Chagrin River Review

Issue 4, Spring 2014

The Literary Journal of Lakeland Community College

Published by Chagrin River Review

Cover Painting: JenMarie Zeleznak

Cover Design: Amy Peck

Editorial Board and Readers:

Angela Weaver Tobin Terry

Thomas Hyland Robert Coughlin

Suzanne Ondrus Ellen McHugh

© 2014.

Chagrin River Review acquires first publication rights. Subsequent rights revert to author.

Issue 4 (Spring 2014)

Fiction

Katie Cortese “Lemonade” ....................................................................................................1

Michael McGlade “And So It Is” ...........................................................................................6

Mark Phillips “Ghosts” ..........................................................................................................13

Denise Emanuel Clemen “Branded” ......................................................................................18

Poetry

Michael Levan “Poet’s Guide to Ada Lovelace, First Computer Programmer” ...................23

“Poet’s Guide to Alien Hand Syndrome”

“Poet’s Guide to Swarm Behavior”

Glady Ruiz “We Pick Pomegranates in the Early Day” ........................................................26

“Taking Out the Nine-Year-Old Crepe Mrytle Without Instructions”

“For This”

William Doreski “Loomis-Breaker, Wilkes-Barre” ..............................................................29

“Grain Elevators, Milwaukee”

Grace Mattern “The Tappan Zee”..........................................................................................31

“August”

John Repp “Who, After All, Is Rimsky-Korsokav?” .............................................................33

“Sweet”

“How Bear Our Child?”

Charles Rafferty “First Date”.................................................................................................35

“Red Flag”

Contributor Notes...................................................................................................................36

CRR │ 1

Lemonade

KATIE CORTESE

-Week One-

When the movie crew arrives, the whole neighborhood is at their windows, including

Mother and me. Since mornings are her best time we usually take our walk after the kids leave

for school, but today fliers in our mailboxes asked us to stay inside until the crew finishes roping

off the cul-de-sac. They’ll be shooting outside the Campbell’s Victorian for six weeks.

“Circus,” Mother says, tsking.

“Movie set,” I say, never sure if she’s speaking in metaphor or legitimately confused.,

This time she’s right either way. Our quiet neighborhood has been commandeered by miniature

cranes dangling strange equipment, a snakepit of black cables, and half a dozen cameras. It’s

going to be a horror film about a drowned girl and a medium. I don’t know how they plan on

turning that sunny pond sinister. No one’s drowned there in living memory.

My mother looks at me askew, like it’s me losing my grip on reality. “It’s a lot of

hullabaloo for a silly film, if you ask me.”

“Oh yes,” I say, hiding a smile in my coffee mug. “A lot of fuss over nothing.”

-Week Two-

The crew created a rain storm over the Campbell’s place, but our kitchen is all sun while

my mother examines her puzzle piece like a jeweler searching a diamond for flaws. She’s

plucked a blue piece with a hint of cloud. I work on the meadow, fitting black-eyed Susans and

tall, waving grass into slow sense. It’s afternoon and the kids will be home any minute.

It’s just a 100-piece jigsaw. Before the diagnosis, she could have done it in her sleep.

While she turns her piece every which way, my meadow builds toward a rickety farmhouse. At

the far right of the picture there’s the curve of a still pond. Mother grew up on a farm in the

Berkshires and she’d picked this puzzle from the store’s jumble of boxes.

“Just like the home place,” she’d said in the Toys-R-Us. “Do you know it was my chore

to feed the lambs?”

“Tell me about it,” I’d said, guiding her by one birdbone elbow toward the register. I

know almost nothing about her childhood. She wasn’t a talker when I was young and now it’s

hard to know what’s true. In the store, she’d fished out a five-dollar bill to pay for our puzzle and

crosswords. Poor weapons in an endless war, but better than laying down arms.

By the time the cashier read off our total, though, my mother had forgotten about the

lambs. “Finders keepers,” she’d said, tucking her fiver furtively away, cutting her eyes sideways.

“I’ve got it,” I’d said, handing the girl my Visa.

Now I look up to see her testing the convex edges of her sky against everything concave,

and I think, today is a good day.

-Week Three-

Though I’ve given up teaching, I’m still up at dawn to wake the kids.

CRR │ 2

Today, Darryl lingers over our goodbye, tightening his tie one-handed. “If you and Max

run away together,” he says, “leave me a casserole, would you?”

The kids are gone, so I can draw him close to kiss him square on the mouth, whispering

thickly that no GQ-cover-model could ever take the place of my Mr. Right. And it’s true. He’s

just pouting because I mentioned seeing Max Asher, the movie’s male lead, doing Tai Chi

behind his trailer yesterday. Shirtless. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t watch his whole routine.

When I go back into the kitchen to ready Mother’s morning meds, she’s at the window

watching the crew scurry around with clipboards held to hips like two-dimensional babies.

Outside, Lorrie Jasper clips her neat hedges. I bet she saw Max’s routine yesterday, too.

When I first quit at Sunlake Elementary, Lorrie would come over for coffee after her twins

boarded the bus, but it got to be too upsetting for Mom. New faces make her anxious, and

anyone she met after 2005 owns a perpetual newness, including my youngest boy.

Lorrie and I just wave from our mailboxes now. All we really have in common anyway is

grief over our mothers. Hers passed last year from an aneurysm. At the funeral, I’d squeezed her

hand. “At least it was quick,” she’d said, then clapped a hand to her mouth. “Deb, I’m so sorry.”

I’d shaken my head. Told her not to worry. Slow, fast; there’s no good way to go. The only

difference is Lorrie lost her mother wholesale, and I lose a new piece of mine every day.

“I don’t know why she’s in this picture,” Mother snaps at the window, tapping the glass

like a child at an aquarium. In the cul-de-sac, far below her bony finger, a petite, elderly woman

stands with arms crossed, speaking to a man in jeans.

“What’s her name again?” I ask. In their write-up, the local paper listed the three main

stars. Besides Muscly Max and the young female star with a famous father, it named an elderly

actress, some forgotten darling of the ‘50s, in the psychic’s role.

“Magic morning,” Mom says.

“Magic morning to you, too,” I say, getting out the orange juice and her Tuesday pills,

counting them out like I believe this time they’ll actually do everything they promise.

-Week Four-

Our new puzzle shows a couple on their backs beneath a star-studded sky; it’s more

intricate than the meadow. Mother works on the edges while I tackle the grass. We are still at it

come noon, when she needs food to take her Reminyl. “Keep working,” I say, jogging upstairs to

fetch the pills. The kids left their pajamas on the bathroom floor, so I plop them into the hamper,

wipe down the sink, and swab at the toilet, thinking tuna on my way back downstairs, and

Saltines. A large glass of milk.

I was upstairs ten minutes, but when I get back, she’s gone. Red drops dot the linoleum

and the front door stands open, letting in a cool breeze and the movie crew’s dim shouts.

Her disappearances are one reason I gave up my job. She’d walk to the library with no

memory of how to get home, or end up at Star Market with a full cart and no money. She’d been

living with us five years—had minded our youngest as a baby—but one day last year I came

home from teaching to an empty house and her cell phone on her nightstand. When I couldn’t

find them in the neighborhood, I called Darryl at work and we drove around, calling the names

of our children as if they were a brace of dachshunds that had escaped the yard.

This was six months ago. Eddie was only four. Toby was eight and Isabelle almost six.

I’d called the police ten minutes before they tumbled in the door bugbitten, wet, and laddered

with scratches. Eddie had buried his head in my stomach. “We got lost,” he sobbed.

CRR │ 3

“Oh pish,” my mother had said, cutting her eyes away. “We took a long way home.”

“Toby?” I’d asked. My oldest studied his feet, saying they’d gone to the pond and then

begged for frozen yogurt. Grandma said she knew a shortcut through the woods, which led them

to the post office, miles away from home and nowhere near the TCBY.

“She forgot her phone,” Toby said, swiping at his eyes with a sleeve, “and wallet.”

“We didn’t get any yogurt,” Izzy said, clinging to her father’s legs. I’d dished up three

bowls of Cookies and Cream with a shaking hand.

“It’s a miracle they didn’t drown,” I’d said to Darryl that night, and we’d agreed that the

next day I’d tender my resignation.

She hasn’t gone missing since. Until now. Her body began to fail after that incident, and

it’s the pond I’m thinking of now. She couldn’t swim well even before the diagnosis. I’m ready

to call the police again when I think I see her inside the caution tape around the cul-de-sac, no

telling how she made it down there in one piece.

“Mom, stay there,” I’m yelling, sprinting across the lawn in my gardening crocs.

When I get close, she smiles broadly. “Deborah. We were just having a cool drink.”

“I’m so sorry to interrupt your work,” I say to the handful of people who’ve gathered.

Impossibly, some of them hold juice glasses half full of a red liquid.

A man jogs over and though there’s no bullhorn in sight, the very curve of his spine

radiates authority. “Break’s over,” he calls. Those with glasses set them on my double-handled

entertaining tray where it rests on the road. I can’t imagine my mother, cloaked in a cardigan

against a breeze that smells of wood fires, negotiating the dips and rises of the lawn, balancing

the weight of seven full glasses. Maybe I’ve underestimated her. I hope, so badly, I have.

“I’m very sorry,” I say again, taking Mother’s arm. “She’s not well.”

One of the crew hands me back a glass. “A little sweet for my taste,” he says, and winks

one brown eye. It’s no wonder. She poured from the pitcher of hummingbird nectar: a sugar-and-

food-coloring cocktail. I thank God it wasn’t the blue of antifreeze.

The director is a foot shorter than me and he squints up with what I think is a smile.

“I’m so sorry,” I say for the third time, lying now. What I actually am is proud. My

mother saw a group of hardworking people and remembered what she used to do when

neighborhood kids mowed our lawn. Lemonade, without fail. She’d not only remembered, but

had somehow done it. Drinks all around and not one broken glass.

“Nice of her,” he through a tight smile, “but y’all can’t be here. Liability, you see.”

“It won’t happen again,” I say, gathering glasses and dumping their contents. My mother

clutches her hands to her chest, muttering: “What a waste, what a waste.”

