A Literation, Volume 2

VOLUME 2: 2014

A Literation. An Issue Of Identity.

Amy HarrisonB.D.T.S.A.D.Christopher SchaefferEvan CulbertsonE.W. CertainChristopher RifeJessica HiestandBrittney DussaultVivienne MahJoe RichardsonLeah BakerMichael W. SchmidtLogan EllisKatherine La MantiaRomila BarrymanSabrina Kulka

A Literation.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFJen Mueller

MANAGING EDITORSun Young

POETRY EDITORSKevin Grijalva (Lead)

Cheyenne VarnerZane Hagans

James Goodwin

PROSE EDITORSNoelle Wonder (Lead)

Cole BubenikKelsey Gutierrez

Amy Weston

OTHER CONTRIBUTIONSLuke Dingle

All Rights Reserved. The respective authors and/or copyright holders retain all rights in each of their individual original contribu-tions. Some of these contributions may be covered by Creative Commons licenses.

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VOLUME 2 / 2014

MISSION STATEMENTA Literation is an online literary maga-zine dedicated to discovering new inter-net writers, fostering a robust online writing community, bringing attention to emerging artists, and bridging the gap between traditional literary chan-nels and next gen lit.

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: who someone is

: the qualities, beliefs, etc., that make a particular person or group different from others

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i-den-ti-ty:

A LITERATION VOL. 2 / 2014

Reusing Sappho By Amy Harrison


αTHEY POACHED HER VOICE FROM TIME TO TIME and no-one knew where the bones were kept so i admired her merely from a distance only walking across the Earth when she wasn’t there to eat the dirt she had milked her words into collect them so the other poets couldn’t trace her paths across the body of dirt and lovers with tender feminine flesh she had carved i wanted to buff it out and cough out a renaissance of my own

β{I ENJOYED HERbecause childbirth and beards hadn’t prevented a knot of hairless limbs atop her verse or the wet membrane that slowly fucked her vocabulary while scissors grew from her meat and moaned}

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ΥTHE SOIL TASTED OF INTENSITY and after my eyes became occupied experimentsi departed with an engorged stomach attempted to regurgitate some meaning from the dust into papercleansing my swollen guts of words all the time replicating and recalling those still tongues my teeth smiled forbefore answering another sapphic voice to breathe lan·guage over brunch

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GOD THINKS I’M PRETTY


Daddy's new wife talks about God more than the pastor at Calvary Church on Broadway and Pine. I think they must know each other, God and my new

mother. She talks to him like she talks to the ladies from church who wear starched dresses and enough hairspray they'd combust if something called "Holy

6

by Brittney Dussault

Fire" showed up. This makes me think they are best friends, God and my new mother. Which is why I partially blame him when she dresses me in khaki skirts and black woolen jumpers well into July, while other little girls my age get to wear pink and frilly string bikinis because boys don't notice us yet. My new mother says not to worry, they'll never notice me. July is when she cracks my head on the sidewalk and says not to tell my fa-ther. I am eight and three quarters and I know two things:1) I am not pretty.2) God must agree.I am ten when she slams my head in the door. My room is pink with gold glitter, but the floor is concrete. I sleep on it the night she raids my room, stealing all my pretty things and tipping my bed over so I cannot sleep on it. I am not allowed dinner. We live by the beach, yet I spend my summers building her a wailing wall and copying scripture into a textbook. In the fall, there will be religious essays to write and she makes the mistake of sending me to a Holy school that believes differ-

ently than her. Which is more impor-tant: an A from the teacher, or a C- from daddy's wife? I can't ask God because step-mother hogs the line.At twelve, I hear my brother doing the f-word with a girl that looks like our fa-ther's first wife. I've been taught about fornication since I was nine and know that sex is a sin. When I am seventeen, there will be a moment in the backseat of a car by a lake in the summer. The car will be too small, but the owner won't no-tice because I will be taller than him. I won't plan on his hand slipping up the length of my khaki skirt, but when his fin-gers reach their destination, I will forget repentance and religious guilt as I experi-ence mindless pleasure that makes my right leg shake the way my dog shakes when you scratch her belly. But I am not seventeen yet. I am fourteen and high school starts to-morrow. I sit on the sunny porch and lis-ten to step-mother's sermon on inde-pendence versus identity. I take away skin the color of Christmas, but it is only August. I am sick and press my head to the coolness of the blue toilet in what is called the "children's bathroom." Grown

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up things happen here, though, like blood and vomit. There are two scales beneath the sink. A precaution, she must think, in case I break one. At school, I tell the people who should be my friends that I cannot spend time with them because they are heathens. In the locker room, before gym, I cover myself the way step-mother taught me. When someone asks, I say it is polite to be mod-est, but know it is better to be courteous and hide the ugly. At fourteen, identity means doing as step-mother says and parroting her lessons back to the world. This, I am told, is witnessing. I suppose that makes step-mother's words Gospel.Sixteen and my only friend is a rapist. Convicted young and now three times my age, the folly of his youth is some-thing I will never experience. He says identity is finding yourself, but I don't tell step-mother this. He wears a purple hat, walks me to the bus, hugs me so I won't run away. I see God in his smile. Seventeen comes and so do I. He never calls again.I no longer confess my sins to step-mother. When I blew out eighteen can-

dles, she ceased being my priest. I re-turn the sweater she gives me and buy a pair of jeans. The weather turns warm and I wear a t-shirt. August arrives and I wear a pink bikini. God, of all people, calls me pretty. My new apartment has a white toilet too pretty to ruin. There are no scales be-neath the sink. Instead of lying, the mir-ror shows me what is. My reflection smiles, says, "I found you."

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Becoming Conch Shells After Edwidge Danticat


Mel

I now know there’s road upon road upon road and more road after that. I also know that each passing car holds a story, a blurry tragedy. I look at my headlights lighting up the yellow pinstripe jacket of the road before me and I don’t miss you. Sometimes I’m lonely. Lonely like a crowded school bus, me sitting in the back with my trumpet case on my lap and you up front, chatting with someone nameless. I think you knew I loved you then. I think you loved me too. I wanted

you to humiliate me. To shout “you fuck-ing pussy” in my face and shame me in front of everyone. I needed something from you.

But I think I’m just confusing loneliness with doubt. I span the roads, wondering where to go, until I force myself to stop. I don’t think I miss you. I wonder more how Damien turned out. I can’t believe you defended that name. No matter how much I said I hated it. It sounded so evil. You had a thing for bad boys,

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by Logan Ellis

though. I still don’t know why you picked me.

What if people I pass on the road think of my tragedy? What if they read it on my face in that one second they see me? I can’t help but thinking as I stare at those see-in-the-dark stars you glued to the ceiling of my SUV. My skin is irrita-ble on these sticky leather seats. Tonight I’ve parked along the side of “Sycamore” street. Like a visitor. The nights remind me of sleeping over at your house when we were in high school. My body wouldn’t let me relax when your dad lurked around the house. Or maybe it’s like you said, my constant thinking leaves me skeptical.

I’m thinking of changing my name. I don’t want you to follow me anymore.

***********

Rue

Everything still feels the same. I’m still wearing the same clothes, I’m still watch-ing the same history programs, I still pop my back obsessively, I’m still lactose intolerant. Everything. I’m living with my Dad now and going to that college in our hometown. Why couldn’t we have gone there before? It’s so much closer to

our families. You wouldn’t tell me why you hated it here, you were being a fuck-ing introvert again, which was frustrat-ing, but cute.

My Dad watches Lance while I’m in classes. He’s always happy to see him, so eager to hold him and rock him, but when he looks at me, I can tell he’s just so fucking disappointed. I just want to grind his face against the wall or claw at it until my fingernails break in his skin. He tells me to throw out your trumpet, or pawn it. Your mother was supposed to pick it up, but she hasn’t visited since Lance was born. He hates how I stand up for you, he thinks I’m a damn delu-sional idiot, or that something’s misfir-ing in my brain. I know he’s worried but really, his emotions are scaring me more than mine.

