Monochrome man

hugged my mother once at the bottom of stairs in between doorway and hall. She didn’t see his gentle pressing. I see him through thick time.  When my son was three, he bled. Blood-blister in his throat emptied red threads onto sheets. Man’s sheer sleeve absorbs. When my son was four, the babysitter spoke little English, watched too many children. End of hall, babies cried in a room stuffed with brown, wooden cribs. Clear plastic couches in her living room. Toddler gate my son pounded each morning, man tending to his ache. In kindergarten my son learned Spanish but couldn’t make letters on pages stay still. Man caught little-boy vowels in his collar, helped consonants dissolve: black salt in thick, pale hands pressed together lightly, fingertips pointing.

In the shower I cried, water pelting my chest, colorless, shapeless, molding into monochrome, the indefinite pulling me away.  Man folded me along the edges, like fresh linen mother placed in dresser drawers, his soft eyes urging me beyond the weight.



The Music of Dead Hands

rests
            silent overtones of the past cushion the fingers
huddled like fleshy sticks ready for a bonfire
or maybe the earth: a dark, wet baritone.

You wait for a beat, slight hint of flux,
what syncopated memories feel like against white cloth,
pristine maple edges,
        the force of thought:
what limbs are before arteries fill
with disinfectant.

repeats
        the similar alignment of muddy wrists,
a likeness among death in coffins,
hands folded just below the waist in unison,
or maybe a leitmotif: calm persona
amid parallels of grief.

You wait for a variation, faint twist of harmony
from knuckles muffled in wood or steel:
unfinished symphonies,
        what ache sounds like.

resolves
        a room full of dead hands in hydrogel,
fingertips stiff amid indefiniteness.

You peer through the large glass wall,
wait for the air’s rush and pitch,
        or maybe applause: strong dance of palms,
a rippling dissonance,
then suspension: a final holding
of clay, the mind’s last form of whole,
        each hand a slow, waving cadence.




Theresa Senato Edwards' first book of poems Voices Through Skin will be published June 2011 by Sibling Rivalry Press. Works from this have been published online at Atticus Books, Pirene’s Fountain, and Touch: The Journal of Healing. Other poems appear in Boxcar Poetry Review's second print anthology (2010) and online at Stirring, Press 1, decomP, Clean Sheets, Chronogram, and elsewhere. Edwards works on a second ms titled “Painting Czeslawa Kwoka ~ Honoring Children of the Holocaust,” a collaboration with Lori Schreiner. Work from this can be found online at AdmitTwo, Autumn Sky Poetry, elimae, and Trickhouse. She teaches literature and tutors writing at Marist College and is founder/editor/publisher of Holly Rose Review.

A Milky Taste

Little boy I could eat you. Swallow you
whole, pick your nails from the gaps
in my teeth.  I’d spit on you, let my hair
float, a woolen mop. Feel tears ooze
out of my skin. The water of my chest,
a set of rulers, will snap across your
knuckles, make them swell up blue.
I laugh at the hand of cards lying
on the wooden table. You lost, with
the cows, our green wedding rings, to
your brother in a barn. Your mouth,
a jagged key, cuts my cheek, I could
scream at the moon nailed in black.
Little boy, drink your milk and kiss me,
the coyotes howl tonight, I can hear
the chickens fuss from my window.



Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza poet from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Juárez, México. She is an  MFA candidate at the University of New Mexico in poetry and will be the new poetry co-editor for Blue Mesa Review.

Ian

“His funeral was on the other side of the country.” That is the first thing he says.

“He used to look up at the marbled skies and get dizzy. His focus would eventually come to rest on the worms writhing in the brown earth at his toes.”

That is the second thing he says. He says this to put a poetic spin on things. But now he seems sick of his oft-repeated summary and makes his way out past the stares and sympathy pats.

Stepping outside the building, he meanders in the warm wind, breezing along him and flapping his undone shirt-tails and pocketed black tie. But his careless body language is betrayed by the intensity of expression on his face. The semi-detached houses have an artificial feel to them. A lack of substance.

He comes to number 23 and walks up the slabbed walkway, he avoids the gaps for luck. He reaches the door, knocks and then remembers.

He’s not here anymore.

He takes a key out of his pocket and unlocks the door.

Once inside he sits. From the red sofa he can see the front and back entrance. The front door has a stained glass representation of a setting sun and the back door has a mish-mash of colourful panes. He wanted it this way so the sun would shine colourfully down on them. It didn't work. The house is positioned in such a way that the sun shines briefly in the morning through the stained glass and once again around three. In the long late afternoons, in the mouthwash drinking mornings, on the multiple grey days, in the sighing evenings of card castles and cryptic crosswords, the colours just stayed dull and dark. Now it's dust and dark.

