At that time everyone lived in a cave underground and the burrow I found to call home hosted so many fleshy languid wayfarers that every move and thought became erotic, even walking to the fridge, now nestled against a few boulders but otherwise the same cheap white affair it had always been in dens of that ilk. Don’t ask me how it worked or how anyone got oxygen because what did I care? Everyone was so sincere and sincere is sex, so no, no one minded living underground, in our burrow or anywhere else, since violence went away forever and life was a boudoir mall cave: rock, and open-faced people, and things people bought before the underground time. Walk out of the burrow through another rock burrow into another rock burrow and pass women in faded silk bathrobes still carrying designer handbags, men in slippers and suit jackets, children in lollipop-sized rubies and bug-eyed Chanel sunglasses. Everything functional and back to a new norm, just step over rubble now, no architecture, no wallpaper, no plants, no sunlight, everyone mellow, all around cave. A hippie living in my burrow left me a love note in a bag of chocolate-covered graham cookies, but I never have any privacy so I walked to the river running through the cave to read. The note was four pages long and full of sincerity, I was sure, and I couldn’t wait; it would totally turn me on. What do you think but when I got there and pulled the note from my pocket, strangers still slung their arms around me and tried to look over my shoulder, everyone sharing everything now, so I waded into the water but you wouldn’t believe the current and with the water rushing and masses of people bobbing along for the ride, urgency lost its hold and the next thing I knew I was at least twenty miles downstream in who knew what burrow. Talk about no maps. Everyone let those go awhile back. But I climbed out of the current and tucked myself in a corner to read the blue-ink handwriting, now smeared. Then I thought of when I met the hippie and returned his warm smile, and I felt something like light, but then I remembered once when he went to the shower and he took off his hat, how his hair underneath fell down to his butt, which meant he’d been growing it out since before the underground time. That was a turnoff, I had to admit, like his hair could get in the way, like I wouldn’t be able to feel his skin. I sat in the corner by the river while contented people rushed contentedly past on the current and I felt contentedness creeping in because the river was warm and fast and the freest of all the free underground, but I clutched the note and couldn’t let go. Still, I’d already forgotten about the cookies and soon I would forget about the note or it wouldn’t matter anymore and I knew, even as I unfolded the note, because it was impossible now not to fail, that the light was fading away but what I wanted was a reason to find a way back through the burrows to the hippie. What I wanted was desire.
Other stories by Lydia Ship have appeared or are forthcoming in Night Train, Hobart, The 2nd Hand, The Battered Suitcase, The Pedestal, A Capella Zoo, Metazen, The Armchair Aesthete, New South, Neon, and The Dead Mule, among others; in 2009, one of her stories received a Pushcart nomination, and she is a Contributing Editor at The Chattahoochee Review. Read more of her stories here–
Category Archives: Fiction
The Mountain Goats
I see them climbing their mountains and I see my mom looking up at them, her head raised and her chin pointing out, my dad with his back turned. We are standing there looking, up the mountain the goats and their white fur, some of them their horns. Some birds come in and around them but the goats, they don’t do anything. They stand and barely move their heads every once in awhile.
We stand and watch, me and my mom and my dad. All of us looking in a different direction.
And the mountain goats here are white and they have these tiny little goats with them, their babies, so it must be that time for them, when the goats here have their babies and they climb the mountain with them, up on the grey rocks.
WE SHOULD GO my dad says and he doesn’t turn back to us when he says it, he keeps his back turned, and the mountain goat up on the mountain, its baby by its feet, it chews with an open mouth. When I chew with an open mouth my mom will say DON’T CHEW WITH YOUR MOUTH OPEN. Her face will look pained, her eyebrows dipping into her eyes. But if she is feeling good she will say DON’T CHEW WITH YOUR MOUTH OPEN, PLEASE. Some days she feels good and some days she doesn’t. That is how I am my mother.
TRAFFIC my dad says and I say YEP, like how it slips out. I don’t drive and I don’t know about traffic except that it takes us longer to get to where we want to go. What do I know about driving I am thinking when my dad he says the same thing. WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT DRIVING he says and I almost say yep again, but then I don’t, because today at the zoo is a day I am learning. Sometimes you say things back and sometimes you don’t, And sometimes words come out on accident and you can’t take them back.
