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In This Issue... Marcin Majkowski Robert D. Lyons Fritz Hamilton Sean Lause Mel Waldman Nancy Lee Bethea Lisa Cappiello Ellie Stewart Eleanor Leonne Bennett art P. Keith Boran Kenneth Rutherford Brian LoRocco Christopher Hivner Jon Gale Brian Looney Alyssa Lawless Amanda McNeil Sheryl L. Nelms Jon Brunette James Livingston Joel Schueler Liam Spencer Stanley B. Trice Janet Kuypers

Note that any artwork that appears in Down in the Dirt will appear in black and white in the print edition of Down in the Dirt magazine.

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Six Liters Marcin Majkowski Six liters is it enough to paint the life’s picture? Minute after minute from pieces of the past it’s depictured Primed canvas tools are ready by hands directed Brushes with short bristle for sketching and long are for the background selected Color palette all possible shades of red tan I’m choosing those most glaring the painting glittering in the sun The canvas is quite large maybe even too ample There won’t be more paint the brush is dipped in the last paint sample Success the painting’s ready will surely stay memorized permanently Its recipients absorber by the cemetery procession consequently http://www.depechmaniac.pl http://depechmaniac.bloog.pl http://satyrykon.net http://ateist-kleranty.deviantart.com/

Neon Rain Robert D. Lyons In all honesty, I don’t really know why I hit him. It’s all a blur, Like some partially remembered past life. I was swept up in the haze of the clubs base, My heart dropping with the beat And burning away with every swift glance I took of her. It was a lot like looking into the sun. My eyes would collapse And I knew if I kept looking I would never see light again. I would never see anything again. Everyone is jumping and dancing, Howling and shouting; Using the noise to cover up everything inside them. The rain of lights merged together in perfect harmony With the thunder of the D.J. Neon flares coming down from the skies To mask And out glow the fires of our young hearts. The strobe flashes as I fail to fight the urge to look back at her. Her bony hand sliding across his hard abs: Her golden hair brushing his face. I’d seen it all before, But how her eyes flashed in the light. Blue, Blue like the sea, Blue like the sky, Blue like me. I could feel this gaping hole growing inside me. I wanted to destroy every single canvas that lined the walls. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I would never have. Like a cancer, It spread throughout my body. My hair stood on end, And my fist, Perfect like a god, Trembled. I felt a hand reach out for my shoulder. It felt so heavy. I was sinking deeper and deeper into some kind of tar bog. That moment could not be preserved. It had to go. Those feelings, That hatred, Could no longer contain itself in me, And I’d be damned To bury it any deeper in an already crowded grave. So I snapped. I only remember the sting of the punch, The pain, And feeling my heart in my knuckles. Everything went black. I finally came to with the sounds of silence. The music had stopped. The lights dialed down, And greeted by fifty blank faces Paler than a strobe. Their mouths hung open Like some kind of retarded in-bred baby. I could feel something crawling on me. It was moist and thick. I looked down, My head filled with cement, And my eyes were about to pop out of their sockets. Blood. There was blood everywhere. Thick And far too black than it was supposed to be. At my feet, He laid, Squirming like a fish on a hook. I don’t know his name, Or anything about him. I’d never met him before in my life. He wasn’t a stranger though. There was something in him I recognized, Something familiar, But distant. I wasn’t sure what it was just quite yet. I’m sorry, Annabel, But someone was going to get hurt. It was inevitable. There were too many bombs dropped. Fragmentation Spreads faster than a wildfire, And there will be civilian casualties. Pieces of you and I lodged into them forever: A wound that would never stop bleeding. The only mistake he ever made Was being within the blast radius, And he won’t soon forget what pain feels like. What love feels like. Our diary Written through the scars He will wake up to every morning. Our love will spread like a disease Through our hatred. Passing on to everyone we meet. A chain being fused link by link. That boy, Bleeding and twitching at my feet, Used to be me. This is our immortality. This is our love everlasting.

My bike rides uneasy into that good night Fritz Hamilton My bike rides uneasy into that good night. It’s lost its capacity to balance. I pedal into bushes & walls. My 75-yr-old bones rise to try again. I’m a danger to myself & the traffic & will end this divine comedy squooshed. There’s supposed to be some wisdom in being old. It comes from experience, I’ve been told, but I’m a perpetual infant. I’m angry at the children who ride well. My bicycle takes me straight to Hell. My bike rides happily into the flames. I tire of these incendiary games. Other old folks seem to ride like kids. It drives me to drink, & I’m on the skids. So next time let me try a tricycle. Three wheels, they tell me, are better than two. My bike rides uneasy into that good night. I pedal into bushes & walls ... !

I’ve disappeared but still feel the pain Fritz Hamilton I’ve disappeared but still feel the pain, the agony of having been here at all. I try to pinch the flesh, but it’s gone with my soul. All that’s left is ashes blown with dust, but still I feel the misery & the anguish. I’ve disappeared but still feel the pain. God-the-devil laughs with cruelty. My suffering is His pleasure & His pride. I try to pinch the flesh, but it’s gone with my soul. God-the-devil boils me in his stew. He enjoys my writhing on His plate. I’ve disappeared but still feel the pain. He chews & swallows each morsel as I scream, beyond the horror of any demon’s dream. I try to pinch the flesh, but it’s gone with my soul. Multicolored savages chew my bone. The howling multitudes set the tone. I’ve disappeared but still feel the pain. I try to pinch the flesh, but it’s gone with my soul ... !

Titanic II Sean Lause They never dreamed that iceberg would sink, but it went down like Wall Street when it struck that fatal cruise liner on that mirrorless night of destiny. Half the penguins died. Mostly the poor ones, who had to inhabit the sea level so the rich penguins could swirl and swill their champagne and crap on them from above. The benefits, they claimed, would trickle down—eventually, but there were not enough life boats because some hedge fund pelican had been cutting corners as usual, and the captain was drunk. James Cameron filmed it all, the iceberg glub-glubbing down to doom, the terrible cries of all those avians leaping to their icy graves, the rich beating them from the boats with their wings and top hats. It was beautiful. The camera angles, I mean. And the special effects! Great shots of penguins tumbling like bowling pins of mourning. It was a ballet of extermination worthy of Liefenstahl. They added a cute subplot about a poor penguin in love with a seagull, just to give it a moral, and provide a soul-less diva crow another chance to croak out a hit. The seagull lived of course.

Vanished A 25-Word Story by Mel Waldman At 39, my buddy Joe suffered a heart attack, had triple bypass surgery, and returned home. Then he went for a walk and vanished forever.

BIO Mel Waldman, Ph. D.     Dr. Mel Waldman is a licensed New York State psychologist and a candidate in Psychoanalysis at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS). He is also a poet, writer, artist, and singer/songwriter. After 9/11, he wrote 4 songs, including “Our Song,” which addresses the tragedy. His stories have appeared in numerous literary reviews and commercial magazines including HAPPY, SWEET ANNIE PRESS, CHILDREN, CHURCHES AND DADDIES and DOWN IN THE DIRT (SCARS PUBLICATIONS), NEW THOUGHT JOURNAL, THE BROOKLYN LITERARY REVIEW, HARDBOILED, HARDBOILED DETECTIVE, DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE, ESPIONAGE, and THE SAINT. He is a past winner of the literary GRADIVA AWARD in Psychoanalysis and was nominated for a PUSHCART PRIZE in literature. Periodically, he has given poetry and prose readings and has appeared on national T.V. and cable T.V. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Private Eye Writers of America, American Mensa, Ltd., and the American Psychological Association. He is currently working on a mystery novel inspired by Freud’s case studies. Who Killed the Heartbreak Kid?, a mystery novel, was published by iUniverse in February 2006. It can be purchased at www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/, www.bn.com, at /www.amazon.com, and other online bookstores or through local bookstores. Recently, some of his poems have appeared online in THE JERUSALEM POST. Dark Soul of the Millennium, a collection of plays and poetry, was published by World Audience, Inc. in January 2007. It can be purchased at www.worldaudience.org, www.bn.com, at /www.amazon.com, and other online bookstores or through local bookstores. A 7-volume short story collection was published by World Audience, Inc. in June 2007 and can also be purchased online at the above-mentioned sites.

Teddy’s Birthday Nancy Lee Bethea Copyright 2011     “Don’t drop it,” Kyle says.     “Okay,” Stella says.     Stella carries a small mason jar with a brass-colored top in her right hand. Liquid sloshes inside the jar.     “It’s smaller than I thought it would be, from your description of it, I mean,” Stella says.     “Small town, small graveyard, but it can only expand, right?” Kyle pauses at the gravestones. “The Chandler family. There’s Tony’s grave. He’s the one I told you about, hit by the school bus in the seventh grade. It happened right over there on Main Street,” Kyle says pointing behind him. “Good people.”     Stella notices angels, animals, flags and flowers - memorials on grave markers. She tightens her grip on the jar.     “Ours are up here by the fence,” Kyle says pointing to his right. “I need to scrub these stones, like I used to every Saturday morning. Check that hose, please. See if there’s running water.”     Stella moves the jar to her left hand and turns the knee-high faucet counter-clockwise. Water streams through a short black hose.     “Water works.” Stella washes the mason jar and then walks over to Kyle. She hands him the jar.     Kyle lifts it to let light shine through it. He places it on his grandfather’s gravestone. He kneels and rubs the engraved words with his hands. Pieces of leaves and dirt stick to his hand.     “Teddy Granger, beloved son, brother, father and grandfather. 1914 – 2006,” Stella reads.     “Here you go, Grandpa,” Kyle says. “You wanted to be buried with your real teeth. I found 12 of them.” Kyle nestles the jar into the right angle between the stone marker and the ground.     Stella walks to a nearby gravestone. She notices a white bunny turned upside down on the grave of someone named Eugenia Pickett. She turns the bunny right side up.     Kyle stands and dusts his hands. “There’s one for my wife here,” he points with his right foot. “My parents bought eight plots – four for their parents, two for them and two for me and...my wife...someday,” Kyle says.     Stella kneels at an infant’s grave. She finds a pink ceramic heart and holds it close to her breast.     Kyle looks back at his grandfather’s headstone. “Happy Birthday, Teddy,” he whispers. “I’ll be back soon to wash all these.”     Kyle walks to his truck and pauses before getting in. “Take as much time as you need, Stella,” he says getting into the truck.     Stella places the heart back on the child’s grave and walks to Kyle’s truck. “I’m ready,” she says as she hops into the passenger seat.

Mourning Lisa Cappiello As a child I used to feel sorry for the old Italian women who wore black lace veils that concealed their faces I couldn’t understand why despite the season or weather they wore the veils for weeks sometimes months after their loved ones passed but they had the right idea For the last four months, I have been mourning the death of my traditional nuclear family my sister’s innocence my father’s indestructibility and my power to remain unfazed by the heaviness of the world around me Since I opted not to wear a black lace veil no one had any idea I was in mourning and proceeded to assume I was fine

Facing Space Ellie Stewart     When I was 16 years old The Buzzcocks were all I listened to, my favourite colour was aquamarine, I gained ten A stars at GCSE and my mother died one January evening.     I was told it wasn’t a shock, as she’d been sick for two years. My father decided that two days off was the appropriate grieving time, and sent me back to school with a note in my hand for the teacher who said she was sorry and allowed me to sit in a room on my own for one hour to cry, which was kind.     My mother’s death registered with my school on the same seismic scale as the flaked paint by the art block and the puddles in the road. I cried, once, in front of others at school. But it made them all feel awkward, and the teachers were worrying about girls with divorced parents and girls with eating disorders and girls with pot habits. And everyone else was worrying about my father, who was surrounded by understanding work colleagues and women with ready hanker-chiefs, so I dried my eyes, and that was that.     But something sudden happened soon after in my head or my heart, I’m not sure which. I felt it very strongly but was able to hide, rather easily, from a painting of people who said things to my father that sounded like the droning platitudes of by-gone housewives: ‘You’ll know when something’s wrong.’ Or the school nurse who asked me if I was ‘interested in boys’ during a routine chat three months after my mother had died. And so I was taught what was important and what people wanted to know, and when to say something and when to say little, and when to say nothing at all.     But the ache was still there, and it was hard because it almost hurt to walk and talk, every day.     And I’d never believed in God, and that had never been a stark problem. I’d wondered and thought, and considered, and read The Bible, and gone to a Christian primary school and been surrounded by believers and read and wondered and thought some more and no, He was not there.     And that didn’t seem a problem until she died. But after that life became rather difficult and it seemed impossible to just ‘get on with things’ as the English mantra goes.     I felt the absence of God with a sharp, terrible pain. I felt the loss of Him in the vast expanse of the sky, and the terrifying emptiness of the space that waits beyond it. The whole world seemed hollowed out. It started at the centre of me, like an aching hunger, a hunger that made me feel so empty I could faint and this feeling grew and expanded like a stomach inflating with air, and it gasped out of me and blew and blew, wider and wider, a great empty, hollow, wide, silent space moving the world out into the darkness beyond the atmosphere and into all that Nothing that lies beyond it.     And I sat in my room with my math homework and tried to forget it.     But of course, it was just too much.     I had a friend, Jack, who believed in God.     He was 19 years old, steady and self-assured. We’d argued about Christianity dozens of times, and I’d always stood firm and told him the reasons and the logic and couldn’t understand how easily he believed in something that he said he needed no proof for, and that no arguments would refute. This had only been a scratching frustration between us until now, and now mother was dead and there was a huge, gaping hole and I just couldn’t bear it any longer.     ‘Your life has more meaning than mine, doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘I want to believe, so much.’     Jack was confused by this sudden turn.     ‘Do you feel you’re beginning to believe in God now?’     ‘No,’ I said, ‘not at all,’ and my hand started to shake, and the darkness squatted at the edges of my eyes like black toads with wide mouths. ‘But I will. I want to. Please, will you go to church with me?’     Jack didn’t go to church often. He frowned. He thought. There was a church at the end of my road and he said he’d meet me at my house that Sunday and we’d walk together. I thanked him, and as I headed home, I decided that I would hold his hand on the way there. That thought made me breathe out slowly and feel, for a moment, quite calm.     We walked into church that Sunday and everyone there was old. They all shuffled slowly in shades of grey and beige, with bent backs and walking sticks, and each of them concentrated on the next step with a pained look on their faces. I clung tighter to Jack’s arm and concentrated my eyes on the great wooden door, and then, as we entered, the high ceiling, gaping upwards, reaching, reaching, with those white-washed walls and modest stained glass pictures: Jesus, handing out loaves and fishes.     We sat at the back and it was all so cold and hollow and hard. I wished it had been some extravagant Catholic cathedral, bright with the Virgin in blue and thick and full with deep red and dazzling gold. In this place, you could hear the loud echo of the old folk’s sticks as they shambled in. They took forever.     And when the priest spoke, I tried to take in his words. I wanted them to resonate, to rumble with the solemn ghosts of ages past, of Moses in the desert, of the struggle of Man, of God’s punishments and his promises to us all. I wanted to take it in like truth, not sentiment.     But it was all dry ponderings on loving thy neighbour, as Jesus did, and the priest said he’d learned his lesson only the other day when some yobbo had lobbed a KFC bucket into his front garden and he’d taken it away and thanked God for giving him his very own trespasser to forgive, and some people in the congregation chuckled, or coughed, I couldn’t tell which. The sounds of dry throats contracting and hacking and wheezing filled the stone walls for the whole hour, and the only way I could find a way to steady myself was to press one ear against Jack’s shoulder so that half of me only heard the muffled fabric of his clothes.     It was what I had expected, but not what I wanted, not what I longed for. I said to Jack we should go for lunch, and we had drinks with our roast dinners at the pub (which I ate little of) and he asked, with a smile, if I thought it made sense and I said ‘oh, yes!’. I went to the bathroom a little later and nearly threw up, but it was all dry heaves. And when I came back it was evening, and dark, and I asked him did he want to come back to mine?, and he did.     The alcohol filled the silence with a muffled buzz, and made me cling to him less but want him more. And he’d loved me for years and I thought: it’s my fault I don’t believe, and I’ve got to fill this gap that makes me strange, I’ve got to fill it with something, with someone. And so I let him have sex with me and he was surprised, but pleased, and for half an hour there was blood beating in my head and enough warmth and discomfort and struggle for me to forget all about space and God and death and afterwards, we both sunk into thick, noiseless sleep.     In the morning the light was bright and the room echoed and it was terrible again.     Still, I told myself, it must be my fault. And I haven’t done enough. Everyone around me smiled vapidly and talked about shopping and laughed and painted their nails and I thought: What is that? Why don’t I have that?     And the next Sunday, I rang Jack in the morning.     ‘So, are you coming with me?’ I said, watching the sunrays outside.     ‘What? To where?’     ‘To church.’ I said, feeling a tremble in my throat.     ‘Oh... Oh, no, I can’t. I can’t this morning. I said I’d go to lunch with my parents.’     All of a sudden, the ground wasn’t there. The air was moving away.     ‘But.... But last weekend. You said we could go... Jack, you said, you said that this was important.... I thought-’     ‘Well I can’t go today. Sorry.’     I began to shake and my voice rose up high. ‘But I slept with you!’     I knew, even before I’d said it, that this was the wrong thing to say.     His voice darkened.     ‘Well I can’t be the one to look after you. I’m sorry. You can go on your own. You’ll be fine. It’ll be good for you.’     ‘No... I can’t! Please. I can’t go on my own.’     ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Bye,’ he said.     He put down the phone. And I did wail, high and desperately, and I did start to cry. And I felt there wasn’t any ground anymore and I thought it was impossible to go on my own.     I felt weak and terrible and worthy to be spat at, and ashamed at my weakness and I thought how pathetic I was for being afraid of the silence.     So I went on my own.     And I was shaking all the way, and had to stand in line as the elderly shuffled in. They seemed even slower than last time and even older, and I had to dig my nails into my palms and bite my bottom lip hard to stop from shaking and and crying out loud. They all had grey hair- the women perms- and naff brown clothes from charity shops and I wondered why old people made themselves look so much older than they needed to look.     Their coughing was even louder this time and I felt dizzy in my seat. I felt so much younger and taller than everyone else. My straight back pressed into the air, the wooden pew dug into my calves. God knows what the priest was talking about this time because the air was spinning in my eyes and my ears and I just wanted Jesus to come down out of that stained glass and hug me and let me cry and not have to sit there clawing at my wrists and trying to make the world still and safe in this great, huge, echoing whitewashed place.     And I thought of trying to talk to him, to the priest, after it ended.     But I thought he would have seen the desperate look in my eyes and the old women were all chattering about biscuits and knitting anyway, as they shuffled up to him. And so I took a great gasp and stood and flung myself back out there, into the wide outside air. And the sky was colourless and endless and when I got home there was nobody there.