What he remembers most is the grouting. He remembers picking at it wide eyed listening to Ian. Those thick lines veining the short sharp twice daily burst of colour. How awe-inspiring they seemed to him, how familiar they seem now.

Brightness veined with darkness. Brightness now greyed and with black veins pulsing through with doubtless and sincere intensity.

He remembers Ian whispering into his slumbers.

He lies sprawled out on the red sofa, his legs angling uncomfortably over the edge and smokes a cigarette. Smoke hovers about him wrapped in stillness. He lies soaking in the mushy smell of old wood and heavy memories.


*

He has been here for three days. Following a trail of empty bottles, which have become receptacles for his cigarette ash, you would come upon him in the loft conversion.

The bottle at his side has a halo of ash, etched by his drunken state. He grumbles about not remembering where he's left the ashtray he'd made as a child.

It was like an oyster shell, he mutters, the concave surface fine and smooth, the convex worn and jagged. He'd put some putty on the bottom to stabalise it and used vermillion nail varnish to paint the convex.

He trails off and falls off into a slumber. A crimson bubble erupts from the corner of his mouth and slides down his chin on a trail of spit. He lies flat on his back upon his tatami bed; his head propped up by a plush, pottery green pillow. The cold white wall behind is lined with porcelain cherubs clumsily painted green. They rise diagonally from his side of the bed.

His hand reaches out and pats the other side of the bed. Feeling nothing he tucks it back into his pocket. He then turns on his side. The TV plays on in the corner of the room and the open window on the downward sloped ceiling is leaving a slowly darkening rectangular mark on the carpet.

His eyes are closed, his body is still but he’s awake. His pupils flutter under quivering eyelids as he attempts to move but feels himself pinned down. He attempts to stretch out of himself but is dragged back by the pressure. His altered state encases him in a fleshy cage. Or maybe it's just very realistic shadow-play.


*

He was woken up, candy-floss mouthed and burkaed in hangover, by John knocking at the door.

John convinced him to go for a drink and a talk.

He was made painfully aware of his pityful state, as well as the house’s, by John’s retrousé nose shivering with disdain at the accumulated stench of stagnation, by John’s darting eyes feasting on the cumulative misery.

He excused himself a moment, within a cough and left John hovering in the hall. He rushed up the creaking wooden steps and entered the bathroom. He exposed his gums and teeth to the mirror, frothed mouthwash, then ruffled his hair and pinched his cheeks. He then creaked his way back downstairs where John had distracted his prying eyes with a Private Eye Compendium.

As they sat in the café, he felt what little he could slip out of him, down the sides of the brown plastic chairs and over the laminated table. Words seemed to mist out and padded in swathes of cotton.

John orders two teas.

“Sugar?” the waitress asks John.

“Sugar?” John asks him turning away from the waitress. He nods.

“Sugar” He says turning back to her.

“Righty-ho. Two sugars.”

They sit in silence. She comes back and places the cups on the edge of the table in front of John.

“There you go sweetie. Your sweet teas”. She guffaws at their meek smiles.

“So how are you?” asks John. The question gloops out of him.

He looks at John, puts his head in his hands and starts spasming with sobs.

John places his hand on his shoulder.

“Listen, he was unhappy. He was very unhappy. There was nothing to be done. We're here to help you Isaac”

Isaac looks up at John.

“You don’t understand. He was my world.”

John lets out a long sigh.

“He was my idol.” Issac continues.


Benoît Du Cann was born at St Mary's Paddington, London in 1987. He is of French Catalan descent. He now lives in Barcelona where he teaches English and French. Other work of his has been published in Ignavia Press and in the upcoming issues of Kerouac's Dog Magazine.

The Next Man

On her way home from work, Evelyn Abingdon tripped over a tooth on the sidewalk.  It was as long and thin as her pinkie finger, a fang of some sort, she figured as she tested its sharp tip against the meaty pad of her thumb.  She pictured all the fang-toothed animals she knew and concluded it must be an alligator's tooth.  Or perhaps a crocodile’s.  She'd never been able to determine the difference between the two.

Evelyn Abingdon didn't think it was wise to leave such a sharp tooth out on the sidewalk so she brought it home and that night as she readied herself for sleep, she slipped it beneath her pillow.  What could it hurt, she thought as she fell into a dream.


