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Saturday, January 12, 2013 at 04:26PM by Amanda R Howland
Sleep – in a sleep like charcoal unsettled on black construction paper. Sitting up – mouth sealed.
A long moment before – knowing in waking but closed sleep – I am in a car – we are wrapping around mountains. Dark trees. Working sleep.
A long black moment – then brakes before impact – desperate breaking jolt. He said shit and I didn’t want to open my eyes but I did. Joined him in waking life.
It was so dark – night in that old country with no lights – Virginia mountains.
Neal – the man who was my husband then – looked at me. Breathing, and he was smiling because we were alive.
A deer, he said. And there was blood on the glass in front of our faces.
We were coming back from a vacation in Nagshead, North Carolina. We’d split from my brother and his wife – they drove back through Maryland. I wished they were still with us.
Still waking up, I stood with him off the side of the highway. We weren’t safe in the dark car, we figured. Afraid to leave the lights on, who knows how long we’d be here, and we didn’t want to drain the battery. But cars flew past us, invisible, shaking the car. Even with the hazards on, we were afraid in the dark curve of the road that someone might hit us. So we got out – our cell phones weren’t picking up reception in these black mountains. There wasn’t much of a shoulder. Cicadas, frogs, crickets made sounds around us. The grass was wet against my ankles.
He lit a cigarette. I went for his free hand, he squeezed my hand fast and let it go.
I wanted to help – to figure something. I opened my useless cell phone again. Searching… it said. I shone the weak light of it around, to see, and there a few yards behind us, was the white bottom of the deer, the deer on its side, still. I closed the phone. The vision struck me with a physical pain rising from my guts to my chest.
Neal opened his phone and looked back at the deer a long minute. “Well, I guess you were right, Mu, we should have left earlier.”
“We’ll be ok, baby.”
Not long, maybe twenty minutes, or forty, a car slid in behind us. The walking light of the state patrolman moved toward us.
“Hey, y’all better get from that ditch. There’s rattlers down in them grasses.”
I gripped Neal’s arm, afraid to move. He jerked us forward, back onto the tar road.
“I didn’t know, we were hiking in Sedona a month ago, we heard a rattle then, but, I didn’t know they weren’t just in the desert.” How could it be – in this humid green night.
“Oh yeah, ma’am, they mate down there, liable to be a dozen or more there now.
We were grateful. It was sometime close to midnight. He drove us into a town, told us this town, believe it or not, had just installed indoor plumbing recently. But he’d take us to the man who could tow our car to his garage, and then give us a ride to the hotel in town.
In the back of the police car, we sat still behind the solid partition. I wondered about the plumbing and the darkness. How could it be – in America? I looked over at Neal. He turned to me fast and gave me a fast smile, a reassuring wink. We’d been married seven years. He was skinny, white and poreless with thin red hair he parted unnaturally on the left. His eyes, once disturbingly beautiful to me, heavy lidded and dark red brown, now seemed to bug out a bit.
Our week at the beach! I’d laughed so easily with my brother. Sisters and brothers have the same humor. I felt lonely for it now. Did Neal see the look of superiority on the officer’s face when he said this town had just received indoor plumbing? Smug pride that his town was more cosmopolitan than this one?
Neal would say I was being mean, but I thought it funny in a friendly way – we are all susceptible to foolish comparisons of our town to the next.
Neal wanted me close, but not to talk to, not to touch. Just to be near while he watched tv: compulsive instant Netflix viewings of Nip Tuck, Prison Break, and any law show. If I picked up a book, or my phone to text, he’s look at me sideways and say, “Now Muriel. Do that on your own time.” Meaning, when I am home and he is not. Which, being that he was rarely employed, was not often.
To which, after being trained these past seven years, I would sigh like an adolescent and obey. If I picked up the book or phone again, he would yell my name, hit my hand.
Once I wrote on the back of an envelope a deal: I would not text while he was in the room, and he would drink with me and listen to music with me once a month, maybe on a Thursday night.
