Winter 2007

End of the Day by Muna Kazi Pathan

Sitting here on this hill, I watch the ghosts of burning wood rise from behind the low mud walls of huts that cluster the foothills. In each of them, a woman, perhaps helped by her daughter is fanning a fire, rolling out rotis and blistering them on red flames.

All the little children must be playing in the narrow lanes, slipping in the ooze of drain water. They are laughing, their voices trickling through the cracked walls. A sick old man lying on a charpoy complains of the noise between coughs of discontent exchanged with is wife.

Their son trudges home from grimy hours spent with steely machines: talking all the time—clicked-clack…clickety-clack…

At home it must be quiet.

He passes the playing children; mosquitoes dive about their heads and dirt crawls beneath their nails.

He and his wife have a baby.

His wife squats before a mud stove. The flames redden her pale cheeks and her partially covered hair is hennaed in their glow. Her hands become a blur as she fans the red, hot coals into tongues of fire. The clink of her bangles echoes tirelessly. It is the sound of coming home. She is so beautiful, he thinks, as he eyes her from the door.

She steals a glance at him, firelight catching her upturned eyes. He is tired. She must quickly, quickly brew the tea. And please, don’t let the baby cry all night again.

The water trickles apologetically from the dented tin jug as he washes the grease from his hands.

He sits at the edge of the charpoy and massages his father’s legs. The splintered wood and the coiled rope dig into his thighs. They talk about selling their land in the country. Nothing will grow on it. But it is security. No, it is a liability. Again, there is an argument. Clickety-clack…clickety.

The familiar hands of his wife place the steaming tea before him. The roti is slightly burnt. How thin her hands have become! He looks up at her, but her head is bent. Black lashes fringe her pale cheeks. He must take her to the Hakim. He will talk to her about it when they are alone.

They have not been alone since before they were married. Perhaps they met on this very hill, on an evening just like this one.

At night, lying in the dark, listening to the coughs of the old man and the whimpering breath of their baby is the closest they get to being alone; touch, their only conversation—whispered.

I watch the fingers of twilight caress the graying sky as the last of the birds fly across like beads scattered from a broken necklace. Black lashes on pale cheeks.

About the Author

Muna Kazi Pathan lives and works in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in local newspapers and the poetry journal My Legacy.

Thoughts on Becoming a Crone by Elizabeth Glixman

There are variegated color hairs on my head,
Yarn all fuzzy and wild
One inch from my scalp there is red
Lush auburn youth.
Below the white
Threads winked with gray waving,
Roots visible like tree arms against the sky.

Crone means old ewe,
An old you
That you do not recognize.
Do old ewes have gray hair graze on grass?
Are they sent to float on arctic ice flows
While families plant corn?

I look close
Seeing if my hair is wiry enough
To be woven—
A blanket to warm old knees or hoofs—
Two toned auburn gray
Auburn blond gray
Light brown crone blanket for sale.

None of us start life as crones
I started as a thought,
Then graduated to being an egg
Then a soft spoken shape that cried.
Yesterday I saw an angioma on my arm
Red like a berry
Blooming on my skin that hasn’t felt like silk for years.
I talc myself
My crotch is raspy.
When this happens we crones
know who we are underneath
our colored hair and lifted chins
Double folds speared like fishes in the sea
Devoured by hunters looking for sustenance
And a buck.
They can’t leave flesh alone too long,
It gets unruly.

We crones know who we are
When our fingers glow from touching
Words that slip bridges in our mouth
Longer than the Great Wall of China
Take heart, it is the demise of fertility that makes
Minds bright.

*

Being friends with your inner Crone is not easy.
I look in the mirror
Wonder who it is I am watching.
My Great Aunt Julia stares back
From the supermarket parking lot years ago.
Aunt Julia with dark eyebrows that needed tweezing
And white hair going yellow
And arms that asked for help.
Walking with rocks in each orthopedic shoe
Asking strangers to carry the weight of milk cartons,
Or open a jar or tell her how to get home.