When she awoke the next morning, Evelyn Abingdon found a man lying next to her in bed.  "Good morning," he said as he stretched his arms up toward the ceiling, turning his hands at the wrists as if to make sure all his fingers were still in place.  His hands were lovely: long-fingered, pink tipped, and clean.  Evelyn Abingdon slid her own stubby hand up under her pillow, though she already knew she would find nothing there.  Indeed, the tooth was gone and here was a man in its place.  The man turned and smiled a wide grin and Evelyn was relieved to find that his teeth were of a uniform and normal size with no gaps or missing large fangs. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of her armchair where the man had laid out his clothes.  For a brief moment, she thought that there was another man sitting there, a very neatly dressed flat man and Evelyn wondered what on earth she would do with two men.  But as she turned to look more closely, she was relieved to realize there wasn't a second man, especially since she wasn't quite sure what to do about the first man yet.  A second man would be too much, an embarrassment of riches, she thought.  Besides, there had been only one tooth.

The first man sprang from the bed and began pulling himself into the clothes from the chair.  Evelyn closed her eyes just enough to allow her to watch through the fringe of her lashes.  He was a tall man, well-built and hairless, with no long tail nor rough scales of any kind.  She wanted to touch him, but thought that perhaps it was too soon.  She did not know the protocol for this sort of meeting.

As Evelyn readied herself for work, the first man bustled around in the kitchen.  "Breakfast is essential, is it not?" he asked as he tipped milk into her coffee.  She preferred her coffee black, but as it was their first morning together, she thought it best not to complain.  Better to get off on the right foot, she thought, and quickly glancing down, she was happy to see what large feet he had, his toes all in a perfectly proportioned row.  She rushed through her work day, excited to see what that evening would hold.


That first night, the first man was everything she'd hoped for and more.  This is what happens when you wish upon a fang, Evelyn thought as she raked her nails across his smooth back.  Thank god she had found such a strong and sizable tooth.  What firm hands, what fine wrists, and ah, those lips, that clean and shiny hair!  As she drifted in half-sleep, Evelyn wondered if elsewhere there were women like her with men sprung fully-formed from fangs found on the city sidewalks.  She hoped so, for their sake, though she had no idea how she would explain any of this to her mother.   

But within the week, the first man began making changes--the positioning of the pillows on the bed, the way he folded back the sheet, a different roast of coffee bean, the meat cooked well-done and then, to Evelyn's dismay, not at all.  Instead blocks of tofu quivered on her plate surrounded by fronds of dark seaweed.  "Think of your arteries," he said when she protested.  "I don't want to wose you."

"Did you say 'wose'?  Are you baby-talking me now?" she demanded to know.  It was all too much, this fang-man baby-talking her.

"Of course not siwwy," he said with a coy smile.


That night Evelyn took her pillow and her blanket and slept on the couch.

"Sweep tight," the first man called to her from the bedroom before he switched off the light.

"Screw you," Evelyn shouted back, her voice swallowed up in the darkness.

   
The next evening, on her way home from work, Evelyn Abingdon stubbed her toe against a short rib on the sidewalk.  It curved against the palm of her hand and ran from the tip of her middle finger to her wrist, gnawed clean of its meat, the yellow bone notched rough with tooth marks.  She slipped it into her pocket, closing her fingers tight around the bone and holding it to her side as she walked.

The first man had dinner waiting on the table when she came in.  Something leafy and steamed.  She set the bone down on the table between them as she picked up her fork.  She didn't bother to wash her hands, the heady scent of the bone masking the mustardy tang of her meal.  "It's delicious," she said with a tight smile.

"And so vewy vewy good for you, is it not?" the first man replied.  Evelyn watched with satisfaction how he stared at the bone but did not ask.

That night, as they settled into bed, Evelyn slid the bone into place beneath her pillow. 

"Do you think that's wise?" the first man asked.  Evelyn ignored him and gave her pillow another pat before pressing her cheek into place.  She was tired of the first man's rhetorical questions.  The next man would be better, she hoped.  He’d belch and fart and slouch in his seat.  She would twine her fingers through his rough pelt, put braids in his thick hair.

They would eat their meat rare; they’d tear it lustily from the bone.



Julie Innis's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle, Pindeldyboz, and BLIP, among others.

Hyperventilation

Friday, I stopped breathing.
I told myself: you have
written before.  You will write again.
Start with one true sentence.
I thought of my mother’s answering machine:
Clinical social worker and psychotherapist.
If this is a psychiatric emergency
please hang up and dial 9-1-1
or go to your nearest hospital emergency room.
No one can commit you unless you make a threat.
Even crazys have rights.
You will write again.
I can skate better than most of the planet
which makes me feel published.
Something no one knows about me is
I see myself like Botticelli’s Venus:
modest but unapologetic, with a dash
of unapologetic sexuality,
but I hear myself saying I’m sorry
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry
I’m sorry you love me, because I’ve fooled you,
because I don’t see what there is to love
while I’m seeing myself birthed from the sea
riding a scallop shell.  That’s cocky narcissism,  
a category in the DSM IV. Commit me.
I’ll make a threat: I’ll write again.
How’s that for violence?
My pride, my skating, my sharp and biting edges.
One true sentence: I hate because I love
and I love despite the hate.


