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The air was cold, as it always was coming out of cryo-sleep. The Tamberlane Supply star freighter EREBUS was commissioned to travel between the Milky Way’s inner spiral arms and kept the crew in cryo for most of its return journey. Warrant Officer Sanders adjusted his stirring eyes to see the other pods had already been vacated and that the emergency lights were flickering. Only he and Executive Officer Kane were still waking while the Erebus’s navigator Lieutenant Billadeau stood by in a pressure suit. A hologram of the ship’s AI, THELEMA, appeared. “Kane, Sanders. The captain ordered your awakening and requested your immediate attendance in the command module.” As they shivered in the cool chamber, Billadeau produced a small hologram from her wrist communicator showing damaged components of the ship, “Mechanical damage to the engines and alternators produced a propulsion malfunction bringing us four months beyond intended arrival.” Billadeau enlarged the hologram. Several energy lines appeared ruptured from a tear from claw marks all along the inner and outer walls. “Vari. Likely jumped aboard from the Perseus ports,” Billadeau continued as a hologram of a large dark blue arthropod ravaged the outer hull with its two forelegs and scurried inside the vessel on its hind four. “So when will we arrive home?” Sanders asked, rubbing his hand together, generating friction. “Captain Canter will further explain the situation,” Billadeau remarked, then started down a corridor. Sanders and Kane gave each other weary looks, then followed after. Entering the command module, they noticed the captain, technician Farah, and Chief Engineer Stevenson wore pressure suits as well. “The longer it stays on the EREBUS, the greater the danger it poses,” Stevenson said, nodding toward the hologram. Captain Canter looked grave as he spoke, “Damage to the engine and alternator has rendered communication impossible, and life-support systems will need to be suspended throughout the EREBUS. We will divert all energy to the command module and the captain’s quarters. Door locks will help keep out the cold and vari but restrict access to the cryo chamber, engines, and even escape pods. Only residual temperatures will remain in the command module bringing the temperature down to just above two-hundred eight Kelvin.” “We’ll freeze to death,” Kane complained. “Pressure suits, with their isolated batteries and a small supply of adrenaline boost, should keep our body temperatures above freezing while worn in the command module. Captain’s quarters will still have the emergency ability to generate sufficient heat for rest if needed,” the Captain said. “We can’t repair it?” Sanders asked. “On recommendation from THELEMA, and captain’s orders, our energy-supported tools are suspended,” technician Farah explained as she dropped an ax on the table. Scratched and worn with recent wear and tear. “The outer layers of just one of the enclosures took nearly two hours to get into, and we still have another twelve more.” “I’m going to be direct,” the captain said.“THELEMA has run over a thousand simulations. Our crew only survives eight. Seven only happen if we immediately divert course for the Eller sector.” “Eller sector? You want us to stop between arms? Is anything even in operation?” Kane asked. “There is not,” Captain Canter replied in a decisive tone. “Lieutenant, expending all remaining energy, how long until we reach the Opol mining station?” “With no further damage, no more than two hours,” answered Billadeau. “How do we know this mining station is even a viable option? Some stations haven’t been active for over a hundred years,” Kane questioned. “This station has an active message relay system. Company logs indicate it was last serviced about eight months ago. We could prompt a rescue team within another six months.” “THELEMA, how many simulated trips to the mining station failed?” Sanders asked. “95.8%, one hundred and fourteen of the one hundred and twenty attempted simulations to the mining station ended with the death of the entire crew due to hypothermia or vari attack.” The crew became quiet. “The vari will come out looking for something warm to eat once the engines kick out, or it finds something easier to jab its mandibles into,” Stevenson added as he pressed commands locking all corridor doors. “These locked doors should help. We can deal with it once we dock at the mining station.” “Did we receive any communication before we lost connection?” Farah asked. “I would advise everyone to focus on their objectives,” Captain Canter said. Farah ignored the captain and opened her wristcom to the messages THELEMA sent. The last one sent showed a video of her child, hardly breathing with tubes sticking out of her, desperately trying to say something but unable to speak. A note attached to the transmission noted her daughter’s condition as terminal, with a date from two months before. Farah covered her mouth to silence her gasps as tears raced down her cheeks. “Two months ago?” Farah finally squeaked out. “My child may have died two months ago, and I wasn’t woken up?” “There is nothing you could’ve done,” Kane stated. “Don’t you dare! This was supposed to be a six-month journey. I could’ve said goodbye. I should’ve been there to hold her so she wasn’t alone.” “You’ve already said goodbye. You just didn’t realize it was the last one. Furthermore, this isn’t a choice that either you or I make alone. THELEMA has offered us two options: We continue on our trajectory in cryo and, for two months, take our chances with the vari, or we stop at the Opol mining station.” The crew fell silent. “Tamberlane Supply policy requires a majority vote. All those in favor of the Opol mining station in the Eller system?” The captain looked around as he raised his hand. Stevenson and Kane immediately raised their hands, as did Billadeau nervously. Sanders raised his reluctantly as well. Farah’s face turned red in frustration and anger before she spoke with great restraint, “When did THELEMA recognize the problem?” “Just after we left port, but the severity did not require our attention until now,” the captain said. “You told me that my diagnostics were wrong, that the EREBUS was fit to perform when we left the docks! We could’ve turned back for help months ago!” Farah’s voice began to rise. “Had we stayed to administer your diagnostic suggestion, the EREBUS would not have been on pace to gain bonus payment, and now this vessel requires your vote to determine our best course of action within cost.” “Within cost? I only came out here to pay for my child’s illness, who doesn’t have another six months! I was supposed to be back home now!” “You are here because of debt, same as everyone else. We’ve all spent the same ten months aboard this ship when it should have only been six. While none of us are pleased about the timing, we all agreed to our contracts. So stop crying!” “You did this to us. You killed us!” Farah screamed. Farah approached the captain as she continued to yell, throwing objects about the module. “You’ve killed us all for greed!” Stevenson stepped in and held Farah’s arms back. “Your daughter is already gone,” Stevenson exclaimed. “And if we don’t focus, we’ll be gone as well. Just don’t think about it. Move on.” “We already knew about the condition of the ship?” Billadeau demanded from the captain. “Repairs had been considered but ultimately denied by ownership. We may be able to complete repairs at the mining station,” Captain Canter insisted. “Now, Lieutenant Billadeau, if you please, redirect the EREBUS at full speed. Kane, divert all energy to essential components.” Billadeau reluctantly nodded back and routed the EREBUS toward the Opol mining station. Farah freed herself from Stevenson’s grip and raised her arms to show she wasn’t a threat. “THELEMA, how many simulations have been successful with partial arrivals?” Farah implored. “3.5%, five successful runs ended with at least one crew member dying,” THELEMA replied. “So having you around doesn’t really increase the odds that we get back alive, does it, Captain?” Farah rushed over to the ax on the table, picked it up, and swung it, wedging it deep into the captain’s side, puncturing through his pressure suit. The captain screamed in pain, and Stevenson and Kane tackled Farah to the ground, knocking off her helmet. “Throw her in the brig!” Captain Canter cried out, commanding Stevenson and Kane to drag the screaming Farah out of the room. Sanders grabbed a med kit as Billadeau dislodged the ax and applied pressure on the captain, who was rapidly turning pale. Once Stevenson and Kane returned, Kane adjusted the controls and diverted all energy to only the essential components. “It’s already starting to get cold in here,” Kane remarked as he rubbed his hands together. Feeling cold already, Sanders checked their vitals on his wristcom, reading: 97°. “Billadeau,” the captain commanded between breaths. “Gather the remaining pressure suits.” “What about Farah?” Billadeau asked, holding the frenzied technician’s helmet. “Without residual heat, she won’t last two hours.” “Good,” Kane commented. “No one knows the EREBUS as well as Farah. We may need her to keep the ship going,” Billadeau pleaded. “She’s hysterical. I’ll manage alone,” Stevenson remarked. “No, Billadeau’s right. Bring Farah her helmet. She’ll stand for trial once we return,” The captain sputtered. ***** After what felt like too long of an absence by Billadeau, Sanders went to inspect the brig. Now in his own pressure suit, he saw Billadeau standing by the brig’s control panel, speaking with Farah, “Farah? Are you okay? We need you to reach the mining station, and you hurt the captain. The EREBUS won’t make it to the mining station unless you help. I’ll let you out, but I need to know that you’ll help us.” Farah just nodded. Billadeau unlocked Farah from the cell. Sanders watched on with caution, still unsure of Farah’s mood. Farah walked over to a control panel and began to input commands. A hologram of the last broadcast appeared. A small child not older than seven appeared with tubes in and out of her body, struggling to breathe. The holographic child showed nothing more than a tear-filled wave while Farah put on her pressure suit helmet. As the video ended, Farah adjusted more controls on the panel, and doors throughout all the ship’s modules began to open. Farah asked, “THELEMA, what are the odds that only one crew member makes it to the mining station?” “0.07%” “What are you doing, Farah?” Billadeau asked frantically. “Before the end, each of you will know my cold, bitter grief,” Farah promised and ran down a dark corridor. Sanders looked over the commands on the control panel and panicked. “She locked every module open but cryo and the escape pods. With all heating systems offline, our thermal pressure suits will be some of the warmest things on this ship for the vari to track us.” Sanders and Billadeau returned to the command module, only to see Stevenson shaking his head over the captain’s cold corpse. “Farah escaped and locked open all hatches!” Sanders exclaimed. “You let her out?!” Kane shouted. “She’s in pain,” Billadeau argued. “This blood is on your hands, Billadeau!” Stevenson picked up the bloody ax. “When I come back, I’ll deal with you! Sanders, are you coming with me?” “You can’t be serious?” Sanders remarked. Stevenson rolled his eyes and headed down the hall in the dark chambers, ax in hand. Kane slowly backed and ran out of the module toward the captain’s quarters. Sanders and Billadeau quickly followed, unsure of what the executive officer was doing. Kane ran inside the captain’s private chambers and immediately closed the entrance behind him. They peered into the window and pounded on it for Kane’s attention. Kane spoke into his wristcom, “The vari can’t get in here, and I don’t trust either of you to not let that freak Farah in.” Sanders looked at their vitals, now a bitter 89.6°, “At this rate, our pressure suits can’t withstand the dropping temperatures for long.” Billadeau looked at her navigation tools. “We need to get to the escape pod! We can just about make it to the station from here. Kane! We need to get out of here. We can make it to the mining station with just the three of us.” Kane paused a moment, then asked, “And leave Stevenson to Farah?” After another pause, Kane tried to open the door, but to no avail. He started to bang and shove. An immediate expression of worry came over Kane’s face as frozen air started to opaque the window. Sanders checked Kane’s vitals, dropping fast to 82.4°. Not a moment later, an image of engineer Stevenson was shown lifeless on the floor of a corridor, along with Farah’s voice over the intercom system, “You’re greedy, Kane. Just like the captain.” “Billadeau, Sanders. Please,” Kane pleaded. Sanders attempted to pull on the door and looked at Kane through the window. His face was icy blue with purple lips, and his eyes were puffy red, swollen, and almost completely covered in frost. “She severed the heat. Kane has no pressure suit,” Billadeau observed. She looked at Sanders and shook her head in frantic desperation. “Sorry, Kane. It’s no use,” is all Sanders could say. He motioned to Billadeau to follow him down the hall. They could hear Kane scream a final cry down the hall, “Billadeau. Sanders. Please!” Hypothermia set in, and Billadeau’s movements became sluggish from the cold. She leaned on Sanders as she hobbled down the last bits of the corridor. Turning a final corner, they stumbled upon the escape pod module, and Sanders rested Billadeau beside the closed door. Sanders rubbed the sides of his pressure suit desperately to generate a small amount of warmth before manually working to override the entrance. The sound of the vari grew in the hall, and Billadeau started to weep in her fatigued state and slumped over, “I can’t go on. Farah killed us all, and we deserve it. I deserve it. I freed the monster.” “Hold on, Billadeau. We’re almost there!” Sanders checked their vitals, now a desperate 80.3°, and activated their adrenaline, jolting her awake. Sanders activated the switch to open the module door, stepped in, and anxiously looked around, wondering if Farah had already found a way inside. Once he was sure she hadn’t made it in, Sanders turned back to grab Billadeau. No sooner did he step back out the door that he saw the outline of the vari creep from the hall's darkness and into the dim walkway lights beside where Billadeau rested. Sanders only had a moment to gasp before the hexapod monster dug its mandible into Billadeau’s leg and pulled her backward into the blackness. Her screams through the wristcom lingered even after Sanders could no longer see her silhouette. He ran back into the escape pod module and shut the entrance behind him. Billadeau’s screams transformed into a coagulated gargle. Sanders couldn’t stand it any longer and shut off his communicator. Sanders activated the system, diverting power to the escape pod. A loud thud rang from the door. A glazed-over eye from the vari peered in the door window and filled Sanders with dread. A moment later, the creature’s face split from an ax driven through from the back. Sanders knew that Farah was here, and he was out of time. The pod had all the energy it was going to get. He quickly dove into the pod and prepared it to jettison. Before the escape pod back hatch completely closed, Sander’s last view was Farah with her bloody ax in one hand and a half-severed head of the vari in the other. The pod launched, and Sanders lined up for the docking port. The mining station was close. He noticed just how little energy the craft had transferred. All heating elements stopped, and functioning lights ceased. The pod rode only on the momentum from launch to propel itself toward the derelict facility. The windows began to frost over, and fatigue started to set in. Sanders glanced down at his wristcom to read his vitals were now a bitter 75.2°. “THELEMA.” “Hello, Sanders.” “What are the chances of an unassisted dock at the Opol mining station?” “0.01%,” THELEMA managed to say before her power ended. Sanders closed his eyes and accepted his fate as the EREBUS’s escape pod began to veer slightly to the left. C.J. Goodin is a Science-Fiction/Horror writer and author of cosmic/gothic horror anthology “Granite Shores.”

