Weird in a Normal World

October 2023 | nonfiction

The table is long, filled with empty plates, glasses, and a steaming pitcher of coffee. Everyone is smiling, and grandpa has an eyebrow cocked in a sassy way at the camera. The plates are red, and they nearly blend in with the teak table. A light on the wall shines behind the family, just above grandpa. A stone fireplace sits to the right of grandpa, and his daughter, my boyfriend’s mother, sits in front of the fireplace, snuggled up close to her father– grandpa. In front of her sits my future brother-in-law, his blonde hair parted in the middle to look straight out of the 90s. The swinging door to the kitchen is far behind everyone, slightly skewed to the left. In front of the door and to the left of grandpa sits grandma, her body hunched just slightly. She leans into my boyfriend, her youngest grandchild, just as his mother leans into grandpa. Closest to the camera is my boyfriend, soon fiancé. Everyone is smiling, probably because they are full of breakfast foods, but more likely because they are enjoying the company. It’s grandpa’s 93rd birthday, and he’s going strong. I’ve heard stories about him, about the farm he owns and continues to run. My boyfriend told me all about it, about the times he worked on the farm. I can listen to stories, but that is it. There’s an empty chair at the table, and I wonder if I could ever fill it. I imagine coming with my boyfriend, or maybe fiancé, or maybe even husband one day to visit his grandparents. I want them to smile at me, offer me a hug, and eat breakfast with me. I want to sit at that table. But I know I can’t. I can’t because they are old and can’t handle change. I can’t because their grandson, my boyfriend, is the normal one, the one not married to a man, but in reality, he is. He is in a relationship with someone who looks like a man at face value but was born a woman. If he told his grandparents? Who knows. He wants to keep them safe in their old age and keep life simple. But my life, and now his life, is not simple. We are two men in a happy relationship. I have a vagina, but strangers don’t see that. We’re nearly engaged, we’ve bought the rings, and we have started the process to have a child. Yet his grandparents will never know this, never know me. And so, at night, as I’m alone in my bed, I find myself hoping my life wasn’t so complicated, that I could be normal, that I could sit at the table and enjoy breakfast.

Aarron Sholar

Aarron Sholar’s book, The Body of a Frog: A Memoir on Self-Loathing, Self-Love, and Transgender Pregnancy,is forthcoming from Atmosphere Press, and his essays have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He holds an MFA from MSU, Mankato, and a BA from Salisbury University. He serves as the Prose Editor for Beaver Magazine.

Seeing Stars

October 2023 | poetry

A house built on sand makes itself felt when a mother

hides glasses of whiskey in the drawers of her vanity table.

That our family was special and blessed was the wishful

fiction read to us children at bedtime. Asteroid and disaster

are linguistic siblings; the Milky Way is a road of milk, a spill

of cream in a black-coffee heaven; and stars, though regarded

as gods by the Greeks, are merely dense balls of gas that spewed

their chemical guts into the galaxy. “Let the stars sit where they will,”

Coyote cries in the Navajo myth, flinging up handfuls of glittering

mica that stick to the sky helter-skelter. My flame-haired mother

saw shades of gray that my father was blind to, yet she projected

her own tortured colors on each of us in turn, her afternoon empathy

sucking me in to be spat upon later. Etymologies tell more truth

about life than the words do themselves, as in the Greek prefix sark

linking “sarcasm” to sarcophagus, literal eater of flesh. Like my mother,

a star in its red giant phase, devouring her innermost planets, the milk

of her human kindness curdled by accusations that ripped me apart

like hyenas tearing the flesh from my bones. A star-crossed ancestral

curse hounded my Janus-faced mother, who winked out at last

like a star.

Sharon Whitehill

 Sharon Whitehill, a retired English professor from Grand Valley State University in Michigan, is currently enjoying her retirement in Port Charlotte, Florida. After years of hard work and dedication, she has achieved her dream of having her poems published in various literary magazines. She has authored two chapbooks titled “The Umbilical Universe” and “Inside Out to the World,” as well as a full collection called “A Dream of Wide Water.” In spring 2024, she will release her third chapbook titled “This Sad and Tender Time.”

