Message in a Romance Novel
Message In a Romance Novel by Anuradha Kumar The day Mother was not waiting for us when we returned from school at our usual time, I knew she had gone to meet the man. He had written to her only two days ago, and I knew from the expression on her face. She looked dreamy and distracted, the face of someone making plans of her own. So, taking my younger sister by the hand, the two of us went to the house of a family friend. The auntie there knew my parents. I told her about our parents being away, that no one had come to pick us up from school. That got us sympathy and we stayed for lunch—a bit of rice with ghee, and a potato and pea curry. After that, I got my sister home safely. I admit I did that to impress my sister. To show her I could manage things when Mother let us down. She trusted me, even when we had to cross the dangerous main road that lay between our school and home. Many a time, I’d drag her across the moment a gap appeared in the traffic. Sometimes, there came a sudden squeal of brakes, an impatient horn somewhere, and then my sister’s frightened sob as I pulled her up onto the sidewalk. This was rare, though my sister thinks differently now. We never argue about it much; we know we must never reach a point where we get too judgmental about our mother. Once we were safely over, my sister always looked up at me scared, even angry. That afternoon when Mother wasn’t around, I felt a deep satisfaction as I bent down to hiss: “Today, she isn’t there to listen to you. Complain all you want.” In those days long ago, when we never felt the heat of summer nor the sharp sting of winter, crossing a road never seemed a big danger, not to me, as a fifteen-year-old. Also, stories were easy to find, make up, and tell; and, in the pre-television days, stories seemed to be everywhere, especially where my mother was concerned. My mother’s lover was a pilot. He flew old planes at a secret air base where my mother first met him. At that time, we did not live in Delhi, but somewhere in the east of the country. The air base had come up during the time of India’s war with China in the early 1960s. Set up with American help, the air base was two hours from the sea and located in a dry part of the country. Tall eucalyptus trees girded one side, looking over the curved steel hangars that glinted like daggers in the afternoon. The soil’s red underlayer was clearly visible amidst clumps of dry grass. On quiet days, we could hear the airplanes from a long way off, watch them land like beetles before vanishing into the clump of trees. Our house was on the edge with the eucalyptus trees, the last in a row of houses that faced an empty expanse of drying grass and tall yellow weeds. The weeds and the tall grass against the yellow and blue sky gave a strange shimmer to things. Sometimes I had a sense of things subtly moving, perhaps swaying—the trees, the tall grass, even the pebbles on the narrow muddy lane seemed to skitter, jump, and move away. The airstrip, as I discovered when I took my sister out on my new bicycle, was a straight gray aisle of concrete that ran from the hangars at one end to the four-storied, white-walled administrative edifices on the other. The planes, after landing, would zoom to that end, turn around, and then decelerating ever so slowly, would glide toward the hangar, rocking and shaking as if shrugging off the long journey it had just made. I don’t know when I first noticed that look of longing on my mother’s face. Did she look a little too long at the landing planes, or was it that one plane that did a series of stunts in the air as it filled up the sky one late afternoon? Its loops, its zigzags through the billowing white clouds? My mother lifted a hand to her mouth as the plane rose and fell, and then she looked at us, the quickest of glances to see if we had noticed. But I was the only one who knew about the pilot and what he meant to her. When he first came to the airbase, the pilot made the customary formal call to my parents. He came with his wife and son. I heard them that first evening as I peered through the loose pink curtain that fell like a waterfall, wavy in its thick folds, separating the drawing room from the rest of the house. As children we could wrap ourselves in it and twirl in its folds, and the grown-ups never noticed. Still, I saw things I never should have. The pilot was a short, trim man, a high forehead with twin just-developing bald spots, and eyes that twinkled and had a unique shine to them. The glow on his face was clearly visible, for he never once looked away from my mother. His smile never faltered either. I was surprised no one noticed. This, and the way our mother began mysteriously vanishing some afternoons. For my sister, it wasn’t really a mystery, but I was then a teenager, more observant, more judgmental, and critical of my mother. When she said she had to go to the bigger town, an hour away, to get supplies for the women’s club or for some charity work, I knew she was planning to meet the pilot somewhere. At the small airbase, we didn’t have to worry about crossing a big road—that would happen a year or so later after our father’s transfer to Delhi—or that someone had to be there when we came home from school. A big school bus,
