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Heartbreak in All Forms Heartbreak is more than just a lover. It comes in many shapes and sizes. Once from a favorite plate shattered in two. Another of my feelings from a story on the news. Yes, a love untethered is tragic as well. Someone you knew, like the back of your hand, Then strangers again. The worst kind of heartbreak though comes from the friends you thought you knew so well. Years of secrets and embarrassing bonds as you grew up. When they break your heart too, Becoming friends with your enemies and wondering Why I have to hold these memories, I want to let go of them too and be mad at you But all I feel is heartbreak. The kind that lives underneath all the layers of what you think it is. The heartbreak that prequels a grief of someone that is still here. Journey of Tears For the tears that carried themselves to the curve of my chin. Finding home on the sleeves of my shirt. Windshield wipers to try and stop the flood from filling the ground with tears. My deepest desire to scoop them into the palms of my hands. Placing them gently into the ocean, because that is where flowing water belongs. Giving permission to tears to sail away the pain to some other place. While being embraced, now by the warming sun. Changing forms as the ocean has many ways. Asking to be gently laid on the beach's sandy toes. Begging for forgiveness. Ashlee Hoskins is a writer based in New England. As a mother of two daughters, she is driven to share the honest feelings we hold inside and embrace our unique journeys unapologetically. Her fresh perspective and love for connecting as humans is what she loves sharing with the world.

I’m embarrassed to be seen with him. He is shorter than me by at least six inches and has a lot of hair that sticks straight up on his head. The top part is blonde—“frosted tips” for the soccer season. He’s athletic and wears red or green gym shorts brighter than traffic lights. You can see him walking down the hallway from a mile away, even if he does get buried in the crowd, what with his height and all. What bothers me most is this height difference between us, but also that he is unrelenting, which I notice immediately upon meeting him. “Hey,” he says to me. We’re seated next to each other in a Technical Theatre class, a class I have little interest in. He squeezes into the desk next to mine—not difficult for him to do, being so small. When he sits down, I see that his socks are pulled up to his calves, as is the current style among freshmen guys. But his legs, little toothpicks, disappear under the white socks, and the effect is off-putting. “I’m Ammar.” He reaches into his backpack and whips out a red folder that has seen better days. He throws it onto his desk. That folder doesn’t have anything in it, I think, so I start to ask, “Why doesn’t your folder have anything in it?” And at the same time, he says, “I like your bracelets.” I pull my hand away from his hot fingers which have reached for my wrist, and the rest of the class I spend leaning on the opposite side of my desk, trying to put as much space between us as possible. He always tells me that he liked me from the beginning. Well, I tell him, the feeling isn’t mutual. I don’t like him, plain and simple. He’s weird, but popular enough to be mostly considered cool. Just not in any way that I think is cool. In class, he always hums a certain Rhianna tune and I tell him to stop, again and again, because it’s the kind of song that attaches to your brain like a parasite and clings to you until bedtime, when you’re tossing and turning, doing anything you can just to get it to go away. Go away! I say to him. Okay, he says—but circles back minutes later, a mosquito not yet satisfied, my forearm already itching. Despite these annoyances, I am unwilling to abandon the friends I’ve had since middle school, and for reasons unknown and unimaginable to me, they have taken a liking to Ammar. So I became his friend in order to remain part of my group, part of my pack, without whom I’d be an ant—less than an ant, less than nothing. In Tech Theatre, I learn how to coil a cable. Or cable a coil? According to Mr. Fox, cable-coiling is an extremely delicate art. One must be efficient and adept. THROW with your HEART! Mr. Fox sings, demonstrating. Orange cable flies through the air. Some people, he tells us, spend their whole lives trying to nail the perfect throw. One afternoon Mr. Fox is tinkering with the soundboard in the back of the auditorium. The class is gathered around. Ammar is standing close to me, too close for comfort. I feel his breath at the base of my neck, which is pretty much where his head reaches, because of how short he is. I lean uncomfortably on my left foot so as not to feel suffocated by his presence. My ankle is starting to cramp when Mr. Fox grabs a set of thick brown cords and waves them in front of our faces. “This is called the male plug,” he says, gesturing to one of the plugs in his hand. “And this is called the female plug. I have no idea why.” He puts the class in pairs of two to practice differentiating between the plugs. “You,” he points to me. “And him.” Ammar nods and shifts next to me, closer. Too close. “Now let’s practice coiling again,” Mr. Fox says. “Throw, and coil!” He paces back and forth to observe us. When Mr. Fox gets to Ammar, he pauses, standing aside to watch. Ammar struggles with the cord. In his small hands, the cable seems like an anchor chain. “Some people,” Mr. Fox says, “spend their whole lives trying to nail the perfect throw.” ** A year goes by and to my relief, a lot of things change. My hair is longer now and touches my shoulders and I can put it in a braid if I want to, which I do, most of the time. Generally, everyone seems to have changed a bit over the summer. I am in new classes, too. I take Art History instead of Tech Theatre, though Art History will prove to be less exciting than the course description led me to believe. Some of my friends are in the same classes as me. Ammar isn’t in any of them. ** Mrs. Monroe is my English teacher this year. Liking her is a task that requires optimism and persistence. I’m a good student. I try to like all teachers, even ones like Mrs. Monroe. And yet I agree with the majority. Everyone calls her a witch. This is mostly because when she paces the room the joints of her knees snap like twigs. Each day I wonder, Will today be the day her knees finally give out? I try not to harbor too much ill-intent toward The Witch, though, because I do have one reason to like her, maybe even to be indebted to her: she places me directly in front of Robby. Curly golden hair. Shorter than me, but not like Ammar is, that is to say, not so painfully obvious. Word on the street is that he deals Adderall to both the JV basketball team and the Mathletes. Of course, I know the truth of the matter, which is that Robby is a drug dealer only by chance and circumstance. Robby is different. I know this because he sits behind me in English for the whole year. This is not the first class I’ve shared with Robby. What provoked him one morning in World History I’m not entirely sure, but whatever it was, it moved him enough that he pulled down his shorts and there they were, his navy Fruit of the Looms. ROBBY, the teacher yelled. But she had a streaky blonde bob and always wore scarves, and this made her unable to control a classroom, much less someone like Robby. Sitting in front of him this year, I’m able to learn a lot more. It works like this: if I lean back far enough, the ends of my hair graze the top of Robby’s desk. He leans forward, and I can hear all the things he mumbles under his breath. He knows that I can hear him because I laugh, and then he jokes more, and so on. Under different circumstances, I wouldn’t laugh at his brand of jokes (crude at best and vaguely sexist at worst) but I don’t make the rules with Robby. I lean back and he leans forward. My common sense walks out the door and takes no hall pass on its way out. I become enamored. I ask Ammar about Robby because they’re both on the soccer team. Ammar tells me simple things like “Robby’s trying out for varsity on Monday,” but other things too, like how “Kai Lee wanted revenge, as you know, for the AMC incident, which is how Robby came to find that rat on his windshield” that morning. To bring