Judith Skillman

Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Judith Skillman Judith Skillman paints expressionist works in oil on canvas and board. She is interested in feelings engendered by the natural world. Her paintings have graced the covers of Thin Air Magazine, Pithead Chapel, The Awakenings Review, and other journals. Work appears in The Penn Review, Artemis, Raven Chronicles, and elsewhere. Skillman has studied visual art at McDaniel College, Pratt Fine Arts Center, and Seattle Artist League (SAL). Shows include The Pratt, Galvanize, and Seattle Artist League. Visit judithskillman.com, www.etsy.com/shop/JkpaintingsStore, www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/823323 Website: www.judithskillman.com. Red Sea

On the Other Side of the Wall​

On the Other Side of the Wall by Andrea Bianchi      When I hear the girl’s scream pierce the cracked plaster between the new guy’s apartment and mine, I do nothing.       My eyes widen, waiting toward the wall in the 1:00 a.m. dark. My back tenses against the mattress. My legs stiffen beneath the covers in the center of the bed.       My breath halts. the way it froze in the grip of Rod’s icy fingers on that night two winters ago when his elbows pinned my breasts to our bed and his hands compressed the tissue of my throat, his thumbs collapsing my airway. Flattening my larynx. So when I opened my mouth to try to scream, it did not make a sound      Silence now.       And then a thud. Perhaps a faint scream.       Perhaps I am imagining.       I unclench my fingers and pull apart the heavy covers. Test my feet on the floor. My knees wobble. I tiptoe barefoot to the bedroom wall and press my ear against its smooth cool.       Maybe thudding with the bass of the new guy’s stereo. But just the ticking of a pipe swishes within.       I tip-toe across my apartment, to the opposite wall, maybe echoing with the shrieking laughter of the old woman’s favorite late-night talk show. But against my palm, the plaster flattens, as lifeless as a blank TV screen. Then a thump. A far-off wail. Maybe out on the city streets below. I tip-toe to the balcony and peer down to the sidewalk, where teenage girls used to squeal beside the boys they liked as they pedaled toward the last suburban train. Back before the sidewalks emptied, eerie, silent, save for the wailing sirens of police cars, flashing their blue rays into vacant storefronts as if with some kind of ultraviolent cleansing agent, some cure for the strange new virus that has come to hover above the whole earth, to choke the air, strangling the lungs of the rare masked pedestrians who dare to sneak down the downtown sidewalks beneath my balcony.      But tonight, far below, no one is wandering.  The only wailing is the wind.      I clutch the railing. Inhale to slow the palpitations in my throat—a heart condition that the doctors in disheveled white coats on TV have warned might turn deadly, even in young people like me, if I were to breathe a contaminated stream of air down there, beyond the safety—and the isolation—of my apartment walls.       A crash against the plaster. A rattle of the dishes on my kitchen shelves.       I march across the floorboards to the wall that separates me from the new guy’s fist.       But as I raise mine in response, to pound my reprimand, shout my threat to summon the police, I hear Rod’s long-ago curse, spat out after my hands grasped at our old apartment’s doorframe, after my feeble cry for help bounced and slid down the outside hallway’s walls. “Now you’ve done it,” he declared as he slammed the door against my fingertips. “Now the police are going to come, and now I’m going to get my gun.”       I know that if the blue beams of police flashlights were to sweep up tonight from the streets and pierce through the new guy’s door, he too might flash a revolver in response to the police pistols, and then bullets might rip apart the plaster.      My hand drops. My palm opens, empty. The silence stretches out the length of the wall. As the blue-lit numbers of the clock on the stove flash past one by one, cleansing the last echoes of the girl’s screams from the quiet darkness of my apartment, I imagine a corresponding blue glow in the room next door. Perhaps a football game replaying on the TV screen. Or maybe a more scripted sort of gore, flashing through some slasher plotline, perhaps prompting the girl’s frightened screams. Perhaps that crash was simply the slamming of a cabinet as the new guy retrieved snacks to accompany the horror film.       Perhaps any actual horror was only my imagining. *****      I started imagining the details of the new guy’s life the night he emerged, mysterious behind his mask, from our building’s elevator.       As the doors slid open, his frame blocked the entrance with the bruising bulk of a football player, perhaps an offensive tackle a few years ago on his college team, his torso wider than the pizza box in his big-knuckled grip, ready for the game later.       The bill of his back-turned cap, which bore Rod’s favorite team logo, tried to suppress the tufts of brown hair punching out in all directions from his head. The edge framed his blue eyes, steady above the blue edge of his mask, as his eyes pierced the hem of my miniskirt and scraped down my bare legs to my heels.       I stepped toward the elevator to slide down to the mailboxes—to the packages of stilettos and party dresses I had begun ordering in my isolation, in anticipation of far-off, imaginary parties—when the girl materialized.       In the shadows behind him, she wore no mask. Only a kind of grimace, her lower lip twisting. Her eyebrows arched, as if trying to form a protective canopy above her body. She shuffled off toward his new apartment behind the stubborn wall of his back.       Then the elevator doors closed into a barrier again between me and them.       Through the wall later, though, I heard him yell.       “Football, baby!” he said. “Let’s pound some skin!”       His bare feet no doubt thumping one after the other up onto the coffee table, his hand stretching out with a beer bolted to one knee. On the other knee, perhaps the girl’s palm was

