Rind Literary Magazine
Issue 14
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Rind Literary Magazine
Issue 14
MARCH 2021
rindliterarymagazine.com
All Works © Respective Authors, 2021
Cover Art By:
Melani ciarrocchi
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Editor in Chief:
Dylan gascon
Fiction Editors:
Johnathan Etchart
Jenny Lin
Melinda Smith
Stephen williams
Shaymaa Mahmoud
Nonfiction Editors:
Collette Curran
Owen Torres
William Ellars
Anastasia Zamora
Poetry Editors:
Shaymaa Mahmoud
Sean hisaka
Lisa Tate
Blog Manager:
Dylan Gascon
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Contents
Acknowledgements 5
Contributors 65
Poetry:
The kid on the corner/john grey 6
To a snail/mark jackley 8
Fill you in/fred pollack 58
Fiction:
glimpses/terry sanville 10
birdhouses/David obuchowski 37
non-fiction:
cigarettes/katrina monet 32
cross beams/katrina monet 34
sal’s diner/susan waters 62
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to all of our contributors, past and present, for
helping us get this thing moving. Thank you to the creative writing
faculty of the University of California-Riverside, Mount San Antonio
College, Rio Hondo College and Riverside Community College for
your continued support of this magazine.
Rind is on the look out for original artwork and photography
for our upcoming issues. If you or someone you know might be
interested in contributing, send us an inquiry for more details.
Please support the San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival; find
them at http://www.sgvlitfest.com. We’ll be there, and so should you.
Check out our listing on Duotrope. We’re also on Facebook
and Twitter. Regular updates on RLM and other fun and interesting
things can be found at our affiliated blog site:
http://www.thegrovebyrind.wordpress.com. If you would like to
contribute to Rind, send your manuscript to
rindliterarymagazine@gmail.com.
Cheers!
–The Rind Staff
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The Kid on the Corner
By John Grey
There’s an earthquake of mood,
a collusion
of fear and flesh,
that unrelenting threat
of spiked hair,
jumbled red eyes,
mouth like torn cloth,
body jutting out of
a street uniform
of leather and studs
whose hands,
heroin nervous,
draw pointless shadow pictures
on the wall
of a shuttered supermarket,
whose expressions
chomp down hard
on the nervous
oxygen between us
as I move quickly
by the hard grind
of incomprehensible words
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spat in my direction,
slip down the street
trying not to look
like an answer
to any questions
his bogeyman brain
might be asking.
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To a Snail
By Mark Jackley
Thanks for the reminder:
I was born
with everything
I need to cross
the garden, a soul
and a home for it
Mission Beach,
San Diego, California
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Glimpses
by Terry Sanville
Billy pushed the dust mop across the checkerboard floor tiles, near the lunch counter
where the sales girls sipped their afternoon coffees and pasted their chewing gum to the
counter’s underside. They probably think nobody notices. Billy noticed, since he had to scrape it off.
At ten minutes to closing, the Woolworth’s five-and-dime had emptied, the popcorn
machine turned off, the Spanish peanut roaster cooling. Myra, the floor manager, counted the
cash drawer and closed out the last register while humming to the sound of The First Noel
playing in the background.
From the photo booth in the corner came a loud moan then a giggle. Myra looked up
from her counting and glared at Billy.
“Get them outta there, will ya,” she ordered.
“Really?” Billy muttered.
“Yes, really. I ain’t stayin’ late just so some kids can get all lovey-dovey in my photo
booth.”
“All right, all right. I should get paid extra for this.”
Billy crept toward the wood-sided booth with its curved corners, its felt curtain pulled
shut, hiding everything from the knees up. He leaned his mop against a glass case filled with
porcelain knickknacks. Bending over, he stared at the two sets of legs: the boy sat on the stool
with his feet pointing outward; the girl’s feet rested on top of his, her legs flexing.
Billy waved at Myra and thrust his hips forward and backward, putting Elvis Presley’s
scandalous stage antics to shame.
Myra grinned. “I don’ care what the hell they’re doing. Just get ’em out.”
He stepped forward and knocked on the doorframe. “Hey guys, we’re closing. You’ve
got to…got to finish up.”
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The couple quieted for a few moments before the girl broke into giggles. A rustle of her dress,
the slide of a zipper and the boy pulled the curtain back, red-faced, not looking at Billy. Hand-in-
hand, they hurried from the store.
“I think you saved her from getting knocked up,” Myra called and laughed.
Billy nodded. While only six months out of high school, he’d worked at Woolworth’s for
three years and had seen plenty of hanky-panky going on in the photo booth. Discarded
snapshots littered its floor. The last couple had left their prints behind, a series of four poses, all of
them a tease. The brunette girl with big boobs revealed just enough to excite any boy.
He collected all the discarded images and dumped them into the paper bag he kept in his
locker in the storeroom. He laid his clip-on tie on the shelf, tossed his apron into the laundry bin and
rejoined Myra at the cash register.
“Are you closing again tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yeah, should be one crazy Friday. Say, why don’t ya wait for me and we’ll go get
somethin’ to eat, my treat.” She drew herself up to her full height, her figure impressive even
covered by the apron. Her grin added parentheses to her mouth.
“Thanks, but I got stuff to do.”
“Stuff. What stuff? You live in a crappy room at the Alexandrian. What grand plans can you
be cookin’ up in that dump?” She glared at him with dark eyes bordered by squint lines.
“How about tomorrow night, Myra? We can maybe, ya know, catch a movie.”
“Now you’re just bein’ kind to an old broad.” Her face flushed.
But Billy could tell she felt pleased. “So, I’ll see ya tomorrow…and it’s a date.”
He clutched the paper bag and pushed through the heavy glass doors onto the deserted
sidewalk. The boulevard seemed quiet, even though the holiday season normally attracted loads of
window shoppers. The tall Christmas trees with their festive lights marched up and down the
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center of Santa Barbara’s State Street. They seemed forlorn in the cold night wind.
He moved swiftly past brightly-lit display windows toward Lower State with its
pawnshops, billiard parlors, bars, liquor stores, and fleabag hotels. At the Alexandrian, he
entered through Spanish arches, nodded at the already-drunk night clerk, and climbed the stairs to his
fifth floor room. Once inside, he snapped on the radio. A station played the latest from Chubby
Checker, Etta James, and the Ventures. Billy lit a Kool and sucked in menthol smoke. Maybe I should
have gone out with Myra. I hate eating alone and I don’t feel like working.
He silenced the radio, clicked on the television and adjusted its rabbit ears, stared at
James Arness in a fuzzy rerun of Gunsmoke. From his tiny refrigerator he grabbed a soda and the
remains of a Sara Lee and sat on the ratty sofa bed, forking cheesecake into his mouth. I’ll go out
later, but for now I gotta work.
He turned off the TV’s sound and watched the actors pantomime
their roles. In his mind, Billy made up dialog for the characters, which made him laugh.
“Why Miss Kitty, you look so fetching tonight.”
“Well why don’ ya do something with it. I been waiting around for years for you to take me
for a ride on that big…big horse of yours.”
“Now, Miss Kitty, you know I’m a upstanding pillar of Dodge City.”
“Matt, I’m more interested in that pillar between your legs. Now you gonna come
upstairs with me or not?”
“Nah, it’ll just give the Longbranch a bad name.”
“Marshall Dillon, you’re such a prude.”
Billy smiled and turned off the TV. He could go all night, writing lines for any number of
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characters, good practice for his own stories. He leaned back and closed his eyes. But the
pulsating light from the hotel sign across the boulevard burned through his eyelids.
Groaning, he moved to his closet. From its shelf he took down a shoebox, returned to the sofa
and opened it. Discarded images of people from Woolworth’s photo booth stared back. He emptied
that day’s collection from the bag into the box. The girl with the big boobs gazed at him, with her shy
boyfriend barely caught by the camera in one of the frames.
Billy pulled his black journal from a bookshelf then plucked the couple’s photo from the
unorganized pile. With scotch tape, he pasted it onto a blank page. He moved to the window, opened
it and sat on the sill, smoking, staring down State Street toward Stern’s Wharf and the black Pacific.
After a few minutes he began to write, and didn’t stop until all the traffic lights on the boulevard
blinked amber.
At seven the next morning, the telephone on his nightstand rang nine times before going
quiet. Billy dragged himself from bed, picked up the receiver, asked the day clerk for an outside line,
then dialed.
After only one ring his mother answered. “Are you up? Did you get enough sleep?
You’re working today, aren’t you? You don’t want to be late.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“I still don’t like you living in that flophouse…and the food from the diner is terrible.
Have you thought any more about coming home?”
“I haven’t changed my mind, Mom. This is what I got to do.”
“Got to do? That’s ridiculous. You’ve been accepted by three wonderful Universities.
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Your father and I are more than willing to pay and all you want to do is waste your time–”
“Enough, Mom. I got to get ready. Thanks for the wakeup call.”
He hung up before hearing her response. But he knew her speech by heart, like the
opening narration to the TV program Dragnet when “…only the names have been changed to
protect the innocent.”
Walking up State Street toward Woolworth’s, he passed the Copper Coffee Pot. Myra
gave a holler and waved him to her window table. She had curled her auburn hair and wore
crimson lipstick, eyeliner, and makeup that hid the dark circles under her eyes.
“You look nice,” Billy said. He turned the upside-down coffee cup over. A waitress filled it
immediately. Billy took a gulp then fanned his mouth.
“You look worried,” Myra said. “What’s wrong, your Mama call again?”
“Yeah, every morning like clockwork.”