“You people have been very patient,” the director says, gesturing to the neighborhood. It

seems he will say more, but instead he waves to someone behind me. “It’s nothing, Adele.”

When I turn Adele George strides briskly toward us, the elderly woman Mother was

watching who’d danced once in a film with Dick Van Dyke. In her last movie, she played a

grouchy grandmother and former champion backstroker who’d helped her granddaughter qualify

for the Olympics. Darryl and I liked it, but the kids gave it an “S” for sappy.

“I heard we were drinking,” Adele says, laughing, her voice like a tire spinning in sand.

“I’m so sorry, a misunderstanding,” I say, and actually mean it. Her makeup is flawless;

the perfect seashell of her coiffed hair shines like a trophy plated in gold.

“Alright, Ma’am. We’ll be out of your hair in a week or two,” the director says, stalking

off without another glance for Adele who surveys the tray of empty glasses mournfully.

“We’re just going,” I say, surprised to be starstruck. “So nice to meet you, Ms. George.”

CRR │ 4

“Don’t mind Harry,” Adele says, lowering her voice to a stage whisper. “The script is a

loser. We’ve all been tense.”

“One Magic Morning,” my mother says. I’d almost forgotten I was standing before the

Campbell’s occupied gingerbread house balancing every juice glass I own on a tray. “You sailed

over that floor like an angel,” my mother says, her gaze fixed on Adele. “The whole reason I

learned to tap. Like an angel. And just look at you. I bet you still can.”

“Aren’t you the sweetest. Thank you, darling,” Adele says, her voice warming. Who

knows how long we’d have basked there if my mother hadn’t staggered against me, jingling the

glasses, before catching herself, her smile winking out like a light. She tires so easily.

“We’ve got to run,” I say. “Good luck, no, break a leg—unless that’s—it was a

pleasure—”

“All mine, ladies, I assure you,” Adele says, pressing her hands together, bowing slightly.

As she heads back to her trailer, trusting that we’re still watching, she breaks into a tripling little

waltz, light on her feet as a bit of dandelion fluff.

“Such a nice woman,” my mother says as we hike the drive, her grip on my arm a vise.

“Yes, Mom. Very gracious. A dying breed.”

Back in the kitchen, over sandwiches, still marveling over all that she managed, I say,

“You never told me you could tap.”

My mother studies her tuna with a plastic smile. “Tap?” She laughs from the belly, that

sound, at least, resistant to change. “As in dance? Whatever gave you that idea?”

I remember all over again that while she recognizes their faces, she cannot remember her

grandchildren’s names. It alarms her to see me cry, so without finishing my sandwich, I go to the

front door and lean against it until the tears are spent and listen as her fingers begin to spider

across the kitchen table, picking puzzle pieces out of the mess we’d made.

-Week Five-

After playing hostess, Mom has a string of bad days. She tears apart our puzzle, snaps at

Isabelle, and slaps Darryl when he takes away her empty plate at dinner. An open-handed smack

across his face. The doctor said it would happen this way. Breakthroughs followed by lapses.

The only blessing is she’s past the point of remembering she has the disease.

In bed the night of the slap, we hear a commotion downstairs. It could be a child or our

aging chocolate lab, but we know it’s not. Nights are the worst time. I find her fumbling with the

new punch-pad lock on the front door Darryl installed without asking me why I wanted it.

I haven’t mentioned her cocktail waitress act yet, or meeting Adele George. We’ve

always known there would come a time when we would no longer be able to keep up with her

illness. Already she has filled electrical outlets with sugar, called 911 to report me missing—a

twelve-year-old version of me, and set a dish towel on fire trying to heat water for tea. If I tell

him how I lost her, Darryl will insist the time has come to get her a room over at Golden Hills.

“Mom?” I say, remembering the first time I’d found her this way, just last year, padding

around the kitchen at night, defrosting a steak for my father who’d been dead for fifteen years.

“Adele’s waiting,” she says now, rattling the door. Her blue dress is neat and pressed.

“Adele George?”

“I overslept,” she says. “We’ll be late. She won’t forgive me this time.”

Half-hoping she’s telling the truth, I go to the kitchen window and peek out, but the set is

still, illuminated by a security light and guarded by one sleepy intern.

CRR │ 5

“I think it’s tomorrow, Mom,” I say. “Wasn’t it happening tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” she laughs, and touches her hair, flat on one side from her pillow. “How

silly. Of course, it’s tomorrow. I’ll never live this one down.”

I help her back to bed. The next day I buy a bell to hang on her bedroom doorknob, and

in another week, we watch the crew pack up their cables and cranes in a sixteen-wheeler and

leave us the same ordinary neighborhood in the ordinary middle of an ordinary day.

-Week Six-

One night in October, the boys crowd the floor in front of the television and Mother sits

between Darryl and I, clicking together a pair of undressed knitting needles to make a sound that

I hope is as comforting to her as it is to me. She has been the author of so many gorgeous

afghans. Baby blankets. Scarves soft and thin as silk.

Earlier, the postman delivered a stack of Netflix discs, One Magic Morning among them.

“This is boring,” Toby says during a blonder, bendier Adele’s first tap number.

“Shut up, dummy,” Isabelle says, standing off to the side of the couch. After a minute,

her feet begin to hop and flash and scuff the rug like Adele’s. Toby faces the screen with a sigh.

“We met her, that actress,” I say, watching my mother’s face. “Didn’t we, Mom?”

“Her?” Toby says, sitting up on his elbows. “When, a thousand years ago?”

“Two weeks ago,” I say, and feel Darryl’s eyes on me, searching, but I don’t flinch.

My mother’s needles hiccup, then stop. The blue glow of the screen turns her soft skin to

a blue-toned putty. When she stands, I think she needs the bathroom, but instead she picks a path

through the children and switches off the TV. The boys sit up and Isabelle freezes mid-tap.

“Mom?” I say, half-standing, but she waves me off, extending her feet in support hose

and soft-soled clogs one at a time, rolling out her ankles. Her hands go pertly to her hips.

“Ball, step, change, ball, change,” she says, demonstrating a talent-show dance routine in

slow motion, her balance and a kind of plodding dexterity miraculously restored.

“Show me,” Izzy says, falling into line.

“You two, get up,” my mother says to Toby and Eddie. Without me having to prod them,

they do. I know my mother has forgotten their names again and that she won’t remember this

later, but the four of them are moving in concert now and Darryl reaches over to take my hand.

Most days, it’s like I’m on the shore, watching while she drowns in the middle of a vast

ocean, all white caps and endless blue. All I can do is cheer when she surfaces, and hold my

breath when she slips out of sight. But dancing now, she’s got that smile on, a grin so like her old

self it might keep us both afloat a little longer. When they bow unevenly at the end of their show,

I applaud until my palms burn, a pain I know won’t last.

CRR │ 6

And So It Is

Michael McGlade

I’m in bed or at least I can sense I’m in bed but with my eyes shut I don’t know where

exactly and I get this arcing-electricity sensation that finally it’s the summer and the limp breeze

from the half-open window isn’t enough to cool the room – that’s the problem with this house,

too hot in summer, Baltic in winter – and even though I want to stay in bed, part of me resisting

being awake just for the sake of it, I urge my body into gear and I’m out of bed and running and

it’s the start of summer and I’m off school and I can do whatever I want so what’s the point in

lying in when I can do what I want.

And even though I’m still lying in bed, in what must be a house that isn’t the house I grew

up in, actively resisting the urge to get up, knowing that lying here is an obvious act of retreat

from the real world, deliberating that I’m hiding here – wishing to disappear – I intensify my

commitment to this memory I’m experiencing from my childhood, viewing it like a postcard

snapshot wish-you-were-here moment, and if somehow I can just inhabit this memory it will

mean that I can live it, quicken to the event, like it’s the first time it’s occurred, and so it is that I

surrender.

There’s a scrapyard off to the side in front of the farm house. Uncle Jemmy is a mechanic

and his garage is a green corrugated steel structure built next to the 35-feet-tall red corrugated

steel shed where the hay bales are stored. When something isn’t needed Jemmy dumps it in the

scrapyard, a quarter-acre of rusting Morris Minors and Austins and Rovers, vans bloated with

moulding boxes of nuts and bolts, clutches, brake assemblies, rectangular gallon tins with a side

removed and filled with gunky engine oil, the entrails of dead vehicles. Engine blocks assembled

like stepping stones. Steering columns with the ignition still attached.

I find an ignition switch with the key still in it and I unhook the bunch of keys from my

belt. The large loop of wire must have fifty keys and I add this one to the collection.

“You veel never get me, tommy svinehund.”

Shots ring out. Sand puffs and powders at my feet. Getting shot at. I’m on Normandy

Beach and Gerry is high on the hill in a concrete bunker, that bastard is unloading everything

he’s got on me and my men, we take shelter behind a metal bollard used to stop our boys getting

their tanks on the floor, still floating out at sea, most of them on fire. “Move out men, climb that

ridge, first one to pop a grenade in Gerry’s backside gets a roast beef dinner.” And I dash from

cover, Gerry still raining down lead, and I spearhead the way to the summit, him cackling on top,

and my bravery inspires my men to follow, most of whom are now slumping colanders, and I’m

almost at the top, can see inside the slit of the bunker, grenade ready

“Fionn, it’s time for a haircut,” Ma yells from the house. “Turlough with you?”

The bunker is gone. Gerry is gone. I’m standing next to my younger brother Turlough on top of a

mound of rubble in the scrapyard. We dash into the house. Everything’s always a dash. Where

did I get the energy from?

“How short you want it?”

Aednat lives across the field, takes the shortcut when she comes to cut our hair.

“Just don’t bald me.”

“Number four alright?”

“Grand,” I say. “Leave a bit of fringe, will you.”

CRR │ 7

She puts the number four comb on the clippers and buzzes the back of my head, and

vibration drills right into the new filling in my back tooth.

“You going to work on your tan this summer?” she says. “Maybe try and join up some of

those freckles?”

“We could work on our tan together.”