up Robby, all I have to do is slip him into the conversation. An easy task since Ammar and Robby are close. Am I obsessed? I ask myself, What would anyone else do? And I don’t feel guilty for using Ammar this way, mostly. So I call Ammar often. Often turns into almost every night. Sometimes these calls last hours. One night my dad walks in and sees Ammar on the screen. “A boy!” my dad exclaims, giving me eyes. I hide myself from the camera, make a face, and shake my head as if to say, nothing to worry about here, Dad. I understand my father’s reaction. I know how it looks. Each time the screen lights up, I pray Ammar’s wearing a shirt. When he’s not, I feign nonchalance. I’m learning what it’s like to be friends with guys. In these outstretched hours of the night, I sometimes remember things. Hot fingers on my wrist. I pull away from his touch as if he has reached through the screen. But that was two years ago. Now we sit and talk, telephone lines connecting our opposite sides of town. There are no warm fingerprints on my hand. ** I learn a lot about Robby through Ammar. Ammar is a valuable resource. It turns out that neither frosted tips nor shortness of stature prevent one from possessing a wealth of information. Ammar quickly proves himself an expert on Robby. I inhabit both worlds and reap all benefits. If the fieldwork is sitting with Robby during English, then the key to the archives is Ammar’s late-night phone call conversation. Ammar’s calls make accessible all of Robby’s tumultuous personal life and family history. This sort of interior access provides the ideal ecosystem for a growing infatuation. One particular Tuesday night finds me unraveling string from a cream-colored throw pillow. I’m on the phone with Ammar again, a video call, his face large and animated on my computer screen. He’s just finished telling me a story in which Robby has accidentally walked in on Kai Lee and Lili Winter doing scandalous things “in Robby’s bed!”. The story is a long one. There are a lot of holes (For example why were they in Robby’s bed? How did they get into Robby’s house?) and anyway we’ve been on the phone more than two hours already. The clock reads nearly twelve. I’m mulling over the story, picturing the look on Lili’s face when Robby walked in. I rip the string from the pillow completely and twist it around my finger, flirting with my circulation. Why were those two even at Robby’s house in the first place? I wonder. Did they have a key? “Did they have a key?” “You know, I love you.” Lili’s face vanishes from my mind. “What?” “I just love you,” Ammar repeats. “I love you. I love everything about you. You are wonderful. I just had to tell you.” What am I supposed to do? My face burns in surprise and I can feel it. And at almost the exact moment I realize my surprise, I also think: I’m not that surprised. I hide my cheeks in my hands and Ammar goes on and on through the screen of my computer, and all I can think is, How do I stop him from going on this way? So I say, Wow, wow. I say, Wow Ammar, I don’t know what to say. I say I have to go. If he has any regret about confessing his love, he does not show it. He is smiling until the moment I hang up. When his face disappears from the screen I stand. I unwind the string from my finger, which is now deep red, and let it fall to the hardwood floor. I pace the bedroom. I address the laundry pile on my bed. With disappointment, I realize my mauve hand towels are still damp. I fold them anyway. I feel around my mouth with my tongue. I’ve bitten my cheek and now I only taste blood. ** What happens after this is difficult to recount. I remember leaning back in my chair during English class, The Witch pacing the room, her knees snapping in rhythm. Tell me what Brontë meant by this. Robby taps me on the shoulder. Ignites a fire there. “Psst. Heard you’re going to the soccer formal with a special someone.” He is referencing Ammar here. I shake my head, turning my face toward him just enough for him to see my profile. “No, I’m not,” I whisper. “Really?” “Yeah. I mean, yes, I’m not going.” “Bummer.” Robby leans back again, away. A few beats of silence pass between us. I had not considered going to soccer formal. Why would I? “Are you going?” I ask him. “Hell no,” Robby says. “Oh,” I nod as if to say, ‘Obviously’. “Well, the truth is, actually, yeah,” Robby says. “Coach forces us to go to these things. It’s ass.” “Oh?” My hands are clenched around my water bottle, forming little lakes of sweat. My thoughts unfold in a row, beat by beat, to the rhythm of knees cracking. “But,” Robby says, leaning forward again— “You should come.” I laugh. “No. No, I don’t know. I don’t know.” ** When Ammar asks me to attend the soccer formal with him, I feel the redness rise in my cheeks again. Okay, I say, making sure to appear hesitant toward the whole idea. Okay, I say, I guess I’ll go. ** I go to the formal and naturally spend the evening searching for Robby. He eludes me at every turn. Ammar is not like Robby in this way. Ammar sticks to my side like glue. I wear a red dress with lace sleeves and I don’t have a bra, it’s one of those dresses where you just have to go braless. At first, I don’t feel self-conscious about this, but as the night wears on I start to question my choices. Eventually the night ends. I fold my arms protectively to cover my chest as Ammar and I walk down the stairs, out of the building, and toward the street. The night air is warm and dry. The formal is over. It seemed to be in a perpetual state of almost ending, until at last it did, and I’m glad to finally be leaving. We cross the street to Ammar’s car. Below my foot, a cricket twitches on the cement, magnified, made powerful by the streetlight. “Ammar!” a voice calls. A car rolls down the street, Robby’s head sticking out of its unrolled window. “Guppy's afterparty! Gonna get smashed! Come with!” “Nah,” Ammar yells. “Pass!” This denial surprises me because I know how much Ammar loves to party. From the car window, Robby smirks. “Screw you, man!” “Screw you, man!” They wave goodbye to each other and the car speeds off. “That was nice,” I say. I have to look down a bit to see Ammar. I’m constantly reminded of our height difference. Sometimes when I stand next to him, I can feel him stretching upwards, to be taller. “I don’t care about Guppy’s party,” Ammar says. “His house smells like cat shit.” I don’t know what to say to this so I just raise my eyebrows. “Cricket,” he points down. “Anyway, I don’t go to those things anymore,” he says. “Oh?” “Yeah.” He kicks the cricket, sending it screeching down the street, into the shadows. “Why’s that?” Sometimes I already know the answer before I ask Ammar a question. He knows I know, and I know he wants me to ask anyway. I brace myself. “Because,” Ammar says, looking at me. “You know.” I have trouble meeting his eyes. He’s right. I know. ** After the night of the formal, Robby doesn’t come to class for three weeks. The desk behind me sits vacant and English becomes unbearably dull. On the seventh day, with no sign of Robby, The Witch asks, “Alright, where’s Robby? Does anybody know?” The Witch and Robby share a unique affair, one sustained by hatred and light verbal abuse. Notable, then, for her to show this sort of concern. Kai says, “I don’t know man, probably went home to BFE. Or he’s getting stoned with Guppy. Possibly both.” Lili whips around in her chair. “With Guppy?” “In Nowhereville,” nods Kai. “His hometown. You know, I’ve been there once. New Year’s, last year. Wouldn’t go back with a gun.” This gets the class talking, and The Witch doesn’t truly care about Robby’s whereabouts. 