“I can’t really blame her…a young fella like you having his morning cup of joe with the likes
of me.” She laughed and stared into his eyes, as if waiting for the denial and objection.
Billy grinned. “It’s not you. It’s the winos and whores that are my neighbors. She’s afraid I’m
gonna wake up some morning with my throat slit.”
“There’s no wakin’ up from that.” Myra laid her fork down, her plate smeared yellow
from the eggs-over-easy she always gobbled before work.
“Do ya know what movie you wanna see?” she asked.
Billy pushed his chair back. “I was thinking about Spartacus. It has lots of action and I know you like
Kirk Douglas. It’s playing at the Granada and we could make the 7 o’clock show.”
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“That sounds great. Gives me somethin’ to look forward to. But what do you look
forward to, Billy? You’re such a…a strange beanpole of a boy, still can’t figure you out.”
“Not much to figure. I’m drinking burnt coffee, stocking shelves and sweeping up for a buck
twenty-five an hour.”
Myra shook her head. “Yeah, but you seem too smart to settle for that.”
“Now you’re sounding like my Mother.”
Myra glared at him. “I don’ wanna be your Mother. But if we’re to be friends, you…you gotta
talk to me. What the hell are you doin’?”
“You know I want to be a writer, write stories for the magazines.”
“You mean like made-up stuff?”
“Yes, but I also like real stories. I could maybe become a stringer for the News Press,
write human interest pieces, then novels, like Hemingway did.”
“Don’t they teach that stuff in college?”
“They teach English and journalism. But from what I can tell, good writers borrow pieces
from what they’ve experienced. I’ve experienced squat, and I won’t get that in school. I’m tired of
going to classes…just want to live on my own for awhile and write what I want.”
“So workin’ in a five-and-dime is gonna give you that? Am I one of your experiences?”
Billy ducked his head, his face warming. “You’re probably the best part.”
It was Myra’s turn to blush. She glanced at her watch. “Damn, the store opens in twenty.
We’ve gotta haul ass or get chewed out by Mr. Landry.”
“We can talk some more after the movie tonight.” He laid a hand on Myra’s.
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She pulled hers away, but slowly. “You’re such a lost boy, Billy.”
“A lot of that’s going around…people just don’t realize it.”
“Huh.”
After the movie, they piled into her ancient Studebaker and drove to the Jolly Tiger on
Chapala Street. Myra had seemed excited all day, even though the Christmas shopping crowds
had kept Woolworth’s employees running.
They sat in a tuck-and-roll upholstered booth and watched the parade of cars filled with
high schoolers fly up Chapala Street before turning onto Victoria then cruising down State, a
circuit they’d repeat for hours.
“Do ya wish you were out there with ’em?” Myra asked in between bites of cherry pie ala
mode.
“Nah, it’s a waste of time and gas.”
“You never tried picking up chicks on State?”
Billy smiled. “They travel in packs, and besides, Petersen’s Drive-in has all the action.
I’m just too…too shy to go there…even if I had a car.”
“Yeah, I can see that. So…so what do you do with all those pictures you take from the
photo booth?”
“I stare at them a lot, then–”
“That sounds creepy. Why do you–”
“Let me finish. I stare at them, let my mind imagine their lives, their stories, then I write
it down, whatever comes into my head.”
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“You’ve never showed me any of your stories.”
“I’ve never shown anyone. I keep them in a journal in my room.”
“Well, why doncha show me…tonight.” Myra smiled, reached across the table and
touched Billy’s cheek.
“I…I guess we can do that. Do you really want to read my stuff?”
“Sure, Billy, sure. And I’m sure those fine folks at the Alexandrian won’t mind you
bringing a lady friend up to your room.”
Billy grinned. “Not at that place.”
Myra frowned and changed the subject. “Is that all you want, tiny little pictures of kids
foolin’ around, or sailors on shore leave?”
“Nah. If I want to be some kind of reporter I need to get my own camera. I’ve been
saving up, but it’s slow going.”
“Tell you what, I’ve got this old Rolleiflex that my ex-husband left behind when he
escaped my clutches. He brought it home from Germany after the war. I never use the thing,
don’t even know how.”
“Jeez, that would be great.”
“Will you take some pictures of me?”
“Sure, Myra, sure. And I’d…I’d love to write your story.”
“It’s more like a novel, kid. But thanks for the offer.”
Myra parked the Studebaker on a side street and they entered the Alexandrian through its
front arches. The night clerk sat with his head tilted back, snoring. They hurried across the
carpeted lobby and climbed the stairs, the sound of Myra’s heels echoing in the stairwell.
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The hotel smelled of body odor, rotting food, and worse. Most of the lights had been
busted out. Myra clamped onto Billy’s arm as they moved quickly through the darkness. At the fifth
floor landing they paused to catch their breath then turned left down the hall. Billy fumbled with his
keys and the lock, then pushed inside his room.
“Sorry about the mess.”
“Hey, my ex was a slob. But I loved ’im anyway…until he traded me in on a younger
model.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. We had some good times in the beginning…but you don’t want to hear about that.”
“A story for another time?”
“Sure. So show me this journal of yours.” Myra collected the newspapers off the sofa and
flounced onto its cushions. “I don’ suppose you got anything to drink?”
“I’ve got Coca Cola. I can go ask my neighbor for a bottle. She’s pretty accommodating.”
“I’ll bet she is. I’ve gotta pint in my purse. Just bring the Coke and some ice.”
They sat on the sofa sipping highballs. Billy paged through his journal and read short
excerpts.
“Oh yeah, I remember that couple,” Myra said and pointed. “That broad gave me a hard time
at the register, wanted new bills for change, not dirty old ones.”
Billy made a note in his journal. “Thanks for the tidbit. Dirty cash can be a strong symbol
for–”
“Yeah, I think your neighbor friend knows all about it.”
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From next door came various thumps and moans that Billy tried to ignore; Myra seemed
to think they were funny. But as she finished her drink, then another, she started to talk about her
life, as if confessing to Father O’Hara, the parish priest that Billy had avoided for the past year.
Billy scribbled notes in his journal.
“I left Omaha at sixteen. My boyfriend had knocked me up and my parents didn’t want
me around…ya know those Bible-thumping types. I lost the kid anyway…and the docs said I
couldn’t have any more. Spent the next months in LA…modeling.”
“Modeling?”
“Well, that’s what they told me at first. But after a year of partying and going to bed with
strangers I wised up. By then I had the biggest damn monkey on my back.”
“Monkey?”
“Heroin, you dope. Don’tcha know anything?”
“No, not really.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot. Maybe I can teach ya somethin’.”
Myra leaned over and slid her lips onto Billy’s and held them there, mouth open, tongue
exploring. She caressed his pale cheeks. Billy held his breath and closed his eyes. Now this is
real, this is what everybody talks about.
They kept drinking, talking, and kissing. Sometime during the night, they unfolded the
sofa bed undressed and slipped between the wrinkled sheets. They made love, slowly, gently, as if
respecting her hard, loveless years and his youthful ignorance. When Billy’s mother phoned the
next morning, he woke with a start, alone in an empty bed, his head pounding. He grabbed his
journal and stared at the almost indecipherable scrawl, the seed of a story growing in his booze-
addled brain.
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They became part of Woolworth’s gossip mill. The stock boys flashed Billy broad grins and
wanted to know details. The women looked at him differently. He didn’t understand, had never been
close to any of the girls in his class, much less to a mature woman in her early forties.
He felt like he could tell Myra anything. And she responded with stories that made Billy feel,
for the first time, like an adult who could be trusted.
“I live over on the West Side,” she told him over morning coffee at the cafe, “in a little
bungalow off Chino Street.”
“Maybe we could, you know, go to your place after work.”
Myra shook her head. “I rent a room from a Mexican family. They’ve got three kids and need
the money. But they don’t want any sleepovers.”
“Well why don’t you stay at my place?”
“Are you kiddin’? That room’s barely big enough for you. Besides, waking up and seeing me
first thing in the mornin’ could…could scare ya off.”
“What are you talking about? You’re beautiful.”
“Thanks, but all of this takes more effort than you know.” She waved her hands over her face
and down her front.”
“So it’s an illusion?”
“Most folks only show their good sides. You really have to…to love somebody to accept the
bad stuff.”
Billy scribbled a note on the napkin, something to add to her story.
Myra sighed. “I may be rough around the edges, but I know about people, ’specially
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the lonely ones. They can pull at your heart strings, or smother you when their self-pity explodes in
your face.”
Billy sipped his coffee and thought about himself as one of those lonely souls.
On a blown-out Sunday afternoon in March, Myra met Billy outside the Alexandrian and
they walked down State Street toward East Beach and the pier. At the foot of Stern’s Wharf they
stopped to buy a bag of popcorn from Everett, the Popcorn Man. The pinwheels fastened to the
top of his ancient truck spun madly and rattled in the breeze.
On a nearby bench a bearded man sat on yellowed newspapers, tossing birdseed to a
flock of cooing pigeons at his feet. He wore an Army field jacket with three stripes on its
shoulder. A battered felt hat held down scraggly hair that hung below his collar. Billy reached for
his camera that he now carried everywhere, and moved forward. The man scrubbed at his face
with filthy hands.
“Do you mind if I take your picture?” Billy asked while trying to focus the Rolleiflex and
set the shutter speed and f-stop.
“Beat it, kid,” the man muttered, “and take your mother with you.”
Myra stepped toward the man. “Hey bud, who the hell do you think you’re–”
Billy put a hand on her shoulder. “So you were in the Army?”
“What’s it to ya.”
“My father was with the 82 nd Airborne in Sicily during World War II.”