Carpet of Ice and Stone, art by Eleanor Leonne Bennett

Negotiating With Ants Kenneth Rutherford     Amber sits at her desk at work, reviewing a stack of purchase orders. She pushes a strand of her disheveled, platinum blonde hair behind her ear while frowning at Billy, who sits at a nearby desk. He winces as he rubs white cream all over his whelp-ridden right hand.     Billy whines, “Amber, do we have any more Cortizone?”     “Try looking in the first aid kit,” she replies, rolling her eyes.     Amber tries to refocus her attention on her work but is unable to do so. Her thoughts wander to an encounter she had with Billy two days earlier. +++     She was sitting at her desk looking at an invoice when Billy peered over her shoulder.     “Okay, Amber. When US Foodservice comes tomorrow, there should be fifteen extra boxes of chicken carnitas, and I ordered ten boxes of parboiled rice yesterday evening to be shipped on the truck, too. Are you listening?”     Amber glares at him. “Yeah, I’m listening. I’m just waiting for you to take your hand off my thigh.”     “You mean that bothers you? I didn’t realize I’d struck a nerve.”     “Uh, yeah. I’d think after two sexual harassment complaints you’d realize that. But for some reason, the Office of Discipline Management has a habit of losing...Billy, why is your hand on my back?! Ugh.” Grabbing a pack of Marlboro Lights, Amber storms out of the office.     Billy yells after her, “The ODM office works for me, Darlin.” +++     Just then, Craig, the supervisor, enters the office. “Okay, people. What are we going to do about our ant problem?” They’re already eating through boxes and gorging themselves on our food. If I can’t eliminate this problem, I’m out of a job. I won’t lose my livelihood to a bunch of ornery ants!”     Billy exclaims, “I’ve never seen ants act like that! They were all over me in seconds. And fire ants...we don’t even have fire ants in this area. Where did they come from? Craig, why don’t we let Amber take a shot at it?”     Craig replies, “Okay, Amber. You’ve been drafted.”     “But...”     “No buts! Talk to your friend at EntoTech and report back to me.”     Her voice falters as she says, “Okay, but I’ll have to re-examine the entry site.”     “Fine. Do whatever it takes.” +++     Amber squats near a hole in the concrete floor. Boxes of twenty-four ounce cups tower above her. Struggling in the darkness, she presses a button on a lamp clamped to her clipboard. The light continuously flickers as it illuminates the clipboard, her pale, tired face, and the hole in the floor. She scribbles down a few notes on a clean piece of paper that reads “Distribution Center Report,” which sits on top of a two-inch stack of papers. Writing a report will be fruitless. The ants manage to elude all exterminators, leaving no sign of their whereabouts. As Amber peers into the opening, a pair of antennae emerge.     Amber looks behind her to see where the voice is coming from. Seeing no one, she continues to fill out the report.     “Helllooooo, human! You aren’t dreaming. I thought human females were like their counterparts in the ant world, reasonably intelligent, and more intelligent than the males. Was I mistaken?”     Amber stares at the ant in disbelief who is talking through a megaphone. “What do you want?”     “Food.”     “Why our food? Can’t you find something to eat outside the warehouse and someone else to aggravate?”     “Ha! And miss out on terrorizing you humans? That one guy is particularly amusing.”     Her mouth shifts from a grimace into a grin, “Billy?”     “Yeah. What a schmuck! Typical male—convinced of his superiority and deserving punishment.     Chuckling she agrees, “I don’t deny that Billy is an arrogant schmuck. But why punish everyone because of one man? Your little occupation has wreaked havoc on our warehouse and cost us nearly a hundred dollars a week in food. “     “ONE MAN?! He flooded our home with kerosene, killing all our male drones and a few female workers. How are we supposed to mate without males? We cannot mate if we cannot eat, so...”     “Okay, Okay. I get the point. Hmmm...” Amber presses her pencil eraser against her lips, “Would providing a fifty-pound bag of sugar to your colony adequately sustain it until you emigrate?”     “You’re not listening. The only way our queen would move the colony would be if we avenged the death of our comrades.”     “Oh. Well, what if I locked him in the warehouse for you to do with him as you please? He is allergic to insect bites, after all.”     The ant’s antennae rise in interest. “Loosen the caps on six half-gallon jugs of honey, the third container from the left, and we have a deal pending approval from my queen. I’ll leave a sugar cube in the pencil mug on your desk if we get the go ahead. Do we have a deal?”     Amber’s eyebrows rise and she smirks, “Deal.”     Later that evening Amber stands by the door, waiting for Billy to lock it. He presses buttons on the security panel with a perplexed look on his face.     “It’s not accepting my pass code. What’s wrong with this thing?”     “Maybe you entered it incorrectly,” Amber suggests.     “No. I’m the assistant supervisor, damn it!” He makes an about-face, takes a deep breath, and turns back towards the panel to try again.     “Have a good evening, Billy,” Amber says, skirting out the door and slamming it behind her.     Click.     “Amber! Let me out of here!!”     Amber pops the sugar cube into her mouth as she walks through the parking lot to her hatchback. Revenge never tasted so sweet.     A couple of hours later, screams are heard from inside the warehouse. Covered in honey and fire ants Billy drops to the concrete floor, wreathing in agony.     “Aaauugghh!”     With his maroon Polo lying crumpled in a sticky heap, Billy fumbles with his belt. He unfastens the shiny, eagle head buckle; manages to unbutton and unzip his pants, chucking them half-way off; and rolls onto his forgotten glasses, crushing them. However, the ants seize the opportunity to migrate to his partially exposed legs. As the ants eat away at his skin, his body spasms and whelps form. They crawl into every hole and crevice entering his ravished body, knowing that their suicide mission will avenge their comrades.