I could deny growth
Never look in the mirror again
Never ask how to get home.
Like the female crone strippers on Sunday TV
I might wiggle my behind
Swing tassels and shake hips
And take off my clothes
wearing only fluffy feathery boas
Hiding nothing old in the Las Vegas dessert
where Georgia O’Keefe saw the beauty of bones.

About the Author

Elizabeth P. Glixman’s fiction and poetry have appeared online and in print in publications including In Posse Review, Wicked Alice Poetry Journal, Subtle Tea, 3 A.M. Magazine, Tough Times Companion, a publication of The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and Frigg.

Elizabeth’s author interviews, articles, book reviews, and creative non-fiction pieces have appeared in a variety of publications including Eclectica, The Pedestal Magazine, Whole Life Times, Spirit of Change, Hadassah Magazine, and the anthologies, Chocolate for A Woman’s Soul II and Cup of Comfort For Women.

Elsie Turner by Juleigh Howard Hobson

Every evening at 6, Elsie Turner drinks her juice. That is what she does every single day. That’s what I think, lately, when I’m pouring the juice out into my glass. Every single evening at six.

Every evening Elsie Turner uses the old fashioned glass with the gold and black stagecoaches printed on the outside of it. Every time. The same glass. That is what she uses. That’s my next thought these days.

There used to be ten of these black and gilt atrocities, these old fashioned old fashioned glasses, but little by little, over the years, they all broke. Except this one. Cracked, more likely than not, up against the heavy pots and my old thick dishes I used to throw into the sink every which way when Henry and the children were here. But I don’t honestly remember what happened to each of them. I never had time, in those days, to stop and tell myself what I was doing. Today Elsie Turner broke another old fashioned glass. No, I never did that.

There was no time to keep track. Those days I was lucky to get all those dishes (oh how many dishes husbands and children can make!), those pots, those cups, those forks and knives and bowls and baking pans and roasting pans and everything else we used to use, into the water to soak before I was washing them and then drying them and putting them away and then taking them back out before they all went back into the dishwater again. No, I never noticed much then. I was always washing, never watching.

Life was always washing something then.

Washing dishes with hot water. The water coming first from a kettle into a dishpan, then like a miracle, out of a tap into a sink, a real sink, after the war. But I didn’t stop to marvel at the time.

Washing laundry. There’s always laundry with two children and a husband. Vats of it, then tubs of it, then—later on—machine loads. Always dried on the line. Even now, even when there’s no laundry to speak of, what I do have I dry right out on the line, same as I always did. But now I find it relaxing more then something to hurry hurry hurry through. But now, of course, there is nothing to hurry to. The children are gone.

Ah, the children. With children you are washing them all over, bathing and dunking and washing them all over all the time at first. Then, just places on them cheeks, chins, hands, sticky patches. Then they grow up and the washing’s all gone.

All of it.

Dishes, clothes, childish places?all gone. Even the holes and the trampled flowers and the buried toys that used to confound Henry in the little patch of back garden we had, all left with the passing of them, my children.

Maryanne is my youngest. My daughter. She grew up to become a woman-dentist, of all things. Married one, too. All those teeth we brushed were well cared for even after she left us. All the shiny equipment you could want, she could use. Her own children had lovely teeth. Still do, I suppose. Some of them have children with lovely teeth too now?grandchildren of my child. Imagine that. They call me great grandmother. So formal. I don’t want to answer to that, but what do you call a person when they are not your mother’s mother but your mother’s own grandmother? They don’t have sticky patches on them. Or smudged cheeks. They aren’t like my own children at all; I don’t know what to do with them.

But they are all I have (I don’t think I really have them at all) left.

