,making the loops and knots, realizing he’d never taught him how to
do any of that. Then he led him out through the back door and onto
the driveway. It was late evening with the sun going down behind thetrees, ruddled leaves, smell of chimney smoke drifting on the wind.
The son was a gawky kid even for his age, reticent, softspoken, witheyes that never seemed to look but glance. He glanced at the little box
the father took out of his jacket pocket.
“You know what these are,” the father said. It was a question
or it wasn’t. It could have been an accusation.
The son stood there. Birds chittered in the trees. The father
opened the box and removed the plastic packet that contained little
white sacks packed in sawdust. He ripped open the plastic and took out
one of the sacks and held it by its twined end. It looked like a small
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Hershey’s Kiss or maybe a small cherry. The boy glanced at it where
it hung between the father’s fingers and looked away, the faded
pavement, dead weeds in the cracks.
“Bang-snaps,” the father said. “You’ve seen these before.
Maybe you haven’t.”
The boy said, “Pop showed me these.”“Right. ‘Course he has.” He looked at the boy’s shoes. “Yourpop,” he said, “he used to get me these too, sometimes, when I was akid. Smoke bombs, sparklers, all that stuff. Used to set off thesem80s—blockbusters. Neighbors up and down the block would becalling the cops. He show you any blockbusters?”
The son shook his head.
“You wouldn’t like those,” the man said. “They aren’t likethese.”He raised his arm and pitched the snap-it at the ground andthe boy flinched at the sound it made. The man saw this and wanted
to ridicule the boy, the son, and had to stop himself.
He said, “I thought Pop showed you these.”
The son didn’t answer.
“He had you throw one of them,” the father said.
“He threw it.”“And you didn’t like it.” There was always something there in
his voice, a measure of contempt, no matter the topic of words. You
could not call it conversation. You could not say they ever talked toeach other or had dialogues. They communicated in the most primitive
sense. Yes, no, angry, sad. It would later develop that their frequentarguing would be the closest they’d get to conversation.
The boy stood there looking down at the pavement.
Just the other day the boy had asked him for help with his
homework, something. The man had told him to speak up, stopmumbling. He never looked at the boy. The question was about life
science, insects, why are cicadas so loud or how do they make thesound they make, something like that. He didn’t know the answer.
Why the hell should he? The kid was always asking questions like that,why do leaves change color or what happened in such and such battleof such and such war, and he wondered how many times did he have44

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to tell the kid. He told him that his wife would have known. He only
referred to her as his wife now, denying the boy a mother. But it wasa lie. She wouldn’t have known the answer either. He only said it sothe boy would leave the room and he could go on sitting there,
watching a commercial for laundry detergent.
He pinched up another popper out of the sawdust and held it
out to the son.
“Go on,” he said. “It’s fun.”The son took it without looking. He stood holding it in thepalm of his hand like something broken.
“Go on,” the father said again. “Like this.” And the boy flinchedagain and the father watched him. He told the boy those blockbusters
would have made him wet himself.
Then he said, “Just try it. It’s different when you’re the one
doing it.”
The son closed his hand around the whipper and raised his fist,
brought it down. A prick of orange light flashed against the pavement.
He glanced at the father. Then he looked at him, smiled. He held out
his hand.
He sits in his cubicle watching words unfurl across the screen while
his fingers flit over the keys. Nor do the sounds they make seem
attached to the action or the sentences to their meaning. Deadline,
regret, these words are vague noises in his mind. The office has a drone
to it. The email he’s typing is about a deliverable that will be late due
to some reason he hasn’t figured out yet. He sits reading over what
he’s so far typed, certain words and phrases, unfortunately, regret to
inform, unforeseen complications, means nothing, the boilerplate excuses.
He thinks what else he might type but nothing makes sense, and thenhe realizes he’s been hearing something. He stops, listens.
He listens to a hissing sound, pressurized, coming in spurts soloud and stark that the sound itself seems silhouetted by the officequiet. His head is turned away from his monitor now and he’s staring
at a picture pinned to the gray tackboard wall of his cubicle but doesn’t
see it. From behind the wall comes a long oscillating hiss, and it’s all45

