Cheryl Evans

The lady on the Bus

The woman in front of me keeps bumping me with her bags. Her arms are loaded down, and I can see the red grooves that her bags are making in the soft flesh of her forearms. It looks painful. She's teetering back and forth and I swear on the next turn she's going to fall over. It's the bags. They’re throwing her off balance. I will never understand why people insist on buying more than they can carry. I mean, didn't she know she would be riding the bus? Not that she’s dressed for it. Her hat is bubblegum pink and looks like it could be made of felt or something. It’s one of those funny french hats, a beret I think they’re called. And then there is the dress. It’s pink, like the hat. And it fits to her body like plastic wrap on leftovers, really tight in some places and baggy in others. It’s low in the front, so low I can see the tan line from her bathing suit on her breasts. Her skin is lightly golden 'til it hits that line and bam! White as whipped cream. Her earrings are so heavy they are pulling down her ears. And they’re cheap. The kind that you know is supposed to look expensive but isn’t foolin’ anyone. The bracelets loaded up her arms clink every time she sways and her feet are shoved into stilettos at least a size too small.

You know she is really trying to look sophisticated but the heat isn’t helping her one bit. Sweat slicks her hair to the back of her neck and it’s starting to curl around her face. She probably spent hours on that hair only to have it ruined by the lack of air in this tin can on wheels. It’s obviously dyed and she probably calls it blond but it's actually yellow, like the petals of a daffodil. It’s oddly pretty actually.

As the bus comes to a stop, a kid whizzes by on his scooter, squinting to look in the windows of the bus. I wonder if he can see her hair, lemon yellow under a pink beret, through the bus windows.

I am fixated on the woman in pink. I have so many questions for her. I wonder what she does? Is her to-do list filled with tasks like dye hair, get manicure? Does she work? No, she can’t to be shopping on a Monday. Does she have kids? I wonder...

A screeching baby snaps me back to reality. The mother sings softly to the child, trying to soothe her. I turn around to glance at the baby and when I look back she’s gone. I stand quickly, knocking my purse off my lap and dumping its contents onto the dirty bus floor. I scan the bus in a kind of panic to see where she went. Then I spot the hat, bobbing toward the front of the bus. As she exits she stumbles, her heel getting stuck in a sidewalk crack. She moves through the crowd on street head held just high enough to seem forced. The bus lurches forward and she fades into the distance like pink mirage.

I wonder where she’s going, wonder, wonder.........

Seth Hepner

The Rat

A man sits in the sunroom of his colonial home with his legs crossed reading a newspaper. His recliner creeks as he reaches for the coffee mug sitting on the end table beside him. Not even one ray of sun shines through the windows, but the inches upon inches of snow provide the light to skim the crime notes in section B of The Repository.

He shakes his head as he passively reads through the easily comparable drug related arrests the previous night. The longest of the crime notes deals with a hold up at the liquor store, just down the street, that the man visits almost daily. Without his fix of Maker’s Mark Whiskey or warm glass of red wine, he’s never able to sleep well enough through the night to feel capable of reading the paper before his 10 a.m. breakfast date with the regulars at the local diner. Knowledge of the local news is required to participate in the discussion at the breakfast table.

Turns out, the man who robbed the liquor store got away, and the police are offering a reward for any information on a suspect. Ironically, he only got away with two liters of Maker’s Mark and a bottle of sweet vermouth. While adjusting himself in the recliner the man thought a good Manhattan, free of charge, might be worth the risk of prison.

The thief wore a typical black ski mask, clothes, and gloves that covered his skin. The clerk confirmed this and that a small hand gun was held to his forehead at one point.

The man closed the newspaper; he folded it just right before tossing it to the beige carpeted floor. Outside the window a large rat struggled through the snow like a man climbing a mountain. He wondered if the thief’s experience was anything like the struggle taking place before his eyes, and he doubted it very much.

Sarah Oser

Stuck in a Moment

The hummingbird hung in the air, suspended in time. It seemed that he really wasn’t moving at all. He was like an image, like a photograph captured in one isolated moment. He was unreal; his vibrant colors, the yellows, blues, and greens couldn’t be natural. Everything about him went against the laws of nature—the way he was frozen in air, his intense coloring, and the way that nothing affected him. Not even the breeze could move him.

From a distance it appeared that he wasn’t even a living breathing thing. In reality, his heart was humming and pounding rapidly and his wings flapped wildly—so fast that the human eye couldn’t see. What seemed to be a moment stuck in time was really the opposite. So much speed prevented this animal from propelling into motion.