Something So Simple
Something So Simple by Wendy Fontaine When the Head Start teacher reported my daughter’s trouble with routine eye exams, I shook my head. My child, age three, could see just fine. Not only was she already reading, she could tell me the color of Mrs. Leclerc’s flowers hanging on the porch across the street. She could say the color of the car parked two houses down in Mr. Romano’s driveway. Little did I know, Angie couldn’t see those things at all. She’d simply memorized her surroundings during our afternoon walks around the neighborhood. At the teacher’s suggestion, I made an appointment with a pediatric optometrist who later diagnosed Angie with astigmatism and amblyopia. Her vision, he said, was 20/200, meaning she needed 20 yards to see what others could see at 200. Meaning she was legally blind. Her first pair of eyeglasses came from Sears. Purple, inscribed with the name Hannah Montana – her favorite TV character at the time. No bigger than a deck of playing cards, they cost two hundred dollars, none of it covered by medical insurance. I put the total on my credit card. I was a single mother at the time, and the amount was exactly one week’s pay from my part-time job as a secretary. When we got home from the store, Angie sat cross-legged on the living room floor, took off her new glasses, and broke them in half. She’d heard the sales lady at Sears say that when little kids don’t like their glasses, they break them. We went back to the store the next day and bought them again. Later on, when Angie learned how to swim, things got much more complicated. ** Swim goggles were invented in 14th century Persia, where divers used tortoise shells polished to near transparency to go searching for pearls. By the 18th century, they’d devised wooden goggles with deeper frames that trapped a layer of air to improve visibility underwater. However, those goggles only worked when the divers looked straight down. As soon as they turned their heads, the air escaped, filling their goggles with water and rendering them useless. They had no choice but to squeeze their eyes tight and float back to the surface. ** Seven years after the Hannah Montana glasses, Angie got her first pair of prescription swim goggles. Up until that point, she’d been taking lessons and getting by with the one-size-fits-all goggles sold in the lobby at the pool. But when she made the junior competition team, she needed something stronger to see better underwater. Contacts were not an option since the lenses can absorb pool water and trap bacteria against a swimmer’s eyes. One day after school, I drove to an optical shop downtown, where Angie picked from the owner’s catalogue. Tony sold a thousand kinds of glasses but only one kind of swim goggle. The singular choice came in the color of the frame: blue or green. Angie asked for blue. Because her prescription was severe, her goggles needed to be custom-made. Give ‘em two weeks, he said, then charged me four hundred dollars. ** In 1911, an Englishman named Thomas “Bill” Burgess donned a pair of motorcycle goggles to breaststroke across the English Channel, which he successfully did on his 16th attempt. The goggles were not waterproof, though they did protect his eyes from splashes during the swim, which he completed in twenty-two hours and thirty-five minutes. Fifteen years later, his protégé Gertrude Ederle did him one better by using paraffin to seal her motorcycle goggles and becoming the first woman to freestyle across the channel. She endured fourteen hours and thirty-four minutes of strong waves and jellyfish stings. The press called her “Queen of the Waves.” ** Sometimes at swim practice Angie’s coach writes instructions on a white board at the edge of the pool, which of course my daughter can’t see. Sometimes that coach observes Angie not doing what she’s supposed to be doing or talking to the swimmer in the next lane over and assumes she’s goofing around. Really, she’s asking her teammates what the whiteboard says. Sometimes the coach calls her out of the pool and makes her do extra pushups on the hot concrete deck. On those days, she comes home