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he can hear and think and see—that awful time one year ago, slowly
ascending the steps to his son’s room, calling out his name while
cicadas hummed in the afternoon heat.
Now he’s standing. He’s standing and looking over the
tackboard wall into the adjacent cubicle, watching a coworker clean
out her keyboard with a can of compressed air, the way she guides thelong red straw of the can up and down the rows of keys, ejecting dust
and crud and now she stops.
She stops and looks, is looking at him. At first she says
nothing. At first she smiles. Then the smile recedes and it’s the way
her lips move, making shapes that do not seem to match the words,
which form an apology or make the sound of one.
He doesn’t speak. His jaw feels slack, eyes rimmed red andsunken from another sleepless night of throwing bang-snaps off thedeck, of lying in his sweat in the pullout in the wake of a recurring
dream.
In this dream he was pushing a mower over the lawn. Last
night it was a mower, the night before last it was a snow blower. But
his wife, she’s always standing in the same spot, doing the same thing:talking to someone in the doorway. He cannot tell who she’s talking
to or what they’re saying. All he can hear is the mower, or the blower.
Blowing leaves across the parched lawn. Even last night when in the
dream he had turned the mower off all he could hear was the drone of
the motor. They were staring at him, or that is how it looked, with
their mouths moving, miming out his name, but all he heard was the
motor going all the time is all the time.
The office has this drone to it, fluorescents humming theirbland light. Her lips shape themselves to the beginning of a word but
she says nothing, this coworker, her nervous laugh and smile. There
are others nearby but they are not paying attention to them.
He sits finally without a word and finds himself staring at the
picture pinned to the tackboard wall. The picture is of his son, after
one of his little league games, the yellow jersey, the white pants. He
did not take this picture nor can he remember the name of the team.
Grass stains, dirt stains, dust. His son is posing in the picture, batangled over his shoulder, ready to slam one out of the park, he
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imagines, likes to imagine. It was his own father who’d taken thispicture, who’d practically raised the boy. He’d thought maybe things
would get better as his son grew, as he developed a personality andhad thoughts that weren’t expressed through long grating shrieks.
But the older he got the more unbearable it became to be around him,
the way his face changed, the latent features becoming apparent. He
had her high cheek bones and sharp nose and her sense of humor.
There was the time his son was watching a movie in his room,a show, watching something, British voices and a lot of laughter. He
could hear it faintly from the home office and he went out into the halland stood outside the boy’s door, listening, hand gripping the knob.
He could tell from the exaggerated speech that it was a Paper Caravanskit but he didn’t know which. Then he did. He heard the famous line—
is all the time is all the time—some traveling magician’s whacko
incantation he’d never understood. But she had loved that skit, loved
the actor. She would have loved the quotes scrawled across their son’sdoor, would have taken up a marker herself to add her own favorites.
But it had only made him despise the boy even more, how he’ddecorated his door with those senseless phrases in some lame attempt
to commune with the mother he never knew except from stories, home
videos, pictures on the sideboard. Sometimes he caught the boy
standing in front of the bathroom mirror, tracing the shape of his nose.
In the hallway the father stood there listening, gripping the knob till
his knuckles turned white. Then he splintered the wood with his fist
and went back into his office while laughter flared behind him.
In his cubicle, his phone begins to ring, a twinkling xylophone
riff that strikes up so loudly in the silence it gives him a start. The
caller ID says Dad. He lets it go to voicemail but his father doesn’t
leave one. He remembers the text message his father had sent the day
before and decides to read it.
Have time to talk? I know someone who’d be happy to help you out.
He means with selling the house. For weeks now his father has
been nagging him to sell, to get out of there, move on, enough isenough. She would have told him that he wasn’t trying to be difficult
but only wanted to help, and he would have said that the only way his
father knows how to help is by being difficult, to which she would have47

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said they were just going in circles. She would have said he was being
dramatic, sleeping in the basement, washing himself in the outdoor
shower, refusing to go to the second floor. She would have told him tolisten to his father, he knows what’s best. But she didn’t know the man
his father had become, a widower same as he and no longer a conductor
but a recently retired MTA train dispatcher who, with his abundanceof free time, could not help himself from attempting to supervise theminutiae of lives that were not his own. Even the real estate agent who
had helped him close on his new house upstate had almost dropped
him as a client.
His father calls again and he silences the ringtone, leaves his
phone there on the desk to mutely flash Dad in bright LED-white
while he heads for the bathroom to splash some cold water on his face.
Snap:
The father was in the kitchen fixing himself a drink.
The son was in his room.
They had gotten into an argument and that is where each had
ended up. The argument was about a call from one of the son’steachers, or at least that was how it started. Apparently the son had
cut his summer chemistry class again. It was chemistry or it was mathor history. It was an excuse. The argument was a lot of yelling andbanging that devolved at a certain point into cruel and spiteful words
that the father found too easy to say, eager to say, how he relished in
the hurt look the son struggled to conceal. How the son was a fuckup.
How he had been and always would be. How he’d killed his mother on
his way out of her. This is what the argument was about—what every
argument was ultimately about.
The father stood in the kitchen stirring his drink with his
finger. He knew it was not nor had it ever been the boy’s fault, though
it had taken him a long while to understand this, to admit it. She had
always been certain that she wanted children, he had only been certainthat he did not want to lose her. Then he lost her anyway, foundhimself stuck with the thing that had killed the person he loved mostin this world. He remembered how the baby had cried all through her
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funeral, somber speeches punctuated by harsh shrieks. At a certain
point during the sister’s eulogy, he finally asked a relative to take thebaby outside. He didn’t call the baby by its name. She had wanted toname the child after her father and that is what he told people when
they asked, nothing more.
The father felt ashamed whenever he thought about it now,
and all the other things he’d said to his son over the years. On the son’s
fifth birthday, when the father had believed him old enough tounderstand, he’d told the son exactly what he’d done to his own
mother. It had been a small gathering of close family, grandparents,
an uncle and an aunt from his wife’s side, and they all sat there in
wordless shock. Then he told the boy to blow out the candles. “Go on,”he’d said, slightly drunk, the son sobbing at the far side of table while
the grandparents tried to console him. “Make a wish.”In the kitchen the father took his finger out of the glass andput it in his mouth, whiskey and ginger ale. Long shadows weresprawled across the room, crumpled in corners.
Upstairs the son was quiet.
He could hear the cicadas throbbing out in the yard, hundreds
or thousands or more. A brood had emerged that summer, billions ofjuvenile cicadas come up from the earth after seventeen long years to
finally grow old and die. He thought about the time when the son was
three, sitting on the floor in the living room and beating clumsily on a
toy bongo set that had been gifted by an aunt while he stood in the
kitchen with the phone to his ear, listening to a rep from an adoption
agency explain the process. All he remembered now was how the rep
had told him, at least fifty times, that putting a child up for adoption
was not giving up. He had given up in different ways. The son had
become someone he merely tolerated, was obliged to raise. Even when
he told the son that he loved him, seldom as that was, he knew thewords were perfunctory and the love itself just as superficial and rote.
He never knew for certain how his son had learned to swim or ride abike.
The father held the drink in his fist. He drained it quickly andmade another and he was capable of this, of harboring some hatred
despite the unfairness of it. His wife would have called him an ass, an49Sunspot Literary Journal