“Get a load of him,” she says. “Finishes his last day of primary school yesterday and

thinks he knows it all. Well, big man, what are your plans for the summer?”

“I like to go with the flow.”

“An ar-teest, then?”

“Don’t like to get bogged down in plans. Got a whole summer ahead.”

“Need you to muck out the byre,” Da says. “Make sure you sweep the yard good and

clean.”

“When do we move the cattle out to grass?”

Good, no more chores, then.

“Next couple of days. Soon as we fix the hole in the ditch up at Yankee’s. The rest can go

to Fairfield, just as soon as the ground dries a bit more.”

And I feel the pressureless act of keeping my eyes closed as I lie here in bed and I can’t

maintain the pretence of living in another time and the act of lying here staring at the backs of

my own eyelids won’t do, just won’t do, not when I have to get up and go to work, unless of

course it’s too early and I can just keep lying here. I open my eyes. I’m on my side of the bed

and living in the city, not back in Ireland, not back in Lislea in South Armagh, back when I was

eleven. The clock reads 5:55 AM. I cancel the alarm before it rings. Same as every morning. The

bed’s empty. The glass of water is gone from the nightstand. That means Saoirse is gone.

The bedroom window is half-open. Too hot at night during the summer to keep it shut.

No other noises in the house. I could be alone. Just me alone in the world. But I know that’s not

true. My housemates are just sleeping. Won’t be up for another couple hours.

I force myself to get out of bed. My spine cracks. Knees crack too when I stand. Twenty-

three years old, feel like I’m sixty.

*

It’s after midnight. I recognise her shape in the sallow glow of the streetlights cataracted

by the bedroom blinds. I sit a glass of water on the nightstand, next to her pile of papers. The

pale moon of where her face should be is all I see and I can’t remember the last time I saw her

face in daylight. Maybe a month ago. That hazy ellipse of face, here in the dark, is all I can

remember of her. Even her appearance, which I’ve known all my life, I can’t quite conjure to

mind, no details, no gentle sweep of nose, high cheekbones, nothing. I don’t know her anymore.

Don’t know myself. Feels like I’m caught in the flux of two powerful magnets and I’m

scrambled

“You be the runner, Runner,” I say. “Run, Runner!”

Saoirse and me are in Cloud City. The walls of the corridor are luminescent panels and

they go on for miles, might as well be into infinity. It’s a maze. And I’m the catcher. If I catch

her, she dies. Cloud City doesn’t have an aging population. When you turn twenty-three, you’re

given the opportunity to run. You are a runner, or you are terminated. If you run, you might

escape. Although no one ever does.

And she’s off. While I’ve been dillydallying she’s gone from the corridor and is deep in the

maze. I follow her. She’s quick, too quick. I may be the cat, and she the mouse, but she knows

her way. Still, I’ve got claws and kitty needs to eat. She makes it to the outer hatch and then

CRR │ 8

we’re on top of the world, outside the main building of Cloud City and we’re floating miles

above the planet, happy and free as a cloud. And Saoirse is breathing hard, panting, and she’s

backing towards the ledge.

“I caught you. You’re dead.”

She keeps backing up.

“I said you’re caught. No fair.”

“You didn’t catch me. Touch me to catch me.”

I lunge. She dances aside. Slips

off the engine block, tumbles onto the oil-black dirt of the junkyard, and wedges headfirst into

another engine block. She stays still. Like she’s hiding. But I can see her so she can’t be hiding.

And I’m at her side now, and there’s blood, blood everywhere, blood all over her face and down

her cheeks and she’s whimpering but not able to move like she’s paralysed and I lift her, carry

her, back creaking like old floorboards and I get her to the house.

“I tole you somebody’d get hurt,” Da says. Takes her from me, sits her in the passenger

seat of the Austin Allegro. Turns to me, grabs me, slaps me twice, three times on the back, drops

me on my arse. I’m crying now, more than I already was, nose green at the corners I’m crying so

hard and the car leaves and I’m on the ground

In the darkened bedroom of this house in Wealdstone, northwest London, I am leaning

across the bed and I have my hand on Saoirse’s forehead. The scar is there. Right on the hairline.

Invisible unless you know where to look. I keep my hand on her scar just to make sure she’s real.

“Remember what you said to me after I fell and cut my head?”

“I said it was your fault for falling.”

She chuckles, almost sounds like a cough. She’s like that when she’s rundown.

She says, “I mean after that.”

“I said … I don’t know. There was a bloody awful lot of blood.”

“You said all you ever wanted to do was move away, get to the city. You said we’d be

together forever. You’d take me somewhere like Cloud City from Star Wars.”

“I really said that?”

“I feel like I’m in Cloud City. Not the one you were talking about. Just feel, just feel

cloudy. All the time.”

She tugs at my trousers and I’m undressed before I tumbled on top of her and we’re one,

I’m inside her, and my hands are all over her, tracing the contours of her body, feeling and

groping my way in the dark, her body at once familiar and at the same time a lost land that I must

travers in order to discover Saoirse and we’re tangled like shoelaces and it feels so good to be

here with her, the two of us, forever

I open my eyes and she is gone. The glass of water on the nightstand is gone. It’s almost

six AM.

*

I exit the train station in Wealdstone around one o’clock in the morning. It’s a ten minute

walk home. The Metro which I read on the Bakerloo line tells me drugs and crime are rampant.

Here is an open market for drugs. It’s a working-class immigrant slum. As I cross under the

railway bridge I see a group of spides cross the street further along. They’re tooled up. One of

them carries a sword, not a souvenir thing but an actual broadsword. They’re running.

Someone’s in trouble. Tonight it’s not me.

I enter the three-bedroom property after the second attempt when I forced the wrong key

into the lock. Almost stuck but in the end I managed to juggle it out. The hallway smells of

CRR │ 9

cooking oil and peanuts. I put the kettle on. All the cups are dirty in the sink. I wash them all and

towel-dry them and set them in the cupboard. Pour a cup of tea and sit at the table. I draw a rota

for chores, assigning each housemate a task. I know they’ll ignore it.

I enter my bedroom. I sit a glass of water on the nightstand next to Saoirse. It’s

something I’ve always done. Can’t remember when or why, but I’ve always brought her water

and in the morning it’s always gone. Seems like this is the only way to know if she’s ever been

here.

She has fallen asleep reading and her pile of notes has spread around the bed, some have

fallen on the rough-sawn floorboards. I gather them. It’s stuff she’s been researching for ITV’s

This Morning show.

I sit on the bed and remove my trainers.

The left has a hole in the sole. I’ve worn them out in less than a month. When they said I’d be a

runner for Spotlight I thought they were using the word euphemistically. It’s a month since we

both graduated from uni. A month of my first summer of freedom, gone.

Saoirse’s breathing changes. I’ve woken her.

“What are we doing here?” I say. “We don’t see each other anymore. I hardly know you.”

She sits and rubs her head. “I don’t need this right now. I’ve got a splitting headache.

Can’t we do this little talk tomorrow?”

She gets water from the nightstand, grabs some ibuprofen, swallows two pills, drinks

water, sets the glass on the nightstand, knocks keys on the floor.

She lifts them, inspects them in the half-light. They’re my keys.

“Why do you have so many keys on your key ring?”

“It makes sense to have them all in one place.”

“What are all of them for? We don’t own that much stuff. There are eight keys. What are

the other five keys for? Are you collecting keys or is there a whole bunch of stuff I don’t know

about you? Another life?”

I had a big bunch of keys, once. Spent a whole summer collecting them. Locked up a

whole mess of bandits and brigands and rapparees with those keys. Sherriff O’Malley’s the

name. And nothing much goes on round these parts without yours truly getting an inkling. You

hear me, crooked Jack-Daw McGee? Killer of eighteen men and women, childer and chiggers.

Not a thing walked this land you ain’t shot full o’ lead.

“It was self-defence.”

“Tell that horse pucky to the hangman’s noose.”

I twirled the keys of the jail cell in my hand, made a glorious jangling sound like

cowboys’ spurs. Jack-Daw McGee lifted his tin cup and rattled it against the bars of the jail cell.

“Quit it.”

“You let me outta here, you varmint, or by sundown these walls will be coming in on

you. They’ll be as-ploding apart by sundown and I’ll just walk outta here, like as you might.”

“Ain’t no one comin for you, Jack-Daw.”

“You’ve been rightly warned. And looky here, ‘tis sundown just this darn minute.”

And the walls rumbled and exploded and catapulted me five feet back in the air, ass over

teakettle, and Jack-Daw McGee went walking right out of

“What are youse doing?” Da yelled.

I was hanging onto the corner of a bale of hay, fifteen feet above the ground, having

almost fallen to my death, while Turlough stood over me, gloating about the jailbreak. The

CRR │ 10

sheriff’s office in the Old West was gone. Obliterated. Not by the dynamite but by reality. We

had built a fort out of hay bales in the red shed.

“You shouldn’t be playing up there,” Da said. “It’s dangerous. And stay away from those

engine blocks, you hear me. Don’t be climbing on them. Can’t remember how many times I tole

Jemmy to move them.”

Saoirse has listened to my story but hasn’t responded. It’s like she’s waiting for me to say

more.

“To be the sheriff you need to have keys,” I say. “I collected a huge bunch of keys, keys

of all kinds, from the cars in the scrapyard.”

“Why are you collecting them now?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to.”

“Did you steal them?”

“I’m not some clepto. I found them. Found a key on the street and kept it. There was

another in the car park. And—”

“You should have handed them in. Lost and Found.”

I wait for more but she doesn’t speak again. I undress and get into bed. Kick the sheets

off. Too hot to sleep. Can’t sleep. Want to sleep but don’t know what I’m waiting for.

“This is our life,” she says. “If we don’t make it work, no one else is going to do it for us.

We’ll make it work. It’ll get better. I promise.”

I roll onto my side away from her.

I say, “Maybe we could move back home.”

*

Da backs the Fordson Dexta tractor up and I attach the cutting bar. I open the gates that

lead from the farmhouse down the back to the Meadow. The Dexta has a cornflower blue body

and bright orange rims. All the fashion back in the fifties. It doesn’t even have a cab. We’re the

only farm in the area not to buy a new tractor.