That happens and traffic happens and we stand and watch in quiet.
My mom wipes sweat from her forehead, where her hair meets her face, and my dad he looks at his watch twice. I guess he is hoping that today will be something it is not.
And the mountain goats, their baby, one of them, it hops down from where it was, its hooves making a thud on the pretend rocks, this mountain made of sidewalks, and it says something. What the baby mountain goat says is called bleating. It isn’t words but noise. I know that it is called bleating because I read the sign last time we were here and I remember what it was called. The mountain goat baby leaps down from its mother and bleats. And its mother, she just chews some more with her mouth open. And the mountain goat dad, like my dad, he stays off to the side somewhere, up a level, his horns shining tan in sun.
IT’S HOT I say because I don’t want YEP to be the last thing I said to my dad, his back turned at this fence, my mom looking up at the grey. And YEP is what he says back, just like me, the two of us.
The goats they stand and the sun goes. If it was raining then these goats would stand I think, in the rain, feeling the rain go into their backs. And the sun when it came again it would dry them down, warm them up again.
And we will come back to this zoo, me and my mom and my dad and maybe then it will be raining and we will stand in it, in the rain or under a tree, the water looking like static in the air. My mom and my dad and me. Her chin pointing to the sky, my dad’s back towards the fence, me not saying anything. Because the silence here and the goat hooves on the fake rocks, that is better.
They stand in the sun, these mountain goats here. They burn up in white fur. We stand and watch and are quiet again.
WE SHOULD GET GOING my dad says, and so we do. We go. And the goats they stand, don’t move, and that is how it stops, us looking at the goats, us making to go.
J. A. Tyler is founding editor of mud luscious and the author of Someone, Somewhere (ghost road press, 2009), In Love With a Ghost (willows wept press, 2010), and Inconceivable Wilson (vox press, 2010) as well as the chapbooks Our Us & We (greying ghost), Zoo: The Tropic House (sunnyoutside), Everyone in this is Either Dying or Will Die or is Thinking of Death (achilles), and The Girl in the Black Sweater (trainwreck press). Visit: www.aboutjatyler.com.
A Brief History of Your Mom
One mother was not impressed with his urinal routine. Marcel’s aim was better than that she knew. Years later, when he changed the meaning of “meaning,” she pushed all her potted plants off the sill. There was no point, and that was the point.
One other mother removed her undergarments and posed for her son’s painting. “Is this a still life?” she asked her son. “Please don’t do this to me,” he said. Gustave was ten seconds old when the light slit open his eyes and that wild bush came into view. There are those who say vision itself is pornographic. Those people do not live in France.
Another mother made her soup from scratch and resented many things. “Soup is not a commercial,” she thought. “My son is gay.” In America everyone is American, probably.
This other mother boiled potatoes in the dark. She had man hands and her sons did not. Vincent and Theo never helped with the potatoes, so she never helped with the rent.
And then there was one mother who had a square face with blue and red boxes, though her nose was an off-center rectangle. She liked to arbitrarily place one thing next to another. Her husband felt she was a control freak, but kept quiet his entire life.
And this one – this one menstruated black and white. This was before color television and black and white was good enough. To call her unabashed was not an exaggeration. Her drippings at the center of town confused both Rorschach and the mayor. “Can you please stay in the barn when you do that?” the mayor asked. She said okay.
The last mother refused to rid of her son’s peaches, pears, and placenta. The cleaning lady was less than enthralled and waited for each of them to die.
Jimmy Chen‘s fiction has appeared in Dzanc Best of the Web 2009, elimae, NOÖ Journal, Juked, Diagram, among others. He is a contributing writer at HTMLGIANT, and lives in San Francisco.
I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground
When was it?
Summer in Minneapolis, near Lake Harriet, eighty-five degrees.
Right, a tattooed group preceded us through the fifty-odd rows of roses, skin tanned and curlicued, bestial designs pouring out of their tank tops and black knit shorts. They paused at each row. They were drunk on roses.