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idiot. She would have called him a piece of shit and he would have
known she was right but it wouldn’t have mattered, and this is whatfrightened him most of all, this fact, or what he believed to be the truthof it—that he would always blame the boy for his wife’s death.
He was making a third drink and getting angry all over again
when he heard a muffled thump in the ceiling, felt it in his chest, a kindof hollow reverb that rang out in harmony with the ebbing drone of
the cicadas.
The next morning, sitting at a red light about twenty minutes awayfrom the train station, his phone buzzes. It’s not a text message thistime but an email. He doesn’t recognize the address save for thedomain, hhrealestate, a popular agency based in Westchester County.
He already knows what the email will be about but reads it anyway,skims through it.
. . . your father gave me . . . sell . . . interested . . . would love . . . feel
free . . .
The light turns green. The car behind him sounds its horn.
Five minutes later he slows the car and pulls off to the side of
the road. The road is a quiet backroad flanked by overgrown fields,
and he sits awhile staring out the windshield, hands still gripping thewheel.
He cuts the engine. He is sweating slightly. Heat crinkles
beneath the hood and there is sunlight is falling through the windows,
dust standing on the dash. He takes out his phone and calls his father.
His father picks up on the second ring and before he can evensay hello the son tells him to stop, just stop.
“Stop with what?”“The house. I’m not selling the house.”“Did that real estate agent ever reach out to you?”“Are you listening to me?”
“I hear you.”“That’s not what I asked.”“Are you still going to that group?”50

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He lowers the phone and presses the top of it against his chin.
He can hear his father’s voice down there, calling his name.
He says, “Dad, Dad. Listen.” He’s still holding the phone to hischin, talking over his father’s voice. “I am not selling the house,” hesays, steadily, and again, louder, a third time. The last time he says it,
he’s screaming the words into the receiver.
There’s a silence after that. In the field wildflowers blue andwhite and yellow heel and shiver in the wind and there is everywhere
the electric pulse of insects.
“Dad?” he says. He puts the phone back to his ear. “Dad?”
Clouds move past the sun and bands of shadow drift, ripple across theland.
“I’m here.” His father’s voice is deep and textured, years ofsmoking and yelling at passengers over the PA. “I’m still here.” And
the way his father’s voice carries a gesture—a hand on his shoulder hecan feel the weight of it even as he sits here miles away in the car amid
engine clacks and dust motes, and he wonders if he’d ever spoken tohis own son in such a way. He remembers opening the door to his son’sroom. He remembers his son lying there crumpled on the floor, eyes
gawking sightlessly at the wall while cicadas throbbed in the heat anda can of compressed air lay overturned on the desk.
He takes a deep breath and says, “I had this dream. Keephaving this dream. I’m out front doing yard work, mowing the lawn.
One time it’s I’m mowing, another I’m blowing leaves, power washing
the siding. But Claire is there. She’s always there standing in the front
door, talking to someone. I can’t see who she’s talking to. It’s just asilhouette, which I don’t know how because.”
He stops here a moment, wets his lips with the tip of his
tongue. His father is silent. There were the times his father had tried
to console him, telling him not to blame himself, be too hard on
himself. Times when he’d broken down completely and confessed or atleast that’s what it had felt like, like something that he had to relieve
himself of, that would not be true unless he said the actual words—
that he failed the boy, failed his son.

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Volume 4, Issue 1“I know it’s him,” he says. “In the dream. The silhouette, it’stall, you know? Grown. But I know it’s Michael. I know it’s him but I
can’t see him. It’s the just the shape of him, of maybe him.”
He stops again. With his other hand he squeezes the wheel till
his knuckles go white. Then he releases.
“I don’t know how he looks,” he says. “How he might’ve
looked. I think about that sometimes, what he might’ve looked like asa grown man, as a father himself maybe.”
Still his father is quiet. There is just his breath coming
through the phone, falling, somehow, warm on his ear.
Four weeks later he watches from the window a red Mercedes coupe
pull into his driveway, sunlight gleaming on the hood. The woman
behind the wheel sees him, waves, and he steps back to let the curtain
fall. He still isn’t sure why he’s agreed to this.
At the door he greets her, then forgets her name by the time
she steps inside. “What a lovely place,” she’s saying, “how lovely.”
He wonders how she’s able to make such an assessment bystanding in the foyer. Lovely, charming, quaint, gorgeous, she likes
these words and others out of the real estate lexicon. In the kitchen heinterrupts her description of the room’s flow to offer her coffee, water.
She declines. She’s eager to see the rest of the house. She’s a lanky
woman in twill pants and blouse who has a peculiar habit of listing
aloud the positive features of each room she enters, embellishing evenminor details with picturesque descriptions that make him bite theinsides of his cheeks, thinking how Claire would have had a field trip
with this one.
And it is easier than he thought it would be, moving up thestairs to the second floor. He does not climb or ascend but just moves.
The agent comments on the railing, the paneled risers. She calls thehome office an audacious space, which he doesn’t quite understand, nordoes he ask for clarification.
The last room he shows her is his son’s.
If she has any thoughts about the words or dent in the door
she keeps them to herself. He reaches for the knob but stops, stands
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there a moment, noticing or re-noticing, reading the words encircling
the rose:
Is all the time is all the time.
Written in Wite-out.
“We don’t have to go in there,” the real estate agent says.
“Your father told me. I’m sorry.”
He moves his head slightly but doesn’t look at her. He opens
the door, stands there with his back pressed against the scrawled
words, hand gripping the knob. The splintered wood scratches at his
shirt as he makes room for her to enter, which she does, hesitantly,
almost shyly. But soon she’s prattling on about size and floorboards
and natural light. There are the words stenciled on the wall, theposters hanging at angles. The bed is unmade. A ripped garbage baglies wadded on the floor and dirty laundry spills from the closet door.
The belt is around his waist.
He realizes the real estate agent is speaking to him. Her voiceseems to travel from far away. He looks up from the spot on the floor
where he had found his son and stares at her. She’s waiting for a
response, but he isn’t sure what she’s said, nor does he ask her to repeat
herself. He looks down again. She’s wearing things on her feet calledshoes, standing in the spot where he’d knelt trying to shake his son
awake.
“Anyway,” she says, perhaps sensing that he’s drifted off fromthe moment, “it never hurts to make connections. Keep your ear to theground.”He nods because such a thing as a nod can go here. He reaches
into his pocket, mutters something at the time displayed on his phone’s
screen and makes something up about some work he needs to get done.
“Clients,” he says. “You know how it goes.”
He does not shut the door to his son’s room. They leave, andhe shows her to the front, thanking her along the way, apologizing forhaving wasted her time, to which she assures him he hasn’t. As he’s
opening the front door, she says, “What is it you do? If you don’t mind
my asking.”“Consulting,” he tells her. “Telos.” It’s a large firm and he feels
halfway prideful saying the name aloud.
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She stands there on the landing. “Telos,” she says. She looks
down for a moment and laughs, softly, a private joke. She stares at him
through the screen door. “I’ve worked with your firm before.”“At H and H real estate?” he says.
“No. This was five years ago. Patina.”
He stares searchingly over her shoulder, trying to remember.
Then it comes to him. He remembers the logo and the conference roomwith the broad windows and large table and he remembers the bulky
man with the ruddy face and what he’d told him to do. He can feel his
cheeks going hot.
“The ad agency,” he says, but the words are dry and brittle inhis mouth. He’s expecting her to yell at him, curse him out, berate him.
Instead she tells him she never much liked that job, nevercared for it. She thanks him. She tells him that getting fired from thatjob was the best thing that had ever happened to her, aside frommeeting her husband, which she never would have had she still beenworking for Patina Media.
“Three years ago,” she says. “Was showing him an apartment
down in Ossining. Now we have a little one on the way, if you canbelieve it.” She places her hand on her stomach. “Just found out a few
weeks ago. Crazy,” she says, “how things work out in the end.”
He stands there staring at her stomach, smiling in a way heknows is creepy, but there’s no helping it.
“Well,” she says. “You have my info. Let me know if anythingchanges.”
He watches her walk to her car. Before she can start the engine
he calls out to her, halfway out the front door and waving his arm forattention. “Hold on,” he says, and goes back into the house. A minutelater he emerges with a few small boxes bundled in his hands.
He walks the flagstone path and proffers them without a word
through the open window. She accepts, tentatively. She holds up oneof the boxes and reads aloud the words printed on the front. “Bangsnaps,” she says, and looks at him as if for clarification.
He shrugs. He says, “I don’t know. To celebrate.”
She smiles politely. “Take care,” she says, and rolls up thewindow.
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When she’s gone he’s left standing there in the driveway, newweeds in the cracks, listening to the sound that silence makes: birds,
wind, leaves, tattered shreds of cigarette paper skidding over the faded
pavement. In the distance, the ebbing drone of an engine. That is all.
It is early spring, and the cicadas won’t be out for another few months.