9QUIET! She yells. And that is that. I hear this all happen, but it only passes through my ears, enough for me to register the basics. For a few days there has been a ringing in my head. Words, repeating themselves: You know, I love you. ** At lunch I watch his mouth move as he talks. He is saying something to us about why goalies suck so much and Lili says Shut up Ammar no one cares. But Ammar explains goalies anyway. Like clockwork, every ten seconds his hand goes up to his head and he runs his fingers through his hair. It’s grown and back to dark brown, normal, with no frosted tips. And as he talks his lips move, parting, then coming together again; he laughs and they stretch into a smile, he has very white teeth. He smiles and keeps talking even though Rory says Shut up Ammar no one cares… Shut up Ammar no one cares. Like clockwork his hand through his hair. And with a sinking feeling deep in my chest, I meet his eyes, and he sees. ** We take a drive one night, just the two of us. (“No destination,” he says.) I’m in the passenger seat, my feet on the dashboard. At a red light I realize my sneakers might be dirtying his dashboard, but I don’t move them, and if it bothers Ammar, he doesn’t say anything. Part of me knows he won’t say anything anyway, even if it does bother him. Ammar drives us into nowhere and as the car rolls down the highway we talk about things. I ask him if he is trying out for varsity soccer again next year. He says he doesn’t want to be midfielder anymore and I ask him what a midfielder is. He says, I want to quit but Robby’s practically forcing me to keep playing, and I say, Well, if you want to quit then that’s what you should do. He says, You know, I love you. I look at him. His eyes dart between me and the road. They are like warm drops of rain. ** I start encouraging him to pursue Janie Yeoh. She’s so pretty, I tell him. Pretty and smart. A two-in-one, so to speak. National Merit Scholar and whatnot, at least I’m pretty sure she is. Let me check. Yep, she is. Don’t you think she’s pretty? No, Ammar says. Come on! She’s gorgeous, I say. Why are you pushing this? He asks. ** At some point it catches up to me. It’s unfair. It’s difficult. Whatever the reasoning. I’m trying out different names for guilt. Ammar and I stand under the oak trees in the driveway of my house. A storm siren howls in the distance. The clouds roll in as I tell him. It has to be over. He can’t like me anymore. “You like me, too,” Ammar argues. His eyes like warm drops of rain. I just shake my head. I could have done something else then. But the important part—important because it haunts me—the important part is that I don’t. I just stand in the driveway and shake my head and say, Ammar, it’s over. I watch him get in his car. I trail his brake lights down the street. With relief I let out a sigh. I tell myself it had to be done. Thunder cracks overhead. His brake lights flash once more, and then they are gone. ** Robby never comes back. He never again sits at the desk behind me. This devastates me. Each day I hope he will walk through the door and sit down, lean forward, and whisper something funny in my ear. Each day I hold out hope that he will return, but he never does and never will. It turns out Mrs. Monroe’s class is unendurable without him, a fact that doesn’t surprise me. She is a sour woman. Liking her is a task that requires optimism. ** I never see or speak to Robby again, except for one day, five years later. I’m pushing open the doors to the gas station. I need a soda for my long drive out of town, back to Boston. It’s New Year’s Day. Voices bounce around from the back of the store and in a few moments, a handful of figures emerge. They rustle past me, right up to the checkout counter. My first thought is, of course: teenagers. Then I lock eyes with Robby. Afterward, I sit in my car and replay the scene. I try to recall something in his eyes, any sign of life, but there was nothing. Only a sense of vacancy. My chest feels how his eyes looked. By the time I’m on the interstate I have already forgotten. As if I’d never cared, or known him at all. ** It’s been years and a lifetime since then, though I like to think of myself further removed from these events than I actually am. The truth is, it was only a matter of years ago. And still I try to distance myself. These are the memories I don’t revisit. At least not on purpose. And yet I frequently find myself pulled back home, back to school, back to the orange cables we tossed outward and coiled up again, back to Ammar. In these outstretched hours of the night I sometimes remember things. A cricket under streetlights. My sneakers on the dashboard. Storm sirens start to sound like words. I hear, as if they are memories, the things I still want to say. Where are you now? What are you doing? Who are you with? I’d start there. I’d say, We don’t have to talk too much—just enough to cover the basics. I’d probably say, I heard you moved to Boston. And then I’d say, Funny thing, I’m in Boston, too. Do you like the city? I do, too. Don’t tell them I said this but I like it better than our dry town. I would say, Maybe we could get coffee sometime. Do you like coffee? You never used to drink it. Then again neither did I. I would say, Maybe we could talk. Only if you’d want to. Only if you like coffee. I would ask him, Do you remember when Mr. Fox taught us about the male and female plugs? And how stupid was that! I would say, Do you know that he’s still teaching? I would say, I’m sorry. I would say, You were right. I hope I didn’t get your dashboard dirty. (But even if I did): I’m so glad you took me for that drive. Eden is a graduate student in the MA English program at Auburn University, where she studies literature and creative writing. She enjoys examining the craft of writing and women's storytelling, particularly the ways in which the two intersect. Her short fiction has been awarded first place in the Sandra Hutchins Writing Competition at Belmont University.

When my son wants to disappear for a while, he turns into a cat. He curls his small limbs into an ovalish shape on the couch, facedown in the pilling navy tweed with his little pink feet poking out, and hatches into a kitten. “All creatures come from eggs,” he claims to have learned in school. I can’t really argue with that. The hatching is a quiet kind of noisy, full of little chirrups and squeaks. It ends when he sits up, shakes invisible slivers of eggshell from his fur, and looks around with bewilderment. Trout is born first. He can speak and read but everything is new to him. “What’s this?” he asks, pointing to a book about birds, a stale glass of water, a wintering tree in the yard. Five years old and already manufacturing novelty. It chips at my heart. Trout is snuggly and surprisingly chore-oriented. He picks up all of his toys with curious glee. “What are these things!” he chortles as he drops cars and trucks and other things that go into a big box. I ask if he knows where my son is. “On a scavenger hunt,” he replies, passing a wooden train between his paws, marveling at its tiny wheels. Trout disappears that afternoon and my son is back with little ceremony but every day new eggs appear and new kittens hatch. It’s hard to keep track of them all. They hatch whenever my son sees fit. What does it mean? I ask myself, then get too scared to answer, then get embarrassed to be scared in the first place. Snowglobe, Snowflake, and Snowball are all born in one afternoon. They mew for a few minutes, then drink a little milk from a green plastic cup and ask for a cookie. “Three cookies? No way,” I say but remember, these are three different kittens. They each need a cookie. Snowflake is feisty and prone to scratching so I take her out for a walk around the block. “Today I learned something,” she says. “I learned I like walks.” She tells me she is puffy like a cotton ball but with thick black fur and a single white spot between her ears. She knows all the other kittens’ names by heart and counts them off on her toes for me. I think of all the people I have been in my life. I could probably count them on my fingers and toes, too. Then Snowflake dies one evening while I’m making dinner. A rattlesnake opens the door and eats her up. Surely, I think, that’s the end of it! My son is coming back for good! But surprise: she laid a new egg just before she died. Here is another fresh kitten curling around my legs. “I miss my son, Candy Cane Sprinkles,” I say to this new kitten later as he purrs on my lap. “Do you know when he will be back?” I stroke the soft patch behind his ear and kiss his sticky nose. “Meow,” the kitten answers.  He looks up at me with impossibly wide eyes. He licks a booger from his paw. “I don’t know how to talk. And I’m not Candy Cane Sprinkles. I’m his twin, Choc-a-lit Cupcake. Can I have a cookie?” Ashley Beresch is a writer and artist living in Athens, GA. Her work appears in Apple in the Dark, Maudlin House, and The Fabulist. She's also a curator for Micro podcast. You can find her online @ashleyberesch/ashleyberesch.com.