You speculated they were dialing back through memory on purpose, plumbing their psyches.
I overheard a woman, stick-skinny, with a blue mountain tattooed across her back, speak in quiet reverence about smells, amygdalas, the limbic system. I’m guessing it was her husband—the big man, bald and hairy—who got down on one knee, sank his nose in a yellow bloom, and wept. The group, nine or so, leaned in and palmed his wooly shoulders. I remember your noting that.
Yes, and “When the man rolled to the ground, collapsed on a mound of black bark and mulch, everyone seemed happy.”
Incredibly happy.
Dazed, even.
Later in the car, my daughter Lil said the garden lacked an “appurtenant array” of pre-modern tea hybrids.
Lil would go on and on about those tea hybrids.
Evie was there.
Yes, Evie, her friend. Evie was shy.
Evie passed away.
Yes, in June.
Years earlier, in Roanoke, without Lil and before your mother died, we were at a costume party where an astronaut spoke plainly about girls in pink clothes.
His name was Hector, or Herman.
An eloquent drunk.
Somewhat. He was maudlin.
What I loved most about that party was the crystal chandelier hanging from the living room ceiling.
I liked the bartender who poured drinks from a collapsible bar near the window.
The place was quasi-rococo, heavily curtained.
“It’s supposed to be like a vagina,” the astronaut told us, “a womb-like color to attract mates.” Whenever the astronaut drank—I believe it was scotch—he raised the mirrored shield of his helmet and tipped his glass inside.
“A straw is like a little penis,” he added.
That night, back at the hotel, in the mirrored bathroom, I tore off your Mary Poppins outfit. Four paper quote marks fell off the wire hangers around my shoulders. The remnants of “myself” and Mary Poppins like a constellated code of sewn wool and paper on the cold tile grid.
You put it so nicely.
Which reminds me, in Wyoming, the tomb of Dick Cheney. His disembodied voice crooning at us.
Like an icy birch tree, as you put it.
I offered the apparition a drink and he said, “We were just kids then, our lives were intact, the radio transmitted true lo-ove.”
Wow.
Then the police came.
Booked, I lay in white rubber slippers, coarse orange jumper, eternal lighting, a combination of body odors. The call was collect; you refused—I told you everything in that pause where the name goes.
Next morning you were stellar in the courtroom.
The judge said, “There’s no camping in the cemetery… city ordinance.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“Nope, no littering, no trespassing, no slurping with ethereal statesmen, get outta here.”
A helicopter ride over Charleston. My uncle Leo asked me to transport a small rifle to Murfreesboro for a talent show—a bolt action .22 named Judy. “Leo,” I said, “I don’t get it. I mean Judy. How does she do it? How does she dance that way?”
“Well, the routine goes ‘Pretty Fair Damsel,’ ‘This Land is Your Land,’ ‘Acadian One Step,’ then she closes out with ‘I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.’ There’s a lot of faith involved, which is key.”
That year Judy won first prize in the Middle Tennessee Firearms Talent Competition, as I recall.
But Leo never saw the ribbon.
Right. Brain tumor that August.
Yes, brain tumor. Always a brain tumor.
Well, not really always. Sometimes it’s other things.
Most of the time, though, it’s a brain tumor.
I guess so. Those fucking brain tumors.
Can we talk about something else?
Of course we can.
Josh Collins teaches at Texas State University and serves as book review editor for Front Porch, editorial staff for Southwestern American Literature, and fiction editor for Precipitate. He also has work forthcoming in Quick Fiction.
Death at the Shower
The winter Chet turned 83, his family threw him a death shower and invited all his friends. The ladies made a coffin out of yellow cake. The men measured the inseam for his last suit with the ribbons from the gifts he had opened on his lap: a pair of wingtips, a travel-size Aqua Velva, a scrap-fabric hanky sewn into a pocket, and a gold watch with a missing hour hand from Death himself, who had arrived late and, in those days, wore the flip flops and seedy pencil mustache of a cruise director.