I feel like I need another body near me. My mind goes to tell you something, and then I remember you left. I take out your trumpet and play a few notes. I played the trombone, but the ombesure is pretty similar, I just have to tighten up my lips, like I’m kissing you.

**********

Mel

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I’ve been having a dream where you drop Damien in a pond. I stand by with you and watch him drown. I wake up wanting to do something terrible. To keep the thoughtless demands of my mind satisfied.

I stole from a convenience store. Twenty years old, my first time stealing. You took more risks than I did. I thought of you there with me. It made it easier. But when I walked out, the excitement left me gasping for air. I ran to my SUV and drove for a while, trying to regulate my breathing. It’s been so long since I’ve had a panic attack. You used to make me laugh when I felt one coming. You made me realize it was pointless. I don’t know what that feels like anymore.

By the time I stopped, the Dreamsicle I had stolen had melted in my pocket. Of all the things, I took something that I didn’t even need.

The next time I decided to steal, I aimed a little higher. I tucked a package of nap-kins, a few razors and some mint gum in my jacket. I walked out whistling like a hotshot. I have no idea where I’m going. I know I’m still in Nebraska. I have just enough money to get by for a month. I’ll

need to find a job soon. You never had a job. I hated you a little for that.

***********

Rue

There’s this guy in my Computer Pro-gramming class that said he liked my eyes. I knew it was bullshit, since you never used to say a damn thing about them, but I took the compliment. I think it’s because he has the same slightly crooked teeth, the same greasy hair, the same average height, the kind of height that barely got you on those roller coast-ers. But what I really like about him is his skin. He has the same beautiful tan skin as you.

He makes Lance laugh, the laugh that re-minds me of yours, kinda broken and fun to laugh with. We do “date-like” things. I don’t know why, nothing much happens. We just take shitty fast food back to his house and sit and tell each other stories. When we talk, I feel like I’m coming back, like reversing an explo-sion, everything’s a tricky fucking cam-era technique. The things he says about you…the things everyone says about you…they don’t even understand. He talks a little too much, a little too confi-dently. He tries to hold my hand and I

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flinch a little. The tension hurts me, but I’m ready to fucking burst.

His name is Oscar. I think I need him. Is it okay to need him? Tell me it’s okay to need him…

***********

Mel

I’m somewhere in Wyoming. The town is vague enough for me to forget the name. But I’m somewhere. I’ve decided against the name change. I think I need something to carry with me. I know I’ll have to give it up sooner or later.

I made a name for myself when it hap-pens. Steven Wilson. I used to rant about names like that, the ones that re-peat the same ending consonant sounds. They stick to the roof of my mouth. I think you understood that. That’s why you avoided people with those names, like I did. You used to tell me to say the odd things on my mind. We were won-derfully terrible people.

I finally landed a job at some place called Jack’s Diner. They rejected me and then called back asking for morning help. I agreed, since I still can’t sleep well. I’m the standard busboy, cleaning up every-one’s dirty napkins and half eaten waf-

fles. The chefs are stereotypical loud-mouths with aprons. The waitresses have no enthusiasm. The food is bland and floppy. They have a soda fountain with all the off-brand cola products. I don’t know if I ever told you how much it bothers me when people order soda in the morning. I mean, morning is for juice and coffee. Not soda. Already I hate the sound of cups refilling. It’s like the sound I imagine when I think of Damien’s lungs filling as he drowns. I still have that dream. I hunch near the water, wondering if there’s a way to save him. A way to do something differently.

I watch the couples that come in. They’re usually sobering up, feeding each other waffles and dumping ten pack-ets of sugar substitute into their coffee. Others are like conch shells. Sullen, empty, forever cursed by the whisper of a memory, a mistake. Regret, longing? Which are they? Which am I? I’m not a poet, but I feel like writing something beautiful…

***********

Rue

…when he fucked me I thought of you. I thought it was you. When he leaned in, I imagined he whispered the same words

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you would before you’d slip your hand under my shirt and dip underneath my bra, “How badly do you want it?” I mum-bled, “So much,” just before he collapsed on top of me, tore at my pants, finally worked at unlatching my bra, all of which you would have done by now with grace and smooth fingers, all while kiss-ing underneath my ear. His skin rub-bing against mine is what really got me off. His skin is so much like yours, a lit-tle bumpy here and there, but practically the same. When he finished and all his clothes were back on, he kissed my cheek and stepped outside. I peeled away the stitching on the couch and imagined you playing John Coltrane. What was the last song you played?...God, what were the last words we said to each other?

***********

Mel

…Is it time to be Steven Wilson? Some-times I don’t respond to my name at the diner anymore. When a customer asks me my name, I say Steven Wilson. Mel no longer has the same meaning.

I tore down those stars yesterday and turned the world on its head. I feel like an insane electrician. I rewire myself, then rip my work apart and rewire again.

I’m trapped in my mind. I don’t want to think anymore. I want you to dig at my skin, to make me dig at my skin, at my temple, so I can peel away the skin like Velcro, like stubborn, desperate Velcro, so I can break apart my skull. i want you to make me do it i want you to move my hands i want you to control me.

I was right to be doubtful. I knew that I wouldn’t be a good father. I knew that a child wouldn’t look up to me, just like no one did before you came. I knew I had to go. I accept it. I’m finding a way out of this Catch22. I won’t say sorry.

I think I’ll stop writing after today. Ste-ven needs different motives, different people to find and care for. It’s not fair for him to think about a previous life he had no part in.

I know what saves Damien in my dream. I just had to leave before he opened his eyes.

*************

Rue

I told Oscar to stop seeing me. It felt like I was cheating on you. I don’t know how to feel anymore. When I was pregnant, I imagined that you were growing inside of me, that you would be the one who

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was attached to the end of my umbilical cord. But Lance did come out with your skin, your naturally dark, but not too dark, tanned skin. Sometimes I want to touch his skin like it’s yours, to run my fingers along his arm and his forehead. Sometimes I want to kiss him like he’s you. Lance, it’s a heroic name, I think.

I’ve been asking myself why you waited until the last month to leave. You could’ve left months before, or as soon as I told you. I saw it in your face then, just for a second, it didn’t respond, it froze, but you changed it so quickly I thought maybe it was just me. Now I know it was your decision. Right then, you knew you couldn’t handle it. But at least you tried. At least you flicked my fat belly when he kicked, at least you read to him. At least you were a father when it didn’t count.

I’m not in shock, they all say the same damn thing, but I know I’m not. There’s so much secretive road between us. I know there’s no chance in hell I’ll see you again. I’m reminded by the cold brass of your trumpet, but it’s the thought that keeps me writing. Some-where, you must still love me.

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“a Storage, 1927; Now Odes, Saints, And Gardening Tools” By B.D.


all hells are in equally diverse fruits,all fruits are in equally diverse geometry,all proofs are satire, all folding into all;a strange hersperus cannot charm phospherus to meaning.

we're potted in a harmless loop of ruggieri's hair, trudging through the gaps of teeth and into the lining of gums and a progenitor mash like chance (1d6): 1: put this in heterodoxy, a less restrictive misplacing; 2:put this in the non-identical gyruses and sulcuses of a "thinking thing" body; 3: put this is milk,or silk, or an affixoid between the two; 4:put this in a hidden compartment of a cuban heel,lodged in a jittering webway once tusked against the bosoms of a lithe singularity; 5: put this two inches away from two inches away from two inches away from from; 6: put this in a picture of the treachery of images called "this," a haecceity inferring no additional knowing.

everything moves through aria, processional,rhizotomy, hacking; humidors, or places where people store small, albeit collectable, versions of david hume,

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are the common tongue,are the smooth bore never fissured to riflery.

