Issue 12 – 2024

My Arm Is Steady. My Hand Does Not Shake

Beth Walker

Buddhists contemplate 32 parts of the body—including the foul, the unmentionable—to serve as an antidote to suffering.

I am not Buddhist, but my cancer does not know the difference.

                                                                            

        

The Well of the Invisible

John Nizalowski

During the pandemic’s first summer, when the midnight sky was clear, I would go outside to watch Jupiter’s bright orange eye rise from the Grand Mesa. . . . To the north, the Pole Star, as always, shone through the outer branches of our backyard mulberry tree.

        

Famous People I Have Touched

Mark Brazaitis

No one was monitoring the number of presidential handshakes guests indulged in. Holding my position, I again reached my hand toward the president’s. His hand grabbed mine, squeezed, and let go. I shook his hand a third time . . .

        

A Place in Hokkaido With a View of the Sea

Kurt Caswell

Kabari village sits at the edge of the Hidaka Mountains near the place the Mu and Saru rivers flow into the sea. The Hidaka Mountains form a rain shadow along the coast, so in winter, even as the snow is very deep up high, the snow is very light on the sea.

        

        

        

Mountain-Keeper

Hye-Kyung Stella Kang

Today is ChuSeok, the Mid-Autumn Festival. Outside my Seattle window, a slate-gray October sky makes me ache for the sapphire autumn sky of my youth in Seoul. In Korea, ChuSeok is a national three-day holiday to allow people to travel to their hometowns to pay respect to their ancestors and celebrate with family.

        

        

Baby Steps

Terry Yanulavich

Rather than drowning at the beach, or in the municipal pool across the street, I spend my summers bathing in boredom and in my own sweat and humiliation. I think Ma’s afraid we’re either going to die, or possibly enjoy ourselves.

        

Sayonara, ai

Angela Miyuki Mackintosh

I’m eight. My hands are blistered and smell metallic from the monkey bars. On the distant playground, kids shriek and pound tetherballs. The sun warms my neck, and my backpack feels light as I stride out to the parking lot with my new girlfriends. They’re singing “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!”

        

        

Her Name is Mama

Maureen Pendras

There was a boy in my driveway. It was nothing; it was ordinary. And yet it was neither of these. My older son had seen him first: “Mom, what’s that little boy doing in the driveway?” I didn’t quite believe him. I thought the boy was probably not that little, or perhaps if the boy were that little, he was not there alone.

        

Breathe

Elizabeth Carls

There is something both sad and beautiful about a king fisher fishing in a bone-dry creek. She stands on a newly exposed stone, defiantly fishing where there cannot possibly be fish. One half of a mile upstream the lake is low, but not dry.

        

L’appel du vide

Telaina Eriksen

I thought if I just tried hard enough, none of the worst-case scenarios that played themselves over and over again in my mind would ever happen.
        If you are an adult, living in this world, reading this, you already know that all of my efforts, all of my worry, all of my earnestness, and all of my devotion, did not protect my children.

        

        

Surfaces

Gary Fincke

When I heard what sounded like the fluttering of a flock of large birds, I took the bag with me to the window. About fifty copies of the Batavia Daily News had unraveled on the sidewalk near where our front yard ended at an intersection corner. The pages lifted and settled. They tumbled and caught on shrubbery and trees, the huge, stained wings of them struggling in the cold front gusts like small disappointments.

        

Coming of Age

William Luvaas

We were perched on a narrow platform high atop a scaffolding overlooking the stage sixty feet below. … Given my problem, I had no business up there with five other boys, but my mantra was: “Whatever the other boys do, I will do”

        

The Making of a Marine

David Larsen

“If you screw up, there are no excuses; we will kick your ass,” said Gunnery Sgt. Bush. “Is there anybody who disagrees with what I just said?” Of course, nobody raised their hand. He asked us not to talk about the tough parts of boot camp in our letters home because it would just make our families worry, as though he was saying, “I hope you are man enough to get through this without crying to your mother.”

        

The Rougarou

Jacob Simmons

On the way, I imagine us unstuck in time, and Grandpa Ola passes us going the opposite direction in a wobbly-wheeled truck, putting Oklahoma behind him to pick oranges in California. We wave to him when he passes, but he doesn’t recognize us, and drives by like we aren’t even here. Away, always farther away from the dust of home.

        

Kaley

Jennifer Lauren

People talk. People listen. But high school is finite, and none of us can wait to reinvent ourselves. We all graduate, except Jessica, who dropped out after sophomore year. We throw our graduation caps in the air, walk out of high school and into the rest of our lives.
        All of us except Aria, who will forever be sixteen.

        

In the Telling

Margaret Morth

Storytelling was mostly out of his range by then, or maybe storytelling was the truest constant: in mind and heart, the old stories at play, alive. Now and then he would bring out a punch line in that old dialect or half-translation: “Yukes, yukes! Hort sang saum!*” or “Four ice cream. Schtroh-berry.” And, knowing what came before, we could all savor it together.

        

Sounds Like

Ann Voorhees Baker

I can read between those lines now. But I couldn’t then. Growing up with my father was like playing a never-ending game of Emotion-Charades. “First word.” “Sounds like.” “Rhymes with.” Expecting me, I guess, to know. But these were clues, see, and nobody ever told me the rules.

        

Otoplasty

John Picard

My ear issues were symptomatic of something larger. I felt like I was at war with my entire body.

        

        

        

        

Libera Me

Judith Fetterley

I perfected the art of performing femininity quite early. By thirteen I knew to cross my legs at the ankle, not the knee. By thirteen I could dance in pumps. I could pass for normal. I never lacked for boyfriends.
                                                                             

        

        

        

The Trans Girl’s Guide to Grey’s Anatomy

Erica Rivera

You’ll start watching Grey’s Anatomy because—four years into puberty, at 13—you’re already familiar with imminent death. . .. A scalpel making its way through someone’s body is the perfect metaphor for how you feel inside.

        

        

Vanishing Acts

Anu Kumar

One month, in the time of the early 1990s, when the monsoon rains lashed large parts of north India, an older cousin of mine vanished. He did have a habit of suddenly falling out of touch. He traveled for work often, and when he was deep in the interior somewhere, or where there were no phone booths, days would go by before we heard from him.

        

        

        

Family photo, Jerusalem house

Across a Precipice of Days

Cate Touryan

He thinks he was seven.

The soldiers come at dawn, shout them awake . . . herd them from the village, the children, the women, the elderly, tell them not to worry—they will return. Where are we going? A susurrus from child to mother to grandfather to God. To the Interior.