#59: "The Crucified Bird" by Patricia L. Meek

~This story previously appeared in Puerto del Sol (1994).

            The bird of prey had been left hanging on the wire fence, its wings pulled to their fullest length along the barbs. The wind kicked up dust, the tips of the feathers twisted in the breeze, and for a moment I imagined the bird in flight.

            Dad saw it, too, and he pulled the station wagon over to the side of the road. I was tired and didn't feel like working, but I unbuckled my seat belt, took a breath of air-conditioned air, and opened the door to the searing California heat.

            Dad was already sweating before he got out of the car, and he wiped his face with the white towel that he wore around his neck before crossing the road to get a closer look at the bird. As he took light meter readings, I studied him. I watched the methodical way he prepared the photograph—checking and rechecking tiny numbers, twisting his moustache while standing at the exact spot, changing his mind, finding a better angle and twisting his moustache some more. If someone had told me six months earlier that I would be helping my father take pictures in the San Joaquin Valley during his sabbatical, I would have said "impossible."  It wasn't that I disliked my dad; it was just that I was eighteen. I had found a great summer job helping young kids write stories at the YMCA. I was dreaming about an apartment, all-night parties—I was even humming the Star Spangled Banner. Then my mother told me that Dad needed my help. For six hundred dollars, I was hired out to my father. It was as simple as that.

 

#58: "Thugs Like Us" by CD Mitchell

~This memoir previously appeared as "Memphis" in Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley (2006)  

Rachel and I left our apartment on June 14th, 1996, closing but not locking the door that swung on a splintered jamb. The swat team and DEA agents had ruined it with that battering ram they used to break in. We drove fifteen miles south to Brookland. I’d arranged earlier in the day for Larry White to meet me there at two o’clock with a brick of crystal-methamphetamine. We were taking it to Memphis, where a buyer would pay twenty thousand dollars cash for it. The buyer was the DEA.

Time and focus have a direct relationship that has always amazed me. It seems the further we are in time from an event, the easier it is to focus on it, and understand the insanity that gripped us. There is the perceived reality of the moment--and the truth, that can only be understood and accepted with time and reflection. Time has helped me to accept what happened that day in Memphis. Time has relieved me of the guilt for what I did. I know I did the right thing at the time; it took me years to realize I did it for the wrong reasons.

            I have changed the names of everyone involved to protect the guilty. No one was innocent.

 

The day started uneventfully, which was good for a change. We got up early--unable to sleep. But the clock kept ticking, and finally the time to leave arrived. Rachel sat in the kitchen, playing with her hands. She’d gone to the window and looked outside two different times while I spoke to Sanders on the phone. As the agent in charge of the Memphis DEA, Sanders oversaw the whole ordeal.

“What do I have to do?” Rachel asked.

“You’ll drive me to Brookland to meet Larry. I’ll ride with him to Memphis. You’ll come get me when it’s over. I can’t tell you anything else.”

            “Go to hell,” she said.

“Sanders hasn’t told me anything. I have no idea where we’re going or what’ll happen when we get there. All I know is you’ll need to come back here and kill an hour before you leave for Memphis.” I got up and walked to the window. Ever since the bust, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they still watched us, even listened to our telephone conversations. I spoke to Rachel as I looked through the curtains. “We’ll have a bunch of paperwork to do. You might as well go to Landry’s when you get there. That’s as good a place as any to wait. Sanders promised he’d send someone to get you and bring you to wherever we’re at.” I turned from the window and walked to the front door. I stepped out on the porch. Someone sat in a car across the street. I took a breath of warm air and walked back in. The apartment reeked of cigarettes and stale beer.

#57: "The Safest Place" by Jen Michalski

~This story was previously published in Reed Magazine (2010)

When Andnej turned sixteen he set like concrete. His cheeks and jaw flattened and squared, and so did his nose, which pointed downward, like a beak. Basha wondered if he smiled whether his face would break. In the afternoons and evenings he sat on a playground swing behind their apartment complex, his necklace catching the sun as his Adidas and jean cuffs dragged across the pavement. When the boys came up to him, he no longer ran.

              “He sold drugs to Henka’s sister,” Kamilia said as Basha studied him through the apartment window.

              “How would you know?” Basha looked down at her. Last year Kamilia had played princess games with Henka, the other 9-year-old in the building. Kamilia, whose face colored and eyes found the floor of the elevator when the boy down the hall read aloud all the bad words spray-painted on its walls. “Do you even know what drugs are?”

              “He gives her aspirin.” Kamilia moved her thumb and pointer finger together to show the size of the pill. “Henka says that Ania takes them to lose weight.”

              Basha could not forbid Kamilia to play with Henka; if it was not one child in the complex, it was another. They were the children of mostly second-generation Polish and Chechnyian families, and they tended to stick together.

              Andnej and Basha had stuck together once. When they were in the third and fourth grades together at Elementary School No. 58, every day Basha sat across from Andnej at the long, empty lunch table and smiled at him. She pretended not to hear the snickers of the other children, feel the spitballs and bread crust fly by her ears and face. She sat across from the only Polish boy in her class, almost a head shorter than she, and smiled at him until he smiled back.