with aching shoulders and bleeding fingers. I email the coach about my daughter’s vision issues, but that whiteboard always returns. Angie does the pushups anyway, knowing they will only make her stronger. ** In 1940, Popular Science magazine printed detailed instructions for readers interested in making their own wooden goggles at home. “With a little care and patience,” the writer explained, “you can construct diving goggles exactly like those used by the spear fishermen of the South Seas and expert Hawaiian divers!” ** At a swim competition during the pandemic, when parents were not allowed on deck, Angie’s goggles broke at the start of a relay. She’d already climbed up onto the block and prepared to start her dive when suddenly the nosepiece snapped. The lenses split apart, and the goggles fell around her neck. In a flurry, she tossed them aside and dove in for her portion of the swim – the anchor leg of the 4×50 freestyle relay. She had no choice; her team was counting on her. She swam hard, goggle-less and blinded, her eyes exposed to the harsh chlorinated water. Still, her team took first place. Her eyes stung for the rest of the day, but her smile never wavered. ** The first pair of commercialized goggles, which came in only one style and one size, appeared in an advertisement in Slimming World magazine in 1968. Marketed as aids for swim training only, they were not considered for use in competitions. They were for workouts only – for observing strokes underwater and protecting the eyes from irritation. One year later, British inventor Tony Godfrey developed a goggle made of polycarbonate, a plastic known to be thin, lightweight and shatter resistant. Swimmers, including some Olympic hopefuls,
Fiction_V16-1
Fiction Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Message In a Romance Novel by Anuradha Kumar FictionVolume 16.1 In Eternal by Lauren O’Donoghue FictionVolume 16.1
Poetry_V16-1
Poetry Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Biological Speculation by Briel Felton PoemVolume 16.1 The More We Go The More We Don’t Know a Thing by Briel Felton PoemVolume 16.1 Away We Go by Claire Wahmanholm PoemVolume 16.1 Dew on the Sea by Claire Wahmanholm PoemVolume 16.1 The Cabinda Spouses by Landa Wo PoemVolume 16.1 And After, No One Lowered Their Flag by Matthew Williams PoemVolume 16.1 Afterbirth (fiction) by Rachel Stempel PoemVolume 16.1 I have two DNAs one belongs to my old by Roman Iorga PoemVolume 16.1 I Licked a Leaf by Ron Antonucci PoemVolume 16.1 i bleed for the first time on a toilet in Versailles by Sirka Elspass (translated by Anne-Sophie Balzer) PoemVolume 16.1 Nothing is more sad than a waning moon by Sirka Elspass (translated by Anne-Sophie Balzer) PoemVolume 16.1
Nonfiction_V16-1
Nonfiction Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Something So Simple by Wendy Fontaine Non-FictionVolume 16.1 Yellowfin by Abby McCord Non-FictionVolume 16.1 Fears, Explained by Kayla Jessop Non-FictionVolume 16.1
Yellowfin
Nonfiction Home Art by Alice Stone-Collins Yellowfin by Abby McCord There’s a delicate painting of koi fish on the porcelain bottle my mom pours her sake from. My dad and brother are discussing politics, their voices muffled over the music. We are sitting in a Japanese restaurant; the light is dim but illuminates each table and our faces in a soft, warm glow. Various staff rush behind me with boards of fresh sushi and steaming bowls of chili garlic noodles. Our waitress emerges from the chef hats and smokey pans as she brings out our food: ginger salad, miso soup, vegetable tempura, and rolls of sushi we share. On the plate sits a decadent Philadelphia roll with salmon roe and a dynamite maki roll with yellowfin tuna. The yellowfin is red like a pomegranate—slightly pink but rich and deep. I reach for a piece with my chopsticks and devour its bright taste as if it came straight from the salty waters. Yellowfin tuna typically reside in the epipelagic zone, the surface layer of the ocean that mixes with waves, wind, and raw heat from the sun as if it were freckled. At its base is the thermocline, the zone where temperature drastically drops and descends into deep, indigo water—the hidden, pale skin of the ocean. Yellowfin are strong schoolers; they swim in a strange synchronized fashion as if they are an intricate ballet following an unseen director. The restaurant is full for a Sunday night. I wonder why all these people are here and if it’s for the same reason as us—a distraction from the holiday break’s inevitable end or to soak up the moments with our loved ones before splitting across the country to different homes. To the right of us are two men in their twenties. They drink beer and wear