Black Ferris Brian LoRocco     On a summer day in July of 2010, Benny Lenotti rode the Ferris wheel with someone who he believed was special.     It was early July and the sun blazed high above the fairgrounds making it uncomfortably hot—and the girl who described herself as annoying, in a voice with a slight accent (that Benny liked a lot), let him know it. And know it. And know it. She said that it was hot more than two dozen times, and that was no lie. Most guys it would have bothered, but it didn’t bother him. It probably should have, but it didn’t. Being several years younger than he was, he had anticipated and was actually tickled by her immaturity.     Holding hands they walked down the asphalt pathways, under the spray heads that did their best to cool them, breathing the smell of amusement park, hearing the roar of coasters and the sudden screams of thrill seekers. Looking back, it was hard to even imagine what would happen within a week’s time.     “How ’bout that?” she suggested, pointing to the regal structure that stood bold over the trees and seemed to touch the sky.     “You want to go on that?” he asked, and that was how he started thinking of his grandfather. He’d actually heard the old man’s voice in the back of his mind: synergy machines.     Synergy machines: leave it to his grandfather to come up with something like that. If mom ever found out what Ben knew about her father, she would have been crushed; he was sure of it. For that reason, he’d been good about keeping his mouth shut. Even today, to be completely honest, something felt wrong acknowledging the old man after all that happened, but for better or worse it always started with the same daunting image in his mind. That old, beat up police cruiser. It was double parked in front of his grandfather’s driveway.     Then the neighbors (who Mom never talked to), Carlos Rivera and his brother, Mrs. Franco and her two boys, and a bunch of others, all of them in the street, all of them with a collective look of curiosity. And of course 37th Street, like all the fucked-up streets in Union City, being far too narrow—Ben unable to drive past the cruiser. Alan Hernandez, the boy from his little league team being spoken to by a lanky cop, and Mrs. Hernandez bellowing in Spanish at the officer while pointing incessantly at his grandfather’s house.     And then his grandfather.     The man himself.     Being dragged out of his house, hand-cuffed. The crowd becoming rowdy, yelling crap in Spanish (a lot of these words Benny understood quite well.) How frail the old man looked. “You sons of bitches!” the old man cried with ferocity contradictory to his size. Finally tossing the old man into the car with force a man half his age was meant to withstand.     That was always the first memory. *    *    *     He pulled into his mother’s driveway. They lived only four houses down. Though he’d been amped with excitement now, initially, he had been exhausted from doing bread deliveries all night. Hauling fifty pound boxes of bread into diners six days a week was enough to convince him that he had to go back to school. His friend Ralphie preached it all the time. School bro, school. And he would, he would definitely go back but he would see to it his little sister got through school first. That was something important to him. It was also something guys with stability, like Ralphie, didn’t get.     “Blame your wonderful grandfather,” his mother would often say, but to Ben blame your fucked up husband was more like it. Yet whatever predicament they found themselves, whoever’s fault their lives was or wasn’t, he knew there was a lot of anguish over the years, a lot of hurt, and he sat in that driveway for far too long contemplating what to do.     He found his mother stirring a pot of stew, with the phone tucked between her ear and shoulder. Whatever his plan was, not that he had one aside from being delicate, all of it somehow went out the window as the words Your father’s been arrested tactlessly came out of his mouth.     She regarded him with absurdity.     “It’s true,” he told her, raising his right hand.     “Jean, let me call you back.”     Lynn, overhearing what happened, stopped her texting or whatever she was doing and called from the living room, “What did the old douche bag do?”     Ignoring her, Mom said, “Did you say he’s been arrested?” Curiosity deepened through her brow. Her eyes rolled up and wandered back and forth. In the silence thereafter, all that could be heard were the pockets of air popping in her stew, until finally, she turned her attention to him, searching his eyes, squinting, almost asking him to help remember something they might have suspected the old man of doing. It was soon clear neither one of them suspected anything. “What happened?”     “I don’t know. When I was pulling in I saw a cop car in front of his house, and Alan Hernandez and his mom. You know Alan, the boy that’s on my little league team? Well, he was out there crying; his mother was screaming, and the next thing I know they’re bringing your father out in cuffs.” As he was saying all of this, he could see his mother’s face getting flush. “I have no idea what happened.”     Then, ever-so-slowly, the look on her face began changing. “I’m sorry, Mom.” As he watched her face redden, he reached out and gently put his hand on her shoulder, knowing damn well he had opened that cycle of rumination. She took his hand, and considerately gave it back to him.     With an unusual poise, that he distrusted, she said, “Haven’t I been saying it? All of these years, haven’t I been saying that sooner or later he’s going to mess up. Sooner or later he’s going to come across the wrong person. Didn’t I always say that?”     “He probably molested the kid,” Lynn called, then laughed, and threw in with a goof voice: “Viagra.”     “Lynn, enough,” Ben said. “Listen, Mom, I don’t know what he did, but whatever it was it looked serious, and whatever it was I don’t want you to—”     “Oh,” she said, her vibe suddenly changing, “don’t you worry about me. I won’t. Remember how he acted after your grandmother died?” Ben remembered quite well, but she reminded him anyway. “I made that beautiful turkey dinner, remember that? I brought it over and he basically told me to go fuck myself. Do you remember when he did that?”     There’s no need to make believe now was what he had said.     “Then when I needed him the most in my life, when your father walked out on us, remember what he said then?” She mimicked his deep voice, ‘I told you, you should have married an Irish guy’ Two kids, and that‘s what he tells me....”     Ben drew a deep breath. Her scrambling, borrowing money from friends, him putting off school, and working, and her crying, most disturbing of all, the un-human sound of her wailing at any odd hour — all of these visions flashed across.     She went on —Benny heard it all before; being taken out of the will, the gambling, the drinking, and the books (he had a fucking book for everything) but primarily about his lovelessness. How distant a man he’d been from his family and how horribly he treated grandma when she was alive; how grandma was afraid to live alone with him. We could have lived in Wayne or somewhere nice, his mom often said.     What really troubled Ben, however, was the look he saw in his mother’s eyes. He realized then, standing in that kitchen, that no matter how much his mother believed to be liberated from her father, somehow she never would be.     Later in the evening, she’d asked Ben, “What are we going to do?”     He told her he didn’t know. *    *    *     He never had a relationship with the man. That used to bother him. Not now, but once upon a time it did. Mostly it bothered him when his father walked out. He wondered if his mother did anything to push him away, and that was more out of natural curiosity than anything, because he knew even though she could be a tough lady, she loved him very much, and when she loved someone she would do everything to keep that person in her life (case in point that dick-head of a husband she had). Yet judging by the fact that in the eight years since his grandmother died the old man had never picked up the phone, walked down the street, or even so much as waved hello, spoke enough of its own truth, he supposed.     Nearly a week following the incident, on a Thursday night, that changed when the doorbell rang. It was ten o’clock in the evening. When Ben opened the door, for a moment, the old man simply stood at the threshold, and Ben merely gazed disbelievingly into his thin, sagging face, and his unwavering blue eyes. Without formal greeting and without further hesitation the old man said, “I need to speak with you.” His voice projected power, carrying this grungy strength, that reminded Ben of a professional wrestler.     “Whose down there, Ben?” his mother called.     Ben looked back into the house, and then at his grandfather. Though the old man balanced himself with a cane, he was lurched forward aggressively; the cane did little to betray his projection of arrogance. She called his name again. Ben said, not knowing if it was to protect his mother or indulge his own curiosity: “No one, Ma. Just a friend.”     “A friend,” his grandfather gruffed.     “What do you want?”     “Five minutes.”     Then the old man turned and started descending the stairs, muttering something that Ben could not make out. He gave the impression of a man who was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. Ben stayed right where he was.     “Five minutes!”     Who the hell are you? Ben wondered. And how do you have the nuts to ring my mother’s doorbell after all of these years?     He decided to find out. *    *    *     It had been on the closer side of ten years since he’d last been inside the man’s house—it was that humid afternoon, in late August and it was the day his mother made the turkey dinner— and walking up onto that porch, brought back an unpleasant reminder that he’d been up these stairs many times before, when his grandmother was alive, when he was a child and he believed things were good—though the railing and the clearing were both smaller than he remembered them being.     “Come on inside.” The house reeked of old roasts that hung in the walls from years past. He followed the old man’s hunched body into the living room. “Have a seat. I would offer you a beer, but all I have is the good stuff.”     It sounded like a joke, but his grandfather did not laugh.     Ben sat on the sofa and glanced around the room, surprised to find it was much the way he remembered it. All of the furniture was the same; there were statues arranged neatly in a walnut curio, a TV dating from the late 1980’s with a VCR on top, the two old Victorian lamps that used to scare him and his sister, and the old landscape painting of a vessel westward bound.     “Tell me,” the old man said, sitting in the love seat, “what you know about the Hernandez boy?”     “What about him? He’s a good kid, if that’s what you’re asking.”     “You know his mother too, don’t you?”     “Yea. She’s not so bad either.”     “She’s a fat spic,” he muttered under his breath.     “Wha—”     His grandfather held up his hand and waved it as if saying forget about that, forget I said that. Then with those hard blue eyes, and those sunken jowls, there was, as Ben saw it, a moment of doubt in the old man’s eyes—a moment where the old man calculated the worth of telling Benny anything at all. Then the old man began rolling up the left leg of his Khaki pants, grunting as he did it. “Come here, I want you to take a look at something.”     Ben leaned forward, squinting.     “Oh stop it, come over here and have a look at this. You’re not gonna catch anything.”     Centered between erect white hairs, there was a reddish, black gouge on the guy’s bony knee, in dire need, Ben thought, of stitches.     “You act like you never seen a gash before.”     “How’d that happen?”     “Stairs,” he said, “Those goddamn stairs. Do yourself a favor, Ben, don’t get old.” He rolled the pant leg back down. “Problem is it’s hard to manage now. It’s taking much longer to heal than I expected.”     “You go to the doctor?”     “It’s a gash, young man. You don’t see a doctor over a gash.”     He decided not to push it—it was after all the old man’s life.     “Anyhow that’s how I came across Alan Hernandez.” *    *    *     The twelve year old boy looked harmless enough, and Vincent knew that he was both a friend of the family and that he had played ball for Ben’s team—that’s what sitting on the porch for hours can do— but more than any of that, this kid just happened to be passing by. Vincent had four bags in the trunk. The bags were heavy. One had a carton of juice, the other a gallon of milk, and there was both meat and poultry in the others. He had four bags, a heap of stairs, and a bad knee. “Say there son, how would you like to make two dollars?”     “Do you need help?”     He looked up at those steps, and though he did not want to admit it, with his knee they had intimidated him. “Got a bum knee right now.”     Alan offered to help, and said he did not need the two dollars.     To Vincent’s surprise the kid took all four bags at once. “Just lay them down, there on the table. Have a seat. Let me fix you something to drink.”     “I’m okay.”     “I insist,” Vincent said, slapping two singles onto the table. “I have coke or ginger-ale. If you say you want diet anything, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”     “Do you have juice?”     “Juice? Young man like you wants juice?” The kid laughed as if Vincent were the one that was weird, go figure, but the kid was Hispanic, Vincent supposed, and all these people did was drink juice and eat fruits. “Well, I don’t have mango or anything fancy like that. I have orange juice.”     “That’s cool,” the kid said.     “Is that cool?” Vincent said now baring those hard blue eyes onto him. He laid a cup before the boy, and shook the half gallon. “It has pulp in it though. Hope you don’t mind?”     Kid shrugged.     “Is that cool too?”     Smiling, Alan said, “Yea, that’s cool too.” *    *    *     “So then,” he told Ben, “I got up to go to the bathroom. I told him I would be right back. I remember telling him that I would be right back. I just took a tinkle, and even with this knee, I couldn’t have been in that bathroom, longer than three minutes. And three minutes, quite frankly is pushing it. You with me so far?”     “Yes,” Ben told him.     “The boy was still sitting in that chair, drinking his juice. I told him he was a big help and I thanked him, I respectfully thanked him,” he sighed, shaking his head. “Ben, I’m seventy-four years old, and I often believe I have become a good enough judge of character to know within a few minutes what a person is and isn’t capable of. But that is foolish. Even at seventy-four, Ben, even at the age of seventy-four, sometimes I’m blown away. It’s only time that tells us such things.”     “What happened?”     “Relax, I’m getting to that.” The old man pointed toward the kitchen, yet never looked in that direction. “Inside there, there’s a key hook, just over the stove. I used to keep your grandmother’s pearls there.” Ben stared toward the empty doorway for a long time, a long time because it took his grandfather several moments to continue. “They hung there on that hook for eight-years. Until one day this boy comes into my house, and takes them.     “Okay, I told that boy, I’m going to say this and I’m only going to say this to you once. I want two things from you. First, I want you to give me back my wife’s pearls and second, I want you to get the hell out of my home.”     The boy looked at him with so much genuine confusion that Vincent said he believed the boy was well practiced. .     “Empty your pockets boy, empty them right now,” Vincent said pointing into the boy’s face. “You know what he said to me then? He called me loco. The little sonofabitch called me loco.” Then the boy stood, as if meaning to hurry out. “Sit down!” But the boy didn’t. Vincent reached out and smacked the child hard across his eye, and the momentum of the shot carried Vincent over the chair where he stumbled to his knees; consequently, it sent the boy running out of the house.     “Now she’s pressing charges. She’s claiming I not only hit him, but I tried to molest him. Oh, Ben,” he said, raising his fist and biting down on his knuckle. “My heart just can’t handle this anymore.”     “Why did you call me here?”     “That’s a good question,” he said, but didn’t answer it. Instead he gazed away.     “How do you even know he took them?”     His grandfather slowly turned to him, those blue eyes very much in focus again. The force of that stare, Ben came to realize, could say so much. When the power of his gaze eased, he said. “I want you to talk to Mrs. Hernandez on my behalf.”     “Talk to Mrs. Hernandez? About what?”     “Tell her, I want to forget the whole thing. Tell her, if she drops the charges, I’ll give her a check for five-hundred dollars, and we’ll call it even.”     It seemed odd, and even, to a large extent, and admission of guilt. He thought about that—about how bizarre it would be for him to approach Mrs. Hernandez, and speak on this man’s behalf, and thus be held in association with this guy who never wanted part in anyone’s life. This guy who disappeared into his isolated world after Loretta died, and who wanted no ties to a life with him, his mother, his little sister, anyone. “I can’t do that,” Ben told him, “I’m sorry.”     He stared back at Ben. Now it was no longer the blue eyes that were speaking but the jowls, the very crevices of his tired flesh. “Well, then, I thank you for coming.” *    *    *     He saw Mrs. Hernandez on a Sunday afternoon in Pathmark. He’d actually been pulling into an adjacent spot as she was loading up her car. Alan had both hands on the handle of a shopping cart and his foot on the axel. For no better reason than to be friendly (or so he believed), he said hello. He supposed he could have waited in the car, or pretended he had lost his phone, or taken an entirely different route to avoid them, but he didn’t.     “Oh hello,” Mrs. Hernandez said. She wore a pink cotton tank that revealed protruding love handles (he could just imagine the choice words his grandfather would have about that).     “What’s up?” he said to Alan. Alan smiled, and said what’s up, then looked at Ben in such a way that Ben suspected he was trying to show off that blackened eye; yet something—he wasn’t quite sure what—had the opposite effect, and it was momentarily humorous.     “He’s your grandfather, right?” Mrs. Hernandez said, while shielding the sun with her hand.     Then the humor was gone. Alan tugged back and forth on the cart playfully, and Ben could feel his cheeks warming with blood. “Yes,” he admitted, “he is. We really don’t keep in touch with him though.”     “Well let me tell you something,” she said, taking the shielding hand, and raising it to a number one. “Nobody hits my child. Look at him. Look what that man did to him. He’s an animal, and you can tell him he’s going to pay for this. He’s going to pay big time.”     “I’m sorry. Like I said, my family really does not associate with him.”     She seemed to not be listening. She asked Ben how a grown man can lose control and proceeded by asking what else the pervert might have done.     “He actually told me,” Ben said, “he wanted to pay you five-hundred dollars to forget the whole thing.”     “He wants to pay me five hundred dollars? He wants to give me five hundred dollars? He should be paying Alan; that’s what he should be doing. Anyway, he’s going to have to pay a lot more than that. You can tell him he can take his five-hundred dollars and shove it where the sun shines.”     Don’t shine, he corrected in his mind.     She made a curt face, and slammed the door. It was clear to Ben; she thought he was her enemy as well. *    *    *     The following evening it rained heavily. It was 10:30 at night, and Ben lay in his bed in the darkness, listening to the rain pattering the window-sill, and splashing down into the alley. He couldn’t sleep. His mind was on the pearl-necklace, and this strange man living in an obscure world a few houses down.     He wondered how regimented the old man was, and wondered if he would have been asleep. He put his sneakers on and went onto the porch, looked down the street and saw lights on in the old man’s house. Ben grabbed his keys and his hoodie, and without knowing why exactly went down the block.     When his grandfather opened the door, he was a different man. His eyes seemed soft now, and his smile revealed teeth yellowed with age. “Come on in,” he said. Ben could smell alcohol on him, and as he followed him into the kitchen noticed a half empty bottle of Chivas Regal, beside a book. “Do you like Scotch?”     “Sure.”     He slapped down a shot glass. “Well then, drink up.” He’d expected the old man to be eager to hear of Mrs. Hernandez, but the fact of the matter was he hadn’t mentioned her at all. After Ben poured himself a shot, his grandfather did the same.     He got to talking, or rambling or whatever you want to call it.     “I’m the type of man,” he told Ben, “that questions things” blah, blah blah. “My life,” it eventually came to. “Ha, my crummy lousy life. Look at how it turned out. Alone. Lonely. You know, I wish I could have been closer to you and to your mother, and your sister, but I’ll tell you something, sometimes when pain gets you into its vice, you can’t get out, you don’t want to anymore. That’s a piss-poor excuse, I know.”     He seemed like he was already quite drunk. Ben said, “I saw Mrs. Hernandez.” His expression hadn’t changed one way or the other; maybe the old man was too drunk to care. “Do you want to know what she said?”     “I already know what she said.”     “How do you know that?”     “I knew what she would say, as soon as I asked you the question. I could read the reaction in your eyes. I knew it was absurd then.”     “I didn’t—” he stopped. He meant to say I didn’t even know what she was going to say. The man was drunk, and there was no point in saying much more.     “I’m going to tell you something, Ben, that I have never told anyone, and I might regret telling you this, but I have to tell someone.” His lower lip began quivering. “I never loved your grandmother.” With that, his breathing became deliberate. “I’m sorry,” he said, “You know what? Give me a minute.”     The old man made his way to the bathroom. Ben listened to him hack up some phlegm and spit it into the sink, followed seconds thereafter by the sound of a strong stream of urine. The empty key ring above the stove caught his attention. For a moment Ben wondered if the pearls had fallen behind the stove, if that was even possible. It was, he thought, it certainly was.     “You okay in there?” Ben called. Then he looked at the book on the table. He opened it to the book marked page. On it was a story written by Ray Bradbury called “The Black Ferris.” Ben skimmed through it as his grandfather came back into the room and poured himself another shot.     “You ever read Bradbury?”     “In high school I did.”     “Oh he brings you back. That there,” he said, glimpsing at the book, but really seeing the book marker set in the page “is my favorite story.”     “What’s it about?”     “It’s about a Ferris wheel.” He smiled and added something that did not make any sense: “Synergy machines. Anyway, it has this ability to go counter-clock wise, and subtract away a year of your life with every spin, bring you all the way back to childhood.” He was going to go on but said, “I won’t spoil it. Read it for yourself.” He grinned. “You know Ben, I wish there really was a Ferris wheel like that.”     “To take you back to childhood, right, when things were good?”     “No,” he said. “Not to childhood. I would go back to more sophisticated times, times that were very special to me. ”     “When would that be?”     “The times that I shared balance with other human beings. Do you know what I mean by that?”     Ben had no idea.     Looking away from him now the old man said, “Loretta and I fought so much. Oh, we fought so much. The problem with relationships is something everyone knows, but rarely admits. The real problem is love doesn’t work the way people believe it does. People don’t love each other equally. One always loves more than another, or it comes and goes at different times, and some of us never really love at all. It works no other way. Yet Ben, there are these moments, moments when two people are in the same place at the same time sharing the same feelings. It’s synergy. It happens as briefly as the last of a sunset disappearing into the ocean, but I’ll tell you something Ben, it’s the most beautiful experience one person can share with another.     “I never loved Loretta. I had two children with that woman, and I mudded through forty loveless years, because it was safe, it was comfortable, God forgive me, after the kids it was obligation. It was the biggest mistake I have ever made.”     “What about the pearls?”     “Guilt,” was all he said.     “The girl’s name was— never mind the girl’s name. That’s not important. We only spent a year together.” He stopped and looked Ben hard in his eyes. “You see Ben, and you have the right not to believe any of this, but there was something about when I shared that synergy with her, her head would tilt back, and there was this shine in her eye, this glow that somehow extenuated her face making it strikingly beautiful, and lovingly receptive to every word I was saying. Even now, it’s hard to put into words. And how her body would quiver and her flesh would ripple during our intimacy. Somehow I was connecting to a very deep part of her; it was like I was talking directly to her soul, or whatever you want to call that place where you keep the deepest and truest feelings. In seventy-four years Ben, I’ve never been able to touch somebody that way again.”     The old man reflected some more. There were experiences rolling around in his head that he probably could never adequately convey with words, but that he knew to be very real.     “What went wrong?”     “That’s what troubles me—I like to think neither of us understood, at the time, what we had. Maybe we were afraid of it. I can’t even tell you I understand it now. Maybe it was so raw, it ran its course. Maybe it all went away the moment I took her home, or worst of all, maybe I’m delusional, but those moments of synergy,” he closed his eyes, the shot glass shaking absently in his hand, “those moments of synergy, man,” he said, “that is life.”     There came silence for a long time. “Did you ever try to get her back?”     “I saw her after that, and you know what Ben, everything was gone, poof, like nothing ever happened at all.”     Ben had wondered something else. If his grandfather so valued human interaction, why had he shut off to it?     “I discovered something too late. I was well into my marriage with your grandmother by then. It might sound strange to you; it might sound selfish, but it’s me; it’s what I’ve come to believe, and ultimately it’s what shut me down. My problem is if you don’t got the real feelings all you got is bullshit.” He drank down the Scotch, shrugged.     Ben thought about that. He thought about everything the old man had said. When he left, he couldn’t decide if the old man was simply drunk or if he was making any kind of sense, but the old man seemed to believe it all. Eventually, Ben would come to understand something about him. In fact, he vowed to make more time with the old man, but as it turned out he would not have that opportunity—within a week, the old man had gone into cardiac arrest and two days later would lose his life in Palisade General. *    *    *     In the summer of July 2010 he was on a Ferris wheel. It was at dusk, and from the ground there were shadows, but in the air, up there on top of the world, where they were untouched, the sun dipped the world in gold, the tops of the trees below them, the sparkle of the roller coaster tracks in the distance, and the park itself; the noise quieting as they ascended, and the warm of a fading summer day upon their skin—initially he thought it would be prettier to ride at night, but when they were on top he realized he was wrong.     She sat with one leg draped over his lap, her arm around his neck, and they looked into one another’s eyes. There was no weight holding them back—the old man was right. It was one of the most beautiful experiences a person can share with another. He took a breath and before they kissed he believed she had said I love you for the first time, but couldn’t be sure because the machinery sounded.     In the brief two months: You’re special to me; I never felt this way before: those were her words. That was what he had said back.     Six days after they rode the Ferris wheel, somehow, to his utter disbelief, it all ended (he couldn’t tell you why exactly either).     But he realized something.     Breaking up so near experiencing the synergy his grandfather spoke of made him appreciate the devastation the old man must have felt—the devastation he must have felt living his entire life in the wake of such feelings, where the sun, as he had said, disappeared.

