#203: "The Other Side of the Line" by Mandy Campbell Moore

~This story was originally published in CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women (2006), under the name Mandy Farrington.

~Selected by Assistant Editor Kenneth A. Fleming

            My first morning on the job, I’m melting. The cafeteria floats in my tears. White-aproned reflections swim across the stainless surfaces—counters, sinks, cabinets, doors. Vegetables I’m fixing to slice sweat odors that seem a bit personal.

            The woman at the station next to mine—Frances—must be seven feet tall and four hundred pounds. A hair net clutches her skull. If it had leg openings, I could wear it as a tutu. She speaks with determination about killing her daughter. “I’ll slit her throat,” she says. “Wash her blood down that drain.” She tilts her massive head toward the hole beneath my heel. “Norbert can put out her carcass with the rest of the pigses.”

            Norbert, with his mane of white hair, looks like God dealing judgment. His pink eyes flicker at Frances, then refocus on the meat slicer.

            “Frances, you’ll do no such thing. All teenagers talk back.” That lady’s name is Elsie, at the station opposite mine. Her voice pipes up and down a scale.

            “I’m the one brought her into this world. I’ma be the one takes her out.” Frances peels boiled eggs with a single motion per shell. She’d peel her daughter’s limbs the same way. Where I come from, a crime is toilet papering somebody’s trees. Maybe I am overreacting. Sweat makes it hard to grip the knife. When I melt, they can rinse me down the drain as well.

            “Shhh,” Elsie hisses and lowers her eyes. Her skin is the color of weak chocolate milk, peppered with dark freckles. She smiled when I was introduced.

            “Pick up the pace,” I hear behind me. It’s Kitty, the manager and only white person here besides me. Perhaps she heard Frances and will call the police or something. Steadying my hand, I chop carrots.

            I have a scholarship. This job is for fun money. Ridiculous not only because the job is plain deadly, but also because I don’t have any friends here to have fun with. They all went to different schools.

            Breathe through the mouth so you won’t cry. You have made a serious mistake.

#202: "Lot's Wife" by Lois Marie Harrod

~This poem was first published in Slant (2000).

Lot's Wife

Even the woman

who was never beautiful

is grateful when

after chemotherapy

her hair returns,

spiky little flames.

For a month or two

she spins,

French waif

catching herself

in the sun’s eye,

who was she?

So why do we blame

the salt woman

who wanted to see

not where she had been

but what?

Gomorrah.

Everything lies

in the season

we do not understand.

These are the pictures

of what we were,

lovelier than we imagined.

Even our children are amazed.

*****

#201: "Chamber Music" by Vic Sizemore

  

~This story was first published in Southern Humanities Review (2013).

~Selected by Assistant Editor Kenneth A. Fleming

            Courtney parks her Prius at the top of Matt’s driveway because Brandon’s blue Mongoose bicycle is sprawled across it. The blazing yellow forsythia at the edge of the drive runs down and is starting to swallow the corner of his house. It’s pretty, just out of control, needs a little tending. A lot of tending. The smell of cut grass wafts from the neighbor’s yard, where a fat man without a shirt on is riding a slow roaring mower.

She grabs her plastic tub of bruschetta—she made it with organic onions and heirloom tomatoes from the co-op, and her own fresh basil—and her grocery bag with baguette and knife and garlic from beside her on the seat and gets out. She closes the door with her hip and picks her way through scattered toys and sidewalk chalk in the carport. The kids’ bodies are traced on the drive in chalk, like victims’ outlines in crime shows. And there is Matt’s outline. Some child has filled him in, drawn him with big round green eyes and jagged blue monster teeth. Matt’s a gentle man, a gentle father. Almost passive. It makes things easy between him and Courtney. The ex-wife, not so much.

The wooden rail at the door is half stripped of its peeling white paint. One whole side is draped in beach towels, turquoise and blue with fish on one, one black with bright pink butterflies, another with blue and yellow flowers. At the back of the carport a blue tarp is balled up like a giant sheet of discarded paper. Beside it are three nylon camping chairs, and a faded bottle of OFF! Clean Feel bug spray. Beside the kitchen door leans a gray snow shovel. The sticker is still on the wooden handle. It says Ames: Our Tools Built America.

Matt gave Courtney a key to his place only yesterday, before leaving for his conference. So she could meet the kids after school. Also yesterday he asked her to consider marrying him. When she didn’t respond with immediate glee—things between the two of them are great, it’s not that; everything is just easy—he backed off a little. “Don’t answer now,” he said. “We’ll discuss it when I get home.”