Take Care.

Nonfiction Home Art by Judith Skillman Take Care. by Nicole Morris The biopsy revealed the start of tooth and bone material, keratin and hair, the beginning and ending of what would have been my twin at conception. Located on the right side of my uterus, holding this flotsam and weighing just under a gram, the equivalent of a single raisin or a quarter of a teaspoon of sugar, was a tumor the size of a plump grape.    We won’t have oncology’s final report for ten days, but it’s looking good. I don’t see any cause for concern. The surrounding tissue was clear, and it looks good. You did great.   In my head I thought, how does a person unconscious, under the backward counting water of general anesthesia, do great? Did I take the medicine well? Or did she mean my body did great under the pressure of foreign instruments being inside of it? Did I do great with the stress of my skin opening under bright lights with masked faces? The origin story of my womanhood and the site of my motherhood the main character in the operating theater. Did my wounded womb do great in not fruiting cancer?   The surgeon told me this very good news while looking past my shoulder at the chrome wall clock hung above a pastoral scene of baby animals circled together under a sunless blue. Breathe, the poster commanded.  She avoided eye contact as she spoke to me, which struck me as odd, evasive even.    But this is good news, doc. I wanted to say “Doc” the way Bugs Bunny did. Maybe she was lost in her own thoughts while she autopiloted this update. Was it too late in the day for a coffee? Would that ruin her sleep? Did she leave the chicken breast out to thaw? Would her son call that evening? Would he remember today was her birthday? Or maybe she was embarrassed to see me, the obediently sleeping patient, now awake, eyes open and unblinking. This peculiar girl, me, needing one ovary removed, along with a cyst, and while we’re at it, let’s tie up those tubes, too. Weeks before the procedure, this same doctor tenderly, softly, delicately, asked if I’d want to be sterilized while they were ‘in there.’ It would be painless, and my insurance covered it.    Sure, I said. Fuck it, yeah, why not. I thought I saw her flinch internally at how easily I agreed to close down shop, to seal off the dam. I’d had two babies, now high schoolers; I saw no need to be greedy and ask the stork for more. Plus, I flashed on how liberating it would be to have unsafe sex with no fear of pregnancy. Sexually transmitted illnesses were always the lone bullet in the game of one-night stands and casual encounters; they were resolvable. Mostly.  But an unplanned pregnancy in a country where politicians were pushing for murder charges to apply to abortion, that escalated the self-harm of Russian roulette to a wider and more permanent wound.    Did she remember that conversation now? Or was she offended when I showed up for surgery this Tuesday, at five in the morning, in the newly remodeled outpatient wing of the Catholic hospital on the far east side of town, with a fresh Brazilian wax?  In preparation for this procedure, even though no one would be going near my down there, I paid eighty-five dollars to have it all removed. It felt like a good-mannerly thing to do at the time. And an expensive gesture of anxiety at being naked in a room full of strangers. A Brazilian in the middle of a snowed-in winter up in the mountains of New Mexico during a dating slump when not a soul was visiting my down there was a cost I felt I needed to pay. A tax. A toll paid without being asked so that, while the surgeon would be bypassing that now hairless seam between my legs and going straight to the middle of me by way of lower abdomen into the uterus, landing on fallopian tubage, she would see that I went to painful and costly lengths to take care of my womanhood.   What’s up, Doc? I said it without meaning to. I was thinking it, but now I’ve said it, interrupting her post-op care instructions. No water on the wound site for six days; no excessive activity; expect some spotting; no sexual intercourse for four weeks.    Uh. I—she looked at me now.   Shit, sorry, I offered. More embarrassed at my Bugs Bunny outburst than at the bit of drool that came with it. Why was my face numb? I can’t feel my face when I’m with you. Who sang that? The Weeknd. I need to remember to listen to that song on the drive home. Wait, when am I going home?  Like she could hear my doped-up thoughts inside my head, she returned to my hearing ears now with, It’s fine. The anesthesia can have a euphoric effect. Makes some patients find themselves saying or doing things they normally wouldn’t.  Yes. What? Oh. Sorry. I thought I heard a question in there. It took all of my facial muscles to not laugh. More drool. I lifted up my paw to wipe my face elegantly. With my paw. Wait that’s my hand. Why is it furry?   Doc, I feel weird. Then I laid down on the paper-sheeted table I’d been sitting on. No memory of arriving in this room now. What time was it? I’ll close my eyes for a moment and get my shit together.    That’s normal, you’re ok. The anesthesia will fade from your system in an hour or so. I have a note here that your ride is waiting for you. Can you hear me, Nicole? Ok good. I see you nodding yes. Your ride is here, er, Amir? Amir. He is ready for you,