In the top field of the Meadow, I lower the cutting bar into position and Da engages the

mechanism. Starting at the side of the field, he cuts a swathe of grass six-feet wide. Then he

reverses back and cuts another swathe, working his way the entire length of the field. There’s

near three hundred cuts on this field. Each cut takes ten minutes. Working a twelve hour day,

we’ll finish in four days.

“Can’t we just get The Grab to cut it for us?” I say. “He’s a mower sits on the back of his

tractor and can finish a field in an hour.”

“But you’re not doing anything better are you?”

“If it rains, the hay’ll be ruined.”

“It’s not going to rain. Not enough to stop us making hay.”

Da cuts another swathe, me following behind to root out thistles and dump them

alongside the stone ditch, while also making sure that the cutting bar flips over the last half-foot

of grass to leave a clear channel between the cut and the uncut, and so it is as it goes making the

next cut possible, but the grass is heavy with wet and the turning arm of the cutting bar isn’t

working, which means I have to turn it manually using a pitchfork. Hands are sore and blistered,

only two hours into the job, not even lunch yet.

“We’re cutting the bottom field, too. Do it all together.”

“It’s twice the size of this field,” I say. “That’s more than a weeks’ work. Maybe two. We

can’t do it ourselves.”

“Who else is going to do it?”

CRR │ 11

“Can’t The Grab—”

“We’re doing it ourselves. End of story.”

“I don’t want to do it. A whole summer wasted doing this.”

Da says, “You’re welcome to leave any time you like. Go on out the field, get your things

from the house, and keep on going.”

“Go where?”

“Wherever you want. Some big city. Wherever someone can stand your yapping.”

I follow after the cutting bar, folding the wet grass, as tall as I am, back to leave a clear

channel.

“I will leave,” I say, “soon as I have the money.”

“Money, aye, that’s the long and the short of it. Till then, you missed a thistle.”

I make fists, take a step closer to him. Up on the tractor he’s as good as in a castle, would

pick me off before I get close. He stares me down.

A stunning percussive thump. The valley walls echo. It rumbles in my chest.

“Is that a bomb?”

“It’s a bomb, alright. IRA must’ve laid a trap near Mullaghbawn way.”

“Someone will have got killed.”

Two helicopters rotor off from the British fort on Sugarloaf Hill and scissor overhead, the

cargo doors of the Lynx and Puma open and they’re winging close enough I could stretch out

and touch the soldiers’ bovver boots.

The echo fades. A crow caws. They always find their way near to us when we work the

fields, if we didn’t leave a crust from lunch, then they’d pick at worms in the freshly cut channel

in the grass.

“That was loud alright,” Da says. “A big one. Bet Irene’s knicker elastic gave out.”

She told us the elastic in her pants always snapped when a bomb exploded, no matter

where in Ireland it happened, no matter how far away.

“Maybe that was the sound of her elastic snapping, not a bomb. She’s a big woman.”

We laugh, a good minute’s worth and then we’re back to work. Another swathe. Only

two hundred eighty left to go. Then onto the bigger of the two fields.

“We’ll get help.” Da says.

“Who?”

“Couple neighbours. They’ll help. Could be eight hundred bales on both fields. More

maybe.”

“What neighbours?”

“McParlands. O’Hanlons, maybe. You go to school with the O’Hanlon girl, don’t you?

Saoirse, isn’t it?”

*

I’m sitting in the kitchen. It’s six o’clock in the morning. The BBC news reports that

President Bush choked on a pretzel, fainted and banged his head off a coffee table. Almost

assassinated by his own choice of salted snack.

The door opens and Saoirse enters. She’s carrying an empty glass.

“You actually drink it?”

“Always.”

I sip coffee.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I say.

“Me neither.”

CRR │ 12

“Some day off, huh? Wanted to lie in, just couldn’t switch off. Been having these weird

dreams.”

She sits next to me. The house is silent. Almost feels like we’re the only people in the

world, just the two of us.

Saoirse opens the fridge and takes out a carton of eggs, breaks four into a bowl and mixes

them. She heats the pan and cooks eggy bread, my favourite. We are eating together for the first

time in a month.

“Remember the first time we met?” I say.

“You were baling hay in the Meadow.”

“You had a yellow bow in your hair looked like a butterfly.”

“I did?”

“And you hated my guts. Wouldn’t talk to me.”

“That was the game, wasn’t it.”

“You’d only talk to me through your sister, Einin. Tell Fionn this, tell him that, ask Fionn

why he keeps talking to me when I clearly don’t want to speak to him.”

She watches me, doesn’t take her eyes off me – eyes green as wild grass.

“I must have been pretty annoying.”

“Determined, I’d say. And I liked that. The more I didn’t talk to you, the more you

continued anyway. What wasn’t to like?”

“You think we fell in love that day?”

“Probably.”

“I know we did. Just before then I was talking about running away. Leaving. And my Da

convinced me to stay. If I’d left, I’d never have met you.”

We watch each other for a time and then eat our food, the bread splashed yolk-yellow,

maybe the faintest shimmer of gold to the east within the fog outside the kitchen window.

“It’s really great being together like this,” she says. “It’s been, what, a fortnight, maybe a

month?”

“So it is,” I say. “I hate not being with you more. Just can’t stand seeing you in the dark.”

She’s blinking too much, like there’s tears there that refuse to surface, don’t want to intrude this

early in the morning when it’s only us two, together, forever, might not be another soul on the

planet for all I care.

“We can work it out,” I say. “No point giving up before it’s over.”

CRR │ 13

Ghosts MARK PHILLIPS

The curtains had tangled around the rod and beyond the water-skiers the hills knuckled

the cottages to the far shore and the aluminum siding and windows waved urgently. From the

sagging dock my brother Jimmy cast a wooden lure sidearm and low into the bright wind while

my father and uncle inspected the rented boat and behind me my mother and aunt unpacked

suitcases in the tiny bedrooms. I turned away from the lake and watched my aunt pause to gaze

at her shaking hands. The adjacent bedroom where Mom was unpacking was hazy despite the

open windows. She slammed a drawer and marched into the living room, edged me aside, and

said, “Start unpacking your stuff.” Face askance to the screen, loose ends of her hair bun

flapping, she yelled out one side of her mouth, a cigarette waggling from the other. “Hey, you

guys bring me along to be your washerwoman? You could help unpack.”

“Be right in, honey.”

“Jimmy, too.”

“He’s fishing.”

Her nose nearly touched the ball of cotton plugging a hole. “Who’s he—disciple Simon?”

“I said I’ll be right in.”

After watching Jimmy make another cast, the lure slicing the wind and then abruptly

halting and falling directly to the lake, Dad started toward the cottage, the greenish boards

bending and creaking. In the boat, Uncle Jerry lost his balance as he lifted his thick dark arms to

peel off his tee shirt. His big belly white between thick patches of black hair, he steadied himself

against the gunwale before he moved to join Jimmy up on the dock, the aluminum boat rising

and falling with a hollow booming while out on the lake speedboats banged on the waves like

hammers on wood.

“I wanna go fishing too.”

“You get in there and help your aunt.” Ash and bits of glowing tobacco streamed from

my mother’s cigarette. She whispered, “Watch and let me know if you see any pills. If she falls

asleep with a cigarette, we’ll all burn even before we get to hell.”

During the two-hour drive to Cattaraugus Lake, my father had reminded us boys that

Aunt Lena was to be pitied. My aunt and uncle lived on our street in Glaucon and Dad knew that

children poked fun at her when Uncle Jerry wasn’t around—which was most of the time—

imitating her slurred speech and tortoise movements. But before Jimmy or I could respond,

Mom said, “Well, you already know what I think. I seem to recall she slurred her words before

she had back trouble. I think she hurt her back in that factory because she was already zonked

out. It’s not safe to work like that unless you’re a musician.”

I watched the telephone poles and mailboxes blur by and held a white tissue in the wind,

pretending it was a ghost as it billowed and flapped and disintegrated. I wondered whether Dad

had heard Mom, but eventually he said, “The way I look at it is you never know anyone until

you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.”

“The way I look at it is that she needed to use her shoes to kick her husband in his fat

ass.”

“You women libbers.”

“It won’t take any libber to kick your ass.”

As Grandpa Lanahan liked to put it, his daughter “would fight someone with the nails of

her feet,” especially if that someone was male—but talk of women’s rights irritated my mother.

CRR │ 14

When her cousin Rebecca, a kindergarten teacher, condescended to her at a Lanahan family

reunion by urging that she take a high school equivalency exam and enroll in the local

community college, Mom looked at Rebecca as if she had just crawled from under a cow pie.

“So I could stop being just a housewife, you mean? Like my husband, filthy and sweaty all day

and his pores and lungs full of fly ash? Like yours at the chemical plant, his skin yellow? Like

you—wiping twenty snotty noses and working for a principal who got the job because he was the

only teacher in the school with a dick? Or like him, gulping antacid and kissing the asses of the

farmers on the school board and the cookie-bakers in the PTA? Is that what you mean?”

Rebecca took two steps back before shouting as if across a ravine. “Well, Marie, let us

just hope your husband remains healthy.”

“Well, I hope so all right—but I don’t know about the us part.” By then Dad and

Rebecca’s husband had abandoned their game of horseshoes and were hurrying toward their

wives as if intending to pour their beer on a small fire. “But don’t worry about me,” she said as

Dad reached out to touch her shoulder. “You know what they say. There are other fish in the

sea.”

After our first day at Cattaraugus Lake, Mom put down her child-rearing rake. None of

the adults seemed tired even though they had stayed up late playing cards and drinking beer and

whiskey at the kitchen table. Mom stopped demanding that we boys pick up after ourselves and

eat vegetables and brush our teeth.