The little black cylinder thing that should pull the screen door hissing back is broken and jabs out at her leg as the white aluminum door drifts and hangs open like a broken wing. It’s ridiculous to be nervous. Courtney has been a Shreveport Wideman semifinalist. She’s concertized, performed Stravinsky Petrushka, Shoenberg. Berg Sonata. She was with management, soloed with the Honolulu Orchestra right before it folded.  This is just three little kids.

#200: Two Hundred Posts! Let's Celebrate!!

Today we reach a milestone of two hundred posts! That’s two hundred excellent stories, essays, and poems that have been published in print journals but that have not been made available to the wider world of an online audience…until Redux printed them!

Among these 200 posts are examples of a very first publication, pieces that suffered in the print publication process, pieces that didn’t fit into story collections, poems that are now in books, and, of course, pieces that will make you laugh and that will make you cry. It is a joy and an honor to have founded this space with its simple mission of seeking out previously published work that deserves online exposure. Along the way, I’ve “met” (on social media) and met (in real life) so many new writers, watching my own world widen and grow.

Thanks to those who have helped Redux along the way, generously donating their advice and time: Deborah Ager, Marlin Barton, Sandra Beasley, Steve Ello, Kenneth A. Fleming, Rachel Hall, Anna Leahy, Joseph M. Schuster, Bill Skillern, and Susan Tekulve.

And thank you to all the writers who have contributed their work. Your words have enriched my life.

For your reading pleasure:

The 10 most popular pieces in Redux’s first 200 posts, presented in alphabetical order:

# 100: "Your Hand Is My Hand" by Catherine Chung

#80: Four Poems by George David Clark

#93: "The Art of Killing the Birds" by Martin Cloutier  

#61: "Foot Notes" by K.L. Cook

#132: "The Burning Bus Club" by Leonard Kress

#71: "Mrs. Turpin Reads the Stars" by Margot Livesey

#33: Two Poems by Sandra Marchetti

#77: "At the Asylum" by Linda McCullough Moore

#113: "Car Wash" by Joseph M. Schuster

#13: "The Rose Garden" by Paula Whyman

12 additional pieces, selected by me from the 50 most popular posts, presented in alphabetical order (oh, but it was SO hard to choose!!):

#162: "South Ozone Park" by Abdul Ali

#52: "Secrets of Small Machines" by Sandra Beasley 

#69: "Plot, Variations I, II and III (Chapters One through Ten)" by Robin Black

#41: Four Poems by Michelle Boisseau

#15: "Washing the Dead" by Michelle Brafman

#187: "Alphabet Autobiografica" by Eufemia Fantetti

#108: "Reprieve for the Minor Pain Ladies" by Sunil Freeman

#114: Three Poems by Bernadette Geyer

#5: "Tourist Season at Auschwitz" by Mark Lewandowski

#160: "Pierced" by William O'Sullivan

#133: "Shift" by Sheila Squillante

#167: "The One That Got Away" by Mary Kay Zuravleff

On to the next 200! 

~~Leslie Pietrzyk, Editor & Founder of Redux

#199: Two Poems by Derek Mong

~This poem previously appeared in from American Literary Review (2012).

Midnight at the School of Cosmetology

     and the mannequins, vacant

as Caesars in their hall of mirrors,

enthrall a night watchman.

His fingers trace their root holes’

perfect rows. This Styrofoam,

bald as the gibbous moon, outlives

the follicles of a thousand women

thinking. Last week the imported hair

shone fulgent as polygraph ink

and delicate as relics.

He still recalls its boxed arrival—

bangs, pigtails, wigs—whirlpools

of third world beauty

cut to train beauticians of tomorrow.

And though he doesn’t fetishize

its climate or cuisine—pelmeni

in mayonnaise, rain sieved

from a tin roof’s runoff—he’s breathed

that hair before the students

kerosened it scentless.  

There is a world pressed between

a harvest and its dreaming. 

There is a hallway he taps his night-

stick back through, luminous

as the one he entered. All night

hairdos never to travel back overseas

dissolve in the field behind

the building. When his shift ends

he walks home and clicks the TV on.

He turns to stone till morning.

*****

  

#198: "Preserved" by Douglas W. Milliken

~This essay was previously published as “Preservation with Clapboard Gaps” in Salt (2007).

~Selected by Assistant Editor Kenneth A. Fleming

The company truck’s bumper has a pink and black sticker that reads Happiness is Being in the Barn, but right now there is very little barn left within which to be happy. Like an anxious patient on a papered bed, the barn in Hollis Center, Maine, waits on frosted mud with its broadside open and exposed, its old timber frame bathed in pale October light.

