Anniversary Issue Fall 2006

Second Daughter by Eugie Foster

Navah was born second daughter to her house, a disappointment to her mother and father, who had expected another son. Her mother died of shame when she realized she had birthed a second girl child and her father named her Navah, which means “regrettable.”

The only one who was kind to Navah was her brother Alsieb. Navah would sit with Alsieb while he wove his warrior's shirt and as his hands twisted and pulled at the thick strands of yarn, he would also spin fabulous tales for her about cunning monkey kings, sly fox women, and her favorite, the fearsome witch who lived in the forest. She barely dared to breathe for fear of disrupting the luck charms his fingers twined into the cloth, but she never missed a single word.

Now Alsieb was sick, the poison from a bandit's lance working its way into his heart. The brigand had stricken off one of Alsieb's charms at a crucial moment and the green tip had stabbed into his side.

The aunties said the wound was cursed and would not heal. Navah overheard them as she stood peeling the vegetables for dinner.

“It was bad magic!” Aunt Yegane said as she poured rice into a cooking pot.

“A demon perhaps,” Aunt Hadara agreed, rolling out flour for dumplings.

“Maybe it wasn't a demon,” Savina said. “Maybe it was Navah. She sat with him while he wove. I saw.” Savina was first daughter and delighted in tormenting Navah, who, after all, was lowlier than her, being second daughter.

The aunties glared at Navah.

“Cursed second daughter,” Aunt Hadara hissed. “Alsieb will surely die because of your thoughtlessness!”

Navah shrank within herself, feeling the harsh glares that fell on her back as though they were rods. She dropped the half-peeled radish and ran out of the kitchen, ignoring the indignant cries of the aunties. They would surely pinch her and beat her later, but she didn't care.

Navah snatched up her ragged mantle, climbed through a low window, and stepped out onto the lane. It was a cold night. Lady Moon wore a thick shawl of dark gray clouds rimmed with faint stars. Navah could barely see her feet on the white-stoned path.

“Mistress Moon,” Navah said, “I am just a second daughter, but I am on an errand to save my brother. Won't you smile upon me so that I may find my way to the witch woman?”

Lady Moon winked at Navah and let her shawl slip. She didn't take it off, for she was shy tonight, but it was enough. A fragile beam of silver glimmered down and touched the path with a pale brilliance.

Navah hurried along, but the trees grew thick in the forest, and their branches tangled over her head so that they blocked out Lady Moon's face. Navah stopped and looked to the left and right. She wasn't sure of the way.

The black eyes of a night hare glittered at her in the shadows.

“Master Rabbit,” Navah said. “I am just a second daughter, but I am on an errand to save my brother. Do you know the way to the witch woman!” The hare flicked his long, black ears and twitched his shiny whiskers. His hind legs kicked out and he soared through the hedges.

Navah ran after him, her heart pattering in her chest. Again and again she thought she'd lost him, but then she would catch a glimpse of his sparkling eyes or the shimmer of his flashing paws. And suddenly, before her was a lopsided hut. But surely this couldn't be the witch's house already? In Alsieb's stories there were always three companion guides—one for truth, one for fortune, and one for honor. There should have been a talking bird of paradise or a rhyming boulder to deliver her to the witch woman, certainly?

The night hare bobbed his head to peer at her.

“Thank you, Master Rabbit,” Navah panted.

The hare flipped his tail at her and vanished into the forest.
Navah had never seen anything like the hut before. It had five sloping sides, which was very unlucky. Everyone knew that five was an evil number. And the path led straight to the door, without a single bend or curve. Surely it was an invitation to bad spirits to have an unbroken line leading to one's door? Finally, not a single lantern hung over the entry. Did the witch not know that a shadowed doorway meant ill fortune? Truly, it was the most poor-omened house Navah had ever seen.

She stepped up to the door—painted dark green, green for sorrow no less!—and lifted the heavy bronze knocker. She struck it three times, the number for prosperity.

A lilting, musical voice called from within: “Strike the knocker once more, if you please.”

Four knocks? That was unheard of! But Navah did as she was bid, and with a trembling hand, raised the knocker one final time.

The door swung open on noiseless hinges. What of the lucky squeak to frighten away goblins? All these contrary omens! But Navah did not dwell long on the silent hinge, for the witch woman, her hostess, caught up her attention.

She was not at all what Navah had expected. She was young for one, a lady, not a crone, and quite beautiful for another. A waterfall of ink-black hair cascaded, almost to the floor, around a smooth, round face. She wore a simple wool dress with a flaxen girdle that emphasized her supple waist and graceful arms. But the wool had been dyed a deep gray, almost black, a very unlucky color; it was the exact hue of a death shroud.

The woman beckoned her inside. Within, the room was hung with herbs around a blue-stoned fireplace and a single round window let in the night sky. Navah struggled not to dwell on all the perils a window with no corners might attract.
“Are—are you the witch woman?” she asked.

Amber eyes twinkled at her, tilted at the corners, cat-slitted. “Call me Lady Isahr.”

Navah gasped; isahr meant “ill-met.” She bowed. “I am Navah.” Lady Isahr laughed. It was a bright, merry sound, full of sunshine and sweetness. She took Navah's arm and tried to coax her out of her obeisance. “What brings you to my door on so cold a night, unregrettably?”

Navah bowed lower. “Please, Lady Isahr, my brother Alsieb is sick, maybe dying. It is my fault, my bad luck that caused it. The stories say you are wise and can lift curses. Will you help him?”

Lady Isahr knelt and wiped Navah's cheeks with a corner of her death-colored gown. Until that moment, Navah had not realized she was crying.
“Tell me what has happened.”

Navah sobbed out the tale in a rush of misery and guilt. Lady Isahr listened, her smooth face somber, until Navah was done. Then she lifted Navah to her feet and ushered her to a five-legged chair by the fire.