Dickie died in a jungle fighting people the government said it was important to fight. Dickie. My son. He was the oldest. My first child. My son. Dickie. Richard, it says on the memorials, Richard Turner. I think it would be better if it said Dickie because then, then everyone would be forced to know that a real person died, they wouldn’t gloss over just another meaningless dried out name. We named him for his great grandfather, but, really, he never was a Richard while he was alive. Now he’s stuck being one forever.

But who is there to get mad to anymore?

Maryanne’s not troubled at all by it. For heaven’s sake, mother, it said Richard on his school reports and on his dental records too she reasons at me. She refers to him, when she does on Memorial Day, as great uncle Richard, now, to her grandchildren. They cannot picture a great uncle Richard anymore than I can. He’s truly dead now, to them. When I’m gone he will be nothing at all.

She’s the one who brought these old fashioned glasses into the house. She won them at Henry’s company-picnic raffle one year when she was 8. Oh she was so proud of winning them! Not of them, mind you, she always had good taste, but of winning them. We had to use them, though, no matter. Until I broke nearly all of them. They were such thin glass.

I put the last one away, for her to have when she grew up. I didn’t want to keep it. Garish with their black and gold stagecoaches running all around and around I always thought. So I put it away for her. She never took it. Called it an ugly thing when I offered it back, once. I think she didn’t even notice that it was something she won all those years ago.

Henry never noticed them. Just used them, of course. He would have used anything. Just so long as the iced tea was cold and had enough sugar. Dickie was just like him. Drank his milk and ate and left the table. Never noticed the boomerang pattern of my dishes. I loved those dishes so much; they were my favorite part of dinner, eating off of them. And my silverware, well? my flatware, it was plate, but I loved it. It had a swirl design and felt so good in your hands. It made washing things up easier to stand, washing things that you loved.

Those black and gold glasses never matched my dinner things, but Maryanne loved that we had them. Loved that she won them for us. So we used them. I washed them.

Now, it doesn’t matter at all, does it? What I loved, what I didn’t love. Doesn’t matter at all. My old lovely dishes are gone. When did they become replaced with these thin anonymously white ones? I think after Dickie.

Yes, after Dickie. After Dickie so much changed, got replaced, was shorn away. A terrible time when nothing mattered and nothing was noticed. I could hardly stand it.

It was more terrible then when Henry died. I know it is a hard thing to hear, but it was. Because, we knew that Henry was going. You don’t last long with lung cancer. So life adjusted around his going in little slow ways. Things were still able to matter. I could still notice. I could still stand it. I didn’t want to, but I could.

It’s amazing how much a person can make herself stand when she has time to make sure she can do it, even losing a husband, you can make yourself do it. There’s nothing else to do, no short sudden edge to drop from, there is nothing else to do but stand it. I stood it. Yes I did.

I stood and I stood. For years I stood.

But, little by little, the margins of what I feel like standing must have moved in closer and closer. I didn’t notice, didn’t notice the lessened space around my life, but then, suddenly there it was. Suddenly I knew: I cannot stand much anymore. And, really, what is there to stand?

Maryanne doesn’t need me. Hasn’t needed me since she was 12 years old, really. Certainly doesn’t need me now.

Dickie and Henry are gone. The laundry is done. My lovely boomerang dishes are gone.

All I have left to stand is this glass. This black and gold atrocious glass. This glass that makes me think when I drink juice.

And when it breaks, Elsie Turner can be done.

About the Author

Juleigh Howard-Hobson lives in the Pacific Northwest with an artist blacksmith husband, three homeschooled children and a small herd of guinea pigs. An award winning poet as well as co-editor of the Arets Boker award winning Norwegian-press literary collection Undertow, her work has most recently appeared in Aesthetica Magazine, Bewildering Stories, The Australian Reader, Shatter Colors Literary Review, The Raintown Review, Dead Letters Vol 2.2, The Hypertexts, and HipMama Magazine. An inveterate multitasker, she is currently working on two novels, as well as collection of short stories.