Clementa No-Kill Mousetrap Boxes – 5 stars Never had mice in the summer before, but somehow they’re getting in. Don’t want to kill the little suckers and these traps worked great. I give my 12-year-old son a dollar to go release the mouse in the neighborhood. My husband says someone else will just have to kill it but hey, at least it isn’t me! HealthyHeart Heart Rate Monitor – 1 star Wish I could give this product zero stars. I bought it to start running with my teenage daughter again. When I put the monitor on it shows my heart rate for five seconds, then the screen goes blank. My daughter hasn’t gone running with me yet, but I tried hers too and it was the same. Shoddy manufacturing and it was not cheap!!! Sending these back. SoBrite Noise-Canceling Headphones – 2 stars Bought these headphones for my 12-year-old son. They work, but they’re not noise canceling. He can still hear whatever is going on while he’s gaming which means he is turning the volume up too high and hurting his ears. Also the plastic is flimsy and seems like it could break if he drops them or slams them down. GoBigg Super 8-Quart Combo Air Fryer – 3 stars Unfortunately there is a gross chemical smell every time this air fryer is turned on. My husband thinks I’m crazy, but his sense of smell is shot after getting Covid. I tossed it in the trash, but the next day my husband “rescued” it and made sweet potato fries. I refused to eat them, but everyone else said they were good. So 3 stars I guess? If you don’t mind a chemical smell that makes you think the air fryer might give you cancer??? Soothing Sounds Multi-Option Peaceful Noise Machine – 4 stars Helps me fall asleep. I like the babbling brook and the ocean waves. Taking away one star because it’s hard to get the button to click on or off. Perfect Clean Crystal Care 11-Setting Dishwasher – 1 star This dishwasher has a gazillion settings but none of them actually get the dishes clean. My parents had the same dishwasher for 40 years and never replaced it. Things were made to last back then. We’re hosting Thanksgiving this year and it’s going to be a disaster with this piece of shit dishwasher that can’t even handle a plate with a tiny bit of tomato sauce on it!!! Breaking the Hold of Video Game and Internet Addiction by Kavin J. Howards – 1 star This “book” is just a few ideas from someone without any special knowledge of the subject. It’s full of typos and the suggestions like limiting video game time are so obvious that they’re useless. There’s a long chapter about porn that I didn’t need because thank God my son is not looking at that yet as far as I know. Sure Sens Multi-Drug At-Home Simple Urine Testing Kit – 1 star PROBLEMS: 1) Came in a box that says DRUG TESTING KIT in big letters. It sat on my porch all day and everyone passing by could see it. The last thing I need is to be the subject of neighbors’ gossip. 2) After a huge scene with my daughter when we told her to pee in the cup, we get a positive result and find out it could mean anything from marijuana to heroin, so not super useful. Then my husband does some research online and turns out there are false positives 25% of the time! So my daughter’s in tears and slams her door so hard a picture falls off the wall in the hallway and breaks and my husband’s saying it’s my fault for making her into an enemy and what does this even prove and she’ll be in college soon living her own life anyway. Hang Loose No-Tuck Dark Paisley Stylish Men’s Oxford Shirt – 5 stars Didn’t know what to get my husband for Christmas, but this shirt caught my eye. I like the way it’s cut shorter so it can be worn untucked. My husband says it makes him look too thick in the middle. I think on a different man this shirt would look really great. Dainty Pyramid Necklace for Girls with Cubic Zirconia – 5 stars This was for my 16-year-old daughter for Xmas. My husband says the pyramid looks like a weird freemason symbol and my daughter hasn’t been wearing it so maybe nobody else likes it, but what do they know – I think it’s lovely. StarScope Refracting Portable Telescope – 5 stars Bought this for my son for Xmas. I would’ve loved something like this when I was a kid. It’s just been sitting in the box in the corner of the living room. So I set it up one night and I’ve been taking it out in the backyard. I’ve looked at the moon, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. It’s freezing outside, but I love it! After everyone’s in bed I come downstairs and pour myself a big glass of wine and bundle up. It’s quiet and the empty tree branches frame the sky, and I think back to when I learned about the planets when I was nine and how they’re still all the same as they were then even if I am not. TrapMastery Glue Traps – 5 stars Our mouse problem is out of control. I think they’re coming in under the loose storm door, but my husband can’t be bothered to fix it. These glue traps are disgusting, but they get the job done. Every morning when I find a mouse on the glue, I stick it in a bucket and drown it. Their limbs tremble, but it doesn’t take long until there are no more bubbles and they’re still. They seem to drown faster when the water is cold. Kate Deimling is a poet, writer, and translator from French. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in I-70 Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Roi Fainéant Literary Press, Ellipsis Zine, Waxwing, and other magazines. Kate is an associate poetry editor at Bracken and was a finalist in the 2022 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction. A native New Orleanian, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family. Find her online at www.katedeimling.com.

The difference in mourning and morning is you. Dawn takes away anything “our”s, transforms it to “or,” a choice between two, as usual. Wordplay is subtraction and addition. A limit is the fifth tally mark, slashing the rest on a friday. I do not live just for the weekend. To lament another turning. It all becomes heavier with age. I start letting myself eat sugar and potatoes. I add almond creamer to my coffee, and think about the bees so bored of these blossoms they drop dead instead of sucking up more nectar. They’d rather starve. Even the birth of a new year is a grief, all erosion. In the spring, I’ll plant lavender and scatter an heirloom wildflower mix around the shed. How can I send you a poem without carrier pigeons? Who is next on the extinction list? The future greys, as do our days. Fresh air gives me a hangover, and I am out of stamps. I’ve already swallowed them all. And I have already donated all of my letters to the crematory, their black smoke rising toward dawn. Alison Lubar is a queer, nonbinary, & mixed-race poet, who works to bring mindfulness practices, and sometimes even poetry, to young people. They’re the author of four chapbooks, two published in 2022, and two forthcoming in 2023. Find out more at http://www.alisonlubar.com/ or on Twitter @theoriginalison.

It’s like waking up in a goddamn freezer. I reach out from under my mound of blankets to shut off the alarm clock and the air spills in like a bucket of ice water, soaking my chest, belly, crotch, all the way down to my knees. I shut up the clock and pull my arm back in, huddled shivering under the covers—two old wool blankets and my childhood sleeping bag with the busted zipper, pulled all the way up over my head. It’s still not enough. Even worse I got classes today, first one’s at 8 a.m., and that bike’s gonna be a bitch to get started in this cold. Last night the housemates were shouting about “Single digits!” over the TV downstairs while I was getting my ass kicked by quadratic equations. Probably better get moving. I ain’t getting out of this bed in just a T-shirt and socks, so I reach down and grab my clothes half-ass folded on the floor. Feels like taking shit out the freezer. I try to warm ’em up under the covers for a few minutes, but all that does is make me cold, so I wrestle into ’em—underwear, jeans, a henley and sweatshirt over the T-shirt I slept in—cold air pouring in every time I move around under the covers. I need a shower, I can smell that, but it was too cold down in the bathroom yesterday and it damn sure ain’t happening this morning. I get dressed, but I’m still huddled up shivering under the covers when the old clock radio cuts on at my desk, between-stations static fading in to full blast as the glowing vacuum tubes warm up in the dark room—a little slower than most mornings. I tense up, flop the covers back, and polar bear out of bed to shut it off. My coming-apart old slippers are so cold they feel wet, and I pull on my old oversized hoodie over everything else. All them layers want to tangle up and twist as I’m freeing my armpit-length hair. My fucking water glass is frozen. Not quite solid like used to happen when my room was up in the attic, but as I’m tying back the wool blanket that serves as a curtain, pouring an icy draft down from my frosted window, I can see by the predawn light that it’s got like half an inch of ice on the top and a meniscus growing down the sides. I light a smoke, same as any other morning, then pick up my icy water glass and head to the kitchen. When I unlock the deadbolt that serves as my door latch I can hear Mark’s clock radio blasting K-92 loud enough to distort the little plasticky speaker. He hates Top 40. Sets it on that station to annoy him out of bed. In the tiny room at the front end of the hall, meth-skinny Kevin’s snoring like a fat man. He was fucking my ex for a while—she broke off our hookup after I’d had time to get good and attached to her and her two kids, after I’d decided to go back to school full time from a single creative writing class and she razzed me that she couldn’t wait to see my 4.0 drop—but the HIV test she told Kevin to get come back positive, and this is the ’80s so that pretty much scared the shit out of everybody and put an end to their hookup even though turned out he just had syphilis. Shame, cause from the sound of it they was fucking like wild animals there for a bit. It’s a little warmer downstairs where the heat is, but not by a hell of a lot. When we got the house it was just a oil burner under the hallway and the illegal gas grate in the living room, with the flue caps from the old coal stoves in the kitchen and upstairs. After the fire, we got central heat put in downstairs but still ain’t shit upstairs. I double back through the hall and the useless room into the kitchen. The cabinet under the sink stands wide open in the dark so’s the pipes don’t freeze, a pile of dishes in the sink because the dishwasher froze up a few years ago and spewed like a hundred gallons of water all over the kitchen. I click on the lightswitch and the fluorescent light in the false ceiling struggles to come on, wan and gray like a solid winter depression. I fill the old orange hot pot, the draft from the window spilling over my hands after we stuffed a bunch of towels and rags and insulation and shit in the gap between the window and the counter that was added later. I set the orange hot pot on the orange countertop my mom picked out, twist the knob to high, then go back through the useless room, through the tiny afterthought of a door into the bathroom. The light switch is so close to the door there’s a cutout in the plain-board doorframe for the switch plate. Don’t ask why the bathroom has a full-size door going to the back porch and a miniature door into the rest of the house. This place was a Sears kit, built when like Grover Cleveland was President and indoor plumbing was new. Rumor has it some folks refused to shit inside the house. Might have something to do with it. The fluorescent light in there also comes on gray and dim above the missing lens in the false ceiling. The light over the sink don’t even come on at all, it just glows kinda pink at the ends. At least the pipes ain’t frozen. Back in the kitchen I make myself a cup of instant coffee in the blue mug with the cheesy sand dollar motif, the one I like because it’s big and keeps things warm. There’s no milk in the fridge, just some leftover cans of beer, so I drink the coffee black, scalding the fuck out of my tongue on the first sip. At least there’s half a loaf of bread in the breadbox and half a bucket of cheap super-crunchy peanut butter in the cabinet above. That’ll do for breakfast and lunch today. Probably supper too, if we’re being honest. I make some peanut butter toast and get a second pot of water heating