I look for dopplegangers, sure that I am adopted.
For a while, I scanned milk cartons. Now, I pause
for amber alerts even though I’m too old

for kidnapping. I want to be the long lost child
of DB Cooper or a descendant of Virginia Dare
and her Lumbee husband.

But, I’d never look like his side of the family -
no blue eyes, no fair skin, just brown . . . brown . . .
brown:  the inevitable pigment.

Commute

There’s always a right
you wait to make; that
you won’t remember
taking until you are already
at work except today
there’s movement
to your left where you
are checking traffic – the J
curve edged by a ditch,
a fence, a fenced in
yellow house that seems very
Wizard of Oz tornadoed into
place. The action – a deer -
never in the street but running
around the house’s black fence
to the grey chain link of government
access fencing. The house’s
only neighbor. The deer runs
its dotted hide against the metal
until the unlocked gate
to the greenway lets the doe – you
decide it is a doe – pass. In a movie,
someone would honk behind you
or you’d decide to turn left. You
turn right. That’s the route
you always drive.

By Elisa Korentayer

“Just call me the Grim Reaper,” my husband’s voice crackled above the car noise coming through his celphone.  “I just killed a sparrow and a grouse on my way to work.”

“Can you eat grouse?”  I knew that you couldn’t eat sparrow.

“Yep.  And I already have it in the backseat.”

My jaw clenched.  “You picked it up off the road?”

“Yep.”

I had mostly been kidding about eating the birds.  I knew that Chris’s father used to stop the car on family trips to check if the roadkill was still warm.  “If it’s warm, it’s fresh,” he would say to his family.  I hadn’t known Chris had inherited the family trait.

“You’re picking up roadkill like your father, huh?”

I should have known that would get Chris’s dander up.  His voice peaked.  “This is different!  I know it’s fresh because I killed it!”

When we got off the phone, I went looking through our cookbooks.  There were chapters on Chicken, Beef, Pork, and even Lamb.  There were no recipes for Grouse.  I chewed my lip while I tried to figure out what to do.  Chris was a good cook, but I was trying to be more domestic and wanted to help out.  I figured that grouse was a bird, and most birds are like chicken, so I could use my mother’s Eastern-European Jewish chicken recipe that she learned from my grandmother:  bake a chicken in the oven over a generous pile of sliced onions, potatoes, and carrots, the whole thing slathered with vegetable oil.

When Chris got home that evening, his button-down shirt just beginning to come out of his pants, I was finishing slicing the carrots.  I had the roasting pan out and the oven pre-heated.

“Hi honey!  Where is it?”

Chris dropped his briefcase on the kitchen chair. He pushed aside the spools of fishing line that were cluttering the kitchen table and plopped a brown paper grocery sack.  From the grocery sack, he brandished a clear plastic bag with the naked pink headless carcass of a bird inside of it.  A few stray tufts of gray feathers were flattened against the otherwise bare and bumpy skin.

“Did you clean it?” I asked, surprised. I knew that Chris didn’t like to clean his own fish; he usually threw them back in the water to catch again another day.

“No, my dad did.” This probably wasn’t the first roadkill grouse Ken had cleaned.  Or the tenth.

“Looks like he did a nice job.” I reached across the counter to take hold of the plastic bag Chris held, and hefted it to feel the weight of the bird. “It’s small,” I said.

“That’s how big grouse are.” Chris noticed that I was wearing an apron, then took in the rest of the kitchen. “What’s that,” he gestured to the counter, where I had lifted the knife again to continue cutting the carrots.

At his question, a piece of newly sliced carrot jumped from my knife and ricocheted off the backsplash and onto the floor with a snap.  I followed the jumping carrot with my eyes. “I figured we could cook the grouse with my mom’s chicken recipe.”

Out of the grocery bag, Chris lifted a red-and-white soup can with a familiar label.  “You don’t need any of that.  Just pour a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup over the top and bake it.”

I put down the knife with a clang.  “You’re kidding.”  I said.

“Nope, that’s the traditional way to cook grouse.”

I wasn’t sure if I was more surprised by the traditional way to cook grouse, or the fact that Chris knew it.  In any case, we didn’t need my jumping carrots.  I wiped my hands on my apron and walked around the counter to plop myself down in the chair.  “I wanted to surprise you,” I said.

Chris gave me a sympathetic look. “Nice job honey.”