“Let’s take guesses on how it will happen,” Chet’s daughter said, passing a yellow legal pad around the room. “Closest wins a booby prize.”
“How droll,” Death said to Chet, rolling his eyes.
But the daughter collected the strips of paper anyway and put them in the hanky pocket, stirring her fingers in the papers before pulling them out to read. “Exposure. For fear of crossing a bean field. Wasps. Impaled by steering wheel.” Each seemed more reasonable than the last, they all agreed, and even Chet cracked a smile.
Toward the end of the evening, Death spun records and wah-toosied time to a freeze, though Chet checked his watch to measure the lapse.
“Don’t be such a stiff,” Chet’s daughter said. She pulled him onto the kitchen floor and he broke in his new shoes dancing the collegiate shag as the music roared. But then Death, always the klutz, spilled the last ladle of punch on Chet’s white cabana shirt.
“I’ll get the club soda,” Chet offered, but Death put up his finger.
“Think nothing of it,” he said. He took off his own shirt and put it over Chet’s shoulders, buttoning it neatly over his bony chest. The spill flared out beyond the line of holes in a gash of color, like the wing of some bird of paradise Chet no longer knew the name of.
THE JACKET
“Never put clothes in drawer,” Nana scolded me. She had come to visit for my thirteenth birthday. “If they’re in drawer, how can get out?”
She smacked the top of my hand, then made me lift my arms and stuck her nose in my pit. She sniffed. “Good,” she said, thumping my head. “Almost ready.”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m no melon.”
“Quiet,” she said.
She took out a red plaid wool shirt that smelled sharp like my first pee in the morning.
“Unbutton top buttons for shirt on hangars. Shirts need air so they can fly and find you strange women.”
I cringed.
“Be man,” she said. “Listen.”
She explained my grandfather was a boarder in her mother’s house. He was from the farms. Lice jumped off him in such multitudes that he looked fuzzy. Her father made him sleep in the barn. Each night, before my grandfather went to bed, he left his tan corduroy jacket in her house, saying it was his only good garment.
“It festered and stank,” Nana said. “I don’t think he had touched bar of soap ever. Food rotted between his teeth. Wax crusted in his ear. My mother want to dip this jacket in lye and him with it, but I hide it in my closet. Every night, the jacket came to me and I sat up in bed like Bride of Frankenstein monster and holding arms out to receive its sleeves. It slid on top of me, so my breasts pressed against soft satin of back lining. And then it buttoned its top button. Only top button though. Jackets were gentlemanly in these days. Not like today. At first this smell gagged me, but this lining was so comforting and cool. Soon I grew to know this smell, to search for it among my village, beyond smoke and soot and shit.”
She said “shit” like it would cover a bed.
“When he left, I followed smell over ocean until I find it again here and marry your reeking grandfather.”
I hung the plaid shirt in the closet and smiled.
“You laugh from other side of face, bub. It’s truth.”
“So where’s the jacket now?” I asked.
“Here,” she said. She rolled up a floral sleeve. The skin hung off her arm like wet paper. She pointed to the sunspots on her bare arm. I could see it was not skin but blackened holes where the corduroy had worn away.
*
Downstairs, my mother called me to light the cake. After I blew out the candles, Nana handed me a rectangular coat box. “Open later,” she said and then told my father to take her home. My father agreed.
Before she went to bed, my mother reached out for my arm and pulled me toward her.
She was never one for hugs, but she held me there.
“Happy Birthday,” she said and squeezed.
My fingers felt the soft cleft of her back and there along her spine, the hard nub of a button.
Patrick Crerand currently lives and writes in Florida where he teaches at Saint Leo University. Recent work of his has appeared in Conjunctions, New Orleans Review, Sentence, and other magazines. He is currently at work on a novel about Bingo (the game) and Jesus (the Christ).
Search for Grace
He says slow down and mouths words like mother and harder. He says sand is a form of torture for children. He claims he is a space invader but to my ears it sounds like I’m a masturbator. We make toe drawings to remember the carved turkey we will never eat.
*
He is bingo tough.
He is wanted by the law.
He is California.
He is the sexiest lizard I’ve seen in my whole life.