Every so often – such a vague beginning I know but stick with me – every so often Marty calls me on the telephone, always the same wet hollow voice like the phone’s in his mouth he says something about coming home. I have an ear for him you see it’s similar to how we used to wade through our old neighbour Yelti’s thick accent when we were kids, Yelti always seemed mad, his words harsh, but we finally caught their quick, that he was offering us cookies like ugly clay but at the bite they crumbled into our mouths so terribly/terrifically sweet I am convinced now that they were only fistfuls of brown sugar. Anyway Marty called this morning and I got that feeling again like butterflies but bats. I tried to not say what? because Marty is easily discouraged so I let him speak all the way and some words rise like how a pulse shows up on those monitors so I catch ones like train and October and others that prove invalid like soiree and Jupiter I reluctantly let them go these superfluous words that are beautiful to me. His phone call like a two-word telegram I know he’ll be home soon. He’ll be carrying that same suitcase so much a part of him now it’s an organ and wearing those baggy beige pants that are in style now they’re called paper bag pants I saw some just the other day at Banana Republic. There will be more geography on his face; he’ll be wearing a floral shirt. Just like when on the telephone I have to be careful not to say what? when he’s here I try not to say stay. Sherry is  from the wilds of Ontario. She writes the kind of stories she longs for and can rarely find. feelingfunny.ca litbit.ca

At that time, I was eating pretty poorly. I’d go down to the stand on the corner and get a hot dog once every couple of days and I’d eat  and then I’d go to the store and buy bread and then I’d see if I could scam any of the restaurants on the block out of some of their spare meat so I could make sandwiches. On the weekends I’d go out and spend what little I had on booze and cheap fried food. I was also bored. Horace was the one with the steady job, and sometimes he’d invite me out, sometimes he’d even buy my drinks, but most of the time I’d just go down to the rocky beach out past the docks and throw rocks into the water, or just walk around, looking at the city. It’s nice to do that, sometimes, especially in the winter. It’s so much quieter, but you can hear the hibernation happening, almost, like a heartbeat. It comes in through your pores, the cold and the sweat under the layers of wool and leather, the thrum of the heat under the streets. I got a motorcycle in the spring, which Horace told me was the worst time to get one, since that’s when they cost the most because all the yuppies buy one in the spring so they can tool around on it all summer. “Buy one in the fall, when they get bored of them and you can get one for half off,” he said, but I wanted one now, so I bought one when I got a big feature in one of the local papers. An all-black Triumph. I’ve still got it somewhere, I think, maybe out back under a tarp or something. When it was new, it was a real thing of beauty. I drove around all summer looking at the sky. Got out of the city and all, and found some great backroads. That’s how I found the barn in the first place. I was out, wind in my face, no helmet because back then I thought I was some kind of daredevil, but to be honest it always scared me, distracted me from that full sensation of flight a motorcycle can sometimes give you—but the barn I found because I stopped to take a piss, and I’m looking out at this beautiful forest and suddenly I notice through the trees that there’s this building, and it’s huge, I mean it’s like an airplane hanger, and there’s a road leading up to it from the outside. Like I said, I’m bored, so I walk up to it, and the whole thing is just sort of this empty shell, it had been cleared out, looked like it had been swept, too, not a speck on the ground,  so I turn back to get back on my bike (why did I go down to the barn in the first place?) and ride away. But something pulls on me, I mean physically, like gravity tilts a little bit, I guess it’s more of a push than a pull, and I find myself walking around a tree, turning back to the barn again, and I look closer, and there’s a hole in the ground in the middle of that clean floor that I didn’t notice before. It’s blacker than anything I’ve ever seen, blacker than new-moon night with the lights off and the blinds closed, and I’m being pulled toward it, or maybe I just think I am, or maybe I wasn’t at all, but no matter what I start walking back to the barn, I go further in this time, the first time I stopped at the doorway and just looked in, but now I’m crossing the floor, looking up at these ancient beams that are barely holding the place up, thinking this isn’t safe, I shouldn’t be in here, this thing’s liable to collapse, but I’m at the hole now, and I stop myself and look down into it, and it just keeps going on and on. I find a rock somewhere on the floor and I drop it in, because I figure this thing has got to be a well or something, though I can’t make out any water at the bottom and there’s no bucket, and when I drop the rock it makes a sound like a bone cracking and this feeling comes over me like I’m sneaking past the mouth of a cave with a horrible beast inside, so I run out of there and I’ve got the fear on me and there’s something hot on my trail, I can feel it breathing down my boots, the moisture of it, a rabid dog or a wolf, a sabertooth tiger, and I jump on the bike and slam the kickstart and peel out of there like Steve McQueen. *** I went back some time later, and the barn was still there, but I didn’t want to check on the hole. Horace said he thought I was nuts, that’s why I went back, so I could show him the place, but when we pulled up in his car, (he didn’t have a motorcycle, thought I was crazy for that, too, I don’t know how he knew so much about when to buy one. He always knew about stuff like that though, some wisdom, I guess they call it street smarts, and he was usually right) I didn’t want to get out of the car, so he called me a pussy and went in himself. He came out shrugging his shoulders like I was a kid who thought there was a monster under the bed and he was my dad, annoyed that he still had to check on these things for me, telling me to go back to sleep. I had a few nights like that, afterwards, just like when I was a kid, where things in the apartment looked like faces and peered at me through the darkness, and I was too scared to move so I didn’t turn on the light and just pulled the covers over my head. Horace confirmed it though, so even though I had been planning on calling the cops, I changed my mind after that and forgot about it for a while, but something about it has been on my mind lately, so I thought I’d write it down. I’m going to go out there this weekend, maybe, see if the hole’s still there. For some reason, I have a feeling it is, that it’s been there this whole time, waiting for me to fall in. Maybe it’s just for me, maybe I’m crazy. Maybe this is the thing I’ve been waiting for, this hole in the world, the unpredictable thing I haven’t been able to find. Maybe it’s a cure for boredom. ***** When I got out there it was raining, usual for November in the coast range, and the water hissed and pinged off the hot bike as I set it down on the kickstand and turned toward the barn. It looked pretty much the same as it had the first time; big, black, intimidating, extra now that I was here alone knowing what was inside. I had looked around for a farmhouse, or the remnants of one, but the only thing for a mile in either direction was a shambles of old granite that could have once been a foundation, or something else. No farmers, ghostly or otherwise, to explain the barn’s presence. I was convinced now that there was something off about the hole, and accordingly, I’d brought some equipment like I’d seen on those ghost hunter TV shows, an infrared camera and a tape recorder, to see if I could catch anything that my eyes might miss. But when I mustered my courage and got everything ready to go and went down there, the inside of the barn was clean, still, there was no wind, and the hole was gone. Horace had been telling the truth. It took a lot to cross the threshold but once I was in I scanned every corner—maybe it had shrunk or moved—and found nothing at all. The place in the center of the room where it had been looked just the same as anywhere else. When I turned to leave, though, as I looked out into the rain, I felt a cold trickle, almost wet, or maybe I didn’t feel it, just thought it was there, and my spine froze up, and I knew if I turned and looked I’d see it, maybe it would jump on me anyway, even if I didn’t turn, and who was I, to come meddling around here with my instruments and my motorcycle, to be in here with this thing that I knew then to be older than the barn and older than the trees and the earth and the sky, some primordial thing, to which I was my life was a thin flicker? Fear is strange. Before, I had run as fast as I could. Now, something was telling me that this was like a bear and that I shouldn’t try to challenge it, or intrude on it, and should just walk away slowly, so that’s what I did, taking the quietest steps I could and feeling the breath tightening my lungs, Orpheus leaving Hades, not looking back and at the same time wanting to do so with all my being, but I’d read that story in high school or since in some girl’s apartment, again out of boredom, maybe, and I knew that if I looked back I would be trapped forever, and so I kept walking, slow and deliberate, my boots squishing the mud and snapping twigs in the forest until I could see my bike, and I climbed on, kicked down, and now that I was on the road the fear had mostly passed, and I couldn’t feel that tendril of cold anymore, and like a fool I looked, and black fire was consuming the forest, and it rushed forward until it was nearly upon me, and I leaned down over the handlebars, closed my eyes, and fled. S. Z. James is an author residing in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in Lurch Zine and Deep Overstock.