He laughed, he said, you’re so silly, Mu.
I said, no, I’m not happy, I need to have fun. I need to have someone to talk with, you to talk with.
He said, you are happy, you don’t even know about unhappy. Go make me some coffee. Then he pinched the soft part of the back of my arm, hard. I winced. I said, I hate that. He said, oh you love it. Go on now. Chop chop.
It seemed all night till we were in the hotel an hour away from the village in the mountain where the tow man and his wife lived. I felt sleepy like a child, pressed between Neal and the window of the tow truck. The guy was nice enough to drop us at the hotel after he dropped our car at the only garage in town.
We were broke, had no credit. Ashamed, I called my brother and asked for help – they were almost home, back in Ohio, but he gave me his wife’s credit card number, said we could charge it all and then pay them back over the rest of the summer. My stomach knotted up.
Inside the hotel, which was incredibly new, as if forest had just been cut to make way for this commercial strip along the highway, corporate billboards guiding the way, I had no reception.
And felt suddenly awake.
“Hey Baby, let’s have a hotel party!” I jumped off the bed and onto the floor in front of him.
“Let’s not, Mumu,” he lay on his belly channel surfing. The sound of the tv made me sick – we never watched network or cable at home. Commercial tv disturbed me. The racing images, the banners and emblems stuck on the screen – I couldn’t believe people put up with it.
“Well, maybe I’ll go see if there’s a bar downstairs, or a convenience store, get some wine or something.”
“Just stay put, will you, god Mu, such a drink drink drinker – didn’t you drink enough with your brother this week? And don’t be stupid, you know there’s no bar in this place.”
“I’ll just go for a walk then – it’s a gorgeous night.”
The tv showed women with black hair and dark tans getting pedicures, then a reality show about prison, then a game show about war, then a reality show about meth, then a reality show about bridezillas, then a commercial for a hamburger with many patties, then a commercial for floor wax. Bees flew out of the rays shining from the floor.
His face glowed blue as I put my boots back on. He held the remote tight, but wouldn’t press mute, he looked over and said, “What the fuck, Muriel, get back here, come on, it’s ridiculous to go walking around, shit, it’s almost three…”
A sudden Jolt – a blind jolt like someone ramming their elbow into me, and I staggered, but nothing was there.
“Yeah, I’ll be back.”
“What’s wrong with you – why’d you fall like that?”
“I’ll get you a candybar, if I see a machine,” my throat felt tight, “I love you, Neal.”
He turned back to the tv, “Yeah, whatever, love you, too. Don’t forget your key.”
I rubbed my shoulder – I swallowed my desire to cry when I passed a couple of women, mother and daughter maybe, silently going to their room. What hit me in there? It was like the air had become a wall and rammed into me. Could there be a ghost in such a new place? Or from what was here before this place?
I just wandered the halls, the light dead and awful, useless. Everything smelled new, what was that smell, drywall and glue.
I was outside myself, arrested, examined. That is, moving down the halls, I could see still images
of myself from three angles, face slack, the light imprinting me in this dimension faded first red, then cherry pink. I sensed the husk I had become, moving alone in this marriage. Eyes dull. Guilty.
There were just two floors, soon I was wandering around on the first floor. The only soul around was the front desk woman, who asked me if I needed any help finding anything. She had a black and red wig that looked squished on one side like she was napping on it before I came around. It didn’t look very soft. I said, no, I said I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t bother asking about a gas station, too late for anything.
She adjusted her wig and turned toward a muted television. She looked how I felt: heavy joyless eyeliner, exposed skin, skin dented from unfriendly surfaces.
My throat was swollen with sorrow – I wondered if carrying this sorrow all the time would affect my lymph nodes. There was no chlorine smell in the hotel, no coffee smell. I stepped out front – the night heat felt good – I’d forgotten it was spongey summertime – my fingertips numb from the air conditioning. So much power to keep this place cold, and how many of us were here tonight. A dozen people at most? Who knows. The highway rushed from the darkness, and the crickets.