“Child, I may be wise, but it is your courage that is needed tonight.” Lady Isahr pulled several herbs down. “I will make a draught for you that will let you walk with the spirits. I fear your brother is caught in a ghost web.”

“I will free him.”

“You are brave, but there is peril.” Lady Isahr plucked up a knife that glistened like a slender star. “I must open your vein to anchor your soul to your body, but if you do not prevail before you are bled white, both you and Alsieb will be lost.”

Navah trembled, but she said again: “I will free him.”

She watched as the witch woman mixed a bitter potion in a tawny, heavy bowl. When it was done, Navah lifted the bowl to her lips and swallowed every drop. Lady Isahr pressed the silver knife to Navah's throat. “Remember, you” she said, and the bright metal flashed.

Pain blossomed like an orchid of fire at Navah's throat. She recoiled from the agony and was astonished to see her body still slumped in the five-legged chair. Lady Isahr bent over her, catching the stream of blood in a honey-teak cup.

“Fly, Navah,” she heard the witch woman call. “Quickly.”

The pain flared in her neck, and with a thought, Navah was outside and back on the path. A night hare blinked at her but she did not need his aid. She ran, her feet skimming the ground, her neck a torrent of fire. Fast as worry, she retraced her steps and slipped into her father's house.

Within, she found Alsieb in a strangling web of spirit knots. Strands thick as despair looped his waist, while razor fine threads of disharmony twined his hands and feet. Alsieb lay as one already dead, his face slack and pale. The trap was so tight that not a flicker of light shone through the coils.

“Alsieb!” she cried.

His eyes opened. “Navah,” he whispered. “Beware. It is a bad luck web. Come no closer.”

Before he finished speaking, tendrils reached out for her. One jagged strand wrapped around her ankle and tugged her forward. It was icy against her skin and the chill of it vied with the fire still ablaze at her throat. She felt dizzy, a wash of sickness in her stomach. But she also saw that as the web clutched at her, the knots around Alsieb loosened.

She waded in, welcoming the lashing cables of discord with open arms. Their touch drained her strength, crushed the breath from her chest. But still she moved forward, until she stood beside Alsieb. She wrenched her hands free from biting knots of misfortune and shoved him with all her remaining strength. The tangle around him had become so slack, distracted by new prey, that she was able to push him free.

As soon as he was loose, he sat up, the color returning to his cheeks. He reached for her, but she staggered back with her burden. She was second daughter and of no consequence; she would not let Alsieb become tangled again.
How she made it outside and onto the path, she did not know, but there she was. She fell heavily, her feet snarled and her limbs too numb to respond.

A black hare appeared by her head. “Silly girl,” he said. “How can you be strangled in ill-fortune if you are a second daughter?” The rabbit reached out with a sharp paw and swiped at Navah's neck. The burning pain from the cut flared anew, like a fire behind her eyes, eating her up, and thawing through the cold. She cried out and found herself back in Lady Isahr's five-legged chair. A black rabbit preened its silken ears by the fire.

“Quietly, child, you must rest,” Lady Isahr said. She set a cooling poultice against Navah's neck.

Navah looked up into a face as beautiful as the full moon and into eyes as kindly as the sun. Surely this woman was brimming with good luck.

But: “Lady Isahr? Are you a second daughter?” Navah cringed at her own temerity.

Lady Isahr only smiled. “Of course I am, child. Didn't you know? Second daughters are very special. We make our own luck.”

Navah thought on Lady Isahr's words as she drank fragrant tea and nibbled sweet bean cakes until the last of the chill faded to a muted tingle. The black rabbit escorted her to the boundaries of her father's house.

The household was rattling lucky chimes and setting food out for good spirits in thanks for Alsieb's recovery. She stepped over the incense sticks and walked straight to Alsieb's room without adding a single curve or twist to her course.

Alsieb greeted her warmly and embraced her in his arms.

She felt his strength and heard the vigor of his voice and rejoiced. But she was also sad. “I am going off to make my own luck,” she told him.

Alsieb pressed his cheek to hers. “Don't go, little sister. You have always been my lucky charm.”

Navah kissed Alsieb's warm forehead. “And you have always been my sanctuary. But I must make my own house now. Perhaps one with five walls.”

Alsieb bowed his head sadly, but let her go, promising to visit her often. And even though the hinges on Navah's door didn't squeak and the walls were a most unsettling green in color, it was a lucky house. And no one who knew Navah thought the acquaintance to be at all regrettable.

About the Author

Eugie Foster calls home a mildly-haunted, fey-infested house in Metro Atlanta that she shares with her husband, Matthew, and her pet skunk, Hobkin. She is an active member of the SFWA, winner of the Phobos Award, and Managing Editor of Tangent. She also pens a monthly column, Writing for Young Readers, for Writing-World.com. Her fiction has been translated into Greek, Hungarian, Polish, and French, and has been nominated for the British Fantasy, Southeastern Science Fiction, and Pushcart Awards. Her publication credits include stories in Realms of Fantasy, The Third Alternative, Paradox, Cricket, Fantasy Magazine, Cicada, and anthologies Best New Fantasy: 2005, edited by Sean Wallace &$040Wildside Press); Heroes in Training, edited by Jim C. Hines and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW Books, forthcoming); and Writers for Relief, edited by Davey Beauchamp—a charity anthology to benefit the survivors of Hurricane Katrina with contributions from Brian W. Aldiss, Gardner Dozois, Joe Haldeman, Nancy Kress, and Larry Niven. Visit her online at www.eugiefoster.com.

The Burning Bush: Fiction by Laura Robinson

God came to Moses, I believe the story goes, in the form of a burning bush to tell him that he must lead the Jewish people. Moses didn't want to be the leader. I'm fascinated by the hero's reluctance to be the hero. Why not? Don't we all want to be leaders? Superheroes? The one who goes down in history, who will be revered and remembered for all eternity, rather than forgotten in a generation, a mere moment's flicker of light?