“Yeah, well I’m fuckin’ happy for ’im. Nobody remembers Korea.”
“So what are you doing out here?”
“What’s it look like…feedin’ the damn birds.”
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“No, I mean, out here?” Billy waved his arm at the sea, the beach, and the hoards of
Sunday strollers.
“I’m jus’ livin’ the good life while sleepin’ in the jungle.”
“Jungle? What’s that about?” Billy stared down into the camera’s viewfinder held at
waist level and moved around the tramp, snapping shots from various angles.
“You don’ know shit, kid. The jungle, man, it’s where I’ve been livin’.” The tramp stared
right through him with a far-away, withdrawn gaze.
“Come on, Billy.” Myra tugged at his arm. “You’ve got enough for a story.”
Billy stumbled over the rough planks as she pulled him along the boardwalk toward the
Harbor Restaurant at the end of the pier. He repacked his camera in its carrying case and they
walked hand-in-hand, silent, his mind racing. A litany of questions bounced around his brain. He
turned and searched for the tramp. But the man had already melted into the crowd.
“Do you know what that jungle thing is all about?” he asked Myra.
“Yeah. When I first came to town I stayed there for a few nights. It’s a hobo camp along
the railroad near East Beach.” She pointed along the palm-lined boulevard. “It’s just a few
shacks. I hear they’ve built showers and toilets.”
“You lived there?”
“Yeah. I’d ridden a freight up from LA and one of the drifters clued me in. It’s not a
place ya wanna stay. People get beat up. A lot of drunks, broken men and a few women…”
“Sounds like it would make a good story. Santa Barbara’s hidden secret.”
“Oh the cops know all about it. They sweep the camp every so often, lookin’ for the
dopers and criminals.”
“Can we drive by the place and you can show me where it is?”
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“You’re not thinkin’ about going there, are you?”
“A reporter’s got to follow the story.”
“You’re nuts. You could get hurt. Ya know, dreamin’ up stories while starin’ at photo
booth pictures is a lot different than dealin’ with the likes of that guy.”
Billy scowled. “I know, I know, but–”
“Some of those folks aren’t nice.”
He smiled. “But you turned out nice, better than nice.”
Myra hooked an arm around his neck, planted a kiss on his lips. “Let’s go back to the
beach and find a cool spot where we can do more of this.”
They returned to the shoreline, slid under the pier and made out. But they got so
excited that they hustled back to his hotel room for an afternoon of sex that left them sweat-
covered and exhausted. As Myra dozed, Billy slipped from bed and retrieved his journal, sat
naked on the windowsill and scribbled ideas onto the blank pages, trying to empty his mind
of all the possibilities about the Korean War vet and his jungle home.
The heat hit Santa Barbara hard in July. Woolworth’s lunch counter did a brisk
business selling snow cones to kids roaming State Street in their bathing suits, on their way to
the beach and the municipal pool, The Plunge. Myra and Billy took their lunch break
together, and walked the boulevard, window-shopping, talking about crazy customers,
stockroom romances, plans for their day off.
Myra wore a thin summer dress, its neckline showing cleavage that attracted stares
from Navy sailors on leave from the cruiser anchored offshore. On their return trip to
Woolworth’s, Billy held Myra close, an arm wrapped around her slender waist. He glanced
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across the street and froze. His parents stood on the steps leading into the Santa Barbara
Museum of Art. They didn’t look happy.
“Shit,” Billy muttered.
“What’s wrong, hon?”
“My folks are staring at us from across the street.”
Myra started to twist around.
“Don’t look, don’t look.”
“Why not? They know about us, don’t they?”
“Not exactly.”
“What the hell’s that supposed ta mean?”
“All right, no, I haven’t told them. But my Mother suspects. Come on, let’s get inside.”
In the privacy of the stockroom they donned their aprons, not speaking. Finally, Billy
sucked in a deep breath.
“I…I….”
“What is it Billy, you ashamed of your girlfriend? Still tied to Mama’s apron strings?”
“God no. But…but this is new to me. I know they’ll get all weird and the longer things
have gone on, the harder it is to tell them.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. If I was in your spot, I’d probably do the same, or maybe get the
hell outta Dodge.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I…I love you.”
Myra came into his arms. “That’s so sweet. I love you too, but I don’t know where this
is goin’.”
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“What’s going?”
“Us, you idiot.” She kissed him just as Mr. Landry pushed through the swinging door.
“Alright kids, save that for after work. Myra, when you’re back from lunch help at the
registers. Stay there until they clear then show the new girl the ropes.”
“Yes, sir.”
The store manager left. Myra and Billy sat on the bench next to the time clock and the
posters that explained the minimum wage laws. Their silence became excruciating. Finally,
Myra stood and turned to stare at Billy.
“Look, hon. We’ve gotta talk, but not here, not now. And I can’t do it without a few
belts first.”
Billy felt the back of his neck go cold. “Yeah, I get it. You’re going to dump me.”
“We’ll talk after work.” She stuck her card into the time clock then hurried out into the
loud world of afternoon Woolworth’s shoppers.
Billy sat staring at the clock. Maybe it’s time…but we’re so good together…and all of
this seems useless without her. She is the story.
On the bench next to him lay a fresh copy of the News Press. Billy picked it up and
paged through the sections, searching for the prize. A month before he had dropped off an
article with photographs at the newsroom, neatly hand written, five thousand words, that
featured the plight of the Korean War veteran. Myra had given him a tour of what the local
hobos called “Jungleville”, introduced him to John Craver, its mayor, an old guy who had
lived there for decades. Billy had interviewed the dozen or so transients who lived in
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shanties, took six rolls of photos and spent nights writing and rewriting his human interest
story while Myra drank rum and cokes and watched TV.
Billy continued his paging until coming to the end of the newspaper’s local section. He
froze. There were his photographs, his words. And they’d even given him a byline! The
article looked about half as long as what he’d submitted. He didn’t care…he was published.
He wanted to run to Myra and show her, to take her in his arms and thank her for everything.
But he held out. When they climbed into her car after work, he unfolded the paper on his
lap.
Myra stared at the article. “Wow, is that yours? That’s that so damn fantastic…and
they used your name.”
“I couldn’t have done it without you, Myra.”
“Oh yes you could. I just gave ya a shove.”
“You can give me more than that.”
He leaned over and planted a wet kiss on her lips.
“Hey, hey, wait till we get to your place. And I gotta stop at the liquor store. We need
some booze to celebrate.” She seemed relieved that they would have something to talk
about besides their uncertain future.
Billy waited in the car while Myra bought the booze. The sun hung two inches above
the horizon, casting a golden glow over Santa Barbara. Crowds mobbed the evening cafés
and restaurants and happy hours at the bars were well underway. Once at the hotel they
hurried from the car and almost skipped across the lobby. The night clerk turned away from
his muttering TV and grinned.
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“Saw your article in the paper. Good goin’, kid.”
Billy smiled and wondered if this is what it would be like if he became a writer. Climbing
the stairs, he had to stop several times to let Myra catch up.
“Slow the hell down, will ya. I’ve been runnin’ all day and my dogs are barkin’ loud.”
“I feel like barking loud.”
They moved to his door and he keyed the lock and let Myra enter. She opened the
window wide to air the place out, mixed them highballs, then slumped onto the sofa.
“You’re on your way, kid, on your way.”
Billy sipped his drink and read over the edited article. “Yeah, they ditched a whole bunch
of background stuff but kept the interview quotes from the hobos. And they tightened it up. It
reads really smooth.”
“Congrats, Billy. Ya got your name up in lights.” Myra took a deep gulp of her drink and
laid her head back. “But we still gotta talk…about us.”
“I know, I know, I just don’t–”
With a splintering crash, the hotel room door flew open. Myra screamed. They jumped up
from the sofa. A scruffy figure stood in the opening, felt hat pulled down over his eyes, the Army
field jacket opened to expose a bare beer gut. The Korean War vet staggered into the room.
“I’ve been waitin’ for ya, mother fucker.”
Billy backed away. “What do you want? You need to leave.”
“What I want is to slit your fuckin’ throat. That’ll shut your yap. Who told you to write that…
that damn story ’bout me?”
The drifter edged closer to Billy, reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a shiv, a
28
sharpened piece of metal with one end taped over to form its handle. Myra backed against the
sidewall, her eyes huge and staring, but her mouth drawn into a tight line. The drifter took
another step and stopped, swaying, his mouth open, eyes trying to focus.
“Why are you so mad?” Billy asked. “That article makes you look like a good guy.”
The hobo seemed to consider Billy’s statement, but continued to shuffle toward him.
Billy felt the window frame at his back, the cool ocean air, heard the sound of laughter drifting up
from the crowded sidewalk.
“You think you’re so fuckin’ smart. Did ya ever think that I might not want my mug
pasted in a newspaper for every cop to see?”
“So you’re wanted by the law? You’ve got warrants?”
“You just couldn’t mind your own damn business, couldja?”
“You want to kill me for that?”
“Yeah, pretty fuckin’ crazy, huh?”
The man stood in front of Billy, swaying. His smell filled the room, a mixture of booze, urine,
and weeks without a shower. He drew the shiv up in front of his face to inspect the blade, then
dropped his knife hand and lunged.
With a yell, Myra slammed into the drifter’s back and pushed, giving him the bum’s rush.
Billy dodged sideways. The drifter hit the opened window; his head took out the upper panel of glass
and the wood sash. In a mist of glass fragments, he fell through the opening, screaming, twisting his
body, trying to grab onto thin air. He continued to shriek until he landed head first on a Taxi parked at
the curb, five floors down.