On our third morning, Dad woke Jimmy and me in darkness. Uncle Jerry was already in

the kitchen frying eggs and sausage and burning the toast. After breakfast, we went fishing,

casting into the fog near docks and weed beds, our fiberglass poles arching as the big net and

cold hard stringer were readied in the boat. Back on our dock again, sweating beneath the

climbing sun, Dad and Jerry scaled the morning catch and sliced off fillets and heaved the waste

out into the lake. Then Dad poured a pail of lake water over the butchering place, though a

coating of blood and slime and scales would remain all day, the flies feasting and glittering

green. After wrapping the fillets in foil and refrigerating them, the men celebrated with shots of

whiskey before joining their wives in bed. I wanted to return to bed too, but Jimmy tugged me

outside. The lake and road and cottages on each side of ours were still quiet and we overturned

flat rocks near the nudged shore and caught crayfish and dropped them into a coffee can so that

we would have bait when the fishing became good again in the evening. My brother didn’t mock

my whimpering when one clamped down on my right middle finger, as he would have back

home, and demonstrated how to twist off the claws.

That afternoon we had contests with our father and uncle to see who could throw a

football the farthest while swimming and make the fanciest dive. Once as Dad bent over the

water, his long arms raised into an inverted V and his bushy toes curled over the end of the dock,

Mom shoved him face-first into the water. Several seconds passed without his surfacing. She

said, “Don’t worry. He’s just holding his breath.” But then a minute had passed and the grins on

our faces had frozen into desperate hope and the sound of a motorboat passing by called to my

mind the murder weapon in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. She said, “Oh, my God.” She dove

and when she surfaced she gasped and shouted, “Did he come up?”

Then he swam out from under the low dock, where he had been all along. “Did who

come up?”

She slapped the water as she swam and then began to strike his head and neck and

shoulders as if she’d changed her mind about wanting him to live, but soon they were both

CRR │ 15

laughing and embracing and treading gently, diluted blood streaming down his cheek. On shore,

Lena, whose speech had shed its usual slur, was bent over at the waist in smoky laughter that

reminded me of the barking of the seals at the Buffalo zoo. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d

witnessed Lena smile so broadly, and as he already had several times during our vacation, Jerry

said, “Now isn’t this fun, Toots? Just this? Don’t you feel just great?”

Bluish smoke drifted from the charcoal grill morning to night. All week we had been

visited by kin and neighbors with offerings of beer and meats and pies and salads, and when my

grandparents Lanahan arrived with yet more drink and food, we already had enough to last

another week even though it was our final full day at the lake. From the steep and rusty iron

stairway from the road to the cottage, Grandpa said, “Dia daoibh.”

He was thin but waddled like a pregnant woman as he descended with a case of beer held

to his abdomen and seemed very old to me even though he hadn’t retired from his job at the

machine shop. Out on the water, Lena and Dad waved to us as Jerry turned the boat toward the

cottage, the bow thrown high as it hit the wake of a speedboat.

“Well,” said my mother, lifting her bottle of beer to salute Grandpa, “If it isn’t the

Irishman from the Stone Age. They don’t greet anyone with God be with you anymore, Dad.

Not even the religious fanatics in remotest Donegal.”

At the bottom of the stairs, he halted to catch his breath and gape at my mother, who said,

“Take that beer from your grandfather before his back goes out.”

He was still staring. “You understood what I said?”

“Last I knew it was you who was losing his hearing.”

“All these years I thought you hadn’t any Irish.”

“Well, happy birthday.”

“My birthday isn’t until October.”

“Whatever.” She flipped a blackening thigh and leg of chicken and stepped back from

the sudden sputtering flames and oily smoke.

Jerry slowed the boat as it neared the dock and Jimmy came out of the cottage in his

swimming trunks and asked, “Did you bring your fishing pole, Grandpa?”

“He didn’t,” said Grandma from behind him. “But he brought beer.”

“You didn’t bring it?”

He finally let me take the case from him and slipped his right hand, the one with only

three and a half fingers, into a pocket of his pants. “Did I ever tell you how my father poached

fish from the streams?”

“I think you did.”

“Fishing with a pole was for people who had time for hobbies. It was a hobby for those

people who could afford to buy fish at the shop. What he did was to pour some manner of secret

solution of his into the flow of water and for a distance downstream the trout and salmon would

soon go belly up and I would grab them as they floated by and toss them into a sack.”

“Neat,” said Jimmy as he turned away. He started down to the lake to help dock and lash

the boat. “But you already told me that.”

“You shouldn’t be telling the boys,” said Grandma.

“These boys didn’t come down the river on the first bubble. These are not innocent lads

in need of our protection.”

“A grandfather should be a good role model,” she said mildly.

“Lucky for you, my father sold enough fish to earn our family’s passage to America.”

“Oh, yes,” said my mother, “lucky Mom.”

CRR │ 16

“And many a profitable pheasant we threw into that same sack. We scattered grain

soaked in poteen and soon got them so drunk they couldn’t fly or even run. Just picked them up

and rung their necks and threw them into the sack.”

My mother said, “Remember that, Mom, the next time he comes home three sheets to the

wind.”

On our last night at the lake, my father, who had vowed in Korea that if he should make

it home alive he would never again sleep outside, agreed to sleep out with his sons. With the

bundle of firewood Dad had bought at a gas station, Jimmy and I started a fire near the edge of

the water and soon were sticky with sooty marshmallow. We guzzled soda and Dad beer and

stared into the flames and conversed only occasionally and in murmurs that meant here I am near

to you in the night beneath the starry sky. After unrolling mine between Dad’s and Jimmy’s on

the dock, I was the first to slide into a sleeping bag. Dad said he needed to say goodnight to

Mom, but did not return from the dark cottage until after I had fallen asleep to the sound of

waves licking the shore in the sheen of the dying fire.

The lake was perfectly still when hours later I woke to my father’s grunt-punctuated

snoring. When I peed from the edge of the dock it sounded to me like a waterfall. Then when I

was back in the warmth of the bag and had stopped shivering, I heard a doorknob rattle and saw

a dim human form leave the cottage. I nearly cried out.

It was Aunt Lena.

She had become almost like a normal aunt during our vacation, commenting on how fast

I was growing and asking boring questions about what I’d done that summer and what I thought

about moving up to the middle school in September. I’d heard Jerry tell my father that he had

been allowing her pills—“but not so many.” Jimmy had two nicknames for our aunt: one was

Sloth Lena for the aunt who was heavily drugged, and the other was Rat Lena for the one who

was suffering withdrawal, and now Rat Lena scurried up the steps to the road in her white

nightgown, leaving the cottage door wide open. As I caught up to her, I whispered, “Are you

okay, Aunt Lena?” Knowing she wouldn’t remember, Jimmy would have said, “Are you okay,

Rat Lena?”

She didn’t reply, and I stayed close behind in my pajamas, afraid she would become lost

or get run over. When she was near her and Jerry’s car on the shoulder of the road, she squatted

as if about to pee but instead reached behind the front bumper and into its hollow curve and I

could hear her fingernails digging at the rusty metal. Eventually she retrieved a small plastic

bottle dangling duct tape. I offered to help as she fumbled at the lid with quivering hands, but

she seemed not to hear or see me and began to tear with her teeth, twisting and pulling until

suddenly the lid popped off as her head jerked back. Even in the night I could detect her neck

muscles working as she swallowed pills with nothing to wash them down but her saliva, and

though the drug could not have taken effect that quickly, she presently transformed into

something other than Sloth or Rat Lena. It was as if her soul had stepped from her body with the

knowledge that she had the pills in her hands and stomach. Thin nightgown billowing, Soul

Lena quickly floated down the stairs and then, until I recalled that she had left the cottage open,

it appeared that she had passed directly through the glass and peeling wood.

I stretched on the gravel driveway and stepped into the yard and gazed around with some

surprise, feeling as if I’d been away for years. Until our vacation, the longest I’d been away

from Glaucon was one Memorial Day weekend with my grandparents Lanahan, who lived in

CRR │ 17

nearby Buffalo, and though we’d been at the lake for only a week, merely seventy miles south of

my home, my neighborhood now seemed different from how it had been before our vacation,

even the Reynolds couple who sat motionless in their rockers on the front porch across the road.

Jimmy and I had once set off a chain of firecrackers in our front yard in an attempt to make the

old folks utter a sound, but during the sparkly smoky popping they had simply glanced at each

other before resuming their mute ghostly stillness, relegating us to the distant past with other

annoying boys they had known during their many years of life. Mom called for me to help

unpack the car. It was Sunday evening and men were in their yards clutching beady bottles of

beer and listening to transistor radios tucked beneath the lawn chairs or doing the mowing they’d

put off until the final hours, all of them somehow stretching their little remaining time away from

the plants and mills and warehouses that somewhat distantly circled the clustered green lawns

and clean homes and safe streets of Glaucon. She called to me again, shrilly and loudly now, as

if I were in someone else’s yard. I ignored her as a youthful greeting seemed to rise from close

behind me and thinking it was one of my neighborhood friends I spun around and saw no one,

just my overgrown lawn and small home, and felt a clammy chill as if I were close to the mouth

of an underground cave.

CRR │ 18

Branded

DENISE CLEMEN

Please God, Lila thought, if you let me get away with this, I promise I’ll never do it

again. The tangle of her long, dark hair blew behind her, woven into a bulky mass like the sleeve

of a sweater or a winter scarf. Her arms encircled Neil’s waist, and although riding on the back

of his motorcycle had been thrilling twenty minutes ago, it was an annoyance now. The noise,

the dirt, the way her tearing eyes were making her mascara run—all of it was getting on her

nerves.

What the hell had Norbert Bell been doing out here on this road anyhow? It was

practically abandoned except for the old farmers who drove their tractors and other pieces of

hulking equipment down it to get from one end of their fields to the other. Why wasn’t Norbert

on the new four-lane? Lila was certain he had seen her as he passed. Christ, if he’s heading back

to the store and he tells my father, Lila thought, I’m dead.

Neil swung the big bike into the driveway of the old Brightbach place, slowing as they

bounced over the rutted gravel. When he saw his brother Brian’s Mustang nestled into the

parking spot behind the two oak trees next to the back door, Neil swore and turned to Lila with a

wounded look on his face. “That dick,” Neil said as he slid his hand up Lila’s plaid uniform skirt

and squeezed her thigh. Lila breathed a sigh of relief. Their hideaway inside the abandoned

farmhouse was occupied.