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Fleas


When she awoke she was in the middle of Caracas, Venezuela slapping a mos-quito on the inside of her arm. It ex-ploded in a juicy splat and the blood trickled down to her wrist. She had never seen the tiny black bag in her lap before. Made of crushed velvet and held to-gether with a simple golden pull string, she dug her fingers into the twisted open-ing and spread the bag apart.

She was no longer of this world. The sky turned black.

A swarm of glowing, incandescent wasps pulsed and vibrated in the darkness. Flashing, brilliant beautiful colors, repre-senting every step of the spectrum, the fat little insects led her weightless frame as it plummeted further and further into oblivion.

Quietly, they whispered string music into her ears. She no longer feared falling.

The wasps were swapping colors, form-ing a melodic arrangement of notes to ac-

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by Michael Williams Schmidt

company the elaborate sequence of blink-ing lights. They surrounded her and en-veloped her. They held her in their midst and carried her into the stars.

The momentum made her eyes water. Her teardrops slid like razors. It re-minded her of the starry pupils of some-one that she knew a long time ago. She remembered the nights alone in the for-est under the wide open sky as the moon smiled down upon her. The weather was cold but she could not remember ever feeling so warm. She was afraid of the dark without him close to her.

The wasps guided her across diamond-encrusted super-highways of blinding, arcing light, passing gelatinous balls of digestive acid as they floated by and belched out the bleached bones of un-lucky carrions.

She raced with the wasps down a cosmic tunnel, a wormhole shadow, as it fun-neled into a dreamscape and past a clus-ter of burning, dying stars.

But the ride would only last so long. The wasps were fading out and falling away. A handful were bursting, exploding like luminous popcorn kernels. She could feel as her body weight once again an-chored her. Gravity regained control.

The light became so dim that there was no way to see the blackbirds streaming out of invisible, ethereal vines to feast. They picked off the wasps, one by one. The last light muted. The strings fell si-lent. She was falling.

The wormhole took her so far down that time and space lost all meaning to her. Fourteen hours or fourteen years, she could not tell which was which. She hit the bottom with a gentle thud and found herself in a river of jelly and lard. Kick-ing and straining, her limbs had no ef-fect on her movements. Slowly, she inched deeper and deeper into the sludge. She took a deep breath and pre-pared to submerge.

She was rescued shortly before blacking out by the blue crabs, a chorus line of over-sized lifeguards patrolling the shal-low edge of the river. They closed their pincers around the oiled skin of her fore-arms and shins. Their claws were tough but the blue crabs were gentle and they fished her toward salvation.

The crabs reminded her of childhood summers spent in Maine. The crabs there were not blue and she had started to feel badly, knowing that if these crea-tures realized how many of their earthly

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counterparts she had feasted upon that they would have surely left her in the lard to drown.

The Ferris wheels of Fryeburg, the canoe trips down the Saco river, memories of long lost romance came flooding back to her. The hippies of yesteryear had only one summer of love but she had been lucky enough to experience three in a row. The end of August would swiftly ap-proach and the words “good-bye” were never spoken. Life would pause, shifting into neutral until the flowers of spring would bloom again and the butterflies in her stomach would flutter once more.

But on that fourth summer’s dawn she realized that three summers is all that she would get. She never saw him again. In her head she believed that no one would ever live up to his standard. Many men were comparable in many different ways but no feeling she shared with any of them ever matched up with the emo-tions that she felt during three summers in Maine before she was even of legal drinking age.

Maybe that was why every subsequent union she had attempted failed. Her first and only ex-husband would devour shredded cheese straight from the zip-

locking plastic bag, stuffing cheddar and American into his gaping mouth by the handful. Silky strings would drip into the corners and crevices of his shirt, ripen-ing for a later date.

She reached the purple shoreline and wrenched herself out of the muck as a black hole in the sun deepened. Her skin tanned and faded with the ebb and flow of the tide. She licked her lips. They tasted of raspberries.

Her saviors wished her a fond farewell and skittered off, perhaps searching out more travelers who had lost their way. Now she had to walk. Every step caked more and more of the purple sand be-tween the toes of her bare feet. Was she always shoeless? Did they get lost along the way? She could not remember.

Before long the hole had eaten the sun and she was left stumbling ahead in th darkness, hands spread out before her as she blindly navigated this unknown land-scape. Torches blazed with blue fire and she trekked heatedly toward her new des-tination.

She could hear the singing long before she could see him. It bellowed and ech-oed. The bass penetrated her chest

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where she felt it in her guts. The sand be-neath her feet began to bump.

“I come from the ball where my little fleas trot.

Where the moon is a wheel and the wa-ter churns hot.

We walk through the echoes where the bloated gnats gnaw

And we sing to the crabs in the waves as they claw.”

Before her stood an enormous flea. He was dressed in his best evening wear, spinning a bejeweled cane like a lengthy baton. He tipped his top hat to her and bowed.

“How do you do, fair lady?”

“Where am I?“ she asked. “How did I get here?”

The flea smiled. His antennae twitched rapidly. “I haven’t the foggiest notion. Would you care to share a few steps with us?”

The flea’s average-sized brothers and sis-ters swarmed around him. Hundreds of thousands climbed on top of one an-other, larva and pupa alike, arching their thoraxes to get a better look at their new guest.

“Pretty lady…”

“Fell from the sky…”

“Big hands…”

“Big feet…”

They buzzed and gossiped at levels too low to decipher. The mass of tiny audio projectors created a terrifying din and she covered her ears.

“I think I want to leave,” she told them. “I think I want to go home now.”

The grandmaster of fleas nodded sadly. “You don’t like it here?” he asked her.

“It’s not that,” she assured him. “I just don’t feel that I belong here.”

The flea agreed. “Perhaps just a simple fox trot before you go?”

She nodded her head and took hold of his outstretched claw. His brothers and sisters cheered and danced. The moon spun. Together they sang.

She remained there for more than one dance and when they were finished the flea whispered into her ear. His briskly whiskers tickled her face and neck. He told her the meaning of life.

When she awoke she was in the middle of Caracas, Venezuela watching a mos-

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quito on the inside of her arm suck blood. She watched it fly away.

How long had she been here? Was she asleep? Had it all been a dream? Four-teen hours ago she was on a plane to Ca-racas, Venezuela. In that period a life-time had passed. Fourteen hours can seem like a lifetime. A lifetime can seem like fourteen hours. She thought back to what the giant flea had said to her in their final moments together, his top hat shifting from side to side as he read-justed his monocle, but she could not re-member what it had been.

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Differences Of ExpurgationA LITERATION VOL. 2 / 2014

I remain a bit anxious about my next grilled cheese with such an extemporaneous precedent at my fingertips Jonas wants hummus, I need to steam a shirt and settle, settle, settle for a despicable calendar

Much like deleting old poems and papers, it’s hard to feel much worse or much cleaner – of all my fears,this may be the most unnecessary. “What priority does the project address? What is the justification for it?”

I just figured I’d toss it out there like tossing cooked noodles at a kitchen cabinet (wood) which I find so vulgar (ignorance)but who’s going to pick up the angel hair

and be the wrong person to stand in the right spot when the moon sank I called you and told you that Ke$ha was cleaner than expected but I washed my hands anyway (just in case).

la vie dans les sacs , anticipating fumigationthere isn’t much of a place to return to today

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by Evan Culbertson

forgo presentability and manifestos and come over so we can watch that One Direction video for the fourteenth time.

Tricked again! I won’t call it a bike but we should leave the country. That would be fun.

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Red, And The Idea That A Color Could Be Angry.


1.

I was removed. Not born, but taken from a womb by knife and doctor a month be-fore I was ready to leave warmth and soli-tude. I had been planned and prayed for, a brown eyed baby girl to grace my mother with chance. I have never been my own person. Even my name is a left over from a member of the family, seem-ingly given to me as an afterthought.

I lived in my brother’s shadow and hand me downs in the Winter’s house. There was no water or electric. And though I don’t remember those days, I have been often told that I never cried.

