January 2020 | fiction
I never met my great-aunt Mary. She died in 1929 at the age of six when she caught a bad cold at her friend Rosie’s birthday party. They buried the girl in a blue dress beneath six feet of red clay dirt in hard winter. “Dig her up in 50 years and she’ll look the same as the day you put her in the ground,” the vault man Henry Rose told her parents as snowflakes bit their cheeks. My father dragged me to the graveyard when I was 16. I’d been to the graveyard plenty of times, but I just hung around by the fence and poked sticks in the dirt. He stuck some fake yellow tulips into the dry, cracked ground and said to me, “We wouldn’t be here if Mary lived, you know.” I looked around the graveyard with my hands jammed in my jean shorts, bored stiff. My phone buzzed, but I ignored it. Danny Kline kept texting me to hook up in his treehouse, but I told him no way. Jerk. He blew me off freshman year, now he just wanted a quickie because Rachel dumped him on Tuesday. I told him to go screw himself behind the dugout, and then call me back later. I didn’t pay any attention as my father kept talking, just spotted a little girl in a blue dress playing by an oak tree beside an unmarked stone. She lifted her head, brown curls dangling around her pretty face, and then disappeared. I stood there staring for a long time until my father told me we needed to get moving because the clouds looked like rain and the road turned to a sloppy mess. I spent the summer standing by the graveyard fence waiting for the little girl to come back. She never did.
Rebecca Buller
Rebecca Buller is a native Oklahoman and a lover of the written word. She’s been published in the quarterly issue 84 of Burningword Literary Journal, October 2017, Star 82 Review, A3 Review & Press, and is a three-time Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition award winner.
January 2020 | fiction
Mostly the problem was that I kept disappearing. I’d be gulping a glass of water or roving through a revolving door or chatting with a man in a crowded bar and then I’d be gone. Just for a moment really, but long enough. I had to keep checking my reflection to make sure I was still there.
It was unclear what exactly had brought this on. It could have been a number of things. There were the superstitious possibilities — your black cats, your stepping on cracks — but more likely it was some fading sense of assumption. Who could assume anything anymore?
It was those hesitant moments that seemed the worst. Where I didn’t just disappear for other people, I disappeared for me too.
When I was gone other girls appeared in my place. Younger girls, girls who knew things. Girls who presumed to know things. Girls who didn’t have any problems with assumptions. Girls who didn’t hesitate.
They said “I” a lot. They asserted that they were there. They wore floral dresses and midrift tops and heels that were higher than mine. I’d never even worn a midrift top. I couldn’t pull that off. My clothing was all regular length. It was “office appropriate” or “business casual.”
My hesitations had gotten worse. Did I ever really know anything? Did my face and voice and hair and skin ever exist at all?
The seasons came and went and only old ladies at the park talked to me. But did they even want to talk to me? They seemed preoccupied with their pigeons and their romance novels. Maybe even they were just trying to be nice.
The younger girls went out. They danced. They ordered drinks. They said things like “I know how to take care of myself.” They insisted. They found men who simply praised their being. They did not think about the old ladies with the pigeons. They didn’t even see them.
Occasionally I’d meet a man and he’d tell me that he’d seen me somewhere before. He was sure he’d seen me. But maybe that had been an illusion, or maybe this was an illusion. And maybe he’d go off with someone else, someone who really existed. Who fully existed. A girl who never worried about the unknown or what happens next because the future was something they could think about later. In the future. A girl who would assume there would be a future. A girl who would assume anything at all.
Nicole Beckley
Nicole Beckley is a writer and performer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Fiction Southeast, New Limestone Review, Litro UK, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 7×7, Tribeza, and The A.V. Club, as well as in many small theaters and on at least one public access channel. She’s at work on a linked story collection titled Perfect Miss. She holds a B.A. in Urban Studies and Communications from Stanford University.
January 2020 | poetry
I don’t have much longer
in the playing fields of love.
So when he looks at the tip
of my ring finger and sees
under the bistro lamp a nascent
callous he perceives desire.
All I do is metaphor,
the steel g-string pressed
again, again, again, in B minor’s
third position–thus my hand
remembers what my body
learns of its embodiment.
I am the guitar.
Play me now.
Karla Linn Merrifield
Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 700+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 14 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the newly released full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing) received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is a frequent contributor to The Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, and assistant editor and poetry book reviewer emerita for The Centrifugal Eye.