Billy bent at the waist and vomited. He stared at Myra, her chest rising and falling
29
calmly, but her cheeks flushed, eyes blazing.
“You better get outta here before the cops come,” Billy croaked.
She nodded slowly. “I told ya, Billy. This is what the world’s all about. Is this what ya
want to write about?”
Before he could answer she grabbed her purse and the bottle and ran from the room. In
the distance sirens wailed. The whore from next door peeked around the doorframe. She held a
kitchen knife in her hand. The thunder of feet on the stairs filled his head. Billy shut his eyes as
Lower State and all its grit closed in.
William sat at his oak desk and stared at the bookshelves. Outside his two-story home,
the red leaves of autumn cast dancing shadows across the carpet in his study. He glanced at the
photos of his grown children and their families and smiled. They would visit for Thanksgiving,
the grandkids excited about exploring their grandparents’ Vermont farm. Sharon would mother
everyone to death.
His recent retirement from teaching had been easy. I’ll finally have a chance to write, to
practice what I’ve been preaching all these years.
He’d come east from Santa Barbara, earned advanced degrees in English and journalism
from Columbia, worked as an editor for a New York City imprint, wrote two novels that proved
moderately successful, and like many, settled into teaching at a small liberal arts college.
But on snowy days when the wind howled and it felt painful to venture outside, he longed
for his summer beach town days, and mostly for the fire he once had as a young man, for writing.
After playing editor and teacher for decades, he found it hard to find the joy in it. But he still
searched for those gems of ideas among the scree of his life.
He continued to scan the bookshelves, hoping to find some author he admired that would
30
provide inspiration, something that would move him forward, challenge him. But nothing
reached out. With elbows resting on knees and head in his hands, William stared at the woven
images in the Persian rug and let his mind drift.
A mental glimpse of a banker’s box filled with old books and papers came into focus.
Sharon had stored it somewhere in the study for him to inventory and dispose of the junk. He
rose and moved across the room and rifled through two cabinets. In the corner closet he found the
box, carried it to his desk, and removed its lid. The stench of moldy papers filled his head, the box
full of spotted and yellowed typewritten pages: his old college work; failed grant applications for
study abroad; drafts of stories that he’d never finished; the start of his autobiography.
But near its bottom he found a black book, a journal of some sort. He opened its cover
and gasped. Inside were page after page of faded photo booth pictures, mostly young people
dressed in late fifties styles. Below each were scrawled paragraphs from his youth. The memories
came flooding back. The last entries in the journal included black-and-white images of a middle-aged
woman, wearing ordinary clothes, thick high heels and seamed stockings, but with a figure that
would still stop traffic. The scribbled sentences next to her photos were almost illegible after nearly
sixty years. But they brought it all back, that stabbing pleasure and pain of first love, the chest-
stomping ache of first loss.
He lay the journal on his desk and opened his laptop. After creating a new file, he stared at the
woman in the photos, squinted his eyes, and began to write. He didn’t stop until all the traffic lights
in his memory blinked amber.
La Jolla Cove
San Diego, California
31
32
Cigarettes
By Katrina Monet
I used to quit smoking cigarettes every few months or so.
Today, it’s the thing that I’ve been longing for since the sun
broke through the gray February clouds. The news has me under
floor boards covered by sacks of cement mix: it’s the barrier
I’ve built between myself and every other person I’ve had to
grieve.
The wind restrained itself as if it was expecting my
arrival and I acquainted the soft cylinder of my deviance and
freedom with the fore and middle fingers that it had missed for
12 months now. The flame approached the round opening of brown
grassy shavings and my lungs inhaled as if it were their first
breath of fresh air. The smoke lingered in the red cave of its
memories, rolled off of my tongue, and drifted off of my lips as
if I were giving the State of the Union address and the air
molecules surrounding me were the American population. I used to
greet every summer morning with a cigarette.
As I pull a stale one out of the ashtray in my old SUV on
the way to my childhood home, I’m half afraid that I might
stumble upon a memory of us or them or him or her (preferred
pronouns). What I can say is this; it’s safe here. I can relish
33
the slivers of light that peak through cracks in the wood. Grief
is a state we eventually get to and must learn to exist in
permanently because it’s constant. Each time I take a drag, on
some level, I’m grateful to be brought that much closer to
death.
34
Cross Beams
By Katrina Monet
I collect notebooks, usually on sad and lonely days. I start
each one anew and hope that maybe it will change the way I feel.
There are piles of notebooks on my desk, in my closet, in the
back seat of my car. Sometimes I think I might rip out the used
up pages and weave them into their own mixed up story. One
moment we are on the beach laughing. The next moment we are
speeding down Interstate 5 back to San Francisco; each word
shedding a new layer of awakening.
There are so many things I could say about the taste of the moon
or how the last time I slept with a guy well over a year ago. I
left his bedroom sobbing. There are always 127 ways things could
have been different, but at the end of the day it’s me and it’s
not; it’s mine and it’s not mine. It’s all the same.
It’s kind of like a cover band or going to a bar in a college
town on Trivia Night. You already know how to play the game and
you already know the words to the song, but for some reason the
lack of lines or new drag of ink makes it feel safe enough to
explore a new way of being even though you haven’t moved from
35
that same patch of grass, still staring into space.
The only difference – day to day – when the days spin around on
those blades of grass and you can almost taste the bleeding in
that final kiss, is that it’s possible to love something so
deeply that it changes inconceivable circumstances and it’s more
than the sun shining down on you this moment. Here is a new
notebook. Here is a new patch of grass. Here is the world
turning.
There were so many times I wanted to be close to you but turned
away. It was a longing to be alone to find meaning in solitude –
to fill new pages with nothing while hoping for something all
the same. The only meaning I have ever known is in holding you
steady enough in my thoughts to feel what it is like to be alive
in the world as it keeps turning.
The place inside I go to feel safe is you.
Mission Beach
San Diego, California
36
37
Birdhouses
By David Obuchowski
The A&P let my old man take their broken wooden pallets. Back when I was a kid, I figured
they were being generous. Now I realize my father was probably doing them a favor since it kept
their dumpster from getting filled up with all that old wood. Anyways, that’s where we’d just come
from, the A&P. So my old man could pick up some pallets for his birdhouses.
We were waiting at a red light, when this big old convertible pulled up next to us. The man
behind the wheel was dressed a bit like a cowboy with his pressed denim shirt and a bolo tie. He
pointed and winked at me like we were old buddies, or something. Hell if I didn’t almost return the
gesture, but then I thought maybe this old cowboy is makin’ fun of me. And then I thought how my
old man would react if he saw me acting all friendly to some stranger. Or anyone, for that matter. So,
instead, I did my thing where I sort of furrowed my eyebrows and gave him a mean stare.
The cowboy’s grin didn’t leave his face, but his eyes changed. They got real serious, if you
know what I mean. He looked right into my own stare, and it took all my strength to not just look
away, so I blinked instead—the world’s fastest loss in a staring contest. “Think half as hard as the
looks you’re giving, son, and you might just be alright.”
Didn’t know what he meant. Hardly heard what he said on account of how low he was talking.
But a man like that didn’t have to speak up. That was plain to see.
I felt about two inches tall, but I mustered everything in me. Dangled my arm out of the
passenger side window, and leaned over so my head was out of the cab. “What’s that, mister? What’d
you say?”
“I said you best be careful who you givin’ them hard stares to,” the man in the Bonneville said
a little louder. Figure his must have been the ’68 model. Goddamn, that Bonneville was bigger than
38
the fucking truck. Longer at least. Looked like it anyway.
My old man, right next to me, was gripping the dark blue steering wheel of his ’65 Chevy
pickup so tightly his knuckles were white. But, for all the attention he was paying me or the stranger
next to me, he might as well have been on Mars. He was just staring through the windshield in some
kind of daze. Like he was lost in his own little world, no idea of who or what was around him,
oblivious to where he was. He got like that a lot. In fact, he was like that most times when he wasn’t
working on his birdhouses.
Between us, the pale blue bench seat was all torn up, exposing the yellow foam like a layer of
fat beneath its vinyl skin. I picked at some of it nervously as I tried to figure out what to say next.
Finally, I settled on this lie: “I ain’t scared of you.” And I do mean it was a lie. Shit, I was
scared of damn-near everything and damn-near everyone. Always have been. That’s why I was
always scowling at everyone. My old man always told me. Don’t look scared. Act tough even if you
don’t feel it.
“Real tough kid,” the man in Bonneville.
“So what if I am?” I said, and I hoped he chalked up my quivering voice to the rough idle of
the truck, only I knew he didn’t.
“Then I guess I wouldn’t want to be the one to get on ya bad side.” He made a clicking sound
with his mouth, like he was telling his horse to get going, and he looked away from me and out into
the same distance my old man was lost in.
“You got that right,” I said, and then I spit. Not at his car. Not at him. Just down onto the
pavement. I mean, shit, I might not be smart, but I sure as hell ain’t stupid. Except for when I am.
“Maybe so. Maybe not. But remember this: tough ain’t how you act. It’s how you do.” He looked
back at me, looking deadly serious. And then, worse, he smiled. It was a mean smile.
39
Goddamn, was it mean. Ten years later, I still never seen a smile so mean as that. Well, except for
one, but I’ll tell you about that later.
But it wasn’t just the smile that got me. It was what he said. Got me then, and still gets me
now. It was like he could see right through me. As soon as I started grade school, my old man had
never missed a chance to tell me how I needed to act tough if I was ever gonna get any respect. So
even back then in elementary school, I’d walk around with a scowl. Didn’t exactly help me make
friends, but people left me alone. And when they didn’t, I’d give ‘em a good shove. You want to
make someone back off? Just give ‘em a good shove, right in the chest. Most times, they’ll fall over
and look all confused, like you broke some kind of unspoken rule.