I Was Waiting for My Turn and It Almost Killed Me

Nonfiction Home Art by Patrice Sullivan I Was Waiting for My Turn and It Almost Killed Me by Maureen Pendras      Were someone to ask me now, after it all, the feeling of a dying organ, I’d still struggle for words. It might be better represented in sound. Something discordant, soft then growing louder but unnerving. You’d want to get up and move around; walk it off. Even better—a drawing. One panel: a swimmer moves about on the surface while underneath a large, dark shape lurks. Nothing yet has happened—but it will. The large shape kicks closer then recedes, in and out of focus. Impending doom.       I would not be the swimmer, or the shape, or the water itself—but the totality of the thing, all of it together—about to become terrible.        I was doing what they asked of me. Waiting. I didn’t think I should be waiting but what did I know? I was the one in the gown, with the pain, not the one holding the clipboard, making decisions.       Initially, I’d had short, sharp pains in my abdomen—distinct and obvious. I tried to reshuffle the order of my body as I sat in my chair at work: lift up my ribs rather than rest them on my stomach; shift backwards and stretch out the line of my body; pull my head up like it was tied on a string—none of these movements helped. This feeling, like a cord stretched to its limit, would not go away.      I called my doctor’s office to get an appointment that day.      “It’s probably your appendix,” said the one available doctor, noting pain more on my right side.       “Let’s get you downstairs for an ultrasound. They’ll get you in-and-out, then you can come back here, and we’ll go over it.” He nodded reassuringly and I felt some relief with the possible diagnosis.      When I came back though, thirty minutes later, his mood had shifted. He stood at his workstation and there was no avuncular looking it over together. We stood right there in the hallway as he explained: “Call a surgeon,” he said flatly, shaking his head. “You’ve got an eleven-centimeter mass in your abdomen.”       “A surgeon?” I asked. I imagined quiet conversation and time consider options. Mostly I imagined time to think. When I asked him if I’d be able to work the next day, he looked dumbfounded and repeated, “You need a surgeon.” I was thinking about the wrong thing.      Even in this swirl, I noticed a question looming there, just say it, just ask him, “But it’s not cancer?”       Was I even supposed to say the words? Admit its potential in my mind? I was in superstitious territory, maybe this was like the devil, or rain, you speak it and there it is.      I watched him, studied him the way the rabbit studies the hound, alert to every twitch. He shifted his weight backward, away from me and averted his eyes. I thought, I am in trouble. His words were nondescript, something like, “We don’t yet know,” but the body language read, get it together, this is bad.      The chaos in my head made me feel like I had taken off on a merry-go-round, fruitlessly searching for a still point and trying not to throw up.       I was still grappling with his initial directive: call a surgeon. Like there wasn’t even time to go find one, I needed to be talking with one already. And already I was behind.      I did call a surgeon. I remembered I knew one—my OB—I’ll call her Dr. A, someone I’d known since I was eighteen years old. But she had just retired from doing surgery. She set me up with one of her partners—Dr. B—for later that day.       Dr. B looked me over quickly. I told her of the pain and that I was having trouble eating. She felt my pulse, looked at my tongue, checked my chart and said, “Hmm, I’m going to admit you to the hospital. Wait here.”      