Boricuas


San Juan, the green stucco façade of St. Elizabeth’s Presbyterian Hospital. Close-up on yellow and blue birth certificates in Spanish.

Mr. & Mrs.:
You two were born blonde
(one with a blue foot,
         an umbilical accident),
two years
and three months
apart.  Each time,
the enfermeras tried
to pierce your ears.

Cut away to a banana tree next to a pool.  Coquis chirp with the coming night.

Bluefoot & Blondie:
We descended from WASPs
wearing nothing
but water wings
and sun bonnets
and diapers.
You:
partial ex-pats,
but we:
Boricuas.

In the foreground, a snowman outside a Tudor house in a New Jersey suburb.  Through a window, the family eating rice and beans.



Brookes Moody is an MFA candidate at The New School. Her work has previously been published in The Northern New England Review and Playground Journal.

Extended Journey to the Afghan Sink

Years later you cross the Persian-Afghan border. Long ago you had a trajectory and an objective, but you cannot remember them. Sometimes the sky clears, the sun is pale, and the rubble and stone of the desert shine with a silver tint. On other days the mist descends, like thinning milk, and the rocks at your feet are transparent.

Your legs are still strong, bounding up the hills of gravel. You often feel weightless, like the air were pulling you up from the hips, and you cross the landscape in huge strides, the earth skipping past your feet. But there are times when you feel weak, and you cannot bear to rise in the morning, cannot even lift your face from the dirt. When finally you do, your muscles groan and you grimace and cough and mutter at the sky.

Your wrist-watch is useless, its mechanism rotted. The clock-hands jerk against grains of dirt. Still you travel, and weeks pass. A goat-like animal comes out from the mist, groaning and babbling at the sight of you. It follows you a while, trotting behind you and licking your calves. But by sundown the creature is nowhere to be seen.

A month goes by. In the afternoon you spot travelers up ahead. Soon you are passing them, two young boys, mouths hidden in their scarves. When they see you they stop, all four eyes fixed upon your watch. You remove the watch and offer it to them. One boy snatches it and runs away downhill, shrieking like a bird, and the other quickly follows. You wince and continue. The priority is to travel faster.

The hills spread and flatten as you enter the steppe. There are sounds far up in the desolate sky, the blurting of animals, some kind of howling, the acoustics of hell. At night you sit for hours and shiver in the dark. You realise that your journey has entered a period of decline. But haven't you been deteriorating for years? Even when you set out from the beaches of Cataluña, even then your eyes were misted, your shoes damp. You think all this while the sun is rising, as you gaze out into the vacuum. There is nothing, not even evil, in the gormless sky or the broken clay.

But soon you feel a breeze, and a fruity smell lifts your nose. The sun thaws and gleams on your skin. Ahead, white clouds nest in the turquoise skyline. The earth seems moist, there are patches of moss, and around them swirl a few flies. You are among hills again, tufts of grass spring from the ground, and ants march to the drumming crickets. You run forward as a horrible shiver shakes your breath: you have realised where you are going, and that you are almost there. A hundred feet ahead are fields of poppies, all pinkish white. Their tall stems sway in the glitter of water drops, stretching so far that they dye the horizon.

Now you walk among the poppies. The height of your waist, they tickle your fingers and slide up your knees. How you could sink into the earth with these flowers, grab them, suck them, swim and starve until you fell. You stop and gaze around, swooning, scratching your head, trying to remember what brought you to this place. Because we both know you have been here before.


Conan McMurtrie was born in Malaysia, and grew up itinerantly in South-East Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Spain. He later studied physics and music at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Last summer, his short story A Walk Before Santa Soledad was shortlisted for the Momaya Press Award, and, more recently, his fiction received a commendation in the Aesthetica Creative Works Annual. He currently lives in London.

Having Already Left Point A


We ride, O yes this is what we do. We ride
in my car on the peripheral rock of interstate
and with your countenance you intimate     
that you think I (the beloved) should die.
Thrusting into the golden Nogal Canyon, we ride
in decaying silence and catch blurs of arroyos. I say
nothing, watch a sunset corrode the same way
that your smiles do. Sweet Jesus, we ride.

But I would make a great corpse. Bloated
sunrays jab, their sting pervasive.
You rub the dusty dashboard
and smear the mess on my hardening head.
I am a novice traveler: I still somehow live
and dabble in a desert of flash-forward.