The burning bush is also a pretty interesting part of the story though. A freak of nature. Was it a bolt of lightening? Or spontaneous combustion? Or merely divine intervention? It speaks of divine desire on a level that is possible, attainable. It turns out, the divine translated into human terms is a bush enflamed. As a lesbian, I truly appreciate that.

And it spaketh thus.

I was up in Temagami, a beautiful and contested old-growth forest in north-eastern Ontario, slashing and stomping through the bush with my fourth year class. Even as I continued with everyday life, my thoughts buzzed back to the same image and thoughts.

This is just like where they found my dad. Plane smashed around a tree. He was hardly recognizable.

I was aware, as I pointed to specific rock formations, geographic anomalies, old burn areas, not of my fresh-faced students, gathered around in their gortex jackets and woollen toques, but of my inescapable pain. I am newly orphaned, I whispered inside to myself, which sounds like a feisty red-haired girl hero of some plucky children's novel, some sort of modern Anne of Green Gables, but that isn't the case at all. I am old enough to expect it, if anyone ever can, but orphanhood is still a newly-earned badge, a new wound to marvel over, poke one's tongue into, as if a lost molar. No such thing as a tooth fairy anymore. My father died in a plane crash in a Northern New Brunswick forest, a small Cessna he flew for fun. Like a Greek myth modified, the father flies too close to the sun. What a tragedy, everyone whispered at the funeral. It was packed; they had to bring chairs over from the church hall. I didn't cry.

My mother died shortly afterwards, of grief they all said, but I knew that the painkillers, and sleeping pills, and tranquilizers, and antidepressants were the more likely culprits. Not as many people whispered, what a tragedy this time, but I felt it more tragically. At least my father lived, swelled past his limitations, crashed in the attempt to push beyond the ordinary. My mother suffocated on her own vomit in her bed in the middle of the afternoon, they figured.

There is something about returning to that field camp each spring that sparks those losses for me. I suppose it's because, some of my friends might argue, I've been unable to “get over them.” I do my best. I go to the gym faithfully, I teach my courses, I smile, and I go for drinks. I feel part frozen inside, like a body suspended under the ice, but I carry on anyway, hoping no one notices. No one does.

And then it happens. The burning bush. But I didn't know it at the time. I was in an East Coast pub in Northern Ontario, because that's where I taught. It was late summer. I was in the pub with an alcoholic depressive friend who was in love with me, because that was all I had at the time. I am a lesbian who kept hopping into bed with men because they are easy, and I needed to shield myself from the yawning darkness of the void. Men'll do in a pinch. With the depressive friend, Matt, who I swore I wouldn't sleep with—famous last words—I scanned the bar for babes, for him, because entertainment is necessary, talk is annoying, and playing cards would be simply embarrassing.

And I see her.

My god.

It was a bolt of lightening that caused the burning bush. She is sitting at a table, leaning forward, with a bandana on her head. She is wearing a tank-top, white, and her muscles shine in the early evening light. She is deep in conversation. And I know. I know.

This only happened once before. I attended a soccer game of my first-ever girlfriend's. I came out rather late in life and was stupidly nervous around all the lesbians who were duly cleated and comfortable with being lesbians. I wore heels and tight pants. To watch a soccer game. What an embarrassing mistake. As in love with Pam as I thought I was, when Diana appeared, sun behind her, and I looked up and saw her, I simultaneously soared upwards and was struck by lightening, which vibrated, reverberated through my entire body right down into the very bowels of the earth, already astir. Diana stared at me as if she knew me, had always known me. A part of me either died right there or came alive. It might necessarily be the same thing.

You know the rest of the story, of course, because it's so typical. Pam and I broke up, if you can call it that, the inevitable unravelling of an already-fragile stitch. I finally march over to talk to Diana one night at the gay bar. I call her. We go out. I immediately start sleeping with a man and wind up in a year-long relationship with him. Is that fear? What would have happened if I had simply embraced my desires? Last I heard, she's in the Yukon. In the wild.

Moses refused God's request at first. He didn't want to be chosen.

I would have gone over there, to Bandana-girl, that night, just enough Keith's and irritation with depressive Matt. I perched at the bar, convincing myself that this was possible, and wondering what I might say: “Hi, I had to meet you.” Or should I come up with some excuse? But when I looked back, she was gone. It was just after nine and the sun had started to set, a blaze of pink and orange in the window framing the empty table where she had been sitting.

Gone.

But life became full anyway. Unburnished grief gave way to a type of contentment in the form of teaching and research, a house that required attention, and a relationship with a woman I'd met through friends, a skinny, nervous dog groomer who required little effort and drank too much. Contentment: a purring of cats on a cold winter night as one arrives home from dinner with friends; a heart-swell on the sunny drive to work when a favourite song comes on the radio; a sense of well-being and fulfillment, like a crawling into bed after a long day.

But little passion. The familiar clink of cutlery as it is loaded into the dishwasher. The quiet warmth of eyes meeting. The safe embrace of the comfortable. Virginia knew that something necessary was missing. I knew it was me. I couldn't possibly be there because I had retreated into an abandoned mine, sought solace in a forgotten forest, like a teddy bear in some children's animal story, a handmade sign in children's scrawl, “Closed,” hanging loosely over the heart.

And then Bandana-girl showed up at the monthly gay dances, which are necessary for a sense of the community' in small-town Northern Ontario. Hallelujah. I knew she was gay. It was Halloween, and she was dressed as a construction worker: work boots, hard hat, low-slung tool belt, white tank top… Great god have mercy. ..

And, then, she appeared on campus, at the college, with glasses, looking much more serious. My heart pounded on approach. She was deep in conversation. She passed me. I looked hopefully over my shoulder. She did not notice.