We moved when I was four. Further into the country and purgatory. Our closet neighbor was a mile way, and rising

26

by Leah Baker

around on all sides of the large farm house corn fields blocked us from the view of gravel roads.

My father worked at a factory. My mother worked at Issac Ray, the ward for the criminally insane at the State Hos-pital. She spent an exhausting amount of time waning between manic and depres-sive. I had tried to learn how to see the difference. The manic mother would bake cookies and demand perfection. Nothing was good enough for the manic mother. The depressive mother was ne-glectful. She would lay in bed and regale us with the sad tale that no one would ever care about us. How we felt. If we were alive or dead. We were nothing.

I was a strange child. Sensitive. My mother saw this as a weakness and be-gan to drill normalcy and control into my head. Emotions were not meant to be shared. Feelings were a dirty thing. Children should be seen and not heard. My brother seemed to be saved from the lessons on how to behave like a normal person, his bright blue eyes and easy per-sonality gathering him friends while I re-mained lonely and withdrawn. I didn’t understand how people worked. Their faces which seemed to give so much in-

formation to other people remained puz-zles to me.

I went to preschool. I was silent and dis-tracted to the point of concern. My teacher decided to test me to see what was wrong with me. Deafness. Mute. Re-tarded. My mother was livid and insisted that the problem was not me, but them. They were treating me like a child. I was not a child.

There was an art project. We laid down on large pieces of paper and traced around each other. I was outlined in thick red marker. They told us to draw, inside the lines, what we wanted to be when we grew up. I drew two large black eyes. A black crooked line for a mouth. Nothing else.

2.

Sadness is the first emotion I can clearly remember outside of need and want. Mother had the idea that people could be trained like animals and took any fail-ures on my part as a personal attack. Fail-ure meant the depressive mother would settle cold eyes on me from across the room. When I started first grade and be-gan to once again show weirdness she sat me down told me how terribly sad I was making her.

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I can see clearly a black and frozen night where my mother is fighting with my fa-ther. She is holding in a shaking hand onto a shrinking wrist a knife that is cleanly reflecting the lights from the open door. I am crying silently holding my arms around my body dressed only in a pair of dirty white underwear. My fa-ther takes pleading moments to beg me to go inside where I will be warm. There is a gnawing hunger in my stomach and I have been outside so long I have forgot-ten what it feels like to have fingers. Two days ago my manic mother had baked a cake for my birthday. There is blood all over the car on the way to the hospital and am telling her stories to keep her awake. My father drives way to fast.

When she comes home I am told that this is what happens to people who are strange. This is what happens to failures. I must never be a failure. I must be per-fect. I must be in control, one slipped mo-ment is all it takes for everything to fall away like skin and flesh and the color of blood to stain the seat of a pickup truck on a cold winter night.

I had no friends in school, passing my time with books in places that didn’t have real names. Mother told me to never excel too much. My genius would

further off set me from the other chil-dren, and she needed me to be normal. I was caught reading during recess in the furthest bathroom stall from the door. The teacher called my mother concerned that I was not being social enough with the other children. Mother burned my books. I had learned not to cry by now.

3.

Silence has been a warm blanket. My most comforting of family and friends. It never demanded more from me than I was able to give. It took each second I was entrenched in it and would stare wide eyed and friendly at me. Children should be seen and not heard.

Out a distance from the farm house with the spacious rooms and creaking floors was a small creak with a smattering of trees around it. It broke up the corn-fields that seemed to expand with each day. Stretching into time, consuming the world till nothing was left but the lonely home. I could disappear for hours with-out notice. My dad worked long hours. My mother was either busy dying or cleaning. Or painting, molding clay, or ignoring that we existed outside of blood and tears, and the occasional failure which must be swiftly punished.

28


I found a dead dear along the side of the creak when I was eight. Its flesh rotting off and the skin sun bleached and dried along the rib cage. I was instantly en-trance across the creek towards the bones and the truth of them. Into the cold water and mud on that hot summer day I moved down the shore until I could hold in my tiny hands the skull of the ani-mal. The bottom jaw fell off splashing wa-ter and mud all over my face and cloths. One small hand gripping an antler and a smile on my muddy face.

I could remember the first time I had seen real bone before. Six years old and on a stretch of highway in early fall lit-tered with broken glass and mangled metal. The terrible smear of blood and brains where the passenger had been flown out of the front window and scraped face first along the road into on-coming traffic. Their skull popping open as their face disappeared in seconds. The bones were not a clean white, but a red that shocked me and stays clear in my head to this day.

Attempts were made in dirty water to make things clean, but at eight you lack the knowledge. Rotten flesh clung desper-ately to the animals skull.

4.

My great grandmother was a part of our legacy of insanity. She was obsessed with owls; the wide watchful eyes of porce-lain, plastic or metal would stare blankly into the rooms of her house thick with cigarette smoke. When I spent the night I dreamt of all their heads spinning at once before taking flight and chasing me through the house and peeling my skin from my muscle. My muscles from my bone, in agonizing details and precision removed while I slept on the couch lined with dining room chairs to keep me from falling in the night. There are still nights when I cannot sleep and when I close my eyes I see mechanical owls staring at me with hell in their eyes and my skin in their beaks.

She was dying when I was turning nine. The summer was well into July and her body was already in December. The hos-pital buzzed a steady sound of beeps and electronic hums into her coffin lined with dire faces of mournful family mem-bers. I sat alone in a chair in the corner, watching her face in the hollows between huddled family members. Her skin like paper over the bones, her mouth always opens devoid of teeth, her eyes stereo-typically sunk into the darkness sur-

29


rounding them accented by the lack of color in her flesh. When the doctors came the adults moved into the hallway and I was left alone with the ghost of a woman. I remembered how she would stand and lean on the back of my great grandfather’s chair and watch TV. I never saw her sit.

When she looked at me I went to her side and took her hand, now skeletal in design with dark shadows cast from flo-rescent lights. She didn’t speak but in-stead stared at her hand in mine. There was a terrifying moment when I met her eyes and I was too young to understand what was happening. Her eyes so subtly changed. The alarms sounding might have woke her from her sleep. I shook her anyways, with a startled cry as I real-ized what was happening. My mother pushed me so hard away I fell onto the floor under the feet of frantic nurses.

I refused to cry when we buried her.

5.

If I was very still in my bed at night I could tell myself lies about the next day. The cold air from broken windows in winter chilling me through thin blankets layered on my naked form. I would press my fingers to my chapped and cracked

lips and wonder if all open wounds felt the same to every person. If I pressed the lies hard enough into my crooked teeth I could taste fresh flowers of blood bloom-ing like bruises under pale skin.

I had stopped sleeping and would stay awake for days. Words and pictures re-playing in my head in a cascade of waves and foam like sea water on sand. Attack. Retreat. Stuttering breathing and short whimpers of desperation into an empty audience. More silence to grace my lies that tomorrow wasn’t coming.

I wondered how far expanded this dark-ness would be in type face. Times New Roman. 12 point. Double spaced. A se-ries of bold blacks against white eight by eleven and half prayers folded and placed where they would be found and read. The heavy foreign feeling of drugs dragging at my lungs and internal or-gans. My arms and legs ached with every effort under the heavy sedatives. No more nightmares.

30


Walk


I went to a shopping mall with my grand-mother when I was eight, and she gig-gled behind me at how I walked. I asked her what was so funny, and she said, “You walk just like your father. You walk like a man.” That was news to me. I didn’t know there was a particular way girls were supposed to walk. She put me on a straight line on the tile floor and said, “Smaller, straighter. Ladies take

small, quick steps.” And I tried. It felt alien and wrong and like I would lose my balance at any moment, but I tried. I walked to the end of the aisle and back and looked up at her for her approval. She shrugged. “Better, I guess. But still not very ladylike.” She smiled and put her hand on my shoulder. “You’ll get the hang of it one day.” And I spent the rest of that afternoon minding my feet, trying

31

by Katherine La Mantia

to make every step fit squarely in the middle of each floor tile.