All around the hummingbird the rest of nature was in motion. Leaves blew in the breeze, lifting off the ground, swirling around in the air before landing back on the ground. Birds made dramatic plunges from far up in the sky only to level out inches from the ground in an effort to catch their prey. Cars speed by with passengers inside hurrying towards their destination. The passengers are moving so fast that they are unable to perceive the bustling life around them.

The hummingbird remained suspended in midair. All his movements were concentrated on staying in this one space. Although the surroundings were so hectic, nothing could match the humming of the bird’s pulsing wings.

Karen Pavlisko

Lola

We called her “Spider-Girl” inspired by the spider web design in black ink that adorned her left arm, tracing all the way down it and tapering off into her middle finger on the back of her left hand. But the name could have come about due to the fact that she looked almost like a spider. She was thin, spindly, and sickly looking. Pale white with long, frizzy, black hair that could best be described as “big.” She had large dilated black eyes that were only further enlarged by the wire rimmed glasses surrounding them, which were much too large for her thin face. She wore oversized dark clothes, commonly frequented by a black hoodie tied about her waist, and socks that stuck up a few inches above her sneakers.

Every day we could see her through the bus windows riding up to school on her purple bicycle. She was the typical “weird kid” that other students would normally make fun of, but for some reason nobody ever said anything to Spider-Girl, and she never said anything to any of us.

She worked at the convenience market on the corner of the main road, and therefore everybody from school avoided the place like a sick leper, though sometimes they would watch it from the ice cream shop across the street to see if the purple bicycle was tied up in the front. Many said she had troubles at home. One boy, Richie Findle, a fat red-headed fellow with freckles and a double chin, swore that he had proof that her mother gave her nothing to eat at home but old peanuts and stale croutons, and beat her if Spider-Girl ever asked for more.

Curtis Clermont offered to give her a ride home one night, pulling over to the curb just past the market in an old, beat up, navy pickup truck. Although the rain was coming down cold and icy, such that it was almost hail, spider girl refused, with excessive shaking of her head and increased the speed to her pedal.

It was startling how much the incident changed Spider-Girl. She grew nervous and jumpy, and would snap at people in a high-pitched squalor if ever they came to close to her. We were all frightened; pondering if we had ever even heard her voice before.

She began riding up to school later and later, until her attendance became such that she skipped several periods before arriving, and began having similar attendance problems at work. The popular rumor was that Curtis’s gesture was the only nice thing that anyone had ever done for her, and the realization that anyone could ever be nice shocked her to the point of snapping.

One week in February Spider-Girl stopped showing up to school all together, but Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday her purple bicycle could be seen at the convenience mart. We all grew concerned for her, although not a one of us could call her friend. A few days later the corner market burnt to the ground overnight. That Friday school was riotous with excitement and rumors as to what had happened. Spider Girl was still unaccounted for and our curiosity led us to bazaar conclusions about Spider-Girl setting it afire. Richie Findle’s explained it as Spider-Girl’s suicide; how she trapped herself inside the lit building, taking her only real home with her to her death.

A few days later the charred frame of a purple bicycle was found amongst the ashes of the corner market. Although no body or skeleton could be found amongst the rubble, we never saw Lola Fulton, the girl with the spider web tattoo, again.

Sarah Dravec

Absolution, Resolution

She wondered, really, how many stars there must have been in the patch of sky above the four houses that bordered the end of the street. From the screened-in porch, she wondered and gazed up into the space above the house next door. Twelve, thirteen maybe—there was too much goddamn light in a suburb to be sure—and she spent a moment wanting to step onto the thin ledge along the screen like a tabby to walk the perimeter of the room and count the rest of them. Goddamnit, she may have said aloud. The cane that always grazed her right hand when she sat ruined everything.

So, how many more angles could there be from this room with twelve or thirteen stars at the end of them? Four seemed safe to assume. There were four cardinal directions, eight if you counted the in-betweens, but why did it matter? Fifty, she guessed. Fifty visible in the night sky, but better yet, she thought, there were really fifty-two. Two more came from the other side of the wicker couch; two goddamn stupid tattoos the boy had gotten the moment he was eighteen, she remembered. They were patterned different colors in alternating sections—nautical, he had proudly called them—and one rested an inch above either elbow. Goddamn stupid, she thought of them. Fifty-two, then; fifty real stars, two nautical ones, how goddamn stupid could a person be—

“Grandma,” Seth said, timid once she turned to him, “take this.” He tugged at his long sleeves. “Please take this,” he said, and he pulled off his hooded sweatshirt and stood beside her, draping it over her shoulders so she could pull the sleeves over herself. She had been noticeably shaking in the cool air, but she refused to go inside. She couldn’t stand to think of the scent that still lurked in her home, clinging to her possessions. She leaned forward, extending a wavering hand toward the cup of tea that rested on the table in front of them. The grip of her fingers was weak; the delicate glass fell to the ground, spilling as it went and shattering when it landed.