Eucalyptus Moonlight by Julie Ann Shapiro

In the interlocking limbs of two eucalyptus trees I see your soul. Can you know it’s me gazing at you from the window? Do you know I dream how it feels to be joined in wood, not flesh?

I see elephant tusks and the flesh of paper in your limbs.

My boyfriend calls, and says “I must stop my staring.” It’s dreaming, I say. Our limbs don’t join as mirrors like yours. Can I wait ’til we grow this close? How long did it take your right limb to match your left?

Oh.you say it was a lifetime, that’s too long. “Commitment shy,” he calls me. No. I look at you. There is contentment the way the top of each limb rests on the other. You touch the sun together; I tell him this is what I seek.

Intimidated, he closes the blinds. I still look at you through the slats. In the darkened sky now your leaves are a tangled web of hair. The way mine looks when I wake up and he tells me I need a brush and I shy away from the mirror.

Untangled and brushed is when I dare to look at my locks and my boyfriend in the morning. But by then he has coffee brewing and a quick peck on the cheek and it’s off to work, while I still gaze at you.

He tells me, “I want too much. People bend together.” Yes, but it is me bending when he says, “I want to close the blinds.” I say yes all the time, knowing I can still see you. “It’s not good enough,” he says, “not a real compromise, not a real bend.”

I know he’s right, too right, when he says, “It’s time to get a second curtain. I can’t compete.” Another one, I question. One is more than I need, I say as I open the blinds.

I see you standing tall with your tangles as he walks out the bedroom door. His footsteps echo on the wooden floor and I think maybe if I crawl on the floor tonight and sleep there, that I’ll know how it feels to rest in your limbs.

Footsteps approached the door. Now what can’t I have this time with my tree. He pokes his head in the room and says, ‘I have pillows and a blanket. You’ll have to make the curtain.”

No, I say and he points to the tree and says, “I made you a house there in the thicket of the limbs.”

It’s a start I say. And maybe tomorrow we’ll touch the sun together.

About the Author

Julie Ann Shapiro is a freelance writer. Her story collection, Flashes of the Other World is published by Pulp Bits. Stories and essays have appeared in the San Diego Union Tribune, North County Times, Los Angeles Journal, Pindeldyboz, Sacred Waters/Fire (Adams Media 2005), Story South, Word Riot, Opium Magazine, Insolent Rudder, Elimae, Cezzane’s Carrot, Mad Hatter’s Review, Writer’s Post Journal, Spoiled Ink, Void, Footsteps to Oxford, Salome, Skive, Barfing Frog, Millennium Shift, Mega Era Magazine, Science Fiction and Fantasy World, Green Tricycle, All Things Girl, Ultimate Hallucination, The Glut, Somewhat, Uber, Moon Dance, The Quarterly Staple, Journal of Modern Post, Rumble, Long Story Short, Cellar Door Magazine (Spring and Summer Issues 2005), Edifice Wrecked, Espresso Fiction, Flashfiction.net.

Grande Femme by Ellen de Vries

I went home,
but I’d grown to outsize the furniture.

My fingers were even longer
than my mother’s hands.

Like perspective had misjudged me
or distance itself.

Mother cried a little,
You’ve grown she said.

I bent myself into an old chair;
the room was clean, ready for me,

but I stayed the night there like a guest;
as if I was some other landscape’s child.

About the Author

Ellen de Vries was born in Belfast to a Northern Irish mother and a Dutch father. She hopes to settle in Brighton in the UK, having lived in many countries, including Morocco, Yemen, the Czech Republic, and Romania. Her work draws on these experiences, not as a traveller, but as a perpetual temporary resident. To find out more about Ellen’s various publications and poetry blog, visit her online at www.ellendevries.org