I wore dresses almost exclusively until the third grade, when my mother spanked me for the second and last time of her entire life to try and make me branch out and try jeans. It worked, and I never touched another dress until my senior year of high school. I wore black, shapeless things most of the time, hiding my body under a Jack Skellington pull over I got at Disney Land. I forgot that I’d ever liked sandals and socks with frills and skirts with matching patent leather belts. I forgot that there was a time when I would beg my mother to french braid my hair instead of wearing it down in front of my face every day, and I wrinkled my nose at the mere thought of owning something pink. It was better to be one of the guys, I thought. Better than trying to be a girl and not doing it right. I didn’t get boobs until too late, and was devastated when Jamie Belcher said to her friends, “I won-der if she even wears a bra?” and peeked down the back of my shirt to check while I pretended to be asleep on the bus. The giggles cemented that idea for me. Yes, it was better to not try than to fail. Better to pretend you don’t care when boys

dare their friends to ask you out and girls snicker when they embarrass their guy friend by yelling out that he likes you. It’s funny, because why would any-body like you.

When I was twelve, I was jealous of the way older girls shimmied down the hall-ways, hips swaying easily from side to side as they walked. I was jealous that they got double takes. And so I broke my own rule and tried to try, again. I gave it a shot when I first saw my friends’ mother having lunch with them. I took a few steps back and forth in the lunch line, adding a subtle bit of sway each time. Everyone else seemed to have it come naturally, but for me, I supposed, it would have to be a conscious effort. And I swore I was getting the hang of it when Mrs. Chizmar came up and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Are you making fun of how I walk?” she joked. And from then on I only practiced in crowded hallways or in the reflection of my backdoor windows at night. I thought I was getting better, and so I tried out a bit of hip movement in front of my aunt, who laughed me all the way upstairs where I pretended the world was empty except for me.

32


I looked up how to walk, searching through diagrams and tips that made me feel sillier than I already was. The leg swings out easily from the hips, the hands relaxed and fingers slightly curled. Chest up, chin out. Gaze forward. And I repeated these words in my head like a mantra going from class to class or tracing the path from the kitchen to the living room to the stair-case.

High school brought some colors. I wore red and blue and green in-between bouts of black and gray and kept my hair all the way down to the small of my back. Dainty shoes instead of sneakers and pretty purses instead of two dollar tote bags. I was better at looking the part, but I still cringed at how my hand looked when I picked things up, how I bent and how I moved and how my mouth looked when I laughed and how my face crushed together when I leaned on my hand in the middle of a boring class. I didn’t know how girls got their hair so smooth and straight that they could run their fingers through it and it would fall perfectly back into place. Touching mine only frizzed it up more. My first real rela-tionship gave me hunched shoulders and a shuffling gait, my spine heavy with the

weight of shame and guilt. Femininity was not important as blending in with the wall, being as small as possible. I don’t know that I really walked at all, but just went where the tide pulled me. I wasn’t one of the boys anymore. I didn’t belong with the girls either. I barely ex-isted at all.

I collected colors through the years. Pur-ple and yellow and white and pure in-digo and finally, the unthinkable, pink. The most girly feminine pink in a lace dress with frills that made me smile whenever I wore it. I took in things with shorter hemlines and bolder prints and cuts that hugged my silhouette. I traded skulls for flowers and my beloved Jack Skellington pull over for an even more beloved cardigan until I looked one day and found a wardrobe and a person brim-ming with life. Now, I think, I walk a lit-tle, straighter, a little taller, not afraid to take up space. My grandmother would be disappointed: I still take wide steps. But my hips move however they like. My body demands a presence. I’d like to be as big as possible to thrust myself upon the world, to be bursting out of my own skin with substance so people make way for me because I command it to be so without saying a word. Sometimes, I can-

33


not help but spy myself in a mirror, a re-flection, in other people’s expressions, and I try to place my feet more carefully, to keep my steps even, to make sure my hips sway just so. The leg swings out eas-ily from the hips, the hands relaxed and fingers slightly curled… But I can quiet these thoughts. I master them easily in the space between one step and the next. It doesn’t matter how I walk; what’s im-portant is that I do. I walk.

34


No More Ghosts Of DescartesA LITERATION VOL. 2 / 2014

Have we spoken to Descartes?No, we haven’t.Terrifying shine on the underside of the ship he carried in his pocket for consultation and assurance,his tiny combs,his ice-skate ruptured at the seam,like an idiot,like a damn animal, or wheezing white cloud.

His feet slipping into elegance—this combat ontology—his mustache so hideous dragged across the lip,those bodies decked out in numerous arrows,as he saw them in pictures,those jars to jam a pair of fingers intoswept up along the clean inner surface and dusted—

as green and blue objects becoming soft and abstract at the mouth of a river,as he saw it,

35

by Christopher Schaeffer

as a smaller cleaner reason erected in the space of a figure he could whistle about or work through with his hands and instruments,looking carefully at and sucking in onloose hairs around his mouthwith his body held back in abeyance I don’t need that now

working intently while drooling on his own white chest,and amazed at its total absence.

I don’t have any reason to address Descartes.Let’s call a figment a figment.I’ve met people who would like to kill him,or write his name on a board and strike it out.Dredge out and kiss upon his mystery skeleton,his brazen head with a horrible wig on top.his expression like worms.Descartes the bones of a vanishing coin,an invisibility potion spilled on a grown-man’s bib.They want his body to be underground,his body in a jar forever,soft flesh like a human vapordoing sword-moves

36


at its subject,at its shedding campaignof sweat and teeth and permanent sumptuary mess.

37


Ignorance And Idealization


There’s a picture of me at age twenty that exists in a folder, in a desk, in the bed-room of a boy I used to love. It once hung in a college photography class exhi-bition for a few weeks; it once hung on the wall of an apartment in a second world country for the better part of a year.

He hands the black and white photo-graph to me one night, grinning. Upon seeing it, I cover my eyes, overwhelmed with embarrassment. It had been almost three years since I had seen it last, al-most three years since it had been taken.

I had almost forgotten of this picture’s ex-istence.

In it, I am naked, one knee up on a bed, one hand supporting myself as I lean for-ward, the other reaching towards the camera. My hair, uncombed and wavy, is shoulder-length. My smile is genuine; my slightly open mouth suggests I may be mid-laugh. I look happy.

This girl, seemingly unconcerned despite her lack of clothing and a lens being pointed at her, is a stranger to me. I feel betrayed by the confidence evident in

38

by Sabrina Kulka

her open shoulders and her wide smile; I feel more vulnerable looking at this im-age than she appears to be as the subject of it.

It was taken one night in late April of that year, both photographer and subject wine-drunk, naked, and giggling.

It was taken in my bedroom at the time, my favorite bedroom I’ve ever had. There were two windows that were more than half the length of the wall that my bed was up against, through which sun-light burst during the day, and moon-light later shone even when the shades were drawn tight. The windowsills were full of books, the bookshelves full of gifts from him.

It was taken from my bed, and appropri-ately so: it was, more specifically than that room itself, the setting for most of our relationship that spring. In that bed, we read out loud to each other from Pa-blo Neruda’s Los Versos Del Capitán, both the Spanish and the English transla-tions. We thumbed through a large book of black and white photographs entitled Mexico: Through Foreign Eyes, imagin-ing the day we could go to Puebla to visit my mother’s side of the family before set-ting off to explore the rest of the country

ourselves. We listened to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on repeat, to which he made a reference in a poem he wrote me six months later. In that bed, I saw him cry mid-salvia-trip as he struggled to write his name on a page in his note-book. In that bed, I cried anytime he re-minded me that he would be leaving soon.