“Goddamnit,” she said too loudly, and Seth winced.

“It’s okay,” he said. He couldn’t comfort her. “It’s okay,” he said again. “Hold on a minute, Grandma, I’ll get you another…” and his voice faded as he reentered the house and busied himself with another teabag, another cup of boiling water.

She stood, taking several seconds, clutching her cane as tightly as her hand would allow. “Goddamnit,” she said when it hurt her back to stand up straight. Her legs wobbled. She regripped her cane and took slow steps toward the outer door of the porch.

The walk to the backyard cost what little energy she had and took more time than it would have even a few weeks ago. She barely lifted each foot, swearing as she went, but she remained diligent as she rounded the house. The energy it took to walk, the chill it brought her to navigate through the dark. She thought of bones, the chill to her bones; she thought of how weak her own must have been. A bird, perhaps away from its nest mistakenly, flew just above the trees that divided her property from the homeowner’s beside it, a person she had never met, maybe some goddamn idiot with ink in their skin—bird bones! she thought. Hollow, extraordinarily light, and able to move without the complications of an elderly woman’s age. Birds flew, she thought, and humans, smarter, never got off the ground. Birds shit on the ground. Men and women stayed in a single place if they were unlucky, and she was, and they still, more or less, shit on the ground. Birds, then—smarter?

She stopped in front of the largest bush that bordered the house. There were several buds poking out of the leaves, but only a single rose had opened its petals. She looked at the flower, iconic, frail, and red, and let out a sigh of relief, but the bush had not been hers. It had come from someone and somewhere else, surely a cramped store that sold plants for sales and never for plants. The bush had come from a bit of stem purchased because of the darkness that awaited them all—everyone on the street, in the suburb—beneath the fifty stars.

“Grandma?” came his voice between the shutting of the porch doors as he emerged, looking for her. There were children, she thought, the ones who belonged to her and the ones who didn’t, stems and the hands that buried them in the ground, and did gardeners garden in hopes that their hands would touch other hands that had once been in that ground?—and grass slowly grew, and the children still grew in a slower manner that was much too fast. They would fail each other, goddamnit. She knew it. She always did.

“Here, Grandma,” Seth said as he moved closer behind her. She turned and saw his sweatshirt in one hand and a new cup of tea in the other. He stretched his arm, placing it just in front of her free hand, and she took the handle of the cup slowly. The teaspoon in it made a tiny clink, and the sound held onto her, and her eyes were heavier than perhaps they had ever been.

“Thank you, Son,” she said.

Curt Brown

They brought it up in trucks, in trope

Grumble... grumble... wondered the nephewless uncle, his niece has gone toward stores weeks ago—migrated westward and shallowed the clouds as they stumblebummed their freight across the bindlestiff plains. He wondered, expressed wonder in grumbles and pushed his cap back to let a line of sweat trace floorward. Orange juice, she had said. The light snaked in cracked blinds. She was gone. His sister was all metaphor. Why hadn't she birthed a boy? Bouncing in blue—bubblegum cigars. Instead she left him with railroads, carving their rails back, illusory-connecting in distant childhood.

Grumble. He wondered again, pulling a folded pack of cigarettes from the pocket of fade denim coverall. Rivets, he thought and he did his best to rivet his memory of her—of both hers—into firm coiled dirt. He planted the tiny metal where it could afford a view of the sea. Swallow the salt. Steal an errant beam. His nephew was a lighthouse. A pulsar. Still, wood clambered in bits. Jagged. His hands were full of splinters. Orange juice, stanzad citrus. Hollow, he thought. Grumble. The pins engaged, the rectangles were plagiarists. There—concrete. The sea heard as blood, beating in tide to his head. Groaning light, hum. In this hue, just. His hand gripped. Cold. Grumble, he wondered, is Florida this close?

Gertrude Stein on the Atomic Bomb (1946)

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They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it.
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I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them. What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested. I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just couldn't any more than in everybody's secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction. Alright, that is the way I feel about it. They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting.
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Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
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[first published in Yale Poetry Review, December 1947]
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