He is everything from Dizrythmia onwards.
He is brie.
He is hands down the star of her (or his) own debut.
He is licensed in North & South Carolina.
He is a Muppet.
He is Nordic sex.
He is standing in front of a small orchestra.
He is sketching in a special room with a big table and chairs.
He is certainly not Martina Navratilova.
*
I love wild boars and Bruce Springsteen. I love plausibility and deniability. I should be writing about Meta but I’m tired of death and destruction. I want to move to Sodom with Charo. I am desperate for space.
*
He says: I’m afraid of suspension bridges and needles too. I say fine. He says sorry. I fold his hands.
*
I’m tired of geese and the cherished treasures of the Holy See. I’m tired of elegant metaphors for snow, e.g. tiny geese fluttering in the wind. What’s the possibility of geese fluttering? Of snow in outer space? Of geese used as weapons of mass destruction? I’m tired of random fires and pebbles in my shoes. I’m not bulletproof and neither is he.
*
I won’t tell you how I feel except for this fact: kerosene.
*
Merlot wine reminds me the guy who served me liquor when I was seventeen, who is the same guy who dies at the end of this story, who is also like the cat who dies at the end of Cats, without my permission. It’s funny how the names of the dead go with them. What’s the sign for memory? I almost wrote sing for memory. Warblers love irony. I can’t remember his fucking name.
*
Say something, he says. I say chicken.
Neil de la Flor’s publications include Almost Dorothy (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, Facial Geometry (NeoPepper Press, 2006), co-authored with Maureen Seaton and Kristine Snodgrass, and Sinead O’Connor and her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds (Firewheel Editions, forthcoming 2011), co-authored with Maureen Seaton and winner of the Sentence Book Award. His work, both solo and collaborative, has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Barrow Street, Pank, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Hobart Pulp, among other journals. He can be reached at http://www.neildelaflor.com.
It Is a Pulsing Heart
And then she grasps with an unpleasant jolt of consciousness like licking the posts of a nine-volt battery, which she did once on a whim when she was ten, that she has never pushed herself to do anything, not a single solitary goddamn thing. She has never endured. She has never borne hardship like a heavy winter coat. The thought pains her in a limpid sort of way as she has no concept of suffering beyond the limit of endurance. It is pain devoid of resolve. It is existential pain. It is embarrassingly bourgeois pain. Pain that settles itself into the vast dark netherworld of what-might-have-been and proceeds to underscore every achievement and failure of her life henceforth with a kind of bitter dissatisfaction, a persimmon out of season, that is subsequently bred into her children and her children’s children, who can never do anything well enough and for whom the refrain of I-wanted-more-for-you belies her shunted aspirations for a life well lived and hard earned. No, she says, no, I reject this narrative. And she resolves herself, finally understanding what it means to be resolved, to be resolute, tonguing its metallic taste in her mouth. And she reaches out and takes it into her hand, she closes her hand around it with a strong fist, and it is a bird, it is a lighted cigarette, a gun, a wild sea, a pulsing heart.
Jess Glass has an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her work has appeared in Surreal South, Knee-Jerk Magazine, The 6S Review, and PANK Magazine. She blogs at jessglass.com.
