Vasilisa the Beautiful Sets the Record Straight

by Mikki Aronoff


On her death bed, Mother handed me a doll. Keep her well-fed. She will keep you safe from Baba Yaga.

A modest meal, a crust of kolach, a spoonful of shchi sets the doll in motion. But everyday a rising creep of needs. I grip and pound the mortar and pestle, grind gristle till dawn. My hands callus as I hoist cauldrons crowded with chicken feet, render pig fat over coals that glow like Baba’s pupils.

Did you think I do nothing? My brow’s a fixed furrow of worry and planning. I trudge to the market, haggle with the butcher, fend off his blood-soaked fingers. I mix and stir and scrape and sever and slice, light fires and bake to spoon-feed her tiny mouth, fill her bottomless abyss.

For this, the doll does what she must to keep me from becoming Baba’s basket of bones. She carries out the simpler tediums. A stick of wood can only do so much. She weeds the vegetable beds, separates bad corn kernels from good, poppy seeds from soil. She turns her ear to my troubles, whispers advice into mine. She is The Mute Keeper of Secrets, the Guardian of My Well-Being. Part-time.

My tongue, too, safeguards secrets and lies. I know what the grandfathers have done. I, too, must hoodwink and bribe, shade my intent. This my doll knows. We are complicit. It is all that we share.

Muscle and grease streak her chin as she waits for the honey cake I shovel into that greedy gape. I stifle my gags, suffer her glassy stare, recall my mother’s words, may leeks sprout from her navel.

My thighs thicken like tree trunks from my labors while Miss Clothespin stays thin. She thrives on the marrow I fry, the milk I daily drain from our cow, on the kudos and thanks she keeps pinned to her frock. But it’s my hands that carry burns, my arms that congeal like sausages. I feed the dogs and pick up their shit, doubled over like a dandelion limp from a drought. I juggle the accounts, sweep mice from the cellar. In the forest, it is I who oils the hinge, ribbons the birch, fattens the witch’s cat. I carry the skull that carries the light. I hold the towel, the comb that can magic a river or woods.

All this I do, and more.

* * * * *

"Vasilisa the Beautiful Sets the Record Straight" was previously published in Qwerty (June 2022).

Mikki Aronoff chases words in New Mexico. She has work in Flash Boulevard, New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, ThimbleLit, The Phare, Bending Genres, The Ekphrastic Review, The Fortnightly Review, Milk Candy Review, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, The Citron Review, Atlas and Alice, 100 word story, trampset, jmww, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her stories and poems have received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.

 

Too Late but Never Mind

by Margaret E. Wells

When Lizzie Marsh gets in her car to drop her kids off at school, she’s already given up on finding matching socks for the four-year-old, and her older daughter has run back inside once to grab the field trip form she forgot, and there is almost certainly something sitting on the kitchen counter that was supposed to be in the car, but it’s too late now. When she drops her daughter off at the school’s back gate, there is just time for her to make it to class before the final bell if she really hustles, but Lizzie doesn’t have time to stay and see if she makes it so she just breathes out a quick Hail Mary and tosses it her daughter’s way as she pulls back out into the street.

It drives her crazy that there are at least 10 masks scattered across the backseat of the car and not one of them is the right size for her four-year-old son, so that she has to put the one from yesterday on his little face, smeared inside with spaghetti sauce and snot, and hope neither he nor his preschool teachers notice or complain.

On her lunch break she’s roped into a meeting with her ex for an interminable half hour, and what she feels is not the sensation of a jellyfish stranded by the tide, not the flapping hop of a captive swan whose wings are clipped, not the spreading rot eating a Halloween pumpkin from the inside out, but something slower and more pathetic: A protozoa swimming, its mass of microscopic hairs rowing frantically. A daddy-long-legs with its legs pulled off by feckless children. She remembers discovering the joy of sleeping naked and then losing it again. She remembers when she was the subject of every picture in his camera (before he slept with other people). Naïve girl so long ago.

Now when she types her last name at the end of the zillionth email of the day she thinks that she has no time—no time to get the car oil changed, no time to grade the stack of student papers before the end of the week, no time to shave her legs because who is looking anyway, no time to shop for groceries so better order delivery again, no time for any of the self-care regimens websites are always pushing on her, and—my God, she’s already late for pickup! And Lizzie Marsh knows that somewhere there are people who set timers and check every item off their lists and are always 10 minutes early and they would never, ever, ever run so close to the line on every damn thing and Lizzie knows this without even hoping, without even dreaming, without even aspiring, really, to be something so other than herself and so close to the divine.

All week Lizzie holds out hope for Sunday, because Sunday is her ex’s day with the kids, and Sunday, after drop-off at 8 am—or a little later than 8 am, let’s be realistic and say by 8:15—she has the whole glorious day in front of her to do any damn thing she pleases. Lizzie has not had this kind of freedom since her first job out of college, before marriage and before kids. In the first months after getting divorced, Lizzie slept every Sunday, gorging on hours of sleep like a bear sinking into hibernation, like a frog letting its blood freeze over for the snowy season, maybe even like someone giving in to hypothermia. She ran no errands, carried out no self improvement, read no books, watched no shows, went nowhere, accomplished nothing—just existed like a limpet on a rock, recovering from the battery of the tide.