I waited two hours to be admitted, like waiting for a hotel room to be cleaned and cleared. I sat in Dr. B’s waiting room, eyes closed, willing every part of my body to slow down. I was getting myself to the place I needed to be. Slow, steady breaths, one by one. I could make it; I would make it. When the bed was ready, I walked slowly over to the seventh floor.       Before I went up though, I found the hallway with my dad’s picture in it. It was an old hallway connecting buildings off the beaten path. There—housing the photos of the Chiefs of Staff for the hospital—was my dad. He had died twenty-five years before from a brain tumor. But in this realm—his realm—he sat still and confident. Handsome and familiar. I made a silent plea, help me. I so wanted him looking over my shoulder. Then kept my steady pilgrimage to floor seven.        The nurses seemed surprised to see me. I said, “Hi, I’m being admitted. I’m a patient. My doctor called earlier.” I felt a need to explain myself as they looked doubtful, pursed lips, sharp tilt of the head. I seemed to be doing this all wrong.       But they checked “the board,” and there was my name. I had a place. Their faces eased; I got into a gown and slowly laid back into bed.       I was dehydrated, hungry, and panting to get my breath, butterfly pulse. Once I had an IV and pain meds, Dr. B came in at the end of her day.      “Wow, you look so much better. I thought you were crashing. We’ll get you an MRI, maybe do the surgery tonight. I should get the results around

Šljivovica

Šljivovica by Celeste Colarič-Gonzales In the native lands    of the ghosts / who formed me / beyond the building  and unbuilding / of bone borders, bloodying / rivers of language / and names  eroding mountains / of faces and dirt, dispersing / across time and space / splintering / a body region / into dozens of / organs, appendages, nations / for all my ancestors lacked / their dirt homed / more ocean-hills of plums / than they could eat / so they drank them / across distinct lands and dialects / they harvested, summer through fall / fermented, through winter / palmed orbs of sunset / mauve-purple, crimson-gold / pulpy flesh falling in plumps / from the knuckle bones and nail-beds / of my ghost’s hands / dripping in red, sour-bitter juice / fingers working small globes / to their stone-cores / each of their parts / a territory divided / made useful    to the whole / seed, skin, and sweet blood / no additive needed / but time   their sacrificial bodies / sufficient / in yeast and sugar / for the wild   of their own / nature Poetry Home Art by GJ Gillespie

Nicole Morris

Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Nicole Morris Nicole Morris is a working-class, mixed-race Black girl poet who writes essays. Her writing has been or will be featured in Banshee, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, the Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Los Angeles, she lives in Western Ireland. Take Care. Take Care.

Maureen Pendras

Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Maureen Pendras Maureen Pendras is a writer and psychoanalyst living in Seattle, WA. She is a faculty member at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and has a private practice. Currently she’s at work on an essay collection and her essay, “Her Name is Mama,” was recently published in Under the Sun magazine. Her friends own a restaurant in which they describe their fare as Earth Food for Earth People, and this is one possible description of her writing. I Waited for My Turn and It Almost Killed Me I Waited for My Turn and It Almost Killed Me