Inaugural Issue Fall 2005

Letter to my Mother by Burcu

February 14, 2005
Los Angeles

Dear Mom,

Writing you a letter across America, the Atlantic, and the Aegean Sea feels very awkward. I should have been back home about a year ago. Under the deep shadow of Mt. Gume's snowy peaks, we'd be laughing at old family photographs over grilled chestnuts and steaming cups of black tea. The kittens would be fast asleep, breathing lightly into their mother's belly. Where do they sleep these days? In the kitchen or out in the yard?

I can't help but imagine the yard with the apricot tree: Many endless summer afternoons spent under its shade swinging to the rhythm of pigeons' songs. Colors would seep through the shapely leaves and turn the hardened earth into a flying carpet. I'd push myself into emptiness with my eyes closed and catch the warm breeze on my bare skin. I'd carry sun spots on my eyelids; all the way up to the thicker branches where the golden pink apricots murmured. Biting into a ripe one was a sacred ritual of sweet and sour simultaneously dissipating on the tongue, glistening juices running down arms, distant body parts tingling uncontrollably, and finally, ice cold water splashing on burning skin: The sensations from stories grandpa didn't live to tell.

Those were the years of pure joy, of exploring wonders of nature as an untamed animal. They only lasted ten years. Once my life in the concrete jungle of the English boarding school started, the animal reacted to its regimented, ‘civilized’ ways. The animal cried, talked, reasoned to no avail. As a last resort, it took up the weapon of ‘civilized beast’.

Upon returning home one Friday night, I penciled a ten page letter in an ant size font explaining my days of hunger, longing, and alienation at the dorm, asking you to please not send me back to the dorm. Saturday morning, I slid the thick stack under your bedroom door while you and dad were preparing breakfast and started my days' long expectation of some type of an acknowledgement from you. Saturday breakfast—the most cherished meal of the entire week—was nothing but an anxiety-ridden ordeal as I tried to anticipate your reaction to my pleas. After breakfast, I volunteered to take care of dishes. You headed upstairs to straighten out the bedrooms and came down after having taken longer than usual.

Hoping you'd bring up the letter, I hung around the house like a restless beast. You went on with your daily chores of laundry, lunch and dinner preparations, yard care, and tea with Aunt Sukran. As we slurped yogurt soup at the dinner table, I figured you'd first need to talk to father about it. In bed, I prayed that you'd discuss it that night and talk to me in the morning. At Sunday breakfast, there was still no mention of my pleas. Looking at your faces, it was impossible to tell if you actually discussed it or not. On the way to the dorm, I convinced myself that you'd definitely talk to me the following Friday.

Two years and many long letters later, I realized there'd not be an acknowledgement of my appeals. And now, after twenty-one long years, it would be irrational to expect you to break that silence and reply to this letter. I only ask that you keep this letter in the drawer of your makeup table where the rest are buried, so that one day someone who can handle truth better than you and I may come across these pages to revive a completely different version of our family history.

Much has changed since our phone conversations. In court, PF is accusing me of having kidnapped Melissa to Turkey three times. He's saying I'll do it again if he is not given sole physical and legal custody. He also filed for Abduction Prevention Orders which, if granted by the California courts, makes it impossible for Melissa and I to leave the U.S.

I live in fear. I can't bring myself to imagine what I'd do without her. Do I return home? Is my home where you are?

The last time I lived with you was in 1999, after father's passing. We were staying at the summer house in Kusadasi. The early morning heat was slowly rising from the blond bushes and settling over the horizon when I finally stopped drinking and got home. I tiptoed into my room, careful not to wake you and Melissa. Peeling off the skintight dress from my sticky body, I felt my arms shake with exhaustion. I was struggling for breath when your voice rang in my dress like an alarm: Where were you? Why? What audacity! I stood half naked and listened to you tell me to leave, to go back to the U.S. if I wasn't going to live by your rules under your roof.

You were furious because I didn't even bother to lie about the night. I had spent it at a cheap hotel with a Kurdish boy, a bartender from Istanbul. What disgrace! You were angry because I was drinking heavily. A divorced young woman with a child cannot, should not get drunk and sleep around! And the audacity, apparently, had to do with the boy's ethnic background.

I keep wondering: how do we manage to become strangers to the people we call family?

Remember the summer Turkish planes systematically carpet-bombed Southeastern Turkey? The summer I was forbidden from leaving the house alone? Come to think of it, it must have been right before the Halabja Massacre , in 1987 or ’ 88 when I used to stay up all night reading the news from Cumhuriyet s daily reports. The Kurdish terrorists were demanding an autonomous state: A Kurdistan within Southeastern Turkey.

My sentence had nothing to do with the Kurdish conflict. For some reason, father decided I had to go under house arrest. Keys to different rooms, including the bathroom one, disappeared overnight. You told me not to leave the house without you. That is the summer I read during night and slept throughout the day so that our paths did not cross.

One late afternoon, I was watching the incredible reflections on the Aegean Sea when you announced my friend Pinar's arrival. She was the girl from Ankara, plumpish with big piercing blue eyes. Pinar. She walked into my room, shut the door behind her and pushed me into a corner. It must have been some sort of a game or joke. Maybe she meant to flirt childishly, who knows. I didn't get a chance to tell her to behave, and that I was under your watchful eye before her hot, tanned body pressed against mine and paralyzed my mind. The thought of you vanished momentarily. I wasn't just fighting off the weight of her body, but more so the overwhelming urge to explore the offering. We were entwined in a corner when you dashed in. Your arm stretched out and pointed to the street; “Out! Out!”

Embarrassment of a lifetime. With her eyes glued to the floor, Pinar pulled herself together and walked past your arm. It was hard to tell if she was beaming or weeping. I worriedly followed her down the narrow corridor to the entrance where she struggled to slip on sandals. You were right behind me watching us with fiery eyes. I had to let her go without a hug. She dragged her feet to the gate, turned around for a brief second, and let out an insolent laughter. I was relieved.

It took awhile for me to come to terms with my bisexuality. But here we are. Your thirty-three year old daughter is still a bisexual after two forced marriages. It is the nature of the beast: The more we deny the more power truth gains. Regardless of the truth, it is unlikely that I can live an openly bisexual life in Turkey. It is unlikely my exile in the U.S. will end soon. It is unlikely I will consider a particular geography ‘home’.

I picture you in the backyard. You are alone under the frozen apricot tree. The sun is about to break through the grayness. And the brutal wind is trying to steal the pages from your grasp. They're in the tight clench of your dry, chapped hands.

Love,
Burcu

Oaken Dreams by Zinta Aistars

Having two homes, two languages, two shores,
both of which hold claim on my blood and oaken heart,
I am always missing one when on the opposite shore…

She dreams always of being a tree,
skin coarsening gradually into springy bark,

limbs bending into branches, fingers
sprouting tender buds of velvety and greening leaves,
soft, soft, covered with fine mossy hairs like skin,

no, bark, and uppermost branches

scraping sky, flirting with clouds,

tickling bird bellies, sprinkled with sun.
Only roots hanging aimlessly, searching

soil chunks and gravel bits, road dust,

fingering unmapped shorelines, crags of dirt,

knuckled fists of fertile earth, upturned plow lines,

clay clods like open palms, uncharted fields, horizon wide,

for the one gritty nutrient, acorn of oaken heart,

that one precious bit of sod that will grasp

these roots, know them, and relinquish

Home.

About the author

Zinta Aistars is the published author of three books in the Latvian language. She is an editor for LuxEsto, the Kalamazoo College alumni magazine, and contributing writer to Encore magazine in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA, and has published poetry, travel essays, stories, and articles in the United States, Latvia, England, Sweden, Germany, and Australia. Her work also appears on several ezines—including Flashquake, The Redbridge Review, milk magazine, Word Riot, The Surface, Serene Light, River Walk Journal, Bobbing Around, The Moon, Burning Word, Insolent Rudder, coilMagazine, Poems Neiderngasse, QuietPoly Writers Magazine, The Paper, Poetry Life & Times, WriteSight, and others. She is a literary publicist with Zeenythe Communications.

Mothers and Sons by Suzanne Kamata

I'm at the playground, sitting on a swing. There's a temple next door and, from time to time, the suggestion of incense wafts over. The chains holding me squeak as I sway, rutting a groove in the dirt beneath me. With the heel of my sneaker I dig up a child's barrette. My throat clogs.

I'm sitting on a swing, recalling how he sat here, too. He soared high above the ground, shrieking.

A little while ago an elderly woman was pulling weeds behind the slide.

“Where are you from?” she asked me in Japanese.

“America.” I said it with pride, in that “don't -you -wish-you -could -be -so -lucky” tone.

“Ah, so.” She nodded. The skin around her eyes crinkled, but her smile was stiff. She seemed to be reflecting, remembering, and she turned away.
Maybe she'd heard about me.

Finally, the hour arrives. The hour of soldier-suited children lugging red satchels, kicking at rocks and cans as they go along. They pass in groups of three or four, sometimes bumping each other and laughing. Usually there is one serious older child leading the way. Sometimes a mother.

I stub out my cigarette in the sand. I bury it deep, pat the dirt over it. I shade my eyes against the mid-afternoon glare and look down the lane.