American Gothic


            It is true that I have not been able to utter more than a madman’s sound since my eyes beheld             the sight. I’ve lost speech. And so they have asked me to write. Since you are a poet, write, they             told me. Little do they know what they might get. Little, even, do I.
                                                                                    -William Goyen, “In the Icebound Hothouse”

Grief works in mysterious ways—you didn’t really die.

St. Patrick’s Day. I came home to pee
and there you were, blue and wrinkled. Well,
grandma’s dead. I turn you over, trying somehow
to imagine your spasms and twitching head
as signs of life. Your tendons relax, and then stiffen.

(It is April Fool’s Day, and the Japanese
Maples are gleaming green below pigeons
resting on power lines and Mulberry trees)

The Fourth of July arrives, grandma. Your son
chases your granddaughter on Seacliff beach, Santa Cruz.
The sky is blue of course, as is the ocean. Blue
blue blue blue all fucking blue and then there’s you
as my sister overturns a clump of kelp.


Adam Crittenden is working on an MFA at New Mexico State University and editing for Puerto Del Sol. He teaches freshman composition and has recently taught a poetry course for the local Community Education program.

Reaching for Da'at


The Kingdom
He is on a bus. He has been on this bus for what seems like forever, riding on the highways through vast Midwestern plains. But he does not see the plains now; it has rained for the last day and a half, and all he sees when he looks out the window now is a sky that looks like a spatter of wet clay.

He has five thousand dollars in traveler's cheques in his pocket, a passport in the name of Sam Gregory, and very little else. He looks like hell, even more than you would expect from a man who has been in limbo for four days. He has dark skin, but his eyes are a crisp, icy blue. He does not wear contacts.

Every now and then, during truck stop lunches or twenty minute piss breaks, he takes a crumpled Polariod out of his pocket. A woman in her late thirties, Mexican, is walking away from the camera. But she's turned, as though someone called out her name. She is wearing a wide smile and a flowing black sun dress.

He looks at the picture often, but never for very long.



Foundation
Marianus is waiting for him when he gets off the bus. His fox-red hair fades into darkness in the stark light of the bus stop. The old German liar taps his watch, annoyed, and shows him to the car.

He has an apartment waiting for him, small and bare, but it's enough. He takes a day or two to settle in, lay about the bed, watch a ball game or two on the television. He has a pork steak on Saturday and sleeps in on Sunday. On Monday, he starts looking through the want ads.

On Tuesday, he remembers. He opens a window, leans outside, and spends a long, long moment listening to the city. Then he flicks his cheap lighter on, and watches her smile fade away into ashes.


Splendor
The circus is in town. It's one of the “art circuses,” just one ring, with a kind of pretentious clown narrating the events. That annoys him a little- it interferes with the magic, the spectacle, the great mental game of watching so many things at once. But they have the tent, and an elephant, and acrobats and clowns. He gets himself a good seat and a big, big bag of popcorn.

He's seen circuses- thousands of them. Big top, stadium, Ringling Brothers and the Shriners, one ring, three rings. He never gets tired of them. He never gets tired of the animals or the aerialists, and he never fails to smile when he sees a boy who is obviously terrified of the clowns. He never gets tired of any of the joys of humanity. It's his blessing and his curse.



Victory
He's a bartender this time. It's okay money- not that he needs much- and he likes it better than he liked driving a cap, what he did last time. He gets to be around people. And for what it's worth, he's pretty good at it. He's a good listener, always has been, and that's a good quality in a bartender.

She's a regular. He comes to recognize her face after a few weeks, and her name soon after. She usually comes with some friends. They might work together, but he never asks. He likes her laugh, especially because she laughs at his jokes. Two months pass before she asks him what his phone number is.

He shouldn't, he knows, not again, not so soon, but he does anyway.



Balance
In the photograph, she is looking back, smiling, lying on her stomach in bed. Her shoulder blades are exposed beneath the straps of her brown tank top.

She has wings tattooed on her back. The irony does not escape him.



Severity
She comes from a big family: four girls, all told. Her father managed a warehouse downtown, until he got laid off. Her mother is a telemarketer. They lived in Chicago when she was a girl, but they moved here when she was eight to be closer to her grandmother, who had a brain tumor.

She chides him sometimes. “Five years and I still barely know anything about your family.”
“What's to tell?” he says. “I never knew my mother, and my father's dead.”

To himself: At least that's what Nietzsche said.



Mercy
He sits on a hard bench outside the Greyhound station, listening to the faint sounds of a piped-in Motown song. The bus is late. He doesn't mind much. He has time.