Dead by Jane Joritz Nakagawa

in the voice of the dead assorted bodies tempt
us in a basket speak to the dead they guffaw

back enfold in the breeze a tree the tree
of everlasting while not paying attention azaleas spring

from graves of the dead cut and sold like
genitalia in the middle of the night robbed of potential this

is how the insignificant live this is how the uninsured die this is how
wars are staged this is why the doctors come this is

pilgrimage slippage and pillage this is why this is why we fled the border this
this the sound of the dead hitting off brick heads

bouncing on stone steps this the hiss of an oven with a dead
bird in it a sprinkling of rape on top of mere pillage the part

i must necessarily paint over the spot you missed this the feel of a foot
stepping over the bodies of the dead this your last

will & testament hidden in this shoe walking without a foot this growth
in your throat from too much pillage spreading up toward the

blood red border slippage your tired beige baby worn hips finally give up
taking it my dry breast severing it

About the Author

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa has well over one hundred publications. Her poetry collection titled Skin Museum was published in 2006 by Avant Books, Tokyo (available from TSSC, Tokyo: contact kawamura@c-enter.co.jp). Other poems have been in journals such as New American Writing, ACM, Tinfish, and One Less. She lives and works in central Japan. Email is welcome at janenakagawa@yahoo.com.

The Stain by Beate Sigriddaughter

“The worst was the maggots.”

That was the accepted punch line of an already firmly established family legend. Lucy had heard it first when she was six. At thirty-eight, she still sat on the edge of her chair waiting for her favorite parts with fairytale anticipation when her parents told it again, as they did at least once every few years.

“We left our things behind with a farmer when we moved on to another village thirty-some kilometers down the road. Then one day I borrowed a bicycle to pick up our stuff,” Linde said. “Your brothers were too small, so I left them with the people I was living with.”

Jochen couldn’t wait to cut in with his storyteller bass. “That was the farm where I had been hired as help. One day the youngest boy comes running out into the field. We were bringing in hay. ‘Mr. Hertel,’ he pants, ‘your wife is here!’ Oh, was I mad at him. I threatened to box his ears for having me on.

‘Never, never joke like that with me,’ I growled at him.

‘But it’s true.’ The boy jumped out of my range, but repeated his message. ‘She’s here. Come.’ Something grabbed my chest. I dropped my pitchfork, everything, and ran back to the farm with the boy.”

“They hadn’t said anything to me,” Linde interrupted. “In case he wasn’t the right one after all.”

“But I was,” Jochen said. “And there was Linde. I said her name.”

“I turned and he stood there,” Linde interrupted. “I couldn’t get a word out.” Her mouth pursed. “You know how rare that is.”

“You did open your mouth.” Jochen grinned. “But nothing came out.”

“I couldn’t believe it.” Linde’s hand flew up from the table, collided with her glass, and spilled mulled wine. “Oops.” She steadied the glass. The purple wine ate rapidly into the crisscross fibers of white tablecloth. Its orange peel and nutmeg smell seemed even stronger in the spill. Linde hesitated, then chose her story over the fabric. “I felt like, now what? Can I finally give up some responsibility? All of a sudden I felt weak. Dizzy.”

“You never told me that.” Jochen’s eyes lifted from the wine spot to meet Linde’s.

“No? Anyway. The point is, you were there.”

Lucy leaned forward, Linde to her right and Jochen to her left. “And you both just happened to be in the same area by chance,” Lucy prompted. This, she thought, was the best, the miracle part of the story.

“Well, I did ask around wherever I could.” Jochen lifted his chest. “I knew Linde had gone on a train to that general area. I got that piece of information from the old post mistress where we used to live.”

To Lucy this was news. She hadn’t heard it like that before.

“So there we were.” Linde’s voice was a fairytale whisper again. “Since I only had the one bicycle, I decided to stay the night. I didn’t want us to have to be apart again.”

Jochen reached across the table to put his bony hand on Linde’s arm. His elbow rested an inch away from the wine spill.

Linde’s eyes blinked. “I would have crawled through a mine field to be allowed to stay with you that night,” she addressed him directly. “I didn’t want to lose you again.”