After the precondition A history of seedless planning resolved itself      in purple sheets for local consul swaddling; the council tenants stand around the drying public grass; after curdling, the milk is tasted, spoiled. A nursing mother sways on one standing leg, then hops quietly fretting over little archangel in his sackcloth, and round the ruined towers, the nettles appear to twist themselves in broken shapes that nestle curds. The air that's left to breathe is of an old museum. In the customary fashion Back then, the shadows of the individual leaves swaddle the limbs of tired flats. There are whispers in the walls about swaddling. There’s a story burning and in it, a young face is pushed into apple pie to laughter. The invasion does not come in the shape of French troops – there are none. I’ve been drinking, which you can tell by how my jacket falls. I’ll hang you up at a key moment, right as you say something nice. You might fear me more if you knew about the pie. At the party blockade, the first sound is not music. I’ll beg mercies for someone I’ll never know, someone I’ll wear a hat and coat for, who drops crystals in my kidneys, his fear bloating out my waistband, though I’d ask how many guys like me out there are bilious, with a few loose leaves in the bottom of the bag. When you smile, the rusted balconies creak and threaten to crush the passing residents. I’m brave only when the eyes are averted. There is no history round here after regeneration. You could clean out the fat from the valves. Since I hung you up there could I ever be clean? I’ll hand you a limb before the cinder blocks crumble. Townes-Thomas lives a quiet life in London, England. He spends his time struggling to make sense of the things he reads and the world in general. His poems are available in Shoreline of Infinity, Scifaikuest, and Graphic Violence Lit.

Lost in the Forest Corsage curated for your chest, I am wearing emerald to match your eyes as we go in the forest for a walk. I point to the river flowing away and I tell you about the philosophy of time and how the universe is always growing outwards. You’re already bored of my stupid voice, you pick a daisy off the ground next to a fallen trunk, you hold it to my face and tell me to appreciate its beauty. I tuck the daisy in your black hair, I hold your hand and give it a kiss, then look away to hold back tears for how unfair everything becomes. Volition So long as you don’t understand what retrospective means, sitting on the shore is a meditation on cleansing the self if only you are brave enough to let go. Living retrospectively is the ontology of a man with little to no future. When the days feel too long and the years pass by in a heartbeat, that is your cue that you are way past due. Taking a stroll in the same old meadow just past the half-broken backyard fence is a rumination about volition, like when you raise your hand to volunteer, like when you take off your shoes filled to the brim with sand, like when you break your wall of shame and swim in the lake fully naked, like when you feel as if the days are too short and the years are unfathomably long, like when you are a child and the whole world is kneeling before you. Where did it go, all those day-packed years? I choose to be in pain since it’s the only proof I have for being alive in the present. I pray to all the non-existent Gods that I don’t believe in for some courage.

Home Feeling I woke up to rain and pain in my stomach eagles chittering and a barge blare staring outside at the devouring grey bleeding the line between waves and sky This place is a far cry from anywhere I ever intended to be dropped like salmon bones between mountains and sea There’s a garbage truck idling between window and beach But the rotten stink reaching in through the cracks isn’t our tipped bin of tin foil laundry lint, dented plastics bound for Oregon on a thousand mile journey but the ocean (whose smell I now know.) I’m drowsily watching and sniffing the air while just there I think the driver is hesitating looking out, yearning seeing the wash of fog, tasting the salt hearing the birds of prey cruising the fault hunting for house cats He sits, not smoking a cigarette not realizing that he’s a part of a picture; that someone has placed the rig and its man in the same unfurling, worshipful hand as the water the eagles the marine layer blur a gloomy, wonderful, consuming wet these feelings of surprise of home (and yet.) House of Green Chairs It became a house of green chairs very naturally The first was a celebration We are moving into our new home Let’s find something special for it The special chair and its special green proved so vibrant that it needed balance It needs a companion When the third appeared nobody thought of it It’s free on the sidewalk comfortable perfect for a reading nook Then came the fourth a miscommunication between them that was funny in hindsight Have you noticed all of the green chairs, babe Are we the green chair house now So that when a friend needed to sell a set of matching green chairs there was no other possibility We are the people who collect green chairs and so it must always be The two of them and their neighbors and all of their closest friends now see green chairs everywhere in the world A phone chimes and on the screen is a spotlit victorian chaise in a history museum a storybook illustration Someone is watching a film on a first date and behold, a hanging lime of a chair they gasp and chuckle, raising eyebrows Explanations are made later I have these friends— Hold on, I’ll show you That’s how things start That’s how things catch What Survives What survives? Stinging nettle plains stretching treacherous across the suffocated asphalt Blackberry brambles to catch what moves and feed it; bleed it Algae corrugating the silver and gold; unblueing the water; crowding the beach sprawling soft fungus like pools of vomit where floodwaters gobbled up farms and spat them out At least, that’s what I hope. English ivy will be there, if we’re lucky; Spanish moss; Scotch broom; Canada thistle The future will have some color at least (Not so bleak as the movies, yet more so.) Something will gasp and creak beyond our mouths and ears It will crack like a seed at our reckoning and send its tendrils helixing around everything we’ve built dragging down our behemoths and finding shelter under our ruin With luck, our taxes and overpasses Will protect a noxious weed a skittering roach or that bristling horsetail through inferno or through flood til the next age What survives? A little thread between, oh please just a little, ferocious life. A. Jenson is a trans, non-binary writer, artist, and farmer whose most recent work appears in 2023/2024 issues of Door Is A Jar, The Bitchin Kitsch, the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, Pile Press, and others. They are revising a fiction manuscript by night, and turning compost heaps by day.

