Things That Stop Us Calling
On Esha’s side of the world, red glints over a hilly horizon. They want to see where the light goes, so they jump. Wheat tangles in their hair and weaves round their wrists, but for all their effort, they only glimpse the tip of a crag.
Jumping disrupts the murky water. Bubbles pop, hiss. A mist fills the air, smelling of cherry musk. The hills sink into the ground.
For the first time, across a long plain, Esha sees the other side of the world. Trees are upside down, the roots sculptural, scraggly, twisted. A being is caught in a mountain. Their skin is weathered, patchy, and their shoulders slump like moors. Esha names them Friend and tries to cross, but sand clings, wheat tightens, and Friend doesn’t see them.
Esha’s chest aches. A bird is pecking it. The small thing breaks through the skin and burrows beside Esha’s heart. Esha cups the hole. “Quickly, fly there. Lay your eggs,” they whisper. “Let Friend know I’m here.”
The bird chirps but it’s not an answer. On the other side of the world, Friend’s face is embedded in mountain, and the hills grow again. Esha stretches on their toes, craning. They see a similar hole in Friend’s chest. In it, there is no bird, only a nest of hairs.
Jean Strickland received her BA in Writing from Loyola University Maryland, and her fiction has appeared in Literary Orphans and Strangelet Journal. She enjoys watching anime and convincing people to play games with her. Find her on twitter: @b4heroes.
Chicken
You found me washing my hands in the bathroom of an AMC after our parents had taken us separately to see March of the Penguins, both sets having mistook it for a children’s movie. I was weird and small, but I knew how to listen.
“Do you dare me to use this giant wind machine?” you asked.
“Yeah.”
I held my breath as we waited for the dryer sound to stop. “Best I can do,” you said, grinning.
“Again,” I said. I was in.
Over the years we played. We often shared a birthday cake, though we were born on different days. That all ended in middle school when our parents fought, and your dad called my mom a slut. I watched them from my bedroom window. She was crying, and I remember your dad, a builder who claimed he could build anything, anything at all, shaking his head. The muscles on the back of his neck spasmed, his skin rough and blistered.
Fifteen years later, you called. When you wanted to fly west from south, I almost asked you not to come. I was unsure of what you wanted from me.
The afternoon of your visit, we drove from Flathead back to Missoula and ordered two spicy chicken sandwiches from Chariot, the food truck parked outside of Zombies. While we waited for our food to come out, I said goodnight to my partner, who was falling asleep in Australia, seventeen hours ahead of us. We sat beneath a Douglas Fir, and I grew cold in the summer shade, though you claimed you were warm. I watched you take off your shirt before I put my jacket back on. A woman came up behind us and you saw her first.
“I’m right behind you,” she said. “I’m right behind you.”
“Okay,” you said, not unkindly. “I hear ya.”
“You see that fence right there?” she said. “We’re gonna hightail it through there.” She pointed a thin finger to a metal fence a few yards away.
I did not want to look at the woman, or to see the distance in her eyes reflected back at me, so I stayed quiet and dug into the ground with a stick. My hot chicken grew limp in its Styrofoam box.
“Are you ready?” the woman asked, leaning her full weight on the trunk of the tree. “Are you gonna do it with me? Or be a baby?”
“Them’s fighting words,” you said.
You glanced at me and knew I didn’t want to. You could see it without me saying anything. You curled into a sprint start and nodded at me. “Say when.”
I imagined you leaving in long, fluid strides. I imagined going with you, the life around us blurring into streams of color. I wondered how it would feel, if we could fix what all those years ago had been taken away from us.
“Go,” I said. My limbs flat and folded as I watched you and the woman rocket away.
Robin Bissett is a writer, editor, and teacher from West Texas. She is an alumna of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program Summer Institute and a second-year MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Montana.
All Saints’ Day
Pack up the eight-inch spiders, extricate
their cottony webs from your entryway.
Face the crack-toothed jack-o-lanterns
to the wall; let their bald pumpkin-heads show.
Remove scarecrow’s vest, stow its rickety hat,
let it return to cornstalks, those willowy,
ramrod symbols of the harvest.
Forgive the wind bleating outside, forgive
the mess she made of the fallen leaves.
Snuggle into your warmest socks
scented with cedar from their long summer rest.
Keep the orange, but fade the black to brown–
there’s enough hard, dark in the world.
Begin to give thanks:
the Horseman rests again in his grave;
we have our heads for another year.
Amy Lee Heinlen is the author of the chapbook, All Else Falls to Shadow (Dancing Girl Press). Her poems are published or forthcoming at Literary Mama, poets.org, Rogue Agent, Stirring: A Literary Collective, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, MER, and elsewhere. She’s a co-founder and editor of Lefty Blondie Press. Awards include an Academy of American Poets University and College prize and Best Thesis in Poetry prize from Chatham University. Visit her at amyleeheinlen.com.