Still, the unanimous opinion of the internet and all her friends and acquaintances and even the people at work when she finally let it be known that she had gotten a divorce is that when you are all alone again after splitting up with your partner of 23 years you need to get on out there and meet new people rather than lying in bed all day like a sloth. Even though everyone loves sloths, even though Costa Rica does a booming eco-tourism trade centered on sloths, even though sloths really have something going for them, Lizzie thinks, in their steady refusal of ant-like dedication to industriousness. Still, when the RSVP notice for an alumni hike on Sunday pops up in her inbox on Friday, and her old roommate Amanda sends her a text saying she and her husband Greg are going, Lizzie recklessly clicks “Yes!”

With Sunday drop-off achieved at 8:11 am, Lizzie Marsh has just enough time to drive back to her apartment, toss a peanut butter sandwich and some carrots into a backpack, grab a water bottle, and hustle back to the car with a prayer of making it to the 9 am hike before it begins. But now that she is in the car and committed, Lizzie finds herself with second thoughts. She considers calling Amanda to cancel, but Lizzie knows that phone reception is spotty out at the nature reserves that the alumni group favors and that Amanda will have gotten there early to greet people, because Amanda is the kind of person who is on the alumni board. Lizzie knows, too, that Amanda is on a mission to get her out and about, and Amanda on a mission is like a pack of sea lions when they decide to take over a dock, crashing through every fence that is supposed to keep them out with their four-hundred pound bodies. So she keeps driving.

The traffic gods are not kind and it’s already 9:05 when Lizzie turns into the main parking lot to find there are no spaces left, though Amanda’s on-time car is neatly parked near a cluster of hikers gathered at the trailhead. When Amanda waves enthusiastically and tells her there is a second parking lot just down the road, Lizzie wishes she were home in bed where her covers are ocean blue and the sun would just be starting to creep across the bamboo floors and she could be sinking into sleep. As she pulls back out into the road, Lizzie is hoping for no parking and an excuse to go home. Rounding a curve, the secondary lot comes into view on the left, and she presses the brake and flicks on the blinker, her eyes already picking out an open space. So she is committing to this hike after all, steering wheel turning under her fingers, already calculating how many minutes it will take to walk over to the main lot, and wondering whether the hike will have started without her, when she catches from the corner of her left eye a blur next to the driver’s side window and hears a sickening crunch. Lizzie hits the brake hard and jerks right, away from the blur and the sound, the car stopping just over the line between road and parking lot.

There is a man on the ground next to a red and silver motorcycle and for a second Lizzie’s heart stops because she knows, she knows she has made a terrible mistake in life and while she can’t decide whether the mistake was marrying the wrong person or not knowing how to keep her ex faithful to her or whether the mistake was marrying at all or something else she knows there was a mistake and somehow she is someone who, when left to her own devices, her own opinions and decisions, is a blight upon the world and the best thing, the only thing, the safest thing is to stay hunkered down in bed with the covers over her head and only do the things that need to be done. What was she thinking, going on a hike?

Another group of hikers is loosening from their tight knot and Lizzie is opening the car door and the man is getting up—oh, thank God!—and Lizzie’s heart starts up again, racing now, because even as she feels relief she wonders, ashamed to be wondering, what exactly is the state of her car insurance? In Lizzie’s fantasies she is someone who keeps an excel spreadsheet of her expenses and has a file cabinet with all of her passwords and account numbers carefully organized and she can recall with perfect clarity the details of her car insurance. Instead, she is pulling out her phone with shaking fingers and logging into the Geico app and praying for signal so that she can download the insurance card she never got around to printing out.

And even as all of this is happening, Lizzie half out of the car and the app finally done loading, the man is standing up. And he is alive and his bike even starts, and for a moment it is like grace. Then she swings from elation to a sense that, once again, she has been undeservedly spared the consequences of all of her bad choices, lined up like a set of bowling pins, for the world to come knock down. She exchanges insurance information with the man and after about 20 minutes he rides off.

Things she forgot and her friends berate her for later: to get his insurance information and to get his license plate number, so that when her insurance determines she is not at fault (but she knows, deep down, that if she hadn’t been late for the hike, and hurrying, she would have seen him coming up on the left and braked in time) she can’t get hold of his insurance and, though she is not legally liable for damage to him or his bike, neither does she ever see a penny from his insurance to fix the dent in her own car. This, Lizzie thinks as she explains the dent to Annabelle, her daughter who is oh-so-sharp, is only justice, and she leaves it unfixed as a reminder to herself of all her luck and all her many sins.