up when Mark comes shuffling in, dressed in a hoodie with the hood up, a clashing pair of sweatpants, a bathrobe over all of it, and his comical pink fuzzy slippers. “Good lord,” he says, his words a cloud of breath. I nod, chewing my gloppy breakfast. He looks at my steaming full mug and the hot pot just coming to a boil. “That for me?” “Yeah.” “Thanks man.” He grabs his usual mug and rinses it out over the crowded sink, then spoons in several spoonfuls of instant coffee. “No milk,” I say. He nods and reaches for the jar of powdered creamer in his cabinet. “Classes today?” he says, pouring the steaming water into his mug. “Yeah,” I say. “Gonna make it?” “Gonna try.” He looks out the icy window into the predawn gloom and shudders. “Good luck.” “What about you and Mike?” I say. “Y’all gonna get out and sell tools?” “I hope so,” he says. “We both need to make—” The phone rings on the wall beside my head, the bell painfully loud. I snatch the handset off the wall. “Hello?” “Jay?” It’s Mike’s voice, as if he heard us talking about him. “Hey Mike.” “Mark there?” “Yep.” I hold the receiver out toward Mark and untangle the pigtail cord as he takes it. “Hey Mike,” he says. I reach under the cord for my plate and stand up and take it to the sink. “…You sure?” he says. “…Well yeah, I know, but…” “…Did you talk this over with…” “…You sure we can afford…” “…Well it is your truck.” I can hear the resignation in his voice. “Okay,” he says. “See you tomorrow then. Yep. Bye.” He stands up and hangs the receiver back on the wall base, unsnapping the cord and letting it twist out of its tangles. “Guess not?” I say. “Guess not,” he says, snapping the cord back in. After trotting upstairs to add a layer of long johns and load my book bag, I clump back down to the flimsy table at the bottom of the stairs beside the door, where our big library table used to been before the fire destroyed it. I pull on my rain pants even though it ain’t raining cause they’ll help block the wind, pull on my heaviest wool-lined muck boots even though they’re hard to shift the bike in, layer a zip-up jacket and a double-breasted coat over the layers I’m already wearing, with a scarf wrapped to protect my neck and down under the plackets to help with the draft at my chest. Then I pull on my helmet sock, my hoodie hood up over it with my hair tucked down the back, and my silver-threaded thermal fabric gloves. The welder’s gloves go in my helmet for the moment as I grab my book bag and head out the flimsy front door into the shocking cold. Even just standing still on the porch, the cold creeps in everywhere while I’m strapping my book bag onto the bike. I perch the helmet and gloves over the top of the sissy bar, get out the old weathered and warped 2x10 that Mark and I use for a motorcycle ramp, and do the little ramp dance to get my bike down off the concrete porch and then up the two steps from our front walk to the sidewalk. With the board stowed back on the porch I go back up to the street for the long process of getting Baby started in this weather. Twist the petcock on, turn the choke lever to full, key switch on, step over the bike, and twist the throttle a couple of times before turning on the kill switch. I flip out the kick starter. Ain’t even trying the electric start in this cold with my weak-ass battery. And even though the CB-360’s engine is easier to kick than a bigger bike, getting it started when it’s this cold is gonna be a workout. They’re really not made to run in this weather. The house is my mom’s, the fisbo fixer-upper she bought in this shitty neighborhood after my dad dumped us all for another woman, the house three doors down from the apartment he was renting here in the town where his mistress lived, when Mom had nowhere else to go and no way she could afford to live where we was living in DC and support two kids on her temp-nurse’s wages and somehow no child support. Then a few years later, after I was out of high school and working full time (making minimum wage) and Jimmy was either living with Dad or locked up again (I don’t remember which), one day Mom said, “You know, I got married with an instant family when I was barely twenty and I’ve spent thirty years raising seven kids and I never got to have a teenage rebellion because I had other people depending on me and now I don’t have to worry about that anymore—and I think It’s my turn,” and she packed her backpack and flew over to wander around Europe for like six months, and then my brother in Seoul flew her to Korea to live with him and his wife and his kids and their other grandparents for a while, and meanwhile I got into it with my little brother because I didn’t know no better than to try to talk to him about the crank he was tweaking on while he was tweaking and I got so pissed off I tried to deck the fridge but the fridge kicked my ass, and then I had my hand in a cast and I couldn’t work and I was late on an insurance payment on Mom’s bug and so they yanked the insurance but kept the money order and there was no way to get the insurance back without her signature but she was in like France stomping grapes or some shit so the car was uninsured and I had to take off the plates and we couldn’t leave it on the street and we couldn’t legally keep it in the backyard because we ain’t have a garage and there was literally no legal option other than rent a storage unit somewheres and get the car towed which woulda cost a shit ton of money I ain’t have and so it just sit in the back yard hoping we didn’t get a citation for it but leastways that ticket would be less than having the plates on it with no insurance. And I couldn’t drive it and I couldn’t ride my bike because you can’t twist the throttle too good with a cast from your fingers to your elbow, so weren’t much for me to do but sit around the house or walk down by the river and think about shit—and really I owe all the credit to Jimmy because maybe he ended up back in the pen but if it weren’t for all that time to think I might not have ever gone back to school like this, where I might be dead broke, and I might be hungry and skinny, and I might be riding my little-ass motorcycle to class in fucking seven-degree weather, and I might be scrounging change to put gas in the tank, but at least I got a Pell grant covering my tuition and books at the community college and a Sunday job driving newspapers and I’m working toward something other than minimum wage with no insurance or paid vacation making money for Collegiate Pacific’s stockholders. I’m sweating in the cold by the time I finally get the damn bike to start and stay running. I light a smoke and nurse the throttle with the choke on almost full for a few minutes, the engine threatening to die again at any moment, the little brap can mufflers that was all I could afford probably pissing off the whole neighborhood at 7:30 on a damn Wednesday morning, a cloud of vapor that smells like a gas station all around me, until the engine gets warm enough I can take my hand off the throttle without it dying straightaway. Then I pull on my helmet—the snap-on visor fogging up instantly—pull on the welder’s gloves, and clunk the bike into gear. It’s cold enough that even after warming it up like that I have to nurse the throttle as I pull away from the curb, and even with the long johns and the rain pants, the cold air rides up my crotch and it almost immediately feels like my balls are in ice water. It’s like four miles to Virginia Western. I can get from home to classroom in 15 minutes on an ideal day, but this ain’t an ideal day. The bike’s almost too stiff to shift as I ride out through the neighborhood, over railroad tracks and the river that has ice on the banks despite its fast current, past the gas station where I fumed out one morning on the way to class, went to switch to reserve and realized I was already on reserve, tried to bum some change for gas and learned just how quickly a guy can become invisible when he needs help, and then literally cried when a dude said “You’re trying to get to class? Fill it up, man, I’ll get it with mine.” The low spot beside the lily pond on Brambleton is always colder than anywhere else along the way. You don’t notice those things in a car but you do on a bike. Today there’s this weird frost I’ve never seen before, almost like everything grew a white beard. There’s one motorcycle parking area on campus, down in the big parking lot along Colonial Avenue, which the campus rises above on the hills on both sides. There’s usually other beat-ass bikes like mine parked there, but not this morning. My right eye watering in the cold wind, tears literally frozen on my eyelashes and soaking the front of my helmet sock, I park the bike, pull off my welding gloves and my helmet, and my hands are shaking when I light my before-class cigarette. My cold knees creak like I’m a lot older than twenty- one as I walk up the forty or so steps to the building my class is in. First class is freshman English. When I told my mom I’d decided to go to the community college she said I could use her old manual typewriter, from the one semester she was in college before my dad charmed the pants off of her and she dropped out to get married. That first formal paper that had to be typewritten, clean cut Mr. Capps looked at it when I set it on the desk, asked if I’d typed it on a manual typewriter, and when I said yeah he penciled an “A” at the top of the page without even reading it. Next formal paper I’ll write for him, the five-paragraph descriptive essay, will be about how old houses are cold. This morning as I’m in the room unbundling all my layers and loading them into the chair-desk beside me he walks into the room in his greatcoat and toboggan, smiles at me, and says, “You made it! I did not expect to see you this morning.” Jay Parr (he/they) lives with his partner and child in North Carolina, where he's an old alumnus of UNCG’s MFA in creative writing, and an NTT-for-life lecturer in their nontraditional humanities program. He's honored to have work published or forthcoming in Reckon Review, Bullshit Lit, Identity Theory, SugarSugarSalt, Roi Fainéant, Five Minutes, Anti-Heroin Chic, Dead Skunk, Discretionary Love, Streetcake, and Variant Lit.

The flakes of your love keep landing on my bare skin and dissolving before I can collate them. Two clutches I’ve salvaged are already turning to dirty slush in my hot, sweaty hands. I want more, so I can patchwork it all into some monstrous tribute to/cheap clone of you. Build a screwed up, Calvin-and-Hobbesque snowman of you. But it is late Spring, it has long stopped snowing, and everyone but me is done with the cold. Allison Thung is a poet and project manager from Singapore. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Chestnut Review, ANMLY, Maudlin House, Lumiere Review, Emerge Literary Journal, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @poetrybyallison or at www.allisonthung.com.

the sun’s a long yellow scarf pull it down to dress warm for the chill

The bumble bee did not know that winter had begun until he woke in the mouth of a tulip, her petals glossed over with ice. He bumbled around on the inside, tried to shake the ice off of her so he could escape. He did somersaults and spins, and tickled her many tongues with his wings in hopes she would sneeze. But he was not strong enough, and the tulip was sleeping – no, the tulip was dying – with the bumble bee her unwilling companion into oblivion. That she had survived this long was a miracle, but winter was not known for its mercy, and the tulip would not survive. The bumble bee would not surrender. He plucked the tulip’s tongues out one by one and wrapped them about his body until he was a flower-scented mummy. For the next several months, the bumble bee sucked the pollen slowly from the tube-like tongues that kept him warm, and he wept and slumbered and wished that the sun would warm him despite the snow; he dreamt of apricity. He did this as the tulip’s tongues grew straw-like and brittle, as she slowly shrunk around him. One day, the sun loitered right above the tulip that held the bumble bee. She reached down and bopped the tulip with her finger, and the bumble bee came tumbling out. The sun’s warmth made him fuzzy and drunk on glee. The bumble bee thanked her with a spin and said goodbye to the tulip. Enchi is a current student at Johns Hopkins University who loves all-things horror, dystopian, and surreal. You can follow them on Twitter @enchienchilada.