Lamentations
When I walk down the street, when I abandon the relative comfort of my city apartment, when I step outside, not knowing where it is that I am going, and when I at last decide to head to the corner 7-Eleven, I see many others, and fiercely do I hate all those others whom I see. I turn away from their hopeful gazes, their kind and searching hellos. I refuse to return their curious greetings. Why should I greet them? Why should I offer them my hello? I do not know them, and do not think that they know me. They do not share my thoughts, my line of thinking. They occupy themselves with different thoughts than I do, feel different emotions. They do not see the world through my eyes, through what I know. Their teeth don’t ache the way that my teeth constantly ache. They do not know the weight, the discomfort of my belly on my belt, the pains in my fingers. They do not feel my fear due to lack of health insurance, or my annoyance at the presence of grease-stained dishes cluttering my sink. They do not know the sore spot on my thumb, or the tear in the seat of my favorite jeans, my addictions to nicotine and caffeine, my dearth of income. They do not suffer as I do each waking hour due to my sweaty crotch, and my sweaty ass. They don’t know the nervous tic that lives behind my left eye, departing it only to take up residency in my right; they don’t know my post-nasal drip, the tickle that haunts the back of my throat, my insomnia, my heartburn, my hair’s split ends, my generally damp and unpleasant odor. The smell of something secret and hidden. The taste like decay in the back of my throat, like rotting sausage, or day-old dog excrement, that flares up every five weeks, my allergic reaction to all brands of soy milk, and which can only be relieved by my abstaining for one week from drinking soy milk. They don’t know my desire to slip a sharpened pencil tip deep into my eyes, into both of my eyes, rooting around to evict their twitches. They don’t know my dumb want to step in front of a passing bus or subway train. They don’t suffer from my incessant need to yawn, the cramps in the sides and in the bottoms of my feet, in the soles of my feet, or the muscular stiffness in my pelvis that can’t be undone, that no stretch I attempt ever loosens. They don’t share in my lightheadedness, my dizziness brought on by not having eaten any breakfast, or not having eaten any lunch, or not having eaten any dinner, or between-meal snacks. They don’t know the freezing numbness in my hands and in my toes that comes after eating ice cream, or the giddiness that overtakes me at the thought of eating yet another pint of ice cream, of stepping outside and walking the seven blocks to the convenience store right now and purchasing yet another pint. They don’t know about my tendency to overfill the bathtub, to turn the water on and then turn to another task, forgetting to turn off the tap until water’s pooling in the hallway. They don’t know my lack of patience, my inability to wait for even three minutes, to allow the microwave to finish reheating my leftovers all the way through before I gobble them. They don’t see the grime that builds up underneath my thumbnails, infecting my hangnails, the spots that I’ve bitten down, lying in bed, unable to sleep, turned edgy by my anxiety and ennui. They do not know my restless leg disorder, my charley horses or my absentmindedness, my incessant feelings of inadequacy and shame, the fact that I can’t afford to take proper care of my cat, or to buy new shirts, or to keep a girlfriend. They do not know my constant guilt. They don’t know my confused thoughts, the mushy disarray of recognitions that I laughingly call my mind, my haphazard inventory of scattered recollections. And how could they know this? And how could they ever be made aware? They don’t know the corrections that I intend; they don’t share in my intent to improve my ways. They don’t share in my regrets, in my many excuses, in my fuzzed-out sense of sickening despair. They don’t hear my apologies, lame as they are, and muttered only to myself; they do not hear my “Oh my my’s,” my “please forgive me’s,” my “mea culpas.” My embarrassingly insincere and pathetically sorry sorries. I mutter them under my breath, to myself, alone, as I walk, as I trudge along the sidewalk, my head bowed, my mind clouded, my eyes turned resolutely elsewhere, my conclusion predetermined, predestined, incontestable. They do not hear me, and they do not see me, and they do not greet me, and they do not care. They do not know me.
A D Jameson is a writer, video artist, teacher, and performer. His fiction has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Brooklyn Rail, the Mississippi Review Online, elimae, Caketrain, PANK, and elsewhere; it is forthcoming in Fiction International, Mad Hatters’ Review, and Action, Yes, among other places. His novel Giant Slugs is forthcoming from Lawrence and Gibson later this year, and his prose collection Amazing Adult Fantasy is forthcoming from Mutable Sound, also later this year. He contributes regularly to the group blog Big Other.
Reckonings
When navigating by dead reckoning, it’s important to start from a known point,
time; time to give the queen a bath.
A point. Start from a point, a needle:
A compass bats its metal lash.
Make the queen’s skirts.
Make the queen in time, Columbus.
The queen’s black bronze skirts fall in wet folds in the mist of her fountain’s white jets in the Plaza de Isabel la Catolica. Her place. Steady now: Colón, black-bronze too, waits at her wet feet, half-kneeling: She’s holding metal paper.
Reckoning. Star from a known: she’s going to say yes.
My name can be Isabel.
My feet are wet too.
I felt some anchor.