* * * * *

Margaret E. Wells is an emerging fiction writer who lives in Pacifica, California, and loves the ocean and the redwoods. She is originally from the Northeast and currently works in education. Her stories are inspired by the wonders of the everyday and the magic of ordinary people.

 

This month, an additional Moon Prize, the 123rd, goes to Angela Townsend's magical prose piece "The Eye."

The Eye

by Angela Townsend

I look at the sparrow’s eye and see my own.

This is not because my father called me Little Sparrow, although it was as accurate a name as I’ve ever been given. I am small and frenetic, breakable and common, song and sticks and soil and sensitivity.

It’s because the almond pool of tea looks so much like mine, liquid alertness, skywatching at all times.

There was a time when I shoved away the sisterhood of the sparrow. I mounted the steed of certainty, trotting into the fortress. The stones were tightly joined. The keep was well kept, the better to guard against the slippery slope.

Best to patrol the flatlands, where you can see a thousand answers in all directions. The horizon is submissive. Invasions are rare.

When a dangerous person like St. Francis of Assisi does his jig on the outskirts, you card him for pantheism. What is this talk of Brother Sun and Sister Moon?

What are the risks of being built from sparrow dust? Confident voices would tell me.

If we came from sparrows and salamanders, everything holy was a lie. If every mystery wasn’t textbook history, we had no future. Shake hands with evolution, and you lose Jesus. One loose stone could topple the tower. Splash about with myth and poetry, and you’re playing theological Jenga.

We are the crown of creation, and trembling creatures serve us.

God’s eye may be on the sparrow, but we are no sparrows. We have strong bones.

The birds and cats and tulips and turnips are accessories in our dollhouse.

It is a docile dollhouse.

But dangerous lives are drawn to play. St. Francis and Jesus and my scampish friends kept showing up with sloppy things like stories and songs, meteor showers and electrons.

Language, my lover, kept removing the roof, lowering me gently into the library. Could it be that holy history has infinite accents, all of them honest? Might seraphs splash in the deep end of our understanding, and invite us in?

Was I paralyzed with worry about protecting God?

Sparrows landed on my shoulders.

Some of them came from the fourth century, feathery Augustines and Cappadocians. These cornerstones were more colorful than I bargained for, marbled with quartzy wild. They read Genesis with birds’ eyes, aloft in allegory, branching boldly into myth.

These were reliable birds, but here they were, tossing my tight, twentieth century Tetris of truths.

Others streaked medieval skies. How could they hold my truths so lightly? Sainted persons read a bigger book than mine, broad and bawdy enough to see genres where I read only the generic. If allegory was wide enough for square-dancing monks, was there a nest for me?

There were modern sparrows and unauthorized cockatoos.

They lobbed my literalism back at me. To read poetry like the evening news is to plug your ears with pap. Far better to gather birdseed and mustard seeds. Far better to take truth on its stormy terms.

My brain flapped breathlessly. Truth has colors and hills.

It was true: God loves creating, and God gave us genres and secret passageways and treasure hunts. There is straightforward history and playful splashing, allegory and exultation, subtlety and cornerstones.

The single genre of “textbook” is too small.

Poetry is permitted.

Genesis gives us truth that language cannot carry, straining syntax to sing with the first stars.

We are birdstuff and stardust, evolution’s holy revolution, safe in lush language. We are the apple of God’s eye, but His eye is on the sparrow, too.

We are too small for the fortress and too wild for the flatlands.

These hilly days, I find myself disorganized and dazzled. I believe that Jesus lived and died and rose and reigns, as literally as I fed the cats this morning. He is Yes and Amen from Genesis to Revelation, the answer to the one question:

Will we be loved unconditionally, forever?

I am weightless and unworried, a brown bird on the breath of Spirit. The land is not flat. The house is not for dolls. Whales swallow prophets, and lonely owls write psalms, and hollow-boned beasts evolve into image-bearers.

I look the sparrow in the eye, and we sing.

* * * * *

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary, where she bears witness to mercy for all beings. She has an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and B.A. from Vassar College. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, makes sure to laugh with her mother every morning, and delights in the moon. Her work appears in Braided Way, Cagibi, Fathom Magazine, LEON Literary Review, and The Razor, among others. Angie loves life dearly.

 

This month's Moon Prize, the 122nd, goes to Michelle Laflamme-Childs's bold poem "Go West."



Go West

by Michelle Laflamme-Childs


1

She said, “my limbs
must go west—soul
too.” He said simply,
“ok.”


2

I had to box
up the blush
lusterware plates—saddened
to quiet
their glow
with cardboard
and stringy tape.

I dropped messy
tears on their
shards when the box
finally arrived.


3

There are two-
thousand ninety-six miles
between us in the futon
on the matted brown
carpet of our
new apartment.


4

He was standing
at the bus stop—awkward—
when a barrel slid out
the cracked window
and laid its eye
on him. Laughter
rang out as it rolled
away leaving only his
sense of safety shot.