The ink was dry, she could see that, but Army decided to give it another minute before folding the paper. Smudges wouldn’t do. Without a delivery or return address, her letter wouldn’t reach its remote recipient, basically fated to end up as junk mail by an irate postal worker and their pitiless stamp. And yet, Army had enjoyed the inspired exercise, glad to have given herself over to the initial impulse and feeling a glimmer lightened thanks to it. Maybe she’d do it again when the helplessness found newer and harsher ways to reduce her. Army was blowing delicately on her handwriting, scanning the unvarnished words and visualizing their intended audience, when Elijah galumphed out of his room. He scripted quite a lot - it wasn’t nonstop, but it was frequent enough to warrant a mother’s anxiety. Whether he was delivering the lyrics of a song, acting out a movie scene by scene, or reciting one of his books from memory, Elijah was seldom quiet. Thank goodness he at least had a sweet voice. Everyone copes, Army speculated, single moms and only children included. Most times they have one another, but now and again they have nobody. Elijah would stagger over in the middles of most nights and clamber up on Army’s far too big, far too cold California King. The way Army figured it, there’d be a day when Elijah would stop coming to bed, stop smelling like a cloud from Heaven, stop letting her so near. So they’d goof off a smidge and then fall asleep entwined, as it had been in the earliest of beginnings. This helped shrink the largeness of her loneliness. That morning, though, Army woke up by herself. She’d waited and waited, but he never came to glow in the gloom. Elijah was singing the entirety of Let it Be and had reached “I Me Mine” when he plodded round the corner, pudgy arms swinging left to right, right to left. Classic Elijah choreography, Army was learning, his way of telegraphing boredom and a desire to be rid of it posthaste. From where she sat, he was bigger than life, though he stood only three and some feet. “I want no school today! I don’t want to school, Mama.” Elijah made this all the clearer with a stout, wagging finger. There was no whine in his voice, just emphasis. “No school, honey,” she agreed. “No more Miss Daisy.” “Bye-bye, Miss Daisy, anymore!” triumphed Elijah. “But I am going to find you a new school soon, OK?” “Mama, can we say what are you doing?” “I wrote a letter.” “Can I read it?” he inquired, his arms no longer swinging but outstretched. Her face ticked in hesitation, enough for Elijah to comprehend. “Elijah will use gentle hands,” he confirmed, intoning one of his many mantras while accepting the letter into a pair of perfectly sculpted palms. “Promise me, Elijah. Listen, please, and be so gentle." Army wasn’t foulmouthed by practice, so she was shocked when the words fucking shit slipped under the fence of her mind and went snapping towards Elijah. But she bit back then and controlled herself, choosing instead to watch the shredded missive float to the parquet floor and heap around Elijah’s chubby toes. “Elijah… honey, you need to listen next time, OK? I told you to be gentle.” The wheeling helplessness again asphyxiating her body and diminishing her soul. Elijah would never hear her. They never do. He would only continue to- “OK, Mama, I will listen,” he said, stunning Army. The boy turned, scripting the title track from the final Beatles album as Army collected the torn bits of paper. “Yeah, yeah, let it be, kiddo,” she said. Army had no wish to post a taped and tattered letter, so she rewrote it. The words, once frozen in ink, didn’t make her problems dissipate. On the contrary, they were laid before her, bare, on a single page. And they seemed small. Her pictured pen pal was also a single mother to an only child. She had been with Army always, an immortal portrait that saw her through from childhood to womanhood to parenthood. Army decided against wasting a stamp. Instead, she said a prayer. With careful cursive, for her hand was atremble, Army ribboned a name on the crisp envelope and imagined it traveling the crunched roads of Nazareth, maybe crinkling over time, where it would land upon the windowsill of Mary, mother of Jesus. *** “Armenoohi, you are late,” stated Ofik, the tiny woman at Army’s front door with crossed arms and wrinkled nose. “I know, Mom, sorry. I was talking with Elijah’s OT. He had a really good session, actually, and they were doing this-” “Oof, why do you waste your time with that? Oh-tee, you tell me, speech therapy! They are lying to you for your money. Only God can help with-” “If you can’t, I don’t know, tie your shoes, someone’s gotta teach you, right? You have to learn. Or do you think God will stop everything he’s got going on and come tie them for you?” “Watch your mouth, shameless! Who raised you as heretic, hah?” Army remembered her letter then, and Mary. Had the Holy Mother ever felt exasperated by Holy Motherhood? A handful of days had come and gone without mail from two thousand years ago and while no mail from two thousand years ago would come, Army had faith. “You should take him to see Father Movses,” advised Ofik, claiming omniscience more readily in her ascending age and wielding it freely. “Why?” “For help.” “Jesus, he’s not possessed, Mom, he’s- he’s just a kid who-” “Your mouth!” Just a kid who needed fine tuning, Army was trying to say - it’s what the pros told her, anyway. But each time Elijah swiped a paw or swung a fist at his helpers, Army choked, the ruthless thumbs of humiliation and inadequacy crushing her brittle windpipe. “Mama, can I have pancakes?” asked Elijah from the lawn. “Of course, baby. Do you want to be my sous-chef?” “Ye-yus!” answered Elijah as he got to his feet, dry grass clinging to his round knees. Army adored him in shorts, the contour of his thighs leading down to his calves, somehow made smoother by a fine carpet of peach fuzz. His perfect chompies, she secretly designated them. Standing atop his stepladder, Elijah was pretty handy with the ladle and rather adept at flicking a whisk. It brought Army such a surge of pleasure to see her child succumb to the process of making pancakes, to still and do. She could see him down the line of time, cooking like this for his own family. Army poured the goo into the skillet and helped Elijah flip the flapjacks. “He should have it a healthy lunch,” Ofik offered. “This is healthy.” “I want to cut,” said Elijah, reaching for the knife. “No, sweetheart, that’s a grown-up tool. We’ve talked about this, remember?” “How this is a healthy lunch? All fat, sugar, nothing nutrient.” “I want to cut!” “Oh, Elijah, use your quiet voice, please. My ears hurt when you yell like that.” “Mama… can I cut, please?” Please came out pwiz. “Thank you, baby, good listening. I really wish you could, and when you’re big enough-” Elijah began to squawk, an abrupt litany of harsh chords which never failed to sink Army’s resolve. It had become her most hated sound. “No, Elijah, no that! You listen to Mama when she say no first time!” Ofik said. “Mom, that’s not what we-” “I want to cut!” screamed Elijah, clubbing his approaching grandmother. “Bad boy, Elijah! Being very so bad,” screeched Ofik, matching his volcanism. “Hey!” yelled Army as gray filmed over her sight. “Absolutely not, we only use-” Too fast to stop, Elijah yanked the knife from the cutting board and slashed it down on the steaming food. “Can I want to cut pancakes!” The kid’s shrieking pumped Army’s head with helium. She needed to pop the thing off her shoulders and toss it rolling across the avenue and down the street, where this animal wailing would become faint and maybe vanish altogether. “Elijah, honey, let’s take some calm breaths together, please.” Army began her slow inhale as she inched closer and closer with hands poised. “I no want breath no more!” he replied, the lunch a sloppy confusion. Army brightened her voice and pitched it higher. “Ooh! I have an idea, Elijah! First, Mama cuts the pancakes, then we watch Sesame Street. First, pancakes, then, Sesame Stre-” Elijah whirled around at the promise of his favorite TV show, slicing the knife through space and across Army’s wrist. Upon seeing blood flow down his mother’s arm, Elijah dropped the knife. “Mama, are you OK?” “No!” she barked at him, sharp and short. Tears pooled and Elijah placed his hands behind his ears, another coping strategy. In spite of her son’s excruciating exposure, it had come too late. Army couldn’t smother her bellowing. “You hurt Mama, Elijah, you hurt me very badly! You cut Mama’s wrist!” During her nine months, Army was cautioned by a succession of women that pregnancy would sow a terrible power which she would reap after the harvest of birth. She filed the warning away as merely another tale wives tell. Until that moment. Frightening clarity prised her apart and delineated the difference between motherly intuition and genuine telepathy. Army could see Elijah’s quaking thoughts through his shimmering eyes. He was scared of her monster face and wanted it gone. In between a mouthful of blubbering, he began to speak the words to one of his beloved Beatles tunes, hoping to calm his Mama and make her happy again. But she was too weak to restrain herself, so she raged, and he wasn’t strong enough to keep from crying, so he sobbed. “Ok, Armenoohi, you go outside now. Go. I will take care of Elijah. Right, my boy? Come, come to Ofik Tati.” Ofik’s former frigidity melted in the fluid motion of her protecting embrace. Army wanted nothing more than to make it right with Elijah, but every single nerve in her body was pressing her to get out of the house. She listened to her remolded mother and turned away from her sniveling son’s sodden cheeks. Army hustled off, gripping her cut arm, when Elijah howled an endless Mama from behind her braided back. It was a far worse stabbing. Outside, Army’s skull shifted and moaned. Some of herself seeped out through a battened hand and splashed. Her breath was half-hearted, shorter and frailer with each huff. She was going to faint, she knew it, not from loss of blood, but of will. She was so tired. Before the cramping black tunnel could take her out absolutely, Army’s swiveling vision caught something, a shape, resting upon the garden wall. She shambled over to it and realized with stupid lucidity that it was a kind of envelope. Army trailed a red finger along its surface but the paper didn’t feel much like paper at all. The texture was coarser, as if composed of sandy beads rather than a single blank flatness, and fastened with simple twine. Army noted that she could somehow read the foreign letters scrawled across the parchment, her own name quilled in loops and angles she’d never before studied. One grand eureka flared up before darkness dragged Army down, and it was this: Mary wrote back! *** The Bible in Army’s hands was new, even if its contents were old. She seldom read the tome anymore, given her unique vantage point. But there was time before breakfast, and the kids were playing in the back, so she cracked it open. Army fiddled through her purse for a cheap pair of off-the-rack readers - as years wore off the calendar, so too did the muscle of her eyes. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Why would a newborn need gold, frankincense, and myrrh? Mary posed this very question to Army in one of their earliest exchanges. No one had brought her a thing other than the unsolicited mantle of motherhood. The scene itself, as captured in the Gospels and memorialized on Christmas lawns, was wholly accurate. The men who’d trekked across barren deserts under the guidance of some silly star barely acknowledged Mary, who’d been skittering around consciousness on bales of sour smelling hay. She was given short shrift, seen as little more than a womb, much less a mom. Actually receiving replies from Mary was shock enough for Army, but strip away the raiments, type up the stories in English, and the chasm between millennia would shrink to a crack. Mary’s frustrations were shared not only by Army, they also blighted an appalling number of women. “Grandma, whatcha reading?” “Hmm?” Army reentered the living room and the passing present. Her granddaughter was blurry so Army removed her pharmacy specs. “All the better to see you with!” “Big Bad Wolf!” giggled the little girl as Army stole her into a hug. “Yes, Vashti, and I’m going to eat you!” That carefree laughter teased a fresh species of bliss from Army’s soul. Vashti’s small hands clutched Army’s slate-colored hair and the flash of pain sent her flying back three decades. She was grabby, like her dad. Army rose and kissed Vashti atop her head. She followed her granddaughter into the kitchen where Elijah was plating their pancakes and singing a song to himself. Any stranger witnessing this wouldn’t blink twice at the scene. It was something normal. But a kid doing it? That steamrolled the naturally pressurized process of childrearing to a blister. Army thumbed her scar, the one Elijah had given her by mistake. The accident took place on the day when Mary’s first reply appeared. And that’s what it did indeed do: it appeared. The makeshift envelope occupied a slice of space where a moment before there had been pointless vacancy. What made Army weep with relief was Mary’s confession that Jesus also scripted - though the way Army’s brain translated the magically penetrable Aramaic was scriptured. From Genesis to Malachi, the scamp wouldn’t stop - couldn’t! It would drive Mary berserk. Army laughed out loud while wrestling with her tears. Turned out too that both boys gnawed their mothers’ nipples bloody and raw while breastfeeding. When a blushing dawn stirred Army from the best sleep of her life, Mary’s letter was still on the nightstand. The helplessness which permeated those budding years was replaced by different-natured worries: will he make friends, how are his grades, should he try sports, does he have any artistic leanings, can he figure out how to shave, is he going to college, won’t he ever just listen, who is this new girl, can we afford a wedding, are they ready to buy a house, will he be a good dad? Have I been a good mother? Army didn’t discuss or dissect these things with such fervor as she did with Mary. Each sentence formed a rising staircase to the bowing frame of Mary’s portrait, the very one that had kept watch over Army all her life. The Holy Mother stepped free from the fixture of suspended animation and became an everyday mom. Army read nothing about any fantastical manifestations of his heritage, simply the things that would be unloaded off the stooped shoulders of any mama doing their duty. The correspondences were ordinary. That’s what made them special. Mary had only just begun to confide thornier developments in the latter letters. A sullenness would float up in Jesus's eyes that evidenced either growing pains or an awakening prescience of the man he was fast becoming. Mary was keyed into the situation and it was starting to scare her. Jesus stood at swords’ point between simmering anger and enormous love while Elijah designed landscapes for a living and inherited his grandpa's bad knees. Army finished every crumb of her only son’s breakfast and bid the family adieu. “I love you, Mom.” “Love you too, my honey.” They kissed goodbye and a dab of syrup stuck onto her cheek. Seeing him settled spoke straight to the deeps of her soul. Vashti begged Army to hang out and accompany them for an afternoon of apple picking. “Oh, my gosh, I would love that, little buddy, but not today. Gotta get in touch with a pal.” On the drive home, Army began to draft a letter in her head: at the small desk facing the north window, a fresh sheet of paper from the printer waiting to be marked, her favorite fountain pen at the ready. The last time she had assumed this position was the previous year, to tell Mary of Ofik’s passing. Before the cancer finished her, Army divulged the collected communication. She assumed the revelation might hush her mother into a happy death. But much to Army’s surprise, Ofik didn’t trust them to be authentic. For Army, the connection to Mary was nothing other than a matter of trust. A matter of faith. Writing that first, harried letter had been the best thing she’d ever done. Next to having Elijah, of course. “Mommy’s home, Boaz,” Army rang out as she locked the front door and slipped off her shoes. The cool of the parquet floor was a blessing but the chill of her kitchen tile was magnificent. Army planted herself for a second as the keenness crept its way up her body. After a second or an hour - time had become oilier during her eight years of empty nesting - she went to the fridge. The ring on her index finger pinged against the metal of the door handle and fluted a high D, Boaz’s favorite note. Army grabbed a carton of oat milk as the English sheepdog drifted in and exploited his eyebrows in a fashion that slew Army every time. “Oh, here,” she said, tossing Boaz a wad of string cheese. Libation poured, Army lifted the the cover of a cake dome. Boaz barked his fancy and caused Army to jump. She turned to admonish. “Now, Bo, don’t be ridiculous. Let’s use a gentle voice, alright? Almost made me drop this, silly mutt. You don’t get anything by barking, do you?” Army couldn’t help but grin - it was a shaggy Elijah. “Listen here: I’ll cut you up some chicken when we sit for dinner, understand? And in any case, it is a well known fact that you, sir, are no fan of coffee cake-” The frayed envelope on the countertop hadn’t been there a second ago. Her fingers groaned on their hinges and lost all strength, surrendering the glass to freefall. No letter of Mary’s had ever materialized inside the house. Always it was the garden wall. More, their arrival conjured feelings of gladness in Army. Today’s surprise placed in her heart a weighty angst. Did people attribute visions to the third eye? Army couldn’t remember, didn’t have the bandwidth in her gray matter to conclude. Whether it was her third, fourth, fifth, whichever eye, her aperture was tearing wide open, like it did in this same kitchen long ago. Army was seeing Mary, a hunched and twisted form clutching herself at the elbows. She was rocking, penduluming on pounded earth, the dust of it plastering her sopping mouth. Mary’s robes were heavy with blood, such quantities they had sponged. She had been similarly gore-covered when she became a mother, only then, it had been her own and it had meant life. Now, with each squeeze of herself, Mary’s hands wetted anew, freshets of her baby’s death dribbling crimson across her wan skin. She’d held him so close at both moments, his hopeful entrance and his hopeless exit, inhaling that first sweet breath and the final dying exhale. They’d killed her child, hammered him to a tree with dull and rusty nails for the pleasure of vultures. Army was hearing Mary now, understanding in the uncanny way she had for thirty years, and she was mumbling about how Jesus hadn’t listened, how he never listened, wouldn’t, couldn’t, didn’t listen, how he never fucking listened. Army joined her tears with Mary’s and wreathed their cries into agonizing harmony. She wept for her companion, for the pain no parent should suffer, and for the foolishness of children. And then it stopped. The light outside hadn’t much changed and from her place on the floor, she could still see the angled tip of the envelope. She reached out a tremulous hand and seized the string of draping twine. Army read and reread and read again. They’re going to execute him. Please tell me what to do, Army. She got up and saw Boaz sitting there, whimpering. “Good boy.” She scratched the inside of his ear with an arthritic knuckle. There, faithfulness. The fulcrum Army’s entire existence depended upon. It had done away with her husband, it had brought her boy to bloom, and it had inexplicably led her to Mary. She knew that Jesus was meant to be sacrificed but how could she in good conscience tell Mary that? Certainly not as a mother and definitely not as her friend. Army took her oat milk and banged it onto the writing desk, facing north. She pressed pen to paper too hard and caused black ink to burst. Her motions were emphatic, razored strokes. Army implored Mary to take her son and run, to fade into the nighttime wilderness. She reminded Mary of her third cousin, the bounty hunter from Armenia who’d helped locate Jesus when he was studying abroad in Nepal. The man was resourceful and useful - contact him! Tell Jesus to wed Magdalene and give you grandchildren and just drop all that nonsense about God. He was her son and no one else’s. If Army took even a moment to proof her rant, she’d trash it for fear of perdition, so she stuffed it into an envelope and let it be. Army’s oatmilk had grown tepid, undrinkable. Ofik had been right: Armenoohi was a heretic. No, nuts to that. She was a mom. Army dropped her letter in the nearest mailbox as she’d done so many times before, not with a stamp, but with a prayer. She hoped he would do the right thing and keep Mary’s heart intact, as any son should. But Army no longer had such faith. She walked back home to Boaz under soft twilight. Robert Nazar Arjoyan was born into the Armenian diaspora of Glendale, California. Aside from an arguably ill-advised foray into rock n roll bandery during his late teens, literature and movies were the vying forces of his life. Naz graduated from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and now works as an author and filmmaker.