Which is fine. Better, really, since I was in a relationship and one that was fine. Fine. Meets all the needs. Is quite compatible.

I was at one of the dances, watching Bandana-girl from afar when I saw her laugh and turn toward someone. I started; it was one of my students. She'd come up to the field camp in Temagami this past spring. Perfect.

“I don't think I've met your friend yet.” I was aiming for subtlety, but alcohol usually runs interference.

“Who?” Anita said, and swung her head to follow my gaze.

“Ah, Charlie… Well, come meet her.” And I went.

Could I have known? Her dark-eyed, sparkling energy was familiar to me. I knew her before I even had my gaze returned. Of course, I was drunk for the introduction, because I'd been taking after dear old Mom in my ability to handle grief and despair without pharmaceuticals.

“This is Charlie.” Charlie?

“As in Brown?” Oh, how embarrassing. I was far too drunk to be having this conversation, but far too hungry for it to leave, to rip my eyes from her eyes. Her large, dark eyes. I wanted to crawl into those eyes, into her very soul, curl into a ball, and stay there forever. She just laughed.

“Charlotte. But I hate that name.”

“Charlie is a firefighter,” Anita pipes up.

“That's pretty sexy.” Shit. A firefighter. Turns out, in the summers when she's not at school taking environmental chemistry, she is a forest firefighter, out in the bush, protecting Canada's vast forests from the ravages of nature or human interference. She could douse the chattering flames of Moses's burning bush if she chose. When sober, I am a geographer, a newly-minted PhD, researching the mysterious forests of the north, and leading students through the wonders of rock and snow formations. Clearly the two of us belong together. I'm not certain I was able to make that clear that night. I think I was having difficulty with my balance.

I went home with the now-uncomfortable girlfriend and writhed like a piece of twisted paper on fire. It might have been better not to speak. To have merely watched from afar, safely projecting one's desires and fears and longings on to that unattainable other. Now she is real. Larger than life. Solid. In the flesh.

Next time in the hallway at school, she saw me. My heart thumped as I approached, gasped hello, and continued. She responded. My cheeks burned.

At the next gay dance, our eyes met immediately. Flame. No matter where I was, I could feel her eyes on me. And she came to speak to me, again and again. And this seemed somehow preordained, divinely decreed. I drunkenly corralled a friend to buy me a drink for some reason known only to the gods of alcohol. As I accompanied him to the bar, Charlie turned with a red wine in hand for me. She was there for me already. Of course, in my drunken challenge to gravity, I spilled said glass of wine all over my white-shirted friend. With a frenzy of apologies and laughter, I turned, and she was there with a cloth, soda water, and another red wine. She was there for me. She presented a competence, a control, a matter-of-fact dominance that enthralled me.

I told her to call me. She called.

You know the rest of the story, of course. Virginia and I broke up with an anguish that did not, unfortunately, go untold, including twenty-three phone messages in one night and three a.m. visits to inform Charlie in a bellow from the front step that she will be “fucked and thrown away.” Virginia might still be somewhere up north drinking this one into oblivion.

No matter. I am in love like I never thought possible. It feels like flying straight into the sun, the sun setting afire glittering wings and casting down great flames of desire like some egomaniacal god starved for worship.

And reluctant Moses led the Jews. He parted the Red Sea and led them through the desert and through the worst hardships–starvation, death, disease, lack of shelter, persecution–they had ever known. These hardships now form the basis for their rituals, for their understanding of themselves as a people, for their identity. If he had known what the burning bush was foretelling would he have run away? He wanted to as it was. He hid his face.

And Moses led the Jews to safety. That is the beauty. Out of the place of persecution and pain, through an outrageous suffering that seems unbearable—mere nuggets of unleavened bread to eat and only tears to drink—into a life of longing for the homeland. Perhaps that's the real story of the divine. That constant yearning to return to the homeland, to a time before suffering was an inevitable fact. Moses's story creates their togetherness, their shared origin, their belief in community.

Beginning with the burning bush.

I don't even really remember our first kiss, but it was in the washroom at the Irish pub in the town in Northern Ontario. Of course, in the washroom and not on the waterfront at sunset or on a yacht. Even as drunk as I was, I remember enough of necking with her on my living room floor, even though I had sworn to myself that I was not taking her home so soon after a break-up, and that I was not going to bed her so quickly. She was stretched out on her back on my fake Persian carpet on sawdust and upholstery nails because I'd been reupholstering a chair that day, in a fitful and unfinished attempt to change my life. She didn't notice. She left me, somewhat reluctantly, as the birds started heralding the rising sun. I was covered in scratches, my lips bruised, and already more in love than seemed possible.

I don't believe these grand narratives, though, the ones that speak to some holy life-transcending love or belief or experience. I see biblical stories, for example, as metaphorical. They teach us something about ourselves, a psychological truth about humanity perhaps. I don't believe that a burning bush actually spoke to Moses, for example. Jeez…

But here I am, plunged into the heart of something soft and warm and pulsing with life, something orange and hot and percolating beneath the surface, something that smells of musky earth and green leaves and sweet perfumes and burning wood, something that curls itself around me like a giant cat, purring and touching and rubbing and loving, something that promises me that I might never feel that ache again, at the very same moment that it reveals to me the absolute barrenness of that former self, and the terrifying possibility that I might slam back into that aloneness. But I don't care. Sore from the night before, I wake in the morning already turned toward her, and the light is caressing her body before me, as if it cannot wait, greedy sun. And I cannot blame it. I join it and the air, all touching her, and I feel myself opening, believing, hoping that, just maybe, maybe it is all true. Maybe there really are knights in shining armour. Maybe people do fall in love for all eternity. Maybe I will desire her with this level of burning intensity for all time.

