Arlene awoke to the loud purring and uneasy shuffling of Purdy the pregnant barn cat ready to pop. She reached over with a chin scratch to calm the aches of the mother-to-be. Once Purdy gave birth, Mrs. Krieger promised Arlene a kitten to keep as an early eighth birthday present. She couldn’t wait to raise the baby animal the same way the Krieger’s had adopted and raised her on their Wisconsin cattle farm. Every day was a new chore, a new harvest, or a new blossom as the grass grazing field blended into the golden hay field, all rippling like water in the wind. When Arlene’s unwed mother got knocked up once again by a local, she was sent to live in a convent for wayward women near Chicago, where the land swelled with hardened brick and empty pavement. The concept of family wasn’t as black and white as other townspeople liked to preach.
Barbara Kuessner Hughes: Parakeet Green
It’s always too late in the day to get through to Dylan, or too early.
‘Dylan . . .’ Annabeth says, going up to the sofa where he has sprawled for the past six months, and looking down at his clammy face.
Either he’s just had a drink and entered a parallel plane where he’s unreachable, or he needs a drink and can’t concentrate. Annabeth feels like rapping on his skull with her knuckles. Hello, is anybody home?
He surprises her by opening his eyes. ‘Going shopping?’ His voice is oiled with inebriation. She looks into those dark pools, once bright, now brackish, searching for the slightest shine of affection. She might as well be gazing at a stranger in a tube train.
Elisa A. Garza: Katherine, Making the Most of Henry V
In 1415 Henry V of England, convinced he had claim to France by inheritance, invaded. Nearly five years later, he had defeated the French armies and took the princess Katherine as his bride to seal the treaty that recognized him as heir of France. An Invasion, An Offer At least he is young, she thinks. She would ask the messenger for his words, and to tell her his looks, the way he frowned, no laughed, at her father's meager offer. A few minor dukedoms! She already knows that he must have all or nothing. The War, the Wait Would he move over her, she wonders, as he now rides over France, slow, and sure only of a victorious outcome? Que magnifique! Surely he would make strong love after so much war? She is learning the English, to loosen her tongue from its heavy sounds, and blushes at the looseness to come. Consummation She feels his hands hot in hers, listens to his fractured French— he is nervous, bubbling like champagne! And she can only stare, think of the world they will make together, the waiting finally over.
For more on Elisa A. Garza, please see our Authors page.
Elisa A. Garza: Philomela Reads Her Weave
"[s]he set up her threads on a barbarian loom and wove a scarlet design on a white ground, which pictured the wrong she had suffered." from Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VI Procne, dear sister, into this cloth I have woven our sad story, but the white wool will dry your tears, as it has dried mine. I trust these images to you, worked on a crude loom built from twigs and vines pulled through the window. Remember our servant, old Oryia, how she taught even my stubborn fingers to weave a scene with grace? Her sharp voice comes back to me in chants: The weave tells the woman's life. The cloth reveals a woman's quality. How we laughed under her stern looks! Even her face would smile at such fine fabric, a weave smooth and pure as sand. You will recognize me in this work, in the tight squares of my weave. Do you perceive the royal ship and sails and your husband's cloak (scarlet against the white)? Father always wears stripes. I have also outlined myself with red, my tunic white with innocence. See your husband Tereus charm Father on bended knee? He convinces Father to allow a visit. Eager to see you, I hug my thanks. Now I know that the gods must be punishing us all. The omen of Mother's death is true— I have not escaped the tragedy of my birth. These red crescents show the ocean— our journey on a sea of blood. The tower rises, also colored red with the shame of Tereus's deeds. Sister, I did not know how to display his violence . . . I cannot even bear to think of it, his heaviness on top of me like a storm. Procne, I long to see your face. On the voyage, I dreamed of our talks, the walks we would take together, arms around each other's waists, our heads so close they touch. Oh, to be girls again, our only trouble setting the loom for our next tapestry. This next part is not as clear, but you must see: I screamed curses at your husband for his actions, and he cut out my tongue. This I show you, and how I bled and bled red from my mouth. I traded my jewelry for thread, and wove this sad message under twelve quarter moons. Dear sister, my story is told. Come quickly, for I am done with weeping.
For more on Elisa A. Garza, please see our Authors page.