Most Days, Dystonia is a Background Hum Most days, dystonia is a constant background hum, Others, a Beethoven symphony But episodically, it’s a death metal concert– Neck muscles pulling so violently My teeth clash together. The tremors And spasms unrelenting, causing Fluid buildup in my face, drooping eyes My back a metal sheet, barely bendable I’ve experienced abdominal spasms So strong that I’ve thrown up, Rib muscles so tight it’s hard to breathe– Like an anxiety attack, and I have to Talk myself down: “it’s just the dystonia.” These are the things other people Don’t see. The DBT group therapist says, “With disabilities, radical acceptance Might be needed on a daily basis And it might involve accepting You see what others cannot see.” I’ve tried to rest today, only doing: The course evals, emails, laundry, Cooking, driving my teen to school, Out of spoons by 11 AM And the 2nd shift is coming: Driving kids to martial arts after dinner, The promised stop for groceries For the promised holiday party. The rest of the month stares me down. I said “yes” to too much, somehow. I want to say “yes,” again, and again. Yes to the holidays, yes to outings To concerts, walks, coffee dates, Teaching more classes, volunteer work– To life itself I think about all the upcoming “no’s,” Try to reframe them: Instead, I’m saying yes To afternoon naps with the cat Self-care, warm blankets, books Space to think, maybe Sometimes poems only come to me During the middle of a migraine. Sometimes I wonder: Are my good weeks the stolen ones? Or is dystonia stealing all the other weeks From me? The tai chi teacher in me Says…my life is equally Made up of both the good weeks and the difficult ones They don’t exist without the other. I look at the holiday cards accumulating From my spoonie penpals The ones who feel good enough To send them. They make me feel Less forgotten. And I know they’ll understand Both the words I’ll send someday And the silence in between. Composite Sketch Someday we'll be the last ones left To remember what life was like before internet, cell phones, smart phones, texting, social media As our parents' generation dies off Then it will be just us You said there was a magic to the frustration Of being a kid in the 80's & 90's , Of wanting more, knowing more was out there And that you had to wait to touch it "But," I said, "there was a slower pace of life And precious serendipity And don't you remember How when you hung out with friends or family No one was checking their phones?" Back then, it seems, to me We were either alone, or together Not so much in between And now we're mostly all alone together Most of the time Less alone And less together How in high school we'd stay til midnight at the Greek diner And no one's mom was texting No one was looking for us at all And you said, "that wasn't me Your memory's already unreliable We didn't even know each other then" And I said "That's because it feels like we've always known each other" And you often cite When I get all Luddite again That we met on social media And stayed in touch all these years via texting Not, apparently, by the grace of God And I say, "that wasn't me Your mind's already going We first met in person, I remember the day" And you said "That's because it feels just like yesterday when we met, I still remember us young." And I said, "do I know you? Aren't you the one with the kraken for an avatar? Do I know you at all? I know I used to have a thing for you But now I can't separate the online you From this person in front of me. Didn't I used to go to your house to play Mario Bros? It was just down the block." "No, no, that wasn't me at all. That was Davie, and like all the kids you grew up with He's not online, really. He's dead, or incarcerated, or working 4 jobs Or he has 12 friends on Facebook And hasn't changed his profile picture in 7 years." And I said, "I remember Jumping on AOL after every X Files episode To chat about it with a friend Even though I'd see him at school the next day That's my 1st memory of the internet I was 17 and it was all new Email was romantic The romance of it was in the extraneous Which has largely been cut out today." As for that X-Files friend, We still like each other's Instagram posts... Once in awhile. And I guiltily thought about how I checked my phone Precisely twice on our last walk in the woods (It's a pandemic! I'm a mom! What if my child got sick at school?) And I silently vowed to myself Not to check my phone even once The next time we were together 2 Gen Xers Who'll someday be the last ones left. Just a Bird I message you and tell you I need to talk to you about death That I have some questions I'm walking in the city we've met in so many times There are sirens going by And there's a sidewalk that goes to nowhere I'm walking in the street I've had to park far away Things look different but yet the same but yet different All the parking rules have changed The mailman is the only other one out And looks at me questioningly, not unkindly Like I'm a curio shop novelty Who's left a window display To sashay grandly down a mythical American lane In a ruffled frock and swinging a parasol About to break out into song and dance like in a Hollywood musical I think about all the things we did when we were young How you biked across the city to meet me Almost getting your ass kicked at a stoplight How hard I laughed when you recounted the tale How many things we laughed off Back then That don't seem funny at all now That permeating undercurrent of hard-edged menace That was a constant childhood companion That sometimes gave our lives The thrill of danger, adrenaline-- There's a continuous wall of traffic And I patiently wait for traffic to clear or cars to stop In my twenties I would confidently walk out into any traffic Making it all halt These days Maybe it's the age of distracted driving Or the sheer increase in the number of vehicles on the road But it's at least in part the growing chronic awareness Like a fly buzzing around my head Of my health, my limitations, my mortality, my chronic pain I'm not so confident crossing the street anymore I thought women were supposed to become more confident with age But these days I think about how much more fragile things seem The world, our health, our bodies Life of all and every kind The older I get, The more I feel everything constantly hangs in the balance Here is a long, curving hill with a narrow curb I always used to walk on as a child, balance beam style I do it again, and don't falter, barely looking down But the vague image of twisting an ankle Is pounding at the gates of my mind Whereas at 4 or 5 years old All I thought about Was how magical the trees and rocks looked all the way down Dirt flies into my eyes Somehow getting past the barrier of my glasses But it's still COVID era and I don't want to wipe my eye without hand sanitizer But hand sanitizer will burn my eye So I walk with the dirt rubbing my eye And I think about how It takes my eyes a lot longer to adjust to the light But also to the dark I think about the last time we walked On the lake bluffs A blackbird flew out of the brush Into your face, hissing, And you started, though I thought Nothing in nature could faze you "Just a bird," I said As gently as I could.