Breaking rules never really bothered me, spoken or unspoken.
I turned to my old man and asked him, “What’s with the light? It’s takin’ all day.”
Nothing. He just sat there, peering through that windshield, staring down Nelson Road, like
he was trying to figure something out, like he was seeing something far off on the horizon that had
him puzzled. There was nothing out there but Nebraska, and none of the interesting parts. Our town
was too far from Omaha to have anything going on, and too close for it to have any of those real big
sprawling farms and ranches—the kind that look like they’re straight out of one of them old oil-
painted landscapes. There were just a few strip malls, some squat little office buildings that were
always for rent, and a whole lot of cheap land mainly used as dinky little fields for growing corn or
soybeans.
“Hey. Pop,” I said. “Hear me?”
“Huh?”
“I said, you hear me?”
“Hear what?”
40
The light turned green, and I looked back out my window, expecting to see that big old
Bonneville right there next to us, waiting, growling, like the two of us were gonna run a quarter mile.
It was gone, though; replaced by nothing at all. Someone behind us honked their horn.
That roused my old man. He glared into the rearview like he might crawl right into the
reflection. “Fuck you, stranger,” he growled.
I turned around, looked over the bedful of broken pallets, and eyed the guy driving the Buick
behind us. Gave him the finger, too. “Eat this, stupid!”
His eyes got all big at first, like he was really offended, like I’d really shocked him. Damn, it
was just a finger. Wasn’t some other body part. Not that I’d ever have the balls to show someone my
privates, no pun intended.
Funny. Not even one minute after I got that bit of wisdom from the Bonneville man, I went
ahead and forgot it. Or ignored it. But that’s the thing about good advice. Sometimes, it takes time to
realize just how good it is. That’s what the way I am with music, come to think of it. I can hear a
song, and in that moment, it might not sound like anything more than background noise, you know?
People hollering about love or heartbreak or being rich or being poor or this, that, or the other damn
thing. But, then two days later, I realize I’m humming the damn tune, wishing I could hear it one
more time, wishing I paid attention to what that singer was going on about. Trouble is, most of the
time I never do hear it again. So I try to keep singing it, only I never get it right, because once I really
start trying to concentrate on how it went, or what the lyrics were, I find it slips away, like the way a
dream does when you try too hard to remember it.
“Forget it, boy,” my old man said, though I could tell he was proud of me for flipping the bird
to the man in the Buick. He pressed the gas pedal, and we got moving. Can’t even remember where
we were headed. Then again, where we lived, there wasn’t any place to go, anyways.
41
Guess it was Vietnam that did it to him—my old man, I mean. My mom said he was a real
joker when he left in ‘70. Year and a half later, he came back with a backful of shrapnel and headful
of nightmares. Never told me what it was that he saw. Asked him about the shrapnel once. “Booby
trap,” he told me. “Ain’t nothin’ over there but booby traps and rain. Never seen so much rain.
Goddamn, there was a lot of rain.” He was real hung up about the rain. It was the only thing about
Vietnam he would talk about. That was it. Just the rain. I quit asking about the war. Hell, I wasn’t
looking for no weather report from fifteen years ago, you know?
But whatever it was—the rain, the booby traps, or something else he never bothered to
mention—it really scrambled him up good. Most nights, he’d wake up yelling. In fact, my mom told
me that when he first came back, he was screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night and my
grandma came running in to check on him. He coldcocked her right there in the pitch black with his
eyes closed.
“Ain’t his fault,” my mom told me. “And don’t act scared of him. He’ll come around.”
Never did. He and my mom got divorced when I was five. Actually, I can’t say for sure
whether or not they even bothered to make the divorce official since something like that costs money,
and that was one thing they never had much of.
He moved back in with my grandma. I lived with my mom most of the time. But I saw my
father on the weekends. Daytimes. Helped him make his birdhouses. He never tried to sell them. Just
donated them to the local thrift store. God knows what they did with them. Probably tossed them in
the dumpster, which is kind of funny when you think about how they were made from those old
pallets that should have been going directly into the dumpster in the first place. But, anyway, it’s
what he did, my old man: made birdhouses
I guess most people probably wouldn’t have gone for a birdhouse like the kind my old man
made, but I thought they were interesting. None of the angles were square, and god knows if any bird
42
would ever want to live in ‘em, but I thought they looked kind of, I don’t know, different. Special, I
mean. With their canted sides and proportions out of whack, they were certainly unique.
But what the hell do I know about birdhouses anyway?
Not much. In fact, I probably wasn’t that much a help to him either. All I’d do is measure and
mark up the wood with a big fat pencil.
“That good, Pop?” I’d ask him when I was dumb enough to wonder how he thought I was
doing.
“Don’t matter if it’s good, but I’ll tell you if it’s bad,” he’d answer. That is, if he’d answer at
all.
Guess you could say he practiced what he preached when it came to being a hard ass.
Which brings me back to that man in the Bonneville. It was only a couple weeks later when I
learned how right he’d been. Learned it the hard way, too. Went to the Dairy Queen to get a root beer
float. Should’ve been a dollar-ten. That’s what it had been for the last two years. I showed up with
exact change: a dime wrapped up in a crumpled-up dollar tucked into the folds of my sweaty palm. I
was hot as hell. Thirsty. Hungry, too.
Some kid in front of me was ordering what sounded like one of everything. He glanced back
at me kind of embarrassed like he knew he was taking up everyone’s time. I gave him a look that told
him to keep his eyes on the ice cream.
When he got done ordering all the sprinkles and peanut butter chips and chocolate sauce, he
paid with a five-dollar bill. Five bucks. Might as well have been a hundred for a kid like me.
He got his change and then he stood off to the side waiting for his feast.
“Root beer float,” I said, and handed over the dime wrapped in a buck.
The kid behind the counter took the money, clearly disgusted by how damp it was. Then
43
he looked at me kind of annoyed.
“It’s one-twenty,” he said.
“Bull. It’s one-ten.”
“Yeah, well, they raised the price last week. It’s one-twenty.”
“Ah, crud,” I said. “Let it slide. I’ll bring an extra dime next time.”
“I’m not gettin’ fired over a root beer float,” he said, like he was offended that I’d ask him for
ten cents.
I walked over to the kid who was still waiting for his extra-fancy sundae. “Hey, kid. Gimme a
dime. I know you got it.”
“Sorry,” he said, and he looked down at the floor.
“You’re gonna be sorry if you don’t give me a dime,” I said in my meanest voice.
The kid backed up. He was real skinny. Pale, too. I remember thinking he looked almost sick.
Shit, I damn-near felt bad for him. “No,” he said, stubbornly.
“Gimme a dime,” I said again and then I went to give him a shove to really let him know I
meant business. Only, the next thing I know, he’d moved to the side, and in the same motion, he
grabbed one of my arms, and twisted it up behind my back. Goddamn, it hurt. It was like a bolt of
pain that went right up into my shoulder. I went up on my tiptoes, and tried to twist myself away, but
he had his other arm across my throat, and the more I struggled to move, the more he pulled up on
my arm and pressed his arm against my neck. I started sputtering, “Stop, stop, stop!”
“I want you to leave me alone,” the kid said, speaking quickly.
“Okay, okay, okay,” I whispered as loudly as I could.
With that, he released me and stepped back into some kind of a karate stance like he was
getting ready to go a round with me. “Don’t mess with me. I have a black belt,” he said calmly.
44
I rotated my arm, trying to make the pain go away. “Cheap shot,” I said, and I heard a quiver
in my voice that filled me with shame.
“Didn’t take a shot,” he corrected me.
The kid behind the counter started clapping. That’s what put me over the edge. It was the
clapping. I just sprinted out of there, got onto my bike and rode all the way home, huffing and
puffing, sucking in air, and crying like a fuckin’ baby. On top of everything else, I’d left without my
dollar-ten. Talk about insult to injury. Talk about salt in the wound.
Never went back to that Dairy Queen. Hell, would you?
Wish I could say that was some sort of freak thing. But the older I got, the more I learned
how right that Pontiac man was. I got my ass beat more than once. Like the time I went to the
County Fair my junior year. As usual, I barely had any money so what I did was I spent most of it on
the game where there’s a piece of paper with a star on it, and you try to shoot it out with an air-rifle
that looks like a tommy gun. The prizes were garbage, of course, but still—I had my principles. I
blasted the star right out of the paper three times in a row. The shady looking character behind the
counter told me he could still see the slightest bit of a point left on one of them. Liar. They’re all
fucking rigged those games, and if they ain’t rigged, they’re run by crooks. But I don’t need to tell
you that.
Anyway, I had a buck and a half left, so I grabbed a hot dog and just sort of wandered around.
Didn’t want to go home. My mom had her new boyfriend over that night. He ran a liquor store out
by the interstate. I know that because it’s all he ever talked about. That and his wife who he hated.
But, mostly he just complained about all the alcoholics. Imagine that: a liquor store owner who
whines about drinkers. Like being a banker who doesn’t like rich people. Anyway, he complained
45
a lot and to make matters worse, he was always looking for a fistfight, so I did my best to keep my
mouth shut and the eye-rolling to a minimum. I wouldn’t have put it past him to take a swing at the
son of his mistress.
So there I was, just walking around, watching the rides twirl and spin, leaving trails of
colored light in the darkness; the Viking Ship going back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch. Half
expected the fucking thing to break and send a dozen kids sailing into the night sky out over the
ballparks. Half hoped it would, too.