Love for someone, this being shot up into a floating plateau of intense, beautiful, transcendent love, cries immediately for the acknowledgement of its necessary limitation, of its brutal finality, of the crash of the plane into the ground. But I don't care any more. I have suffered the worst pain already and survived. It has been a hell of a bloodbath, a persecution without an enemy, a war with no sides. I have been shaken into fragments like a child's toy, and I have pieced myself together again, biting my lip with concentration.

Miraculously, I see that suffering reflected in Charlie. In her muscled body that speaks to hard work. In her broad shoulders. In her hands that are calloused with labour and yet so gently lift her two-year-old niece to her shoulder. In her unconscious chewing of the inside of her mouth. In the scarring that decorates her left arm: a u-shaped burn from the top of a lighter she pressed there, the hole where the safety pin went in and where it came out, and the lines where she cut and cut in order to bleed herself free from her own inarticulate grief as a teenager. She still refuses to tell me about it.

In Temagami, a fire tower rises over the town and forest from a high escarpment. It was someone's job in years before the advent of small planes and helicopters to watch for fires from this tower in order to protect the forest and surrounding lands. Now it is a tourist attraction that the geography students love. Climbing the tower is scary as each level becomes more slender, more exposed, higher up. Some of the more timid students refuse to climb last few tiers of rickety ladders. Once at the top, however, the entire world spreads its luxurious foliage before you for kilometres and kilometres on every side: glimmers of rivers and creeks and small lakes; patchwork of farmlands; squares of houses and buildings; small cubes of cars; wild dark tousle of forest as far as the eye can see. At the apex, you can almost believe you are soaring. That is how I feel with Charlie.

I would not be able to love with this trembling intensity if I hadn't suffered such unaccountable pain. I would not be able to hold her tight to my body and appreciate the fullness of what she is, if the people I loved so passionately hadn't been ripped from me. That pain necessarily makes this absolute joy. I am thankful.

Moses led me out of the desert. Finally.

As the religious know, faith is entirely necessary, it turns out.

About the Author

Laura Robinson is an Associate Professor of English literature at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. She has published articles on L.M. Montgomery in Canadian Studies: An Introductory Reader, Canadian Literature, L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, and Children's Voices in Atlantic Literature Culture, as well as articles on Ann-Marie MacDonald in Canadian Literature and on Margaret Atwood in English Studies in Canada. Her short fiction has appeared in Wascana Review, torquere, and Frontiers.

35 Years of Living: Poetry by Jameela Nishat

35 years of living
with only five fingers to help out
with my closed fist
I have confined all time and space
Cabbage potatoe egg plant
Fish chicken a chicken feast
All life's luxury drips like ghee
From my cook's fingers
All the world*#039s knowledge
Roams scot free since gods knows when
Dehradun to jaffana
Hudud: two good men's witness
To a woman 's rape
Kills all conscience
Of any good woman
Buddha too has fallen silent

No Regrets: Poetry by Jing Xing

distance
measured by silence
stretching oceans away
no bridge.

love letter

red lipstick kiss

perfumed words inside
no reply.

costumed leading lady

pale white mask

red curtains open
no audience.

mother of too many
bearing dream children

kitchen withering hopes

no love.

Poet breathing under heavy ocean.
Star fish thrive,
suckling in life;
no regrets.

About the Author

Jing Xing was born in Lansing, MI before she moved to Traverse City, MI, where she was raised. From there she moved to “Cin City” Cincinnati, OH, which she currently resides. Her first forage onto the 'Net was ZoogDisney.Com. From there she quickly moved on to fanfiction and now writes mainly for Gundam Wing, dabbling now and then into poetry and original fiction. An anime and manga junkie, in her spare time she also enjoys dancing, watching television, and long, moonlit surfing on the Web. Among writing, her hobbies include Internet blogging, playing the piano, and singing in a very loud and off-key manner. Sometimes all three at once. You can see more of Jing Xing's work on her personal LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/~razberrycreme

Chad: An Essay by Gretchen Wallace

In the Southern stretches of the Sahara, the water only flows at night. Almost as infrequently as the appearance of fresh vegetables at market, dry pipes come to life sputtering and coughing wet exhaust like a tired tailpipe. It is 10pm.

Our five-man team is gathered in the courtyard of the tiny compound hidden around the corner from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) outpost in Iriba, Chad. Clapping with delight, we watch as the small dribble of water in the outdoor faucet begins to surge, and we scramble to fill every empty water bottle and spare jug. No effort is wasted to capture each and every drop in any available receptacle. We may only have an hour or less before the water once again recedes, and the mysterious powers at the other end of the spigot decide the daily ration limit has been met for this small town's enjoyment of the luxury of murky running water.

And yet this actually represents an improvement in our amenities. At our last outpost, we invested in daily water delivery from the local well via donkey. Leather pouches saturated, the miniscule horse would struggle to balance itself, heeding its master's stick and maneuvering slowly along the walls of the compound to reach the series of thirsty clay jugs.

The scene at most local wells is equally distressing: The crowd somehow maintains an air of civility despite the chaotic array of jerry cans, each patiently attending to its owner's place in some imagined, crooked line. Water is retrieved only with intense manual and/or animal effort—perhaps a donkey attached to a pulley, a pair of women hauling buckets or a crank that requires constant body weight to slowly turn. Each well, sometimes more than 20 feet deep, is dug by hand, strategically located in a wahdi, or riverbed to minimize the distance to the water table.

However, you needn't watch the struggling at each well. The truth cries out blatantly from the sun-cracked mud surface. Here in Iriba, it has not rained in over two years.

It thus comes of no surprise that you cannot rid yourself of orange dust. Without delay, upon arrival your toes take on the weathered hue of one's favorite sandals. It only takes two days of attempted washing to realize there is nothing you can do. Only first-time visitors or the most experienced residents attempt to wear white, and it is not hard to tell them apart. I have certainly given it my best try.