Elisa A. Garza: Winter Beach
Padre Island
A man and a woman walk the sand only they and the gulls, the sky four shades of blue, horizon a white mist. They stand in surf under a rounding moon dull as an antique coin, sand sinking under their feet. If this was a romance, they would walk holding hands, then watch green waves collapse into smooth brown planes of glass. He would stand behind her and she would lean on him while the wind touched his face with her hair. If they were strangers, they would have walked from opposite directions, each stopping to watch the cawing gulls swoop, wind-jerked, over red guts, fight over silver heads left by a fisherman. If they crossed their arms into Xs tight and hard as pretzels, eyes closed to the gulls, to the blues and browns and whites of this scene, the wind would say good-bye for them, their mouths and ears closed to this beach, to each other. Neither knows how it is supposed to go.
For more on Elisa A. Garza, please see our Authors page.
Danny P. Barbare: Mother’s Pneumonia
Quietness is the sound of the breathing machine in the corner of the den the sound that lifts and settles like the curtains in the house, happy to be home like the lamp turned on and the sunlight that shows on the magnolia tree.—
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Joel Hinman: Nobody Listens
Dekko Cahill is a bull of a man. His head has the girth and heft of a field stone. There are places where his skin even looks like pink granite, a dull tongue color flecked with gray patches underneath his eyes. Dekko grips the edges of the examination table with both hands. His shirt is off and his braces dangle down to his boot tops. The great silver shag of his chest rises and falls as he watches the doctor pace back and forth. Dekko looks down at the man’s tiny feet. He doesn’t want to be here nor hear what the doctor has to say.
The doctor opens the medical folder theatrically.
“You were supposed to come back and see me 18 months ago,” the Doctor says.
Dekko kneads his scalp with thick fingers, knuckles raw from rough work. “When I feel poorly my wife gives me a pill,” Dekko says.
The Doctor glances over. “She’s a pharmacist?”
“A vet,” Dekko says.
Ron Hartley: Without a Helmet
I called him boyfriend as an endearment, like good morning boyfriend or I love you boyfriend; boy meaning he was much younger than me and friend because I desperately needed one. I was coming home from work at Best Buy, knowing his dyed blond hair would be punked up like always into a disarray of golden spiked ends, knowing he’d be waiting to teach me Texas Hold’em online, knowing he was hustling me and that duplicitous love was okay if it helped ease my pain. I was coming home from work at Best Buy knowing, knowing, knowing.
“Let’s go to Poker Planet,” he said, but as it turned out I couldn’t catch on to the math of loss to win ratios. “Just talk to me,” I said. “Tell me a story taller than Poker Planet.”
Susan Dugan: My Funny Valentine
Jay Whitiker parked in a space outside the church and sat drawing deep breaths, hands over naval–left, over right for males, the way they taught in his tai chi classes. Outside the car window, the day shone like a page torn from a Colorado Bureau of Tourism magazine: blueberry skies and sugared mountains. A fresh coating of powdery snow steamed off the asphalt.
Jay glanced over at the roses he had picked up at King Soopers that were resting on the passenger seat beside his battered leather shoulder bag. A dozen red, a dozen white.
Angelica.
Even his voice teacher’s name suggested higher realms. Sometimes he would find himself suddenly repeating it over and over in his head like a string of prime numbers.
A rap on the window startled him. His hands flew up, palms out, as if expecting to confront a police officer demanding license and registration. But it was only Sheila, upstairs neighbor of his rented flat. Flustered, he grabbed the flowers and his bag, and climbed out of the car.
John Muro: Adrift
Twilight’s turning out the daytime sky as if it was a pilot light, blue flame fluttering into vapor, leaving the edges of heaven fringed in rippled scatter. Shadows lengthening as the last play of light is pulled down to water. Overhead, the hushed, dust-soft sweep of bats, the slow, easy lilt of wind dawdling in languor, and star’s sinking between clouds in bright idleness. Leaf-burdened branches catch and then release a cold, celibate moon into apertures of orange-yellow light. And I see how this may well be the way life abandons us at some near-distant, mystical hour. Luminous in parting, it, too, becomes a thing unburdened and, set adrift, brightly burns as it spins away from us.
John Muro: Andantino
- After Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor: Third Movement Calls to mind the disquieting Lull and puddled velvet that comes just after receding tides unravel into an ampersand of foam and fall back to water, thickset in calm, aglint without motion, revealing where grief gathers as surf recoils or that hushed, holy space between breaths, with air held in a kind of peaceful penitence, neither moving in nor out, soft as wide, immaculate lawns at twilight or the momentary stoppage of the heart that comes on just as hope departs, leaving an undulant wake and fractures of light blossoming in abundance and the sound of idle water rising and what amounts to a life near- drowning taken back to shore
Amarillo Bay 