“Can’t we use my mother’s chicken recipe anyway?  Won’t it turn out okay?”

“It would dry out,” Chris said, patting my shoulder. “You need to add fat to grouse.”  He looked behind us at my pile of vegetables.  “Thank you for getting everything ready.  We can use some of the carrots for a side dish and the rest of those vegetables for dinner tomorrow.”

One hour later, Chris had changed into a T-shirt and shorts. He had pushed the plate and cutlery out of the way so he could go through mail at the table.  The oven beeped, and Chris rose to pull a pan full of thick mushroom-soup-gravy-topped grouse out of the oven.  He put the steaming dish on a trivet, alongside the bowl of sauteed carrots and onions I’d made up from the vegetables I’d sliced.  We sat down at the table to eat.

Cooked and sauced, the grouse looked like a small chicken without skin.

I looked at the bird.  Chris looked at me.  I took a tentative sniff in its direction.  It smelled like meaty mushroom soup.  Chris raised his eyebrow at me.  “Want some grouse?”

I wanted to eat grouse. If only so I could say I ate grouse.  I felt my throat starting to close, and I fought it.  “Yes, please.”  I heard the cries of my inner three-year-old who only wanted to eat familiar food—like chicken, and macaroni and cheese, and spaghetti and meatballs.  I shoved its whining below the calm attenuated voice of my inner adult, who wanted to try new things.  I held up my plate.  Chris reached into the pan and pulled out a small ribcage covered with white meat.  He sawed at it with his steak knife, ripping meat from the bone.  He place the first chunk he loosed onto my plate.

Plate back in front of me, I looked at the congealed mass of fowl and goo in front of me.  I took my time serving myself a heaping portion of carrots.  I put my hands on my lap.

Chris watched me.  “Dig in,” he said.

I leaned over my plate, the smell of meat was stronger now.  My stomach did a little leap.  “You first.”

“Are you chickening out on me?”

“Me? No!”

“You’re going to at least try it, right?”

“Of course.  I want to try it.” I picked up my fork and knife and carefully sliced through the hunk of meat on my plate.  I speared a morsel with my fork, and lifted it towards my face. I sniffed again.  I looked over to Chris; he was chewing on a big mouthful.  He seemed to be okay.

“Is it good?” I asked, fork hovering halfway between plate and mouth.

Chris considered. “It’s good.  A little dry, but not bad for not having cooked grouse in a while.” He turned towards me, waiting.

I looked back down at the forkful of grouse.  My hand was moving it towards my mouth.  My mouth didn’t want to open.  I made my inner adult have a talk with my inner three-year-old.  You can do this.  It tastes just like chicken.  I took a deep breath and sighed the air out slowly.  I wasn’t retching yet.  I opened my mouth.  The fork deposited the piece of grouse behind my teeth, and I started to chew.

The flavor was gamey, strong and sharp.  The meat was dense, chewy. I could feel the fibers of the meat being ripped apart by my teeth. A slice of slimy mushroom slipped down my throat.

This wasn’t chicken.

It was an effort to swallow.  Then I moved my tongue around my mouth to clear it of any remnants of grouse.  I took a large gulp of water.  I paused to check in with my body.  My esophagus was attentively pulling the hunk of meat down my gullet towards my stomach.  My throat had managed to swallow.  I was still not retching.

I put down my fork, smiled with my success, and looked up at Chris.  I had managed to eat grouse.  Chris wasn’t looking at me; he was engrossed in reading the back label of one of his hot sauces.  Or at least, he seemed to be.  “You are going to eat more, aren’t you?” Chris said, still looking at the label.

My grin turned into a grimace. “Oh. Sure.” My mind flipped back to the image I had of the soft gray-brown grouse hitting the steel of Chris’s Buick and then falling silent and still to the side of the road.  I shut my imagination down.  No thinking about the grouse when it was alive. And certainly no thinking about the grouse when it was only recently dead.  I took another drink of water, and steeled myself.  I hadn’t realized how hard it would be to eat grouse.  Okay, okay, just focus on the separate motions involved.

Cut. Spear. Lift. Bite. Chew.

I swallowed again.  Quickly.  The mostly unmasticated chunk of grouse hurt as it made its slow way down my throat.

“You have to eat at least five bites.” Chris said to his plate, now almost empty.

“Why?”