Even from a distance I know exactly which one is him. He is with two other boys, but he scuffles along, chin to chest, ignoring the others. His yellow hat is wadded into his jacket pocket. The brass buttons of his blazer catch the sun. He is coming this way.

I rise from the swing, heart pounding. I walk to the edge of the playground. A quartet of pony-tailed girls crosses to the other side of the road when they see me. They giggle behind their little hands. I barely hear them. He is coming closer, but he hasn't looked up yet. I see that his dark brown hair is longer than before, brushing over his ears. He is deeply tanned from outdoor play. An adhesive bandage is pasted over his left knee.

One of his friends grabs the yellow hat from his pocket and tosses it into the air.

“Oi,” he says, irritated. “Kaeshite.” Give it back. He swipes at the boy's head.

The other two boys toss the hat back and forth, but I can tell from their high, excited voices, from the way that they keep in line, that they are teasing him out of affection. They are not bullies, not the little monsters who steal lunch money and wield knives that you read about in the newspaper. They are only trying to pull him out of himself, to bring his attention to them.

I am so caught up in watching them that I almost forget why I am here. Remembering, I raise my hand as far as my temple and call out, “Kei!”

He looks up, searches for a moment, and finds me.

From this close I can see the lush fringe of his lashes, the dimples in his cheeks. In his eyes, I detect yearning. Just for a moment. Because then, out of nowhere, his grandmother appears. She must have seen me. She must have noticed me even as I stood entranced by this boy. She runs to him and the others fall away.

“Kei!” I shout again, but she won't let him look at me.

She holds his head firmly against her side and rushes him off down the street and I can do nothing but watch.

I have lost him again. I have lost my son Kei.

The last time Kei and I were together, I took him to McDonald's, the one near the train station. He ate a cheeseburger (minus the pickles), an order of fries (plus half of mine), and a little cup of vanilla ice cream. I can still see the smear of sticky white on his upper lip.

“I've got tickets to a soccer game. Semi-professional,” I said. "Do you want to go?"

His smile blasted like a hundred suns. “When? When?” His hand tugged on mine, as if he wanted to drag me off to the playing field right then.

“Next Saturday,” I said. “We can take our lunch and eat it in the stands.” I was thinking about how I'd get up early and mold rice balls in my hands, how I'd fill each one with a different surprise: pickled plums, bonito flakes sprinkled with soy sauce, tuna and mayonnaise. “What's your favorite pro team?” I asked.

“The Antlers,” he said.

I nodded. Next chance, I'd watch them on TV.

“They've got Kazu. He's my hero.”

I reached over and wiped the ice cream from his lip with my finger. “Well, you know what? You're my hero. I love you more than anything else in the world.”

He squirmed, but he was smiling. “I love you too, Mom. So why can't I live with you?”

The rumble of a train pulling into the station resonated on my bones. What if we just hopped aboard one of those cars and let it carry us as far as it would go?

“You know what? I want you to live with me, but Obasan and Daddy want you to live with them. It's two against one.” I'd meant to speak lightly, but his eyes darkened. “I'm going to get you back,” I said. “I'll find a way for us to be together. I promise you. Anyway, you've got soccer practice, right?”

His features softened. He nodded.

“So let's get you back home. And then you can start ticking off the days till the big game next week-end.”

On the following Saturday, I showed up at the appointed time and rang the doorbell. Not even door-to-door salesmen bothered with the bell. Most visitors just went ahead and slid the door open and called out a greeting, since the entryway was considered public space. But I, who'd once lived in this house, could not bring myself to do that.

I could hear the singsong chime on the other side of the door, then footsteps. Not the sound of my son's puppy-dog scramble, but the measured, muted steps of Yusuke's mother.

She slid open the door and raised her eyebrows. “Hai?”

“I've come to pick up Kei for the soccer game. I promised him—”

“Oh, well, I'm sorry. He's not here now. He went to Awajishima for the day with a friend.”

“Awaji Island? To the amusement park? To the zoo with koalas?” I'd taken him there just two weeks before. “But we had plans. I told you. I told Yusuke.”

She shrugged. Her hand was on the door, eager to pull it shut. “I guess Kei changed his mind.”

I had never hated her so much as I did at that moment. I suddenly knew that she had been plotting against me.

It is evening, hours after I sat in the park, watching my son. I am at
the table with a bowl of cream stew, thinking about Kei. I’m already dressed for work, in a black silk ensemble that I wore two nights ago and haven't yet washed. It still smells of cigarettes, even though I'd aired it out on the balcony. I’m eating my cream stew, thinking about the way the sunlight ignited Kei’s hair, the ginger strands, when the doorbell rings.

I never answer the door unless I am expecting company. Most of the
time, I don't even bother to glance through the peephole. We get a lot of
door-to-door salespeople in this apartment complex. They peddle everything from bras to strawberries. And I, the fallen foreigner, get a good number of visits from cruel-hearted children. They come to pester and gawk. They stuff used tissues and wads of chewed gum through my mail slot. Once, a
dead bird.

The doorbell chimes again and again. I count up to ten, and then I plug
my ears with my fingers.

Now there is pounding. The door vibrates. I hear the scuffle of feet
and then a phlegmy cough and I know that it is some man and that he is after
me.

I think of turning off the lights, but that would give me away. I hold
my breath until the pounding stops and the footsteps click down the
corridor. I listen to the elevator doors sliding open and closed, to the
labored grind of machinery as my visitor is lowered to the first floor. A
car door, opening and slamming. The rev of a souped-up engine.

I've lost my appetite. I dump my stew, the bits of carrots and
pork, into the trash and put on lipstick: Rabblerouser Red.

It takes a shot of whiskey to get me out the door. I need that hot
sharp burst for the courage to get me down the dark hall and through the
ill-lit streets. I down another shot for an extra jolt of confidence and
then I splash on some cologne and am headed for work.

I think about Veronica and what I will tell her. She, more than anyone
else I know, will understand the pain that's cracking me apart.

Veronica hasn't seen her own little boy in three years, not since she
left him behind in Manila to come to Japan and earn money for his support.
The boy's father was a U.S. marine, a good old boy from Kentucky, and
although he married Veronica, the marriage didn't last. He shipped out,
leaving his ex-wife and child behind, and Veronica has heard nothing
since.

Now the boy lives with her mother. The grandmother sends the photos
that Veronica shows me when we don't have any customers. The boy's milk tea
eyes are shy. He is missing his front teeth. Sometimes they talk on the
phone, and the next evening Veronica will show up with a heavily powdered
nose and red veins shooting across her pupils.

I think about Veronica all the way to the club, and I’m able to put the
pounding and the heavy footsteps out of my head. When I reach the entrance,
my shoulders loosen. I let the breath flow out of my lungs.

Mama Morita welcomed me back, no questions asked, when I showed up on
her doorstep a year ago.

“You're like a daughter to me,” she'd said, embracing me. Hugs are rare
in Japan, and I'd clung to her for a good five minutes.

I'd spilled my story—the full schedule of private English lessons that
had dwindled into nothing, the unpaid rent, the threatened evictions. My
empty refrigerator. All I had left was a cupboard full of cans of Spaghettio’s—Kei’s favorite—that I had been tending like a shrine.

“You can start working again tonight, if you like,” Mama Morita had
said. She patted my hand. Her heavy rings clunked against my knuckles.

And so here I am, a year later, still working as a bar hostess.

The other women are gathered, lounging on the cushioned stools, like a
scene out of a harem. Veronica, in a peony-painted cheongsam, is in the
back painting Betty's fingernails. How nice it would be if we could just
lock the doors and drink and gab all night long without fingers creeping up
our thighs. The thought has barely entered my mind when our first customer of the evening breezes in.

We all go quiet at once. I hear a sharp intake of breath. I know it
isn't Mama Morita. She is all charm as she floats to the doorway.

They man is wearing a gaudy aloha shirt, the short sleeves revealing
intricately tattooed forearms. His hair is permed and a gold toothpick
flashes at the corner of his mouth. I can't see his eyes behind the dark
sunglasses. I feel like laughing because he is nearly a caricature of a
Japanese gangster. But of course I don't laugh because I know almost
immediately that he is here for me.

“Jill, why don't you keep this gentleman company.” Mama Morita has her
arm though his as she escorts him to my table. She nods to another hostess
who busies herself preparing a tray of peanuts and liquor.

I know that I am relatively safe here. Mama Morita will be behind the
bar, keeping on eye on things, and there are witnesses all around. I sit
there and wait for him to speak.

He isn't interested in chit chat.

“I've heard that you've been bothering the Yamashiro's son.”

He uses the word “chonan,” to indicate eldest son, heir.

“He's my child,” I say. I should be scared, I know, but I feel as if
I’m in a B-movie, a comic book.

Mama Morita sets a couple of drinks before us, and just to show this
thug how little I respect him, I take a swig before he's even touched his
glass. She's mixed them especially strong and the drink kicks in right away.

“Do you have any children?” I ask. “Do you have a son?”

He ignores me. “You're working illegally as a hostess on a tourist
visa,” he says. He looks around the bar, rests his gaze on the beautiful
Veronica, on Betty with her vermilion fingernails. “And so are they.”