“We sent one of the farmer’s sons on the bicycle to let our boys, and the people where Linde was staying, know what was going on. We didn’t want them to worry,” Jochen said to Lucy.

“Yes, and the farmer’s wife made up a cot for us,” Linde said. “Up under the roof.”

“Where they had their salt meats hang from the rafters,” Jochen added.

Linde crinkled her nose. “It wasn’t just the smell. There were maggots, too. And they kept falling down into the sheet on the cot.”

Lucy felt her stomach protest the concept. She grimaced. The thick spice of the wine fogged over her sinuses. “Could you even sleep?” she asked. Memories of college flashed across her mind, cheap student housing with no less than three varieties of roaches. She had never been able to sleep naked since.

“I got them off the sheet, of course,” Jochen said.

“Sure,” Linde said. “But the meat was still up there. And so were the maggots that were still on the meat.”

Jochen shrugged. “I couldn’t very well take down all of their meat. Where would I have put it?”

“All night long that meat over our heads,” Linde said. “It was hot, too. It was summer already. I did fall asleep toward morning, though….”

“Shh,” Jochen interrupted. “The news. I don’t want to miss the news.”

Linde and Lucy exchanged a glance of indulgence. Years had passed. His hair had gone gray and thin on top. But, as far back as Lucy could remember, Jochen had never changed his news routine. He didn’t read the papers, but, ever since they had owned their first TV, for the evening news the rest of the world was required to either stop or keep on turning without him.

“You’ve been through so much, Mom,” Lucy whispered to Linde with compassion and admiration. “Miracles, too.”

It wasn’t necessary to whisper. Jochen’s hearing was steadily getting worse, which Linde always tried to help mask, by pretending she was the one who needed words repeated or the volume turned up higher.

* * *
Thank God you don’t know the rest of it, Linde thought, acknowledging Lucy’s miracle comment with a pixie smile.

Would she tell anyone? Ever? Not likely. Certainly not her daughter. The mealy white maggots were nothing.

* * *
When Jochen stands face to face with Linde, she trembles, though it is summer and warm. How skinny he is. His bones stick out into his grimy undershirt, which is all he wears over patched tan trousers. His arms and shoulders are muscular, though. Blood seems to drain from her brain, her heart. She feels faint. His smile is anxious, and glistening with bliss and fieldwork sweat. He looks like an incredulous boy about to get something he has long wished for. His eyes are moist.

Both of them are fragile, broken in a lot of ways. She feels ancient compared with when she last kissed him good-bye, almost a year ago, in their former home. She wants to look at him with innocent and unselfconscious love. She wants him to be her teacher, her hero, her prince. She had been taught to revere a man for squaring up to the enemy. And there he stands with a lopsided grin, looking so young despite all that has happened, and looking also like a stranger she has never seen before. She likes his strong smell of work and of hay. She trembles and stutters and doesn’t have a clue what either one of them is saying, even as words at last come from her own mouth.

She wants to be in love, excited. He seems to be both. But all her old dreams of a fairytale life at the side of her handsome husband surround her and taunt her like malevolent ghosts.

She looks at him and registers an unexpected fear. She wants to shoo it away. Who are you? she wonders. Their experiences have taken them worlds apart. She doesn’t want to bother him with hers. Katherina’s birth and death, a life that Jochen created with her and never got to see.

How may children have you killed, Jochen?

She blames herself for allowing such a question into her mind, but she has no defense against it. She shivers.

All afternoon they are shy with each other. But at night his hands find her. So what if they lie under maggots, or even on top of ones that have fallen unnoticed? She already knows that later she’ll be able to talk of the maggots, and the smell of these hams overhead. Salty. Porky. Rancid.

She feels she is being torn in half, for she is glad to hold her husband in her arms, but the new fear of him she felt this afternoon has, if anything, grown. Will she ever be able to embrace him again with the breathlessness of innocence? The scent of perspiration and sexual fluids is overpowered by the salt pork in the rafters. Her pain feels like bones growing.