As I wait for a used plastic bottle to fill from a now dribbling tap, I reflect back on our mission here. We are in Chad to bear witness to the suffering of the refugees who have fled genocide in Darfur. It is June. Since early 2003, when Government of Sudan (GOS) soldiers and its unofficially-backed “Janjaweed” Arab nomad militias began carrying out a campaign of terror against Darfur's non-Arab tribes, hundreds of thousands have crossed the scorched desert terrain to arrive safely in Chad. There are stories of children shot while they slept, babies thrown into the air and stabbed with bayonets, and women as old as 78 and girls as young as 8 gang-raped. One man we interviewed claimed his contorted left arm and leg which now hung uselessly from his body were deformities only transformed after exposure to the smoke of GOS bombs. Helicopter gunships shoot missiles filled with tiny nails at innocent civilian populations, while Janjaweed wreak havoc within villages, riding through on horseback, firing at villagers, destroying homes and food stocks, looting stores, torturing men and often locking people in their huts before burning them alive. It is a gruesome campaign of what can only be identified as genocide.

The refugees have come stumbling into Chad in groups or alone, sometimes with their flocks and sometimes even naked and barefoot. Enduring a week, a month or even three months journey on foot with six or eight children, they tell of sleeping under trees during sandstorms with no water to drink except that which might be salvaged by digging in a stone dry riverbed or collecting from heavy rains. They do not bother with the thought of food nor the hyenas that stalk them at night. “We are facing death both ways, so there is no point in fear,” they say. Many are forced to step over the dead bodies of other tribesmen murdered as they shuffle past villages recently attacked and burned to the ground. The wounded travel with the same determination, albeit at a slower pace, and others carry injured relatives upon their shoulders. It is a harrowing journey.

Today on the road from Iriba to Tine, the border-town crossing point for a majority of Northern Darfurians, we came across a group of six refugee women who were making a four day one-way trip on foot from Iridimi Camp to the border of Sudan. They had left their belongings in suitcases under a tree nearly a year and a half ago. They had finally been able to borrow enough donkeys to hold their week's worth of food and water so that they could make the trip to check on their luggage. Of course they did not intend on bringing anything back with them. They are still waiting for the day when they can permanently return to Sudan.

We have come to hear their stories, to honor their suffering and to bring their messages back home to a West that frequently seems both ignorant of the conflict and weary of yet another African travesty. The suffering and devastation are unimaginable, but this time, this time we can stop it before it is too late. That is, if we are willing to step forward and take responsibility for the fate of approximately 6 million Darfurians. The question is, do we see them as strangers or can we see them as brothers and sisters—beings that inhabit the same earth who happen to live a less fortunate life than we just 6000 or so miles to the East?

One of many stories now etched in my mind is that of Asha, a twenty-something refugee from Kounoungo Camp. Asha was in her family's fields planting at about 6am when the Janjaweed arrived in her village. They began to round up their livestock to steal. When her brother resisted, they shot him in the head in front of her eyes. She was unable to return to her village to collect any of her belongings and fled carrying her dead grandfather across her shoulders and pulling her dead brother by the arm until she could reach a tree for shelter where she could leave them at their final resting place. She is in this camp alone, longing to be reunited with her parents who she believes to be located in a South Darfur Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp. Tears ran down her cheeks as she recounted her story and offered her greatest dream of reunification with her family. Using her dusty garment to wipe her eyes, she quickly regained the stoic composure which is confusingly widespread among the Sudanese refugees when speaking of the tragedies they have endured.

This has been the most bewildering aspect of what our mission here has experienced. The beautiful people we have met demonstrate very little sorrow, almost no anger and hardly any fear. You will barely hear muttered a complaint. Most refugees are overwhelmingly grateful for the aid of the international community. When pressed about their needs, they pause to make small requests—perhaps another set of clothes—as they now only own one, or some milk or sauce to go with their food. A day later, we were resting within the tent of a refugee sheik learning of his flight from Darfur. When asked about ways in which he may have shown courage during his escape, he drew a blank and had nothing to offer even when prodded. Later as we casually asked about a large five or six inch scar along his left forearm, he mentioned without pride that he had been shot by the Janjaweed during the attack and had sewn his own wound shut with a needle and thread.

What I see as overwhelming modesty on their part and the subsequent astonishment I feel when I hear their stories may indeed signify more about the comforts of my own life than what it is that they personally feel they have suffered. Maybe they are used to life in this harsh desert climate. In fact most of those we met are farmers, who somehow, magically bring life from this dusty, stone-hard earth year after year. The wisdom they possess overshadows any formal education I have achieved when it comes to this environment. But this in no way lessens the unnecessary hardship they have faced and continue to tolerate. No one should ever have to experience what they have survived.

The greatest need in the camps at the moment, of course, is water, as the dry season ends, the water table is extremely low and there is not enough water available to the refugees, not to mention the local population. Refugees must now rely upon aid deliveries rather than local wells. Jerry cans and empty bottles stand at attention in long lines that stretch out from each of the camp's water station's faucets, waiting for the timeframe daily when the water will flow.

Food rations are distributed monthly to each family, but the refugees express it is not adequate to feed their families. They need milk for their children, and plead for diversity in their food source as the only staple food they receive is sorghum and beans. Those refugees who have not yet been able to officially register have to share the limited monthly rations that are provided to each of their relatives, further endangering their collective ability to heal physically and avoid malnutrition. Many make the dangerous journey back and forth to Sudan to trade or do odd jobs for extra provisions.

The refugees must use firewood to cook their rations. Initially they collected wood from the surrounding areas. However, consider 10,000 – 20,000 refugees per camp collecting wood daily from a sparse desert climate with few trees, and you can imagine it does not take long to consume just about everything that exists within a day's walking distance. From what we could see, there remain only shrubs, many of which have been hacked up as well. The negative environmental impact is extremely apparent. At this point, we are told that the refugees are no longer permitted to seek firewood outside the camps. However, that which is now trucked in monthly by NGOs only lasts about two weeks, according to refugees.