The threat is clear. He means to have me deported, to destroy my
benefactor's business. But I won’t be cowed.

What I'm thinking is: My son is in the hands of crooks and I don't want
him growing up in that house.

I decide to bluff. I bow my head, force tears into my eyes.
“Wakarimashita,” I say. “I understand.”

He smiles then and I get a good look at all of his silver teeth. He
downs his drink with one tip of the glass and then he leaves without
paying.

No one tries to stop him.

About once a month, Veronica and I have dinner together. We take turns cooking comfort food for one another. For me, it's often macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, eggs scrambled with smoked salmon.

On this evening, we sit in Veronica's impeccable apartment—no dust to write your name in here—the windows pushed open to welcome sea air, Filipino pop music spilling from the stereo. We stretch out on tatami, our heads cushioned by zabuton.

Veronica's got a dish of adobo on the stove. She says that the vinegary aroma brings back memories of Cebu.

"Do you think you'll ever go back?" I ask her. We've had this conversation before. It's almost a ritual by now.

“Someday,” she says, twining her black hair around her hands. Her red fingernails peek out from among the strands. “How about you? Do you want to go back to your country?”

“Someday.” I almost tell her then what I've got planned. I'm bursting to confide, but it's a dangerous thing. I stopper my mouth with a beer bottle and take a long swig.

And then we move on to our next favorite topic, our dreams of true love.

“He'll be tall,” Veronica says. “A basketball player.”

I stretch out admiring my glitter-painted toenails. “Mine will look like Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously.” I giggle. “He'll write haiku all over my naked body. With his tongue.”

Veronica wrinkles her nose. “That's just sex. I want somebody who'll make chicken soup when I'm sick in bed. A guy who will help Luis with his homework and teach him how to fix a car.”

I nod. It's been awhile since I've been laid, so I tend to get distracted. “I want a guy who will hold back my hair when I'm throwing up in the toilet bowl. I want a man who'll pick his socks up off the floor.”

Veronica goes over to the refrigerator and gets herself another bottle of beer. She pries off the cap and takes her drink to the window, looks out to sea. Our momentum is lost.

“His birthday is tomorrow,” she says, in barely a whisper. “He'll be nine. Can you believe it?”

I reach out and touch her shoulder, feel her wilting under my fingers. “Men,”I say softly. “Who needs them anyway?”

But the thing is, we do need them. We need them sitting on those worn, crushed velvet chairs, sucking up drinks, sharing their million and one woes so that we can take their money and pay our rent, save up for plane tickets and long-distance phone calls.

The next evening, Veronica and I are both a little hung-over from too many beers, depleted by confessions. But we put on our make-up and our almost-silk polyester dresses and arrange ourselves at the bar.

The first group to come in is from the board of education. They're already wobbly and as red as strawberries from an earlier party. Mama Morita guides them into a corner and they flop into chairs, loosen their ties, and begin passing around the songbook.

Veronica goes over with a little notebook to write down their selections. One guy with a bad toupee tries to pull her onto his lap, but she swats his hand away. “Dame, dame,”she says, waggling her finger. “Be a good boy now.”

Betty and Yoko start pouring whiskey. The more these guys drink, the more money we make. We've devised a repertoire of drinking games, some recalled from my American university days. Betty takes a coin out of her pocket and I see that she's about to engage them in a round of “quarters.”

I'm still sitting at the bar, nursing a seltzer. Mama Morita is saving me. She's got four Filipinas, but I'm the only American.

A couple more groups come in—bankers, and then some insurance guys, and then there's only one hostess left. Me.

The door swings open again and a man steps in. He's rather portly with thinning hair. His eyes, behind dark-rimmed glasses, turn down at the corners, giving him an air of perpetual melancholy. Unlike our other customers this evening, this one walks in sober. He stands in the doorway looking slightly bewildered, but only for a heartbeat. Mama Morita glides over as soon as she sees him and takes his arm. She settles him at a table. He sits facing outward with a view of the room. Before he has time to feel lonely, I sashay over with a smile.

“Konbanwa.”

He half-rises and bows. “Dozo, dozo.”

I wonder if this is his first time in a hostess bar.

“How about a whiskey?” I ask in Japanese.

He nods vigorously and I get to pouring drinks. “Karaoke?” I ask, proffering the songbook.

“No, no.” The guy actually blushes. “Uta ga heta.” I can't sing.

“Well, then,” I slide into my Marlene Dietrich bargirl croon. “How about if I sing something for you?”

He nods again, even more vigorously than before. “That would be fine.”

We engage in more chitchat till my number comes up.

Veronica brings the mike over, leaning in just enough for my guy to catch a whiff of her perfume. He gazes up into her face, into her smile, and blinks a few times. He watches as she whirls away from us, back to the table with the superintendent of schools. He stares at her while I sing, “Country roads, take me home to the place I belong…” His eyes are still on her when I sit back down beside him.

“Shima-san,” I say, pressing a hand on his arm. “Did you like my song? How about if I refill your glass?”

He turns to me as if waking from a dream.

A month later, I'm stirring grits, thinking about Veronica and Luis. I try to imagine what it would be like to relinquish the care of one's son to another willingly. I look at her, smoking at my kitchen table, and wonder how she had felt when she'd left her son behind.

“So what is that you're making?” she asks.

“Shrimp and hominy grits. Good for the soul.”

She smirks. She was less than impressed with the Spaghettios I served up last time, but I know she'll eat up anyway.

“Ready for another drink?” I ask her.

“Sure.” She holds out her empty glass.

We are having watermelon daiquiris. I refill her tumbler with pink sludge. “So how are things going with Shima-san?” I ask.

“Okay,” she says, and shrugs.

She's already told me that she's been out to dinner with him. He sends her hibsicuses and santan, which Veronica suspects he has imported from the Phillipines. Boxes of cookies from Negros.

“Do you think he'll ask you to marry him?”

She sighs and looks out the window, past the palm trees, beyond the sun-bleached sand to the horizon. “He's asked me already. He says that Luis can come and live with us. My mother, too.”

I know that she doesn't love this guy. She isn't even attracted to him. And yet I know that she will go ahead and marry him. “Maybe you'll meet someone else,” I say.

She shakes her head, swinging her curtain of hair. “I miss Luis. I don't want to wait any longer. And I'm tired of the Cha Cha Club.”

All this talk has unsettled my stomach. I feel the flutter of nervousness when I should be getting hungry. The grits are starting to congeal in the pan.

Veronica shrugs and gestures to the table set with paper plates. “Let's eat,” she says. And we do.

The lawyer's office looked like my husband's office, or like every other office I'd seen in Japan—big desk, dark paneled walls, black vinyl sofas flanking what my mother would call a coffee table, but was more accurately a place to set down down tea cups. On Yusuke's office walls there were paintings. Gotonda-san's walls were bare, save for some official looking documents stamped with orange ink, which I took to be his licenses. Of course there were no photos of his family around. There wouldn't be.

Gotonda-san stared at me for a moment through his thickly framed glasses. “Hai?”

I introduced myself. “I've been told you speak English,” I said.

He froze.

I decided to rephrase in Japanese. “Eigo shaberimasu ka?”

“Chotto,” he replied. He pinched the air to show me how much he could understand. Only about a centimeter.

I assumed he'd heard all about me from Mama Morita. When I invoked her name, he seemed to remember a few details. He stood up, lit a cigarette, and started nodding vigorously. His glasses slid down his nose. “Sit, sit,”he said, waving to the sofa. He laid a yellow legal pad on the table.

“I ask you some questions,” he said.

I sat down and tapped out a cigarette of my own.

“Do you work?”

“Yes. I'm a hostess at the Cha Cha Club.” No use perjuring myself.

He nodded again several times, pushed his glasses up his nose, and took a drag. The ash on his cigarette was growing perilously long.

“You were faithful to Yamashiro-san?”

“Yes. Completely.”

I had been an exemplary Japanese wife, had I not? I'd spent six years under the watchful eyes of Okasan. There was no way she could accuse me of an affair.

I riffled through my past, through my conversations with Yusuke. Had I told him about the Prozac? About the pot I smoked in college? About posing in the nude for the life drawing class?

Was I going to lose custody because I smoked cigarettes?

Gotonda-san puffed his own cigarette and shook his head. “You know,” he said, finally looking at me, “It's not a crime in Japan to kidnap your own child.”

I'm stepping into the Silver Bell Wedding Chapel in heels and a pastel polyester suit. The clothes are on loan from Betty. I don't have much in my closet these days besides surf wear and sleazy hostess attire. Certainly nothing for a church wedding. But this isn't really a church. It's a steepled playhouse on the roof of a hotel. The Caucasian clergyman in the choir robe isn't really a minister, either. He's probably an English teacher Monday through Friday, an actor-for-hire when Western-style wedding comes up.

I slide into a pew at the front, next to Mama Morita. She's already got her hankie ready. I'm hoping her mascara is waterproof. I remember that Mama-san ever took vows herself, and I wonder if, at times like these, she has regrets. Of course, there is still time. You never know.

She reaches over and squeezes my hand. I pat hers back, scratching my palm on her rings.