What frightens her most is that she no longer knows who he is. Has he killed? By hand? With a gun? Has he snuffed out lives? One? Two? More? None? Has he slain a Frenchman? A Russian? More likely a Frenchman, because he spent more time in France than later in Russia. A French baby perhaps, like Katherina? Inadvertently? On purpose? Fais dodo, fais dodo, mon cher petit ange, the child’s mother might have sung just an hour before its death.

The more Linde tries to push the uninvited thoughts away, the more vividly they insist on being present, huge and grotesque. If they had all been killed on their train journey from the eastern part of Germany, she, and the boys, and the girl who didn’t survive the journey anyway, those bombers–British most likely–wouldn’t even have known how many children and women they had personally extinguished. Has Jochen killed? A baby? Like hers? Like his own?

He told her a story that afternoon, because it was still fresh and grisly in his mind. After escaping from prison camp in Russia–no dangerous stunt there, they simply walked away at an opportune moment and kept on walking; nobody knew what to do with so many prisoners anyway–he and a buddy joined other men walking toward some nebulous future somewhere in the western part of Germany. Among them was a small group led by a young commander their own age, possibly even younger.

One day they came face to face with Americans.

“Surrender,” said the young German commander, raising his arms.

An old German soldier shot the young commander in the back. His message: A good German doesn’t surrenders. A good German prefers to die proudly. Blood spread in a circle on the young man’s brown shirt. The old philosopher in turn was shot at once by the Americans before he could take out more of his own. The rest were allowed to surrender in peace, including Jochen.

How brutally obedient men could be to principles, beliefs, convictions. And if you disagreed with their convictions, that made you, with table-thumping logic, the enemy.

How many of his so-called enemies has Jochen taken out in zealous righteousness? It is all she can think of as his penis presses against her, then moves inside. His lips cover hers with wet kisses.

“Linde,” he murmurs, emotion humming in his voice. “That I get to be with you again.”

Against her will she thinks of the dead, dead at his hands, perhaps, and certainly dead at other hands. Katherina. Children spilled open. Women split apart. Chests ripped. Arms sliced. The smell of blood, metallic. Salt. Decay. Ham. Maggots.

How can she make love to this skinny, handsome man, this stranger, this husband, never knowing if he has killed, sunk a bayonet into someone as easily as he now sinks his member into her? He seems carried away, taken over by need. She envies him.

Will she ever get past her questions? Will they ever go away? Whom has he killed? Katherina? No, not Katherina, of course. A French bébé somewhere, burning up with the fever of war? Or in a blast of fire?

She knows she’ll never ask. She doesn’t have the nerve to reach for and face that kind of truth. What if the answer were yes? And who is she to be his judge? But there is no trust left in her world. How is she to love without trust?

She remembers Katherina’s birth, easier than that of the two surviving boys. With Katherina she had hardly felt any physical pain, just loneliness. She had ached with its vastness, not knowing where Jochen was, or whether dead or alive. And then the loneliness of the yellowish drops of the baby’s saliva on her blouse, exactly in the place where one might pin an ornament, when the child exhaled for the final time.

Now Jochen is here in her arms. She keeps as still as possible, so as not to break apart with despair while he is taking his pleasure of her. She owes him this–and everything else she can possibly give him. He is a survivor who made it to hell and back.

But doubt and fear seem to strangle her. She prays she won’t conceive this night, not while the surprise attack from within is raging. Maybe in time she will get used to her doubts. Maybe in time she can forget that she may be holding in her arms an executioner who nonetheless still needs her tenderness. She realizes that it is okay to sob. Chalk it up to release of worry, to relief, even to pleasure.

She prays feverishly. ‘Not this night, God, please. Not like this. I don’t want my precious Katherina replaced by a child conceived like this.’