Then – a slap hard on my back and I stumbled forward, falling to my hands on the hard concrete. My wind was knocked out of me – no one was there. Embarrassed, I looked through the glass windows , but the front desk woman was faced away from me, toward a screen.
I sat back on the ground, catching my breath, looking at the palms of my hands, scratched and bleeding a little, as well as my right knee.
I was having a stroke, or a seizure of some kind. A brain tumor was pushing on the part of my brain that keeps my shit straight.
I felt strange calm in the panic, wondering, what next, and, will I die here, and I sat for a long time.
Back in the room, my eyes dry from too much wakefulness. He was sleeping, soundlessly as always. His hand lay still stretched out across the cover, so peaceful, I ached. I wanted to reach for his hand, to touch him and be touched by him. Flickers of our first days together, sitting in the café at the art museum with acorns falling around us, hugging at the beach, sitting around a fire with Halloween paint on our faces, these flickers rose up then fell away. They were losing their power. I’d held them close for seven years, but three sweet months followed by six years and nine months of – something like tension – and their power was fading.
I remembered the candy bar, so I slipped out again, but only had 72 cents, there was nothing.
I turned away from him in bed, because he didn’t like our skin touching while we slept. I thought my eyes would not seal shut, but just stay open over the dry air, but no, I fell asleep fast.
In my dream, I was standing on a rock, at the edge of a mountain, over a valley. I knew there was a fire somewhere down in the valley, but I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. The forest moved behind me – I sensed Another at my back. The Bear grasped my shoulders in his paws, hard, but I stood still. I could smell his musk, and the paws were larger than I would have thought. He began to shake me, and occasionally a claw grazed my cheek, but I didn’t look back, or fall. He shook me harder, and I began to cry, but it was honey-crying – sweet streams of honey pouring down my face, pouring into my mouth, and down the front of my body, and down to the ground, and down to the valley below.
(His Cubs were our Mothers, and so I felt safe in his ravaging.)
Then he tore off my arms, and I didn’t fall. And then he tore off my legs, and I hovered over the town, and then he tore my head from my torso and threw them down to the fire, and I flew away.
Or course, morning came fast and hard. Nothing was easy, and the continental breakfast was over at eight, before we got up, and the shower had a weak stream, and the cell phone etc etc.
And of course, the car was so damaged, we’d have to rent one, and somehow, get this car ten hours home in a few weeks. And my brother had to give me a second card, and I was ashamed, and felt guilty for the thousandth time, that I didn’t make more money. And angry at Neal etc etc, old bruisy feelings, our vacation most completely over.
We had to take a cab to the rental car place. (We were so hungry.)
We waited in the heat for an hour for the cab. Then, a banged up flat grey Chevy from the eighties puttered up and stopped in front of us. The cabby, also flat grey, ushered us in like a grouch, as if, of course we were supposed to recognize this unmarked jalopy as a commercial service vehicle.
Of course we were, because, as George the cabby told us, he was the only cabby in town. He was known.
I sat up front and Neal sat in back. We did not stop at the first stop sign down at the bottom of a hill. We slid on into the intersection right in front of a speeding truck that slammed to a stop and honked for a long honk.
“What’s his problem,” said George.
I looked back at Neal and we exchanged a yikes look.
We rode slowly down a lone state route that gradually turned into a main street lined with two story buildings from a hundred or more years ago – businesses with apartments above.
“Hey you old coo!” George stuck his hand out the window at a man sitting outside a barber shop smoking and reading a paper. He stopped in the middle of the road, but there weren’t any other cars.
“When you openin’ up, George?”
“Gotta run these ‘uns to Gladsdale, then I’ll be back, better side an hour.”
“I’ll be here.”
Slowly the cab pulled forward again. George said to us, “See, I’m the town’s only barber, too.”
I looked back at Neal again and we smiled. I was feeling good for the first time – since – back at the beach with my brother and his wife. With the ocean in front of us, a warm kitchen, deep drinks and none of the obstacles of our lives back home.