It was taken a long time ago, I think sadly, knowing that the “me” who is pic-tured here is the “me” he is still in love with. Then, I was more willing to expose myself, to rid myself of self-doubt, to al-low myself to believe what he said about my condition: that mental illness wasn’t real, that depression was an excuse I made for myself so I didn’t have to try the things that frightened me, that I could be functional without medication. He said he saw my potential and encour-aged me to realize it myself. He believed in me, and because he did, I did, too.

I know that now, the parts of me that he has always found frustrating are pushing him away; the illness to which he pro-posed I “just be happy” as a legitimate so-lution renders me lethargic and weepy and irritable, making me a less than de-sirable candidate for partnership. I know that he would rather ignore that there

39


might be something wrong with me, pick and choose the characteristics about me that he likes best, and at the very least, remember me the way I appear in that photograph. I know that, after three long years of trying to be, who I am is not who he wants me to be.

Everything is different now, I think as I give the photograph back to him. It will never again be the way that it was.

We spend one more night together. When I get home the next day, I take two of the postcards he had sent me while he was away down from my bedroom wall and read them again.

Yours, he had signed them. I wonder if he had ever truly thought of himself in that context—as mine—the way I had thought of myself as his, letting myself adopt the idea that belonging to some-one else was a significant part of who I was. How could I have not? The way that he addressed me frequently had affec-tionate overtones of possession: my gypsy woman, my little gremlin, Sabrinichka mía.

I put the postcards in a shoebox, put the box in my closet, and close the door. I vow to myself to never again allow an-other person’s perception of me to define

me, to never again define myself by my relationship to and with another person, and to never again let anybody take a pic-ture of me naked.

40


CondimentsA LITERATION VOL. 2 / 2014

the chicken skin on my forearmthe oily coffee beans I press into my eyelids I could drown in a claw-foot bathtub but I always forget to love things

trees aren’t objectively boring but the Big Bang would probably become boring if you watched itevery day for twenty-one years

I smell like the millennium I don’t use a bathrobe but I pretend to my hair will be prettier when it falls out

two years ago in Boston Commons a man approached me to tell me I was very beautiful and it made me feel like a glass bottle full of sugar cubes

we were going to watch Koyaanisqatsiwe were going to watch the moon turn into salt we were going to spell it wrong

42

by Jessica Hiestand

when I get anxious I spin a hair tie around my middle finger

I am pregnant with rituals,I am ancient as wine.

43


The Enlightenment Of A Well Traveled Soul


I knew of a boy who spent his whole life avoiding himself. He slept with his head-phones on so the music could feed him thoughts he was certain he would never think up of. And I thought about this when I was trying to trap the bokeh of the sunlit bamboo shack through the clicks of my camera. If you grow up spending volumes of silence with strong, centered souls in South India’s dry heated madness, is it enough to breathe the same air to subconsciously store the

way their hearts and mind succinctly share the same calm? The idea that things simply are, the general acceptance towards everything imaginable; does it happen without the infuse of communal and personal spiritual fullness fasting in Ramadhan brings? And what if mistakes were set in stone for us to love ourselves more? I sat with an empty pocketed drug addict one winter morning. The sun shone softly enough to remind us of kind-ness, while our condensation of words

44

by Romilia Barryman

evaporated visibly between us. I could’ve sworn he was only acting unhappy be-cause society condemned him to be so. And, I mean, for veins so intoxicated, his mind seemed so clean; equipped with the idea that things simply were, a gen-eral acceptance towards everything uni-maginable. If you push the endurance of your thought processes to find calm among the shattered lives of East Van’s exiles, is it enough to breathe the same air to subconsciously build a sanctuary in the depth of someone else? There are those who can see details and there are those who feel them like braille. What happens to regrets when you have those I-am-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time moments? I tried to give everything to someone who was trying to exhaust my energy and emotions because he was convinced it was easier to fill an empty bottle. But a man who is a bottle can never change that who is a book. And that who is a book may wet and destroy their pages by conversing with a bottle, but having to rewrite and update thoughts is never time wasted. And de-bates are futile at times. They don’t dis-cuss those microscopic facts you would only know if you allow yourself to be-come her. Walking in shoes is only the

half of the first step - the rest is to create a self-induced amnesia to listen proper. And if your family breaks seemingly to the point of no repair, would you offer yourself as a wrench to the problem or would your pride refuse to sacrifice your happiness for the cause? I took six years and countless relapses before I could step back and see how beautifully strong we all progressed – how our foundation of sand was simply cement waiting for water. That’s what all people are, really; cement waiting for water. But some look at the cloud of thoughts of others and wait a lifetime for rain, not knowing if they look up, they’d see their own burst-ing to create thunderstorms.

45


BrasstownA LITERATION VOL. 2 / 2014

I have laid out twenty two years on the Brasstown bridge,each memento evenly spaced by ten centimeters fromedge to edge.

And I have laid myself down in front of them,face towards the rusting arches,head to one end and feet to the other.

I have taken your skinout from under the floor boardsand cleaned it, doing away with the strangulation marks upon your neckfrom the guitar strings.

Tacked on the letters to your fingernails,polished with alcohol and organized round you,and I know how flat you are in comparison.

I wonder if the blinking aerials of the cooling towers of Duke can be approached from the base of the valley where this river runs through.

Day's time by walking, you think?Ah, you were never as much of a speakeras you had claimed.

46

by E.W. Certain

I can hear the train marching,and it is heading for us.Should I get off the bridge?What direction should I go?Shall you glide me down?

And as I had contemplated my place on the Brasstown bridge,the Westward wind swept you away.

Muffled by grinding steel,flesh torn into schematics,I could not see you floatinto the mountains that had swelled around our arrangement.

How I am unfortunately caught in long visits with harmonic creatures,heavenly bodied and longing for Eden.

They say outside these gardens are arid imitations and sickened beasts,but I am likened to disagree.

47


Girl


Where you are not is standing at the edge of a beach, with the water lapping at your toes like some faithful mutt and one friend's fingers entwined perfectly in yours. Where you should be is in the white confines of your shrink's second best office, the not-detestable, not-loved man sitting before you in his spotted tie and grey slacks nibbling on the end of his pen like plastic and poison is his bread and butter.

Where you are is curled, fetal, in the pul-sating cave of your mind because in these hours, these momentous moments where time is suspended and your face eroded away by confusion alone, reality ceases to exist. There are demons that stalk these passageways with every inten-tion of plunging razor-sharp claws into where your metaphorical chest should be.

48

by Vivienne Mah

You want fresh water, life giving water and cold air to sting your eyes so that you cannot see that the shadows are still moving and you are sure that the trees are reaching towards you with their spin-dly fingers. You want the world to rob you of your oxygen so that you cannot blame your own lungs for deflating within your chest, you want the yellow of your skin to wash away in the water and your blood to turn to ice so you cannot recall you are bound to a name that disre-gards the buzzing in your brain as a weakness, not an illness. It's longing that brings humanity, and by God you long for it, a second heartbeat that desires nor-malcy thrumming underneath your skin.

There are nails clawing against your wrist and it takes you a moment to real-ize that you are gouging the numbers of the girl you loved deep into your skin, drawing red as proof that the paper masks your parents wear are not enough to transform you into their China doll. Your teacher once said there was a man in a book who brought entertainment to the crazy masses one nurse lorded over, but you're losing words now, spiraling away into characters and jagged lines that possess hot maws that come to rav-age you and you close your eyes, close,

close them and cover your face, cover your pores, because all that abnormality of girl-love is seeping into you and you could choke on your disease.

Your parents have taught you about a lit-tle red man that sits on your shoulder and flashes in fluorescent shades when it is inappropriate for you to cross, but dancing on the edge of oblivion runs pure bliss in a shade you can't identify through your veins. As does the feel of a woman's hair, soft and silken in between your fingers and at times crisp from the dye they've run through it to destroy what's not appropriate, or stubble-like, shorn close to their scalp. Nausea's set up tent in the pit of your stomach at the thought you're touching another that pos-sesses the same swell of flesh and softer curve, down below, that you have. Yet your fingers find a way there nonethe-less, and you are thinking of the down-wards angle of your mother's face and the lines you will put on that high fore-head when you have mashed your own flesh into the angles of another woman's, you are thinking of what you should not be.