A Brief Interruption Christopher Hivner I have been made irrelevant by layoffs and rejections, form letters and non-replies, haughty, indifferent felines, telephone solicitors who don’t know when to quit, check engine lights that won’t go off and noises from somewhere that get louder, but won’t reveal their location with a mechanic present, television announcers who make in one year what would take me twenty and still don’t know what they’re talking about, politicians that talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. I have been interrupted in my quest for fulfillment, in my daily lecture series to no one in particular about things that annoy me, in my search for inspiration, during a longed for good night’s sleep, by a friend with a problem I have no solution to, in the middle of a prayer, during a good conversation, by an answer I wasn’t expecting. These moments of life have stalled my progress, chased dreams from my yard, refused to do the dishes that are piling up in the sink, left me laughing uncontrollably, gave me stories to tell to people who didn’t care but listened amiably anyway from the supermarket check-out line, have found me face down and in tears, led me to question everything, gave me purpose.

Back to the old house Jon Gale     There was an electric light next to the black glossy door. It was new. The hole by the drainpipe was crammed with newspapers. Jade rung the doorbell and stepped back and chewed her fingernails as she waited.     Mrs. Fuller shuffled through the vestibule and opened the door. She was wearing her old violet cardigan, olive green skirt and clumpy brown shoes. The wrinkles above her top lip made her look like she was in her sixties. She couldn’t be. It hadn’t been that long. Had it?     ‘Jade, come in, come in.’     Jade stepped through the front door into the hallway and unzipped her tracksuit Jacket.     ‘Your sister is up there with him already.’ Mrs. Fuller went to take her jacket but Jade pulled it back and rested it on her arm.     ‘Would you like a drink?’ Mrs. Fuller asked, as she walked through into the kitchen and rummaged in the fridge.     ‘Has he got anything proper to drink?’     ‘Wouldn’t you like a coffee?’     Jade opened the cupboard above the kettle and toaster. There wasn’t much left. Just a bottle of baileys and a half bottle of honey rum. ‘Got any clean glasses?’     ‘I know this must be hard for you, Jade, but you have to be strong for Rosie.’     ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ Jade said.     ‘I trained as a Macmillan nurse after I lost my Arthur. I’m only next door so I was the perfect choice.’     Jade started opening cupboard doors searching for a glass. She found a mug and a pint glass. They would do.     ‘Why hasn’t he got a proper nurse?’ Jade said.     ‘She needed some rest.’      At the top of the stairs the photographs of Jade and Rosie had been taken down. The faded rectangles had left uneven blocks against the lemon wallpaper.     ‘I took the pictures of you and Rosie down. The paramedics kept knocking them off. They’re safe in the back room.’ Mrs. Fuller opened the door for Jade and went back downstairs.     The room was lit by a small lamp on the bedside table. Rosie was sat on the edge of the bed.     ‘Rosie.’ Jade put the bottle and glasses down and moved over to her.     ‘Hello, Jade.’     Rosie stood up and hugged Jade too tightly. She rubbed her hands up and down Jades shoulder. Jade patted her back a few times and moved away.      Their father lay on his side in bed. He’d lost most of his hair. He still had some at the sides that stuck to his head in wet curls. The powder blue cover had slid down to his waist. His hip joint was jutting out. Rosie sat back down and started stroking his hand. His breathing was quiet, his eyes closed. It wasn’t his old bed. This one had a metal base and wheels. It must have been the hospital’s.     ‘I thought you would have come sooner. I called for you at Liam’s –’ Rosie was interrupted by their fathers low, bubbling cough. She poured him a glass of water and put it to his mouth. Some of it dribbled out and darkened his night shirt.     ‘Can he talk?’     ‘He’s on a lot of diamorphine for the pain?’     ‘Is there any in here?’     ‘What?’ Rosie turned, her forehead wrinkling.     ‘I just meant for the pain, if he gets any worse.’     Mrs. Fuller knocked on the door and let herself in. She was carrying a tray of tea. She rested it on the bedside table and smiled at Rosie. ‘Drink some tea love.’ She took Jade by the elbow. ‘He’s really bad, Jade. I tried to tell Rosie but she ignored me.’     ‘I think it’s time you left. We need some time with him, alone.’     Jade used her body to edge Mrs. Fuller out the door and onto the landing.     ‘Don’t say anything to upset him.’     ‘Excuse me?’     ‘You know what I mean, Jade. I remember.’     ‘I’m just going the loo. Will you sit with him for a minute?’ Rosie asked. She had died her hair cranberry red and wore it loose down to her shoulders. She squeezed past Jade and left the room. She’d lost weight. It didn’t suit her.     Her father smelt of cooking apples and talc.     ‘Dad, it’s me, Jade.’     He whispered something. She leant forward. He thumbed at the oxygen machine at the side of the bed. Jade reached for it, and placed it over his nose and mouth. His mustard yellow hand clutched at the mask and brushed against hers. She recoiled as if burnt.     ‘What do you want? Do you want some water?’     He pulled the mask off and tried to talk. Instead he coughed again and clutched his stomach.     ‘What do you want?’     His eyes flickered for a moment then shut.     There wasn’t anything personal in his bedside table. A daughter is entitled to look anyway. There was a box of Kleenex, a few pens from the bookies and a mouldy smelling newspaper. The school picture of Rosie and Jade in their grey uniforms had been ripped and cello taped back together again. Did Miss Fuller really take the photographs of them down? Not likely.     The room was made darker by the green wallpaper and heavy curtains. She moved one of the curtains aside letting the street light shine in. He hadn’t decorated in twenty years. It was a state. The plaster had began to peel and flake onto the carpet. The paint above the radiator had swelled and cracked.     In the yard opposite, an abandoned washing machine was propped against the fence, its door tangerine with rust. It was nice looking out of the window.     ‘Did he say anything?’ Rosie asked as she closed the door quietly behind her.     Jade shook her head and picked up the bottle of rum.     ‘Want one?’     ‘No, thank you.’ Rosie sat back down on the bed and rubbed the sleeves of her beige jacket.     ‘Go on then, just a small one.’     ‘It’ll stop you shaking.’ Jade poured two drinks out. Rosie ended up with the mug. She sipped at hers and grimaced. Jade drank three shots then opened the baileys and drank.     ‘Don’t you think you should slow down?’     ‘Nope.’     ‘OK.’ Rosie rummaged in her Louis Vuitton handbag. ‘So, how is Liam?’ The clicking she made whilst rooting in the bag was infuriating.     ‘I wouldn’t know.’     ‘Why? Have you two broken up? Shame, he seemed good for you.’ She finally got a photograph out of her bag, looked at it, and smiled. ‘So what happened with you and him?’     ‘He wanted kids and I didn’t’     ‘Hmm right. Here’s a picture of Jake, isn’t he gorgeous?’     Jade took the photo and held it at hands length. What was so ‘gorgeous’ about him? He was just a fat, pink bundle of flesh. ‘How is he?’     ‘Fine, fine. He misses his aunty though.’     ‘Yeah I’ve been busy.’ She lied. ‘Do you want another drink?’     ‘No, I don’t think you should either.’     ‘Why not?’     ‘Because imagine what daddy must think, seeing you like this. I mean really, Jade. Look here’s a brush for your hair and a lip gloss-’     ‘Fuck you.’     ‘Fine. Do you mind leaving me and daddy alone for a while? We need to talk.’ Rosie put her father’s hand to her lips. She kissed the top of his hand and his finger gently. She cried making ugly sobbing sounds. Jade took the bottle of rum out of the room.     She went to her old room and flicked the switch several times. Would any of her old stuff still be there? She took out her phone and used it as a torch. On top of her chest of draws was an empty bottle of Malibu, a pencil case and a silver portable CD player. She opened the CD player and took the CD out. It was All Rise by Blue. Jesus Christ? Still it was better than what Rosie listened to, or pretended to. Fucking Mozart. Who did she think she was? She held it up to the light and admired the shards of purple and green. She threw it at the wall like a Frisbee. It didn’t shatter like in films.     She moved the blue glare of her phone to the wardrobe and opened it. It was probably best to leave it shut. On its floor were mounds of sketch books, paperbacks and magazines. The magazines were mainly yellow framed National Geographic. She loved the green forests and the tigers skulking in the grass. She pulled the shortbread tin from the bottom. She blew the dust from the lid and pressed it against her chest trying to ease it off. It sprang open and crashed to the floor, the papers scattering around it. She knelt down and began sifting through the notebooks. She picked out a sketch that her first boyfriend, Luke, had given her. It was a portrait of a couple, but their faces were faded. All that was left of her diary was a blackened bronze padlock.     She had come home from school one afternoon and seen her Father in the back yard, poking at a fire.     ‘Eh, you, come here!’ he had shouted.     She had run out and saw the diary’s plastic cover, crackling and melting into thick sludge. The words on the cream paper rapidly disappeared into ash. She went to rescue it, but her Father grabbed her hand.      ‘Do you think I’m a cunt, do you? How could you write that stuff about your own father?’ He’d taken his cigarette and stubbed it into Jade’s forearm. She had screamed, but he had cupped his hand over her mouth. He had pushed her through the back door. She had fallen backwards over the step and lay on the floor, clutching her arm.     ‘Go and run it under cold water.’     Jade looked at the scar and ran her fingers over it. It felt like dried wax. In her Father’s room the smell of sick masked the talc. He looked like he was already dead. The skin beneath his sunken eyes was flecked with purple blotches. Rosie was brushing the sheets trying to smooth them out. Jade went back to the window ledge. She could hear the clink of milk bottles outside. It was still dark, but it must have been early morning.     ‘When are you going back to Salford?’ Rosie blew her nose on a tissue and crunched it into a ball.     ‘I don’t know really, after the funeral I suppose.’     ‘Are you staying here?’     ‘No, I’ll find somewhere else to stay.’     Rosie passed her glass to Jade.     ‘Am I really that bad that you can’t stay with me?’     Jade filled her glass up with rum and passed it back.     ‘We’ll sort things out quickly. You need to get back to Jake.’     Rosie started crying again. It was like Jake was the trigger word to set her off. It was getting tiresome. Their father was groaning – a low growl-like sound. He leant to his side and dry retched.     ‘Is there anything we can give him?’ Jade asked.     ‘Miss Fuller said she’s given him something beginning with a c, to stop the nausea.’     ‘I wish I had some. It fucking stinks in here. Can I open a window?’     Rosie shook her head and held their fathers hand. Jade poured herself another drink.     ‘At least empty that commode.’     ‘Why don’t you do it if you’re that bothered? Honestly, Jade.’     The only sound was when Rosie gave her father the oxygen mask. She did it regularly. The noise was so unnatural.     ‘What are we going to do? I can’t lose him, not now.’ Rosie said.     ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what you want me to say.’     ‘Do you even care that he’s dying?’     ‘I care. It’s just hard for me. You know what he was like with me.’     ‘Don’t start with all that again, Jade. I mean it.’     ‘So what? Pretend it never happened?’     Rosie closed her eyes and took a deep breath.     ‘Jade you hurt daddy when you said those things. You hurt me. But that’s what you were like back then.’     Jade moved into the corner of the room and slumped down into a wicker chair. She clenched her fist and bit down on her knuckles.     ‘We forgave you. Can’t you try and make peace with him?’     Their Father was still, his jaw slack. Rosie touched his chest to check if there was any movement. She put her fingers against his throat. There was nothing she could do. She clasped her hands together and covered her mouth. She leant forward, hands clasped together. Frozen.      Jade tried to speak but no words came out. Her heart was beating normally. She didn’t feel sick. Her hands weren’t shaking. She tried to make herself cry, pinching her hand. She managed a few tears and smoothed them away with her little finger. She leant over her father and tried to shut his mouth. It was upsetting Rosie. It sagged open again. The smell of the body was like boiled cabbage.     ‘Who do we ring, to you know, come and take him.’ Rosie asked.     Jade looked at her watch. It was four O’clock. Mrs. Fuller was a busybody but she’d help.      ‘The funeral directors won’t be open for a few hours.’     ‘Should we call a priest?’ Rosie asked.     ‘I don’t know.’     Was their father still a Catholic? It didn’t matter.

Escape Artist Brian Looney Banging hard, The unyielding door, My tender fists, My hamburger hands. Let me in, Something chases, A guttural growl, My savage half. We’ve grappled before, Drenched in sweat, Its savage strength, Claws years away. Adrenaline jumps, So open up, Or I’ll shatter the door, And the beast will follow, And eat us both.