“I’ve got to get back anyway. That blue Ford Falcon was Norbert Bell,” Lila said. “Why

don’t you just come over to my house tonight after dinner? My parents will be out.” In her head,

she was already in a race with Norbert as she moved her hands along Neil’s rib cage. Neil spun

the bike around and headed for town.

Neil dropped Lila at the far end of the park near the swimming pool. It was closed for the

season, and the alcove of the small cement-block building that housed the snack bar and the

dressing rooms provided good cover. Lila swung herself off the bike, but lost her balance just

long enough for her calf to graze the hot metal of the motorcycle’s exhaust pipe. “Tonight,” Lila

said, stifling a flinch. Neil kissed her hard on the mouth, then roared away.

Please—son of a bitch—please, God. Lila alternated between desperation and a true hope

for divine intervention. Stepping over the sagging fence next to the Little League diamond that

bordered her subdivision, her leg felt like it had been stung by a million wasps. She hobbled

across three neighbors’ backyards to avoid the elaborately curving streets. Stupid, Lila thought,

like the board from Candy Land or some other game she’d played as a kid.

“Mom?” Lila called as she opened the door. She knew her mother was at a Lilly Belle

sales meeting, but she wanted to be sure. The only answer was the gurgle of the aquarium. Lila

raced to the bathroom and began flinging things onto the counter. Ointment for her leg, her

hairbrush, the tube of shiny hair-grooming cream her father used to slick back his hair each

morning. Lila squeezed a dab of the cream into her palm and rubbed her hands together the way

he did, then smoothed her hair into a ponytail. She peeled off her short socks, tossed them into

the hamper, and winced as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom.

* * *

“Hi, Dad,” Lila said as she flung open the door to Carpet Town. She was breathing

evenly now, after she’d transformed her half-mile limping run into a walk for the final block. Her

CRR │ 19

father was on the phone behind the counter, discussing the merits of shag.

“We sell the rake attachments for most vacuum cleaners right here in the store,” he was

saying. “You’ll love the stuff. Stylish. Great for a growing family, hides a lot of problems.” He

smiled at Lila and held up one finger. Lila sat in one of the upholstered easy chairs across from

the counter and worked the toes of her loafers into the square of cinnamon-colored shag beneath

a sparkling glass-topped coffee table. The wall behind the counter was emblazoned with the

store’s slogan, which her dad had thought of himself: Carpet Town—Where the Streets are

Paved with Fine Carpeting. The letters were all cut from carpet remnants, and if that wasn’t

enough, there was the meager skyline of a little town in the background, with a wide road carved

out of deep gray pile curving up to meet it.

“I’m supposed to work today, right?” Lila asked as her father set the receiver back in its

cradle.

“Lila, it’s Tuesday,” he said, his tone of voice letting her know that nothing was more

exasperating than a teenage daughter. “Tonight’s your night to cook supper.” The bell on the

back door jingled as Norbert entered with the afternoon sun streaming behind him, his blond

Beatle haircut like a halo as he glided up the aisle with a stack of sample books.

“Right,” Lila groaned. “I forgot. Darn—I hurried here right from school.” Norbert Bell

was at the counter now, shelving the samples, and Lila wished she could catch his eye. Norbert’s

face was pink, his shirt rumpled, and his tie had flipped up and stuck to his shoulder. Lila

wondered if he had stopped somewhere for what her father referred to as a “nip.” Maybe her

father would smell alcohol on his breath and fire him, since he didn’t like Norbert Bell anyway.

He called him “Tinker Bell” or “the town fairy” behind his back, and only tolerated him because

he was such a good salesman. Lila heard him say more than once that he’d like to run Norbert

and his kind out of town. Drinking on the job would be the last straw.

“Hi, Mr. Bell,” Lila said when Norbert looked up. He was only a couple of years older

than Neil, and she had to stifle a giggle to call him “Mr.” With the blond bangs that drooped into

his wide blue eyes, he looked like a high school classmate. Norbert raised one eyebrow, and Lila

held his gaze before turning back to her father. “I’ll get that meat loaf in the oven, Dad,” she

said. Standing up, it felt as though all the blood in her leg rushed to the raw spot on her calf. She

gritted her teeth and straightened her blazer. As she passed the plate-glass window, Norbert

waved and made a zipping motion across his lips with his fingers. Lila gave him her best smile.

* * *

Lila watched the clock as she cleared the supper dishes. She hoped there wouldn’t be any

confusion. Neil would see that her father’s car was still in the driveway and realize there’d been

a change in plans, wouldn’t he? Her fingers twitched around the dishrag as her ears tuned

themselves to the sound of Neil’s motorcycle. She stacked the clean dishes delicately, not

wanting to disturb her father, already asleep in his easy chair with the newspaper on his chest.

The gruff rhythm of his snores reminded her of a bear, and she pictured her father ripping Neil in

two. Neil was the last person her father would want her to date. He rode a motorcycle, and he

was almost twenty-one.

It was 7:08 when the motorcycle purred slowly past as Lila rinsed the greasy soap

bubbles from the meat-loaf pan. The thought of Neil created a familiar melting sensation in the

pit of her stomach, but her mother’s voice yanked her back to reality. “Have you taken out the

trash, Lila?” she called from the bottom of the basement steps, where she’d been organizing her

sample case of Lilly Belle makeup. The sales meeting had previewed the new colors for spring,

which meant that she would spend an hour or two staring into her plug-in makeup mirror, her

CRR │ 20

eyelids dusted in Fern Green or Sky-High Blue.

“I’ll do it right now.” Lila could barely keep from stammering as she heard Neil’s bike

make another pass. She wrung out the dishrag as if she intended to squeeze every last drop of

moisture out of it, and spread it over the faucet. If she timed it just right, she could make it to the

alley and catch Neil as he rode around the block the next time.

“You look tired, Lila,” her mother said, startling Lila as she reached for the bag of trash.

“I’ve got it,” her mother said. “Just go take your shower and get to bed early tonight.”

“Nice colors, Mom.”

“‘Plum Luscious,’” her mother said, touching her tongue to her lip. “And ‘Lilac Love.’”

She paused at the kitchen door to bat her eyes. As her mother closed the door behind her, Lila

heard Neil rev the engine before he sped away.

* * *

Lila’s leg woke her whenever she moved, and at 2:00 a.m. she could have sworn she

heard the hum of Neil’s motorcycle until she realized she’d been dreaming. In the dream, Neil

raced back and forth in front of her house until her father ran outside with a rolled-up newspaper

and threatened to swat him with it.

A searing rush of pins and needles attacked the burn on her leg when she got out of bed

in the morning. It was a good thing she wasn’t due to meet Neil for a trip to the farmhouse until

next Tuesday. Her leg would surely feel better by then. But God only knew what Neil might

attempt before that. They hadn’t gotten together yesterday, and he might try something crazy like

the last time they’d missed their Tuesday date and he’d stood outside her bedroom window

pitching pennies against her screen at one in the morning.

Lila seemed to have that effect on boys in general, and she wasn’t entirely sure why.

Maybe it was her hair, the way it reached to her waist, the color of night in a town full of

blondes. The blond girls were tall and thin, as a rule, like that English model Twiggy. Their legs

reminded Lila of horses’ legs, while her own legs reminded her of the Easter hams on display at

Gerthner’s Meat Market. She hoped that the burn on her calf wouldn’t leave a scar.

* * *

By the time Tuesday arrived, Lila was giddy at the prospect of seeing Neil. When she got

to their meeting place in the park, Neil had already rolled his motorcycle into the alcove.

“Brian’s out at Brightbach’s again today,” he said as he unbuttoned the top three buttons of

Lila’s white blouse and nuzzled her collarbone. “He told me he’d kick my ass if we showed up

out there again.” Neil’s brother Brian was as mean as Neil was sweet. Only nine and a half

months older than Neil, Brian was, unmistakably, the boss. “That bastard McDermott and his

Irish twins,” was how her father referred to them after he’d bought his new Oldsmobile at

McDermott’s dealership, and then McDermott recarpeted his house through a big chain store

twenty-five miles down the four-lane.

Lila felt certain Neil was a good salesman, and she knew exactly what he was trying to

sell her. Now, as he pressed against her, the coolness emanating from the cement-block wall was

a relief as she maneuvered the burned spot on her leg against it. At least here, Lila knew they

wouldn’t go all the way. Not like at the Brightbach house, where there was a mattress on one of

the bedroom floors and anything could happen.

The Brightbach farm had been bought by Neil’s father after old Mr. Brightbach had died

of cancer, and he planned to make a fortune selling off the acreage next to it for a subdivision.

Meanwhile, the old farmhouse sat empty, its windows boarded, a tall chain-link fence protecting

it from weekend beer busts. Neil and Brian had made themselves keys.

CRR │ 21

The first time Neil had taken Lila to the Brightbach place, he’d shown her the little shiny-

wrapped packet he kept in his wallet, but she’d told him no. He laughed and took his ballpoint

pen from his shirt pocket before he pulled her to him. Try something NEW! Buy an OLDS! the

slogan on the pen said. Lila preferred the old to the new. Old was interesting—for boyfriends and

houses. The house was the sort of place that her parents would think of as outdated, but Lila

loved the dark woodwork of the curving staircase and the colored light fixtures that hung like

dusty jewels from the tall ceilings. She had a good feeling about the place from the very first

moment she’d followed Neil through the back door. The kitchen smelled vaguely of oatmeal

cookies, and she wished that she and Neil could spend time there with some sort of

understanding about what Lila would and wouldn’t do. Maybe she needed some sort of slogan to

explain herself. Something catchy that would get caught in Neil’s head and make everything

simple. I’ve got a lot to live, but not so much to give. A little dabbling will do ya. Only you can

prevent…

Lila liked kissing. Neil kissed like he knew what he was doing—like he was kissing her

right now—and he smelled better than anything. Like chocolate. No. Hot cocoa with a hint of

marshmallow, warming her from the inside out. Lila peeled herself away from Neil, and a blast

of cool spring air hit her throat. “Tuesday,” Lila said. “I’ve got to start supper.” He kissed her

again and worked his way from her lips to behind her ear.