These guilty pleasures are what colours your waking hours and the thought of them sustains them like a pill would a

49


junkie. You make the comparisons as a prayer: there are worse, there are worse, there are worse, and breath comes easier when the weight is displaced to a lie. You are well aware you should stop, that the shadows will only grow longer the more hours you count towards your deceit, but some nutters choose to take the weight of the world on their shoulders and lug it around with them as proof that they are alive.

God.

And God, kissing. You made a poem about it once, scrawled it hastily down in jagged lettering. 'Kissing is nice, kissing is good, I'd do it all day if I could.' There is some sick pleasure to be found in the knowledge your father prides himself in his butterfly-light touches, when you alone know the power a tongue dug deep into another's mouth can evoke, know how the exposed hollow at the base of a throat is not a weakness, it's a gift that al-lows you to feel the fluttering of exis-tence that's pressed fiercely against when a savior presses against your wrist and throat. Strongest in that hollow, too.

Yet. Yet you still crumple when you go home and catch that waft of day-old clothing and the heat that lingers in your

bedroom when you haven't put up the drapes and wound open the window to let a change of air enter. And again, you are vividly aware that this is not a fight you want. You want complacency, you want decency, you want the clear eyes and forward gaze your sisters possess.

Not this. Not this heady combination of certain oblivion and a slow drive towards a balance of lies, late nights and too much tequila to justify it when your pulse picks up at exposed belly and dark hair piled high upon a Cherokee girl's head. You do not want that raw hunger that tugs you away from the life you have been gifted with, should sustain, you do not want sex to dull the senses.

Someone says, 'this is Australia. We ac-cept anything here.' You are entitled to scoff, make that harsh sound at the base of your throat that sounds like it could be a sob if you cared to let the wet slip through. Your lungs are, after all, al-ready working in that position. They un-derestimate you if they think you'll sob. You've learnt the rigidity of a stiff back, locked jaw. You've the benefit of smaller eyes: who can fathom the depths of an iris when to peer into it is to get too close

50


into the space of a woman who cares for impersonality?

Your love comes with and is for the tide, red or blue. Calls you in as it's called to the moon and away. Thrumming, throb-bing, a beat runs through you that's tied to the entire history of you, not the dreaded germ that's infected you to be-come a creature an old woman doesn't know.

51


Irrational SonnetA LITERATION VOL. 2 / 2014

Ang Lee, envious of anorexics,had a zebra and a tiger and a raft made of sticks to contend with. Enough for one man's plate.

The zebra had to fill in lots of forms,

a blasting wind of paperwork that ate the striped horizon. None of Ang Lee's tricks could overcome the hoof-to-pen logistics to cash in on and eat it—what a fate!

When Ang came in, his skinny little arms

stacked with apples, the zebra had no qualms with signing envelopes: "How I could faint at the joy I find in fruit but not in forms!"He took the zebra's forms with upturned palms and pleased all. Ang the tiger, Ang the saint.

53

by T.S.A.D.

“Wake Up Apache, You’ll Sleep The Day Away,”


the Woman said. “And you’ll never make money sleeping this late.”

The bundle of blankets on the bed moved. A hairy arm stuck out and reached into the drawer of the nightstand. The Woman chuckled. She moved closer to the bed. The arm pulled a black pistol out of the drawer. The gun pointed toward the source of the noise. The finger squeezed the trigger. The Woman howled in pain.

Apache threw the blankets away. He still gripped the smoking gun. He scanned the room. It was empty. The Woman’s sobs followed him as he stormed out of the bed-room.

54

by Joe Richardson

He avoided the piles of books and magazines. He dodged the heaps of discarded food and cigarette containers. He kicked through the scattered masses of crumpled up newspapers. He scooped the mix of dirty and clean clothes off the couch and sat down. He dropped the pistol on the coffee table and reached for a box of cigarettes. Empty. He reached for another one. Empty. He searched through the other boxes on the table. Each one was empty. He picked up his jacket from the floor and hunted through the pockets. He pulled out one bent cigarette from a crumpled pack. He pulled a lighter from the pocket of his pants. He flicked on the flame, lit the tip, and inhaled the smoke.

“When will you learn that never works,” The Woman said. “You’ll always be stuck with me.”

Apache picked the TV remote up off the table. The small television flickered on. A woman with platinum blonde hair sat in front of a silhouette of the Capital. She spoke directly to the camera. “People of the Southern Sector continue to battle Corpo-rate troops in the streets. A leader of the revolts, Ajax, was executed this morning. Troops are preparing for a retaliation at some point in the future.” A picture of a young man appeared in a box above the woman’s shoulder.

“Wasn’t Ajax that simple kid who lived upstairs with his sister? He couldn’t lead a line to the bathroom,” she said.

“They had to execute someone,” Apache said. “He was probably just caught out-side during the riots and hauled away.”

“You would have been furious back before you were on the Corporation’s pay-roll,” she said.

“Why do you care?” he said. “You hate anyone that’s flesh and blood.”

“I care about you,” she said. “Poor Apache, you never had a marble to lose.”

Apache pulled a small silver case out of his pocket. He dropped out two circular pills into his palm and popped them into his mouth.

“Those never work for long,” she said.55


Apache closed his eyes and waited for the pills to kick in. Junkies called it Seren-ity. It was a purgatory between life and death. Hours of seeing, hearing, thinking and feeling nothing. Bliss in a pill. Hours of peace.

He came to with a jolt. He gasped for air. He struggled against imaginary waves trying to drown him. He coughed, hunched over and fell to the floor. He tried to breach the surface of an all-consuming black pool where faces of devils and ghouls whirled around him. He shook uncontrollably. He vomited on the floor. He pulled him-self into a sitting position trying to come down. He looked at the large window. The sun was gone.

“It’s disgusting when you come back from your trip,” the Woman said.

There were two loud knocks on the door. The Woman screeched. “Get up, Apache. We got one!”

Apache crawled to the door and pulled himself up. He unlocked the series of deadbolts. No one was there. There was a large manila envelope on the floor. He sat on the couched and cleared the debris from the coffee table. Piles of empty cigarette packs and books fell to the floor.

He tore open the envelope and pulled out a stack of papers and several bundles of cash. He thumbed through the pages and pulled out a photograph. “She’s pretty,” the Woman said. The lady in the photograph had black hair and bright blue eyes. “What’d she do?”

“Her name is Circe Reynolds. Twenty-eight years old. Works as a Corporate per-sonal assistant in the Capital. Lives in building 2B in one of the fourteenth floor pent-houses number 1428,” Apache said. “Now how do you suppose she can afford that kind of place on an assistant’s pay?”

He flipped through more pages. “Hello,” he said. “Looks like she was not being a very good girl. She is currently the sexual companion of a few men- and women- on the Corporation’s board of directors. And she is apparently threatening to go public with this series of affairs.”

56


“She’s not a very smart extortionist,” the Woman said.

“That she is not,” he replied.

He pulled one more sheet from the stack. “She should be home right now,” he said. “We better get moving.”

Apache pulled on a dirty shirt and a ratty jacket. He checked the bullets in the pistol and slipped it into his pocket. He reached under the couch and pulled out a metal box. He pulled his identification papers from it and stuffed them into his jacket pocket. He dropped some of the bundles of cash inside and put it back under the couch.

He picked up the manila envelope and slipped the papers back into it. He dropped the package down the incinerator shaft near the door.

The hallway smelled like urine, cigarettes and booze. A junky sat under a flicker-ing light. His closed eyelids twitched and his lips twisted into a strange smile. Apache passed him and stepped onto the elevator. The car shook all the way down. The cables groaned and nearly drowned out the hisses and pops from the old speaker. He hit the side of the box with his fist. Music- expert hands moving along the keys of a piano re-placed the pops and hisses.