Brian Looney Bio     Brian Looney was born 12/2/85 and is from Albuquerque, NM. He likes it when Lady Poetry kicks him in the head. The harder the better. Check out his website at Reclusewritings.com.

Janet Kuypers reads the Brian Looney poem Escape Artist from the 2/12 issue (v103) of Down in the Dirt magazine

Watch the YouTube video of Kuypers reading this poem at the open mike 2/1/12 at Gallery Cabaret’s the Café Gallery in Chicago

Jaclyn-Kate Alyssa Lawless     Jaclyn-Kate sat in silence as Dave pulled the pick-up truck onto the main drag. The radio was down low, barely audible over the loud, souped up muffler.     She watched out the window as the truck rolled along in the early morning hour. The roads were empty; everyone was asleep. He drove over the bridge and she stared out at the harbor. She counted the boats. There were nine.     The silence was heavy but neither said a word. Dave’s phone blared some random rap song. She drew in a breath. She turned her head slightly and watched him pick up the phone and peer at it. He clicked the side of the phone and placed it back on his lap. His dark hair was messy, sticking up here and there. As they drove downtown, the lights from the illuminated shop signs sprayed enough light on his face to make her stare. Dark hair, blue eyes. He was good-looking, borderline beautiful.     “Take a right at the hardware store. It’s quicker,” she said, surprised by the steadiness of her voice.     His eyes left the road and locked on her. She kept her sight straight ahead. Her body tensed. He turned his head back to the road. Her body relaxed. He stayed straight and the hardware store disappeared behind them.     “No. It’s not quicker,” he said.     Warmness welled up in her eyes and a few tears fell. He stopped at a red light and she stared into the empty coffee shop outside the window.      She bit the inside of her mouth, trying to stop the tears and dissipate the lump in her throat. After she succeeded, she quickly wiped the wetness away, trying to play it off like her cheekbones were itchy.     The truck rumbled up to the front of her apartment. He pulled up on the curb and she yanked at the door handle before he had rolled to a stop. The doors were locked. He quickly unlocked them. She swung open the door and was about to slide down off the seat when she felt his hand grip her arm. Her pulse started pounding in her head.     “Look, I’m sorry. Like I said before, I clearly misread you at the bar and I’m sorry.” He still had a grip on her arm. The flood light from the house shone into the car, onto his apologetic blue eyes.     “It’s fine,” she whispered.     He let go of her arm and she got out of the truck.     “Jaclyn.” Her feet had just met the concrete.     “You’re not planning on telling anybody about this right? Because you know, it was a misunderstanding and it’s kind of embarrassing,” he paused, “for both of us.”     She stared into his eyes, hard. The left side of his lip crept up into playful smirk.     “No, I won’t,” she said.      “Okay. Good. Hey, come back up here for a minute,” he said tapping the passenger seat with his hand.     She evaluated his benign smile then got back in the truck. He leaned over the console and reached out his right hand. She froze and fixated on his eyes. His lean stopped when he was a ruler’s length from her face and he pushed back a strand of her brown hair, his fingers grazing her temple as he did. She sucked in her breath and the blood pulsed in her head. She felt the blood pulsing down there too. He rested his hand on the back of her neck and pulled her in closer.     “I’m sorry,” he said.     She shook her head in acceptance.     “Give me a kiss,” he whispered.     He kissed her.     “Don’t tell anybody,” he whispered and pulled away.     He put the truck into drive and Jaclyn slid out of the truck. She shut the heavy, black door and he drove away.     She fumbled with her keys, until she finally unlocked the door. She stepped into the foyer and stood, facing the stairs to her apartment. She listened to the exhaust become more and more faint. She listened until she couldn’t hear it anymore.

The Most Lovely Morning Amanda McNeil     A hint of winter spices the fall morning in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hospital employees, teachers, key holders of stores, and committed students bustle along the brick paved streets and sidewalks, dashing into traffic to cross the street with the bravery of a bear--or perhaps the foolishness of a fleeing antelope. Although some scrubs layered over long-sleeved tshirts or under fleece jackets dot the herd, most don the look of a professional in the cooler climes--tights with boots under a classic pencil skirt topped by a warm suit jacket for the women. A typical suit and tie for the men. It’s not yet cool enough to layer on a winter jacket with a wool pashmina or cashmere scarf and finely tailored gloves yet. But today there is an anomaly among the swarm. One solitary person in an ankle-length, quilted, gray winter jacket shuffles among the crowd. Perhaps shuffles is the wrong word. Shuffle used to allude to a quiet, slow determination combined with slightly uncoordinated movements, but now in the songs and the vernacular it tends to tell us of an energetic dance. So, the figure is not so much shuffling as meticulously stepping forward a few mere inches at a time surrounded by people taking long, energetic strides, quickly leaving the figure in their dust.     The figure wears what locals call a “beanie”--a knit cap--pulled down low over gray hair pulled back into a bun. A skirt nearly as long as the coat repeatedly attempts to static cling to her black tights. Perhaps these tights are her one attempt at staying in with the local fashion, or perhaps she just likes the color black. Inexplicably, the front of her coat is completely open--not partially zipped or buttoned in any way. Her face is surprisingly largely free of wrinkles and relaxed into a happy semi-smile. While the others rush around her, sometimes harumphing as they dodge around her slow-moving frame, she seems to exist within her own tube of transport, completely unperturbed by either the morning stress or the declarations of frustration around her. This fall morning is entirely hers.     It takes her five minutes to walk to the two blocks from the main bustle down a side street to a city bus stop. A Harvard building stands across the street. Through the windows can be seen large professorial desks and shelves stuffed full of books. No students come to or from the building yet. It is too early for meetings with the professor. Directly behind the bus stop is a US post office, open much earlier than those outside of city limits. People fly in and out of it dropping off letters and packages, hurrying to get errands done before their first duties of the day.     Sitting on one of the cold black marble benches at the stop, a Latina woman speaks furiously in Spanish into her smart phone while tapping her iPad at a frenzied pace. Her professional briefcase sits, temporarily forgotten, by her side zipped firmly against the contents that fill it to the brim. Standing at the stop next to a tree with a trunk so tiny that you could easily wrap your thumb and forefinger around it--indeed it can barely be called a tree--is a 20-something young professional man holding a cup of iced coffee from the local independent coffee shop. His fingers wrapped around it seem to be almost blue, yet he stares stoically ahead, ignoring the discomfort. Black ear buds plug his ears and descend into the depths of his pants pocket. He periodically checks his watch for the time, but studiously ignores the people in his immediate vicinity.     The elderly woman briefly stares at the marble benches, pondering, but eventually moves to stand on the other side of the tree from the young professional. She attempts to catch his gaze, but he quickly looks away and instead gently bops his head to the beat of whatever it is he is listening to. The woman gives a sad shake of her head and instead watches the traffic as it goes by. Every minute or so someone honks their horn for some unkown reason. People rush by on the street, already engaged in business and academic discussions with each other. Some wear nametags on a lanyard around their necks for an academic symposium occurring that day. The woman tries to make out the name of the event, but her eyes are too old and frail to read the small print without digging out her glasses. One of the symposium attendees, a bespectacled Asian male, spots her staring and scowls at her. She sighs and looks away at the same speed with which she does everything. Slowly and deliberately.     With a mechanical groan of shifting gears, the bus appears around the corner about two blocks away. The man throws out his now empty coffee cup. The woman sitting on the bench slings the strap of her briefcase over her shoulder then stands, managing to hold onto briefcase, iPad, and cell phone. The elderly woman slides her right hand into the pocket of her winter jacket, pulling out a handful of coins, lint, and a cough drop wrapper. After yelling one last sentence into her phone, the businesswoman sticks it in her pocket and immediately starts coughing, a low, hacking sound that calls up from memory the awful feeling of phlegm stuck in the chest.     The elderly woman and the young man notice the coughing, but whereas the young man shoots the businesswoman an annoyed looks and puts a couple more feet between himself and her germs, the elderly woman slides her left hand into her left coat pocket, pulling out a cough drop. She shuffles forward two steps toward the businesswoman, “Excuse me, miss, would you like a cough drop?” she holds it out, a wasting away shadow of a toddler offering up her last piece of candy to a friend.     The businesswoman shoots her an embarrassed look, “No, I’m fine thank you,” her thanks immediately interrupted by more coughing.     “Are you sure, dear?” the elderly woman’s English lilts and jumbles a bit in a light accent reminiscent of a youth spent in Eastern Europe or Russia.     “I said I’m fine!” the businesswoman snaps and moves away from the elderly woman, digging into her briefcase in search of her bus pass.     The elderly woman’s face falls, momentarily highlighting the wrinkles present on her thin, aging skin, but at this moment the bus pulls up to the curb, and the woman quickly reverts to her calm demeanor.     The young man has his pass at the ready, pulling it from his trouser pocket. He steps up to the bus door with it held out toward the token machine beside the driver. His long legs take the high step easily, and he taps his card against the machine quickly. The acceptance ding echoes through the bus and out onto the curb.     Still coughing periodically into her elbow, the businesswoman follows suit and momentarily has claimed a seat along the middle of the bus.     Smiling up at the driver, the elderly woman casts a brief glance at the high step currently existing between the floor of the bus and the curb of the road, “Good morning young man,” her voice cheerily wavers, “Would you mind kneeling the bus for me? That’s quite the step for my old legs.”     The driver may or may not glance at her; it is difficult to tell through the sunglasses he wears, but without a word the bus beeps, creaks, and groans as he kneels the bus down to the curb for her. Someone from within the bus sighs a deep sigh at this unnecessary delay.     Even with the bus knelt, the woman can barely raise her leg high enough to take the step. She inches forward and begins placing her dimes one by one into the token machine. Sixty cents for seniors.     Plink.     A few seconds’ pause.     Plink.     Another pause.     Plink.     Plink.     Plop.     She’s dropped her fifth dime. Sighs and dissatisfied murmurs erupt from the back of the bus. This pick-up has taken nearly three minutes already. “Oh dear,” the woman states as she begins looking for her dime on the floor of the bus. She bends partly at the waist, squinting.     The bus driver, previously encountering the entire morning with a poker face, sighs and gets down off his seat. His dreadlocks fall over the sides of his face as he examines the floor then straightens up with the rescued dime, plinking it into the machine.     “Oh, thank you young man,” the woman responds, “My eyesight is not what it used to be.”     “Yeah, no problem, but put the rest in so we can go, ok? I can’t move when you’re in front of the yellow line.” He gestures at the line painted on the floor just behind the token machine. His tone is not unkind, but stressed and rushed. He has a schedule to keep. Still, the woman’s face falls at his response, and she plinks the final dime in then shuffles back behind the yellow line, seeking a seat.     The instant she starts moving, the driver raises the bus. It is finished raising just as she crosses the yellow line, and the driver pulls the bus back into traffic. The bus gives its customary starting jolt, and the woman barely manages to grasp one of the metal poles to keep from falling. She gives an oof, but doesn’t complain. People of all ages and ethnicities fill the bus, although they are predominantly working aged folk engaging in their commute. One woman with a baby in a stroller stands near the back door of the bus. Two highschool students do their homework together on the double seat they’re sharing. One other elderly person is on the bus, but the rest are young to middle aged. He is an old black man, half-dozing in his seat with a newsie cap pulled down over his eyes. The jolt of the bus brings him awake for a moment, and he glances around at the scene.     All of the seats are full, including the ones designated for the elderly or disabled, which are filled with entirely young to middle-aged able-bodied people, except for the seat he himself is in. His eyes fall upon the elderly woman in the winter coat. Her pale hand clasps the metal hand-hold in a near death-grip, turning her knuckles a pale blue. He casts a stern gaze at the younger people around him. The ones managing to stay awake on the early morning ride either avoid his gaze by becoming instantly busier in their consumption of books, newspapers, and electronic tablets, or close their eyes feigning sleep.     The old man sighs, grabs a hand hold on the pole nearest to himself, and pulls himself up from his seat, “Here, honey, take my seat,” he calls out to the elderly woman.     The bus jolts to a halt at a stoplight, and the woman breathes a sigh of relief, “Oh thank you, sir. You’re a real gentleman,” she hurriedly shuffles to the seat, managing to collapse into it just before the bus jerks back into motion.     “Well, someone around here’s gotta be,” he pointedly replies. No one looks the least chagrined. “Besides, the next stop is mine anyway.”     “Oh, well still. Thank you.”     He inches forward toward the door as the bus slows down.     “Don’t mention it. You have a nice day, y’hear?” he exits the bus.     “You too!” she calls after him. A smile now lights up her face, granting a hint of the youthful beauty once present there. A faint hint of color brightens her cheeks. She pulls a newspaper and pencil from somewhere inside her coat and focuses in on the daily Sudoku.     The morning routine of the bus swirls around her. Some stops nearly empty the bus near popular places of work like a hospital and an academic building. Other stops near residential streets refill it. The elderly woman glances up periodically venturing smiles at people. None return them except for one baby being held in a frazzled mother’s arms. She smiles and giggles at the woman just as the mother is rushing off the bus.     The semi-robotic recording of a man’s voice announce through the bus speakers, “Main Street at Maple Lane.” The woman raises her hand to the side of the bus just behind the head of the middle-aged man next to her. He is attempting to read a library book, but his eyes keep drooping. She firmly presses on the yellow tape that runs along the sides of the bus, and the voice announces, “Stop requested.”     The bus comes to a quick halt at the intersection. On the right-hand side of the street immediately next to the stop is a classic New England style Episcopalian Church. It is whitewashed with a large steeple and bell in the tower. A small gay pride flag flies in front of it alongside a sign reading “All welcome here.” The well-mowed grass is various shades of brown and green from the recent frosts and is carpeted in colorful leaves that have fallen from the large maple tree in front of the church. Some of the leaves are in piles indicating that the children of the members were playing in the leaves at some point yesterday. Perhaps between Sunday School and the main church service.     The woman starts to stand, a slow process accented by her squinting her face in pain. Looking toward the back of the bus, the driver impatiently calls, “Someone getting off?”     “Yes, coming,” replies the woman, inching her way toward the bus door. People glare at her in the accusatory quiet that she momentarily breaks by saying to the driver, “Have a nice day.”     “You too,” he automatically replies.     Just as she reaches the door, a young, female voice sotto whispers, “I really do wish seniors would be considerate and not slow down the buses during rush hour.”     The elderly woman pauses at the door of the bus; the only indication that she has heard this statement from a younger member of her gender, but she bites her lip and continues off the bus. The doors slam shut behind her, and the bus pulls away after a brief hesitation at the stop sign at the intersection. Turning toward the church, the woman resolutely continues on.     A small, laughing boy whose windbreaker and backpack are both falling off suddenly rounds the corner of Maple Lane and nearly knocks her over. His mother, rushing after him, calls a half-hearted apology toward the woman and continues chasing her son down the street, “Nicky, slow down! Mommy can’t keep up!”     The woman gives her head a slight shake and starts up the front walk toward the church. Instead of ascending the steps to the door, though, she turns to the path running toward the side. It turns from cement to dirt, and she slows her step, even so managing to catch her toe on a wayward rock. Her breathing is heavier from the exertion, but she continues on her mission.     Rounding to the back of the church, a graveyard surrounded by an iron fence comes into view. The gate with a sign of vague open cemetery hours--dawn to dusk--was propped open at some point earlier by the pastor or his wife with a rock.     The graves range from new to old. Neatly kept to completely ignored. The markers are sometimes a simple piece of granite flat on the ground with names and dates to ornate, large angels standing guard over the dead.     Progressing into one of the newer sections, the woman’s face lights up at the sight of a rather unique marker. It is a small, granite bench over a plot covered in pots of wildflowers. The woman walks carefully among the pots and sighs, her first sigh of the day, as she runs her fingers along the name and dates engraved in the right-hand side of the bench. Charles M. Dubois Born: June 1, 1925 Died: November 15, 2010 Beloved husband.     The woman pulls a cloth from inside her coat and wipes the bench down. Then she turns and pulls out a small black stone with specks of white in what is naturally nearly a heart shape and places it on the edge of one of the pots.     “I found this near our favorite cafe yesterday evening, Charlie. The one with the raspberry pastries you love and the,” she chuckles, “Irish coffee I can’t ever seem to do without. It made me think of us.”     She turns back toward the bench, runs her fingers along the name again, and, sighing, sits down on the left-hand side of the bench, placing her hand on top of the carving.     “After I went to the cafe last night for a sandwich and some espresso, I went home and sat in our living room listening to Cat Stevens. I’m working on a sweater. Don’t know who I’ll give it to now that you’re gone. Maybe the minister. He does such a fine job maintaining things here, you know.     “Anyway, I didn’t think anything could possibly match such a lovely evening. I sat there with the windows open, beautiful jams flowing into my ears, soft Alpaca yarn in my fingers, but this morning, Charlie, I had the most lovely morning today.     “I met a man on the bus who looked just like you, Charlie, I swear he did. He was the same fine shade of dark chocolate and even was wearing a newsie cap just like you always did favor, might still favor up in heaven, who knows if you wear clothes up there though,” she chuckles.     “I thought for sure I was on my way to join you, and the good Lord had sent you to escort me, but it turned out that it was just a kind man offering up his seat to me. For a moment, it reminded me of how you always took care of me, Charlie. It made me feel just like old times.”     She pats the seat beside her and appears to stare off into the distance at the back of the church and the fall scenery, but anyone can tell she is truly looking at memories. Memories of her and Charlie.