“I wish I could eat whatever you’re cooking,” Neil said.

* * *

The meat loaf was underdone when her mother tested it at a few minutes past six that

evening. “Lila, what time did you put this in the oven?” she asked. Without waiting for an

answer, Lila’s mother sawed into the meat loaf, its pink insides oozing blood, and slapped the

pieces onto the broiler pan. “Make the salad while I watch this, or it’ll go up in flames.” Lila

hated it when her mother got into a tizzy in the kitchen. If she wasn’t careful, her mother would

be slamming cupboard doors, and the platter of meat loaf would be slammed onto the table. Life

was so much easier when her mother spent her time in the basement working on her Lilly Belle

business. It was too bad her father didn’t really appreciate her mother’s business abilities or how

young and stylish she looked. “Kissin’ don’t last,” he’d say whenever he forked up something

especially delicious that Lila’s mother had managed to create. Then he’d pat his paunch and

make a series of little smacks and grunts and finish the line: “But cookin’do.” Lila would bet a

year’s allowance that her mother believed just the opposite.

* * *

When Lila walked into the kitchen after school the next day, her mother was standing on

the step stool with a sponge in her hand. She was barefoot and wore an old housedress that had

belonged to Lila’s grandmother.

“Bake a cake?” Lila asked.

“Spring-cleaning,” her mother said.

“I thought I smelled chocolate,” Lila said.

“Charismatic Cocoa-Bunny body lotion from the spring collection.” Lila’s mother’s

voice was muffled as she spoke with her head deep inside a corner cupboard.

Lila needed only a moment to recognize the scent rising from her mother’s body. It

wasn’t necessary to see Neil again or press her face against his neck. Lila knew what was what

the moment she noticed the mark on her mother’s bare leg. Petal-shaped and pink, it was only a

shade or two lighter than the fading burn on Lila’s own leg.

“I forgot something from my locker,” Lila said. “I have to run back to school.”

CRR │ 22

Lila took her time walking to the phone booth outside Hap’s House of Spirits on the edge

of town. In Hap’s parking lot, she shut the phone booth door, settled herself on the metal stool,

and then lit a cigarette from the pack Hap had sold her without any questions. She almost

laughed the cigarette right out of her mouth when she closed the cover of the book of matches.

Get HAPpy! Get spirited! it said. Lila admired the purplish outline of her mouth on the butt

before she ground it into the phone booth floor, then pulled the tube of Plum Luscious out of her

pocket and recoated her lips before she smoked the next one. When she was finished, she lit the

book of matches on fire and dropped it. She watched the matchbook burn itself out, and checked

her reflection in the glass as she dialed Neil’s house. How convenient that Brian answered.

It was a two-mile walk to the old Brightbach place, and Lila savored the delicacy of the

spring evening. There were tiny buds on the trees, but there was a bite of cold in the air. If it

snowed again, as it sometimes did in March, all of that sweetness would be ruined. Lila walked

slowly. She knew Brian would be by in his Mustang to pick her up before long. “Just look for me

on the road,” she’d told him.

There wasn’t a single thing Lila liked about Brian, but she decided she was just going to

close her eyes and let him do it. His wavy reddish hair would probably feel the same as Neil’s.

And his lips…well, she didn’t care if he kissed like Neil or not. She never wanted to see Neil

again. After Brian was finished with her, she’d ask him to drive her back to Hap’s. The

Greyhound bus stopped there for its nighttime run to Chicago, and Lila had over four hundred

dollars she’d stolen from the Lilly Belle cashbox—far more than she needed for a one-way

ticket. But Lila surprised herself as she heard the Mustang climbing the rise behind her. She

dropped into the ditch and lay flat among the weeds. Brian drove by twice more, but she stayed

still.

The road was deserted when she stood up and brushed off her clothes and hair. She could

see the lights from Hap’s place in the distance, and she walked toward them. When she got there,

she’d look up Norbert Bell’s number in the phone book. She’d tell him what her father said about

him. She’d tell him about her mother and Neil. She’d tell him about the money she’d stolen from

her mother, and that she knew the combination to the safe in her father’s store. Something would

happen next. Something big. Lila didn’t know what, but she smoked cigarette after cigarette,

preparing herself for the next surprise.

CRR │ 23

Poet’s Guide to Ada Lovelace, First Computer Programmer

MICHAEL LEVAN

Say you’re the daughter to a famous poet,

man who birthed Don Juan on paper

as thin as a layer of skin, that blows

over with slightest breeze.

Say your dream of being a physician

is a century-and-some too soon,

though because your mother wants you

to be rational—unlike your father

who walked out on both of you—

your mathematics are encouraged.

Then one genteel dinner party,

you eavesdrop Mr. Babbage’s ideas

for a calculating engine that not only

could foresee but could act on that insight,

touching you in ways that pique your heart,

your head, the universality of his ideas

appreciated by no one but you.

Say you’re his Enchantress of Numbers,

figures bending to your will

as you write him notes,

programs which seek to calculate

sequences of Bernoulli numbers,

jealous critics trying to take

away from a woman all credit.

Say you are too preoccupied

with madness—your father’s only gift,

your mother accuses—your mind that will

turn against you, if only you could create

a calculus of the nervous system

measuring how the brain gives

rise to thought, nerves to feeling,

though in the end your math does nothing

to stem your gambling, your uterus

which fails you, leaves you laying

next to your father, forever.

CRR │ 24

But say your name becomes

its own code, its own language

governments use to defend themselves,

their secrets, is that the only fair way

for you to be remembered?

Poet’s Guide to Alien Hand Syndrome

MICHAEL LEVAN

One hand washes the other,

then gives up, decides to unbutton

your shirt, grab a breast,

wake you up from dead sleep

as it wraps its fingers

around your thin throat,

anything to make itself known

as its own person who answers

to no one, especially not you.

It’s easy to see the humor,

to toss out the old line:

What we have here is a failure

to communicate, forgetting

how your body fails the hand,

never letting it know it’s always

been a valued member of the pack,

so to speak.

Communication is the silver bullet

to every problem you’ve had,

so try again to keep your hand

occupied and appreciated.

If you can’t talk to it, then how

could you ever hold on

to your one true love who’s

always worked to close

the distance between you?

CRR │ 25

Poet’s Guide to Swarm Behavior

MICHAEL LEVAN

If only you could be locked

in a bank vault, the world

destroyed around you,

no one else alive when you find

your way out, all the books

you’ve ever wanted

left to keep you company—

You saw this on a show once

and refused to accept the man

couldn’t have found another

pair of glasses, that his woeful

That’s not fair was anything

but a cry to keep solitude close,

not a plea to ask another

soul to emerge over horizon,

one weak moment believing

he couldn’t rely on himself.

Because you want to think

that is your natural state too,

since people make your life

more difficult than need be.

Because if people needed people

there’d be a name like starlings’

murmurations, hives of bees,

plankton blooms and herds of cows,

lions’ prides, alligators’ congregations.

A group of people falls short,

as does a crowd pushing

its way through one door

when Fire! echoes theater walls,

as does family.

You are the lone wolf among

all the lone wolves,

nothing more important

than the way you work

alone.

CRR │ 26

We Pick Pomegranates in the Early Day

GLADY RUIZ

We pick pomegranates in the early day,

canvas sleeves over our arms and snapped

into place on our gloved hands

that part the orbed branches. The fruit,

sometimes split, an annual feast of pith

and arils. Telltale lacewings keep the thrips

from moving in, from sucking out

what we will press after the haul.

You call from around the tree, say my name

in the same cadence remarking how easily the harvest plucks.

We’re new to the task –

How small can we go? do we toss the cracked

globes? do we prune while we’re at it?

We trundle down the rows of tangled green and red,

faces scratched from the backswing of branches

pulled down breast high for the pick.

Time reconfigures herself, orb by orb,

washing, halving, recording, pressing

till the red juices scatter, grow from a hundred

repetitions six times over to where

you are orb, I am juice

in the press.

CRR │ 27

Taking Out the Nine-Year-Old Crepe Myrtle Without Instructions

GLADY RUIZ

I

The 1950 Massey-Ferguson saddle seat sits high

and beltless. Fumes ride back, noisy. First lesson

of step here to push forward, or shift here to gear

up, and we're off after fifteen futile minutes

of muscle and shovel beading our will, lungs desperate

to build your vision of a replacement cypress allee

for your new home. So I back up the faded

red tractor to the first of four dozen sprawled trees,

untended a year before you move to the land. You crawl

beneath heat-hardened spines, unfriendly as the thumb-

thick chain you wrap around base shaft, hook

the iron barb onto a link, untangle

yourself from underneath the prickle

of my foot above the gas.

II

The Massey-Fergusson rattles forward then

bucks at my press. First wheelie, whoopee;

my heart no longer in a thousand places:

vibrant muscle hammers on the cage

of my throat. But the box attachment

saves me, forces down the long nose

of my bronco, repairs my grip on the flat-

style steering, and frees the long cynical

root and its toughened cousins, sweet

sounds of stress through breaking earth,

one exhale of diesel and renewal.

CRR │ 28

For This

GLADY RUIZ

– after Adrienne Rich

If I’ve reached for your lines (I have),

voicemail incanted word for word,

lifted my chin to the way your voice

caught the light when you said

you wanted to live the rest of your life

with me, then I return to the chant on my knees,

repeat the sigh while seasons shift and the flowers

concern themselves with coloring their cheeks

for the spring dance.

If you’ve touched my finger

with your tongue, tipped my face so I match

you groove for groove, hollow for hollow,

then my words pitch back and forth,

tilt me sideways so I lose my place

and cannot remember six springs or falls,

or that seventh summer–

catching light, my chant reissues,

red-lipped song.

CRR │ 29

Loomis Breaker, Wilkes-Barre

WILLIAM DORESKI

Nothing uglier than the greenhouse

slab of this structure, hundreds of panes

broken or missing, the thousand

still intact so dusted with coal

they look like many rotten bruises.

The conveyor lurching to the piles

of crushed anthracite looks spindly

as a flicker of spider web.