It was completely wrong to be riding in the front seat next to Raúl. It was inappropriate. Perhaps improper was a better term due to their statuary differences. Surely, Marty had not had the slightest opportunity to sit anywhere else. Amil had opened the back door for Elena, and she had graciously entered and slid sideways to the opposite window as elegantly as she could. Amil did not even give Raúl the chance to step out of the car to open the left door for Elena, the only door that should have been opened for her. After Elena entered the car, it was obvious that Amil would sit next to her. Despite the dimensions of the Audi, it was indisputable that the three of them could sit together. Amil did not know anything about good manners or, most probably, did not care. How could it be that with a soul modeled in the best private English academies, he was able to oversee such an unambiguous rule of courtesy? When a gentleman opens the car door for a lady and plans to sit next to her, he is the one who should enter first to spare her pristine garments the shame of sweeping the whole length of the back seat. Amil may have been born in the heart of Knightsbridge, but some particle in his ancestral Indian blood was maneuvering his bad memory. Raúl instead, as the gentleman in uniform he was, with his unobtrusive wisdom, had let Amil play the role of the efficient knight and take care of their only damsel, who was not in distress but exuberantly delighted at the prospect of the luxury shopping center inauguration, a project that Marty had supervised and financed, Amil was still promoting and of which Elena had taken possession as the executive director of commercial real estate management. Raúl dove into the traffic and Marty looked straight into the magma of lights and noise that this contradictory city in the southern hemisphere was able to amass every late afternoon. Even when the building they were about to see in all its majesty was barely five miles away, Marty was sure that it would take Raúl almost forty-five minutes to reach their destination. Marty was not supposed to look at their chauffeur for the whole duration of the trip. Raúl was a serious employee used to the eccentricities and secrets of all these high-rank ex-pats who came to the developing country chasing a good chunk of money and an inflated reputation. Two blocks and five irresponsible pedestrians later, Marty decided to turn his head back to say some triviality about the traffic. He did not do it. Amil had started his incoherent chants about how Anika, his Swedish girlfriend for the last three years, had left their apartment two weeks ago never to return. Amil had found out through the inebriated indiscretion of a friend that the whitish blond he thought he would marry had hopped on a last-minute flight back to Oslo grabbing by the elbow a tall French instructor who for the last six months had offered to teach her Spanish for free. Amil had recounted the story endlessly for ten days, at the office, at the bars, and at the golf tournament. It was getting very difficult to swallow anymore. Marty was convinced that his younger coworker was doing it to impress Elena with his manly sorrows. His seductive reasoning being that if Don Quixote had almost cried in the presence of Dulcinea, why not poor, gentle Amil, in an intimate car ride, for the entertainment and possibly the compassion of the tempting woman sitting so strategically next to him? Raúl braked inches away–centimeters here, Marty thought–from a car that was miraculously still able to move. He finally turned and looked directly at Elena, her eyes lost beyond the havoc of the insane avenue, her ironic smile respectfully hidden from Amil, her thick Spanish accent about to come out at any moment from her poorly sealed lips. Marty was carelessly admiring her unavoidable, perfect knees when she turned her gaze to him. “Marty, do you think we will get to see the President?” “That would be interesting,” Amil intercepted. “I wonder if he is as ugly and short in real life as he looks on TV.” “Dr. Sacerdote told me the other day that the President assured him in person that he would be there. I cannot believe he would miss such a chance to blab about how the country is improving thanks to his brave policies.” Marty stated. “The head of your bank talks directly to the President?” asked Amil incredulously. “Of course!” Elena laughed. “Who do you think is the guy who really runs this country? It’s not us, for sure, nor the presidential monkey! Mr. Head of the Bank is! Isn’t it true, Marty?” Marty did not like it when Elena replied for him, giving away his theories as if they belonged to her. Marty’s wife did the same the very few times she expressed any interesting opinions and when he complained she shielded her appropriations with the excuse that women only repeat the words of men they admire. “I am not going to wait for the President. It’s Erich’s fifth birthday tomorrow and we have early plans,” said Marty in a defensive way. “Your son is already five?” Amil gasped. Marty did not reply. Elena went back to stare at the insurmountable traffic and did not pay any more attention to the men until they arrived. This time Amil recovered his British composure and went around the car to open the left door for Elena and to protect her from the upcoming vehicles that were trying to find a safe spot to deliver their sophisticated occupants. The building was an imposing palace from the beginning of the twentieth century that had served as the city’s central market for seventy years and had been abandoned to its corrosive luck when the economy and the mores of the citizens had drowned in the throat of extreme socialism. Marty’s deed had been to awaken this brick-and-mortar cyclops with the tender milk of political change propelled by the inelegant President. The exterior looked again as regal as it had in its origins, when a mythical singer from the times of Rudolph Valentino used to sell his mother’s vegetables and dreamt of becoming the star he got to be. Inside, the shopping center was a hymn to capitalism and the fresh hopes of becoming a first-world country again. Bathed by the creamy radiance of light and music, Elena entered through the cast-iron portico holding the arm of Amil, while Marty made sure that he would be able to find Raúl and the car in the next thirty minutes or whenever he decided that his mandatory presence was enough. Elena and Amil walked ahead, greeting people, accepting champagne glasses, and choosing between caviar canapés or obscene chocolate strawberries served in almond praline replicas of the dome over their heads. Marty observed the couple from behind, nodding to the puppetry aristocracy of the poor country and wondering if Elena could really surrender to Amil’s dandy arts. The three of them reunited at the doors of the unfinished multi-theater space on the third level that had been Marty’s shrewd idea. Amil was telling the story of his spiteful heart to one of the bank’s senior investors. Marty whispered in Elena’s ear: “Come with me. I don’t think we are allowed in the theaters but I know how to get in from the side. You won’t believe the new technology.” Elena beamed with the sudden possibility of mischief and stepped ceremonially into the carpeted space declaring with her broken accent that she was the very first and most beautiful person to enter the cinema from that moment until the end of time. Marty looked toward the dead screen and knew it was time to go. Amil had finished his lamentation when he saw them exiting the theater through the velvet doors. “They say the President is visiting the stores before his speech. Shall we go and hunt for him? I need to check the Hermès suits and maybe a pair of Pradas anyway.” “I will see you tomorrow. Try to behave, Amil. Remember that you are the one selling this shit.” Elena looked up at Marty, disoriented. He was not going to wait to see the President. He moved away from her and Amil as smoothly as the crowd allowed him and turned in front of the descending escalator to send Elena a mocking salute that she could not interpret. “Back home, Mr. Carman?” asked Raúl when Marty settled in the back seat as it should be. “Just give me some minutes, Raúl. Let’s wait. My plans for the evening are more open. They are not waiting for me at home until much later. I need to rest my eyes. Raúl did not reply. Deep respect is better expressed with silence. The calmer traffic set a suspended mood. Raúl continued reading a mystery novel that had more romance than murder, just as he liked them. “Raúl, open the door!” Elena was yelling from the other side of the locked door where Marty was leaning his head. Raúl reacted immediately, unlocked the door, closed his book, and turned the car on. Marty started dragging himself sideways helped by the firm pressure of Elena’s hip. “Raúl, look what I brought you. Dripping chocolate strawberries in a praline cup! I ate four of them already. Aren’t they perfect for an evening of eternal love and desire?” “To your apartment, Señorita?” Raúl stated more than asked. “To our secret nest, Raúl. And you can go home after leaving us. I have very serious business matters to discuss with Mr. Carman. Isn’t that right, Marty?” Marty smiled while kissing her. He liked this country, with its blasts of dust, Raúl’s discretion, almond praline cups, and Elena’s broken accent ready to assault him through her poorly sealed lips.

Grief of Hands Burned to Dust I just thought about how I won’t hold your hand again the wrinkles all over each knuckle you’ve been using them since you pulled the taro out of the ground as a child back in Samoa And when you first came here with my father the first thing you did was cleaning cleaning the offices of higher ups and those who flew and sometimes you would talk of the private jets being cleaned if I could look at your hands again I would be able to find Tom Cruise in your hands or that is the story you always told me cleaned his private jet the difference between you and him will always be your oily hands whenever I grabbed them because you always had to put hand lotion on you’d get so upset with yourself every time your long nails would accidentally scratch me though it was a complete accident I still remember your touch nine months later And it doesn’t feel any better that I won’t feel the individual wrinkles across your middle finger or the curved that almost always made a ‘c’ on every fingernail and when my fingernails were long enough you’d try taking out the dirt from underneath them like I didn’t know how and you know I am a nail biter The look of disappointment every time I came home from college cause my nails were behind my fingertips the sun behind the hills not even the morning sun to peek through I don’t know how to use my hands with long nails I use my fingertips for everything Typing this poem out for the first time First on my phone then computer I love the sound the computer makes every time a letter Comes through, a new thought, new pain—                the juxtaposition of that comfort typing is I miss my mom more Boroughs Often unaware are they for fortune is on their side whole animals burrow inside looking to make a home where no one has “to the left of the belly fat” “just south of the scapular, if you’ve made it to the ass you’ve gone too far” a burrow is a burrow is a burrow a burrow of pain to bring all of me to the tables sat at, forgotten pillows only bring regret new homes to burrow in old neighborhoods Mirm Hurula is a Samoan American writer creating and publishing pieces of stories they needed growing up. They write of heartbreak without the ability to make it succinct, of heart just opening at the fluttering brought on by another, of wisdom that a 26 year-old should not know.