“Because we don’t want to waste it.”  Chris had strong feelings about being good stewards of the earth’s resources.

“It was roadkill, honey, it was already waste. The fact that we’re eating any of it means that we get extra credit for preserving resources.”

Chris glared at me.  “You’re using your Yale debate powers on me, and you know I don’t like it when you do that.  I can’t win arguments with you.”

I harrumphed towards the napkin in my lap. “I’ll eat two more bites.”

I could feel my inner three-year-old starting to work on the back of my throat.  It was closing up.  I put the forkful of grouse in my mouth anyway and started to chew. This time, it took me so long to will myself to swallow, that I’d chewed the grouse up to a thin liquidy pulp before it left my mouth.  Next time it would be easier, I thought.

The next bite took even longer.  I had a few flashes of feathers on road, and a few more conversations between my inner adult and inner three-year-old before I managed to get it down.  In the end, I managed to finish my sauteed carrots and make a four-bite dent in the hunk of meat on my plate.

“That’s all I can manage.”

“So you don’t like grouse much, huh?” Chris leaned back in his chair, hands on his belly, surveying my plate.

I chewed on my inner cheek.  “I want to like grouse.”

Chris laughed.  “We don’t have to make grouse again.”

“Maybe I’ll like it better next time.  Hey, we could find another recipe.  Maybe it’s just I don’t like grouse made with cream of mushroom soup.”

“Okay.”

“Um, honey?”

“What.”

“Just… next time…could you run over a chicken?”

The next morning I thought back to dinner the night before and felt a measure of pride rise in my belly.  I had eaten roadkill.  And I was doing just fine.

This line of thinking got me to wondering about grouse.  Grouse might well have been a delicacy in different times or places.  I opened up my computer and typed “grouse” into the search engine.  A row of images of squat gray-brown birds appeared across the top of my screen.  An array of summaries about grouse-related websites ran down the center of the screen, the most intriguing of which was a page that promised to tell me all the nutritional information about grouse.  I clicked it.  Turned out, eating grouse was better than eating chicken.

I started to think about how maybe, next time, I might be able to eat more than four bites.  If I was used to grouse, that is.  And I liked the recipe.

From then on, I couldn’t help it: I started looking more carefully at the dead animals by the side of the road, wondering whether they’d make a decent meal.  At least, the second time.

There’s only one place to
buy gas in this town.

Two churches,
one motel, three bars

and a stop-light
that blinks.

What you might call
a complete town

‘cept there’s noplace
to eat that doesn’t come

wrapped
in cellophane.

Love goes by
fast, too.

Hardly need to stop
‘less it’s night,

the moon
hides its face

and you need
that promise to stay.

SOUTHERN LIVING

The sun down here
is deep, and soul-wide.

Hiding is hard
but everyone tries—

small lies, big tales,
sunscreen, patio screen,
ballcap or parasol,

simply idling
with iced tea once
the light
gets so high

it kicks off socks
on its own.

You have to put down
deep, deep roots
in this soil

where old water
draws back

and memory
and pain are blended
cocoa and cream.

The oaktree knows
what has hung
in these branches,

how peckers sing
of nests and flying,

returning home
to roots,

what cools off
this burning heart.

     I set that purty gold trophy up ‘tween the pictures o’ my mama an my daddy. Right there on the mantle ‘bove the fireplace.

My mama usta say, “Boy, you shore can make that fiddle sound sweet.”

An my daddy says, “That jus’ may be, but you has gotta git yo’ head outta the clouds an learn to do somethin’ with yo’ hands.”

An mama says, “Papa, he play that fiddle with his hands.”

An my daddy says, “You know what I mean. He need a backup plan.”

And back and forth like I weren’t even there.

So I put that purty gold Grammy up ‘tween their pictures on the mantel. The mantel me an’ my li’l sugar baby now owns. Thank you mama.

My purty li’l sugar baby smiles real big an gives me a squeeze. I saved her fo’ hundred dollars today – fixin’ the brakes on her Caddy. Thank you daddy.

An my sugar baby cuddle up next to me. She say, “I shore do love you.”

By Anthony S. Abbott

My first pick up is Robert Reid

who has had three surgeries already

this year and is expecting one more.

“Do not go gentle into that good night.”

“Rage, rage, against. . .” No that is the third

line. “Old age should burn and rage…” No “rave”—

God, I can’t get it. I drop Mr. Reid at the doctor

and tell him someone else will pick him up.