A few more guests bustle into the chapel and then the “minister” nods to the organist, a Japanese woman in hot pink tulle, and Braham's wedding march fills our ears.

There are no little girls strewing rose petals, no parade of bridesmaids and ushers. Everyone turns to the entrance at the end of the aisle, but no one comes. Has she changed her mind? I look around the room, trying to read the faces of the others. It's then that I spot the tiny Filipina woman in glasses and a bun, and the coffee-colored boy next to her. His hair still has comb tracks. His is wearing a powder blue suit. His face suddenly lights up and I turn to see that the doorway has filled with a cloud of white froth. The bride's two hour make-up job is concealed by a veil. She moves slowly past the pews, in time with the music. She walks by herself. No one is giving this woman away. She has decided everything on her own.

As she approaches the altar, her waiting groom, the bursts of flowers, I see that the boy is leaning toward her. And Veronica, she's not looking at her husband-to-be; even through the lace I can see that her gaze is directed at him. Her son. Luis. She winks at him and takes her place in front of Mr. Shima. He hesitates, then takes her hands, holds them as if they might break.

As the ceremony gets underway, I find myself diving into my purse for a tissue. Such plain hope on Shima-san's face! And Veronica's look of cool resignation. I pray that she will learn to love him. I wish them a thousand years of happiness—Veronica, Mr. Shima and Luis.

It's time for me to get my son back.

About the author

Suzanne Kamata lives in Shikoku, Japan, with her husband and bi-cultural twins. Her fiction has appeared online in Literarymama.com and Talesmag.com. She is the editor of The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and the author of River of Dolls, a short story collection forthcoming from Curbstone Press.

Slav by Zdravka Etimova

He drank his wine slowly, trying not to look at her. Her words were flat, and there was wine in their sounds that pressed his eyes against the table. She had invited him to her study, to the armchair beside the heavy tomes by Shakespeare and Schiller. The books were arranged in alphabetical order, first and second, depending on the weight of the gilt on their jackets. He had visited her place several times. Now he hoped she’d speak about the snow that fell like wet rags from the scuffed sky. Last time she had given him the same armchair. He had been silent, she had not done anything, absolutely anything, just sat, staring tactlessly at his face, sipping at her wine that must have cost her husband a fortune.

“I thought I'd never get over it,” the shards of her words whirred in his face. “I'd been saving my teacher's salaries. I had put aside all the money I took from the private lessons in that backwoods village. My student's parents paid me beans, tomatoes, eggs, rarely pennies. I collected the levs I got in my pillow.”

It was difficult for him to place that refined woman beside a shabby pillow and a sweaty bundle of banknotes stuffed in it.

“I had saved up enough to buy a small house. Houses in the country are not expensive as you know. The village was wild with howls of wolves in winter, with owls that lived in the linden tree in my landlady's backyard. Autumns came with mushrooms that sprouted up overnight in front of my threshold. I put up with the owls and wolves for my students' sake. Every night the growls of the wolf pack invaded my room instead of the newscast on the TV. I gave him all my money,” her words tied an icy knot around his wine.

“He was important to me,” the woman went on. “At that time I thought a human being is meant for another human. Banal, isn’t it? I thought my life made sense only because I was born at the time when he picked mushrooms in my backyard and in the evenings sauntered with the owls to get to know the night. He was a poet. He dedicated his poems to me, to the river and the owls. I believed my blood would disintegrate if I didn’t see him. In the evenings, in the daytime, at nights I ran to his house, which was on the outskirts of the village. In fact all the houses were on the outskirts, the Town Hall and the mayor were the center.

“My room was constantly in a mess, the floor and the cupboard were covered in dust and I wondered where the dust came from in that clean village. The road was dusty, yes. Perhaps time and clouds turned into dust.”

He could not imagine the clutter in her room. Here even the shadows of the vases lay symmetrically on the Persian rug. The gold jewelry, the collection of sapphires and ancient swords glittered warmly, not a speck of clouds flitting over them.

“My salaries arrived with a delay of several months, I dreamt of the house I'd buy and he dreamt of becoming a great poet. I asked, ‘Isn't it enough that you have me?’ It was not enough. He didn't have enough money to go and live in Sofia. I knew he'd become a great man. I couldn't live without his poems. I read them in the morning, in the evening, in the breaks at school. I gave him everything I had put aside. Folks paid me after harvest, after they sold their beans and the wheat.

“‘I'll give it back to you,’ he said and I knew he would. He had never lied to me. I believed his words the way I believed the clouds and the river that never ran dry in summer. He promised he'd come back during the spring term. Perhaps he'd make people's hearts explode, I hoped.”

He wondered why she told him all that. He felt much better when her distant eyes did not linger on his face. Her words failed to bring him to the village where the river did not run dry. He couldn't care less what the poet had done. He knew him.

“It was a pile of tattered banknotes that the guys had got for their tomatoes and Indian corn, so their kids could analyze ‘Wild Stories’ and other beautiful works of fiction which brought no one any good.

“He went away, and I received a letter from him in which he explained how hard it was to find a rented flat in Sofia and how lonely he felt. There were two poems for me in the envelope. The howl of the wolves became my happy path and his poems illuminated the whole village that had only outskirts and no center at all. There was the Town Hall, too, with the mayor in it and, from time to time, his old friend from the armored troops.

“That was the only letter from Slav I got. I glued it to the wall, beside the calendar. I must have taken leave of my senses, I guess. I circled in red ink the words in his letter every day I had no news from Slav. The red circles became so many I could build a blood-soaked pyramid with them. After a couple of months that I spent in the company of owls, the folks from the neighboring villages dropped hints that I had a screw loose.

“They stopped sending their kids to me and I had no one to give private lessons to. One day I received a parcel: a magazine in which Slav's poems were published plus an invitation card asking me to kindly attend Slav's wedding. The card explained Slav had married a Milla Kirova. It let me know where the wedding feast would take place: Bulgaria Restaurant.

“Then I became anemic.

“I could not eat. The smell of food made me throw up. I vomited when I saw the owls, I vomited when people talked to me, I vomited and not only my young students avoided me, their parents chose the opposite end of the street to get out of my way. It didn't matter to me. I obstinately went to school, to the only classroom where the students had lessons, but the kids were scared. They clumped together by the door and peeked inside the room together with the mayor and his fellow-soldier from the armored troops. Wolves howled from the blackboard. One day the mayor and his old friend dragged me out of the classroom and took me to the ambulance that usually arrived in the village when somebody had died. The mayor himself drove me to the county hospital in Radomir.

“I don't remember how long I saw owls, wolves, the outskirts of the village, Slav's letter and the circles in red ink. I remember that I wrenched out the needle through which the doctors infused drugs into me to make me a human being again.

“I trudged from the hospital to the village for a week, maybe two weeks. Lorries stopped and gave me a lift. I did what the drivers wanted, and I did things that the drivers could not think of. Every evening of that month sick with wet snow, I ate a piece of the magazine with his poems. The lorry driver did not understand I fed on poetry. He asked me if I was in my right mind, but it was not because of my right mind that he kept me on the passenger's seat. Not because of my right mind that the lorry deviated from its usual route, turning to the nearby groves, to the driver's country shack where he gave me as a present to his cousins.

“It was only natural I lost my job in the village with the owls and the only classroom. I lost the mushrooms and the mountain, I lost the howl of the wolves, but sometimes I can still hear it, especially when I drink from this wine, Sir.”

He avoided her eyes, cold like a screech of the birds she was talking about. Her face was a wolf's howl that bit the gilded jackets of the books.

“I didn't have any money, I didn't even have clothes. The sweaters I put on smelled of lorry drivers, of groves and cousins, but at least they did not smell of Slav. I stopped seeing the village and the mayor from the armored troops in my T-shirts.”

She fell silent, her eyes pressing the collection of ancient swords. That woman's study was in fact a picture gallery and it constantly rained in her pictures. There were black and white drawings, and there was a collection of sapphires and gold that appeared black. Her study had nothing to do with the wayside groves, the drivers and the wolves in her mountain. Perhaps rains were different: some were for the books with gilded jackets, others remained in her cold eyes for good.

He could not understand why she gave him that expensive wine which probably cost as much as one of these houses with owls in the attics and mushrooms in the backyards. Maybe that bottle cost more than the whole village that had outskirts and a mayor, and no center at all.

“Your husband will be back soon,” he told her, astonished that she remained unimpressed with his remark.

“No, Petar won't be back soon,” she said. “You are a quiet man. It's my pleasure talking to you.”

“First, I became Mr. Petar Savov's housekeeper. Imagine the chaos in the woods I was accustomed to, the notebooks, the sheets of paper, the dictionaries I've cluttered my desk and bed with. There were Slav's poems, too, glued to the chest of drawers, to the table and the mirror. My room had walls built of poetry, of rains and the moon. I never knew where my pens and my bag were. My head was Slav's words he had written for me, my dry flowers in an empty plastic bottle.

“In Mr. Savov's house all swords lay at a forty-five degree angle to the base of the boxes. The brocade on the sofas was folded 12.5 centimeters from the floor.