The Viking Ship. That’s what I was looking at when I sort of bumped into this kid by
accident. It becomes second nature after a while, acting all mean. Somewhere in me, there was a
person who figured he should just say sorry, and keep walking. But instead, I kind of looked down
at this kid—he looked like he was maybe a couple years younger and a good six inches shorter—and
I said, “watch it, Helen Keller,” which was supposed to be a smart remark about him not seeing me.
The kid didn’t hesitate. Reached back and gave me a right hook across the face that made my
vision go black for a second, which is funny when you consider I’d just made a crack about him
being the one who was blind. Didn’t even hurt so much at first, but damn was it a powerful punch. I
was on the ground before I knew it, and by the time I sat up, the short kid was already walking off
with his buddies like nothing happened. Like I was never even there in the first place.
I picked myself up and rubbed my cheek. It was starting to hurt, and I could feel the inside of
my mouth bleeding. I spat some blood out next to whatever was left of my hot dog, which I’d lost in
the scuffle, if you could even call it a scuffle. For a second, I thought about running after the kid,
bashing him over the head with something from behind. But with what? Anyway, I won’t lie: I
wasn’t exactly looking forward to having him lay me out all over again. So I kept wandering down
the dirt path. A couple of people asked me if I was okay because they’d seen me get knocked out,
but I just ignored ‘em.
46
Came to the Fun House, and it was the damnedest thing. It looked just like a big version of
one of my old man’s birdhouses. Slanted walls and a doorway that was all out of whack. Made me
wonder what he was up to. Part of me wanted to find a payphone and give him a ring, see if he
wanted to come down to meet me. Then I realized I probably had a black eye, and I didn’t want him
to see me like that. Probably wouldn’t be too proud of me. Then I also started thinking about the
swirling, twirling, spinning lights, the tommy guns, all the people, and the noise I guess I figured it
probably wouldn’t be such a great spot for him.
I walked the train tracks home instead, and a train didn’t come once.
Not even once.
In the few baby pictures my mom had of me, my dad was this real skinny guy with long,
thick, kinda greasy-looking hair. As I grew up, his hair thinned, and his belly got thick. By the time
1991 rolled around, I was a senior in high school, and my father didn’t look a thing like the young
man in those photos from almost twenty years earlier. The little hair he had left was gray; his skin
had gone leathery and wrinkled, and he had this real big gut that always looked like it was about to
bust through his worn-out t-shirts. He’d been hospitalized a few times, but no one would tell me
why. Something about his kidneys or liver. Maybe both. He looked like shit if I had to be real honest
about it.
But his birdhouses were something else entirely. They’d gotten more bizarre than ever—
more distorted, but also more complicated.
I went and saw him on my 18th birthday because I had some news for him. He gave me a
beer, and he opened the barn.
“Watch the wasps,” he warned me.
47
Sure enough, there were big, bulging wasp nests in the corners and rafters.
“You need to get some spray,” I said.
“Don’t bother me any,” he said.
“Suit yourself,” I said, trying to sound amused. Really, I was nervous I was about to get a
face full of wasp stings. I took a sip of Grain Belt to distract myself. It was warm.
“Don’t know why you’d want one, but if you feel like it, you can pick one out,” he
grumbled.
“Pick what out?” I asked.
“Eighteen’s a big birthday. I ain’t got money for no gift,” he said, shuffling over to a filthy
burlap tarp that was draped across some old boards so that it hung like a curtain. With a small grunt,
he pulled it down. The tarp crumpled to the floor, looking like a shrouded corpse.
“Holy hell,” I said.
“These are mine,” he said. “These are my birdhouses. The ones I keep.”
They looked less like birdhouses and a lot more like miniature churches from the Middle
Ages. They had spires and stairs and alcoves and buttresses. The angles were still crazy, and the
proportions exaggerated, but these were some kind of combination of beautiful and frightening.
“If you want one, take one,” he said, like he didn’t care either way. And maybe he didn’t.
But, really, I think he did.
“I want to,” I said. “But I can’t.”
“Fine by me,” he said and quickly began gathering up the tarp so he could cover them back
up. “Probably all infested with wasps anyway.” He sounded like he regretted asking in the first
place. Like maybe he was even a little embarrassed.
“I mean it, pop. I would if I could. But, I’m heading out,” I told him.
“Heading out. What’s that mean?”
48
“Gonna try to work on a ranch. Wyoming.”
“A ranch? Where the hell you get that idea from?”
“Guess it’s just something I’ve always wanted to try. Working on a ranch,” I lied. Truth is,
I’d gotten the idea from a crossword puzzle I’d been doing in Geometry class. The clue was least
populous state. Shit, I’d already had the first letter filled in as W, so it wasn’t too hard to figure out it
was Wyoming. After class, I’d gone straight down to the library and asked the librarian if it was true
about Wyoming having less people than any other state.
“Well, let’s just consult a reference book,” she’d suggested pretty excitedly. Then she pulled
out some book—I don’t even know what—and looked it up. “That’s exactly right.”
“Even less people than Alaska?” I’d asked her.
“That’s what it says,” she’d smiled. “Would you like to check it out?”
“What? The book?”
“Correct. The book. Would you like to check it out so you can bring it home?”
“Nah,” I’d said. “But thanks for the info.”
From that moment, I’d decided Wyoming would probably be a pretty great spot for me to
settle. Someplace where no one could bother me, and I didn’t have to bother no one else, either.
“I ain’t never heard you dreamin’ of a ranch life,” my old man said suspiciously.
I shrugged.
“What about school?” he grunted.
“What, college?”
“College? Hell no, not college. I’m talking about finishing high school.”
“Don’t need no diploma to work on a ranch,” I said.
“What are you? A goddamned expert on ranches all of a sudden? The hell you know
49
about ranches anyway?” The old man seemed disgusted, though I couldn’t tell if what it was he was
disgusted by: ranches themselves, or how piss-poor my idea was. Maybe both.
I shrugged. “Nothin’, I guess.” Then I added, “Only that they’re supposed to be big, and if
you work hard, you can make a decent living.”
The old man considered this, and failing to come up with much of an argument against it, he
asked, “Guess I’m supposed to tell you no? Make you stay here and finish school?”
I shrugged again. “Don’t see the point. Doubt they’d even let me graduate. Flunking half my
classes. Geometry’s a real bitch.”
“No it ain’t. Math’s easy.”
“For you maybe.”
“For anyone.”
“Anyway,” I said.
“Anyway,” he said, too. He exhaled like he’d just expended a lot of effort.
“Ain’t no shame in workin’ is there?” I asked him.
“Shame ain’t for anyone else to decide. You gotta wake up with yourself. Not me. Not
nobody else.” He sounded angry. Though he always sounded angry.
“You pissed?”
“No,” he said, and then he pounded his chest, hawked up some Camel tar from his lungs, and
spat some brown shit down into the grass. “No, I ain’t pissed. I’m just asking the kinds of shit
fathers ask. That against the fuckin’ law?” he asked. And then, real slightly, he smiled at me.
“No it ain’t,” I said.
We sat there taking sips of our beer, not saying anything until, after a minute, I finally spoke
up. “Well, anyways, I never once been out of Nebraska. I just wanna see somewhere else for a
while.”
50
“Could do worse than working the land, I guess,” he allowed.
“It’s honest. All I want to do is mind my own business, work hard, earn a living. Don’t seem
like too much to ask.”
“Ain’t nothin’ ever so simple. Don’t forget what I told you when you was little.”
He didn’t need to remind me what that was.
“I never told you this before, but someone once warned me to watch out who I was givin’
hard looks to.”
“The hell said that?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “You believe that?” I asked him.
“Nope,” he said. “Sometimes them hard looks is all you got.”
Guess if I was older or smarter I might have known he was talking about himself more than
he was talking about me. But, hell, I wasn’t nothin’ more than a high school kid, and soon-to-be
dropout. Still, I knew enough it felt like a good time to pay him a compliment. “I like your
birdhouses, pop.”
“I don’t. I look at ‘em and they make me feel like I’m a fucking lunatic.”
“Well,” I said, thinking about him laying my grandma out with a single haymaker, “you
ain’t. And I like ‘em. I’ll come back when I can and I’ll pick one out. Maybe when I’m ready to
settle down, you know?”
“No law says you have to.”
“Never said there was,” I told him. “Anyway. Thanks for the beer, pop.”
“Let’s have another on account of you goin’ away.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
And I did even though we didn’t say another word.
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Thing of it is, I don’t like animals. Didn’t mind mending the fences, but I couldn’t stand
feeding the livestock, making sure the heaters were working in the pens, waiting up all night during
calving season. And even if Wyoming was a big place with a tiny population, working on a ranch
meant working on a crew. Hell, it wasn’t too different from being back in high school again. Only
instead of class, it was work. And instead of going home, you went back to a bunkhouse along with
everyone else.
Lucky for me, I got fired that next spring. Guess they wanted someone who could do more
than just pound nails or rebuild a small engine.
So, I took my duffel bag and headed to the nearest town. Worked at a C-store for a few
weeks, where they let me sleep in a cot in the back. They let me go when the owner’s son got out of
the county jail and was ready to come back to work. So it was further on down the interstate for me.
Put in for a construction job on this new development they were trying to build. Wasn’t half-bad ‘til
they ran out of money, though. So, then I tried my hand at working the oil fields. It was something
I’d been hearing about, and the pay was supposed to be better than any ranch or construction outfit
could pay. Took a bus north to where I heard they were hiring. And they were. Only, turns out I
wasn’t cut out for the job. Got flagged three times for safety violations, and they canned my ass.