5

You were drowning
in brown
and blue and
thought only the east
could dust
your cracks.

You couldn’t
wipe the moisture
from your hands.


6

The day the phone shattered
my history—you
accidentally shaved off
your beard. Nothing
made sense.


7

He hated her
short haircut—it
reminded him
of the expanses
of wheaten nothingness still
uprooting his deciduous trees.

Her head, a clearcut,
bristly and bleached, sucked
the moisture
from him.


8

Cursed by the pottery
shards they
picked up in the arroyo
on their rented land,
they moved
to the affordable bedroom community
to have a baby.


9

Remember
that Thanksgiving
we were in LA and—
Tom called to tell
us our dog died?


10

Suspended in charcoal
slumber, she nurses—filled
with milk
and honey, giving
and taking
both life
and death.


11

I drove slowly
along the tree-
lined road, the twisted
branches reaching
into my head to pull
out a way
to explain myself to
you.


12

After throwing the door
into its jamb so hard
that the rubber duckie
photo exploded
into a million yellow shards, she
hurled the basket of child’s hair-
ties onto the bricks screaming,
“find it, then, FIND IT!”


13

What I was trying
to tell you, amid the incessancy
of screeching
and laments crashing over
us from the backseat, was:

“I have lost the abstraction
of my own mortality.”

You said
            “You’re not old…”

You said
            “That’s dumb…”


14

The dryer is broken.
The door is broken.
The fascia board is broken.
The stucco is broken.
The windshield is broken.
The screen is broken.
The fireplace fan is broken.
The gate is broken.
The oven is broken.
The pergola is broken.
The shed is broken.
The sink is broken.


15

They taught
her patience.

They taught her
impatience.


16

The other day I saw:
    ·  Three official city vehicles with white crosses hanging from their review mirrors.
    ·  Uncle Sam standing on the corner of Llano and St. Mike’s wearing a black ski mask.
    ·  An aquiline tree carved like a woman clad in old tire treads.
    ·  An old couple sitting at a café intently ignoring each other.
    ·  A construction sign that read “Road Work Beings Ahead."


17
 
Shards of chatter land
in her ash toned hair and on her
table, while she nurses the now cold
latte. Two-thousand
ninety-six miles and almost 30
years have slowly poured her
back into herself.
An errant finger absently roams
the terrain of her
brow, feeling for words
that still don’t come
without a fight.


* * * * *

Michelle Laflamme-Childs is a poet, arts administrator, and radio personality from Santa Fe, NM. She holds a BA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and an MA from St. John’s College in Santa Fe. She hopes to one day finish her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas, El Paso.

Michelle’s small, compact poems tend to be personal though not confessional. She strives to play with language and image in a way that is highly specific to her own lived experience while still holding space for readers to find places they might be able to fit inside.

 

Snake threnody, remix

by Thomasin LaMay

                       
I wonder how to shed my skin,
all of it, like the snake who
spirals, blind and naked, 
a bloody puddle on the porch.
This to grow, become,
intransitive. 
 
She survives by peeling off
her backstory.

I wonder if she spits anger
at perpetrators - the apple
or surely Adam – who couldn’t
speak in sentences, so
made himself up - myth,
transitive.

I would tell him
pusillanimity is dust.

I decide this: to slide
off the biblical page,
quit the finale and flirt
with the snake. The garden
lush, our skins molt
sun to gold, and then

we fall in love. 

In the remix, I tell them
I am who I am.


* * * * *

Thomasin LaMay is a writer, singer and teacher. She’s taught music and women/gender studies at Goucher College, Baltimore and currently works with high school kids/women/victims of trauma at Penn North. Her poems have most recently appeared in Thimble Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and Yellow Arrow Journal. She lives in Baltimore city with about 500 books and plants, a dog, two cats and for fun she plays drums.

 

White cosmos sing the song of lily  

by Thomasin LaMay


Snowy day in late fall,
clusters of white cosmos shoot from frozen dirt,
feathered arms and fragile blooms
lifted fine as butterfly wings.
They want to fly. 

I want to cut, to save,
bring them in from cold and futile birth.
They start to sing.

Hear the song of lily. 
We come ahead, announce beginning,
do not mark her virgin.

Lily’s flower is not from seed,
her rapture self-conceived. She waits
for her story to thaw.

Gently, cosmos offers me
her green and juicy stem.  I lick
up the ripened length of her spine,
 
tongue to petals

all my lips tingle


* * * * *

Thomasin LaMay is a writer, singer and teacher. She’s taught music and women/gender studies at Goucher College, Baltimore and currently works with high school kids/women/victims of trauma at Penn North. Her poems have most recently appeared in Thimble Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and Yellow Arrow Journal. She lives in Baltimore city with about 500 books and plants, a dog, two cats and for fun she plays drums.

 

The Eye

by Angela Townsend

I look at the sparrow’s eye and see my own.

This is not because my father called me Little Sparrow, although it was as accurate a name as I’ve ever been given. I am small and frenetic, breakable and common, song and sticks and soil and sensitivity.