Come, words! Come!
Come like an old friend in a hotel room, where the door is always left unlocked. Come and sing to me and tell me your jokes and show me the things I’d forgotten were beautiful. It’s January and the year has already snowed half its snows. My porch steps–which are wood and need painting–creak in the cold like glass about to pop.
The old friend in the hotel room was fogged by alcohol. Slumped in a slip her mother bought her for Christmas. Her moon-soaked flesh, cold as morning. I think of all the scenes she didn’t paint, the rolls of craft paper under her childhood bed filled up with her high school sketches.
Small morning hours accumulate at the kitchen table, where I am filled with dim light and creamed coffee. For inspiration, I read poetry, and I listen to poems read aloud. On YouTube, I watch poets reading in university auditoriums or the café of a bookstore. Some poets memorize their poems, never glancing back at the page. They let the poems live in the body like a zoo animal pacing its enclosure. Their poems are still wild, not yet petted and fed and coaxed into submission. They are named things that don’t know their names.
And then I have to ask myself, what am I called? What names do I hold? Dear one. Sweetheart. Early riser. Dreamer. Wannabe doer. One who holds up her end of the sofa. My husband calls me doll. I call myself love, so when I speak to myself, I have something soft and kind to say.
My old friend was called many things, but in the end, no one remembered her name, or they confused her name with the names of her sisters. The hotel room had become her home, and she sank into the bed like she belonged there. I wonder how many paintings went with her, or do the ideas leave us when we leave? Do they float out and around until they find someone else?
I make a page in my journal for events I want to happen. They’re written as though I’m just about to do them, and I say them to the moon. I will see my day job as harmless and easy, and it will become harmless and easy. I will rekindle old friendships. I will find big inspiration. I will write the book I’m afraid to write. The trick is to speak to the moon with full confidence, with a knowing that these things will happen. The other trick is to speak to the moon through all the phases, especially when it’s new and dark and doesn’t appear to be anywhere in the sky.
This night, the moon is full, and I thank its light for shining on my list of desires–spoken aloud on a snow-covered porch. I speak my wishes, run my whole list through two times, while the dog sniffs the snow in the yard and walks along the rocks on the edge of the woods.
In Another Life
I watch the houses from the train window. I watch the tracks which sometimes become a stream, a seam marrying us to the Earth. In one yard, a woman’s cigarette hinges in the doored-edge of her fingers. She watches the space above the train, the powerlines, the trees, and then she watches my watching. There’s a blue-green square of summer grass around her feet. In another yard, children are jumping on a trampoline. People come to homes, come to food faithful as shutters. A union of tiny bowls on their tables. Boiled air, pretty as a gathering mist. In my own home, my daughter waits with her book and any number of Barbies, and my son calls his girlfriend baby over the phone. There’s a spatula and mail on the counter waiting to be turned and opened. My husband chops potatoes into cubes, presses garlic. When I walk through the door, he’ll kiss my lips, plucking words—thin as parsley—from the wet of my mouth.
Everyday Fog
I remember after-school TV and the thin pages of my textbooks. Their photo captions and theorems and timelines. While I studied, you watched your show from a blanket nest on the living room floor. Always The Highlander.
I remember after-school chores. No one home to watch us slack a little. No other ears to hear our bickering. Pouring dish soap in the washing machine. Pinkie-promising not to tell mom how the laundry room floor came to be so clean. How many pieces of egg-coated silverware did we hide behind the oven?
I remember bonfires in the field and moons in my bedroom window and the morning school buses of those days. Lights flash in the fog above my memory, so thick we have to feel our way across the street. The bus driver’s cheery voice says, Good morning!
How does he see the road? We ask each other. But we always make it to school.
And now, you’re gone and there’s no one to correct my memory when it’s wrong. No one to pick up the missing pieces and jog something I’ve forgotten.
I want to go back to one of those mornings and take them in piece by piece. The everyday fog ruining my curls. Our beagles, waiting with us in the cold, their freckled paws. The maples in our front yard. The gray porch, our hollow steps. What did we say to each other all those mornings waiting for the bus? I was probably cruel in the way most older sisters are.
I didn’t know then that I’d forget those moments, that I’d blow through them like an instrument and only have a faint recollection of the song.
Our mother has dreams she’s trying to save you over and over. From drowning, from falling, from accidents. You’re a baby in her dreams. But one time you come to her as your teenage self–handsomer in the dream. Glowing, smiling.
You say, Mom, it’s just like The Highlander. Everyone thinks I’m dead, but I’m right here.
Lydia Gwyn is the author of the flash collections: You’ll Never Find Another (2021, Matter Press) and Tiny Doors (2018, Another New Calligraphy). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, The Florida Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Midway Journal, and others. She lives with her family in East Tennessee, where she works as an academic librarian.
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