Foreshadowed Sheryl L. Nelms fog ripples in waves sinister thru the night billowed over the moon and stars black clouds swaddle Tucson spin all to Goth

I Don’t Want to Live Anymore Jon Brunette     Kimberly sat on her father’s lap. She cooed into his ears, “I don’t want to live anymore, Daddy.” She had just turned eight, her legs were stumps, and her fingers had been cut off. Although it had probably hurt, she couldn’t remember anymore. She tried to walk that day on her new artificial legs and found the attempt painful. Her knees were knobby, and, thankfully, she hadn’t begun to think about sex, friendships, and everything else that made youth so fun. Yet, she looked into her father’s eyes, and said, in a voice that didn’t really understand what it said, “I don’t want to live anymore, Daddy.” #     Kimberly had a brother. He had just turned eight; Kimberly was two years behind. Trying to become a big boy, so his parents would trust him like an adult, he wanted to use the new lawnmower. Like a kid would, her brother had argued and pleaded and made a lot of promises that he would never fulfill. The mower was big, with a thick seat and a knobby wheel that turned it, and massive blades that had impressed Kimberly. Her father had turned it upside-down to show her the metal prongs that would cut the grass, after he bought it at SEARS. She was impressed, naturally; her father wouldn’t have believed her if she had told him that she wasn’t.     Everything impressed her. The fact that her dog messed the floor tiles with urine would open her eyes widely, until her Daddy would tell her that dogs did that and no one could prevent it. Kimberly would stare, wide-eyed and jaw-dropped, at Fluffy, who would look back lamely, tail behind its butt, head drooped.     When their father went to take Fluffy for a walk, circumstance finally put her brother, George, on the lawnmower. He had wanted to cut the grass so badly that their father had finally relented. It probably could turn him into a young man instead of the nuisance that he had become lately. He had told their father that he could do it without pay to drive the big machine like their Dad. Although their father hadn’t taught him yet to use it properly, he had decided to let his boy try anyway. Actually, he had always had his hands full with Fluffy, who had to be walked, with a plastic bag and a small metal scooper. It had to be done, and no one else would but him. Kimberly wouldn’t, naturally; she just had to sunbathe like their Mommy always would.     As George came around the house with the mower, he actually did see Kimberly on the grass, head back and bare feet kicking to a tune on Radio Disney. She wore earphones to hear the music better. George tried to yell, but his voice couldn’t carry very far, scared because he couldn’t yet control the mower properly. In sheer panic, he couldn’t scream loudly at all. Really, just a hoarse whisper escaped his lips. His sister didn’t turn around or try to run. Like anyone would, she took for granted that whoever rode the mower would use it properly.     After their father came back, with a small bag of doggy-doo, Kimberly was sitting on the front porch. She told her Daddy that she got hurt. He could tell that she had: thick blood trailed behind her, and her feet looked a little too ugly. Like any parent would, he spanked George, hard, with a wooden paddle, yet he couldn’t have realized that he would spend the next two years trying to help Kimberly with her fake legs.     When she finally told him that she wanted to die, he did the only thing that he could do: he did what any father who loved his baby would do; he did what his friends in Iraq had done when survival had looked impossible to another soldier.     Eventually, she would think about sex, friendships, and everything else that made youth so fun, and like his baby-faced friends in Iraq, she wouldn’t get to enjoy any of it. What else could he do but help to carry out her final request?

Doppelganger James Livingston Pre-stressed, distressed concrete words and images Lined up in couplets free      of verse      without onomatopoetic grunts      without screams      Feeling hard-felled in forms Hardened voices cracked and shattered. You allow not my visage to appear just my fatal bowing shadow A pretext of                                    being      not justified      in      becoming                                   Margin left,                                     right,                                   or centered.

Thoughts on Wilson Joel Schueler August Wilson has said of his 10-play cycle that he wanted to ‘focus upon what I felt were the most important issues confronting African Americans for that decade, so ultimately they could stand as a record of Black experience over the past hundred years...what you end up with is a kind of review or re-examination of history.’     August Wilson’s work is hugely steeped in the experiences of African American culture. Sometimes thought of as the ‘Black Arthur Miller,’ Wilson’s expostulatory plays of social and cultural identity have firmly established him as one of the finest playwrights of the latter half of the 20th century. A history of oral tradition from the struggles on the plantation fields of the slavery era is examined right up to Wilson’s contemporary Black America, and indeed even how the future will play out. Wilson’s selective review of certain periods of American history via the medium of his plays provides a fresh angle on important issues. Paul Carter Harrison states that they are so important in their review and comment on African American culture that they ‘represent the culmination of political, social...objectives presaged by the Harlem Renaissance in the twenties and the Black Arts Movement of the sixties.’i Along with fellow civil rights writers such as Amiri Baraka and James Baldwin, the work focuses on an African unity and strength, away from the culture of Western America that mistreated their race. Through Wilson’s work we learn that Blacks endured many inequalities and hardships compared to whites even in the modern America Wilson sets his plays in. This essay will offer an exploration into the use of history in a small selection of his plays.     Fences is set in 1950’s Pittsburgh. Wilson uses history to effect by setting the play very purposely in the same year Hank Aaron shocked American baseball by becoming the first Black manager in history to win the World Series with his Milwaukee Braves. Wilson wanted to emphasise the importance of this Black history, and by setting the play in this memorable year, a subtle device is being used to stress the notability of the play. Troy is depicted as the tragic character of the play, whose life as one of the older play’s characters, remains scarred by the slavery period. Despite there being a brighter future for his two children, in an America of slight progression, Troy is one of the older ones left behind after abolition, left like many Blacks of his time, he is left a failed sharecropper. Wilson uses Troy and Bono as characters as examples of a generation America forgot. The result is that they spend years living in shacks and turning to crime which many Black Americans of their era also did after abolition. With a lack of infrastructure and resources, Wilson is not excusing Black crime but implies that in these conditions the rise of Black crime is an inevitable occurrence. With all this considered, Wilson is delineating that despite emancipation from slavery compared with the Black experience of the past hundred years, that Troy’s generation are not that much better off than when they were slaves. Another reason for this is that Blacks still faced many inequalities to Whites in the 1950’s. As we see with Troy’s occupation, his role is a garbage lifter but is annoyed at how it is only the White drivers that drive the garbage vehicles. Troy works hard but gets little in return. His whole life is not without hardships, from starting off life in the poverty-stricken south to being ‘pushed back by the white establishment’ii in his pursuit of his baseball-playing dreams. This is important as baseball was separated by the standard leagues for Whites and the subordinate Negro leagues for Blacks during the 1950’s and many Black baseball players would have been in Troy’s position. Like lots of Blacks, Troy moved during ‘The Great Migration’ to the north in search of a better life but as we discover it did not necessarily mean it was better. A resulting factor of Black oppression is the common feeling for Black citizens to ‘stick together’ and build strong relations with one another, empowering their Black identity. An important part of the play that represents this involves the title of the play itself:- Troy’s wife Rose sets Troy and their son Cory the task of building a fence in their garden. It is said that fences can either keep people out or keep people in, and Rose being a compassionate character very much wants to enhance keep the fortitude of the housemates relations and keep racism out. The fence is also symbolic in that it represents a fence that Troy can hit a baseball over for a home run, something he was hampered from doing in a darker past. Paul Carter Harrison takes an interesting angle on what the building of the fence will mean to Troy. ‘Troy will erect a fence to set the boundaries of his universe...keeping the profane at bay and containing divine order.’iii     Another consequence of Troy’s past is that he finds it difficult to be close to his loved ones and indeed even has an affair with a woman named Alberta. This is part of Troy’s hypocrisy and moral depravity, largely as a consequence of Blacks’ belittlement.     In a similar way that Wilson hoped to galvanise his Black readers into living their lives in happiness and pride with a fight against oppressors, he also wrote Fences with a burning desire to prove the white doubters wrong. He wrote it mainly because Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was slated for its ‘non-narrative aspects of its structure’iv and ‘focus on two...characters.’v     In typical fighting fashion he wanted to show that he could write a decent play with a central character, in Troy Maxson. Furthermore, he was sick of whites thinking ‘about niggers as lazy and shiftless. Well, here’s a man (Troy) with responsibilities as prime to his life.’vi He was desperate to show the Black man’s worth and that they were a capable and industrious people in America, with many of their faults a by-product of the oppression they had experienced. Fishman believes that, ‘it is Wilson’s approach to...responsibility which ultimately makes the play universal and allows him to examine issues which cross cultural lines.’vii     The characters’ speech is often typical of an African American vernacular. Wilson hopes to engage Black readers with this as all Blacks can relate to it from the lowest socio-economic group to the highest. In one of Harrison’s most important quotes, he suggests that Wilson’s work is affective on a multifaceted level. ‘Wilson has reaffirmed the potency of the African continuum as a psychic and spiritual repository of values and survival strategies that authenticates experience and fuels the imagination...capable of promoting personal renewal and collective healing.’viii     In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom we also notice the theme of dispossession that is felt by Blacks, ‘We’s the leftovers’ix and ‘Now what’s the colored man gonna do with himself?’x These quotes attributed to Toledo symbolize the same type of loss that Troy and Bono feel in Fences. Levee is a young ambitious musician keen to start his own band. Just like the dispossessed Black race whose futures are ruined we witness in Fences that Levee’s future is also ruined once he shoots and kills Toledo. This is an example of Black peoples’ moral deterioration as a result of the devaluation they have suffered. The economic exploitation of Blacks was apparent in the 1920s in which this play is set and indeed for decades after. The arguing between Sturdyvant and Rainey symbolizes the battle between capitalists and workers, or powerful Whites and non-powerful Blacks, like the difference between garbage lifters like Troy and the white garbage vehicle drivers. The exploitative Irvin and Sturdyvant are countered in their behaviour by the non-negotiable Ma Rainey. In Act I of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Rainey arrives at the studio late flaunting her ‘black bottom’ with ‘the parodic gesture of male empowerment.’xi She wants the heating up, wants coke and will only act on her terms. ‘I don’t care what you say, Irvin...I’m singing Ma Rainey’s song...Now that’s all there is to it.’xii Wilson here is saying that Rainey represents what the Black people feel and need to copy: - an upstanding stance against the white oppressors. Song is an important weapon in Wilson’s plays. Such examples include Ma Rainey’s song along with Rose’s, and also in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone Jeremy is a ‘proficient guitar player, yet his spirit has yet to be molded into a song.’xiii In this play as well, Bynum’s father had a Healing Song to cure the sick, and he himself has a Binding Song, ‘used to bind together dislocated lives.’xiv Bynum further criticises Loomis who, ‘done forgot his song.’xv Song has a very holy place in Black culture, with the Blues making sense of their everyday lives and history, right back to the songs slaves used to sing on the plantation fields. Song and music have been a firm backbone of Black culture to help them through the difficult times, and this is not lost on Wilson who wishes to emphasise this by their being in his plays. However unlike the Black slave songs, Levee, a character whom Wilson wishes to undermine as a bad example, sings a song that is egoist and anti-God. In Act II we gain a further understanding of the way in which the blues is a key musical account of life’s past and present experiences as Rainey points out, ‘The blues help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain’t alone.’     One cannot emphasize enough the importance of the idea in Wilson’s work that remembering the past is essential to establishing the correct moral values and ways of living. As Harrison points out, ‘The African American moral personality...is shaped and validated by a value system gleaned from the folkloric repository of experience.’xvi Ralph Ellison further describes folklore as, ‘the first drawings of any group’s character.’xvii     Troy tries to dismiss the inequalities imposed upon him and therefore does not allow himself to be devalued. However this strong personality he has come to adopt to fight off evils also pushes away those close to him, as it is also used as a selfish tool to help him feel better. It is also due to his difficult past that he sets up an unshakeable personality barrier or ‘sanctified province’xviii and he even refuses to be intimidated by Death whom he fights with venom. ‘Death standing there staring at me...“Bound over hell! Let’s settle this now!” It seem like he kinda fell back when I said that, and all the cold went out of me.’xix Part of his strong character also comes from establishing a patriarchal authority that is embedded in historic African American households. In similar fashion to the way in which Troy was brought up by a harsh, abusive father, which thus established Troy’s manhood in separating from his father and creating his image as the sole breadwinner, Troy’s fatherhood over Cory is similarly disciplinary, ‘I brought you into the world...I’ll take you out of the world!’xx Wilson also tells us through Troy that not only during the 1950s was it common for the father of an African American household to have an old-fashioned authoritative role but that he is duty-bound. ‘...it’s my duty to take care of you. I owe a responsibility to you!’xxi     This is further seen when Troy brings home his daughter out of wedlock to care for her.     Through Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Fences Wilson coveys to us that the 1920s were different from the 1950s as far as hope for Blacks was concerned. If we look at the end of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom we witness a tragic end where not only a life from an older generation is lost but also the ambitions of an upcoming youngster. Wilson depicts here that the general feeling amongst Blacks at this time was one of limited hope, both for the older and younger generations with increasing atmospheric anger. However, with Fences we witness a more positive ending to the play, and it is Troy who absorbs all the anger from others towards him. Although in many ways Troy’s life is a tragedy and a struggle, it serves as a self-sacrifice to the younger generation. With Troy’s death is the end of an old generation encompassed by poverty and subordination, and the start of a young hopeful generation, of which Wilson was part. The brain-damaged Gabriel plays a muted trumpet to sound the passing of his brother and Harrison believes this is a fitting end to Troy’s death as it, ‘is a...gesture...of Troy’s transformation into the spirit which promises a new day.’xxii Harrison goes on to comment that Gabriel’s ‘That’s the way that go!’xxiii provides a sobering finish to the play and indeed Troy’s life, that restores order and reality to a very unreal life, ‘profaned by intolerable social limitations.’xxiv     In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom there is a male-orientated ego match between the musicians, comparing and discussing their tales of survival in an inhospitable world, that in turn causes a heated atmosphere. Levee ignores the wiser and older Toledo, fully intent on his own satisfaction and ambitions and ‘self-indulgence.’xxv Wilson depicts Levee in this way to show his readers that if they are Black and follow Levee’s methods, they will end in self-destruction. It is therefore necessary to learn from history’s lessons and older folk before selfishness.     In his plays Wilson often provides us with subtle perspectives on the past, allowing the reader to think over them more deeply and re-evaluate them. Through Bono we learn about the ‘walking blues’ and how this associates with the African American diaspora. In Act I, scene iv he comments, ‘they walk out their front door and just take on down one road or another and keep on walking.’ In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Toledo offers an interesting look at history via a ‘culinary parable’xxvi You take and make your history with that stew. Alright. Now it’s over. Your history’s over and you done ate the stew. But you look around and you see some carrots over here, some potatoes over there. That stew’s still there.’xxvii     In conclusion it would correct in saying that history plays a fundamental role throughout Wilson’s work. Harrison argues that Blacks’ status as a minority race in America has helped form a bond of proud, vibrant writers like Wilson. ‘Marginalization prompted African Americans to probe the recesses of ancestral memory for recognizable African values, linguistic techniques, and aesthetic constructions that could be cultivated as a source of ethnic reaffirmation’xxviii     In amongst the implied messages to Blacks, his plays are so densely rich that they also cross cultures and remind us of the difficulties of inner-family life, particularly between husband and wife and father and son. In many of Wilson’s plays is the notion of a blues dynamic that sets the tone of despair and a will to survive. Moreover the texture and structure of his plays have a bluesy feel. Like a blues song his plays are lamenting and slow-moving. Kester is of the opinion that in Fences, Wilson ‘flattens...time by bringing...an acute sense of the closeness of personal experience and by drawing a parallel between past and future generations.’xxix The past of Black religion and migration is deep rooted in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Harrison concludes it, ‘extends backward into the past where ancestors reside for “paradigmatic acts of gods.”’xxx Repetition in the form of music, phrases in speech and actions further extends the use of the blues dynamic and the repeating of history. The harshness of Troy’s father on him for instance is repeated by Troy on his son. Furthermore the importance of memory and history is apparent in the most subtle of places. For example in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, ‘Bertha’s biscuits,’xxxi and in Fences the fence as well as ‘Rose’s chicken’xxxii and the ‘carrying out of trash.’xxxiii All of these items about the home are linked with the characters’ joint need for settlement. Away from the wilderness of slavery in the fields comes a real protective feel to cement their sense of home. In Wilson’s plays there is, ‘an implicit mythic voice, one that struggles against the wall of history...and an explicit narrator.’xxxiv It is a common theme not just in Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, but indeed throughout many of August Wilson’s plays that recognising the past of oral tradition and ancestral hardships is essential in establishing survival and more positively, a brighter, more progressive future for Blacks in America.     i Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 316 ii Elkins, Marilyn, August Wilson: A Casebook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994) Pg 162 iii Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 303 iv Elkins, Marilyn, August Wilson: A Casebook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994) Pg 163 v ibid vi ibid vii Elkins, Marilyn, August Wilson: A Casebook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994) Pg 164 viii Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 315 ix ibid x ibid xi Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 309 xii ibid xiii ibid xiv ibid xv ibid xvi Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 293 xvii ibid xviii Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 304 xix ibid xx ibid xxi ibid xxii Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 305 xxiii ibid xxiv ibid xxv Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 308 xxvi Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 315 xxvii ibid xxviii Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 292 xxix Elkins, Marilyn, August Wilson: A Casebook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994) Pg 108 xxx Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 315 xxxi Elkins, Marilyn, August Wilson: A Casebook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994) Pg 106 xxxii ibid xxxiii ibid xxxiv Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) Pg 306