This one lasted him eight years. Over all, that's not bad. Sometimes he only hangs around for a few months. Once or twice it was decades, but it's been a long time since he did that.
He will think to himself, when the bus pulls up, that maybe this time he should stay. That maybe, this once, he could stay until the end. He would have no explanation for it, when it got towards the end, but maybe that wouldn't matter. This city had been good to him.

But then he'll feel the five thousand dollars in traveler's cheques in his pocket and see the bus lurch to a stop. He'll hear the call for passengers and slowly stand up with his duffle bag- once a suitcase, once a knapsack, once just a coarse threaded sack- and move towards the door. He'll get to his seat and know it's for the best. It will hurt, but it will be for the best.

Then Semyaza will take the crumpled photograph out of the pocket of his jeans and think of injustice of immortality. For a time he will look at that photograph often, but never for very long.


Eric Scott is a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, due to graduate this December. His nonfiction work has recently appeared in Ashe Journal, Killing the Buddha and Kerouac's Dog Magazine.

Laura E. Davis is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the City of Champions. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry and nonfiction at Chatham University. She has read her poetry on the weekly radio show Prosody. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Splinter Generation, Redactions, Meadowland Review, The Ante Review, Pear Noir!, and dotdotdash. She teaches gifted education for a local charter school and is the Founding Editor of Weave Magazine.

Read her poetry here.




Selections

Bridgette Shade
Robyn Campbell
Siobhan Casey
Davka
Sarah Machinak
Crystal J. Hoffman

The Shape of More

Someone was in the tub. Georgia knew it was true because she heard water sloshing from the hall, and her Daddy didn’t allow the bathroom door to be closed unless someone was in the tub, in case someone else needed to wash his face or brush his teeth while you were on the pot. Must have been Mother; she took extra long, letting the water run while she peeled off the hairs sticking to the soap.

The bathroom was across the hall from the basement. If she stretched out her legs, Georgia could flatten her feet against the basement door to push it shut, which was handy because down there was the barber’s chair.  When the men sat in it, the chair hiccupped and belched and cracked jokes she knew weren’t intended for her ears. Georgia leaned forward on her haunches, listening for whether or not Daddy had a customer, but all she could hear was the tub water teaming out of the spigot, and she jerked away from the door when she felt something move behind her.

There was a stickiness to the air, the kind that suction-cupped your bare legs to the breakfast chairs, so in the early and late hours her Daddy went out walking, searching for stray dogs and cats whose fur he said caused them to suffer in such weather. Animals he brought home to shave or groom with silver picks and whose tails he wrapped with rubber bands at the root. Tails were dust rags for collecting disease, and when they fell off, Georgia would find them all shriveled up, sometimes in the litter box. She kept a stash of them in her sock drawer because it was important to keep track of how many animals came and went, to know where things and people were and where they were not.

Before bed each night she lined up one of the stubs to her tailbone and stood sideways staring into the mirror. Oh, to arch your back and feel the stretch ripple through your spine to the tip of your tail! Georgia lay on top of the covers with Leo the Collie and the sound of his tongue scraping. As if he licked his lost tail hard enough, it might spring to life. She sprawled out beside him, back to back, and dreamed she grew a set of long ears - ears that could hear Daddy’s thoughts, so she would be ready for when he was about to shout about a fleck of cat litter in the carpeting. Shake her shoulders till her teeth rattled over who had left the peanut butter knife on the counter or hurt himself with the point of the scissors when Georgia swore she didn’t know where Mother was. Half the time, though, he read stories out loud and made toast with the crusts cut off and not knowing which half to expect was the hard part.

Her ears stayed the same, a pair of unpierced handles, but one morning she felt something new. Small and round, she pinched it between her fingers and it squished a little like the family of warts living on her elbow. There was the mama wart and all her babies poking up heads in a circle so they could keep a close eye on her whereabouts. Except it wasn’t a wart, and at first, she thought it might be part of the curse Mother had mentioned once - the monthly visitor that would slink back to wherever it came from in five to seven days. But days came and went and nothing emptied out of her. Instead there was more of her, so much more that it stretched her skin from the inside, pouring into her old parts, her fingers and toes and when all the regular places were full, the more pushed and shoved until it formed the shape of a new part – one that waved when she laughed and wilted when she cried.

She couldn’t reach to lick her tail, and the feel of it flapping on its own behind her still startled Georgia, but one thing she knew was it had to be kept clean. There was another sink in the basement next to a glass jar full of combs soaking in the blue water, but Georgia decided to wait. Mother would have to be done soon. 