In some camps there is not enough plastic sheeting to go around and in others, the standard issue tents are already deteriorating after a year or two. In almost all camps we visited, we saw refugees building semi-permanent mud huts. They usually construct dirt-brick walls using the earth that directly surrounds them. However, this leaves huge holes that children fall into, and when the rainy season comes, they will fill up with water and become breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Further, the refugees use their precious water to make the mud, reducing the amount available for consumption. It takes three days to build the cylindrical structure that will be covered with grass, garbage or cardboard, depending upon resources available, a woman explained to us as she scraped mud from a small hole with her fingernails and shaped it into a patty-like brick. As mortar or decoration, we watched her carefully arrange a set of small pebbles. Would I even know that I could build a mud house out of the hardest desert earth?

The most ironic thing is that the refugees have no opportunity to work, except in very limited cases, as refugees are usually not permitted to be hired by NGOs. Instead, the NGOs aim to help employ the local population, which is of course extremely important given the impact the crisis has had on Chad, a country with possibly fewer resources than Sudan itself. Resentment has grown between refugees and the local Chadians who bear the burden of lower water tables and fewer firewood and food supplies, and yet enjoy little benefit from the millions of dollars of humanitarian aid and services provided to the displaced communities. The local population is also in dire need. We are told by one medical service NGO that in some Chadian villages the malnutrition rate is above 80%, and occasionally Chadians will come to the refugee camps to try to receive food distributions as well. These tensions have made it necessary for the international community to take into consideration a balanced approach that helps address infrastructure, capacity building and resource needs locally as well as in the camps.

Every day I feel a greater level of discomfort as we make our way back to our compound with our stash of food and our cases of bottled water. Usually I am not hungry—partly from the heat, partly from the day's stories, and partly because we only ever have oily canned tuna, bread, and processed cheese or macaroni and tomato sauce to eat. The local bread, without fail, always conceals an inner layer of sand, and the tomato sauce is bland without the spices I crave. And yet I know that just 15km to our west, there is another family eating their 2,184th meal of beans or sorghum porridge. Even still, there is not enough to go around.

At least our plastic water bottles are recycled. They could very well be plated in solid gold, by the look in the eyes of the children as they scramble to snatch our offering. “Cadeau!” (“Gift!”) is a familiar cry from the children who line the paths alongside the refugee camps or wander in fields alone tending flocks of animals. The bottles become the prized possessions of those who now might have the means to carry their own water supply, provided they get through the line at the spouts before the day's water has run out.

I can almost imagine their daily water collection routine, as I finish filling the last bucket before the water pipes spit forth their final offering. I realize that we have but a week left before we ourselves will return to the US, where such concerns for the most part do not exist. We aim to leave Chad with emptier suitcases, many of our belongings we brought specifically to donate, and fuller hearts overflowing with the names and stories of our new refugee friends. I also hope to capture ideas, the creative dreams of a population without any means to such ends; projects that with support from afar could make their lives just that much better.

Just as we foreign travelers are forced to innovate awkwardly to ensure our evening's ration of water will suffice for our cooking, drinking and washing needs, so too am I certain that there exists a wellspring of genius among a people that continue to survive unmentionable atrocities and depravation. All they need is a little more assistance. All we—that is, the broader “We” of the rest of the world—need is a little more compassion. The connection that is born out of one human being caring about the welfare of another ensures the highest response. May we embrace the suffering of our African brothers and sisters and treat them not as strangers.

About the Author

Gretchen Wallace's inspiration for her work with women in developing countries first stirred in her as a child when her military family was transferred to the Philippines. She graduated in 1996 with a BA in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia, where she attended as a Jefferson Scholar. She returned for her MBA at the Tuck School at Dartmouth College, where she was the student founder of Tuck*#039s Allwin Initiative for Corporate Citizenship. In 2005 she established Global Grassroots, a 501(c)Ɠ) non-profit organization, which invests in social entrepreneurs working for women's rights in developing countries. Gretchen is co-author of her brother's forthcoming memoirs to be published by Public Affairs Books in 2007. She is also engaged in making a documentary film about the crisis, The Devil Came on Horseback, a project of BreakThru Films produced in association with Global Grassroots.

Strange Big Moon, The Japan and India Journals: 1960-1964 by Joanne Kyger

North Atlantic Books, Berkeley
c.2000

Anne Waldman’s introduction to Strange Big Moon describes Joann Kyger’s journal, part travelogue, part poetic and personal introspection, as a “surprisingly, surreptitiously, feminist tract as well.” Living and writing as she did, however, with and among the greatest male writers of both the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat movement, Kyger’s exertion of such a strong yet subtle female presence becomes a clear necessity in her pursuit of a poetic voice. Newly married to poet Gary Snyder and relocated to Kyoto in January of 1960 (when her journal begins), Kyger is almost immediately struggling to retain her sense of voice and self. The snatches and fragments of poetry found throughout the journals, however, bear little of the insecurity exposed here; rather, they are the foundations upon which Kyger, upon her return from Japan, would later complete and publish a seminal collection, The Tapestry and the Web. Adopting an approach similar to that of her San Francisco Renaissance predecessors Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, Kyger draws upon history and myth in an imaginative remembrance of women before her—women who lend Kyger the experience to maintain control of art and domesticity alike. Kyger becomes preoccupied with the power of weaving (a historically female occupation), and echoes of the above excerpt resound in Tapestry’s re-writing of Penelope and the Odysseus myth. Returning to Walden’s assessment of Kyger’s “surreptitious” feminism, it is fascinating to watch it shine forth as, with passing years, young Joanne develops a foothold in her own domestic experience with Gary Snyder and simultaneously redefines her male predecessors’ poetic ideologies to plant and justify incredibly powerful women at the heart of lyric history.