Hardly lasted a month. The money was damn-near gone, so before I knew it, I was back to chasing
another ranch job. This one was in Idaho.
So much for my big Wyoming dreams.
Got out there to Idaho, and told the boss I wasn’t much for animals but could mend fences,
saw wood, even fix tractors and trucks so long as it wasn’t transmission work. Transmission work’s
something you leave to the pros, I’ll tell you that. Especially if it’s an auto. The boss told me he’d
see what he could do, and for a while everything seemed to be going ok. I even saved up enough
52
money to buy my mom something for her birthday. Necklace with some kind of bird on it. Silver.
Don’t mean it was actually silver. I mean, the color was silver. It was nice. I got it at one of those
fancy truckstops with the restaurants and the showers. Wrote her a letter, too. Called home the next
week to make sure she got it, and she did. She loved it. She asked me when I was coming home, and
I told her soon. What else would I say? Never? Anyways, I’m sure she knew I was lying. But I
wasn’t lying to be mean, I was just trying to make her happy.
Like I’d ever made anyone happy.
After a summer of odd jobs, the boss called me into the house and told me they wanted to
rebuild the pens before winter. He wanted to put me on the project along with this other fella named
Tom. I was glad to have the work, but I wasn’t so thrilled to be paired up with him. He was one of
these hot-shit guys who used to ride bulls and rope cows and crap like that. Everyone looked up to
him like he was John Wayne or something, but I thought he was just a loudmouth. His clothes were
always extra neat. No wrinkles. He was one of them guys who looked like a young man from afar,
but when he got up close, you could tell he was probably in the back half of his 30s.
First day on the job we were clearing out the old pens and he says to me, “You the one who’s
afraid of the cattle?”
“Afraid of the cattle?” I asked him. “The hell gave you that idea?”
“Boss says you ain’t much for animals.”
“That’s right. I ain’t much for ‘em,” I said, a little defensive. Truth of it is, of course, a lot of
those cows are big as hell. Those bulls are mean bastards. You get a whole herd of cattle in a
stampede, you’re liable to get your neck broken. “That don’t mean I’m afraid of ‘em.”
“Don’t mean you’re not,” he laughed and stuffed a wad of Mail Pouch into his cheek.
I didn’t say anything to that.
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Tom snickered.
I’d been shoveling rocks and old rotten wood and other debris, but it was slow work. So I
tossed the shovel aside and grabbed the bow rake. It was dusty as hell in the pens, and it was hot
even though it was getting to be fall.
We worked in silence for a few minutes. Well, I did. He pretty much stood there, not looking.
And he wasn’t silent, either. That Mail Pouch he was gnawing on made him spit every five seconds,
and when the brown juice hit the ground, it sounded like vulture shit falling from a roost at the top
of a tall pine.
I just kept working, scraping up debris.
“They tell you about initiation?” Tom asked me.
“No idea what you’re talkin’ about,” I said, trying to sound annoyed, which wasn’t hard,
because I was.
“Musta not said anything ‘cause no one likes ya,” he said and cracked up laughing. “But, let
me catch you up.”
“Ain’t interested,” I said.
“That ain’t relevant,” he said. “For you to be a real-life cowboy—” he started to say, but I
interrupted him.
“Hell you know about being a cowboy? You look more like a jockey to me,” I chuckled.
That got him real offended, and he walked straight over to me, right up to my face. His eyes
were nearly black, and he grimaced. The man’s face, which had narrow lines cut into it, was pure
hatred and violence. He was looking for a reason to tangle.
“I’ll cut to the quick, son,” he said, and he spoke so low it was almost a whisper. “First week’s pay
goes to me. You been here for awhile now. So the way I see it, you owe me interest.” He switched
54
the chaw from one cheek to the other then spat on my boot. “Understood?”
No point in acting tough. Anyone could see I was scared as hell. I just looked down and got
back to work.
“I’ll take that as a yes, sir,” Tom said and took a step back. Then he took another, and one
more until he was about two feet from me. He ejected more brown spit from his pursed lips and
smiled an evil smile. Meaner even than the one I got from the man in the Pontiac.
I tried meeting his eyes but couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“Now about that interest,” he started to say, “I figure maybe ten per—”
Brained him with the fucking rake.
Wasn’t planning to. Just happened. Wham. He went down with a thud.
I didn’t stick around to see how he fared. I ran, and I ran like hell. I may be stupid, but I’m
no dummy: I took the rake with me. Hopped into the truck the boss let us use for supply runs, and I
drove the thing down 191 back to Wyoming. The boss would come looking for it before too long,
but I’d be good for a few hours before he went calling the cops about a missing vehicle. Along the
way, I stopped in Pinedale where I snapped the rake into a few pieces and tossed it into the Upper
Green River. Then I made it the rest of the way to Rock Springs.
Ditched the truck behind a grocery store, and took the plates off. Threw those in a dumpster,
just to buy myself even more time before the police figured out whose pickup it was. After that, I
went into the store and bought myself one of those candy bars, a Whatchamacallit. I tucked into that
and walked across the street, where I spied the train tracks out behind the strip mall with the K-Mart.
Always liked walking train tracks. So I figured I’d just walk the tracks for awhile until I came to a
station, or maybe a station beyond that one. From there, I’d by a ticket to who-knows-where.
55
And that’s just what I did. I walked those tracks, eating my Whatchamacallit, replaying in my
head how I’d bashed Tom’s head in.
Not a single train came the whole time.
Not a single one.
Eventually, I came to a station. Took a look at the route map, then I marched right up to the
million-year-old woman behind the window, and spent damn-near all my cash on a one-way ticket to
Saltair, Washington. It was either that, or Omaha.
Why the hell would I ever do that? I’d never seen the ocean. Never stood on a beach. Figured it
would be good to go someplace different. Also, I’d heard logging is big up there. And that seemed like a
good fit. After all, I was good with a chainsaw. What the hell, couldn’t have been worse than clearing out
the pens with Tom.
Tom.
As the train headed west, I wondered if I’d killed him. If not, I thought, well, maybe I wiped his
slate, you know? Maybe he was laid up in some hospital bed in Idaho Falls wondering who the hell he
was. I wondered if they were looking for me. The police, I mean. Probably they were. They were
probably posting my picture up in the post offices, informing the public about how dangerous I was,
asking the public for information on my whereabouts, warning them not to approach me on account of
how vicious I was. Murder. Attempted murder. Grand theft auto.
Or maybe Tom got up and walked away, too tough to tell anyone it even happened. And maybe
they found the truck and returned it to the boss, and he didn’t even bother to file a report since I never
bothered to collect my last check.
Or maybe I was just that same scared, scowling kid, going from one knock-out to the
next.
56
Or maybe doing what I’d done to Tom did something to me. Changed me, I mean.
“Seat taken?”
“No, sir,” I answered. Would’ve been nice to have the row to myself, but who was I to say
someone can’t sit where they want to? It’s a free country. At least, that’s what they say.
“Headed home?” he asked me in a raspy sort of voice. Not weak. Just raspy.
“Not exactly,” I shrugged. “Guess it could be if it works out, though.”
“Know what you mean,” he nodded. “I been there.”
“That right?”
“How else you gonna find home unless you go lookin’ for it?” he asked me.
“Guess that’s true, sir,” I said to him. And I guessed it really was.
We sat there in silence for a little while, but it wasn’t one of those awkward kinds of silences.
It was kind of nice actually. Kind of nice to just sit right there next to someone, knowing one of you
ain’t gonna steal the other’s stuff, or that you weren’t likely to end up in a fistfight.
The old guy sighed like he was tired, but in a relaxed sort of way. “Yeah,” he said. “You’ll be
alright.”
“I hope you’re right, sir,” I said to him. “I sure hope you’re right.” All at once, I wanted to
fucking cry.
I went back to looking out the window, watching the world rush by. I kept thinking about my old
man’s birdhouses, because all we kept passing out there in the Great Wide Open were sheds. I kept
wondering what was inside of them all. Was it just old tractors? Or did other people have secrets like
my old man? And if they did, what were they? An affair? A booby trap in Vietnam? A fear of damn
near everything and everyone?
57
I kept thinking about that tarp piled up on the ground, how it looked so much like Tom after
I’d bashed his head in with a rake. Thought about the birdhouses he’d had hidden away beneath that
tarp. They were ornate. They were irrational. Some kind of symbol of my old man’s madness,
something that looked beautiful to me but that made him feel like a lunatic. I wished I could have
taken one. Wished I could have brought one with me to the cold, Pacific Ocean, and nailed it high
up on the trunk of an old elm. I wished I could have watched it fill with warblers, not wasps.
You know, it’s like that old song, I thought.
Only I couldn’t remember which, because I’d only heard it the one time, before the melody
and words had slipped away like some kind of crazy dream.
58
Fill You In
By Fred Pollack
A transitional moment
must have occurred. The bros
(not yet called that) here for hours,
except the few whose thing is to come late;
where they sleep, if at all, is indifferent.
Now they rise
from strobing cursors, half-completed lines
of code whose aim is already uninteresting:
There is no spot that cannot see you
or change your life. They are wearing
shorts (in contempt of contemptible winter),
T-shirts with ads or obscurely obscene
slogans, beards and piercings, mixed plaids.
In the new dispensation they won’t;
will drive home to wives and second wives and children,
the asocial become a mere ideal.
But by then the office will be bigger,
a campus in itself, not looking out
on a parking lot, one palm. Out there
a wind is rising without symbolism.