“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” – John Paul Sartre. “Let me count the ways.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning I. September 13, 1977 – 0 I was born 13 years after segregation ended in the U.S. And even though the laws had changed, the psychological and emotional trauma had not ended for my family and community. My grandparents were my parents, it was either be adopted or be raised by them and so they took me in at three months of age. In 1977 Jimmy Carter was President, The miniseries Roots appeared on television, Apple Computer was first incorporated as a company, Elvis Presley died and Star Wars was born. In ’82, as far as I remember, we were reading in kindergarten. We all had the same book and the teacher, Ms. Margaret, called on members of the class to read a sentence out loud. And though I knew the words, for some reason Ms. Margaret let the other kids read out loud but not me. When I relayed this to my grandmother, Grandma immediately told me the teacher hadn’t let me read out loud because I was Black. Looking back, there was never any hard evidence this was true, but there wasn’t any hard evidence this wasn’t either. Certainly, to my grandmother who—was born in rural Mississippi in 1923, and didn’t see segregation end until she was 41 years of age—it was true enough. Grandma never questioned Ms. Margaret about why she wouldn’t let me read in school; instead she told me that I could read to her, and she could read to me. And so every night after school I’d read Bible books for children and Little Golden Books about dogs and trains. I would take my index finger and follow each word and if I didn’t know the word, I’d sound it out, and if I missed a word, Grandma would correct me. Reading after school taught me the difference between just getting an education and learning. My grandmother was either knowingly or unknowingly instilling in me the values of self-education and not waiting for the teacher to spoon-feed me, but to read on my own outside of class. Practice on your own after school. Learn for you. Learn to be a better you. The heart of seeking freedom. Thank you Grandma for that. September 13, 1984 – 7 When I reached 7 it was 1984. Ronald Reagan was president. I was in the second grade. The Olympics came to Los Angeles that summer. Michael Jackson’s Jheri curl caught on fire doing a Pepsi commercial. My grandparents let me watch R-rated movies—movies my friends couldn’t see, like Beverly Hills Cop and Purple Rain. As long as I read my Bible stories afterwards it was okay to watch them. Sort of like eat your broccoli and you can have cake. Every other Saturday Grandma took me to the theater. She’d go to sleep in her seat, and I’d watch the film. When the lights turned on, I woke Grandma up and we left. Movies allowed me to dream in a way books didn’t. Movies required more use of my five senses. The smell of fresh popcorn, the taste of stale popcorn. The physical travel to a movie theater: a separate, sacred, place that wasn’t my everyday home. I could sit in a dark room in a soft chair, look up at a huge screen and see larger-than-life faces surrounded by sound and explosions and that synthesized ’80s music. 1984 had Ghostbusters, not that 2016 remake. 1984 had Red Dawn, not the 2012 remake. 1984 had Freddy Kruger and A Nightmare on Elm Street, not that 2010 remake. 1984 had the original Terminator. And, of course, the original The Karate Kid. The world stage was complex. 1984 was 20 years after the end of racial segregation in America, but I could still turn on the evening news and watch Black people in South Africa being abused under Apartheid. It was one thing to feel safe as an American and another thing to feel safe as a Black person—and if you were both Black and American, there was always that rift. In school, we were spoon-fed fear and stress. The teachers would tell us to work harder in school because children from both the Soviet Union and Japan were going to get ahead of us, and as American children: our grades were not just crucial for us, but for our nation’s future. We had to compete to be the best world leaders. And of course, more movies in and around 1984 reflected this. Rambo II Sylvester Stallone vs. the Southeast Asians. Commando Arnold Schwarzenegger vs. the South Americans. Missing in Action I and II Chuck Norris vs. the Vietnamese. Rocky IV Sylvester Stallone vs The Soviet Union. The Delta Force Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin teamed up to fight the Middle Easterners. America kicked everyone’s ass in the movies, and I watched them all. White American men scared the shit out of the entire Third World on the movie screens long before Black American rappers began scaring the shit out of the White world on audio cassette tapes. But it was Bugs Bunny who had the biggest influence on me. Before my eighth birthday, I watched an episode titled: His Hare Raising Tale in which Bugs Bunny tells his life story to his nephew Clyde, recapping his adventures as a baseball player, then a boxer, then a vaudeville performer, then as an air force pilot, and finally an astronaut. Bugs Bunny did it all before Forrest Gump did it all—and at seven—I wanted to do it all, too. I was going to play basketball for the Los Angeles Lakers like Kareem, run the 100 at the Olympics like Carl Lewis, and, in my off season, I was going to be an archeologist like Indiana Jones while living on a farm with my animals. I held big dreams in my little body. And every day after school, just as when I’d read with my grandmother in kindergarten, I dreamed, I practiced, I read on my own, and I made a whole lot of lists about who I was going to be and what I was going to do. September 13, 1991 – 14 It was 1991 when I turned 14. George Bush (the father) was president. Black people celebrated the ending of Apartheid in South Africa, and wept at the death of Latasha Harlins, the 15 year old girl shot in the back of the head by a convenience store owner in Los Angeles over a bottle of orange juice. Rodney King was beaten and we watched it endlessly on the television news because there was no internet back then. Magic Johnson announced he had HIV, becoming the most famous face of AIDS. The Gulf War began, and the Soviet Union Dissolved—so all that B.S. they’d told me in elementary school about studying hard to compete against the Soviets meant nothing anymore. Rap music became the budding popular form. 49 rap albums came out that year and I owned 17 of them. My grandparents still let me watch R-rated movies, and listen to gangster rap: I had it good. The only deal was I had to read the Bible, go to church, believe in Jesus and make As on my tests and so I did. At the age of 14 I had a different set of dreams. All of those Bible stories for children I’d read with my grandma in kindergarten, and all of that Bible reading I was doing on my own, turned me into a low-grade fundamentalist. It wasn’t my dream anymore to be the human Bugs Bunny, but rather the Black Billy Graham; I was going to be a minister. In fact, Grandma would often tell me, “Boy, you gonna be a preacher one day.” And so after school I studied my Bible and did my research on what it took to start a church and go to seminary. Still, I could not divorce myself from gangster rap. It wasn’t that I liked listening to words like nigga, bitch and ho, it was because I liked the direct poetry of it all. Rappers weren’t singing and rappers weren’t speaking; rappers were doing something else. And they were talking about social issues that the pop singers were not. I liked rap songs because they weren’t love songs. They were like movies. They addressed Rodney King being beaten, R&B singers and Gospel singers did not. It was the specifics that I enjoyed. And so after school I began writing weird, unpreachable, experimental sermons. I took what was in the Bible and made it as raw as a rapper would make it. Unpreachable sermons about God with R-Rated language. That was my budding literary style: a blending of the sacred and the profane. If Ice Cube wrote a sermon what would it sound like? Hmmm. And then, a magic day came. February 17, 1993, I wrote my first poem in Mrs. Stevens’ high school English class. And the more I wrote poems, the less I wrote sermons. And the deeper I got into poetry, the less I was into gangster Christian fundamentalism. Poetry saved me from being a bona fide religious nut; and it wasn’t just the craft of poetry. It was The Path of Poetry. September 13, 1998 – 21 I turned 21 in 1998, and Bill Clinton was president. I lost my enthusiasm for the movies: there were a lot of remakes. City of Angels remade the 1987 movie Wings of Desire. Godzilla was remade from the 1954 iteration. Psycho was remade, scene for scene, shot by shot, from the 1960 film. And of course, Less Miserables was being remade yet again. Anything rap or hip hop after 1995 I avoided—I’d become a hip hop snob. My thing was poetry. I had written over 800 poems. But only 6 had been published—two in my high school newspaper and four in the college journal. I was one year into having a poetry band and in ’98 we were still called The Maples because I wrote poetry under maple trees. Two months after my 21st birthday a sheriff pulled over my grandmother and me. I was in the passenger seat and she was the one driving: a tail-light had gone out. His only questions, however, were to me: “Are you in trouble?” “No, officer” “Are you on probation?” “No officer.” “Are you on parole?” “No.” “Let me see your ID.” I gave him my college ID to show him I wasn’t a nigger. “No, I don’t want that,” he said, “Let me see your driver’s license, the DMV one.” He gave my grandmother back her license and a fix-it ticket. Then he handed mine back saying, “It’s a good thing no one in this car is wanted for murder. Have a nice night.” When I was in kindergarten and Grandma taught me to read, because she said that Ms. Margaret didn’t want me to read because I was Black, I thought it was strange because I sort of liked Ms. Margaret. Sort of. But at 21, I didn’t like that cop. And for the next 10 years I would have run-ins with sheriffs who were far more aggressive. I would be stopped, thrown on top of cop car hoods, fondled between my legs by female sheriffs searching me for drugs; I was made to sit on the curb while people in their SUVs stared, some laughing at me, my arms contorted into joint locks and Jiu-Jitsu chicken wing holds. It was all due to false reports and mistaken identity. And each time I was let go with the words: “Have a nice night” or “Be safe.” I never got an apology. Never a “We’re sorry.” Not even a “Thank you for your patience.” And far be it from the female cops to thank me for letting them grab my jewels. The fear, the anger, the embarrassment darkened my writing and I started touching on new themes. September 13, 2005 – 28 I turned 28 in 2005 and George Bush (the son) was president. YouTube went online. Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. I developed a caregiving routine for my grandfather, changing diapers and distributing medication. After Grandpa died, Grandma was next to be cared for; her Alzheimer’s was progressing. I’d had a couple of poems published, but I was working in a library cubicle 40 hours a week to pay my student loan debt—six years after graduating. Caregiving necessitated I divide my writing time up with bathing, feeding and taking trips to the doctor. The same grandparents who had taken me in as a three month old infant had become my elderly infants. There are two nests. The first nest I experienced as a child. My grandparents taught me lessons intentionally as they took care of me. The second nest, I experienced as I got older. My grandparents taught me lessons unintentionally as I took care of them. The first nest is a common one, the second nest not so much as it’s tempting to avoid the bondage associated with caregiving—so the nursing home can rob a child or grandchild of that second nest. But that second nest is where many of the spiritual secrets and wisdom lie, and I hadn’t learned these lessons from church alone. I’d specifically avoided becoming a teacher because I wanted to write and perform and not take my work home with me. Lo and behold, the duties of caregiving became a round-the-clock job I worked at home. Folks become caregivers at 50; I was 28. I had no wife, no girlfriend, no children, but my band was still live. We had four independent music award nominations but no record deal, no traveling tour—still chasing the dream. September 13, 2012 – 35 I was 35 years old and my grandmother was 89. In 2012, the same woman who was born and raised under, and had suffered under, Jim Crow segregation, had lived long enough to see the first Black president of the United States. But Alzheimer’s had taken her mind. “Ain’t no Black President,” she’d say. “Ain’t no cracker gonna let us in office.” “But Grandma, he’s already been President for 4 years. He’s about to be President again.” “Shit. You talkin’ shit. Ain’t no Black President.” “Okay. Whatever you say.” Caregiving was one of the greatest gifts thrust on me: the greatest gift to build and deplete me, and because of that I needed therapy, so running became my therapy. By 2012, I had already run fourteen 26.2-mile marathons. There was freedom in running and the emotional high of just going none-stop. The same euphoria I got as a kid from sitting in a dark theater staring at the stories on screen, I got from running now. Running also helped my writing. Maybe it was all that oxygen going to my brain, all those endorphins kicking in. I never listened to music when I ran those long miles, and because of that I was able to form lines of poetry, come up with dialogue between characters, restructure plots, and fashion imagery in my head along the way. Of course, I’d forget a lot of it by the time I was done but enough remained. As a child, the Bugs Bunny in me wanted to be an Olympic runner. I was already too old for that but nothing kept me from running for me, as in kindergarten when nothing would keep me from reading for me. Six months and seven days after my 35th birthday, I watched Grandma take her last breaths in the hospital. While my relatives stood around her crying, I shed no tears. I whispered, “Get up, Grandma. Get up. Prove ’em wrong. Get up. You got more. Get up.” When the electrocardiogram went flat, I stared at the line like a hypnotist and whispering to it, “Move. Move line. Move. Move up. Move. Move.” Mystical powers of suggestion are not strong enough to trip up a marathon runner; the willpower of a marathoner is stronger than words, and my grandmother had finished her marathon. 89 years long. I shed no tears that morning. I’d shed tears 19 days prior; when the doctor told me she only had four days to live. I cried that night. I cried and I thanked my grandmother over and over, “Thank you. Thank you, Grandma.” For taking me in as a baby, for reading with me after school as a child, for praying for me at all stages of my life. And at that point I felt ashamed. Ashamed that after all of the work my grandparents did for me, all I did with my life was write poems and chase a music career. Sure I had gotten my master’s degree. I was the first in my family to attend a four year university and graduate. The first to visit foreign countries without having to join the U.S. military to do so. The first to be a published writer. The first to record an award-nominated album. But I was still poor. Still in debt, with new student loans. And I would go into further debt paying hospital and funeral bills. My other friends had families and careers that made money—real money. What material fruits did my English major give me other than a list of firsts? I had entered my own Gethsemane. II. At a writer’s conference I listened in on a panel discussion entitled: “We Got Here as Fast as We Could: Debut Authors Over 35.” The words “as fast as we could” choked me up because I still hadn’t made it. 365 days a year, I probably worry 365 days that the mark I’ve left on the world really isn’t big enough. Robert Hayden, in his poem “Frederick Douglass,” called freedom a beautiful needful thing. Beautiful and needful aren’t always pleasurable. I say freedom can also be a painful tugging thing, a painful pulling thing especially when dark forces come along. Looking back on what I’ve walked through every seven years, I’ve discerned that I’m never really free. I’ve always had to go into some sort of bondage to liberate another aspect of me. It’s all currency. Trade this freedom for that freedom. Although I haven’t lived long on this planet, I’ve lived some. Much of what we live through we don’t take notice of, till it has passed; or until, as with film, a crappy remake reminds you later of how good the original was. As a poet it’s a big no-no for me to take my moments for granted, but I am guilty of doing so. A professor of mine in grad school, the poet Matthew Zapruder, once told me: “Getting published shouldn’t be the higher goal. The higher goal of a poet should be to obtain a certain consciousness. A wisdom. A freedom.” I keep a piece of laminated paper in my wallet, with a passage from Rope Burns by F.X. Toole. I refer to it often to guide me through myriad Gethsemanes: “About the only thing I haven't done in boxing is make money. But that hasn't stopped me anymore than not making money in writing has. Both are something you just do, and you feel grateful for being able to do them, even if both keep you broke, drive you crazy, and make you sick…Rational people don't think like that. But they don't have in their lives what I have in mine. Magic. The magic of going to wars I believe in…the magic of will, and skill and pain, and the risking of everything so you can respect yourself for the rest of your life.” Fitting, isn’t it, that it’s only a myth that our bodies are renewed every seven years at the cellular level? Fitting that—for a child born into a newly unsegregated America, a boy who wanted to do it all, a ganger preacher, a target of the cops, an enriched, impoverished caregiver and a man mourning his first real teacher—the words that I keep close were written by a man who trains fighters. Larry Handy leads the award-winning poetry band Totem Maples. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appear in such journals as Cog, Proximity, Quiddity, Rivet, Storylandia, Straight Forward Poetry and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside. His horror novelette Paper Cuts: 1000 Paper Cranes was published by TWB Press. His essay “What to Do When Grandma Has Dementia” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was listed in The Best American series under Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2016. When not writing he is practicing Chinese martial arts or running 26.2 mile marathons. SoCal is his home.