Redemption by Kay Langdale

Transita. Oxford
November 2006

Kay Langdale’s debut novel is, in the simplest of terms, an account of love and marriage. Avoiding entirely the clichés of romance or “chick-lit” genres, however, Langdale’s approach in crafting Redemption is refreshingly, compellingly alternative. Six women—wives, daughters, a grandmother still a virgin, an unwed mother of sixteen, an aging mistress—inextricably but unknowingly bound to one another, are compelled by coinciding circumstances to determine and face the truths of their married lives. Beginning with Sarah, a middle‘aged working mother whose happy but familiar life with husband Michael is threatened by a fantasy desire which, when combined with opportunity, tempts her to consider an affair, Langdale subsequently winds her narrative between and within the lives of Kate, Isobel, Martha, Sheila, and Judith. With each new perspective comes a fuller understanding of characters at once varied and connected, of experience unusual yet utterly believable, and an ultimate collected realization of what it means for each woman to be, and to have, a marriage partner.

Langdale’s work derives its greatest strength from the confluence of an elegant, adept use of language and a singularly insightful evocation of the mature female psyche. Spread as it is between six women, who stand united as much by their flawed and honest humanity as by the workings of Langdale’s plot, that insight lends the novel a resonant validity—one which, I imagine, would suffer had Langdale chosen a narrower scope, and the delineation of a single heroine. In light of Redemption’s ultimate argument for marriage made in the face of social challenges and modern skepticism, the novel’s structural effectiveness takes on thematic significance as well. For the work*’ breadth of understanding and accrued wisdom, resulting from an intent focus upon female honesty, proves the strength of a sustained bond to redeem misuse or abuse of marriage vows, and even transform that bond to the greater empowerment of each woman’s individuality.

Haweswater by Sarah Hall

Harper Collins. New York
October 2006

First impressions of both the setting and synopsis of Haweswater promises the reader an English historical romance soaked in social and geographical commentary, reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell or, according to The Independent, Hardy and Lawrence. Despite the clear applicability of these comparisons, however, Sarah Hall’s debut novel, together with a fierce heroine and surprisingly unique locale, defy categorization as merely one amongst their predecessors. Something about Hall’s creation, lying perhaps in its comparative modernity (the novel is set in 1936) or the strangely violent, animalistic nature of her protagonist’s independence—but most likely an amalgam thereof—lends it a compelling distinction unlike most prior novels of its kind.

Haweswater takes its name from a dam construction project, begun on the site of a tiny and rustic outpost of anachronistic existence located in the far north of England’s Lake District. The village of Marsdale nurtures its erratic own (as showcased by the Lightburn family, upon whom much of Hall’s background narrative is centered) in relative isolation. Then a representative of Manchester City Water, herald of modern industry and innovation, breaks into the Marsdale enclave with the news of the intended reservoir; and Janet Lightburn, a blue-blond anomaly of a woman with a dangerous energy that seethes beneath an oddly feline aspect, takes up immediate defense of her home against the stranger. Somewhat predictably, Janet’s quarrel with outsider Jack Liggett soon evolves into a passionate, secret, and scandalous affair. What is thoroughly unpredictable, however, is the way in which Hall crafts and unveils their fate, increasingly and inextricably linking both lovers to the land and water from which their passions are born and made.

Allusions to Hardy and Lawrence automatically portend a tragic end for Janet Lightburn (as do Hall’s own early indications her heroine’s penchant for self-destructive behavior). But again, this author evades her forefathers’ trademark sense of futile hopelessness. She evokes an organic connection between Janet and the wet earth she works, lives and loves upon with an almost mythic vitality, one which is spread to Liggett, born within Janet’s brother Isaac, proves all-consuming in each case—and yet strangely, reconcilably so by the novel’s end.

Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay

HarperPerennial. New York, 1988

Not long after making her debut upon the world of American literary modernism, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s frank voice and deft talent earned her work canonical status, while delineating herself as a “national symbol of the modern woman.” In both her poetic and personal life, however, Millay’s modern womanhood is clearly an identity in transition, liberated from Victorian mores and yet enamored with the romanticist legacy of her literary predecessors. It is the fusion of these two spheres, the amalgam of modernity and tradition, for which much of Millay’s poetry is most admiredŸ and nowhere are the results more gloriously evident than in her impressively broad collection of sonnets.

In the revised and expanded edition of Collected Sonnets, Elizabeth Barnett quotes Millay’s own assessment of the sonnet’s dual virtues in her preface. Referring to Wordsworth’s poems, Millay writes, on the one hand, that she loves the sonnet as “a peculiarly, a magically beautiful form of poetryŸ” but one which also, “like a sharp‘tongued wife, pulled Wordsworth together, made him pull up his socks, told him to shut up, when he had finished what he had to say.” The duality possible within such a form, at once exacting in its strictures and tailor made for the fancy of romanticism, is evident even in Millay’s tone shift here—the elegance of her first statement, and the frank efficacy of the second.

The principle carries over to sonnets from collections such as A Few Figs from Thistles and The Harp Weaver, where form and verse of traditional grace contain an honesty of voice and experience peculiar to the modern woman and, until penned by Millay, unfamiliar to the sonnet’s repertoire. At times, Millay’s frankness is almost cold in its utter rejection of the gendered standards associated with her chosen form: within the same mould into which Shakespeare and Petrarch poured words to immortalize love and beauty are found Millay’s “I shall forget you presently, my dear,” or the stinging “I, being born a woman and distressed” Œ“…urged by your propinquity to find your person fair,” yet “Think not for this, however…I shall remember you with love, or season/ My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain”).

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