It’s because the almond pool of tea looks so much like mine, liquid alertness, skywatching at all times.

There was a time when I shoved away the sisterhood of the sparrow. I mounted the steed of certainty, trotting into the fortress. The stones were tightly joined. The keep was well kept, the better to guard against the slippery slope.

Best to patrol the flatlands, where you can see a thousand answers in all directions. The horizon is submissive. Invasions are rare.

When a dangerous person like St. Francis of Assisi does his jig on the outskirts, you card him for pantheism. What is this talk of Brother Sun and Sister Moon?

What are the risks of being built from sparrow dust? Confident voices would tell me.

If we came from sparrows and salamanders, everything holy was a lie. If every mystery wasn’t textbook history, we had no future. Shake hands with evolution, and you lose Jesus. One loose stone could topple the tower. Splash about with myth and poetry, and you’re playing theological Jenga.

We are the crown of creation, and trembling creatures serve us.

God’s eye may be on the sparrow, but we are no sparrows. We have strong bones.

The birds and cats and tulips and turnips are accessories in our dollhouse.

It is a docile dollhouse.

But dangerous lives are drawn to play. St. Francis and Jesus and my scampish friends kept showing up with sloppy things like stories and songs, meteor showers and electrons.

Language, my lover, kept removing the roof, lowering me gently into the library. Could it be that holy history has infinite accents, all of them honest? Might seraphs splash in the deep end of our understanding, and invite us in?

Was I paralyzed with worry about protecting God?

Sparrows landed on my shoulders.

Some of them came from the fourth century, feathery Augustines and Cappadocians. These cornerstones were more colorful than I bargained for, marbled with quartzy wild. They read Genesis with birds’ eyes, aloft in allegory, branching boldly into myth.

These were reliable birds, but here they were, tossing my tight, twentieth century Tetris of truths.

Others streaked medieval skies. How could they hold my truths so lightly? Sainted persons read a bigger book than mine, broad and bawdy enough to see genres where I read only the generic. If allegory was wide enough for square-dancing monks, was there a nest for me?

There were modern sparrows and unauthorized cockatoos.

They lobbed my literalism back at me. To read poetry like the evening news is to plug your ears with pap. Far better to gather birdseed and mustard seeds. Far better to take truth on its stormy terms.

My brain flapped breathlessly. Truth has colors and hills.

It was true: God loves creating, and God gave us genres and secret passageways and treasure hunts. There is straightforward history and playful splashing, allegory and exultation, subtlety and cornerstones.

The single genre of “textbook” is too small.

Poetry is permitted.

Genesis gives us truth that language cannot carry, straining syntax to sing with the first stars.

We are birdstuff and stardust, evolution’s holy revolution, safe in lush language. We are the apple of God’s eye, but His eye is on the sparrow, too.

We are too small for the fortress and too wild for the flatlands.

These hilly days, I find myself disorganized and dazzled. I believe that Jesus lived and died and rose and reigns, as literally as I fed the cats this morning. He is Yes and Amen from Genesis to Revelation, the answer to the one question:

Will we be loved unconditionally, forever?

I am weightless and unworried, a brown bird on the breath of Spirit. The land is not flat. The house is not for dolls. Whales swallow prophets, and lonely owls write psalms, and hollow-boned beasts evolve into image-bearers.

I look the sparrow in the eye, and we sing.

* * * * *

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary, where she bears witness to mercy for all beings. She has an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and B.A. from Vassar College. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, makes sure to laugh with her mother every morning, and delights in the moon. Her work appears in Braided Way, Cagibi, Fathom Magazine, LEON Literary Review, and The Razor, among others. Angie loves life dearly.

 

The Undiscovered Country

by Kathleen Chamberlin

     She sat at the table, the sunlight streaming through the open curtains, the dust motes riding the currents of air. She paid them no mind. Instead, she watched her pen gliding across the whiteness of the page, each loop forming a letter, flowing gracefully into the next until miraculously a word appeared, elegant in the script she had perfected from practicing the Palmer Method earnestly. She preferred to use a fountain pen, feeling free to relax her grip and letting it rest easily in the hollow between her thumb and index finger, moving by the impulses her imagination sent to her fingertips. She liked to think of herself as a linguistic choreographer, her hand partnering her pen as it twirled and extended its point to create something concrete and beautiful. A dazzling sunset near the Cliffs of Mohr, perhaps or a dashing personality like her romantic hero, Winthrop Graham, but always something costumed in truth and beauty, like ballet, her interior voice providing musical accompaniment. Keats had said it succinctly: Truth and Beauty were equivalents.  If her words were beautiful in both meaning and appearance,  were they not doubly truthful?  And if she wrote the truth in her elegant penmanship, was its beauty not doubly enhanced? But what about those truths that were dark or brutal?  Did beauty fade or cease to be, overpowered by malevolent violence? Or was there beauty even in darkness, a beauty language could capture and elevate?