Facts can be more fascinating than fiction. Ming was acutely aware of that, but sometimes he wondered if he could tell one from the other without flights of fancy. On October 2, 2019, during his visit to his mother in Jingzhou, Ming went out of his way to host a gathering in Songzi, his native town which he left permanently after finishing high school. Throughout the party, all the attending “comrades-in-arms” remained high- spirited, some singing the old songs aloud, some playing mahjong attentively, others eating the local snacks with terrible mannerisms while chatting boisterously about their shared experiences in Mayuhe, a forest farm adjacent to the Yangtze River, where they all had “received the re-education from poor peasants” at the same youth station during the Cultural Revolution. For Ming, this was not only the first time to see these old comrades after 42 years of separation without knowing their whereabouts, but more importantly, the only opportunity to pay off his last “emotional debt,” something he thought he was still owing to Hua, who had immigrated to Australia years before he retired from his main job as an independent tutor, translator and publisher in Vancouver. When the party finally ended in the middle of the night, he managed to strike up a private conversation with her, though only for a couple minutes. “Hua, you know why I have come all the way from Canada to attend this gathering?” he asked. “Like all of us, you want to see old friends while we still can move around, don’t you?” “No! I have few friends in my entire life, nor do I really want to see anyone except you!” “Why me?” “There is one thing I have been wanting to say to you in person for almost half a century. Now that we are all lining up for our final exits from this world, I….” “What is it you must say to me?” “I loved you, while we were laboring together in Mayuhe, and…” “Really? Some comrades did mention this to me long ago, but I never believed them, because you yourself had said nothing like that.” “That’s why I owe you a confession, long overdue….Still remember the tuner you gave to me in the summer of 1975?” “What tuner?” Hua looked bewildered as they were joined helter-skelter by other comrades, who, all in their mid-sixties, well knew this to be the last occasion to goodbye one another face to face. Before getting into a comrade’s car back to Jingzhou, Ming rushed to ask for Hua’s weixin number and said meaningfully to her, “Let’s stay in touch thru weixin, shall we?” But once back to his home in Vancouver, he found it hard to communicate with Hua. For one thing, knowing she spent almost every waking minute together with her husband after retirement, Ming saw it as utterly imprudent to video- or even audio-chat with her. A polite seasonal greeting was certainly customary, but frequent conversations about their old days would be alarming, let alone any in-depth discussion about their long lost relationship. Textual messaging seemed to be a viable option, yet it too was overly restrictive and troublesome. With his fingers getting clumsier and eyes blurrier nowadays, he simply hated typing Chinese characters on a small screen. This being so, all he could do was to constantly forward to her whatever posts or moments he found interesting or relevant. In return, Hua would make casual and succinct comments on what she had actually viewed. Undoubtedly, this was not the way he hoped to remain in contact with her. Shortly after the Chinese New Year’s day, Hua complained that she was stuck at her parents’ residence in Songzi as lockdowns became the order of the day in response to the new coronavirus outbreak in their native province of Hubei. To kill time and fulfill one of her fondest teenage dreams, she mentioned she was taking online lessons in color-lead painting. Hearing this, Ming realized there might be much more he could share with her than he had thought, so he became more enthusiastic about sending her beautiful photos of landscapes and visual artworks as well as inspiring stories about Chinese or western artists. But what he most wanted to do was to get answers to two questions that had been bugging him recently: one was how come Hua remembered nothing about the tuner, something he had been hiding in the depth of his heart as the first token of love he got in his whole lifetime; the second was why he and Hua failed to become husband and wife despite his strong belief that they had been karmaed for each other in this world. Only by finding the truth would he emotionally “die with his eyes closed,” as the Chinese idiom goes. On a weekend evening in early summer, well before he could find a chance to bring up the topic with Hua, his wife happened to notice the brief but flirting textual messages he had sent to Hua. “Something going on, eh? You two seem to contact each other too often!” she said in a suspicious and sarcastic tone. “Nothing at all, just joking as we used to in Mayuhe,” he explained. Nonetheless, alerted by this incident, he began to resort to underground communication to avoid jeopardizing his marriage. After all, he could not afford to get himself into another emotional debt. Aged 64, he had gone through all the storms of life, now he wanted to make sure to see nothing but rainbows for the rest of his life, even when there was no sunlight. But he was curious enough to search for the truth about his fated connections with Hua. Time after time, he would indulge himself in recollecting the details about how they worked together in Mayuhe between 1974 and 1977. As the leader of the youth group, he was neither tall nor really handsome, but he showed himself to be a highly ambitious youngster with a strong will power. Not surprisingly, he had several secret admirers who were actually very pretty, but he only had eyes for Hua; to him, she not only was the sexiest and most beautiful of all, but also had a good sense of humor in addition to a cheerful personality. In fact, he had fallen in love with her at first sight when he happened to spot her during a meeting at high school one year before. Since they came to receive ‘re-education’ in the country like millions of Mao Zedong’s red guards, he had developed a crush on her. Part of the reason why he tried so hard to outperform others in Mayuhe was to prove himself worthy of her attention. Each time they chanced to be shoulder- carrying trees together, he would love to tease or make fun of her, while she appeared to enjoy the clever way he joked with her. In the spring of 1975 when all the boys at the youth station started to learn to play the erhu or the flute, she gave him a tuner supposedly to help him set the tune, but she did so in such a private manner that he readily took it as a special gift, nothing less than a solid token of love, though never explicitly proclaimed as such on her part. However, though he loved Hua tremendously and believed that she loved him as well, he hid this feeling even from himself, knowing his top priority was to win the opportunity to go to university, however slim it might be. Once he achieved his first career objective, he would make the proposal, which he believed she would readily accept. Then, with the help of his family connections, they could go to the same city and get married in due course. But given the sociopolitical realities of the day, his plan for their joint future would have been thwarted if the political authorities had discovered his romantic relationship with her. Alas, it was to his surprise as much as to his disappointment and humiliation that Hua asked him to return the tuner towards the end of the year. Thinking she might have a new sweetheart, he decided to focus on his career development. Though he had a hunch that Hua had given the tuner to his major rival named Pan, a much taller if not smarter or more handsome comrade, Ming said nothing about his suspicion, nor did he disclose his love for her to anyone; instead, he had kept his jealousy, pain, self-pity and shame to himself even until now. After graduating from Shanghai Jiaotong University, he did have several intimate relationships, but he eventually married his wife because only she could ‘beat’ Hua in some sense or was as attractive to him as Hua. It was not until he began to thoroughly examine his life after his semi-retirement that he realized Hua as his lifetime model of love, that is, someone who embodied all female attractiveness to him. When he met her at the October party, he could not help falling in love with her again. To his amazement, he found her even more attractive than before. Already with two grandchildren, she looked as if still around forty, even sexier, more beautiful and definitely more graceful than when he saw her last time in Mayuhe. A true lady rather than a Chinese dama, a stunner she really was, he said to himself. But how come Hua had no memory of the tuner? Given the way this little gadget of hers had set for him the tune of love, if not of life, this was something simply unthinkable. Perhaps she remembered it too well to admit it; she felt the need to safeguard her happy married life; she had a strong sense of female dignity; or she hated to be “debunked” in an emotional sense. There could be many underlying reasons for her persistent denial, he thought. The more Ming pondered over this tuner episode, the more he craved for the truth, and the more he started to miss her, especially as the Pandemic made it increasingly difficult for them to reunite in person anywhere or anytime soon. To alleviate his ever intensifying yearning for her, he conducted longer and more frequent text-talks via weixin until one day in August, she wrote, “If we were really karmaed for each other, I would wait for you in Mayuhe in our next life.” While this remark might well be disregarded as a lip serviceby anyone else, he took it so seriously that he began to address her as his “dear future wife.” Every so often he would even request her to send him her photos taken in different years, because he wanted to “make up for the loss of [their] otherwise married life in this world” and to “become familiar enough to readily recognize her in their afterlives”; and with words and images, he invited her to co-build what they called ‘weixin home,’ a virtual residence where they could play with the idea of living together as a loving couple. He was clear that all such effort was just an illusion on his part, but she apparently did enjoy this cyber relationship to some extent. On the morning of December 27, he was doing stretching exercise when he hit upon the idea of resuming to write his book Love Letters from Vancouver, which he had initially intended to be his first (autobiographical) novel in Chinese, but later thrown into his garage after getting a sharp criticism from his first reader, one of his closest comrades-in- arms in Mayuhe who had become a well-read software engineer in Silicon Valley. On the same evening, Ming told Hua that the book, which was based on his quite dramatic life experiences up until 2000, was devoted to his first date; but now, he was all geared up to recount his life experiences from the millennium to the present. Since then, he would write three to four thousand Chinese characters every day and, exactly one month later, he finished this extremely challenging job. During the whole writing process, he was as excited as he was eager to share with Hua all his ups and downs on every front, though he had no idea about what impact it might have on her. To him, she was both his closest reader and his best or most informed critic. On Valentine’s Day 2021, he wrote a love poem in Chinese and sent it to her as a gift, in which he articulated his long-cherished feeling for her since their separation, in which he told her he had loved her profoundly while in Mayuhe, and still did so now, though he loved his wife nonetheless. After typing the three Chinese characters and hitting the send key, he turned off the light, but felt too nervous to sleep because he had broken the language ban she had imposed on him, and concurrently too guilty because he had done something unfaithful to his wife. Perhaps, without bodily contact, such “spiritual derailment” or platonic love might be excusable, he told himself. No matter what, love was running wildly in his inner space as in the virtual world. At the end of March, after much waiting and scheduling, he finally got his first chance to call her. It was an almost 5-hour long chat over the phone. During this passionate and informative conversation, he did not mention his first e. d. experience with his wife partly because of Hua just two nights before, but he and Hua talked a great deal about each other’s life experience, family situation and health condition. At one point, Hua told him frankly that after receiving his special Valentine gift, she spent almost two weeks struggling fiercely with her own sense of being a good traditional woman before deciding to resume communication with him. “I was waiting nervously for your response all that time,” Ming said. “If you had stopped responding to my love message at all, I would have never contacted you again, but fortunately you forwarded a meme to me later, though totally irrelevant to my confession.” “Even now I am still hesitating if I should keep in touch with you,” Hua said. “I fear I might have fallen into some sort of trap.” “Don’t worry! Since I am in the trap already, I would push you up to safety even at the cost of my own life,” he assured her. “But don’t say those three words again!” “What if your ban makes me suffocate to death?” “Don’t worry; I could readily call an ambulance for you,” Hua said, jokingly. “There would be no time for that. You should perform a CPR on the spot,” Ming continued by changing the topic into a pun. “Only if you were really dying!” Hua got his pun and extended it right away. “The moment your lips touch mine, I would resurrect!” As in Mayuhe, she enjoyed such allusive and light-hearted conversations with him, whereas he found it utterly unthinkable that Hua should have lost all her memories about the tuner. Her innocent response made him wonder if the whole matter was actually one of his own illusions or imagined events as she suggested. But on second thought, he was just as sure that Hua must have some unknown reasons to continue hiding the truth. With no hard or handy evidence to authenticate his story, he had to put aside her nonchalance about the whole matter, though it sometimes caused him to feel deplorably perplexed, hurt and even ashamed of the way he might have overestimated her feelings for him in the first place. To remain faithful to his wife, he even thought of giving up his pursuit of the truth or terminating his contact with Hua. Being a respected grandpa now, he certainly would not want to become a laughingstock for anyone as a victim of “first love complex” that was typical of the young; nor had he had the slightest intention to develop an extramarital relationship with the same person after such a long lapse of time. But somehow he just could not help missing her more and more. To soothe his lovesickness, he turned to poetry and, in a matter of mere several months, he wrote almost fifty love poems, all inspired by and thus devoted to Hua. For him, this was certainly some achievement: he had written and published all kinds of poetry in English (which he had begun to learn at age 19 as a college student in Shanghai), from what he called “mini-epic” to “bilinguacultural poems,” from “dark fantasy” to “dinggedicht,” in disparate forms and styles, yet he had never been able to compose a single love piece. The reason was he had never experienced any truly inspiring