“I could cook scrambled eggs. I milked my landlady's cow and drank the milk from the bucket. I ate sorrels and bread when I was hungry in the breaks. I drank raw eggs and rain water. Mr. Savov adored French cuisine and hired a cook from Fevre-sur-Mere to train me. It was agony learning the names of the one hundred twenty seven spices the French cook had brought with him. Imagine me cooking a smoked duck with sugar beet, caramel sauce and raisins. I had boiled potatoes before, and that was all I had cooked. I had to arrange two inch spoons 8.6 centimeters from the oyster saucer and the three inch knife two centimeters from the spoons.”

The wine from the ancient Bordeaux cellar scorched his throat. Her words were mad ducks in caramel sauce and raisins, and he could hear their wings flapping in his face.

“I can't imagine that,” he said.

“Mr. Savov gave me the sack a number of times. I stayed in a garret owned by two Turkish women who sold second-hand clothes at the Housewife’s Market. They let me spend the night under their roof because I taught them to speak Bulgarian. One of them told me, ‘Your eyes are great.’ She was not interested only in my eyes, but when she went on saying what else was great about me I left their place and strolled at midnight along the Housewife's Market. It was beautiful and quiet, no crush, no shoppers, the stalls like owls hovering over the sidewalks.

“I visited an old lady and her cat that was almost as big as the woman. The front door of her apartment gaped open all the time like the Town Hall of that village. She walked with difficulty, gasping and choking, and when I entered her home she said she'd call down curses on me. I was not scared of curses. I had eaten so many pages of that poetry magazine and so many trucks had given me a lift from the hospital to the owls in the village. I learnt the one hundred twenty seven spices of the French cuisine and I made Mr. Savov's bed every morning, leaving 12.5 centimeters of brocade visible from the floor.

“I still don't know why Mr. Savov sent his bodyguard to bring me back to his house. Surely not because I glued dozens of pages of ‘Wild Stories’ all over the closet he had allowed me to move into. The letters on the pages reminded me of the kids I taught to read and write, of their parents who paid me tomatoes and hot peppers they plucked from their meager gardens.

“The Turkish woman who said my eyes were great gave me clothes and asked me to recite ‘Visit Your Mother's Place’ for her. She cried for her mother's place, for the cherry trees covered with clouds of white blossoms, and her tears dripped onto my hand. She wanted to drink her tears from my hand, but I fled to the old lady and her cat.

“The old lady stopped calling down curses on me. Once she gave me money to buy aspirin for her: she fought death with aspirin and hoped to win the game. I did not steal her money and when I came back from the pharmacy, instead of curses she gave me her full blessing. It could hardly bring me any good. Once she and I recited together Goethe's ‘Ruhe’ and she sobbed. It was not because she was hungry or lonely. She felt her shadow flit beyond the Housewife's Market and she feared I wouldn't be there to see death passing through the gaping front door of her apartment.

“Mr. Savov's men dragged me from the Turkish women's garret, from the old lady's shadow and the desperate songs of her cat. They brought me back to the closet where the walls told the wild stories. In fact, the walls were the kids I taught in the only classroom of my life. When Savov asked me why I wasted my time on these scumbags from the Housewife's Market I lied to him that I wanted to become a nun.

“Savov is a silent man like you, but he doesn't drink. He just sits in his armchair, intent, waiting, watching me set in order his spoons, his swords, his cigars. He threw out his fashion model for no apparent reason at all, maybe because the girl had set fire to my books in the closet. He didn't have to prove to me he was a man of genius, I knew he wasn't.

“It was after his child was born i.e. after I gave birth to Savov's son and the doctors said the baby was normal, that he stopped throwing me out of his house. He forbade me to amble down to the Housewife's Market. I went there all the same. I hoped the old lady and I could recite ‘Ruhe’ once again, but her shadow had already vanished beyond the clouds and her apartment had a strong metal door. Her cat was nowhere in sight. The Turkish woman told me, ‘I'll give my mother's only golden coin. Please, stay with us.’

“Savov's son is a healthy lad and he proudly shows him off to his friends. I know all the spices of the French, the Bavarian and the Italian cuisine. I can make spaghetti with twenty-one different sauces. All brocade bedspreads in the mansion are exactly 12.5 centimeters from the floor.

“Drink all your wine, please. Prepare yourself. That will make it easy on me. I hope my husband finds us. I don't see any reason why he should keep me here any more. I have money—enough to buy the only classroom in that village.”

He rose from the chair. She was a generous woman. She had left a bundle of banknotes for him in a saucer exactly 12.5 centimeters from her sapphire collection, just like the first time.

She looked at him and the glass of expensive wine in his hand shook.

“Slav sends you this,” he said. His words sounded sharp, like ancient swords in the golden air of her books. “That's the money he owes you. He hired me to find you for him.” The banknotes in his hand looked humped. There was wolf's howl in them. “Slav's looked for you.”

The woman took a sip of her wine. Her hand as thin as the river in that village did not go for the money.

“He told me that after he sent you that magazine he could not write any more,” the man said.

About the author

Zdravka Evtimova lives in Bulgaria, Europe. In her native country, three short story collections and two
novels have been published, including the novel THURSDAY that won the best fiction award 2003 of the Union of Bulgarian Writers.

Her short story collection “Bitter Sky“ was published by Skrev Press, UK in 2003 and two short
stories from it were selected and broadcast in February 2004 by Radio BBC London.

Her short story collection “Somebody Else” was published by MAG Press, USA in 2004 and was nominated
for Pushcart Prize 2005. It won the best short story collection by an established author award of the press
in 2004.

Her short stories have been published in USA Œincluding Antioch Review twice, and a publication in
Masachusetts Review is forthcoming— in UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, Russia, Hungary and India.

She lives with her husband, her two sons and her daughter in Pernik, Bulgaria and works as a literary
translator from English into Bulgarian.

Kyoko’s Rite of Passage by Mary Cook

It came almost as a surprise to Etsuko that the sun had remembered to rise over the Takeda household as it always did. Breakfast had been like breakfast on any other morning: miso soup, rice and smoked fish.

The one difference was that only Kyoko felt like eating anything. Slender as a young bamboo stem, she wielded her chopsticks with the same absorption and joyous exuberance with which she did everything, chattering all the while about her immediate plans.

As she returned to her room to finish packing, her parents looked at each other in despair. Ever since Kyoko announced her decision, colors had looked less bright, food lost most of its flavor and Fuji-san had taken refuge in a blanket of fog, refusing to show himself.

New Year's Day came and went, and with it the family's security. For it was on that auspicious day that Kyoko announced her New Year's vow to her parents.

“I'm absolutely determined,” Kyoko told them. “It's what I've always wanted to do. And now Miho-san has shown me the way, I couldn’t be happier.”

Her breathtaking smile underlined that happiness and colored it in rainbow hues.

There were oceans of tears—most of them from Etsuko. She and her husband Nobu had cherished plans for their only child.

They waited a long time for her to be born and she arrived just when Etsuko thought she could never have a baby. Kyoko's life was mapped out for her from birth. Her parents wanted only the best for her. But as far as they were concerned, Kyoko had been lost to them from the turn of the year.

Now even the imminent prospect of cherry blossom failed to comfort them.

“You know we only ever wanted what was best for you,” said Nobu. “School, perhaps a job in an office then marriage and children, all the traditional things.”

“But what could be more traditional than this?” she cried, passion making her normally soft voice sound strident.

There was no answer to that and her father released a deep, sad sigh.

Contrary to her parents' wishes, Kyoko took a job in a fashion shop in the Asakusa district of Tokyo. It was there that she forged what her parents regarded as unsuitable friendships. One new friend in particular gave them cause for heartache—the young woman they only ever heard referred to as Miho.

“Are we such bad parents Nobu-san?” Etsuko asked her husband.

“Of course not! No woman could be a better mother than you,” cried Nobu loyally.

“Then why is she doing this to us?”

“I don't think she means to hurt us,” replied her husband. “Perhaps we should have seen it coming. After all she began collecting the pictures when she was just five years old, though we weren’t to know she'd take her interest to such extremes.”

“But doesn't she realize we'll probably never be grandparents?”

“I doubt if such a thing crossed her mind,” Nobu said dryly. “She's too young to look so far into the future.”

Indeed, Kyoko's mind was set firmly on the immediate future and her chosen career.

Nobu and Etsuko knew she practiced her art every night behind the closed door of her room. She took her brushes and colors with her—always white, black and red. There was never another color to relieve their tripartite starkness. And by morning there was never a trace of her handiwork. It was regularly and thoroughly washed away as though it had never been.

It seemed such a waste: of effort, of time, of a young life. To the worried couple the New Year and Kyoko's sworn resolution were a hated memory.

When his daughter returned with her small case, Nobu looked at his watch. “All right, time to go,” he proclaimed.

During the short car journey to the railway station, the three were silent, wrapped in their individual thoughts like rice cakes twisted up in paper packages.

Too soon it was time for Kyoko to leave. Standing on the platform at Shinfuji Station, Nobu and Etsuko looked small and defeated as their beloved daughter boarded the train.

As it drew away from the platform, Kyoko stood at the carriage window, waving and smiling and looking so radiant that they couldn't help but see she'd make a lot of people happy. Perhaps they should be grateful that she possessed a power to touch so many lives.