I fell into water, getting out. I heard intruders. Somewhere in this house, in this heat. Somewhere in the center of this city in the dead center of this country.
What is a paper monarch? One who floats?
Twice thieves ripped the copper cables from the walls in the corridors, but I can’t escape my windows, barred with scrolled wrought iron: not even in case of fire.
I stood in the dark, listening. I called the police, twelve arrived in three cars in blue uniforms, they call them smurfs, still they are handsome and they found no one.
Seems I’m all wet.
What is a viceroy?
She deals double, laments Colón, wrapped in irons like an anchor and shuttled beneath the surface of the Atlantic from Santo Domingo to Cadiz. She dissolves
breadcrumbs into the sea: using the method thought to be used by animals, we move through the world.
It’s important to start from a known point:
Give me what I want and I will give you what you want.
My face was wet. Later, I fell.
The bruise will be long and purple-black, the shape of a fish on my shin. I smell frying pork, frying cod, frying dough and hot chocolate from the Plaza de Lavapies. It’s the August fair, so it’s August and I’m a cripple who breaks her leg in the tub, reaching for a towel, slipping. To reckon, to put in order, to estimate, or to tell, may have come from to reach.
A known: I want to go home.
I reach only Palos de la Frontera, the street with the closed post office so no letters; Palos de la Frontera, where the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria’ve all given me the slip: if I had made it in time:
I swear I am seaworthy;
I fell in the bath.
Count steps, name streets something from the past so the frontier sticks.
Like me, Colón looks behind him as he moves through the world. Counts bubbles in his wake. Watch’s a needle. Waits for a blinking boy with a glassful of sand to turn the hours. Waits for this even in his sleep, fears the boy will sleep too, fears this out loud in his diary, fears he will be lost in time
time for her bath!
it’s easy to lose sight of his face in the inky scrolls of her black bronze skirts, the metal papers she withholds. It is her place. There are over seventy portraits of different men who are him
a man I knew lived in the Plaza Colón on the eighth floor of a building with the name COLÓN perched in pink letters twinkling 24/7 on the roof, and I don’t ever want him to discover me
in the bath, dreaming a metal queen made out of paper
Cristóbal Colón, your name covers that silver ice bucket, those black sheets, the being seduced by him.
Christ on a cruise! Navigational techniques so crude, like an animal’s. Every hour with that needle boring a hole in the vellum map—ink can’t penetrate skin—one hole each hour, one star to drain speed, duration, direction—
In English this process is called “pricking her off.”
speed duration direction
leaving darker prints on the black leather couch, eating jamon iberico and langostinos, big cold prawns in clear pink shells, drinking lambrusco from an icy silver bucket till I said, “Just so you know, I’m not going to sleep with you.”
Why not, he said. Conquistador, I called him, right into his prawn-pink ear.
Where did you learn that word. That word is for Italians.
Awake she admits to only two baths in her life, that of birth and that bridal one.
Give me what I want, I swear I am seaworthy.
A paper monarch might fly or fail to convince.
His beard drips salt into his skin map.
Many people claim his body. Drug dead twice over the ocean, he popped up in a box in Santo Domingo, while supposed safe in state in Sevilla.
The queen will not make up her mind. Her black bronze dress is heavy with folds. She likes not making it up. Indecision is a kind of fruit. She holds metal paper in her black bronze hand. Metal paper is her fruit.
Secret eating in the bath is a known symptom.
The DNA tests are not conclusive. We blame the officials in Santo Domingo. For seven centuries, pilgrims follow a trail of cockle shells through the Pyrenees to Compostela, the end of the known world.
Many try to claim.
I put my hands, my mouth on him under your name.
Amargo is “bitter.” Amar is a verb widely used as an exercise when practicing Latin conjugation, how the west was
or love
I fell—I felt—anchor
After seven centuries and a beheading, St. James popped up in Compostela field of stars with a sword and a wild yen to slay the Moors.
She will not take up her mind.
The saint’s boat was carved from a single stone, smooth as his neck. There was no captain.
Give me what I want, I want to go home.