It’s Midnight and Cinderella’s still dancing. The Prince missed a couple of steps in surprise. But so what if she’s no longer in formal wear? She’s still smart, beautiful and funny, if anything more interesting. The long gown replaced by a ragged dress, the tiara now a Hardup Spartans cap, and those amazing shoes transformed into battered sneakers, she still moves like silk, dances as though she’s practiced to this exact tune for months. It's 1 AM and Cinderella and the Prince are still dancing. Some of the other suitors tried to cut in. There was a dance off between Cinderella and two sisters. They were good but one tottered on too-tall heels, the other held up too stiffly by corsetry. Neither could match her best moves. Now she’s invited some of the others to the floor, the ones who held back, knowing they had no chance with the Prince. All the younger sons and daughters, in their hand-me-down finery and self-sewn outfits, getting to show off on the dancefloor. Turning this into a proper party. It's 2 AM and the Prince has had to take a break. Cinderella’s got some of the staff to join her. The buffet table stands neglected, guests helping themselves at the bar. The candle boys are dancing frantically, throwing each other about, ignoring the declining light, half gone already, the dance floor becoming more intimate, more mysterious in the shadows. The announcer has abandoned his post by the door, moving slightly out of time with the music. If a mysterious and beautiful stranger arrived now there would be no one to greet them. They’d be welcome anyway. It's 3 AM and some of the early arrivals are back on the dance floor, having a second wind. Some of them are there to congratulate Cinderella, others curious to see this stranger whose quick change and dance moves have dominated the party. More are here to find her flaws, to see if they can break off this relationship, or to sound out where she stands politically. She’s stronger than them though, enduring it like a marathon, outlasting them, showing off with flair that make her partners look good when they falter from exhaustion. It's 6 AM and the DJ’s worn out, he’s asleep in the corner, pillowed on the set list requested by the Queen and screwed up before half the guests had arrived. Cinderella’s at the decks now, she’s dug deep into the unopened record boxes, letting some smooth Soul ease the hardy dancers still on the floor, lining up some higher energy grooves for when the sun rises to replace the light of the last few guttering candles. It's 12 Noon and the Fairy Godmother has come to the palace, to find out why her girl isn’t home. Has she short cut the happy ending or has something gone wrong? She weaves her way past the pest control vans, giving a cheery wave at the men standing around eating pumpkin pie. Follows her instinct, follows her nose. Follows her ears. At the side all the doors and windows are open and Cinderella has led the partygoers out onto the lawn. The Prince has got changed into his oldest jeans, and the others back for a second or third shift are casual too. Cinderella’s still in her ragged old dress, her scuffed shoes, her worn cap. Cinderella looks fresher than anyone, even those who might have had a nap, had a shower, had breakfast. The Fairy Godmother looks closely at her. Cinderella looks like she can dance anyone else there into the floor. Cinderella looks like she’s just getting started.

In the fading evening light of summer, 1961, Frank rests his palms on the rough wooden kitchen table. Through the window, just beyond the dangerously tilted boards and beams of a half collapsed clapboard barn, Tatel-1’s steel girder toe extends into the meadow grass. Frank smiles, and in a half-whisper says, “Come out come out wherever you are.” Mary sits bolt upright on a black starless night in the summer of 1816. She thinks she’s heard a voice, but it’s only the sound of heavy snoring from the man who lies beside her. Mary seems an assemblage of parts. Her mother, the feminist, philosopher, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to her father, the philosopher William Godwin, grafted onto her sleeping lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She seems their bone and flesh, if not the milk of her mother, who died eleven days after giving birth. When Mary awoke and began life, she found herself alone. Frank adjusts his glasses and thinks about the austere kitchen in his childhood home on the South Shore of Chicago where his parents demanded strict observance of Baptist fundamentalism. His father, a chemical engineer and amateur astronomer, once told him there were, “Other worlds in space.” He meant other planets in the solar system, but eight-year-old Frank imagined Earth-like worlds strewn throughout the galaxy. Habitable planets with beings driving cars on streets just like his hometown. Sitting in the last row of Sunday Bible school, Frank wondered if he could contact them. After class, he rode his bike to the Museum of Science along a winding bikeway by the edge of a lake that stretched into the infinite distance. There he came upon a photo of Nikola Tesla. Dark hair and sharp mustache, shoulders back, head tilted forward like some popinjay daring Frank to join him. A plaque below the photo recounted that in 1899, Tesla built a laboratory in the mountains of Colorado to search for high-frequency electricity and wireless transmissions and reported receiving signals from Mars that, “world spoke to the world in language strange at first, but sure to be clearer.” The signal originated with Marconi, not Mars, but that did not quench Tesla’s desire to reach out to the stars, and Frank now remembers how in that moment, that same wave of desire first broke over him. Now the table wobbles, and Frank, a Harvard educated physicist, sits upright, looks about, reflexively reproduces the motion, hypothesizes a short leg, imagines placing a matchbook beneath as a confirming test. Frank’s here at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, to create a new research program for the radio telescope Tatel-1 which has, till now, been mapping the center of the Milky Way galaxy. It squats on four massive concrete pilings, indifferent to the barn, the farmhouse, and the scientist. Its 85-foot wide white parabolic dish is tilted upward, watching the evening sky. Electromagnetic energy radiates from the stars onto the dish, surges through a low pass amplifier and a superheterodyne receiver and emerges as an ear splitting cry for attention. Mapping places he can’t reach is of no interest to Frank. But what if he can bring the aliens here? So, he’s convinced the laboratory director to let Tatel-1 hunt for alien radio transmissions. He’s named the new research program Ozma, after the princess of Oz, a land both fantastical, faraway, and much like our own. Frank Drake has turned Tatel-1 towards the star systems Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, a dozen light years away. He keeps the project secret for fear of ridicule, but one of his colleagues, Carl Sagan, has convinced the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences of the importance of Ozma. The Board has asked Frank to organize a conference at Green Bank to encourage the search for life on other planets. Mary lights a candle by her bedside. Her eyes roam over the brown tangled mass of hair, large round eyes, soft, delicate nose and lips of the man beside her. Mary was 16 when she met Percy, who was 21, and married with a pregnant wife. He’d just been thrown out of Oxford for his atheism, disowned by his father, and had sought out Mary’s father, his intellectual hero. Mary and Percy had an illicit courtship, as much Romanticism as romance, reading the works of Mary’s parents while reclining beside her mother’s grave in the St. Pancras churchyard. Sublime and rapturous, Mary fell in love with Percy’s looks and intellect, and the two ran off to Paris along with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who was willing to be ruined as well. From there they traveled by donkey, mule, carriage, and foot through war torn France where Mary wrote, "The distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war..." Returning to England, pregnant, Mary learned Percy was bereft of money and friends, the two having been shunned by society. She also learned Percy’s conception of romance was staggeringly different than hers when he pressured 17-year-old Mary to sleep with his best friend in pursuit of free love, while his own long-running romantic involvement with Mary’s stepsister had continued since the time the three of them had left England. Mary’s baby was born prematurely and died. She wrote, “It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. It was dead then, but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions.” The couple’s fortunes improved after Percy inherited from his grandfather, and Mary gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom she named Percy, although she was forever haunted by visions of her first born, a contorted baby girl lying lifeless and alone in the center of the bassinet. Mary, Percy, and Claire have now just recently rented a small cottage, the Maison Chapuis, on Lake Geneva. It’s proved a wet ungenial summer, and incessant rain has confined them for days to a log fire and German ghost stories in Lord Byron’s villa. Byron is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. His many affairs have included his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron is married and has a daughter, Ada, who in 1843 will write a theoretical description of a general-purpose computer a century before one is built. But now his wife has left