Once outside the station Nobu and Etsuko stood blinking, dazzled by sudden sunlight. Fuji-san had thrown off his blanket and was smiling benignly down on them from a vibrant blue sky.

“You know, we'll probably be allowed to see her at festivals,” said Nobu bravely. “I'm sure she'll let us know when she's taking part.”

Etsuko dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief that had stemmed the flow of countless tears since New Year. Smiling tremulously up at her husband, she ventured, “She'll make a beautiful geisha, Nobu-san.”

Brushing a sleeve across his own eyes, he had to agree.

About the Author

Mary Cook is a UK-based freelance writer and former newspaper reporter. A Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist, she makes an annual pilgrimage to the area of Japan where her story is set. Her articles, short stories and poems have appeared in numerous publications, both in print and online. She's a regular contributor to the online writers' community: www.writelink.co.uk

My Grandmother’s House by Elizabeth Harris

Nested in this room,
healing from life's perfect storm,
I watched the winter come and go.

I've seen the leaves of the maple
outside the north window
turn the colors of the season
and fall to blanket the garden,
watched the fruit of the rowan tree
sunset-red and thickly clustered,
feed the birds through

December's long and icy days.

As a child I climbed these trees,

wandered these halls, slept in this bed
here, in my grandmother's house.
Rooms so familiar, named for those
raised here, stand quietly now

as a testimony to sixty years
of one family's life, in a house
where two were born and six were buried.

The creak at the top of the stairs,
the chime of the living room clock,
the distant sound of church bells,
form a mosaic of meaning to
those who know this place.
Each window holds a memory
of trees bending in the wind,
dancing to the sound of the Lake
as She sings her presence
under the summer sky.

The white picket fence next door

looks the same as it did

forty-five years ago
to this little girl sitting in the apple tree

with a salt shaker and a lap

of green apples, tomorrow's bellyache.
I pulled the last root of that old tree
from the garden I made
this spring with my cousin,
the one who loves plants.

We gathered phlox and veronica
from abandoned plots, far and wide,
left by old women whose backs
no longer bend, who now play cards
and eat pudding in the long-term care unit.
Tilling and raking we planted a celebration
of their lives, a small tribute to having
fought the good fight. They are

on their way to becoming ancestors,
living forward and providing beauty
to all those who stop to smell the flowers.

It's odd and so very precious
how, in this frenetic pace of life,
on the brink of the third millennium,
the sound of the back porch door,
or the fragrance of Gilead's Balm
riding the young summer breeze,
can bring up the rear of a long parade
where the Continuous and the Finite
march side by side to the music
of heaven, the drumbeat of earth.

Last night four granddaughters gathered
to honor the woman who made this home.
Each knows every inch of it—
the sounds, the smells, the taste
of the water from the backwards faucet—
and we've each taken our turn
adding and subtracting from this story
as our parents did before us.
We share our memories, we laugh and cry;
in the end, we extinguish the candles
with full and tender hearts, and
with small tokens of gratitude,

we step out into our lives.

Up here, in this room that cradled me,
soothed me, epiphanized me—
one by one, I put my things in boxes.
The wind blows through the leaves
of that maple, just outside my window,
and once again it begins to shed its leaves.
I take the lesson to heart.
This is the place where the past,
the present and the future converge.
I am doing…I am undoing.
I am preparing to leave
my grandmother's house.

About the Author

Elizabeth was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. When she was eight years old, her family moved to a small town on the shore of Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In 1964, she moved to Hawaii and two years later to California. She settled in San Francisco for several years before relocating to Seattle.

In 1971, after quitting her corporate job, she moved to a tiny cabin on 250 acres of land on the Olympic Peninsula. There she wildcrafted herbs and, inspired by Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau, devoted herself to living a ‘natural’ life. Her love of nature eventually took her to rural Alaska where she and her husband lived with their two sons and a variety of animals, both wild and domestic. After eight years, she returned to Washington state as a single mother, settled in Bellingham and enrolled at Fairhaven College, graduating with a degree in Social Psychology. Following a 9 year career in non-profit management, she opened her own business and currently works from home writing for businesses and individuals. She has published one book, Bonedance, and is currently working on a second book, With Soft Eyes.

“I've been composing poetry since I was a child. The human experience is awash in exquisite moments, each of them with their story. As a poet, I notice the moments and seek to express my perceptions of them as purely as possible. I shape words to create a sensory landscape that evokes emotion in the reader. I believe that emotions have their own intelligence; they alert us to our own true nature, which is the perfect Muse.”

Elizabeth's poetry can be found at www.poetscove.org

Sarnate by Zinta Aistars

For the house on the Baltic Sea in the tiny village
of Sarnate, Latvia, where generations of my family
have been born, loved, have given birth to new
generations, have died, but live on in the blood
of generations to come.

Seven generations accounted for,

the tiny house hunches its stone shoulders

against the cool salted winds of the Baltic,

windows watching with tested patience

the swoop of gulls, the occasional tern,

the passing frame of a familiar figure, glimpsed,

then gone again, like the years,

the generations themselves, of women

watching from those windows,

shutters thrown open, curtains flaring,

their eyes focused on the blue horizon

disappearing in mist, or perhaps tears.

Even as they work, even as they cook their meals,

peeling potatoes, coring green apples,

kneading the soft dough of bread,

even as they nurse their babes to breasts

too long untouched by a man’s callused palm,

they watch—for the return of their mates,

always lured from their honeyed embrace

to that other unknown, to that misted horizon,

to those chests of uncounted gold,

to those women of untasted flesh, fruits

ripened by tropical suns, and the lure

of unfought battles testing muscle and grit

and flaming bravado baptized

by the burn of absinthe and mead,

the madness of dreams that can never be bought.

The house waits. The watchers at the windows

change with each generation, weathered

by the same sea, the same sun, the same salty breeze.

The women walk the white sand of the Baltic,

skirts flaring with the wind, hair tousled and sun bleached,

faces bronzed and eyes lined with the fine

imprint of gazing long against the sun. They bend

to finger each nugget of clouded stone,

rubbing the pad of a knowing thumb

across its wave worn surface, the resin

warming to their touch as they hold it up

to the amber light that will identify

its jeweled and enduring past.

They wear amber necklaces, beads

of amber molded to their fingers,

thick knuckled and gnarled like roots,

knotted amber eyes, clear as sunlight,

golden as honey, dangling from the lobes of their ears,

from wrists, clasped against white linen blouses,

evidence of that which survives

seven upon seven generations, and seven more:

the years of waiting and knowing

the horizon is but a line of dreams,

hopes that palpate the human heart,

the siren call that drives a good man to wander

but a woman to wait, in the wisdom

of seven upon seven generations

to know the virtue of a passing madness

always returns to a horizon seen from the sea,

blue with promise of a tiny house

with stone shoulders hunched against the winds,

and windows framing a face turned towards the sea

About the Author

Zinta Aistars is the published author of three books in the Latvian language. She is an editor for LuxEsto, the Kalamazoo College alumni magazine, and contributing writer to Encore magazine in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA, and has published poetry, travel essays, stories, and articles in the United States, Latvia, England, Sweden, Germany, and Australia. Her work also appears on several ezines—including Flashquake, The Redbridge Review, milk magazine, Word Riot, The Surface, Serene Light, River Walk Journal, Bobbing Around, The Moon, Burning Word, Insolent Rudder, coilMagazine, Poems Neiderngasse, QuietPoly Writers Magazine, The Paper, Poetry Life & Times, WriteSight, and others. She is a literary publicist with Zeenythe Communications.

The Pretty Girl by Kellye Whitney

Ann was a pretty girl. Not pretty like a supermodel or a Barbie doll. Not even girl-next-door pretty, the one whose memory lingered for years after she'd moved away. Ann's beauty was special, elusive, a “there's-just-something-about-her” pretty. The kind of pretty that meant bargains for a smile and a short sundress, no waiting in line at the door, and special invitations to the VIP section.

Ann's pretty meant extra in restaurants: extra hot house tomatoes in her salad, a scoop of sorbet in a huge drink laden with out of season raspberries, an umbrella, and later dessert to take home. None of it was reflected in the tab. Sometimes the entrees weren't either.

When Ann needed cheering up people took her shopping, to the movies, and to dinner. Friend Jack for instance, was quite content to sit and watch patiently as she dug out fabulous bargains from jumbled racks of mish-mash sale merchandise.

“What do you think of this?” she'd ask. When he expressed doubt over the item in question, she'd shoo away his opinion and say, “You don't know what you're talking about.”

Indeed he didn't. He was consistently amazed at how great she looked when she put the shoe, dress or hat on, and was more than willing to concede her style savvy. He let her introduce him to her favorite restaurants around town and even took her helpful suggestions on what to order. And when she moved house there was no shortage of volunteers to help, Jack and his friend Sal included, despite the fact that most of her furniture was that heavy as hell, twenty-five-year, old-school, mahogany wood.

Ann was short and petite, with long, shapely legs, a tiny waist, and slightly too round hips. Her bosom was nothing dramatic, but it was enough to make a man's hands itch to measure it as she jiggled gently along the street. Around the middle of high school, coinciding with her new habit of wearing vintage dresses and smoking pot, her name morphed into the more interesting Annie. Most people were picky about their names. It was a source of identity, some might say the cornerstone of who they were, but Ann was strange; she didn't care. Nicknames were ubiquitous in high school.