On the starburst walls in the Hall of the Ambassadors in the Alhambra where it is claimed that Isabel la Catolica gave in to Colón and put her name to paper, the walls are covered with Arabic script reading:
No one conquers but Allah.
Anything you want.
an ironclad contract: I am my own stone boat when I fold my knees like paper and float, drawing a bath: ink doesn’t sink into skin.
Stars broke in my dream and I woke, my building shaking. I dove for my glasses.
When the saintly ship approached, the sea’s welcome washed a bridegroom away from shore, holding him close.
The living room was hot, dark and smoky. My pink nylon curtains glowed danger-red: there’s only one way out of this apartment, and it’s barred with black iron.
His bride wept and prayed to St. James.
My street was filled with firemen and smurfs, flames and the skeleton of the illegally-parked black full-size van whose doors, windows and hood burst with booms and pops: the stars broke in my dream.
When her tears dried the sea retreated in a pale rush and left her her husband and his reflection on the gleaming sand, shaking the water and the cockle shells out of his hair and his beard.
When the firemen ran out of water, they used their axes.
In the Ridley Scott film, Columbus uses an orange.
Someone stretched the hose around the corner, pumped more water.
high tide for a bath
When the van began to cool, ladies in square nightgowns came to their windows and leaned out on their elbows. I stuck my pale, wet arm through my black iron bars and waited till the police light hit me. “The whole world is up in 2D,” one smurf said, sniffing for fire.
the cockle shells that mark the pilgrims’ trail, when filled with water and lifted to the face, make fine drinking vessels.
My phone lines are melted on the face of my building and with them my connection to the whole world: the New World or what is my Old World: I want to tell someone that I’m in the middle of an explosion and that debris is raining on my windows, that wet glass is like my skin, that they are shining flashlights and water
a known: I want to go home
a paper monarch says nothing: she dissolves.
At this point, you could tell me anything.
Even his lips have small teeth in them.
Our tracks being circles proves we are not lost: a white van with a worn fan belt passed my window the morning after the fire: a ghost, whaling.
my leg caught in a black sheet: waking
saint james
cut apart like a starfish
wash a man fresh
from the sea for me
good-looking, salty
Sucking the yellow string brains from a cold pink langostino, he asks, what will you serve me when you seduce me at your home?
I felt anchor. Well. Indecision. A kind of fruit.
Emily Anderson’s fiction and poetry have appeared in various journals including the Denver Quarterly, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Caketrain, Sawbuck, Coconut, and elimae. She lives in Madrid.
A Forgotten Picture
James Tadd Adcox
A FORGOTTEN PICTURE
The new library downtown was larger than the previous downtown library, filled with shelf after shelf, all unmarked. Even the sections were unmarked. The floors, too. The woman at the information desk told me that the city had cut the funding before the new library could pay to have anything marked. Politics, she told me. It is the duty of each administration to destroy the work of the previous administration. Bad timing, she said. Rotten conditions for a new library, I agreed. Not even the staff knew where most of the books were. There were entire floors out-of-order, with books on the first world war next to Plato’s Timaeus, next to a recording of sound effects used in the film Red Dawn, and the elevator hidden behind boxes of misplaced Newsweeks. I soon found myself lost in Contemporary Poetry, or what at any rate appeared to be Contemporary Poetry—it was impossible to know if, beside Eavan Boland, I might find The Faith of George W. Bush. It was easier to read right there than to try to check anything out. I wasn’t sure, after all, if I’d be able to find my way back to the circulation desk. In the back of one of Mary Ruefle’s books, the one with the poem about James Dean as a farmer, was a picture of a teenage girl, a digital photograph that someone had printed on low-quality paper, and then had traced, steady-handed, with a pencil, so that the effect was of a smoothing-out of whatever imperfections her face might once have had. I couldn’t not take the picture. It was as lost as I was. On the back, also in pencil, two names: X, love Y.
James Tadd Adcox lives in Chicago, where he edits Artifice Magazine (www.artificemag.com), and is at work on a PhD at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He has had work published in PANK, n+1, and The Literary Review, and forthcoming in Barrelhouse and Another Chicago Magazine.
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