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Nobody’s Princess
Meg Hurtado Bloom
D tells C to fuck off. She doesn’t want to spend her life with somebody
who won’t really put the past away. She has a lot to do with the futureand she can feel that even if nobody else can. She goes home for longenough to pack a bag and then, in the middle of the night when all thereporters are gone, she has her brother drive her to Heathrow where
she boards a plane to New York. She refuses to take any money, thenor ever. In New York, she nannies for a while, and then she starts topaint. Her paintings are paintings of exile, interrupted attachment, yetpossess an inner regality that none can deny, says the NYT. She isoffered a show at Tate Modern, and E. attends. They meet. D wears along-sleeved clinging knit bodycon dress of the finest Italian blackwool over a black silk slip. Her hair is black by now (it is the ’90s), andthe two of them resemble each other more than you would imagine
possible. A photo is taken of them at the gallery and published in theT., which hasn’t missed the fact that she’s an ex. C, too, is stunned. Hephones her the next day.
D tells C to fuck off. C is stunned. D goes home and gives everyone
the silent treatment for a week. Then she calls up one of her old school
friends who’s on holiday in Paris. They go shopping at Balmain, stuff
themselves with pastry. They get drunk in the Marais and are almost
run over by a taxi. D thinks she is going to throw up but then she
doesn’t. They laugh all the way back to the friend’s hotel. In themorning they will stumble around until they find strong coffee andtwo beautiful boys, the first of many.
D tells C to fuck off. C is stunned. D goes home and locks herself in
her room. Nobody can bring themselves to ask what happened. Theyleave meals outside her room for a month. When it is clear that she
has already had a nervous breakdown, she joins the family for meals
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Volume 4, Issue 1again. She appears incredibly serene, but doesn’t gain any weight. This
goes on for another month and then one day her sister finds a notesaying that she simply needs to clear her head. They have no idea
where she has gone. She has left her little car in the airport parking lot
and her father has to have it towed home. A decade later, she returns,
the veiled and glowing wife of an Iranian doctor who has recently
joined the board of a prominent London health charity. They have twobeautiful boys.
D tells C no thank you, and then asks if someone can drive her car
home for her, because she isn’t feeling well. It is awkward. C isstunned, but sends someone. The press linger outside her father’shouse for weeks, and everyone feels embarrassed about it. Nobody asks
her what happened, they know that D is a very single-minded girl. D
tries to go back to work at the nursery school but it is very awkward.
D sees a photo of C in the paper with the new princess and feels very
sure that she has missed her biggest chance. And then she thinks,
Well, what’s there to do? She quits her job, even though the press has
left her alone for weeks. She asks her father for a tutor and completes
her A-levels, enrolls at U, but doesn’t do very well, and when she meetsa nice boy named R, that’s that, they get married. They have two boys.
R’s mother runs a prominent charity from a chic little office in Chelsea,
so D gets a job there, truly makes a difference among the poor of
London, and then goes shopping after work. Occasionally people
remember that she might have become a princess and didn’t. D lives.
D tells C, no thank you. C says nothing, sends her home. She tells her
family everything, and they send her to friends in New York. The
friends are kind, her family sends her an allowance. She dances again.
She makes a whole gaggle of lovely girlfriends, none of whom have
any idea where she’s coming from. She’s happy, but she’s lonely. One
night her mother’s friend says, “Why don’t you come to the Met Gala
with me? H has the most terrible headache,” and she goes. She meetsa fluffy-haired tycoon who simply won’t leave her alone—eventually,57