“You're a freak,” a friend said fondly, studying the smooth golden skin and long frizzy black hair. “I never know if you'll paint the town cherry bomb red or turn into a hermit. But you are gorgeous.”

This extreme behavior, said her sister, might be the result of a chemical imbalance. It ran in the family. But Ann did not take her sister's advice to go and get herself analyzed. I don't even like to take aspirin, she thought. What was the point of getting a prescription for mood elevators that would languish in the medicine cabinet until one of her friend's took them for fun? Besides, Ann did not need a therapist to tell her she had problems. She was herself day in, day out. She already knew she had issues!

She was finicky to the point of obsessiveness about her hygiene and clothes. What she wore might not match, it might even be more than slightly wrinkled, but everything was kept scrupulously clean. She kept extra everything in the trunk of her car with the spare, safe from dirt in labeled Ziplock bags.

Ann would wear a ball gown with bare legs because she had a personal problem with panty hose. The problem was she refused point blank to wear them. Only a select few knew the reason: the sound the hose made when her thighs rubbed together made her so angry she'd rip them right off her legs.

“I looove your dress!” Someone was always telling her, and she began to like revealing that she'd made it.

This need for confirmation was a weakness, she thought, but it was part and parcel of being pretty. Once you get used to a certain kind of attention, and it doesn't take long, you grow to like it, to crave it. The niggling desire to please people was as obsessive and misdirected, she felt, as her overly strenuous housekeeping habits.

When people came to visit, she cleaned up after them immediately. Sometimes she couldn't even wait until they left. She'd just follow behind them, righting touched pictures and returning looked at books to their precise position on the shelf.

She drove her car too fast around the curves on Lake Shore Drive with Cypress Hill's “Insane in the Brain” thumping through the speakers; not because she had a death wish, but because her ex had screamed at her for doing it. Fuck him, she thought, as her car swooped around the bends like a dusty red comet. It have her a perverse thrill to watch the yellow and white markings rear up from the darkness when her headlights hit them. Traffic surged around her wheels like vicious little bugs and she relished her independence to act so recklessly. Now that she was alone again, her behavior went gloriously uncommented upon.

V had seemed so promising when they first met, so affectionate and considerate, a breath of fresh air in a lonely room in her heart. Then he changed. He couldn't understand that a pretty girl will always have a lot of male friends. Not because she was sleeping with them either. Annie was surrounded by men because she was nice to look at, loads of fun, and not fussy and silly like girls can be. But V was jealous and soon he began to act out, accusing her of things that weren't true and treating her mean.

At first she tried to work things out. She accepted his apology and tried to heed his unsolicited advice. No woman was an island after all, perfect in isolated splendor. Ann went out of her way to make V feel like top dog and continued to introduce him to friends and take him around town with her, hoping that he would see that he was THE man in her eyes.

He didn't. He just acted meaner. So she fired him. What was the point of trying to show someone he was her number one man when he ranted and pouted like a spoiled little boy intent on bashing down the walls with his chin? V had graduated quickly from tantrumic outbursts to outright nastiness, snatching and snarling like a crabby little dog. The kind of dog that yips incessantly for months behind a closed door and then appears, sweet and cute, bow drunkenly to one side at the top of its small, hairy head.

Really. Should she wait for him to hit her? Life was too short. Exactly how many times can one person apologize for the same thing before words are just words? Once? Twice? V'd had at least a dozen. At the end his words no longer even registered. They'd passed over into the sing-song realm of a refrain, a pop song chorus, and not even a good pop song.

She enjoyed her space tremendously after he was gone. There was no one to tell her, “I'm hungry,” and look at her expectantly like there was a ham sandwich in her pocket just waiting to emerge and jump into his mouth. Annie did not know how to cook.

There was no one to ask her what they should do in pursuit of their dream. She had looked at him like he was crazy. “I only have the energy to pursue one dream,” she told him. “Mine.” Then sat silently while he yelled at her for being selfish.

There was no one to make her feel like shit for being who she was and to criticize things that she'd been doing for ten odd years. She wasn't perfect, and Rome wasn't built in a day. She was who she was, as Popeye always said. Who was this creep to think that he could expect changes overnight or even to expect changes at all?

Then she got ill. It was difficult to tell if her sickness was physical or mental manifesting in the physical, but she felt like shit nonetheless. V called to inquire why she hadn't called him that day.

“I'm sick,” she said through a stuffy nose and scratchy throat.

“Aw, boo boo sick,” said he and took the train over to keep her company.

That night he was nicer than he'd been since the beginning. He cuddled her, brought her juice, and fetched the little things she wanted from here and there. But in the middle of the night she woke up and he was inside of her. She shook her head no because her throat felt like fire and her body was aching, but he paid her no mind, and she lay there unmoving until he finished.

“We're breaking up today,” she told him that next morning. She had been awake for hours watching him, waiting for him to open his eyes.

“Oh?” he laughed.

Oh yeah, she thought, not bothering to correct his assumption that she was joking. Instead she pondered the normality of their morning behavior sans the kiss she ordinarily gave him.

“I don't want you to get sick,” she smiled, when he wondered at the lack.

Eventually he left. She immediately took the sheets off the bed and threw out his toothbrush. His washcloth went into the hamper and all of his food into the trash. She felt like someone had given her a second chance, and despite her cold, her aches and pains, she went to work and smiled the whole day.

She didn't miss V. She celebrated her single-ness and listened with pity to various female conversations on the bus, in line at the store, and from her few girlfriends about men troubles. Not for me that bullshit, she thought smugly. Then the time for her period came and went and she realized that she was pregnant.

Just my luck, sighed Ann, and swallowed a lump in her throat. I'm always a minute too early or a second too late. She ignored the ache around her heart. She pushed aside the images of a golden skinned baby with a huge, toothless smile and tiny arms outstretched and made an appointment. She climbed into the stirrups, and twenty minutes and twenty-six days later, no more pregnancy.

She recovered physically but something was different. Her friends thought she was having a hermit episode, so they still called to make fun of her for not calling or coming by. They teased her that the hot spots weren't as hot without her there to get tiddly off two beers and trip over the bar stools, or dance outrageously sexy on the dance floor and make the other girls jealous.

“Aann-niee? We miss you,” said one.

“You don't love me anymore,” said another.

“What's wrong with you?” several cried.

Ann did not reply; she started screening her calls. V called one day and, unused to her caller ID, she picked up. After that her machine stayed full. Ann stayed home and listened to her friends wonder aloud where she was at, whom she was talking to, and just when the hell would they see her?

She wondered if people would think she was so fabulous if they knew she had a habit of picking her nose and playing with her snot. That she wiped boogers without the use of Kleenex and talked to herself aloud. How pretty would she be if people knew that in college and the company of bullies she had once terrorized a girl into avoiding her on the street?

That she'd rather kill her beautiful absentee baby than find herself shackled to a worthless man for the rest of her life. That she was so sad some days she didn't leave the house except to work, and even then went the whole day without looking a single person in the eye because she was scared they'd see how scared she was.

Her possible imbalance might be the reason, but with her aversion to therapy and pills, Ann relied only on the restorative power of her sunny yellow “lemons to lemonade” philosophy to pull her through the tough spots.

Gradually she grew tired of her own company. The wilder crazier Annie that everyone knew and loved emerged and her friends rejoiced. But even as they partied, as smoke billowed toward the ceiling fan and bottles were emptied, they recognized a more subdued note in their friend. She was still a pretty girl, even prettier now with a new and unexplained fullness around the bust, but the loud moments of hilarity and merry making were far fewer than the hermit ones.
There was a strange quietness about her that should have dulled her gaiety but had created instead a kind of gilded glow. Some of her more astute friends looked at her and felt a flash of sadness, of frailty, but they passed it off as a trick. After all, Annie was a pretty girl. The world was her oyster, and a good portion of its inhabitants would gladly lie down at her feet for a smile. What could possibly be wrong with her?

Silly boys, she thought. Pretty doesn't keep you from getting laid off when your company has no money to pay your salary. When you're pretty and get laid off it means that you don't get severance because you are a “consultant” and that means no benefits, just a chunk of cash every week to do with as you please.

Being pretty and being laid off also meant that hundreds of dollars in additional income picked up typing the occasional letter for a small businessman in the building stopped too, since now there was no convenient computer, email and laser printer set up to base operations from. No more Airborne Express or free postage and supplies with which to carry out personal business. No more free downtown parking spot, breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner from an infatuated coworker.

Come to think of it, being laid off wasn't completely a bad thing because being pretty didn't keep that friendly, generous, overly attentive coworker from getting on her nerves. Not having to see his face every day all day long was a blessing. All those good lunches were ruining her figure anyway, because being pretty meant never having to say “no!”

On the other hand, being pretty doesn't help you hear a “no.” Not when you really want the job but go on interviews with a faux smile hanging on your face. Pretty doesn't cut it then. At least, not when a woman's interviewing you.