I must find Mrs. Wiley in Huntersville

before nine o’clock. “Wise men, at their end

know dark is right, but….”oh yes, “because

their words had forked no lightning…”

OK, Mrs. Wiley, where are you? I can’t find

the number of your house. It says here on Mapquest

this is where you live. “Rage, rage, against the dying

of the light.” There is no goddam 300 on this corner.

Great. I call the office. They can’t find it either.

I ask at the Farmer’s Market. It might be the old

folks community across the street. Mapquest said

left, this is right. “Wild men, who caught and sang

the sun in flight, and learn too late they grieved it.”

Oh I like that one. Mrs. Wiley, where are you?

There are old folks all over sitting on benches outside.

No one knows her. What is her apartment number?

I don’t know. “Do not go gentle.” No, I will not go

gentle or otherwise. I call the office. They find out

Mrs. Wiley is in 5B. Ok, I go to 5b. No one answers.

I call her on my cell phone. No one answers. “Rage

rage, against the dying of the light.” What if

she’s lying inside, dead?  Now what do I do?

“Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight.”

O God, maybe she’s gone gentle into that good night.

I call her doctor, who says she’s sitting in his waiting

room, calm as can be.. Great, and here I am looking

like an idiot. I sit in my car and say the words out loud:

“Old age should burn and rave at close of day.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

What is it about
a red barn
that makes us stop
and notice, as if
because it’s red
it has to be
historical, intentional,
significant, as if
even a new one
qualifies as old,
classic, retro,
timeless, as if
it had nothing
to do with mere
habit, frugality,
available materials,
as if given
the chance even God
would have made them red,
knowing nothing
could look as good,
suggest as much
against green
of grass, blue
of sky, winter’s
white, vacant
trees of autumn?

Who Hasn’t Contemplated Civil Disobedience Stuck Behind
a Tractor Trailer Carrying Chickens to Dobson, NC
By Scott Owens

I mean we’ve all been there, right?
First offended by the stench of a thousand chickens
and their requisite shit, piss, cackle,
doomed pathetic feathers stuffed
between metal slats of a rolling henhouse,
chuffing them off to heaven-sounding Holly Farms
and cursing our luck that even though
every road around Dobson, NC,
is a country road as straight as it is narrow,
every time we try to pass we meet
a car coming the other way.
And so, we sit, stuffed in our own box
too tight to move, legs drawn up, arms bent,
back hunched over the wheel
until we start to feel more than a bit
sympathetic towards the horde
of gallus domesticus perched before us
certainly deserving better treatment
than this, and that’s when our imaginations
begin to run a bit wild and we see ourselves
modern-day Thoreaus refusing our quiet
desperation and thinking for a moment
we might pull up alongside this slaughterhouse
on wheels, use an umbrella to wedge
the accelerator down, climb through the passenger
side window, swing ourselves onto the side
of the truck, sidle around to the back,
fling open the doors and scream
Fly free my fine-feathered friends.

But then, the vision continues
and their luminous white bodies
fall to asphalt one by one
and are crushed beneath the wheels of cars
whose drivers cheered us on
but moments ago, and so
we keep our seats, grip the wheel
of the minivan with two hands,
and try to stay between the lines.

David Childers

They called him Captain of the Beer Joints. It was nothing official, just a colloquial title he earned from being a tough son of a bitch. For years, nobody messed with him, and they did not mess with his friends, the people who owned the beer joints. Usually, his presence was enough to settle troublesome situations, but some times he  had to fight to make things right. He had fought many tough men and a few tough women. His left ear stuck out jaggedly from his head because of it; and his hands ached in cold weather; his back locked up some times, his knees had lost their spring but he could still deliver. Most people knew that, and even as he aged, they gave him lots of room.

He knew he was a drunk. So what? . He never saw the sense in lying to himself.  So much drinking and fighting, so many teeth rattling blows to the head, so many trips by his brain from one side of the cranium to the other. That is how the doctor explained it.

‘Look at Mohammad Ali.”

He could see that his greatest ally, the rage that he never understood, but depended on, had diminished. He knew he could do nothing about it but push on. He could also see that he was losing his usefulness.