Mother’s picture was in the paper again. At least once a week when Daddy asked where Mother had gotten off to, Georgia thought to open the paper and point as if to say, There she is. But something told her to keep her fingers to herself.  Lately, Georgia had been checking the paper everyday. Even though she hadn’t ventured farther than the front stoop in weeks, she worried someone might have caught sight of her tail and snapped a photo. Maybe the man whose name appeared under all of Mother’s pictures was following Georgia, too.  A GARDEN PARTY was what the paper called it this time, yet it wasn’t a party at all – just Mother strolling by a path of tall flowers with Pearl toddling behind. Often when they were wandering through the park a flash bulb would go off and then Poof! There was Mother grinning through her new teeth. Her regular teeth had disappeared after Pearl was born. Mother explained that those old teeth were fine for a woman concentrating on bearing children, but she was done with all that - there was more to her than that. The new teeth, which, unlike Georgia’s did not push out from her pink gums in pieces but arrived all together at the same time, would help her take a fresh bite out of life.

Dressed in her best suit, Mother’s pocket book swung behind her as if it were a magnet pulling her away from the cameraman back to Daddy. Georgia giggled at the idea that if the photo were a comic strip, the next frame would show Pearl balled up and wailing, having been bowled to the ground by Mother’s leather bag. Truth was the baby sister had turned out nice as a new recipe from Woman’s Day. One that Mother experimented with a few times before she finally got it right, and once she did, she never bothered to make it again. 
 
Georgia thought Mother’s hair looked especially clean in the photograph. Her own hair was thick and ornery straight, like her Daddy’s. Pearl had wild curls white as marshmallows, and she tended to get jittery at the sight of shears, sliding her bony rump back and forth on a stack of phone books and magazines showing pictures of popular coiffures for men. Georgia held Pearl’s hands so she wouldn’t fidget herself off the barber’s chair. Daddy said “Sit still,” and Georgia made funny faces to distract her while he cleared away the curls from her eyes. He snipped and she cried as those feathery strands floated to the floor, landing on the tips of his hard black shoes and into the pocket of his work jacket. Georgia let go of Pearl’s hand when the sobs slowed to sniffles and ran her fingers through her own hair, twisting it up and posing as if a flash bulb were about to go off.

Too late, she realized Daddy was watching. Strange but so far no one had noticed her tail. She’d managed to keep it tucked under and pinned beneath her waistband until she was alone, except for Leo the Collie, in bed. Then she circled the mattress on all fours, watching the golden fur fan out behind her.

“Let me see your fingers,” he said. Georgia curled her hands toward her mouth. She had been so busy worrying about what would happen if Daddy found out she had a tail, she’d forgotten all about the way she’d been chewing her fingers. Finally, she held them out for him to inspect. The skin alongside her nails was torn and spotty, and there were little red dents where her teeth had dug in as if mining for blood.  “What have I told you? Your hands are caked with germs and disease. Keep them out of your mouth or I’ll have to cut them off! And where is your mother?”

Georgia felt her tail beating down, shamed, it threatened to pop out between her knees.  She squeezed her legs together and said “I am sorry, Daddy.”

Daddy smiled a little and made his scissors go Snip Snip in the air. “I know you are, and I’m going to forgive you very soon.”

Georgia climbed the stairs out of the basement fast as she could, crabwise and backwards before he thought to ask her anymore questions.
    
Mother had a mother too, but when she said it, it sounded like Mumma. “Are you comfortable, Mumma? Need a light, Mumma?” Gran-Mumma sat with Georgia and Pearl in the evenings when Daddy’d gone walking and Mother was out, even though Georgia was more than capable of sitting with herself and the baby sister. She wanted to ask where to tell Daddy she was going, but Mother couldn’t talk about things when she was in a hurry.

“Got to get out,” she said. “You have everything you need Mumma?” She barely waited for Gran-Mumma to answer before she started feeling for her car keys at the bottom of her pocket book and blotting her lips in the cabinet mirror next to the front door. Behind the mirror was where Daddy kept a shaving cup full of quarters to pay the paperboy and the box of rubber bands.  After Mother left, Gran-Mumma sucked on skinny cigarettes and lassoed Pearl with rings of chalky smoke.

When Jimmy Ryan came to collect his paper money, Pearl was bouncing on Gran-Mumma’s lap, so Georgia had to enter the mirror herself. He knocked and all the dogs raced to her side. Leo the Collie barked and jumped and clawed at the storm door, and the sound was like a foot falling through ice.  Georgia’s tail wagged hard against her spine as if in time with Leo’s heart. Each night while Leo licked a puddle onto her bedspread, she chased her tail - circling the mattress one last time before blowing it a kiss and twisting the bands at the root - sad but certain she was wrong to want more. It surprised her how little it hurt, a pinch and a throb – a pain tiny as the hangnails she stripped from her cuticles with her teeth - and by morning the tail was loose, shrinking into a withered finger, a dead thing beside her on the sheet. But by lunch it fought to point straight out of her culottes when Daddy asked where Mother had gotten off to and later flicked fast against her thighs when Mother came home to start supper. No matter how tightly she wound the rubber bands, or how many of them she used, the tail always returned. She’d gotten used to walking backwards out of a room and standing flush to the lumpy walls, but answering the door was tricky – especially with Gran-Mumma bouncing the baby sister five feet away. 