       These were the questions she pondered as she wrote her poetry and short stories, bifurcating her consciousness. They oversaw the process of creation, interlopers whose critical eye and swift judgment could reduce to rubble the artistry she was creating.  With each movement of her pen across the blue lined college-ruled notebook that was the fortress of her efforts, she sheltered within an edifice that showed clearly the battles and skirmishes of revision or abandonment, some ideas imprisoned in dungeons of incompleteness, wasting away in the recesses of her mind. Many had been hopeful that she would return to them, key in hand, carrying nourishment to give them the strength to enter the outside world. Some were languishing in dark corners, merely shells without any definite shape, unsure of what they truly were, waiting for their sentences to be handed down.

       She loved not only the places her imagination took her, more vibrant than the hues of Nature's palette as spring turned to summer and summer to autumn, but she also loved the physical act of writing. She rejected the idea of composing on a computer or tablet where one misplaced keystroke could send her creation to the limbo of ether that floated somewhere between herself and that cloud her son had spoken of. No. Her notebook and pen were tangible and they connected her to her creations in hieroglyphics easily recognized and understood, the only comfortable space in her current existence.

      She would awaken each day to follow the same routine: Out of bed by nine, then showering and dressing before finding a breakfast tray with a pot of coffee and cinnamon raisin toast, buttered and cut into triangles on her small table. Alongside it rested her notebook and pen. She'd nibble at her toast while letting her coffee cool and then she'd take a swallow, enjoying the warmth that trickled down her throat and jump-started her brain. She would open the notebook and uncap her pen, skimming segments of the previous day's efforts before choosing which story to continue. Her habit was to write for a solid hour or longer. She knew that 11:00 brought the doctor in his pristine white coat, name deftly embroidered in black thread over his heart, clipboard or laptop in hand, ready to begin the Interrogation. At least that was the way she thought of it. She was imprisoned here, sentenced to spend her remaining time on earth behind these walls, guilty of being old. She knew her memory had been failing but she didn't need memories to function in the present, she had argued to her son. 

     “What happens if you forget to turn off the stove? Or forget to take your meds? Or worse, forget you have taken them and take them again?”

     She fought off the inevitable for as long as she could, but when her reality merged with the fiction she had created during a successful writing career, she was left no choice. “All is lost,” she'd written on the first page of the notebook that waited for her in the room they had prepared for her, a room with neither a personality nor a soul, sterile in its institutional blandness. The only thing that was distinct about her room and distinguished it from all the other rooms on her floor was her name on the door.

     Writing had been Alice Jackson's salvation throughout the turbulent times in her life. She'd poured the anguish of her broken heart into countless poems, hoping to find the one incantation that would banish the hurt caused by losing her first love. Those she had kept hidden away, behind a pile of letters in a shoe box, remnants of her teenage years. She wrote strident odes and song lyrics protesting the war that had torn friendships apart and pitted her against her family. There was the poignant eulogy she had written as an op-ed, citing the many lives lost to her town, lives of childhood friends or their brothers and sisters. There was the novel she had written when she first suspected her ex-husband, Matt Preston, was having an affair. The wronged wife she'd created was far stronger than she was, and willing to face the world undaunted, albeit damaged. It was after the success of that book, and the advance for its sequel, that she served Matt with divorce papers, telling him she hoped he and his mistress would be very happy together and moved out.

     When she met Elliott Harmon at a book signing, she felt the surge of passion stirring. Just as she had as a teenager, discovering love for the first time, she composed hauntingly beautiful love poems about him, never imagining that her feelings were reciprocated. That was until she came to her next book signing and brought her an iced coffee, one cream, one sugar.  As their romance blossomed, she didn't write much, her daily life exploding with joy. When she and Elliot welcomed first Kevin and then Kenneth into their lives, she wrote a little about them, but she was too busy enjoying her life to pick up her pen to write another novel.  Life was writing her story now, she had said, so the characters she had sketched out using all the writing organizational tools available, were tucked away on a bookshelf.

     That was before the accident that had nearly killed her. Alice could still return to the moments before the accident when she sat alone in this room by the window. It had been such a happy day. The sun had broken through the rain clouds and there was Kevin, smiling and begging her to let him ride shotgun, “just this once” as they celebrated his graduation from Middle School. She had tousled his hair and said, “Okay, just because today is special,” and climbed into the back seat with Kenneth.  “It's you and me, kiddo, backseat drivers for the duration.”