love, he believed. But now though he was still not really sure about Hua’s affection for him, he had drawn so many strong inspirations from her that he had not only completed writing (and self-published) his Chinese memoire Love Letters from Vancouver, but had more than a dozen love poems appearing or forthcoming in literary journals across the English speaking world. On 26 April 2021, just one day before receiving his first shot of Pfizer against covid-19, he hastily self-published his collection of love poems under the title of Limerence, just in case he, with his heart condition worsening, could not survive the probable severe side effects of the vaccination. Of course, he never mentioned this book to Hua, because he planned to give it to her later in person as a happy surprise, something like her tuner, or as his intended token of love. A few months later, Hua was diagnosed as having cancerous cells in her lungs during her annual physical checkup. While she suffered greatly, more psychologically than physically, he gave her his best support by teaching her how to build a stronger inner self to overcome her fear and defeat all misfortunes. Right before she was pushed into the operation room on the morning of August 12, he advised her to print the Chinese character for ‘love’ on her left hand, and his name on her right, promising that his love would be her most powerful guardian angel. And much as he had expected, she had a very successful operation. By the time she was fully recovered, he had written several dozen more love pieces, many of which were soon to be published. When circumstances finally allowed them to video-chat with each other on weixin, they began to spend nearly two hours together online every day though living on the opposite sides of the world. Among all the topics they touched upon, they enjoyed talking about love, sex and art the most, though they both felt quite guilty and embarrassed at first. From their daily communications, he learned almost everything about the development of their relationship. For example, Hua told him, to his great joy and comfort, that she had been keen on reading every page of his Love Letters earlier in the year. Also, knowing what he had gone through in the past few decades, she had felt not merely happy for his achievements on every front, from family to finance, from work to poetry, but also sympathetic with his sufferings, including his health problems and psychological setbacks, especially the way he functioned like a money-making machine with no lubricant of love or care. In particular, she developed a strong emotional attachment to him though with an equally strong sense of guilt while in the hospital. She admitted longing to say “I love you, too” to him on receiving his Valentine message, but considering their relationship to be so “abnormal and immoral” (and “imbalanced” as he had often added), she had often thought of putting out their love sparkle before it became a sweeping fire. “What eventually made you decide to continue our relationship?” he asked. “I am not sure, but I felt I must follow my heart, mustn’t I?” Hua responded. “Of course you must! So karmaed as we are for each other, we should follow our hearts together, be it a bliss or curse on us.” “Sure, why not! After the operation, I may not have so many more years to live anyway.” “An enlightened girl! So, you are really sure now? Isn’t it a happy thing to be your whole self rather than only part of it? -- I mean to live with our free will…” “Sure thing! For the past sixty years, I have been living mainly for others, now it is time to live for myself.” “That’s why you decided to lift your speech ban on me and allow me to say ‘I love you’ after receiving my Valentine message?” “Yes, I do treasure your lifelong feeling for me, and I do want to let you know I love you too, only it’s too embarrassing even to talk about love as old grandparents.” “No love is embarrassing, just as no love is wrong, ‘abnormal’ or ‘immoral,’ except perhaps it could be ‘imbalanced.’ Don’t you think we grandparents are as much entitled to love as the young?” “Whatever you say, we are really too old to love like young people.” “But our love is just as passionate. Physically we are no longer strong or energetic. Old as I am, I’ve become softened on both ways, so much so that I cannot satisfy you, an extraordinary woman with the physique of a forty-year old, but without enough sexual power, even without penetration at all, we can still make love in countless alternative ways. Just as we can talk dirty together on weixin, we can also make babies together in our bed of art and poetry. At least, our love can help each other maintain good health besides good looks.” “Anyway, we must keep our relationship underground, however beautiful or helpful to ourselves, or people would find us ridiculous and disgusting.” “Still care about how others might look at us?” To protect each other’s spouse from getting hurt, Ming and Hua decided to tell all the white lies about their mutual love, and reached two basic agreements. 1) they would face all possible challenges to their relationship together until their last breaths; and 2) they would have part of their ashes mixed and buried together in Mayuhe after death. Upon signing their love agreement at the outset of 2022, Ming was further inspired to write a long and hybrid book in English, into whose fabric he tried to weave all his ‘bests,’ including his most insightful findings about life as well as his worthiest life experiences. By adopting a highly innovative narrative framework and exploring his true relationship with Hua in terms of spiritual growth, he hoped to raise, and offer his answer to, this question: how can Adam and Eve live together happily as they grow really old? In a larger sense, how can the aged regain their lost pureness, beauty and nearness to the Supreme? Meanwhile, Hua embarked on a series of color-lead paintings, most of which he would use as illustrations for his book. In so doing, both of them felt as if being reborn into love and living in a paradise regained. In the meantime, he had never really stopped trying to dig the truth about the tuner, the very starting point of their relationship. But for all their efforts, she failed to retrieve her memory, if any at all. She did admit liking him a lot while still in Mayuhe, but she did not love him as he believed she had done; it was only after she received his valentine gift that she started to feel seriously for him. “But how do you account for the tuner you gave to me back then?” he asked once again, thinking that she might be, unconsciously or unknowingly, playing the classic game of love with him. Indeed, love could be an emotional battle between a man and a woman: if one had admitted loving the other more than the other way around, one would lose at least part of one’s own attraction, if not the whole battle. Unsure about the depth of Hua’s feeling for him, he kept hoping she would one day break free of her reserve, the chain of moral restraints, or whatever else had been blocking her memory about the tuner. “Sorry, Mingming,” Hua explained, “if the tuner thing were not an invention of yours, if I had given it to you as you remembered, and requested it back later to give it to Pan Lihao as you had suspected, I must have done all this just to help you guys learn to play the erhu.” “You mean you gave it to me not as a token of love, but nothing more or less than a learning device?” “Sure thing! If I had intended it to be a love token, how could I have asked you to return it to me and give it to Pan instead? What a childish and ridiculous thing to do…. that would be completely against my character!” “In that case, our relationship was based on a misunderstanding, an emotional error to begin with?” “You bet, but a very beautiful one, isn’t it?” “Sure it is! Except that it makes me feel painfully embarrassed about how I have been flattering myself in our relationship all these years!” “But my affection for you now is true!” “Well, I think I must accept your explanation. It seems to be the only logical answer to my questions about the whole matter.” A few days after ‘resolving’ the tuner myth and finishing the first draft of his hybrid novel “Back to Eden,” Ming received a video call from his mother across the Pacific, who showed him a small package meant for him. “Just open it, Mom, and see who has sent me what is inside!” It turned out to be none other than the tuner! Dark red, one inch long, in the shape of a tube, about the thickness of a little finger, with a metal reed at one end getting somewhat rusty. More intriguing was the short handwritten note that came along with it from Pan: “Long long time no see, old pal! The other day, I was browsing randomly online when I happened to find your Love Letters. From your memoir, I learned Hua had actually given the tuner to you first. If I had known this fact in Mayuhe, I would never have kept it as a special souvenir! Now that you two seem to have developed a real (extramarital?) relationship despite old age, I send my very best wishes as well as this little thing (I have no way to contact her). Keep it well, Pal, hope the tuner would not tune out your marriage as in my case!” Author’s Note: This story is inspired by and thus devoted to Helena Qi Hong ( 祁红) Yuan Changming grew up in rural China and has published 18 poetry collections in English. Early this year, Yuan began to write fiction, with short stories already appearing in Aloka (UK) and Kolkata Arts (India) or forthcoming in Lincoln Review (UK), StylusLit (Australia) and Nashwaak Review (Canada), among others. Currently, Yuan is working on his trilogy. Yuan also has 4 poetry collections released since May 2022: All My Crows at: https://www.coldriverpress.com/ E.dening at: https://lnkd.in/gPGwupbB Homelanding at: https://www.amazon.com/Homelanding-Yuan-Changming-ebook/dp/B0BB1JBS37 and Sinosaur: Bilingual-Cultural Poems at: https://redhawkpublications.com/Sinosuar-p504579309

A Miniature Castle Surrounds My Brain Think: 2lbs of hamburger meat plopped and nestled in a shoebox. Think: a drawbridge, moat, archers on battlements, a ballista on every tower, gatehouses, a portcullis, turrets, and huge vats of oil and tar, fire at the ready against a gooey pink horizon. Enough defenses to keep the thoughts out, most often. But in actuality, the thoughts, invasive by nature, are strategic. They bide their time. They wear no colors, because they fight for no Country, no cause but to lay siege on my brain. For fun? For sport? Just because they can? The thoughts are mad in that way. An army to themselves: paranoid delusions, irrational fears. Everything I’ve ever done wrong, back again to torture and interrogate, bind me on the rack. Before bed, the thoughts sense a slippage, a weakness, an opening, and they collect like plaque. No need for gigantic wooden ladders or battering rams, they pile on each other as most pests do and storm the gates, breach the curtain walls. Overcome, I shake and sweat that near-surrender, vinegar-like sweat, bombarded by thoughts. Is that Honda Odyssey from this morning still parked out by my mailbox? I am increasingly concerned that its owner wishes to murder me with some knife/gun combo weapon, or strap a bomb collar around my neck. Did I remember to lock the sliding glass door? By now I’ve learned to sleep with one eye (and my video doorbell app) open. What’s worse, empirically: dying a horrible, painful death by a strangely inventive intruder, or wasting my life worrying about such a thing as I spiral deeper and deeper until I’m wholly unable to parse out real threats versus imaginary. Reading a book, I get no further than a page. A potion of minor healing. Doom scrolling Twitter only feeds their frenzy. A spell of swift destruction. Listening to a podcast invokes an enchantment over the land. A momentary mercy. The thoughts scatter, disorientated, unfocused. I bet wherever you leave a fingernail on Earth is where you can travel to in the afterlife. In their confusion, I make it through the hatch. I situate my makeshift raft to escape down the river of sleep. Where I’ll wake up on the other side, full of rations and reinforcements to take on a new sun. But just as I kick off the cold dirt, launch from the sediment and begin to drift along the water, the thoughts recoup and attack in hoards. They play out past ill deeds in my head: me, a high school sophomore, crouched down by the safe under the register at Mr. Tony’s Pizza. Constance, my older coworker, is mopping front of house. It’s after close. I angle my body perfectly away from the security camera above my right shoulder, to make it look like I’m scrubbing the tile floor with a wet rag. Really going to town on the mozzarella eternally congealed in the grout lines. But I’m not. I’m fishing for a twenty from one of the big bill envelopes. Though it’s not a chain restaurant, no corporate lords or ladies to Robinhood from, Tony underpays and we don’t make tips. In the parking lot after our shift, I convince Constance, reluctant, but kind to a fault, to buy me a tin of chewing tobacco from the Speedway around the corner. I pocket the change. Even though that was fifteen years ago, the thoughts make me worry about the potential harm that solitary, immediately repugnant pinch of Grizzly Wintergreen did to my gumline, the cancer that’ll undoubtedly grow. They make me worry about talking over the phone to schedule a dentist appointment. They make me worry about a nicotine addiction I may somehow unknowingly have. They make me worry about Tony, likely retired, living a thousand miles away in Mesa, Arizona, calling the cops to throw me in jail for stealing from him way back when. But most of all, they make me worry about Constance. I was too demanding. She for sure hates me. I don’t remember if I even said thank you, and regret using her all the more. I know I must act fast to not be eaten from the inside out. To not fold up, crumble, lose my last supply of reason buried deep in a dank crypt, hidden away from these barbaric thoughts. God only knows what would happen then. I rush to the medicine cabinet. Not for milk of the poppy. Not for valerian root. Not for poison-dipped chocolates. Not yet ready to accept defeat. But for a fighting chance. 10mg of maximum strength time release melatonin. My vat of oil and tar. Fall asleep faster. Stay asleep longer. I choke down the pill and wait with a shrewd smile. Because I know what’s to come. Because I have been here before. And I will be here again, so says the soothsayer. There will be complete obliteration. A clean scorch of the battlefield. Sweltering blazes of absolution and fury. There will be sweet, if only temporary, victory. Subject Line Mercy Daniel ate a quick lunch on the hotel’s terrace, the seat across from him empty, and thought about the difference between true atonement and self-flagellation when he was interrupted by a gentle buzz in his pocket that caused him to hold his phone up, lean forward until it recognized his sleepless, unshaven face, which, after some time, finally populated the subject line of an email he’d just received like invisible ink under a blacklight that read: Hey, wait a sec! We know you didn’t mean to leave 101 Ways to Forgive Yourself & Other Lies unpurchased in your cart. Come back now for 10% off with code WHOOPS10. Don’t worry, we’ll keep it right here ready and waiting for you. Paul Rousseau is a disabled writer with work in Roxane Gay's The Audacity, Waxwing, Catapult, Jellyfish Review, Pithead Chapel, and Wigleaf, among others. You can read his words online at Paul-Rousseau.com and follow him on Twitter @Paulwrites7.