Below it, a payloader and truck

interact, puny vehicles

to aggress on such a heap.

The lower part of the breaker

is three stories of poured concrete.

I press one hand against it

and feel an ancient earthen cool

simmer through me. At my feet

a pair of discarded tires,

old-fashioned wide whitewalls, relax

in the filth, their working lives done.

This breaker won’t stand here much longer,

the anthracite seams exhausted,

whole villages collapsing

above burning abandoned mines.

As I kick at the treadless old tires

I feel all Pennsylvania

and almost all America

shudder with the secret pleasure

of those slow underground fires.

CRR │ 30

Grain Elevators, Milwaukee

WILLIAM DORESKI

On the lake stands a cluster

of eight grain elevators, concrete

patched with thick black strokes of tar,

an abstract expressionist statement

chiding pleasure boats docked nearby.

Franz Kline drunker than usual

would have signed this construction

if he’d seen it. I wonder

if the people of Milwaukee

appreciate its vigor and stark

penetration of industrial

pieties, appreciate the way

form overcomes content, forcing

the eye to understand despite

our pictorial expectations.

Maybe the city has torn it down

by now, but in the Seventies

this structure so engaged me

I spent a whole day watching light

slide across its grainy surface,

the huge brush strokes bleeding

at their edges into the gray,

the reflection in the brownish lake

shuddering like an aurora.

I learned so much about painting

that day that I gave it up for good

and went home happy and drank a toast

to Franz Kline and other artists

with visions larger than mine.

CRR │ 31

The Tappan Zee

GRACE MATTERN

Blue broken bluer by the tint

of windshield and sunglasses

a river of trees, leaves waving

hands along the parkway.

Outside this cockpit of cooled air

and road hum sun sharpens

the day, our hope for a clear

bridge as we cross wide water,

the next state a steep bank ahead.

We move fast, beating our own

time and age as generations

unpeel caring and caretaking

in the same bed which is two

beds pushed together

in the room where we’ll sleep,

a tight crack between us.

CRR │ 32

August

GRACE MATTERN

Horses come to the railing. Your hand

reaches to trace white fur ruffled

along a nose, my hand smoothes

a mane, you stroke an ear, our hands

fondle muted light on broad shoulders,

sun-silk as warm on our necks

as our breath when we call each other

to the fence, our skill with the familiar

boundary, how we gather the long

gallop in each other. The horses turn

from us to race across grass crushed

to dust, through an open gate.

CRR │ 33

Who, After All, Is Rimsky-Korsokav?

JOHN REPP

Were the meadow more rich with blooms,

blooms would be too fey a word for the colors

of the Rimsky-Korsakov windblown rumbling thunderhead

we reclined in, sketching. If you wade in a reedy pond,

you worry about things alien to the forty-two steps

between walk-up & Red Apple. Can a bassoon make

a cadenza-choked spiral or is that an oboe? “I’ve already stocked

the pears,” said the new stock boy, so this must be the age

of roller-skates clamped to P.F. Flyers. Then again, L’s thigh

is cold & the nothing she almost wears vaporizes the future.

She’s a comic heroine, what with that silver streak

in her kinky hair, assuming a heroine can lisp & still be so.

The Alexander Technique, camping mishaps & grave doubts

about whiskey made for a gemütlich meal that night.

CRR │ 34

Sweet

JOHN REPP

methane bouquet

my shrieking boy

fanned forth at long,

crow-pecked, hyena-chewed,

plague-ridden, Job-boiled last—

3:37 a.m. his second morning home.

How Bear Our Child

JOHN REPP

How bear our child dropping

for the last time the stuffed dog

he toted through griefs & joys so fierce?

We bear so much & so will he

& that weighs far too much.

CRR │ 35

First Date

CHARLES RAFFERTY

The punched mouth of the sky staggered into the trees above our table, and the waiter came over

to see if we'd decided. You waved him off and said someone was sobbing in the ladies room.

You saw her in there, and wondered if we should do something. I told you that privacy was what

we'd all want at such a time, but you didn't look so sure. You said that she talked about angels,

how they were all dead, and I imagined them dropping from the sky like shot swans striking the

deck umbrellas, the coffee station. I decided to hold off telling you that I was the kind of guy

who would order one up if it happened to be on the menu, that I'd gorge myself on its airy flesh. I

told you instead to just pick a wine, to think about a walk later on by the stone-filled river that

crashed unstoppably beyond our rail. And then your eyes gathered their grayness into two sharp

points. You flagged the waiter down to say that now you knew.

CRR │ 36

Red Flag

CHARLES RAFFERTY

On the first cold night of the year, the field mice come scratching into our walls. The next day I

put out the poison, and the town raises a red flag beside its only pond. The color of the flag

reminds me of broken watermelon, overly ripe. There isn't even ice yet, but the people in charge

of the flag need to be sure. Two years ago, a boy went under. Now the flag flies even when the

ice is a foot thick. The mother of the dead boy haunts us. She enters the town bar and all eyes

head into their drinks. We watch her in the mirror behind the counter, or in the reflection of the

big front window that faces a town of parked cars. Some things cannot be looked at directly: the

faintest stars, an oven door just opened. The poison I use is supposed to make the mice thirsty.

They die on the way to a pond so beautiful we raised a family on its bank.

CRR │ 37

Contributor Notes

Katie Cortese holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a PhD from Florida State. She

has earned prizes in contests hosted by Narrative Magazine, River Styx, Silk Road, and

elsewhere. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Third Coast,

Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Willow Springs, and The Baltimore Review, among other

journals. She teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University where she also

serves as the fiction editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

Michael McGlade grew up in an Irish farmhouse where the leaky roof didn’t bother him as

much as the fear of electrocution from the nightly scramble for prime position beneath

the chicken lamp, the only source of heating in the house – a large infrared heat lamp more

commonly used for poultry. His seminal influences were Darwin’s Survival Of The Fattest and a

morbid belief that “undying love” meant you had a soft-spot for zombies. Never allowing these

misapprehensions to hold him back from success, he understood that nothing is as clear as the

illegible comprehensibility of the modern world.

His short fiction has been published in Ambit, Green Door, J Journal, Grain, Spinetingler,

Downstate Story, and other journals. He holds a master’s degree in English from Queen’s

University, Ireland. You can find out the latest news and views from him

on McGladeWriting.com.

Mark Phillips recently took up the writing of fiction, but his essays have appeared in Salon, The

Sun, North Dakota Quarterly, Commonweal, New York Times Magazine, Notre Dame Magazine,

and in many other journals. He is the author of the memoir My Father’s Cabin, a Barnes &

Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, of which Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “I don’t believe

I have ever read so relentlessly honest, unsentimental, and unsparing account of working-class

life.”

Denise Emanuel Clemen, prior to writing, worked as an art model, a merchant of her own blood

plasma, and an assembly-line worker in a factory where she became an expert at assembling toy

manure spreaders.

Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Delmarva Review, Fiction Fix,

the Georgetown Review (including an honorable mention for their prize), Knee-Jerk, Two Hawks

Quarterly, Literary Mama, and The Rattling Wall, among others. She’s received fellowships to

the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Ragdale Foundation, and

was an Auvillar fellow at Moulin à Nef in France in 2009. Denise received an MFA in creative

writing from the University of Nebraska in 2010.

She regularly walks the beaches of Ventura County, California, hunting for treasures to take

home to her 89-year-old mother. Her household is home to three generations and an elderly cat.

CRR │ 38

Michael Levan, a native of NE Ohio, received his MFA in poetry from Western Michigan

University and PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee. His work

can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of Natural Bridge, Mid-American Review,

American Literary Review, and Heron Tree. He teaches writing at the University of Saint Francis

and lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his wife, Molly, and son, Atticus.

Glady Ruiz is a poetry MFA student by night, and a high school science teacher by day. She

looks forward to graduating in May.

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and teaches at Keene State College.

His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical

studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have

appeared in many journals.

Grace Mattern's poetry and short fiction have been published in numerous literary journals and

magazines, including Calyx, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, Poet Lore, Cider Press Review and

Yankee. She has received fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and

Vermont Studio Center and has published two books of poetry, Fever of Unknown Origin

(Oyster River Press, 2002) and The Truth About Death (Turning Point Books, 2012), which

received the Readers' Choice NH Literary Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry.

John Repp's most recent collections are Music Over the Water, a chapbook from Alice Greene

& Co., and Fat Jersey Blues, the 2013 winner of the Akron Poetry Prize (University of Akron

Press, February, 2014).

Charles Rafferty's tenth book of poetry is The Unleashable Dog (2014, Steel Toe Books). His

poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner. His

collection of flash fiction is Saturday Night at Magellan's (2013, Fomite Press). Currently, he

directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College.

Amy Peck has 20 years of experience working in the graphic design field ranging from a small

design studio, a large publication house and a nationally recognized advertising agency. Peck has

worked for a wide range of clients including HOW Magazine, Nestlé, Wal-Mart, Goodyear,

Kimberly-Clark, Interweave Press, Humana, University Hospitals, and more. In May 2012, she

earned her MFA in Visual Communication Design and her Certificate in User Experience

Design, from Kent State University. In the past seven years she has taught graphic design part-

time at The University of Akron, Kent State University and Cleveland State University. She is

currently Assistant Professor and Chair of the Graphic Design Department at Lakeland

Community College on the East side of Cleveland, Ohio. In her spare time she likes to watch

movies, sew, read, craft, and hang out with her 13-year-old twin boys, her husband and her

newly adopted dogs, Bianca and Chloe.

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JenMarie Zeleznak received her M.F.A. from the Savannah College of Art and Design and her

B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art. She is an Adjunct Professor at Lakeland Community

College and Lake Erie College in Northeast Ohio. In 2013, her works were featured in

Animatopoeia, A PostModern Bestiary at the Cleveland State University Art Gallery and were

included in Studio Visit Magazine, Volume 17. JenMarie’s work is concerned with spiritual,

social and emotionally driven experiences, proclaiming the animal as autonomous and self-

referential, but also as an emblem of the human condition. JenMarie lives and works at the

Tower Press Building in Cleveland, Ohio.

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