him, and Byron has been barred from seeing wife or daughter ever again. Fleeing scandal, Byron left England for Geneva, and meet up with Percy, Mary, Claire, and several others, known to gentile society as the League of Incest. Claire has become pregnant by Byron, Byron is bored of the dalliance and the weather, so earlier this evening he announced, “We will each write a ghost story.” Frank stares at the yellow legal pad on the table before him as he considers how to organize his conference. He pulls a ballpoint pen from the pocket protector of his rayon shirt and writes the title, “Do Detectable Civilizations Exist?” He continues with the agenda topics. What is the rate of new star formation? How many stars have planets? How many planets have life? How often do life forms create civilizations? What proportion of civilizations acquire the appropriate communication technology? He stops, sets the pen down, having recognized each topic as the probability of an event. He hypothesizes the fractional values. Rate of star formation in the Milky Way, four per year. Number of stars with planets, one in five. He realizes these fractions multiplied together will tell him exactly how many are out there in the Milky Way with cars and streets just like his childhood hometown. The ball of his pen rolls smoothly across the page as he writes a mathematical equation that will calculate the number. N = R* · fp· ne · fl · fi · fc The number of galactic stars, times the fraction of stars with planets, times the fraction of planets supporting life, times the fraction of life forms that create civilization, times the fraction of civilizations with communication technology. Exotic worlds of imagination collapse into a sublime set of symbols. A group of unknowns begging to be known. The ecstasy of creation. When Byron had announced his literary challenge, the men in the room busied themselves with serious talk about “the principles of life.” Mary sat tactfully silent. She already knew more about such principles than anyone present. She already had her story in her head and now busied herself working on the answer to the humiliating question she knew would eventually be asked, “How she, a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” She decides the idea came to her in a dream and that writing it consists of “making only a transcript.” Now, as she rises from bed, steps onto the cool cottage floor, the vision she has carefully assembled from the pieces of her own life is clear. There is a ghost of course, a pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside a hideous phantasm of a man-creature stretched out. The ghost works some powerful engine, and the creature stretched out stirs with an uneasy, half vital motion, mocking the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. A thunderstorm rumbles in the distance. Lightning bolts rip inorganic molecules from the sky, forging them into the building blocks of life. The creature raises its re-animated head on limbs in proportion, with hair lustrous black and flowing, in horrid contrast with its shriveled complexion and watery eyes. Mary sits at a table, lights a candle, opens her oversized writing journal, dips a quill in the inkwell, and in cramped script begins to write a novel where myth powers technology. She does not focus on the twists and turns of plot, the visceral and alienating subject matter, but rather on the mental and moral struggles of the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein. Who is he? Her husband snuffles and snorts in the bed behind her while she feels the ecstasy of creation. She skewers the individualism and egotism of the men still talking in the other room, and these Romantic times. Her Victor Frankenstein is like Prometheus, or Satan in Paradise Lost, rebelling against tradition, creating life, shaping his own destiny. His aspiration and progress are indistinguishable from hubris – until something goes wrong, and we see all too clearly what is reasonable endeavor and what is a self-delusion clothed as a quest for truth. The fire is fading. The room’s grown cold. Mary rises and pulls her wrap more tightly around herself. There’s no more wood by the fire and so she shuffles to the back door. She leans against it, it gives too easily, and she stumbles across 144 years into the harsh light of Frank’s kitchen. They should both be surprised but they are not, for in the ecstasy of creation, anything is possible. Frank pours Mary some coffee from a shiny electric percolator. She takes a sip, scowls at the bitter taste, presses the warm white mug against her chest, and follows him out the door and down the steps into the cool darkness of the night. They circle behind the barn. Mary places her hand on one of Tatel-1’s concrete pillars as she looks up through the dark steel girders that slice the starry sky into rectangles, triangles, and trapezoids, and asks, “Why?” “Sublime destiny,” Drake replies. “To uncover the meaning of existence. No one person can in one lifetime, of course. We all chip away at it bit by bit. The more we see, the more there is to see. Enough meaning for an entire civilization.” Frank waves his hands about his head as he speaks to the stars. “At this very minute, with almost absolute certainty, the chatter of other intelligent civilizations is falling on the earth as radio waves. A radio telescope, pointed in the right place, tuned to the right frequency, can discover them. We can send our own radio waves in response. Begin a dialogue so that someday, from somewhere afar out amongst the stars, will come the answer to our questions.” Mary’s deadpan look is directed at the man. “And how far is too far?” “How can there be such a thing?” He exclaims. Mary recounts our collective history. Describes first encounters, clashes of cultures. Columbus, Cortez, the Little Corporal and the smoldering French countryside, the men back in the Lake Geneva cottage, pillars of literature, free thinkers who blather on about the principles of life. She describes the horrors that will come with the progress of another century. She’ll never see them but she doesn’t have to. She already understands. She tries to explain, quietly, how progress is not inevitable. That advancement lies close by chaos. Frank doesn’t hear her, for Mary’s voice is drowned out by the turning of Tatel-1’s gears as it slowly moves against the Earth’s axis of rotation, following its master’s command. When silence returns, Mary is gone. Frank’s conference launches the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Drake’s equation becomes the embodiment of the cosmic optimism of the early sixties, a time when terrestrial intelligence races to the moon, then turns away, consumed by terrestrial events. It’s a time when anything is possible, and when humankind is almost destroyed, several times, by its own creations. In a quest to look further and further, Drake moves to a hilly cave-filled jungle on the north shore of Puerto Rico. There, abandoned in a giant sinkhole sits Arecibo, a 1,000-foot-wide parabolic dish. Frank uses Arecibo to transmit a three-minute message to star clusters more than 22,000 light years away. The message is filled with the double-helix structure of DNA, the dimensions of the human form, and the location of Earth and the solar system. Arecibo eventually collapses from neglect, but its message travels ceaselessly to the stars. To civilizations with towns and streets just like Drake’s hometown, or whatever else lurks out there. Mary publishes Frankenstein in 1818, anonymously, out of a concern that its hideous truth might cause the authorities to take custody of a mad woman’s child. The book contains an unsigned preface by Percy Shelley. It becomes an immediate sensation. Sir Walter Scott writes, in an early review, “The author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination.” Scott, like many readers, assumes that the author is Percy Shelley. Conservatives are not enamored and damn the book’s radicalism and its Byronic impieties. They miss the point. The novel is a revolutionary story wrapped in a counter-revolutionary point of view. Mary continues writing. 23 short stories, two travel narratives, and eight novels. One, The Last Man, is an apocalyptic story of tragic love set in 2072, when humanity is gradually exterminated by a pandemic. The Last Man is the lone survivor, having failed, for all his imagination and knowledge, to save the life of anyone. Mary Shelley remains generally regarded as a result. William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter who became Shelley's Pygmalion. Her intelligence is questioned, as is her authorship of Frankenstein. But as the crickets’ chirp in the summer evening of 1961, Frank sits at the kitchen table, places the pen back in his pocket, looks upon his formula, and notices a new term in his equation. An “L”, not in ballpoint pen, but in large looping quill and ink script has been added. N = R* · fp· ne· fl · fi · fc  * L In the bottom right-hand corner of the page there’s a note. Consider adding “L,” the fraction of civilizations, once born, that now exist, for every civilization must have a beginning, and an end. Mary Shelley Rob Rosen has spent the better part of a life as a technologist and applied mathematician with a front row seat to the technology revolutions of our time -- and the resulting social convulsions. He’s a member of the Historical Novel Society, The Burlington (VT) Writers Workshop, Grub Street, Writers Digest, has written essays and fiction for our local newspaper here in central Vermont, and had several short stories published in other speculative fiction magazines and music literary journals.