“Now what do you want?” Georgia hid her body behind the door and peeked her head around the edge. “Daddy says if you can’t manage to land our paper on the stoop, he’s inclined to stop paying you altogether.”  Her voice leeched through the pinholes of the screen, and she cupped her hand to keep the sun, which was beginning to sink into a slot behind Jimmy’s head, out of her eyes. 

“Your Mama’s become a regular celebrity,” Jimmy Ryan said, almost squeaking. Wasn’t it just like him to say a thing like that? Jimmy Ryan, who thought he was so funny, pulling her ponytail in class and pretending to be attacked by a swarm of killer bees while clinging to the rusted out chains of the swing set at recess. She did not laugh. Not even when he slapped so hard at his face, he smashed his eyeglasses in two. Now here he was, a mouse come to squeak about indecencies on her front stoop. His nose wiggled while he talked, aggravating the tape between his eyes, and he didn’t even have the common courtesy to use his big ears in a more useful fashion so as to block out the sun.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said. “You want your money or what?”

“I ran into your daddy on the street. He paid me.”

Georgia turned the quarters over in her palm. Slippery from sweat, one slipped from her grip and seesawed back and forth on the linoleum until finally it came to a silent stop.    

“Daddy paid you?” Her stomach turned over like a sick fish. Had Jimmy mentioned that business about Mother being a celebrity to Daddy? She knew Daddy had noticed the pictures, but he didn’t need to be reminded that other people could see them, too.

“Did I stutter?” Jimmy Ryan kicked the metal base of the screen door and shook his head as if disappointed. “I mean, yes. Yes, he did, indeed.”

Georgia heard something strange in his voice. Something soft as if it longed to be stroked, but arguing had always been their way. Words shot between them like spitballs, each one aiming for an insult that would stick. She would not be fooled by a sly attempt at sweetness.

“Why are you here, then?”

“To see you, I guess. I don’t know,” he said but ran off before she could respond.

Georgia went to the window and watched him hoist his bicycle from the curb. Her tail danced at the sight of his pointy shoulders, his legs like the spokes holding him up, skinny and spinning so fast his feet kept slipping from the pedals. And for the first time, she thought there might be more in him, too. After all, Jimmy tended not to say kind things. Daddy tended not to stray from his usual path, and Mother insisted on posing for that man behind the camera, the one in the snappy suit whose smile you could see reflecting in her eyes. But now Daddy had crossed paths with Jimmy who had not come to collect money for the paper or pick a fight but to kick the screen door and talk of sweet I don’t knows. If a girl could grow a tail then maybe Mother could forget about the cameraman. Turn the car around and pick-up Daddy on a street neither of them had ever seen. Drive through the melting sun together, lavawise - making their way slowly but steadily toward home.

“What was that all about?” shouted Gran-Mumma over the sound of Pearl banging an ashtray against the TV screen.

Georgia backed into the hallway and shrugged her shoulders, pantomiming her new favorite words.



That night, when Mother and Daddy and Pearl were asleep, Georgia brushed her tail. She decided she would show it to them over a plate of soft-boiled eggs, and they would see what she had seen. How impossible things could happen. She would invite Jimmy Ryan to sit on her stoop and show him her tail, too. Tomorrow, she would stop biting her fingers. But, first, she needed a clean slate. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she slipped the rubber bands from her robe pocket. Twisted them around her wrists and stretched out next to Leo. She petted him past the pinch, beyond the place of tiny pain. In the morning, she would hide the shriveled old hands – push them beneath her pillow with her chin and wait for a fresh pair, for this new way of feeling to take root.   


Bridgette Shade lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and is the Fiction Editor for the independent literary journal, Weave Magazine. Her work has been featured on Prosody, an NPR affiliate radio program showcasing the work of poets and writers. Her fiction has recently appeared in Clapboard House, The Oral Tradition, Voices from the Attic, and is forthcoming this spring in Compass Rose.

This piece was selected by guest editor Laura E. Davis. Laura E. Davis is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the City of Champions. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry and nonfiction at Chatham University. She has read her poetry on the weekly radio show Prosody. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Splinter Generation, Redactions, Meadowland Review, The Ante Review, Pear Noir!, and dotdotdash. She teaches gifted education for a local charter school and is the Founding Editor of Weave Magazine.