I could never figure out why our days at home were so difficult – it didn’t seem like they had to be that way.
But I reached back and Neal squeezed my hand. I felt calm, and suddenly looking forward to being back home. After this bumpy cab ride, once we settle the paperwork and got into some boat of a rental, I would look out the window and daydream about the changes I’d make when we got back home. The new routines, rituals, rhythms, the way to finding happiness again with myself, and with Neal.
We were approaching what seemed to be the main intersection of town, and George put on his turn signal. It ticked loud and fast. As we got closer to the red light, I saw a dog across the street, a big moppy dog running between people on the sidewalk. I laughed – the dog was clowning and the people were enjoying him. His red tongue flapping against his big white body, running from this person to that, stopping to roll, hop back up and side to side.
Then the dog walked into the street and I worried for him – but there were no cars, we were coming to a stop, and the dog was walking slowly.
I turned to Neal to point out the dog, but then George wasn’t stopping, and I turned back to see the dog walking diagonally across the intersection, and everything was moving so slowly, but instead of saying stop, I looked back at Neal, and then I heard the yelp, the cry of the beast, and felt the bump as we ran him over.
My stomach rolled. I looked back to see if he was lying in the street, but we’d turned. Moving fast away from the town, down long country roads. Riding up, and then down. I looked at George – his eyes were inscrutable, aged like wood, maybe he only knew the road by feel. His feet charged the gas and brakes with no regard.
I couldn’t look back at Neal. The guilt waved through my body. My heart was with the body of the white dog. Images of pets I’d lost to cars in the street came back to me.
When we got to the barren industrial park that housed the car rental office, I got out fast, I felt like I was going to vomit. I was grateful to Neal for dealing with George.
“What’s wrong with you?” He squinted in the sun, his hand shielding his eyes.
I was bent over, breathing hard with my hands on my knees. “That dog – Jesus, Neal.”
“Oh, that,” he laughed, “That dog’ll be fine, Mu.”
“I don’t think so,” I stood up and looked at him, my face in cold sweat.
This thing between us – it was contempt. Contempt I saw in his face, for the words I said, and the movements of my body.
“Well. Come on, chop it, Muriel, I want to get out of this sun,” he clapped his hands and walked ahead of me into the one-room building.
We stood in the rental office. The carpet was blue like a new boy’s room, and the walls were blue, and the whole thing smelled like the hotel, new wood and glues and paints. There was no music, just the receptionist, holding her index finger up to us, saying, just a minute.
We didn’t look at each other, we stood apart with our hands not touching. The new air, cooling and sweet like canned water, the new air seemed to expose the field between us. We were waiting for a safe car, however expensive, to take us back to Ohio. We didn’t look at each other.
I looked instead into a painting behind the receptionist. It was loud and out of place here, framed in garish yellow wood, slightly crooked. It was a messy sunset – paints of melted egg yolk pouring into heavy golden water. Rough black trees scattered on the shore, some reaching veiny into the sun, and then repeated on the water. A forest somewhere, a dark molten sun.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 at 12:34AM by Carla Reimer
I was born a month early, on Queen Victoria’s birthday, in Medicine Hat, Alberta. My father was belting out the hallelujah chorus as I entered the birthing room at the St. Francis of Assisi Hospital.
Five months before my delivery, my father had started taking weekly voice lessons, tired of the scathing looks he received from my mother and other members of the First Mennonite Church whenever he opened his mouth to sing. According to this small congregation of the righteous, his off-key singing was tantamount to sin. So, when I arrived, kicking and screaming, on Sunday, May 23, 1960, at 11:13 a.m., my father was either one step closer or one step farther away from the pearly gates of heaven, depending on how much you admire his attempt to achieve perfect pitch.