The new mayor was all about cleaning up. Massage parlors, porno houses, low rent beer joints were not a part of the new city that was coming. There was a new crowd coming in; much rougher than any one had seen. They looked like pussies, but they were ruthless, armed with the law and more importantly. Money, lawyers, police, judges and banks. You could hit one or two of them, shoot as many as you could, but they were too big, and there were too many of them.            .

He perceived in his future the approach of a terminating shadow, like a pack of hyenas gathering around a dying lion. One day it took human form, a broad shouldered roundhouse left from a young man in a green t-shirt. When it landed against the side of his head, things went brightly white, then black. . It was a natural thing, he realized as he spun semi conscious and collapsed backwards. “You ain’t the Captain of these beer joints no more,” he heard some one say.

After that, he stayed away from the beer joints. He worked it out with Larry to get paid something to leave. He had money saved too. Might as well spend it, he decided. He moved into one of Hulon’s travel trailers near the highway 16 bridge. It had a little bedroom, a toilet,  a small kitchen with a  refrigerator.  His life became a succession of girls and liquor, some cases of beer, pills, and partying. Soon it  got lonely. He could see the interest and arousal in the girls fade as time wore on, and the beer ran out, or the money ran out, or whatever it was that ran out that was not really him but was the reason the girls came to his place.

It depressed him to see the old men in the trailers give  Hulon their Social Security checks for  the drunk life he gave them. They died fast and often. He got tired of the ambulances and the hearses and the police coming around.

One day, from the door of his trailer, he watched the removal of two bodies from a Cadillac in the parking lot. It was a warm evening and the sun was starting to set.. He knew his turn could come any time.

He looked out on to the lake. He could feel its coolness from half a mile away. He realized that it was the first time he had actually noticed it, and the river that fed it. It looked clean.

He felt the water and the air scrubbing away the dirt and the shit inside him.

***

Soaking wet from being out on the river all day, men, women and children stepped from the boat on to a narrow pier made of soggy planks. It was warm, late Summer. They all wore shorts, swimming suits, the ladies in bathing caps that made their heads look like toadstools. The air was darkening with storm. The pier lead into a ramshackle collection of buildings,  same soggy wood as the pier. The air inside was dark and cool. It was lit with red lights mounted against pictures of happy far off times; snow covered mountains, rural scenes. He felt chilled, vulnerable, like a fish drowning on air.

The boy was smaller than any one there. He moved timidly through a forest of legs. Voices crossed the through the air above him. The voices sounded happy, excited. He could hear his father laughing while the man from Charleston talked. The man’s  kids were kind and protective of him, especially the tallest girl. He felt safe in her shadow. He could hear his mother laughing. Some one handed him a coca-cola in a small bottle. It tasted really good. It told him something about the happiness he heard in the voices in the room.

At some point the bodies parted, and looking up, he saw before him, extending for several panoramic feet across the wall behind the bar, a horrifying picture of men being killed and tortured, horses rearing and running, bright colors,  wild frenzy on some faces, utter despair and terror in others; tomahawks, spears, arrows, pistols and carbines, smoke and blood in tall grass with mountains faintly rising behind the scene. He pointed at it.             His older brother, who knew such things, told him it was Custer’s last stand. He had to turn away. It frightened him, but he did not want to show it. Worse things could follow just by letting the world know what he felt.

The day he turned eighteen, and could legally buy beer, he and a couple of friends went on a drinking spree in Charlotte. They went to all the bars they could find. Starting at lunch time, and it being mid August and very hot, by sundown, they were drunk and tired. They went into a bar in the downtown area, near the offices and department stores. It was a long, narrow room, with a low bar. Above it was the picture of Custer’s Last Stand, with the beer logo in the corner.  Like a carnival poster, he thought.. He bought a beer, smoked a cigarette and silently studied the picture while the other guys talked.

The day finally ended, much later, with a brawl at the crossroads drive-in in Belmont. He did not remember too much about it the next day, but he felt good enough and did not have any bad memories so he figured it was all fine. He did remember holding a boy’s head under his arm and punching his face again and again. Yes, that felt good.

***

In his dreams there is a foot bridge beneath the highway bridge that connects Gaston and Mecklenburg Counties. It is rickety and soggy with gaps between wooden planks. It frightens and excites him. He dreads but desires the vulnerability he feels when he steps out into the river, his closeness to the dead. He hears the voice of his friend Fred, who had jumped from the high trestle above. Lots of bad spots, shallow places, but deep holes, dead tress that grab you and pull you down. Look out. He walks on across the water.