     They has been so proud of Kevin and the awards he had won. Elliot had welcomed the opportunity to talk to Kevin, seated next to him, and bask in his accomplishments. She remembered how bright the sun was and how she pointed out the sparkling reflections in the drying puddles to Kenneth. She remembered seeing the car speeding toward them: a dark red Mustang convertible,  a handsome man at the wheel arguing with the woman next to him. All at once, she realized they were on a collision course, with no means to avoid it. What happened next unfolded in slow motion. The woman's eyes grew wide, her mouth opened in a scream. The handsome man turning too late, slamming on the brakes, his face etched with horror. She threw herself across Kenneth just before the impact sent their car catapulting across the intersection, going airborne after being hit by cars unable to swerve away from them. Their moment of joy exploded amid the smoking remnants of crushed metal. One indelible, unalterable action had severed her from the life she had known and transformed her to an anguished and desolate widow robbed of her firstborn son. When she woke to the rhythmic beats of monitors in a hospital bed, she knew she would hear bad news by the looks of sympathy and concern on the faces of each nurse who quietly took her pulse and blood pressure, monitored her pain medication and recorded their findings.  When she learned of her loss, she was inconsolable.  But Kenneth had survived. Her physical injuries healed, but she walked around shell shocked, hollow and disbelieving. She held on to Kenneth with fierce protectiveness, lest he be taken from her, as well.

     She joined support groups and went to a grief counselor. During one of her sessions, her therapist had suggested she try to write about the accident, as a way to assuage the pain. She had resisted at first, but then it occurred to her that she could change the outcome.  She could simultaneously write of their survival and give them immortality.  So, she made a few attempts. 

     The red Mustang merely cut them off, Elliot raging at the driver who flipped him the bird while Kevin screamed “Asshole!”  In this incarnation, she had scolded both her husband and her son, saying “Language!” as they drove on, unscathed, to the restaurant.  In another version, the two cars narrowly avoided colliding, but the driver's look of panic as he jerked on the steering wheel gave her little comfort as this version of reality left her white-knuckled, with her heart pounding. The final draft included the collision, all the sounds of skidding tires and metal scraping and crumpling accompanied by the ear-piercing screams she had emitted, as the landscape changed places with the sky and the car cartwheeled across the intersection, landing on its roof. In this version, however, it was the occupants of the red Mustang convertible who died, while her family survived. She told her therapist that writing had helped her manage her grief and when she felt that grief tugging at her, she would read the story of their survival, her own happily ever after. It was this practice that paved the way to her undoing. She had begun writing a parallel life for herself in which she and Elliot grew old together, traveling to all the destinations they had put on their bucket list.  The boundary between the two worlds slipped the day she told Kenneth she and Elliot were planning another trip. Kenneth's alarm was immediate.

     “Mom,” he said as gently as he could, “Dad's gone, remember?”

     “Gone? Where? He didn't say he had any plans for today,” her confusion clear in her voice.

     Kenneth's wife spoke up. “You asked him to pick up milk from the grocery store,” she said, warning Kenneth with her eyes not to contradict her. “He should be back soon.”

     The answer seemed to reassure her, but Kenneth realized it was time for someone to take responsibility for Alice’s daily care, something neither he nor his wife could provide. So here she was, her name printed out in black letters on the door to her room: ALICE HARMON, and on a sheet of paper under it, the names of her physician and her son with their phone numbers to be called in case of emergency. 

     If her daytime hours were regimented and predictable, the nights were a wild cacophony of voices melded to an ever shifting kaleidoscope of images. Each dreamscape was vivid and detailed, reminiscent of the decor in a Poe tale. There was the teenage boy she had loved and lost who lounged against the hood of his car, those warm brown eyes and wide smile an invitation, his voice as earthy as she remembered. She also encountered her first husband both before and after he had proved himself a cad. They would drive to an illicit assignation, filled with alcohol fumes and sex. Intimacy with him, even in dreams, left her puzzled and tawdry when she awoke the next morning. Every so often, her parents made an appearance and she would find herself still cleaning out their house as she had more than 25 years ago, explaining to them that they could no longer stay in the house because it had been sold. And, she would add, as painful as it was to hear, because they were dead. There were dreams where her cellphone wouldn't work and she was stranded, threading through unknown streets and forbidding towns.  At other times, she sat alongside Eliot, feeling loved and, above all, safe. When she climbed to consciousness from those dreams, she was bereft. She would close her eyes and try to recapture those moments before they were lost to the dismal reality of the four walls of her room.

     Last night had brought one of those happy dreams and she was sitting at her table, notebook closed, pen capped, staring out the window when her son arrived.  He kissed her on the top of her head.

     “Hi Mom. It's Kenneth. I stopped by to see how you were doing.”

     She tilted her head to look at him and felt a tremor in the recesses of her memory. This face was familiar as was the name, but was he really there? Or was it another assault on her sanity? She stretched an aged arm out to him, allowing her fingers to touch his cheek, gliding down to cup his chin. Then she smiled. 

     “I know you, don’t I? You're someone important to me but I can't remember your name.”

     “It's Kenneth.”

     “Kenneth,” she said, trying it out to see whether the name was familiar to her lips. “I think I wrote a story about a young man named Kenneth.” She frowned. “Or maybe I had a son named Kenneth.  That’s who it was. He was such a handsome boy. Sadly, I haven't heard anything from him in a long time. Kenneth, or maybe it was Kevin.  He resembles you, too. Do you know him?”