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the press outside the house becomes unbearable. She writes to herbrother, who has been drinking a lot since she left and decides tolawyer up. She isn’t sure, but then runs into the tycoon in the loo at
Christie’s of all places. What he does there steels her, and she hires
three more lawyers the next day, fathers of her girlfriends. They findall kinds of damning tidbits about a man nobody has really noticed
yet—but it’s enough. D takes half his empire, starts a magazine, atelevision station, and a training corps for compassionate nannies in
the City. D lives. Things change.
D tells C to fuck off. C is stunned. He asks, Are you very sure? Shesays, Oh, yes. She goes home. But on holiday with The Family she has
fallen in love with the Highlands, and she knows what she must do.
She asks her father for a job in finance. He is stunned, but finds a way.
She works on the London Exchange for three years, wearing navy
suits every day. She was nervous at first, because everyone said she
wasn’t good at maths, but her charm and intuition prove unstoppableon the trading floor. She makes a fortune of her own, buys a little
cottage outside Inverness, with a little stone wall to shield the chickens
from the icy wind. D likes to have tea in her garden wearing theevening gowns she’s had shipped from London. Her neighbors wave
and think how good it is to see her. She lives alone, and enjoys a stringof male visitors, some of them very young men hired from nearby
villages. Her family assumes she has gone mad at last and never speaks
to her again. But she has kept up her investments, and has a small armyof young women doing her bidding in London, so within another three
years she buys the meadow attached to her cottage, and builds a barn,
and a little pavilion for picnics. She imports two little Dartmoor
ponies, names them W and H, and grants the neighbor children rides
whenever they ask.
D tells C to fuck off. C is stunned. D goes home and cleans her room,
her sister’s room, her brother’s room, the library, the kitchen, the backstairs. She enrolls at London College, in the fashion department. She
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does very well. Her father knows the owner of Harrod’s and she grewup with his son, so she gets a job immediately at the head of theirstyling league. C has waited around and found another prospective
princess about whom he feels just the same, and now they’re getting
married. He comes to D and says, It’s no hard feelings, you always had
such an eye and Mummy liked you, could you come and dress her for
the wedding? D says, of course, and she is thrilled, and picks out adaring full-skirted suit for E which will change everything else E
wears for years. The Day-Of, D is on set to handle any last-minutestitchings … for any other client she could have sent an assistant, but
E is notoriously private and knows that D “knows how it works” sowould prefer D handle any adjustments (The bride needs the dress
taken in, of course.) D frolics with the flower girls and C sees her andhow happy she is and he wonders, he definitely wonders. But then C
thinks of C and all’s well. D was of course already a celebrity stylist of
the greatest reach but now that she has dressed the Q she isuntouchable. She buys her brother out of the S estate, adopts sevenchildren and employs an army of young refugees as nannies. They will
all receive college degrees and a job placement of their dreams. D
grows old, surrounded. She wears a lot of red.

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Something In the Water
Federica Santini
It just rained and the ground smells of new births and ashes. The
bottle is half buried and cracked. Held in its uneven mouth, barely
visible: two opaque beads (my eyes?), leaves not quite burned by theseason (the polish has splintered on my fingertips), rain-darkened weeds(my hair is matted, unruly), a single green blade chanting softly in tune
with my voice, which I hear but cannot recognize. Soil all around, abroken doll’s hand (my own broken hand? Another’s?). Everything thathurts is in the bottle.
Can water hurt? Small white faces peer from the branches,staring at me. The day the pill bank at the station shut down, everyone
screaming and rushing out, he said he’d go for a vasectomy. Next
morning, the news came that they made that illegal along with all bodyalterations. I took off my earrings, he slid off his tongue piercing. I
started covering my tattoo with long-sleeved tops—it’s best to display
modesty in any case, though there has been no ban. No matter now, I
no longer go out. We stopped sex for a while, thought of other ways
for intimacy, our limbs intertwined in our dreams.
Then the supplements arrived in the mail for non-mothers, tohelp us conceive. You have to take two every night with dinner. Just
vitamins, B12, nothing harmful. It’s what every woman should take.
Every new cycle, I see another small face lurking, white and jeering.
They say it’s my conscience, the unconceived babies calling for me.
They say I’m murdering them every month. He said it’s all in my head.
But I think there must be something in the water. The water comes
free with the supplements, a special treat for us non-mothers. I threw
out the first pills, and got fined. Then the fines got higher, the checkins tighter. Weekly blood sampling, bounty hunters out to seek those
who do not comply, those who do not conceive. I complied. The small
white faces began popping up at the edge of my vision. He said it’s all
in my head. I say there’s something in the water.
I look at that first bottle, half-hidden in the garden, the twopills like glassy eyes just inside it. Small faces circle around like eerie
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glowworms, yet it’s full day. Everything that hurts is in the bottle,
hard to dislodge or unearth. Hidden deep in the bottle there’s me,
waiting, whole and unseen.

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We Haven’t Eaten
Christopher Bowen
We bought the house on a quiet street like a deep sigh. Children played
kickball. There was a sign that said slow down.
She planted the rose bed first and over the years put fish bones
and bone powder at each of their bases.
“The calcium helps them grow,” she said, holding a flower by
the stem so as not to prick herself.
She puts down a fish, an offering, at the boneyard.
We haven’t eaten fish in a hundred and eighty-five days. She
puts the bones over the deep, dark mulch in early fall and I have noidea where they ever come from.
I don’t love her anymore, but sometimes when she says she’s
about to go, she kisses me on the cheek and I miss the woman she wasmore than when she’s even around.