Joel Schueler Bibliography     Wilson, August, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991)

Bulls in the Attic Liam Spencer     I rolled over in the uncomfortable bed. My back was killing me. Ugh, another day of this shit. It was 10:30 in the morning, and my head hurt worse than usual. I rose and went for the only known cure for the morning blah; coffee. After the pot was set, I went to the bathroom and did my routine. I still felt like shit and faced a whole day of it. I wished I could have fast forwarded to after work, when I’d be home drinking wine and catching up on the days’ news while I waited for Zantha to come over.     There was an opportunity we were exploring. It was a 5,500 sq ft building with storefront, warehouse space, and offices that could be converted to a place to live. All that for much less than an apartment! I had doubts they’d lease it to me. They wanted a business plan and financials. I had neither. Zantha was very optimistic, though, and was coming over to help prepare paperwork. I would be so glad to see her!     After a third cup of coffee, I looked at my cell to see if anyone sent a text. It showed I had missed Zantha’s call. Being awake enough to converse, I eagerly called back, figuring she was bored at her store and wanted to talk. The day was starting well after all.     Her day was going far worse than mine! First, she ran out of coffee at her house, so had none in the morning. She remembered I had left coffee at her store the last time I was there, and so headed to the store early to take her cure for mornings. She arrived to a waterfall in the middle of her store. Upstairs plumbing of the old building had developed a leak. Forty pieces of clothing were soaked. She called the building owner and left a message, then called the maintence guy, who called the plumber. Then she rearranged the store to make room for the new waterfall.     What a day she was having! It was busy for a Tuesday, but few stayed long. The place was a mess. Sales were lost. A couple hours later, the building owner had come in to see the new store design she had just completed. He did not get his voice mail. He stood staring at the waterfall, then left to make more phone calls.     We talked for a good half hour. She was understandably upset, but there was a delighted wackiness to her voice. It was bad, but an adventure. I love that about her. She can take the shittery of life and make it an adventure, so long as it doesn’t take too long to be resolved. We talked and laughed, but had mixed in empathy and frustration in the conversation to keep each other sane. Soon, she went back to thinking of ways around the water and I left for work. The fun was over, for a while, anyway. She’d still be over that night, and more enjoyment was in store.     It turned out more bad luck was to follow. The plumber came, assessed the situation, and left to get pipes and so on. The waterfall continued. Customers came and left quickly. Time rolled on and on. Still no plumber. Hours later, a phone call solved the mystery; his truck broke down. He wouldn’t be back that day. The water for the building would be turned off after closing, but the water would continue to fall all night.     My route was fine, the usual shittery, but nothing too terrible. My back ached, I couldn’t feel my legs, and felt devaststed when filling the gas tank. The usual plight of the underemployed. I counted the hours until I’d have both wine and Zantha, and hope for opportunity. I daydreamt about it all; the storefront would hold Zantha’s second store, which meant more time with her. The apartment built in the office space. The warehouse converted to a playhouse and wine bar. The cheap rent and higher income. Being a business owner again. The return of my old self; ambitious, optimistic, driven, hopeful, not just a low paid employee with dim prospects who depended on coffee and wine to make it through the day.     Toward evening, Zantha sent a text explaining that she had a monster headache and was going to lay down for a while. I knew what that meant; no Zantha tonight. Gone was the adventure she had in her voice earlier. It had taken too long. I couldn’t blame her. What shit to have happen! She lost money from sales, had 40 pieces damaged, and nothing had been resolved. Small business owners don’t have much margin of losing before it becomes a huge deal, and have to strike while sales are available. She had taken a hell of a hit. I found myself wishing I could give a long massage and clear the way for her to sleep sound.     That evening we spoke by phone again, and she told me all about it. Nothing was done about the waterfall all day, and she wondered about the next day. I listened and tried to support her. No help could do anything but ease the stress slightly. It was numbers and frustrations, all external to us. Conditions can be so ruthless. I offered to help at the store in the morning. She accepted. We got off the phone after an hour or so. I had a few more glasses of wine, tried to write poetry, and went to sleep.     The next morning, I woke with a severe backache that overshadowed my aching head. Coffee brewed, bathroom routine done, and ached stretching out of the way, coffee brought focus. It was 8:30. Coffee helped me remember why I was up so early; Zantha. I chugged two more cups while smoking, filled my thermos, and was out the door.     Zantha’s store was rearranged to cater to the demanding water, but she managed to make it look alright. There was a big tub in the middle of the store, filled with last night’s water. Zantha and I slid the tub out to the parking lot and dumped it. We put it back with little water on the floor, and I worked on the carpet with a shopvac. Zantha went about the store trying to make it look as good as possible. It was early, so few people came by anyway.     Shortly, two plumbers came in, needing to get to the attic to work on the pipes. Zantha showed them where to go. They hardly looked like professional plumbers. They looked more like rural farmers, with overalls and dumbed down facial expressions. They had rural, almost southern accents. Thre was a certain drawl to the speaking. I had known guys like that; unruly, clumbsy good old boys who lacked style, consideration, or common sense. Bulls in china shops. I worried for Zantha. Don’t get me wrong. I was and am a dog, but I can be a well behaved dog. They’re bulls. Bulls just destroy.     Having cleaned up as well as could be done, I could have left. There was nothing more I could have done. I stayed around for Zantha, as I worried about the farmer/plumber bulls that were in her attic. Customers were coming in. Zantha flowed magically through the store helping them pick the right looks, the right clothes, the right everything. The bulls in the attic thumped and stuffled voices could be heard, much like Charlie Brown’s teacher. I could see the collision course; the cultured, upscale customers in the store and the bulls in the attic meeting head to head. The bulls had nothing to lose. The customers would leave, offended. The only one who could lose was Zantha. I pondered calling off work to head off the bulls. I was the bullfighter of a woman’s clothing store.     The bulls came and went with pipes and tools, and thumped around in the attic and clanged at their truck. As late morning arrived, more ladies tried things on, and the dressing rooms were rather busy. Many tuned out the waterfall and got in the zone of shopping. Things were going as well as could be.     With everything going on, there was one thing neither I nor Zantha had thought of. While the bulls sounded muffled from the sales floor, they could be heard perfectly from the dressing rooms. It wasn’t an issue early, as few customers ventured in the store, and few had gone into the dressing rooms. Now those rooms were busy.     A woman who had been in the zone for quite a while headed for the dressing room with a pricey sexy outfit . She was an older lady, probably in her early fifties, and conservatively dressed. She walked past sporting a devilish grin and a bright glow about her. It was clear that just the thought of owning such an outfit was making her day. Knowing nothing about womens’ fashion, and not caring about anything except taking clothes off, I was amazed at the effect clothes can have on a person. It gave me an even greater admiration of Zantha and her passions.     The lady was in there quite a while. Then it happened. The bulls in the attic had been coming toward the stairway after taking off the leaking pipes. That put them close to the dressing room and the cash register where Zantha and I were standing.     We over heard one bull say to the other, “Now THEMS some old pipes!”     There were thumps in the dressing room. Shortly, the older lady darted from the dressing room. Her clothes were unkempt, and her shoes barely on. She darted past, redfaced and furious, emabarrassed and hurt. Zantha held her head low, her hands over her face, trying to suppress anger. I held her close and waited for bulls to climb down the ladder. I knew bulls would respond to a bullfighter better than to a classy woman like Zantha, so I offered to talk with them. She went to the other customers. I went to fight the bulls.     “Hey guys, can I speak with you for a moment?”     They glared harsh. Bulls on the ready. “What you want?”     “She has customers here. They can hear you in the dressing room. A lady heard you about old pipes and thought you meant her.”     Laughter erupted. Make a bull laugh, and he’ll do what you want.     “It sounds funny, but it cost Zantha a sale of $250. Would you laugh if you lost $250 in 3 seconds?”     There was no laughing.     “Just please watch what you say, and try to stay away from the dressing room area. You might want to apologize to Zantha too. She’s losing a lot of money with all this.”     The bulls sneared a bit, then went to the truck. Zantha was glowing about another sale. My God, what a woman! What talent, smarts, skill! She rebounds from everything with a glow, with class, with smarts, with beauty. I watched her a while in admiration, doing her thing, smiling and glowing. A Godsend. A miracle. Everything would be just fine with her, despite it all. Waterfalls, disasters, lack of coffee. She’ll always be amazing.     It was time for me to go to work. Back to realities of traffic, killer back aches, headaches, idiot customers, incompetent managers, low pay, dim prospects, hopelessness, and low wages. At least Zantha would be over that night. There was much to look forward to, and much to be happy about. I climbed in my little clown car. I had been the bullfighter, now I was the clown.     The mindless, soulless clown car pulled out of the parking lot, and drove away from the store. The brakes ground at every stop. Sports talk came from the radio. Rain was swept away by wipers. There was no feeling in the legs that operated the pedals. An aching back leaning against the seat. A numbed spirit paired with an empty mind went on autopilot to get the day over with. Cigarette smoke rolled out of the window. A new day was at hand.

Briefing on Cue Stanley B. Trice     The Director held his three page budget brief in his sweaty hands unable to think of anything but his belief in himself. “Sweaty hands are the result of my excitement,” he told the analyst who handed him the papers.     The person walked out of the Director’s office and back among the cubicle workers without saying anything. The Director only noticed the three pages that had the correct complement of white space and purposely lacked numbers.     “The resource committee will believe in me,” he spoke into his empty office. “I am important to the organization,” he said as if in a prayer to himself.     The meeting tomorrow with the resource committee consumed the Director’s attention the rest of that day. If it went his way, he would control more public money and direct the funds toward what he thought was important. That was all that mattered, he concluded. Not the bobbing heads of his staff in their cubicle farm who should be trying harder to make me famous, he thought.     The Director read the biographies of the resource committee. Five balding men who the Director was confident he could manipulate into giving him what he wanted. All he had to do was tell them he was saving lives. The Director considered this thought of saving lives. The gimmick worked before, but he did not know for how much longer before someone asked him what lives were saved.     “The secret is I don’t care for anyone’s life,” said the Director to the five photographs he held. “You are pitiful,” he told them only because they were only pictures.     That evening inside his suburbia apartment, the Director found the emptiness creak at him. He took a half bottle of merlot to bed. The stupor allowed him to sleep through his nightmares that he could be a failure if he looked too hard in all of the successes he thought he had achieved.     In the morning, the Director walked toward the Sun and into the Building where he forgot his nightmares and envisioned himself a beautiful leader, again.     Stomping through his staff’s cubicle, the Director wanted to yell at them to save his life that he could not save. The Director called a staff meeting.     “I need to control more public money because it will suit my needs and gain me political advantage. Don’t you people see this? You act like you’re shipwrecked in my organization. Stop that and listen only to me. I need to be successful in the budget meeting. I want the committee to give me more control of public money. I need more.” He liked this speech. He liked that public money did not need to be earned, just stolen. No one spoke or, if they did, the Director did not listen.     That afternoon in his office alone, the Director used his index finger to trace over an outline he made that listed all the people and resources he controlled in his empire. There was too much white space. His staff told him the programs under him were failing. That was their fault, he wanted them to know. They were nothing but a tiered hierarchy of lost souls fighting among themselves to help him select the next scapegoat to blame for any failure. Nothing was his fault. It couldn’t be.     Yes, he liked the rumors of him being a line hierarchy and an autocratic, despot tin god. Yes, he heard the losers just before they lost. Yes, he still had his kingdom when they were gone.     The Director only let a few of his staff talk to him before this critical meeting. They adored him and lavished infinite yeses and praise for his three slides. They told the Director how his budget brief would make him a success. They are smart, he thought, they don’t want to be the next scapegoat.     His briefing slides were out of order when he presented his case. The Director told inaccuracies that he covered over in lies. He succeeded in his failures.     The Director gave the bosses hope that they were decent, intelligent, and heroic leaders. Here was someone who needed their help. They granted him more money so he could succeed next time.