I was supposed to be named after my maternal grandmother, Maria. But, my mother, afraid of the anti-German sentiment post-World War II, decided to call me Carmen. My mother wasn’t crazy about opera, but, when she was ten years old, her brother, Jake, had snuck her into the Royale Theatre on Spadina to see a showing of “The Loves of Carmen.” This 1948 movie, loosely based on Bizet’s “Carmen,” starred Hollywood glamour girl Rita Hayworth and her favorite leading man, Glenn Ford. It was the first time my mother had seen anyone dance and she was instantly mesmerized.
“Her first name is Carmen and her middle name is Michele,” she told her mother when she called with the news. “Michele’s French for Maria.” Since her marriage one year earlier, she had seen her mother once, at Christmas. It was only a six-hour drive to Saskatoon, but my mother felt it took too much effort to see her more than a couple of times a year. She was busy completing her lab tech training and perfecting the art of meringue.
My grandmother, who knew a limited number of English words, thought my name sounded nice. She asked my mother to repeat it.
“Carmen Michele Friesen.”
“So you called her Maria,” she had said, after a pause. I like to think it’s possible that my grandmother was already aware of my mother’s deception and simply wanted proof. Since her husband’s death four and one-half years ago from Parkinson’s disease, my grandmother had rarely left her apartment except to attend the 9:30 a.m. German worship service at the Saskatoon Mennonite Church. A congenital hip condition made it difficult for her to negotiate the streets alone, especially in the middle of a Saskatchewan winter. But, every morning, rain or shine, my grandmother read from her devotional, right after she finished eating her cornflakes. That morning, on May 23, 1960, she had been reading the passage where Peter denies he knows Jesus three times. This is a few minutes before he is escorted to his execution on the old, rugged cross.
Just to set the record straight, I look nothing like my grandmother or my mother or Rita Hayworth or the original star of “Carmen.” I do not smolder. In fact, the person I most resemble is my father. We’re both tall with long legs and freckled skin. I could be quite happy with this arrangement except that I’m the only one on either side of my extended family who has blonde hair and blue eyes. No one can explain this anomaly.
“When you were two, you had the most gorgeous red hair,” said my mother, “and, then, one year later, it disappeared and you became a blonde again.” She sounds disappointed, as if it’s somehow my fault.
There are no redheads on her side of the family. But, three of my aunts, on my father’s side, are redheads. My favorite is Adena or Dee. She doesn’t like to cook or sew.
And, when she opens her mouth, it’s either to take a drag from her cigarette or to offer her two cents about life’s finer qualities. I’m forever in her debt for teaching me the delicacies of swearing. It’s her hair, though, that I most admire. In the sun, it is the color of a dying ember.
When I was six years old, I tried swearing out loud for the first time. “Jesus Christ!” I exclaimed, in a fit of exasperation over my inability to create a stable structure out of tinker toys. My mother dragged me to the bathroom. She shoved my head down into the white porcelain sink.
“You’re a bad girl, a bad, bad girl,” she said, again and again, as she washed my mouth out with soap.
In fifth grade, I experience my first bout of amnesia. Our family has moved back to Saskatchewan from Alberta, and as I fill out a government form, I cannot remember where I was born. All summer I have been reading about the history of the Blackfoot
Indians. I learn that sa-ah-ump-sin is the Blackfoot word for the eagle tail feather headdress worn by the Medicine Man and that the medicine hat is made out of otter skin, weasel skin, owl feathers, magpie tail feathers and the stuffed body of a crow.
I figure I might as well write in the name of a place I have never been.
Pine Lake, up north, sounds nice.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012 at 07:19PM 
DEAD RIVER
by Chris Potts
FADE IN:
1. From the BLACKNESS before the first images, in the distance, we hear a savage SCREAM echoing along a corridor, scurrying feet, and a Southern woman babbling scripture. Then, in the dark with us, a man’s grunt of exertion as a heavy wooden chair is dragged across tile.
We fade in to a yellowed poster illustrating the Heimlich maneuver as we hear the man plug in an electrical cord and test a switch. A device hums on and off. Pulling back we see a thrashed medical exam room now used for storage of random equipment draped in dusty plastic sheets. The walls are scrawled with crude graffiti and brown finger-painted warnings. We hear a leather strap being adjusted and the occasional distant sounds of institutional mayhem past the bolted door.