Lean times were coming. She'd been through it before, and she wasn't the only one, however she looked. Ann knew the day was coming when people would stop speaking to her on the street just because. Men would stop being so helpful, and the freebies would dwindle and lessen down to almost nothing. Annie just hoped she'd milked being pretty dry and that her insides had blossomed despite the outside fading. Her phone rang.

“Peace.”

“What are you doing?”

Ann wiped sleep from her eye with a small fist. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? You must think you're Jackie O's daughter.”

Ann laughed. “I am. If Jackie O was plumply corseted, jazzily turned out and Black, I would be her daughter.”

Her ruse didn't work completely, her sister still asked what she'd been doing that day, and why she wasn't out pounding the pavement looking for her next crust. But this time Ann did not answer. The urge to convince someone else of her worth had been distant these past days, thank the good Lord. She wasn't moving as fast as she'd like, or perhaps even as fast as she should, but it was enough to keep moving. If she listened to other people, absorbed their beliefs and expectations like a paper towel does spills, what the hell was the point of struggling gallantly on? She would go crazy, break her own heart, and no sane person who knew how it felt would do that voluntarily.

When her heart broke the first time it did so loudly, with horrendous creaking and wailing and long-winded sighs like the wood floorboards of an old house on a cold night. The pain was so sharp it brought tears to her eyes and rendered the rest of her body useless.

The heart could also break softly, like fabric tearing, or the insidious hiss of steam from a cranky kettle. That's the one she knew to watch out for. When a heart breaks slowly, you might not even know it's cracked until a draught of frigid air whistles in and for a moment, it stops beating.

“You're going through that phase of life,” her sister said knowingly. “Quite a few of the women on our father's side of the family have experienced malaise of some kind in their twenties.”

Kindly she did not reiterate her belief that Annie should seek medication. But Paxil, one of her favorite words these days, remained in the air, a voiceless specter hovering over Ann's ear like a wayward hair.

“Just be grateful you didn't waste all of your youth in bad marriages like I did,” her sister said, and her precise, cultured tone rose sharply. “When I left my marriage to T, I had $ 47. My hair was wild on top of my head and there was only one thing on my mind: get out.”

Her sister had confided the story of her second, disastrous marriage over time. The silences, the raging fights, the long unexplained absences, even a stint where in the midst of a serious blue funk she had slept on a park bench to avoid going home. Ann was grateful that she'd never endured such. Having a broken heart was more than enough since it healed slower than molasses could drip. The memory of waves of pain throbbing in tune with her blood eventually softened, but any new distress seemed to revive it, make it echo in her brain until she grew weary and sad all over again.

“I can't imagine it, Linda Mae.”

“Well, Annie Lee, I hope you never do. Living with someone who's tearing you down is the worst thing in the world?”

“So, along with our bad DNA comes an inability to form a meaningful relationship with a man.”

Linda burst out laughing. “Bad DNA?”

“Well, you said this bullshit state runs through the family.”

“Yes, but you have such a way of summing things up!”

“Yeah.” Linda heard the muted whoosh of a lighter. “Thanks for coming out, dad. So.” There was a faint sound of breath exhaling. “In addition to this very difficult time in the world, where in between looking rather furtively over one's shoulder for falling planes and sniper bullets, one must, if you are a female in our family, deal with an instability of temperament. Fits of melancholy.”

“Males too, but yes. It's as though when things go bad, they snowball out of control in our minds if not necessarily in life, though that has also happened.”

Ann laughed softly. “We should write a book. I bet we could get on Oprah's Book Club list easy with this story. It's so ‘Dr. Phil special’, and set right here in Chicago.”

“No, no. I'm too busy baking, and you dressmaking.”

Ann's handy, old-fashioned little talent for sewing had helped her come out of her slump. She started with buttons and hems for her mother, who wore them to work where the other ladies noticed and threw more business her way. Word spread, and Ann often made special trips to her mother's school. She found it was good for business to look as pretty as possible, and soon she was tailoring nephews' school uniforms, sewing monogrammed handkerchiefs, and embroidering grandbabies' baptism dresses.

Ann was also gently pumped for information and offered bright young sons for influence or escort. She gladly took the sewing, but was vague on the offers. She did charge them each three dollars extra for the delivery service though.
When she wasn't doing that she was making herself new things, or adding her signature stamp to some thrift store find. Before she trolled the downtown shops for special sale priced finery to look pretty in and soothe ruffled feelings and randomly administered hurts. Now Ann haunted resale shops and sold most of the things she found after gently refurbishing them. She wasn't making as much money as she had been, but she felt better working at home, and business was steadily increasing. She got so busy she didn't have time to keep her own books.

Annie immediately thought of one of her male friends. Ricky was a two-nighter friend. Meaning she could spend a whole two nights in his company before he got on her nerves. She'd slept with him once. They'd been friends for about a year when a few Coronas and a fabulous party had done them both in. They literally had too much fun.

They did not repeat the experience and their friendship settled back to normal with a minimum of fuss. Now she gave him her accounting stuff to do every week, and he got what he called beer money. Some of which he shared. He confided to her on one such night, as she sat in front of her newly upgraded sewing machine and he sat at her desk paying bills and tallying receipts, that he liked this softer her.

“I miss that you don't come out like you used to but you seem much calmer and happier. Dare I say domesticated?”

They'd both had a good laugh over that later when she almost let their frozen pizza burn. Ann wondered what he would say if he knew that last night, she and her paper-chasing sister had sat on the phone for over an hour, listening to the swish-swish of counting money and planning a dozen ways to get more.

“You were pretty before, but you've grown lovelier,” Ricky said quite seriously, and Ann blinked at his tone.

He was obviously sincere and she was touched.

“Thank you,” she said. “I feel better. There's such a thing as too much attention,” she added.

Ricky sat still and quiet for a moment.

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose certain kinds of attention could cause more harm than good. Looking like you can't be all it's cracked up to be?”

Ann laughed but said nothing. Being pretty meant knowing when to keep one's secrets.

About the Author

Kellye Whitney describes herself as a diehard romantic and has devoured romance novels since the age of 13, when she first made the decision to become a writer. With a BA in news-editorial journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia, Whitney currently earns a living as an editor for a publishing company in Chicago, and as a freelance writer for Vibe and other publications. She has interviewed artists like Kanye West, Destiny's Child and Macy Gray. However, recently her creative urges have prompted more action on her own projects and she plans to publish a romance novel within the next year.

Motherland by Sarmista Das

My breasts abound with milk I am
bountiful, my hips swollen with the heat of summer
eyes flush and gait straight I walk
fluid in the motion of my veins
The blood beats quick around my belly I swell
with the fullness of motherhood, twice blessed.

That night two bodies crawled into me, one with a pain that was
deafening, the other slow and silent, it took me more than two months to notice

the scars growing beneath my flesh.
That night I practiced the art of chameleon
my shades as fickle as autumnal leaves.
That night, I lay, sprawled, spread like
compote on dry toast, one leg here and one in the
air,
my eyelids shut tight as if hoarding a secret,

my conscience sprawled in the
backseat of some crummy lemon.

My throat parched my tears evaporated as dry lips and chapped hands scraped my peach fuzz body

not yet ripe enough to eat. But I was
devoured, I left with tooth marks all over my body, tooth marks the size of footprints
I left as a map, a travelogue, a savage terrain, the mysteries long discovered,
civilized, tamed, and uncovered.
I left transformed into a holiday destination,
my bloodstains that decorated the faux leather seats
flaunted as trinkets, cheap souvenirs.

That night, two bodies crawled into me
crawled into my eyes, clawed behind my eyelids, carved and
carved their histories into my vision, embalmed me in their memories
For months I lay frozen and entombed
paralyzed in the winter of my wounds
my womb whittled into a weapon, its war cry the
icy scratch scratch of stale skin against skin
of a body broken, bruised and battered
the skin of a spirit smashed and shattered,
welts grew in me, contusions and eruptions clung to my skin like
climbing ivy but I thought
this land is spoilt. I thought this soil has been plowed, this earth has been tilled
I thought Nothing will grow here, nothing can grow here but
shady vacation spots and gaping scars left by tourist signs.

That night was a night that lived with me for six months. But I awoke one morning
covered in the dew of warmth so thick, my tongue was full with the taste of sunlight.

That same morning I thawed out of my tomb, crawled and clawed out of my bedroom
And looked in the mirror but saw not my self, but two selves enveloped in one
layer of skin, laced with pearls of sweat I thought

this belly is brimming with the roots of something beautiful I thought

these breasts are brimming with the milk of a thousand babes and that same morning, I vowed
I will walk, I will walk, I will walk all over this map and uproot the tourist signs and the souvenir shops,
I will walk all over this land and water the earth and plant seeds in the pocks that have marked me,
I will walk with a spring in every step and let the sun envelop me in its sweetness, I will let rain douse and drench and fill the river of my veins. This land is mine, and now

my breasts abound with milk I am
bountiful, my hips swollen with the heat of summer
eyes flush and gait straight I walk
fluid in the motion of my veins
The blood beats quick around my belly I swell
with the fullness of motherhood, twice blessed.

About the Author

Sarmista Das identifies herself as a “postcolonial feminist.” Fluent in English, Bengali and French, she is currently working towards her MA in Literature at McMaster University in Montreal, Canada.

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