The current pulls at his feet, trying to take him into the flow  with all its flooded factories, drowned locomotives and boxcars, anonymous, abandoned, forsaken children, drunks, fisher people, dogs and cats, all the drowning, all the dying under that slow brown flow.

And in that dream, just as it was when he was a small kid wearing Sunday school clothes, on the other side is Jay’s Esso station. Mostly, they sell gas and  beer.

On Sundays, when he was a child, after Sunday School and Church, his father would take him there with his brother, and sister.  Beer did not go on sale for a few more hours, so it was quiet and peaceful. They went there for sausages and pickles. They would hang around eating, watching cars pull in, pull out, clouds of dust, and the sulphur smell of the chemical plant just over the kudzu hill mingling with vinegar and garlic.

Jay’s was bulldozed as part of a toxic clean up, but in the dreams, it is always there, he just can never get there. He always wakes up as he steps from the last plank. He wakes up knowing that his dad, and brother and sister are waiting there.

****

He is running down a long road between thick pine woods toward the river. A girl is just behind him to his right. Ahead, the trees part. They run down to a trail that is sandy and flat. It takes them sprinting to a small creek which is shallow enough for them to run through, breaking into a full sprint until they reach a beach where they pull up, breathing hard, sweating.

The river shines. The sands are cool and soft. The sun has risen straight above. It presses down hard. They walk back into the shade of the pine trees, back to the little creek. They lay down in the sand. They are quiet, just barely touching hands.  Fog rises form the rain on the water.

He thinks of the bridge. A long peel of thunder rolls. The trailer shakes. He wakes up. The rain. So long falling. He falls with it, back down. His father maneuvers the Oldsmobile around mud holes in the dirt road. They stop for the soaking wet skinny boy who gets in with a big satchel and sits quietly by the window. He is poor and lives in a place where the bus will not go.

But his father will go, will push through the sadness that devours the world. “They need us,” he would say.

“There is no hope here.”

Another thunder blast. He rolls up from bed and sits on the edge. Still dark. He Something is moving near him.

He falls back into his seat in the Oldsmobile, looking at the skinny boy and thanking god that he is not him; wondering why things turn out like they do. Give him a ride then turn him over to the teachers. He never sees the boy at school, just in the car after school and in the nauseated, nervous hours before school.

He needs to piss.

He gets to his feet and bumps toward the camode tucked far back in the trailer, near the kerosene furnace. Lightning lights up the face that meets him. She looks toward the floor and brushes softly past, her cigarettes, liquor and sex odor reminding him of where the night began.

Who is she? In this hallway with snakes coiled under the floor, and whispering voices coming out of the lake? Who is she?

When he returns to bed she has her back turned to him, is softly snoring. He lays down beside her, throwing his left arm and leg over her.

He holds her as tightly as he can. More thunder. The world floats away. The door to the Oldsmobile swings outward and the skinny boy vanishes. The car rolls on through mud holes, windshield wipers thumping.

***

All shut down, bulldozed:  Walt’s, Dents’, Hideout Lounge, Victory Tavern, Red Willie’s, The Lamplighter, The Hole In The Wall, Ace High. The new city does not want this kind of thing. The Sunday School teachers and politicians are all the same now. God frowns on him and his kind. Cast out from the Garden, they fall victim to their vices and abuses. Aging comes cruelly to strip them down and devour them. Assassins, car wrecks, heart attacks, overdoses, strokes: These are their rewards.

From the hill above the river, he sees new houses being built on the other side of the Lake. He watches the new highway and the new bridge replace the one he had lived with.

He has given up the liquor and pills. Cigarettes are impossible to quit, and beer helps what pain medicines can’t.

Alive.             In the Veterans’ Hospital. He does not know the people who take him places. They are nice. He cannot remember their names. He wants to talk to them but he cannot do more than groan.

Where is the River? Take me there.

The people smile .

He floats on his back and smiles at the blue sky.

On both sides of the river, the forests rise darkly.

There are good places there to sleep and he will go to one of them soon. But not yet.