Outside their Circle

October 2023 | poetry

They finished each other’s sentences about the differences

between ’56 and ’57 Chevies, how they rebuilt transmissions,

how the Hurst shifters needed a hole drilled in the floorboard,

as I sat in the back seat hearing tales of another country.

 

Their dads knew how to build houses and get the right tools,

took their boys to the seances of men huddled in a circle

who spit as they called forth the spirits of wrenches and vises,

while I slept each night on the living room couch overhearing

 

Mom and Sis whispering in their beds about curlers and creams.

I learned about how to bounce drops of water on the heated pan

telling what size flame would make the pancake batter not stick,

and to speak about love and hurt, and not bolt it down inside.

 

The soft voices of poets and writers speaking sadness and joy

let me wander in places far away from that sofa in the night,

and I liked myself knowing the things that other boys didn’t

as they lay under cars with friends finding power in engines.

 

No dad, I sank lower in the back seat hearing how men loved

mastering gears, electrodes, filters, valves, and carburetors

like there was a way of friendship with the tribe of machines

always scary to me, who hissed I was not one of them.

 

Glen A. Mazis

Glen A. Mazis taught philosophy for decades at Penn State Harrisburg, retiring in 2020. He has more than 90 poems in literary journals, including Rosebud, The North American Review, Sou’wester, Spoon River Poetry Review, Willow Review, Atlanta Review, Reed Magazine and Asheville Poetry Review, and the collection, The River Bends in Time (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012), a chapbook, The Body Is a Dancing Star (Orchard Street Press, 2020), and Bodies of Space and Time (Kelsay Books, 2022). He is the 2019 winner of the Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize (Orchard Street national contest).

Behind the Garden Wall

October 2023 | fiction

A cracked skull the constables told me, must have happened when I hit the flagstone walkway. And the bruises, obviously caused by my convulsions. There was no doubt in their minds that I had succumbed to a fit of hysteria, which was perfectly understandable considering the recent spate of molestations in area. The dark stains on my bodice they attributed to a bloody nose, a matter of a weak constitution to be sure. They weren’t concerned about the volume of blood and didn’t seem to notice that there wasn’t any of it around my nostrils. They also didn’t seem to notice the rumpled grass at the edge of the walkway—or that it continued to the garden.

It was an uncivil hour, and he made quite a racket banging on the front gate and yelling that the beast had been seen prowling the lane. He said he followed its curious spring-heeled footprints to our garden wall where they simply stopped, as if it had leaped straight up into the air and over the top. If I could just spare a candle, he could continue the hunt.

From what I could see of him, he wore a long, dark cloak and carried a bullseye lantern that was spent. As I opened the gate, I offered a candle fetched from the kitchen—but instead of accepting it, he threw off his cloak with a sudden jerk revealing a devilish visage and claws that glinted in the moonlight as if made of metal.

He seemed surprised that I didn’t immediately faint at the sight of him or run as he belched out a gout of blue-white flame and clawed at me. He seemed equally surprised at what else I had brought from the kitchen—and at just how much blood a dinner knife could draw.

I wonder if, after I rolled his body off me and began dragging it to the garden, the thought crossed his mind that I might have been expecting him.

Francesco Levato

Francesco Levato is a poet, professor, and writer of speculative fiction. Recent books include SCARLET; Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; and Elegy for Dead Languages. Recent speculative fiction appears in Savage Planets, Sci-Fi Shorts, and Tales to Terrify. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a Ph.D. in English Studies, and is an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.

Holly Willis

October 2023 | visual art

Peony 2

Peony 2

Peony 3

Peony 3

Holly Willis

Holly Willis is a hybrid artist/theorist working primarily in film, video, and still photography. Her work often examines the materiality of the image within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film, video, and photography with the goal of designing encounters with media that spark an embodied sense of curiosity and wonder alongside critical reflection about our relationship with the matter around us.