              And now he was looking at her, nine stories up. His short blond hair bristled out of the edges of his backward baseball cap as his eyes squinted in the sun.

#56: "Fear of Giants" by Philip Belcher

~This poem was originally published in Shenandoah (2009)

Fear of Giants

After Diane Arbus’s photograph, “A Jewish Giant at Home

with His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970”

Rabbi Mueller stopped calling him Samson

when my son at ten looked down on me.

By twelve, he’d torn the tightening collar

of school, and I saw his future frown.

Last week, Bart’s Deli named him worker

of the month.  He stocks the highest shelves.

Now we wait, our evening service, as he steps

in from the job, conquers the door with his cane,

his limp.  My wife’s hands nest on the ledge

of her hips, her mouth’s delighted “o” telling

him, telling me, of her triumph, that this Titan

began in her.  I look straight at his waist,

hands moling my pockets for dark.  Myths

have come and gone since I brushed his hair

while he stood.  Tonight, I sit by his brow,

surveying the baffling terrain of his face,

and muster a waning affection.

[Editor’s Note:  Here’s a link to the Arbus photograph.]

*****

#55: "The Nest" by Mark Farrington

~This story previously appeared in Phoebe: The George Mason Review (1987).

Eleanor, weeding the strip of flower garden along the front of the house, almost picked up a snake. From the window Al watched his wife jump to her feet and stumble backwards. She yanked off one of her work gloves and threw it to the ground. He started outside but stopped when he saw her running toward the kitchen door.

She closed the door behind her, pressing her body against it. Her shoulders rose and fell. “Eleanor?” Al said. “What is it? El?”

She eased away, keeping her back to her husband, and peeled off the other work glove and laid it on the counter. Turning, she rubbed her hands up and down her arms, squeezing the fabric of her navy blue windbreaker, and told him. All the while, she fought to recapture her breath.       

“What kind of snake?”

“I don’t know. A snake. It was in the garden. It was--” She shivered. When Al approached her she passed him, so they ended up exchanging places. “I thought it was a stick. I almost picked it up.”

“Is it out there now?”

“It went underneath the steps.”

“The front steps?”

#54: Two Poems by Lisa Hammond

~This poem previously appeared in CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women (2011)

The Goddess Cleans Out Her Purse

Sometimes that bag just got too heavy, full

of papyrus scraps a thousand years old at least,

a dried-out chapstick, stiff old rabbit skin

from before tampons, buried deep just in case.

First she decided to throw out the sun—

she had enough fire to last, handful of stars

dusting the leather bottom dense as sand. 

She never really used the spear and shield.

Her cornucopia spilled fruit constantly,

but she’d need it later, she thought, digging it

out from underneath the moon and her phone.

Though she thought of starting over, emptying

everything, she finally just lightened her load,

ocean still pouring from that small torn seam.

*****

#53: "Nora" by Tamra Wilson

~This piece was previously published  in North Carolina Literary Review (2001)

            When Nora had all she could take of life, she doused her hair in kerosene and ran down the road swaying and hollering like a branded calf before she finally crumpled to meet her Maker face down.

Hal and Billy were there and they couldn’t forget the sight of their big sister turned into a heap of smoked meat, and it bothered them for weeks and months afterward. They’d wake up nights in bawling fits about a booger, and it about drove Mama distracted trying to quieten them down. (Of course, I was only a baby then, so I couldn’t have no such recollection of my own. I’m just relaying what folks said.) Mama thought maybe all this happened according to the Good Lord’s plan being as how Nora had been an odd sock, but it didn’t matter then; Nora was as dead this way as any other.

The first thing they did was cover Nora up. Then they laid her out in a hand-planed casket that was already made up for Grandfather Tompkins. He hadn’t died yet, so she got dibs on his coffin. They said she was awful small for that man-sized box, but she was in it for Eternity whether she fit or not, along with the rest of her kin in the Providence Cemetery.

The folks weren’t about to ship her back to England, though some said they might should. Nora was a married lady at the time and her husband was an Englishman she’d met in the Great War. He’d been shot up in the Somme, and was one of the lucky ones that didn’t get gassed, trench footed or killt by the Germans, but he did get the shell shock. (That’s something that makes a fellow with otherwise good sense shake like a fresh butchered hog.) To actually see Nora’s husband, you’d never know he’d been messed up like that, but folks said he was. And they said it made him swimmy-headed, like when he was out back talking to soldiers and nobody was there.

The truth is, Nora first ran across Mason Thacker talking out of his head in a hospital tent. Being a nurse, she tried to quieten him down as best she could among all that hollering and damp misery. By then she’d seen plenty of men shot up, though I can’t see how any sane person could get used to something as awful as that. Mama said she didn’t know what Nora saw in being there, what when she could have been home in a clean bed and have decent things to think about besides strange men’s messes. Why that alone would be enough to drive anybody distracted!