     “I am Kenneth, Mom.”

     “Of course, you are! You don’t have to remind me. Goodness gracious! Do you think I could ever forget my own son?”

     “Don't you feel like writing today?”

     “Maybe later. Right now, I want you to arrange for me to have my hair done. Will you do that for me, dear?”

     “Whoa, do you have a hot date? Anyone I know?”

     “As a matter of fact, you do.” She smiled. “Your father is taking me to a wonderful restaurant he’s been to. It’s called The Undiscovered Country—very Shakespearean--and it sounds out of this world! Oh, and I’ll need my nails done and I want to wear my periwinkle blue dress, the one your father likes. Will you make sure?”

     “Of course, Mom. I’ll let them know at the front desk.” 

     Kenneth stayed his usual half hour, the time it took for Alice to lose her foothold in reality and slide into fabulation, a term he learned that described that fantasy world his mother retreated to with greater frequency.  Today, however, she held on.

     “I’m so looking forward to seeing your father tonight. I want to look my best. You won’t forget about the dress, will you? It’s a special occasion, you know. It’s our anniversary.”

     A look of pleasure illuminated her face as she continued. “I remember thinking that he had saved me. That he gave me everything I could ever imagine wanting. I loved him very much. I’m going to make sure I tell him that tonight.”

     “Give him my love as well,” Kenneth managed to say. Then he hugged his mother, conscious of how fragile she felt in his arms, and went to the front desk to convey his mother’s wishes.

     Early the next morning, Kenneth got a phone call telling him of his mother’s passing. He drove to the nursing home, his mind a hive of competing thoughts. When the doctor took him to her room, Kenneth saw a single white rose resting on her open notebook and her fountain pen was uncapped, as if she had been writing when she died. Kenneth capped the pen and picked up the notebook.

     “Dear Son,” it read. “Dad said to tell you, he loves you and he’s come to take me home. We’ll watch over you. Love, Mom.”

* * * * *

Kathleen Chamberlin is a retired educator living in Albany, New York. Her writing has appeared in both print and electronic journals and in several anthologies, including Chicken Soup for the Soul: Attitude of Gratitude. She enjoys gardening, genealogy, and grandchildren. 

Feral Shoot   

by Angela Hoffman


We stood amid a riot of zinnias, snapping photos.
At first we were awkward, our poses rigid.
Unsure of where to put our arms, we left them 
dangling. 
We forced smiles, all proper. 

But under the untamed blue of the sky, with nudges from bees,
we captured the warmth, and our hearts began to remember
what we had forgotten; what we were be-gotten for, 
and about frivolity, instinct, 
times when life seemed more possible,
and we raised our chins, spread our arms all feral, leapt with ease, 
the way we were meant to be, with smiles wide and wild
for the days we find ourselves domesticated 
all over again. 


* * * * *

Angela Hoffman’s poetry collections include Resurrection Lily and Olly Olly Oxen Free (Kelsay Books). Her work has been widely published. She writes a poem a day. Angela lives in Wisconsin. 

 

They Sing in the Dark         

by Angela Hoffman


It’s crickets in the house, but I wear you down,
and you tell me you are weary, that there’s no room for joy,
to just expect that you will withdraw to that place you go
with all that life demands of you. You say it is just the way
things are, there is no fixing, but I say hell 
is lived here and now, and heaven too, 
and I know a bit about putting one foot in front of the other,
that by being brave you learn to brave, 
that if you open just a crack, something will erupt from you. 
Did you hear the crickets last night with their song sweet enough
to make the night weep? 


* * * * *

Angela Hoffman’s poetry collections include Resurrection Lily and Olly Olly Oxen Free (Kelsay Books). Her work has been widely published. She writes a poem a day. Angela lives in Wisconsin. 

Silver Bracelet

By KateLynn Hibbard

It was one of those first good days of spring, warm, steady sun, feathered clouds floating on a fine wet breeze. I had wandered into a pretty little shop full of fripperies: artisan chocolates, hand laid papers, trays full of bangles splayed on the counter like ransom. I picked up several and held them to the light, weighing the heft, imagining the clanking pleasure the beveled one would bring me when I heard the story on the radio: two hundred girls from the Chibok school, kidnapped by Boko Haram, and my mind went blank –. Of course they would be raped, of course they would be forced to bear children. Did they even speak the same language? Were they girls who wore silver bracelets on their slim brown wrists, tucked beneath their burkas? I felt helpless, meaningless, complicit, and I bought the damn bracelet anyway.

* * * * *

KateLynn Hibbard’s books are Sleeping Upside Down, Sweet Weight, and Simples, winner of the 2018 Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize. Some journals where her poems have appeared include Barrow Street, Ars Medica, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. Editor of When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwest Experience, she teaches at Minneapolis College, sings with One Voice Mixed Chorus, and lives with many pets and her spouse Jan in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Please visit katelynnhibbard.com for more information.