59
On the milky floor-to-ceiling panels
at the end of the room, their principal,
ideal, progenitor, the Boss
appears. He looks born to corporate finery
but the voice retains, as naturally,
the tone of a trippy joke.
In the screen on the left he’s in Boston. New York,
Vancouver pick up the tale.
There is wit about these places and drinks in these places
but the story concerns very clearly stated
amounts and assignments. The proto-bros
know they must hop. But for a moment
(perhaps) they want
to smoke or inhale the treasures in their desks,
repurpose code they’re writing (not to destroy
everything, only as much as they like),
break screens and windows. Outside,
the wind is slapping the palm about.
Perhaps it will uproot itself and walk
with a crude analog vitality.
Winter in Austin, Texas
60
61
Sal’s Diner
By Susan Waters
I was the waitress that everyone thought should be fired. I didn’t hear anyone say it, but
their looks when I delivered their mismatched orders and when they responded with drunken rants—
“I wanted my coffee with my meal! What kind of joint is this anyhow?”—made it abundantly clear
that I should be summarily fired. All the customers’ unwanted (but not unjustified) comments and
looks made me even more sullen. I have never liked being subservient and have only submitted to
the outrage or even cowered when I absolutely needed the money.
Sal’s Diner was what one would expect from an eatery with a name like that. Wedged into a
street-long string of buildings in Seneca Falls, New York, it was a respectable diner but sometimes a
dive. It was open early and even far into the night to catch the drinking crowd, still drunk. The floor
was checkered, a rust and yellowish tile which may have once been brilliant white. Maybe it always
was drab because drab is easier to maintain. Nobody expected anything else. It was just the type of
diner found all over New York state at the time. Trendy coffee did not exist in much of the country
beyond the wealthy enclaves. Meals were hearty. No entrees with small bits of food surrounded by
edible flowers. A staple at Sal’s was a hamburger and a mountain of fries smothered with gravy.
Some customers were perennial, probably because they wanted to be around people and to have
some sort of routine to follow. I now understand why.
Sal had a firm grip on the reality he was faced with. He had to hire people like me,
lackadaisical, partly sullen because that was what he had. Waitresses worth something, the ones
who smoothly went through a shift, carrying large trays with one hand and not spilling anything
ever, preferred an up-scale restaurant where they made better tips. They were a wonder to behold,
the ones who made a career of it, breezing through the tables, immediately scooping up dirty dishes.
62
They never seemed to have to write down an order, and when they did, it was in their own
shorthand. In contrast, I took my time with orders and never seemed to get much of anything right.
To reprimand me for my inattentiveness, or at least to show me that there were worse things than
waitressing, Sal once commanded me back to kitchen to scrub pots and pans. I was equally bad at
that—slow, not getting enough of the grease out of all the pans. I must have been Sal’s nightmare,
but in retrospect, I think he was patiently trying to guide me through the steps for what he thought
was probably my career. Meanwhile, I was still fixated on that German degree which was
meaningless in a small town. Maybe I could have taught German, but then I would have had to deal
with comatose high school students who had their own dreams, dreams mainly about escaping the
tedium of sitting in a classroom for endless hours.
Bill, the cook, was a hulking presence with outraged brown hair that stuck out at every
angle, and he had the most striking glass eye in the universe. Because of some accident he never
talked about, he had lost an eye. Because he didn’t have a lot of money or because he didn’t want to
spend his money on something like that, he bought an artificial eye that was a peculiar color. The
batch of glass eyes had been wrong and so his eye was almost neon blue with streaks of lightning-
like yellow. It was hard not to stare at it, and I think he liked how intimidating it could be.
Bill may have had a regular name, but he was anything but regular. He became the cook at
Sal’s because he had to stay out of trouble for a while. He was on parole and didn’t want to go back
to jail. Prison was more than OK in the wintertime, when upstate New York froze into a picture
mainly uninhabited because the cold had driven people inside to worry, at least some of them, about
the cost of heating bills and houses which would need repairs because the winters wore them down.
Bill liked his summers free. Spring and fall are fine to be out, back to so-called reality. Bill’s
occupation before his most unfortunate incarceration was theft. Even in that, Bill was not a regular
63
thief. He only robbed businesses because he thought they could afford the loss. After all, they had
insurance.
Bill was particularly good at glowering. Normally, his smooth face was a slightly darker
white of mushrooms and without expression. But when the customers complained—and they so
liked to do so when they were drunk, the alcohol coaxing them into being the bullies they wanted to
be in normal day life—his face would darken to the color of winter woods and he would glower. The
eye had a startled look, not just because of its color, but because it seemed oversized. Maybe it held
his eye open; I don’t know if he ever blinked. When customers abused him, he would pretend an
odd sort of subservient shame, take the steak back to the kitchen and throw it against a grimy wall.
Then he would put the meat back on the plate and graciously present it to the bully. He was a
wonderful character, and had I not met him, I would have been tempted to create him.
When I was hired by Sal, I had a newly granted German degree in my tight, 22-year-old fist,
and I expected the world! I thought the world was waiting for me. It took years, but I discovered
that the world didn’t even know or cared that I existed. I didn’t know until way too late that
connections and money have much to do with great success in every country. That was a long time
ago, but I think many of today’s graduates feel the same. What I was faced with was a scarcity of
jobs and certainly none in German. Stuck in a little town because my new husband wanted to
volunteer as a soccer coach as a living, with a scrawny check from his night job at Howard Johnson,
the bleak hours passed by only nearly. I also had to have a job so we could have the walk-up
apartment in town with windows that were painted shut. I tried, like so many young women, to
make a nest, but we were ill fated from the start. Our parents had pressured us into marriage. I
didn’t have to marry, but his parents persuaded him, and he persuaded me. I don’t think of any of
those instrumental in our walk down the aisle as having been mean-spirited; the expectation of
marriage was just part of the time.
64
I was just steps away from the Erie Canal, a place in history where cheating and/or mean
customers were once dumped into the canal from a convenient trap door in a few salons. I was just a
mile or so away from where women began the women’s suffrage movement. All of this did not
interest me then as it does now. I was only interested in my life starting, or what I envisioned as
starting, with unconditional love and a more than generous dollop of sex. I did not espy a future I
thought was my entitlement as much as I tried. What I did see was the night shift from the local
factory marching home, after a third shift stint, much like the workers in George Segal’s “Rush
Hour,” except that Segal’s workers are better dressed. Heads slightly hung in the noose that some
jobs require, the Seneca Falls workers walked in almost a file, with empty lunch tins in hand. In
colder months, their breath could be seen, a small cloud surrounding each person. I saw them as a
future I did not want. I now realize that they contained the courage needed to stay decades at a job to
support their families, and that many of them were probably proud of what they did for a living, as
they should have been. Mine was a generation that prefigured the present: even if the jobs were
scarce or non-existent, I thought because I went to college, I was entitled to climb up the societal
ladder. I didn’t know about the endless glass ceilings and the inequity in pay and advancement. I
spent a lot of time banging my head against the glass ceiling to the point of an almost concussion. I
guess it was worth it? I am still trying to learn the lesson Voltaire’s Candide understood at the end of
the novel by the same name: happiness is found tending one’s own garden—in other words, in the
circumstances of one’s life. In Seneca Falls, I was learning and living the imperfection of life, and in
retrospect, I would not wish that it had been any different.
65
contributors
Mark Jackley lives in Purcellville, va. His poems have appeared
in Sugar
house review,
the cape rock,
=, and other journals.
John grey is an Australian poet and us resident. Recently published inthat, Dalhousie review and
qwerty with work upcoming in
blueline,
Hawaii
pacific review and
clade song.
Terry sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet
wife (his in-house editor) and two plumb cats (his in-house critics). He
writes full time, producing short stories, essays, poems, and novels. Since
2005, his short stories have been accepted more than 370 times by
commercial and academic journals, magazines, and anthologies includingthe Potomac review, the Bryant literary review, and
Shenandoah. He was
nominated twice for pushcart prizes and once for inclusion in
best of the
net anthology. His stories have been listed among “the most popular
contemporary fiction of 2017” by the
Saturday evening post. Terry is a
retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist – who
once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George
shearing.
Katrina monet katrina began her writing career as a poet at the age of
seven and works across genres in non-fiction and flash fiction. She has
been nationally acclaimed through wiring awards, grants, and private
scholarships. She has been personally recognized by and inspired the
work of New York times bestselling authors.
66
David obuchowski is a prolific writer of fiction and long-form essays. His
short stories have appeared (or are scheduled to appear) in
The
Balitomore Review,
border crossing,
twisted vine,
west trade review, and
many others. His non-fiction can be found in
salon,
longreads,
jalopnik,the daily beast,
the awl, and more. His in-depth documentary podcast,TEMPEST, is a critical and popular success and serves as the inspiration
for an upcoming television series. For work published in 2019, he was
nominated for a pushcart prize for both fiction and non-fiction. David and
his family live in Colorado.
Fred pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems,
The
adventure and
happiness (Story line press; the former to be reissued by
red hen press), and two collections,
a poverty of words (prolific press,
2015) and
landscape with mutant (smokestack books, uk, 2018). Many other
poems in print and online journals.
Susan waters started out as a journalist covering hard news in upstate
New York and for 13 years was a magazine editor and writer at the viriginia
institute of marine science, college of William and mary. Her publishing
credits are extensive. She has won 10 prizes in poetry and has been
nominated twice for the pushcart prize in poetry. Her chapbook
heat
lightning was published in 2017 by orchard street press. Currently, she is
a professor emeritus at new Mexico junior college.
rindliterarymagazine.com
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Vox Inaudica 