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Waiting for the Commands
Jose Varghese
It begins in the year of extinctions. The breeze that used tolick off sweat from the back of your neckin summer days is gone. You hide behind the hefty ceramic
pickle jars, solaced by its cold, glossy exterior.
The aroma of whole ripe mangoes that’re preserved in themwith salt, oil and dry red chilies, seeps throughthe cloth that’s tied tight over its lid with several strandsof jute. No one has told you about the absences
you were to be made with, in a world that’s not yet readyfor your cultivated skills of flawless accumulationof data and accurate response to commands, gained morefrom machines than humans. You still imagine
yourself to be a part of them, but those races and genders
and faiths confuse you as much as the pickles
they make, the ideologies they use to fight with one another,
the green and red and blue caps they sport
to show how they differ from one another, the snacks anddrinks and words they choose to declaretheir love or hurt or hatred at night, in dimly-lit terraces
with yellow walls. You were born out of theircollective ambition, but no one accepts you for what you’ve
become in their hands. You still dream of the hillson all sides cradling the home that you thought was yours.
The smell of jackfruit and guava, the squeaky
squirrels that hung upside-down from plantains, the frantic
movement of their tails and cacophonous praiseof the cornucopia they thought of as theirs while they ate
and drank to their fill in dimly-lit duskswith amber skies, the parakeets playing hide-and-seek with
gooseberry leaves, the snakes coiling aroundthe dried-up secrets of the sun, the pheromone-driven
processions of the ants—are all in the past, as
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you wait for commands from radio hisses and rumbles,
hiding behind the last mangoes in pickle jars.

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Bowl City Splash Page / Dave Sims
Inception Winner65

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Orpheus Far from the Abyss
Meagan Daine
Inception Runner-up
Orpheus. Do you remember when we used to climb the dusty hill andpush through tangled thorns to reach the eucalyptus grove? The spicy
smell of the trees. The strips of bark, long as we were tall but fragile,easy to take in the fingers and crack to let the fragrance stain thehands. The dry, fallen leaves in the thick grass, the cool grass
sometimes parting, sometimes buried beneath them. The grass
pushing up in stalks, knots, bunches, finally to hillocks covered in bellshaped yellow flowers. You taught me to pluck these flowers and chew
the stems for their sour juices.
Do you remember?
Orpheus. Sometimes I dream that we are walking up that hill
again and I am happy as if my heart were full of sunlight because I
know you have forgiven me.

In school I knew a man who wrote strange music. He hunched over the keysof an old piano and played through the night. Tones spilled through thewindow into the garden where I walked, splashing colors onto my path,
painting a world I’d never been able to reach alone. A place I’d never believed
in. In which it became impossible not to believe.

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This Summer I Hear the Gun
Noah Ruiz
Inception Finalist
First of all, I have three questions for you:
1. Please fill in the blank below.
“Racial hate had been the bane of my life, and here before myeyes was concrete proof that it could be abolished. Yet a newhate had come to take the place of the rankling racial hate. It
was irrational thatshould hate what they called“intellectuals” or anybody who tried to think for himself. I had
fled men who did not like the color of my skin, and now I wasamong men who did not like the tone of my thoughts.”—Richard Wright, writing from Paris, France, 1944.
A. Communists
B. ANTIFA
C. Trump supporters
D. Covid-19 Victims
E. The CDC
F. George Floyd Protesters
G. All of the above
2. Choose the answer below that best defines “2020” as a
linguistic neologism (i.e., beyond its literal referent—how is it being
used in discourse now, as more than just a number?):
A. The intersection of race, politics, police brutality,
pandemic, and economic disaster
B. A statement of moral despair about the state of ourculture, our nation, and the world
C. The year I graduated college
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D. The third year since I entered college
E. The third consecutive year since I was last brutalized by amember of the police force
3. What Race / Ethnicity are you?
A. WhiteB. Mexican
C. Both?
D. Culturally white and American, ethnically mixed-race
descent
E. None of the above
F. All of the above
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Eye of the Sun / Evelyn M
Inception Finalist

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Spiderland
DS Higdon
Inception Finalist
We spent nights in the basement. We shared our space with thinlegged spiders and humpback crickets, minor things that scurried andhugged shadows. Earth wept through the foundation, damp
cinderblocks stained with specks of dirt, like blackheads on a shy boy’s
face. We spent nights under mason jars ranked on plywood shelves,
opaque with kraut, pickles, peppers, pole beans, and crushed tomatoes.
Behind a bedsheet curtain, Issacs’s dad grew pot in five-gallon buckets
under fluorescent lights. We strung Christmas lights from the joists
and scavenged a stack of 45s from a moldy cardboard box. One Toke
Over the Line Sweet Jesus. Cover of the Rolling Stone. We flipped throughcreased Hustlers and Swamp Thing comics. The coils of a space heater
glowed and hummed in a corner, and we smoked Newports I stolefrom Mom’s purse. We exhaled our dreams from the window well into
the cold dark sky, only our faces and the constellations reflected in thecasement pane.

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NaiadsJanna Urschel
Inception Finalist
One wrinkly Naiad after another washed up to shore, crisp andleathery. At first, people mistook them for fish, dried-up fish. But evenafter they knew better, they figured, why not? Seafood is seafood
No one even knew there were Naiads in the Hudson until they
started dying.
“This isn’t Greece,” someone notable complained in a New
York Times editorial, and some smartass wrote a letter to the editor
in reply to say, “But there’s Troy. And Ithaca.”
Why were they here? Had they always been here? The
scientists were called in, from Boston, mostly, so they could beobjective. But they didn’t know a good goddamn about mythology. So
they brought in the classicists, but there are, like, thirty-seventranslations of Ovid, and then someone had to bring up Homer, so
until they could get their declensions worked out, they weren’t going
to be much help either. A noted physicist said something about
dimensions, but it was more opaque than the Ovid translations, so no
one paid him much mind.

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Ad Lucem Aeternam
HR Harper
Culmination Winner…
What leaves asks for our surrender.
From this end of the story,
freedom and slavery both overrate us.
I was rowing away from shore anyway.