January 2020 | poetry
Moment in a Story
A Japanese aphorism, said to be samurai:
“Live like you are already dead.”
Fair enough, the same thing
my squad sergeant told me
as we shared a foxhole under fire
somewhere near Cu Chi, sometime
in the ’69 rainy season. “You
can’t die if you’re already dead.
Nothing else matters.” I hoped
it was true, because a piece of shrapnel
sliced off the top of his skull
disclosing the brain
in a stunning anatomy lesson.
Snowden’s secret
confirmed once more.
Metal shards cut me, too,
but only a minor tattooing
that healed to invisible. I
didn’t break through to another side
or do the death thing. I just absented
me from myself and suffered it,
as millions before me had, returning
to a continuation of my life
that never quite worked out.
Mother Medusa
He lopped her head off while looking
at her reflection in a shiny shield,
so he couldn’t be petrified
like all the others who came before,
now statues scattered around her.
She didn’t do it on purpose. Poseidon
raped her in Athena’s temple
affronting the goddess who cursed the victim,
having her beautiful face and golden tresses
rendered horrific, her hair becoming
her trademark writhing serpents,
a monster whose terrifying visage
turned all who saw her into stone.
But the sea god had impregnated her,
and when the sword took her head
she foaled Pegasus, the winged horse,
who would wind up outlined in stars.
It’s part of a myth.
Metamorphosis eats mimesis,
then excretes it in other forms.
Happens all the time.
Save your questions for later,
when you find someone who can help.
Lucas Carpenter
Lucas Carpenter’s stories have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Short Story, The Crescent Review, Nassau Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and South Carolina Review. He is also the author of three collections of poetry, one book of literary criticism, a collection of short stories, and many poems, essays, and reviews published in more than twenty-five periodicals, including Prairie Schooner, The Minnesota Review, College Literature, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kansas Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, Concerning Poetry, Poetry (Australia), Southern Humanities Review, College English, Art Papers, San Francisco Review of Books, Callaloo, Southern History Journal, Chicago Quarterly Review, and New York Newsday. He is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Emory University.
January 2020 | nonfiction
We stand in our black catering aprons waiting for the wedding ceremony to end. For the guests to hike up the hill with their demands. There is a lull before the storm.
I watch as a bee lands just inside a half-empty glass perched on the counter behind the bar. It is late in the season, and the bee moves slowly, sluggish in the cool afternoon, as it hurtles toward its fate. It approaches the ledge and hovers over the surface of the lemonade. I wonder how long the drink has been sitting out.
The bee lingers, enticed by the sticky sweet, but hesitant. It gathers a lick—a sip—and suddenly tumbles all the way in, flailing and muttering, unable to buzz under the weight of the mild yellow liquid. It is like watching a young man fall in love with the wrong woman.
There is a gravity that cannot be argued with. The bee submerges and reappears, struggling in fits and starts, foaming up the liquid. It goes still—then, thrashes again, harder than before.
I am a rapt audience. Small-talk swirls. I’m not paying attention, except to the bee. I stand waiting on this ceremony to end. Waiting on this bee to die. Waiting on whatever can grow out of this arid pause.
And, it dawns on me—a dull ache that deepens with every damp wingbeat against the glass—how I am complicit to this suffering. I witness death encroach and pull back and resurrect again and again and again. The natural way of things.
Eventually, it’s me who breaks. I can’t take it any more.
“Will someone kill that fucking bee?” I say unkindly, a hint of upset braided into my voice. I am brimming with fury, an emotion that surprises even me, its bearer. Appalled by my own curiosity at how long it will take for the bee to die, I berate myself, wishing I could muster kindness, a shining compassion for it all. For the bee and those watching it and all the eyes and minds adjusting to the very thought of something so merciful—the intrepid act of living, right up to the edge, to the very, very end.
The soft-spoken-Millennial bartender with a Jesus-beard turns and in one unbroken gesture dumps the contents of the glass down the floor drain. He has the grace not to smile at his own quiet act of saving the world.
Anna Oberg
Anna Oberg is a professional photographer living and working in Colorado. When she’s not hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park with her camera, she writes from home. She holds a Master’s degree in American Literature from Eastern Kentucky University. This is her first publication.