Stanley B. Trice Bio     Stanley has had a dozen of his short stories published in national and international magazines in addition to several essays and over a dozen book reviews published regionally. He won several local writing contests and is a member of the Riverside Writers, the Virginia Writers Club, and the North Carolina Writers Network. During the day, Stanley commutes by train to Northern Virginia where he works on budgets and legislative issues. He uses the long commute as an opportune time to write. Currently, he is looking for publication of his science fiction book about monsters who may be no more than different looking people.

I remember Janet Kuypers 1997     I remember the hot tub party at the end of our junior year. Remember how I begged you to take me, because it was a date dance and not a casual party? You already had a date so you set me up with Reedy, and I thought it was just an innocent friendship set-up... Ugh, what a mess, there I was, trying to push him away from me, and then Chad came along and saved me. I have pictures of us from that night, in the hot tub together, with Tres, who won the palest-man-at-the-party award, or photos inside, with plastic lais around our necks.     I remember when we went to the They Might be Giants concert and managed to get seats in the third row. The two of us, along with four other strangers, then yelled requests at the band when they weren’t playing music. I still can’t believe we actually got them to respond to us while they were in the middle of a show.     I remember when we were travelling through Boston, how we stopped at Cheers to take our picture in front of the front door. We were soaking wet because it was raining on our only day in Boston. But we followed all the painted red lines on the streets to find historical landmarks, stood on the torture devises on the sidewalks, took pictures everywhere.     And when we drove to Harvard campus, we took pictures of ourselves looking “intelligent” - looking upward, hands under our chin, poised in thought, looking as tacky as possible.     I remember how we would sit in my dorm room, in the window sill, feet hanging outside, my stereo blaring. You used to always joke that one day you’d push me out the window. But we’d sit there, listening to music, singing to people that would walk in front of my window. Remember how we’d sing to Potholes in My Lawn by De La Soul or Pump Up the Jam by Technotronic or Hoe Down by Special Ed. How you thought the lines to Istanbul (Not Constantinople) by They Might be Giants wasn’t “This is a recording” but “Give it to me, give it to me.” How you thought the lines to Headhunter by Front 242 wasn’t “Three you slowly spread the net” but “Three you slowly spread the legs.” We’d sing, make people look up at us, and either wave or laugh.     Yesterday was the first day that I hadn’t cried for you. Those first two days had been so hard, I might have been fine for a half hour and then something would trigger it in my mind and I would want to cry. I thought maybe I’m getting used to the news, but today I cried again.     I remember the Valentine’s Dance we went to together. It was at your fraternity house, you came over, dressed up in a nice suit, I was wearing a red strapless Vanna White-style dress, and you came over and you looked so mad.      “Why are you mad?”     “I just came from the house, it’s an hour before the dance, and everyone is wearing jeans watching the basketball game. Decorations aren’t even up.”     I look at my dress. ”So what you’re saying is that I’m overdressed?”     We decided to take pictures of us dressed up before I changed dresses. We went through a few photos, then I changed into a more casual, cotton, off-the-shoulder dress. We took more pictures with outfit number two. Then I felt a breeze. Apparently there was a rip in the back of the dress, making it indecent at best. So, back to the closet I went, found a casual black dress, and so we took yet more pictures. Then off to the dance we went.     I remember how you’d come over to my dorm on Sunday nights, and we’d order pizza, usually Grog’s, Home of Mold, I think, and spend the evening together. We’d play Stand by R.E.M. and do the dance they do in the video. Or we’d play Madonna’s Vogue and you’d contort yourself around. Once we even spent the evening writing up lists of exes, like we were in high school.     I remember how we met - I was sitting in the cafeteria with the other girls from my dorm, and you were friends with them so you sat down and ended up right across the table from me. And it was right after Christmas break and I just got back from visiting my parents in Florida and was tan, so your first words to me were, “Is that a real tan?” And I was so mad at you, I though you were a cocky jerk.     “Well, you could have gone to a tanning salon over vacation!”     I don’t know how that could have been the start of one of the best friendships of my life.     And when you called me on the phone to tell me the news you still sounded so happy. Your viewpoint was that anyone could die at any point in time and we have to live every day to the fullest. “And I could be hit by a car tomorrow,” you said. You can’t let the thought of death kill you. And you were telling me these things, and I was trying so hard not to just start sobbing on the phone.     I remember our freshman year in college, after the horrible way we met, of course, and how we’d go to Eddie’s bar for ice cream drinks. They were about the only things we could order while underage, so we’d spend I don’t know how many Saturday afternoons drinking Oreo shakes, or maybe peach, or mint. I remember walking home to the dorms with you one rainy Saturday after an Eddie’s excursion, and we just decided to walk in the middle of the street, jumping in as many puddles as possible. A truck even drove by, yelled that we were going to catch colds. And we just laughed. We were alive, and invincible.     I remember when we met up in New Orleans, I was with Eugene, you were with Randy and Jessica, and you found out how to get to the roof of the Jackson Brewing Company building. It was the highest building near the French Quarter, and we had a fantastic view, all to ourselves.     I remember our freshman year you invited me to see the Violent Femmes in concert at Foellinger Hall. You got drunk, and ended up trying to make the moves on me, knowing I had a boyfriend... I knew you had just drank too much, but I had to draw the line when you licked the side of my face. I still like to tease you with that one.     You’re not supposed to die. This isn’t supposed to be happening to you. I’ve always expected to be able to visit your family after we all retire, compare photos of grandchildren. You can’t leave this hole in my life.     I remember after I broke up with Bill I still tried to remain friends with him so I could periodically borrow his black convertible. So one day I did, told him I needed to get some groceries, but I picked you up instead and we put the top down even when it was sixty-five degrees and about to rain and cruised around the mecca known as Champaign, Illinois.     I remember the Halloween Dance we went to. We couldn’t come up with costumes, and last minute we went to Dallas and Company costume shop and you picked up a Dick Tracy bright-yellow overcoat and hat, along with a plastic machine gun with two water cartridges. I put on a black cocktail dress, pulled up my hair, added rhinestones and a dimple and was Breathless Mahoney, but we made a point to fill the machine gun water cartridges, one with peach schnapps, one with peppermint. Someone at the dance would say, ”Don’t shoot me!” And we would say in unison, “Don’t worry.” No one could understand why we were shooting at each other’s faces.     I remember how every time we were going out for the evening and you’d be over waiting for me to get ready, I’d come out and ask you how I looked and you would always tell me that I looked really nice. Or sexy. Or fantastic. Or whatever. But you’d always say something to me me feel like the most beautiful girl in the world.     I don’t want to catalog these events, these times I’ve shared with you. I don’t want to feel as if there will never be any more memories with you.     I remember how every time you guys would come over to my apartment and start drinking, you would inevitably pull out my hats, particularly the wide-brimmed straw ones, and wear them. How many pictures do I have of you with Jay, or Brian, or Brad, all in a drunken stupor wearing women’s hats?     I remember how at your fraternity house, every time they’d have a party they’d have to play “Crockodile Rock” by Elton John once. And when they did, people made a ring around the dance floor (otherwise known as the living room), and your fraternity brothers would then proceed to do somersaults and other strange dances with each other. I’m glad this whole scene frightened you as much as it did me, because I remember how every time we heard the song we’d run into the basement where the kitchen was and hide until the song was over. Usually we’d find some potato chips or salad croutons to munch on, and we’d sit on the steel counter, amongst racks of generic white bread and bulk containers to tomato paste and talk.     I remember taking Dan out for his twenty-first birthday, this six-foot-five animal of a roommate of ours, and how he got so drunk that when he started to get violent in the bar you suggested that he “play with Carol” in order to entice him to leaving the bar. So we carried him through the bar until he broke free and fell right in front of the bouncers at the front door, and you tried to drag him outside, and then the five of us ended up carrying him blocks home, stopping occasionally from exhaustion and setting him in the dirt. When we got him in you suggested we write all over him, but me being the voice of reason suggested we only write all over his back, so in permanent markers you and Chad and Eric and Ray and I scribbled “I am a drunk moron!” and other intelligent remarks all over him. And you, you were smart enough to be gone when he finally woke up in the morning.     And you were on the phone with me saying that you just have to get used to the fact that you’re not going to grow old, have a family. That all you superiors tell you, wait till you get that promotion, and you know there is no waiting for the future, you won’t be around. People take for granted that they’re just going to be around.     You never did, of course, you were the one that was always making a point to cram as much living as you could in a day, but most people aren’t like that. Most people are never as alive as you.     I remember you and Sara standing on Green and Sixth waiting in line for the cash station when a cop walked up behind the two of you, and appeared to be in line. You asked, “Do you think the cop wants cash?”     I remember visiting you in New Hampshire, trying to decide where to go out to eat for lobster, til I decided on the mess hall at the base. So while you were at work your mom showed me a private room in the hall, with one elaborately set table for two, with china cabinets and a couch and roaring fireplace. I reserved it, went home and put on a black velvet dress and waited for you to get home from work. When you got back, I told your brother and sister to tell you that I changed our plans and I was in the bathroom. You started banging on the bathroom door, and when I opened it you were stunned. You were wearing a uniform that looked like a gas station attendant’s, and there I was, completely dressed up for a formal dinner.     Your sister took a picture of us in your hallway, you just after your shower and still in a bathrobe, and me in that dress.     And after dinner we went for a stroll outside, and you were holding my hand, and I remember thinking that I wanted you to kiss me. It’s funny how we both have thought about dating each other, but never found the right time.     I remember shopping with you on the East coast, going into a clothing store and watching you look for sweaters. You pulled out a pink patterned one, asked my opinion, and I shook my head no. “I’m not a pink person,” I said. You kept looking, so I pulled up a dark brown and black cardigan from the rack and held it up from a few feet away. You shook your head no and said loudly, “I’m not a black person,” loud enough for the black security guard to give you a funny look.     I think I want all of my friends to die after I do. I don’t think I can handle this. You’re not supposed to leave me, I’m the one that’s supposed to make the dramatic exit. Besides, whenever I get married, you’re supposed to stand up in the wedding. If you die before then, I swear, I’ll kill you.     I remember once our freshman year we were sitting in the cafeteria, I don’t remember if it was lunch or dinner, my roommate Lisa was there, and we were screwing around trying to be funny. Well, I got up and got a soft serve ice cream cone and acted like I was tripping as I got to the table, like I was going to drop the cone into your lap. Well, I didn’t, but the ice cream wasn’t securely anchored to the cone, and the next thing I know all my ice cream was right in the middle of your food.     I remember visiting you in New Hampshire, and one night we just watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off over and over again. We learned half the lines to the movie that night.     “I could be the walrus, and I’d still have to bum rides off of people.”     “Drugs?” “No, thank you, I’m straight.”     We’d always find something, a line from a movie or television show... Oh, and Heathers, we could probably recreate scenes from that movie, we’ve seen it so much.     “Thank you, Ms. Fleming, you call me when the shuttle lands.”     “Icklooga bullets, I’m such an idiot...”     “Great paté, but I gotta motor if I’m going to make it to the funeral on time.”     “Will somebody tell me why I smoke these damn things?” “’Cause you’re an idiot.” “Oh, yeah...” God, these quotes make sense to no one else, just us, just you and me. It was like we had our own language.     I remember when you came to Chicago to visit me, it was around Christmas time, and you finally saw the house I grew up in. The only thing you noticed was that all of the lamps in the house were hanging from chains.     You said that some people feel like they are on death’s door with a T-cell count of four hundred, and some people can run marathons with a T-cell count of zero. You tell me yours is at eighty, and you feel fine. A little run-down, but that is to be expected.     This scares me. I know I’m being selfish, I know that deep-down inside of you it has to scare you too, but you’re too strong to let it beat you. I don’t want you to feel a little run-down, I don’t want you to feel just fine. I want you to feel alive, more alive than anyone else. I want you to live forever.     I remember once when you took me to an Air Force dinner dance, and afterward I went with you to a party of mostly Air Force people. There were people there I knew, and we were out really late, and by three-thirty in the morning you and Chris walked me home. And we stood out on Fourth Street and talked for a while, and before we knew it you had fallen to the ground grabbing you knee, screaming. You knew how to pop your knee back in place, and granted, from what I understand having your knee pop out is really, really painful, but watching you there almost made Chris and I laugh. After you got it back in place you were just drunk and sad and still in pain and all I kept thinking was “Oh, please, he just needs some sleep,” and I just kept thinking, “Oh, we’re right in front of my apartment, please, it’s four in the morning, let me just go to bed,” but I stayed out there with you and Chris until you were ready to get up and make the long journey home.     I remember the Halloween party I held on Friday the thirteenth of October - your birthday. I put up pages from the Weekly World News about supernatural sightings, lit candles and pulled out the ouija board, then you came over, put on one of my hats, I gave you a carnation, and then we all went out for the night.     I remember when you and Jay and Ellen came over to welcome Blaine to Illinois. You got really drunk, fed Ellen my pound cake that my mother gave me, then proceeded to fall asleep in my chair, sitting sideways with your head in my open window sill. And yes, I have pictures, so you can’t deny any of this.     I remember going to C.O. Daniel’s with you on Friday afternoons with the other guys from the house and how we’d dress up in our Greek Sweatshirts to fit in... Well, you always fit in, that’s how you dressed, but I had to make an exception in my dress code for these weekly happy hours. And I remember how we were wallowing in our respective depression one friday afternoon, saying that nobody loves us and we’re ugly and we’ll grow up old and alone. Well, the vision I had of my future was that I would be an old maid living in an apartment with forty cats, periodically picking one up and asking “You love me, don’t you?”     Well, anyway, I remember how we made a pact that if the two of us were still alone by the time we were forty, we’d get married.     We made a pact. You can’t back out on me now.

Janet Kuypers Bio     Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.     She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.     She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org and chaoticarts.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images.     Since 2010 Kuypers also hosts the weekly Chicago poetry open mic at the Café, while also broadcasting the Cafés weekly feature podcasts (and where she sometimes also performs impromptu mini-features of poetry or short stories or songs, in addition to other shows she performs live in the Chicago area).     In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, , Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, and the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook . Three collection books were also published of her work in 2004, Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art).