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Blue Mustang; Red Rose
Jeanne Wilkinson
Culmination Finalist
I hung up the phone feeling dizzy, as if I were looking at life throughthe wrong end of a telescope. As if the events of the past year had
twisted my life into a puzzle whose pieces would never fit into that
suburban template where the end picture is you, your spouse, and twopoint-three kids in front of a big split-level house on a spotless
concrete driveway flanked by a neon-green lawn. But I was no longer
a girl from the suburbs and, hmmm, was it mescaline in Golden Gate
Park where the trees danced, or LSD at the Pacific shoreline where I
found my name written in the sand that made me understand I neverwould be again?
Either way, I was a stranger in an ordinary land, and going ona date with you seemed, well, impossible. Like we’d be speaking
different languages and I had no interest in yours anymore and didn’t
have the energy to teach you mine. And worse, getting close to me
could very possibly twist and warp you into some bizarre, distorted
shape, and I didn’t want that kind of karma marking my soul. Or
yours.
So I’d have to find my own way and you’d have to find yours.
I hoped yours would be good because you at the gas station—
clutching that red rose in your shining, greasy hand—had been anangel in my life at a moment when I’d badly needed one.

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Final Crises
Haylee Millikan
Culmination Finalist
I was once gropedby dissonance,& I gripped him until I felt myself
hemorrhage.

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MotionNoah Ruiz
Culmination Finalist
I will try to figure out who my father is. Who he was.
When I was an infant, he competed in martial arts
tournaments, spectated by grandmasters. He used to weightlift everyday. Before he met my mother, he travelled to Europe to play soccer
internationally. He worked for the Viper team of software engineers at
Comcast. He lacked an official college degree, but he achieved his
dream of becoming a multimillionaire through Bitcoin. He retired atage forty-two. He had three children.
See, that doesn’t feel like him at all. Past, present, future. Noneof it makes sense. How are we talking about the same person?
The landscape streams by. Grass, plains. On the other side,
mountains. Sun. I haven’t said anything since we got on the highway.
The house music is still playing. There’s a new thumbnail of a different
girl in a skirt. She’s teasing her breasts, standing on a rooftop in a
black crop top. He’s still driving, wearing those sunglasses. I bet
they’re spotless by now.
I sink further into my chair and lean my head against thewindow as I peer out. I begin drifting in and out of sleep. My head isso heavy. It bobs around from the motion of the car. At ninety miles
an hour we are being pushed forward by the rubber wheels, steel mesh,the driveshaft. Always moving forward, inexorably. All my life, we’vebeen on the move. But we haven’t crashed yet. I’m always wondering
how.

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for want of parchment
Claude Clayton Smith
Culmination Finalist
greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare
what have they not written
for want of parchment
flitting perspectives and demi-experiences
which never die

