Cover Works
CARNATIONS
MARCO ETHERIDGE
I see the ghost on the U-6 train often enough to recognize him. He wears an old suit worn shiny at the elbows, a heavy scarf knotted at his throat. The weave of his suit is dusted with the finest skein of flour. A shimmer of white hangs in the cuffs of his pants, clings to his shoes, the residue of some transformation. Ghost to human, human to ghost; I cannot tell which.
His eyes are a thousand-yard stare in a train car ninety feet long. He sees things I do not see, far off down the darkened tunnels that we ride through under the cobbled streets of Vienna. The train screeches and groans in the darkness. He watches something in the unseeable distance as I watch him.
The man rises from his plastic seat as the train reaches Bahnhof Meidling, the station where the world gets on and off. The double-doors lurch open with a pneumatic hiss. He moves across the crowded platform, silent in the babel of languages from three continents. Stepping onto the crowded escalator, he raises three white carnations above the crush. The spindly flowers are wrapped in a tube of crumpled white paper. A battered leather bag hangs from the same hand; white carnations over brown leather, always white, always three. read more…
PRACTICALLY NOTHING
ELIZABETH MARKLEY
The problem with Calhoun County is the way people say it. It just sounds so redneck. Most residents, even those with patently flat Midwestern accents, elongate the second syllable until it sounds like they are from a Southern plantation, and not the cold plains of Lower Michigan. I remember studying the map in elementary school and discovering that other counties in our state had such beautiful names - St. Claire, or Presque Isle, or Isabella. Even whimsical Kalamazoo would be better. It doesn’t help that Calhoun is an utterly unremarkable shape, identical to the uniformly square counties that surround it. Someone very organized or OCD must have been in charge of divvying up the land all those years ago. The Lower Peninsula appears to have been neatly sliced with a knife, like a sheet cake at a child’s birthday party.
Despite the name, Calhoun is not such a bad place to live. It has lots of open space and a simple, Midwestern beauty. I disparage it because I’m ashamed that I haven’t summoned the courage to live anywhere else. I was born here twenty-five years ago, and here I have remained. This was not the plan. Though, to say that implies there was a plan, and the very fact that I live with my grandparents means there was not. I mean, I had vague notions of success – become a musician, sell my songs, buy a big house – but not a sensible road map to get there. When I took my job six years ago it was nothing but a stopgap measure. I was nineteen, had just quit community college, and I needed some cash while I figured things out. This is a phrase the waiters at work use a lot. Not many people set out to sling beer and wings for a career. Even the lifers, the servers who have been here for fifteen, twenty years are still in the process of figuring things out. read more…
BUTTERFRUIT
DEMREE MCGHEE
She chased the slightest cool breeze in the air with her sweat slicked nose, lifting her body up and feeling her legs rip away from the plastic covered couch. Her mother pinched her knee and told her to stop fidgeting.
The relatives only spoke to Tess when they thought she was doing something wrong. But how could she do anything wrong when she was forced to sit perfectly still and sweat next to her mother until she evaporated into the air? It wouldn’t have made a difference to the relatives if she did disappear. Every time she tried to speak their cackling laughter ate up anything she had to say.
But they could hear Archie just fine. It was his eighty-ninth birthday. He held a crumpled up tissue in his hand that he used to wipe his watery bug eyes every few seconds. He sat bundled up in a sweater and a cardigan, a crisp white shirt buttoned up to his hanging leathery neck, despite the fact that the flowers on the coffee table wilted in their vase and everyone else pulled at the collars of their shirts to let the damp heat escape their chests like a split baked potato. read more…
MNEMOSYNE
MAY STEINBERG
Olive trees are the most assertive flora I’ve ever encountered. The peppery smell logged itself into my memory, rendering the different scents of trees I had experienced in my lifetime into an indistinct odious blob of pollen. My nose hairs back stroked through a sea of olive oil as the scent wafted through the cracked car window and activated the deepest synapses of my brain. I eyed the grove of twisted trees flush with delicate, muted green leaves and expected the hand of Zeus, clutching a heel of bread, to drop out of the sky and dab into the grove we are whooshing past.
I settled into the soft leather seat, taking it in, despite my distaste for olives. The scent of the trees, tapped into something deeper, which made my chromosomes quiver. I look to my left at Mnemosyne. She was in the car when Agiris, our distant cousin and driver, picked us up for our lengthy day trip to Koupia, my Yia Yia’s village in southern Greece, a modern version of my mother’s own journey 40 years ago which she always brushed with a wistful glaze in her descriptions of unpaved roads, donkey rides, and connecting with relatives.
I knew who Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, was when I saw her. The folds in her drapey tea-stained dress contained our collective memories, generations of births, deaths, victories, defeats. She gazed at me with irises coated in honey syrup emphasized by chestnut-colored arched eyebrows that matched her coils pinned into a hellenic chingon. Her slight smile screamed, “Remember me?” read more…
HIGH ON THE HOGBACK
HARLAN YARBROUGH
Ben had lived in Bhutan for almost two years, when a Kuiper Belt object changed the course of history. Astronomers monitored the solar system’s asteroid belt and understood pretty well what objects could pose a threat to earth, but none expected a massive object from the edge of the solar system. NASA and its counterparts around the world noticed the object and began plotting the trajectory less than five weeks before it reached earth. Those agencies warned their governments of what they called an “impact scenario” three weeks before the calculated impact. The world’s governments warned their citizens three days later.
For the first few days, most people greeted the news with a shrug and talk of “ho hum, another close approach by an asteroid”. Ben was not one of those. His two-decade-old practice of checking the news on-line every morning meant he maintained a good grasp of world events. To him, the announcements sounded like a massive catastrophe, and he responded accordingly. He immediately began stocking up on—some might say “hoarding”—necessities, such as non-perishable foods, matches and lighters, wet- and cold-weather clothing, and other survival-oriented goods and urged Sonam, his not-exactly-girlfriend, and other friends to do the same. read more…
In This Issue
Winter Journey
LAURA CANON
ONE MORE MILE
KALLIE CROUCH
A DEAD MESSAGE
DARIA DEPTULA
CARNATIONS
MARCO ETHERIDGE
GROOMED
KATE GRIMES
PRACTICALLY NOTHING
ELIZABETH MARKLEY
BUTTERFRUIT
DEMREE MCGHEE
ON STUPIDITY
GAVIN MCCALL
A SECOND CHANCE
BRI OLLRE
DREAMING IN AMERICA
NICK PADRON
THE PROBLEM SOLVER
BRESLIN SAND
MNEMOSYNE
MAY STEINBERG
COLD
DON STOLL
PLAYING HIDE AND SEEK
RUNE WOODMAN
HIGH ON THE HOGBACK
HARLAN YARBROUGH