hats and hunch their gym-addicted shoulders to watch a game of soccer on their phones. They don’t look at each other but are still together in their own way. I can tell they think the waitress is pretty by the way their eyes soften when she walks by. To the left of us is another family; the parents sit closely while their adolescent daughter is across from them. Her glasses sit lopsided as she rests her chin in her hand and impassively pokes the table with a chopstick. I wonder what brings her melancholic expression, if she’s experiencing the confusion of being a teenager or maybe missing an older sibling who couldn’t come home for the holiday. I wonder if she’s navigating the dark water for the first time. Directly behind our table is a wooden wall that splits the restaurant into two sections. It’s some type of glossy oak also illuminated in a soft glow. A long, stringy plant sits on top, its vines daintily traveling down the polished wood. Somewhere in a gap of the plant’s speckled leaves, I spot another version of me across the restaurant. She is 18 years old, sitting on the edge of a booth, shoved beside her boyfriend at the time and his friends she doesn’t know. Six years ago, on homecoming night, dressed in heels and hairspray and uncertainty, sitting in a Japanese restaurant. As if a wave drags me under its current, I am thrust over the oak wall to be by her. I swim and tumble into her energy as the temperature drops and my vision blurs in shades of indigo. She is navigating the dark water. I watch her closely, remembering her mind and the way it works. Her dress hugs her stomach in ways she doesn’t like, but she wonders if a subtle suggestion to what was underneath would impress him. She crosses her arms in her lap and smiles as he laughs with his body turned away from her. She desperately wants to hide her pale skin, although she cannot hide her freckling shoulders from coming to the surface. I know her contentment is only a fragile shell she inhabits. She knows somewhere deep within her there is me, a version of her that knows what it’s like to swim in the sun-kissed waters. She doesn’t know I am standing beside her, that I have always been with her, even in the dark water. I want to scream I am here I am here I am here. She sits small with her shoulders low and razor-nicked legs crossed as if the space will burst if she takes up too much of it. She picks at her fried rice with her fork, stirring the steam until there is none left. Her gaze finds the interlaced fingers of the couple next to her as she notices the empty space in between her own. When I reach for her, another wave thrusts me under its current, and I am being pulled over the oak wall again. I desperately claw and cry to her so I can tell her all the things she needs to hear: you do not need to fear being alone or taking up space or wandering into uncertainty. Somewhere, somehow, I am with you, and I know all the beauty and pain and heartbreak and love you have yet to feel. Trust me—let your world crack and burst and you will finally see how tenderly sunlight dances upon your skin. Her innocent, uncertain eyes only catch a glimpse of me. But I know, in this one millisecond transcending across years, she hears me. Breathless and drenched in an enigmatic feeling, I am placed back into my seat; warm, gentle water swirls around me. There are still discussions of politics and sake to be sipped. Our rolls of brightly colored sushi have diminished to clumps of sticky rice and chopstick-poked wasabi. The yellowfin has been eaten. I look through the gap in the leaves but only see an empty table. In this fleeting moment—where the four of us sit under a
Afterbirth (fiction)
Afterbirth (fiction) by Rachel Stempel Today’s horoscope told me it’s okay to lie.It’s not that I need permission but I need something. (Apparently this is self-sabotage. Or, at least, the reek of desperation.) Last night the way the hallway backlit her bedhead turned me—I don’t want to hurt you, really, but I don’t care if I do. (If you think you’re using me it won’t be that bad.) Sometimes God speaks to me through the Telehealth waiting room and the electric hum of computer silence is hymnal. Sometimes God speaks to me through the Telehealth waiting room and the message is swallowed with one-hundred silver bullets. I may’ve stolen the blueprint for my inner world but now it’s as mine as anyone’s: desert oasis, never enough money, every permutation of man. And all sound delivered through an unplugged box TV while someone who is not me (honorific) watches the longest baseball game of all time. (Someone who is not me is: a fire escape; the last yellow raincoat in Moscow; a pocket watch that fits so well in the