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Contributors
Erin Birdsall is a writer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and holds a B.A.
in English (Creative Writing—Fiction) from Northwestern University. She
is currently drafting her first novel and has written a few short stories over
the years. If you read her work, you’ll encounter stories about women, Celtic
folklore, grief, magic, and spirituality.
Christopher Bowen is the author of the chapbook We Were Giants, thenovella When I Return to You, I Will Be Unfed, and the nonfiction Debt. He wasa semifinalist in the 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom Novella Competition andreceived honorable mention in the 45th New Millennium Writing Awards inthe nonfiction category.
Christopher Paul Brown is known for his exploration of the unconscious
and the serendipitous. In 2020 his work appeared in fourteen periodicals andtwo hardcover books. His first photography sale was to the Standard Oil
Company of Indiana and his video You Define Single File was nominated for
the Golden Gate Award at the 47th San Francisco International Film
Festival. He earned a BA in Film from Columbia College Chicago in 1980.
Brown was born in Dubuque, Iowa, grew up in northern Illinois, and now
resides in North Carolina.
Garrett Candrea grew up in Eastchester, New York and currently lives inAstoria, Queens. His work has appeared in Sunspot.
Meagan Daine is a multimedia storyteller specializing in alternative comingof-age tales about diverse characters in extraordinary circumstances. Born
and raised in East Texas, she moved away at age seventeen to attend the allfemale Mills College in Oakland, CA. She worked as a waitress, an ESL
teacher, a "jolly" in a Roman dance club, a theatre manager, a magician’s
assistant, and a private investigator while establishing her writing career.
Meagan speaks fluent Spanish and Italian, along with some French andRussian.
Bianca Giglio is a Canadian university student in the process of completing
Bachelor’s degrees in both Biology and Women’s Studies.
Lindsey Morrison Grant is a self-identifying neurodivergent, two-spirit,elder storyteller, and contrarian deeply rooted in the roar and lore of what’s
become Portlandia of The Left Coast. The Artist attributes success andsurvival (if not salvation) to superlative supports, mindfulness practice, anddaily creative expression in words, sounds, and images.
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HR Harper is a poet living in the redwoods above Santa Cruz, CA. In recent
months he’s had poems published in Prospectus, The Write Launch, a WinglessDreamer anthology, The Vital Sparks, The 34thParallel Magazine, High Shelf
Press journal, and Angel Rust magazine. A student/practitioner of Dzogchen
meditation, he writes to understand, heal and resolve the curious limits andcontradictions of consciousness in a world that is being destroyed by humans.
JJ Chen Henderson is a writer, poet and an artist. She has published a novel,
short stories and poetry in literary reviews and magazines such as Fourteen
Hills, Poetry East, Clackamas Reviews, and Slant Magazine.
DS Higdon is a writer from Kentucky. His work has been published or isforthcoming in Rust + Moth, Exposition Review, Lucky Jefferson, Coffin Bell
Journal, and others. He is the 2021 winner of The Grand Prix Prize from the
Kentucky State Poetry Society. He lives with his family in Louisville, KY.
Meg Hurtado Bloom has her MFA in Poetry from St Mary’s College ofCalifornia. She also studied English and Art History at the University ofRichmond. Meg’s work has appeared in The Volta, Cannibal, Hidden City
Quarterly, the West Wind Review, POOL, the Columbia Poetry Review, and the
McSweeney’s anthology Conversations at the Wartime Cafe. She has worked for
VERSE, Wave Books, and Omnidawn.
Candice Kelsey teaches writing in the South. Her poetry appears in Poets
Reading the News and Poet Lore, among other journals, and her first collection,
Still I am Pushing, explores mother-daughter relationships as well as toxic
body messages. She won the 2019 Two Sisters Writing’s Contest and wasrecently nominated for both a Best of the Net and a Pushcart. Find her at
www.candicemkelseypoet.com.
Roeethyll Lunn is a lifelong educator, learner, and writer. For many years
she has been a Developmental Writing Instructor at Wayne Community
College in Goldsboro, NC. She declares herself to be “an experimental writer”
of essays, short stories, poetry, and articles about people living in the Pee Deearea of rural South Carolina just before desegregation. She was born inDarlington, South Carolina, has a BFA in Broadcast Media and an MFA in
English and writing.
Evelyn M is an interior designer, artist and micro urban flower farmer living
in Campbell River. She was born in Vancouver where she received her
Associate of Interior Design from Douglas College after which she continued
her education studying building technology and art. Evelyn began a career infine art with her detailed custom watercolors of dogs, cats and people, soon
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expanding to wildlife of the Antarctic. Evelyn M moved to the islands at 30
where the influences of the city and rural/suburban life became a strong partof her art and design. Recently, she has embraced digital photography. Her
work can be found at www.EvelynM.com.
Ryan Mattern holds an MA in English from UC Davis, and a BA in Creative
Writing from CSUSB. He is the recipient of the Felix Valdez Award. His
work has appeared in Crazyhorse, The Santa Clara Review, and Poetry Quarterly.
He currently serves in the US Army.
Haylee Millikan is a poet originally from Spokane. Haylee’s work focuses onthemes of intimacy, disability, self, and the elusive concept of home, and has
been featured in Equinox, Litro, Beyond Words, Susie Magazine, Textploit,
pioneertown, and others. They currently reside in Long Beach with their two
Flatbush rescue cats.
Karen Poppy has work published in numerous literary journals, magazines,
and anthologies. Her chapbook Crack Open/Emergency was published by
Finishing Line Press (2020), where she has another chapbook forthcoming.
Her chapbook Every Possible Thing is published by Homestead Lighthouse
Press (2020). An attorney licensed in California and Texas, Karen Poppy lives
in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ron Pullins is a fiction writer, playwright, and poet working in Tucson AZ.
His works in fiction, poetry and drama have been published in numerous
journals, including Typishly, Southwest Review, and Shenandoah.
Noah Ruiz was born in Michigan and raised in Colorado. He attended
Colorado State University, where he was published for the first time in
Greyrock Review. After studying English, history, rhetoric, linguistics, andliteracy, he moved to Florida to pursue his writing and his music.
Federica Santini lives in Atlanta and teaches at Kennesaw State University.
She holds an MA from the University of Siena, Italy, and a PhD from UCLA.
She has authored or edited four volumes on poetics, and her poetry and fiction
has been published in numerous journals in North America and Europe. She
is the author of the poetry chapbook Unearthed (Kelsay Books, 2021).
A retired educator, Dave Sims makes art and music in the mountains ofcentral Pennsylvania. His comix and paintings—both old-school anddigital—appear upon the walls, covers and inside pages of over seventy tactile
and virtual publications and exhibits. He’s currently working on the art for79

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Bowl City, an experimental graphic novel written by his LA surfer friend, John
Peterson. Experience more at www.tincansims.com.
Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University Claude Clayton
Smith is the author of eight books and coeditor/translator of four others. His
own work has been translated into five languages, including Russian andChinese. For further information visit: claudeclaytonsmith.wordpress.com.
Kate Strong Stadt is a former children’s librarian turned knowledge worker.
Recently, her poems have been published in The Collidescope, Sparked Literary
Magazine, and swifts & slows. Her latest obsession is blacksmithing.
Travis Stephens is a tugboat captain who resides with his family in
California. An alumni of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, recent
credits include: 2River, Sheila-Na-Gig, Hole in the Head Review, Griffel, andThe Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Visit him at: zolothstephenswrites.com.
Janna Urschel has been a wedding harpist, dog musher, native language
linguist, children’s Spanish teacher, and college writing instructor. She iscurrently a PhD student in English at SUNY. Janna recently relocated to thehigh plains of Wyoming, where she is at work on a creative dissertation
exploring nonhuman agency. She has been published in Trolley, Mamalode,and Ladybug. She was a finalist for the 2021 Montana Prize, and blogs at
www.lifeinthemultiverse.com.
Jose Varghese is the author of Silver Painted Gandhi and Other Poems, and his
short story manuscript In/Sane was a finalist in the 2018 Beverly
International Prize. His second collection of poems is scheduled for
publication in 2022 by Black Spring Press Group, UK. He was a finalist twicein the London Independent Story Prize (LISP), a runner up in the Salt Prize,
and was commended in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize.
His works are published or forthcoming in a number of journals andmagazines.
Jeanne Wilkinson is a writer and artist sharing time between Brooklyn, NY
and Madison, WI. From being a “back-to-the-land” organic dairy farmer in
Wisconsin, she ended up with an MFA in painting at Pratt Institute. Her
essays have been featured on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show and NPR’s
Living on Earth. Her fiction has appeared in Columbia Journal and Digging
Through the Fat, and chapters from her memoir 1969: My Year with a San
Francisco Drug Dealer, have been published by Raven’s Perch, New Millennium
Writings, and more. See her website at https://jeannewilkinson.com.
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Writing a New World
Sunspot Literary Journal believes in the power of the written word. Fiction,
nonfiction, poetry and art can speak truth to power with the power inherent
in all human beings. Our mission is to amplify every voice. Four digitalquarterly editions are produced per year, along with one print volume.

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