“Mozart,” he said.

“What?” said the Woman.

“Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” he said. “He was a composer centuries ago. My dad used to play this song when I was a kid. I wish I could remember what it was called.”

“Sounds boring,” she said. The elevator jerked to a stop on the ground floor. The pops and hissing returned.

A man sat at a desk behind bulletproof glass in the lobby. He was a mountain of flesh wrapped in a dirty tee shirt. His eyes were glued to a small television on his desk. “Rent’s late, Apache,” he said without looking up.

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Apache went to the desk and slid two fresh bills into a small hole near the bot-tom of the glass. “Enjoy,” he said.

“I hate him,” the Woman said. “We should do him in too.”

“There’s no money in it,” Apache said. He pushed the lobby doors open.

Loudspeakers outside announced curfew. A young couple- sucking each other’s faces and feeling each other’s bodies- stumbled into a nearby building. For a moment the streets were empty. Apache stood on a corner near the checkpoint. A gentle breeze swirled around him.

He heard a cadence of marching boots. A Jeep turned the corner up ahead. A man shouted into a bullhorn, “Curfew is in effect. All people must return to their homes. Anyone found on the street will be dealt with severely.” He repeated this man-tra as the Jeep rumbled past. A column of helmeted Corporate troops with guns at the ready followed the vehicle. The buttons on their dark coats sparkled under the streetlights. Apache kept his head down and hurried to the checkpoint.

Four men stood guard at the checkpoint. Two blocked the passage into the capi-tal and two more hid behind sand bags with heavy guns pointed toward the South Sec-tor.

“Papers,” said one of the checkpoint guards. Apache handed him his identifica-tion and Corporate approval documents. “Go ahead,” the man said. He waved Apache through.

Something happened when he crossed into the capital. One of the roving Jeeps exploded, lighting up the night. The men at the checkpoint readied their weapons. Alarms sounded. The columns of troops broke rank. Men and women darted out of al-leys and buildings. They were armed with pistols and knives and hatchets. People from the windows of of buildings rained down Molotov cocktails onto groups of soldiers. Ex-plosions and the staccato of gunfire split the air. Apache watched from the safety of the capital as the rioters were cut down. He saw Corporation troops hacked to pieces by

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dissidents. Apache smelled the blood in the air. He heard the screams of the dying. A rioter ran toward the checkpoint. He was cut to shreds by the big guns.

Apache walked away from the carnage and deeper into the capital.

Citizens of the capital sat at outdoor cafes swapping stories with friends. Music flowed from open windows and mixed in the air. People wandered the streets drunk and happy. In the distance, the Corporation’s Headquarters shone like a beacon.

Building 2B was identical to the other white, fourteen story buildings that sur-rounded the Corporation’s headquarters. The lobby was flooded with light from chan-deliers. The walls and floors were marble and shining elevators lined the walls.

“Beethoven,” he said as the elevator carried him smoothly to the top floor. The piano music filled the car. “Ludwig Van Beethoven.”

“If only your job was to remember the names of dead musicians playing in eleva-tors,” the Woman said. “I bet she screams. I bet she begs for her life.” There was glee in her voice.

“You’re sick,” he said.

The doors opened with a ding. Apache’s shoes made deep imprints in the thick, luxurious carpet. The muffled sounds of dinner parties and families gathering around the television sets for the Corporation’s evening broadcast emanated from behind the closed doors.

“Think anyone will notice,” the Woman said.

“They never do,” he said.

1438 was at the end of the hall. Apache pressed his ear against the door. Silence. Apache gripped the pistol in his pocket. He rested his finger gently on the trigger. He knocked. Nothing. He knocked again louder. Nothing. He banged his fist on the door until he heard a voice on the other side. He heard a dead bolt slide away and the clink of a chain being undone.

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The door swung open. A naked man with tired eyes stood in the doorway. “What do you want?”

Apache hesitated.

“Who is it?” A woman’s voice called from somewhere inside.

“I’m handling it,” he shouted back to the disembodied voice.

Apache pressed the barrel of his gun against the back of the naked man’s head. he squeezed the trigger. The bullet burrowed into the man’s skull. The ringing in Apache’s ears caused by the gunshot stifled the sound of crunching bone and tearing viscera. The naked corpse fell forward with a thud. Apache dragged the body into the penthouse and closed the door.

He saw her out of the corner of his eye. He swung and pointed the gun at her. She was the spitting image of her picture. She wore a black, thin robe that shimmered under the light. She looked at the body on the floor. Her thin face showed no emotion. But Apache saw something in her eyes that he knew all too well.

“She’s scared,” the Woman said.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Apache said.

She stared at the gun in his hand. “So what is it that you want?” she slid the robe off her shoulders. It fell to the floor in a heap around her ankles.

Apache’s eyes roamed over the contours of her body. He drank in every curve and every inch of exposed flesh. “Sorry,” he said. He pulled the trigger twice. Two bul-lets tore into her chest. She collapsed. Her face contorted in pain. She tried to suck in gasps of air. He fired once more into her head. Her body fell limp.

“What a rush,” the Woman said as the elevator slid to the ground floor. “I never get over the excitement. You’re hands are still shaking.”

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Apache shoved his hands into his pockets. He slipped through the capital and across the checkpoint unnoticed. The corporate troops lifted body bags into trucks and led lines of handcuffed rioters to the outskirts of the Sector.

“Poor bastards,” the Woman said.

Apache passed the landlord asleep in the lobby. The elevator smelled like fresh vomit and urine. The speaker hissed and popped all the way up. The junky was still there. he slumped down under the light. His lips formed silent words and his eyelids twitched.

Apache hesitated at his door. He glanced around the hallway. He pulled the gun from his pocket. The door was cracked down the middle. He gingerly pushed it open. He stepped into his dark apartment. He reached for the light switch.

Apache heard a gunshot. He felt a hot pain in his lower back. He fell to the ground. His gun slid across the floor. He tried to crawl toward it. The shooter rolled him over onto his back. He heard the Woman scream. She wailed and sobbed. “Don’t go. I’m not ready.” The shooter fired again. Apache felt the bullet enter his chest. He gasped for air. The shooter stepped over Apache. He heard his murderer walk down the hall and climb onto the elevator.

The Woman whimpered between sobs, “Good night, Apache.”

As the darkness closed in, Apache could hear music. “Mozart,” he whispered. His eyes closed and he was still.

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62


Year Of The Delted XangaA LITERATION VOL. 2 / 2014

Homer Simpson: Where are we going sir?Mr. Burns: To create a new and better world. Home Simpson: If it’s on the way, could you drop me off at my house?

The latest polls indicate days when fourteen people could be considered your best friend are most missed. These numbers are as rebellious as my tongue can paint.I want bitter cobwebs off my deleted walk. I need a practical use for geometry.I’m up with single mothers, down six points in the crucial showers-at-night demographic.Under bridges where I spray paint cartoon characters instead of beer like my friends,I found shame in soft rebellion.Now I stir it into my coffee.This is a big decision, so I better daydream on it.Maybe I’m misattributing, but there are things the electorate should never understand.

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by Christopher Rife

Contributors

POETRYAmy Harrison

B.D.

T.S.A.D.

Christopher Schaeffer

Evan Culbertson

E.W. Certain

Christopher Rife

Jessica Hiestand

PROSEBrittney Dussault

Vivienne Mah

Joe Richardson

Leah Baker

Michael Williams Schmidt

Logan Ellis

Katherine La Mantia

Romilia Barryman

Sabrina Kulka

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AcknowledgmentsSpecial thanks to

all the Tumblr writers who submitted to us;

all the Tumblr lit editors who featured us;

all the Tumblr lit journals who supported us;

all the Tumblr bloggers who reblogged us;

all the Tumblr readers who read us;

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all the Tumblr peoples.

-A Literation Staff

lxvi

A Literation, Volume 2

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