Not yet.

by chesley oxendine
imagine an early evening

nestled in deep, Southern summer:

twilight sluicing through

the trees in a parade of

red and gold, a hazy cabaret show

in the sweet, sticky air;

imagine you and i curled

into each other on a hammock

guided back and forth by the

touch of a rare breeze.

imagine the july symphony:

cicadas and crickets in concerto,

the sound dancing in the heat.

imagine the sky on fire above us

and the world turning slowly beneath

and imagine, our eyes half closed,

tasting one another’s breath–

imagine that the words “i love you” just

fell over my lips, suddenly,

almost imperceptible.

now tell me how you’d feel.

by Shannon Hennessey

My name was scratched with blue-black ink across the skin of a convict’s rib cage.

The first time I saw the tattoo was in the dim moonlight that bled down from the pine needles in the plot of woods behind our trailer. He had been drinking, and decided we should go skinny dipping in the muddy river that wove in and out of the trees. I always did what he said when he had been drinking.

He was peeling off his sweaty work shirt, the one with matching holes in each yellow armpit and his name patched onto the left breast, when I saw it.

I imagined the electric needle humming a mechanic tune as it pushed thick dark liquid into the pink cells of his side. Uncurling and curling, like a drop of blood in water, seeping into his flesh and spelling out my name.

He had the artist dot the “i” of Eileen with an anatomically correct heart. Each letter was drawn out with long smoky curls.

I thought it was hideous.

“Davey, what is that?” I asked as I pulled off my own shirt.

He slipped off his canvas shorts, “What?”

“The tattoo.”

“Which one?” he held out his arms and examined the array of shapes and colors on them.

“The new one, asshole,” I picked at the dirt under my fake fingernails, trying not to seem too interested.

“Oh, this?” He lifted his left arm and traced the letters of my name with the tough fingers of his right hand as he walked toward me.

“This is the name of my fiancé,” he dragged his hand over my hip bone which protruded slightly out of my side as he walked by to wade into the water with a PBR can in hand. The layers of dead skin on his callused hand sent a wave through my spinal cord, raising little fleshy goose bumps in the shape of his hand on my hip.

And with that we were engaged. There was no ring and no proposal.

We were engaged because he said so.

We walked home on the game trail, lit by the silver film leaking from the craterous moon. I walked. He stumbled. We marched to the cacophony of the beating wings of cicadas and the instrumentals of the crickets as they rubbed their blacklegs’ together belting out the song of night in the thick summer heat.

I led Davey up to the trailer and sat him in the rusting lawn chair under the thick plastic awning. He wanted me to make him coffee so I went inside and put some water in a mug, microwaved it, then stirred in some instant Folgers using the handle of a dirty knife I found resting in the bottom of the sink.

The screen door screeched as it tried to escape its hinges, then shuttered with a thin metallic sigh as it snapped back into its frame behind me.

Davey was asleep, slumped back in his chair with his buzz cut head resting on the cheap siding of the trailer, snoring.

I stood on the cinderblock step with his steaming NASCAR mug of coffee in my hand and watched as the insects of flight beat themselves against the porch light. A dull thud and a zap followed each collision. I wanted to think that I could smell the burning of their exoskeletons but that would have been a lie. I smelled nothing but Davey’s microwaved coffee.

I curled my lips at the smell of Davey in the morning, hot coffee that was always stale. Or maybe it was just at the sight of Davey himself. Sleeping in his chair. Lounging around. Useless.

His left arm slung over the back of the chair revealing his boney rib cage. He was a skinny man with just a little pudge of fat forming under his belly button.

I dumped the coffee off the step and listened to it fizzle as it was pulled down into the porous soil.

I dragged up another lawn chair and sat down next to Davey. I leaned forward with my elbow on my knee and my head resting in my hands as I examined the tattoo.

It was even more grotesque up close.

My name rose with each rib, and fell with each depression between the bones.

And it was huge.

I sprawled across his entire side. Reaching up with those gaudy smoke like tendrils into his arm pit and sinking down to almost his hip. It looked as if my name was trying to strangle him.

I did not want to be a part of him.

I wanted to leave, but even if I did go I would still be a part of him forever and I didn’t want any part of me left with him. Not even my name.

I looked up into his closed eyes as he exhaled a particularly animal-like snore. I lowered my eyes back to his ribs.

I dragged the corner of my thumb nail through the middle of the tattoo, envisioning my nail opening a fissure in his flesh that cut my name in half, making it no longer my name but a spliced jumble of letters that held no significance to anyone.

Nothing happened.