            “This was a beautiful barn,” Scott Hatch says from the yard, admiring the building’s uncovered network of right triangles and hemlock. “A classic English barn, immune to gravity, probably outlived a dozen or more owners. Beautiful.” Scott squints against the sun. “Then somebody built an addition to it and opened up a can of worms.”

            Stitched to the barn’s side like an awkward new appendage, the shabby annex gradually sank in its foundation, wrenching the conjoined barn backward as it rotted, skewing it into a parallelogram. Scott turns away, settles stoutly into his excavator’s cockpit, ignites the engine roaring. The addition has long since collapsed and been trucked away to the burn pile. But the original barn still stands a chance.

            Guiding his excavator over rocks and mud to the rear gable-end of the barn, Scott, self-proclaimed barn wright and owner of the Barn Wright Inc., extends the hydraulic arm and nudges the bucket against the exterior wall. Near the machine’s nest of levers, a red retractable leash hangs from the cockpit cage: Spencer, the crew dog, stayed home today. His lips curled as if to break into sudden laughter, Scott yells over the engine’s drone, “Alright, let’s put the pressure to ‘er.”

            Spanning from where the barn’s rear corner post meets the roof plate, two metal cables stretch diagonally like tendons across the open broadside, winding into the spooled bellies of two comealongs, or hand-winches: one is bound to the base of the front corner post; the other is strapped to a tree. Hunching forward, Scott’s apprentice barn wrights, Dave Rose and Joe Marshall, grab the comealong handles and crank.

            The excavator bucket prods the leaning barn; the comealongs gather the slack. Inch by creaking inch, the parallelogram becomes a square.

            Calling for a halt, Scott shuts down the machine, hops to the ground, and checks with a speed-square the angle between corner post and floor. “Ninety-one degrees,” he laughs. “A little overzealous in our approach, I think.”

            Joe chuckles and runs a hand across his premature bald spot, his blonde goatee. A smile hidden within his coarse black beard, Dave adjusts his comealong, barely slackening the cable’s tension.

            Checking again: “Ninety. Perfect.”

            In less than one minute, Scott, Dave, and Joe pushed and pulled a two-hundred-year old barn and returned it square and plumb.

#197: The Remedy by Tim Mayo

 ~ This poem was first published in River Styx (2011).

You were fat in those days: neglect

had slipped like a towel from your waist

showing the whole world the soft rolls of yourself.

How it all glowed under your skin

like a radium dial,

becoming in the end:

a thick envelope for a thin heart.

And on summer nights, when the heat

dripped off the leaves like fat caterpillars,

you’d hang out sniffing cognac, putting on airs

in the only class restaurant around.

Those were the days when haute cuisine

were still foreign words

meaning something more than meatloaf.

How it moved you purposely along

up an invisible ladder

toward some new decorum.

Still, you dared to ask the slim dishwasher,

her first night ever on a job,

to go for a swim after work.

She was a young slip of a blonde with corkscrew hair,

whose father had wired your house and whose lightning wrath

you had never known,

but always feared

like a biblical child fears his Maker.

Nonetheless, somewhere in that part of your brain,

where things dwelled under the surface,

as quiet as crocodiles,                                    

you both knew the pitter-patter

and thump of your intent.                      

*

There is a safety in numbers

when a handful of strangers all begin to disrobe at once,

side by side,

in the sweltering privacy of their own dark space.

Everyone concentrates so hard

to liberate their right foot

from the left leg of their lonely lives,

they see nothing else, and nakedness goes unnoticed.

(But let’s forget about the others.

They are irrelevant.)

The two of you slip into the water

as pat as opposable thumbs.

You swim out to the raft

where a host of faceless bodies

loll about like Romans.

The idea of numbers is still in play.

Then, one by one, the faceless bathers

roll off the raft and swim away,

taking with them the peeled grapes

and nibbling minnows of their hands,

and only the two of you are left to count the stars.

*

You know how it is about the dark,

how even in a moonless sky

the night stars can seem strong enough

to show you things as if it were day.                        

That’s when you noticed                    

the statuary-beauty of her body,

(as if your art had suddenly found art)      

but what you remember most about that night,

and knew you would,

as you stood watching

her leggy presence

cross and uncross itself,

before she reached up to, finally,

clasp her hands behind the bustle of curls

bedding her head

––so unabashedly at ease––so unafraid––willing to show you––

every delicate portion and pocket

of her being,

that it was hard to believe she was that young,

and that you did not touch her––not out of fear––

nor youth––nor even any unwritten law of decency––

but out of an inkling that, one day, this memory

of her fearless poise would be more precious

to you than what you sought.

*****