We cut to the man’s face covered entirely in dirty bandages except for his tormented eyes. He wears filthy institutional garb over his gaunt frame and is seated in a wooden, antique electric chair. He is long-limbed---one arm strapped, the other free so he can reach the switch on a low generator. He flips it and is electrocuted, flailing wildly. He falls out of the chair and hangs from one long arm, convulsing on the floor. The machine shorts and he lays supine with blood leaking from his mouth onto the tile.
CREDIT SEQUENCE:
DEAD RIVER
(Due to technical difficulties, we cannot post the entire winning entry here. If you are interested in reading the rest, please email writersninja@gmail.com and we will send a copy to you as a webpage or pdf).
Friday, July 27, 2012 at 07:20PM Lasagna
by Priscilla Turner
Amy and Renee stare down three pounds of chorizo in Renee’s kitchen. The thought of layering the
sausage with tortillas, salsa, and the cheese Amy has just nicked her finger grating in pie plates disgusts her. Mexican lasagna. It’s the kind of food, she thinks, you’d make for homeless guys in a soup kitchen. “So we’re going to freeze most of this?” Amy shifts her weight to her other hip. “To get us through to July?”
“No,” says Renee, “We’re having company.”
Renee works at the women’s shelter, and Amy would like to say that she doesn’t need to be rescued. But really, she thinks, I do.
When they arrive, the guests don’t interest Amy—shelter strays, Bruce would have called them. Do-gooder women and their hearty, tagalong men. The lesbian couple. They all treat her like a visitor from a foreign country who doesn’t understand their idioms. Still, she finds herself saying pathetically—he left me—rather than—we divorced. They are overly helpful to Renee in the kitchen after dinner, abandoning Amy in the living room with the unattached guy—Roger? Robert? Rogbert. Fortyish.
Amy notes Rogbert’s dark widow’s peak, his gaunt five-o’clock shadow, and the orange grease tingeing his lips. Even from a safe distance, he smells like limes, like tequila, like he should be wearing a polo with the logo Cabo San Lucas, or a Jimmy Buffet tropical print, not a sports jacket and an oxford shirt. Though it’s loose at the collar.
The triple sec is gone and he’s poured them both tequila shots. “Drinking this straight,” he says, “reminds me of high school. Only then I knew better.” She laughs. “Actually, I didn’t,” he says as he throws his shot back. Amy crosses her legs. The smooth ridge of her quads in tights plays nicely under her new short skirt. Amy thinks she remembers. Rogbert is a public defender. Used to losing, or losers, anyway. They’re smoking pot in the kitchen now.
Rogbert has a knack for kissing. Amy’s back is pressed into the shoe drawers in Renee’s walk-in closet, upstairs in the bedroom. Rogbert is giving her razor burn. She considers giving leaving a print of her mouth on his neck in return. She stops him, takes his face in her hands and says into the darkness, “Drinking this straight reminds me of high school. Only then I knew better.” He laughs. She says, “Actually, I didn’t.”
Amy tries to hang Renee’s fallen clothes on the pole in the closet in the approximate order they might have been. Rogbert has excused himself, using the bathroom adjoining the master bedroom. Amy has always liked Renee’s perfume, some vanilla scent that probably comes from a women’s fair trade co-op in Madagascar. She wishes for a minute that the blouses and shirts will tangle their arms around her and hold her here, but they don’t.
Amy takes the joint from Renee, tokes and gives it back. The kitchen smells like chorizo and bud. Amy walks to the sink, picks up a pie plate, squirts it with soap and starts scrubbing it with a brush. The countertops are covered with dirty dishes, glasses, napkins. Over the other guests’ chatter and the soundtrack on the speakers, she distinctly hears the sound of breathing, huge lungs filling and emptying, far bigger than her own.