I then traced the letters with the spirals of skin on the pad of my index finger. My name was flush with his skin. I don’t know if I thought it would be slightly raised, or maybe concave, but it felt odd to not feel a bump of groove in the part of his side where I was.

I did not want to be fit with him so seamlessly.

I shook his shoulders until he woke up.

He grumbled in his half sleep, “Not tonight baby, I’m too tired”, and tried to fall back asleep. I grabbed him by his elbow and made him stand up. I led him into the trailer and dropped him on the couch- making sure that he would sleep with his tattooed side facing the back cushion. So that I didn’t have to see it.

I walked into the bedroom, crawled between the sheets, and fell asleep.

Perfectly alone.

I woke up to the thin screen door being hammered on. The metal crying out echoes of the fist beating it. I looked out the window and saw five Tennessee State Trooper cruisers parked in the dusty grey gravel that served as our driveway.  The banging on the door persisted, and I could hear Davey tearing the living room apart, looking for something. The police shouted for him to come out with his hands behind his head.

I ran to the doorway of the bedroom, “Damn it, Davey, what the fuck did you-?“

He spun away from the living room window to face me, and I saw that he had found what he was looking for. His old hunting rifle. “Get the hell out of here Eileen.”

Before he had time to turn back to the window the front door gave way and seven policemen stormed in, guns pointed at Davey.

Davey dropped his rifle and was forced to his knees. They shouted at me to get back, and that Davey was being arrested for the assault and murder of a man at a local gas station late Thursday night. I never found out why Davey did it.

I never cared.

I stood on the cinderblock front step, imagining that I could still smell microwave coffee as I gave my report to the police. I watched as Davey was walked to the car with his arms handcuffed behind his head.  The last thing I saw before they lowered him into the seat and closed the door was my name.

In smoky blue-black letters etched into the pink cells of the convict’s ribcage.

Shannon Hennessey was born in upstate New York, raised down south in New Mexico and lived in New Jersey. She is currently attending SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse New York where she is pursuing a degree in forestry. Her work has appeared in Flyway: Journal of Writing and the Environment, Menda City Review and Shaking Magazine.

By Laurance Dyson

He…..was truly of the sea and its seaweed and crustaceans. Part and parcel of the ‘make a living’ selling fish and shrimp, and squid .Everything about the way of life, coffee in the morning smelling of chicory and sea salt. Hardboiled egg and a hardtack biscuit. Heavy on the black pepper and a little garlic if on hand. Mending nets as the schooner set out to the reefs…shuttle in- hand and weaving back the holes the ocean took from the last runs. The gulls and pelicans were the ever present pilferers and begger vagabonds. Just a bit of fish Sir, one needs a small bit if ones to survive. And galumph hard swallow when it’s tossed skyward, acrobatics for the prize and then formation once again.

Picturesque in the morning pre-dawn light, Red in the Morning, sailor…what was it…oh sailor take warning, Painted like the watercolors of a true beach comber. Visual images of the Still Lives of the proud few who still plied this trade and hoped beyond hope a son would carry the sea water in his blood, one more, yes one more generation to the likes of Captain, nay lubber and the hard way of the sailors and hands of the sloops and diesel engine shrimpers of the Gulf Coast.

Gone is the time of masted ships and rigging to spin about the main sails and capture the sea breezes and not becalmed of a turn; a tack into the gentle breeze to speed the laying of the nets …the cry shrimp on and the sails taut to the pull, lines dropped with skills that the fathers taught the sons, the grandfathers taught them.Buoy away and net in the schools and runs, times a wastin’ son ..the first to lay the nets gets the run and the others a lookin for the tells. Woe be he who cuts the excluders , required now to test the patience and skill of even the best of the old salts. Shark meat was the fin cuts now used in the kitchens as clams or scallops or other sort of shell fish less likely due to the red tides and the slicks of the rigs leaking and blow outs.Estuaries and birthing grounds of the coastal marshes,brackish to over winter the sea birds and crustacians,crabs ever plentiful in the past are now just mostly a dream…What say you to the crabbers and shrimpers and redfish gleaners for trade and for license is pricy and hard fought…maintain your quota or loose next year come.

We sang the song of the trade by the moon…’Shrimp boats are a comin’ their sails are in sight’ Shrimp boats a comin’ there ‘ll be dancin’ tonite.”