mouth it settles into the palate—diagnostically speaking, a torus palatinus: still too much but at least hidden.) I am learning how wrong I am about everything and this is not how I wanted my year to start. It was only last month I finished taxonomizing the past year’s guilt so it looked like I’d some to show. (I’d gotten work-high in the spreadsheets and thought I must be getting better.) Tucked away in grooves (first, of your arms; then, of your chest), tonight I will sleep to be rutted the same. I do my best work before bird-dawn. My sex is goal-oriented but the best sex is a bad sentence: bleating and in need of a tourniquet. Naked, before a range of immutables can interrupt. The bouquet vending machine replaces your phonetics. We recite sound, slaughter—my shirt smells like it, like blood. I try to sound what out through cryptic fingerings on an invisible clarinet. You misread the notes. It’s natural to do so. Tell me something. Anything. I’m an excavator of meaning even in the smallest sample. Stop. I’ve no frame of reference for abundance. I’m so something, it’s impossible. (Or, at least, the reek of desperation.) Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz
i have two DNAs one belongs to my old
i have two DNAs one belongs to my old by Romana Iorga self the other one is my sister’si don’t know how to write about illnessi write about fall fever & hopesomeone would read between the linesthere usually was someone who would check my pulse draw blood hookme up to an IV change my bedsheetswash the floor the toilet the sinkbring in the food close the blinds wipeoff my sick change my bedsheetstake the food out uneaten help meto the bathroom no modesty leftafter a while even when i wasdischarged what’s the point everyonehad seen everything i never feltmore unseen except that daysomeone stopped outside my reverseairflow room & peeked in she waspale she was old she was wearing allblack for a moment i thoughti was a goner then she moved on & ilived down the hallway someonecleaned out the room for a new patient Poetry Home Art by Morgan Auten-Smith
The More We Go The More We Don’t Know a Thing
The More We Go The More We Don’t Know A Thing by Briel Felton Even the yellowjackets are confused. The mosquitos, the wasps & the bees all in a tizzy. Say brotha it must be August, but I don’t hear the cicadas hollering with those big ass lungs. What the fuck is happnin’? There ain’t a flower to steal or skin to bite into. Just yesterday sweat pooled above my lip in the middle of this hot ass winter. I don’t know what’s going on and the yellowjacket who decided to use my apartment as hospice, don’t either. He asked to bum a cig. I told him I don’t smoke, and he let out of a string of obscenities which you do when you’re dying. I offered him leftover lentils. He looked up at me slow. Sweet cakes, you’ll never stop being confused ‘cause small patches change just as quickly as the world does. I ask him how he knew much about the restofthaworld. Television. I’ve heard your prayers at night. Begging. Bargaining. Answers don’t really do much. Might I suggest not looking for them. Just— & and the damn ministering yellowjacket croaked and I sucked his corpse up into the vacuum and finished the lentils. Poetry Home Art by Suzanne Benton
Biological Speculation
Biological Speculation by Briel Felton I bought the green carton of Newports. Lit one to time it and gave the rest to someone in need: a 14-year-old asking me to buy a 6-pack of beer in the 7/11 for him and his friends. I wonder if they are pretending to be their fathers. I thought my gift would take longer to kill them. So, these are the wonder years. All I know is the suffix -ette denotes something small. Cigar+ette= a little bit closer to it. Is the ‘it’ all we branch our organs towards? Like a little death, a deathette. I have things to learn. I still don’t know when to replace my underwear. I am an empty milk carton licking at the asphalt. The most astounding thing about us is we are made of the same things as a pile of dirt & no matter how many cigarettes we light the body talks us back to life. I’ve held my hand over a flame before. I pictured myself jerking the wheel too hard on a highway. 7 billion billion billion atoms decided to be me. What were the meeting notes in this urgency? In the second it takes to light a cigarette; my body has made a million red blood cells. I’ve prayed and cussed just as many times. Cells are irreversibly dying and I’m not so sure leaving anything behind will fix the flood. It depends on how much you inhale but it took about 7 minutes. The inhales were uncareful and maybe then I realized the expanse of lungs and their capabilities. Poetry Home Art by Peter L. Scacco