She starts counting Jochen’s thrusts. Killer? Thoughts stab through her mind. Fourteen, fifteen. A memory, but from a sharp distance, of how she used to adore his body moving inside hers.

He no longer kisses her lips. He is too busy concentrating on his body’s urgency. Good. The less of her he touches, the less surface there is with which she has to hide from him.

I know you didn’t start this war, Jochen. And yet I hate you for it, she thinks. I love you for surviving. But I’m not sure if I can ever love you for yourself again, for the essence of what once was my Jochen, the man I married.

* * *
No, this wasn’t the kind of story to tell your family. Linde pressed her fingers on the edges of the wine stain, as though trying to prevent its spread. And yet, who would tell it then? No one? And if no one, then how would the truth ever change?

* * *
Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. She is waiting for his groan. Her heart is filled with tears. Her throat is filled with tears. She feels she can’t get air. Thirty-three. Thirty-four. His breath is loud.

I love you, Jochen, she tries to chant to herself. I have always loved you and I always will. You are my husband. I chose you for love. I want to give you all my tenderness. I have promised it to you with my wedding vow. I want to keep my promise.

But horror competes with her chant and gains the upper hand at times. Who are they after all? Two maggots copulating on a blanket among others? Writhing. Wiggling. She is yearning to be human.

In the morning while Jochen is still talking to the farmer down in the kitchen, she rubs at the spot they have made on the sheet with a sprinkling of water from a jug and the small stick of green shaving soap that he left by the wash bowl. But when she hears Jochen on the ladder up to the loft, she stops. It can’t be helped now. She folds the bed sheets neatly and leaves them at the foot of the cot.

* * *
When the news on TV was over, Jochen excused himself from the table to brush his teeth. Linde followed his back with her eyes. In time the horror did fade and love grew out of it again. Maybe it wasn’t necessary to share these kinds of secrets with others.

“Did you ever wonder if he slept with anybody else, when he was away for so long? In France, for instance?” Lucy still whispered, though he could not possibly hear.

“No.” Linde laughed out loud with relief, thrilled to have something to laugh at freely. That thought had never occurred to her.

Still, she felt like a coward. Maybe that was how women got their reputation for stupidity–because they hid these things–things that were true but were treated as though they didn’t exist. Smiled away with defeated smiles of tenderness and resignation. Until the smiles began to look like simpering stupidity instead of merely a make-shift mask over knowing too much.

Lucy gathered up the empty glasses and carried them to the kitchen. When she returned, she pulled off the tablecloth.

“What are you doing?” Linde asked, puzzled momentarily.

“Maybe I’ll get the stain out while it’s still fairly fresh.”

“Oh, good idea.” Linde lifted herself out of her chair to follow Lucy to the kitchen.

About the Author

Born and raised in Germany, Beate Sigriddaughter came to the United States in her teens, and now divides her time between Denver and Vancouver. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Beate has published short fiction, poetry and essays in over 25 magazines and ezines. Beate is also fiction editor of Moondance (www.moondance.org), a women’s literary ezine. “The Stain” is part of her novel “Parcival,” a novel about women and war, which is currently in search of a publisher. For more information on Beate, visit her website www.sigriddaughter.com

Thoughts During Marilyn Waring’s Lecture by Deborah Hedd

Marilyn told of women and hot steaming dung used for fuel, plaster for houses,
fertilizer: dung, life-giving, treasured birthday gift for a desperate gardener of
a dry garden.

What about world meltdown coming? A questioner asked.

Marilyn grew quiet, thoughtful. She spoke of dire omens in other countries.
Those who have the most (like the U.S.) Have the most to lose, the farthest to
fall, the least to shore up their wants, needs.

Her calmness made me want to run to stores, stock up
on seeds, mason jars, (electricity might fail), canning supplies, top soil,
and maybe half a dozen free range hens (one rooster)
a nanny goat or two to milk
(notice female animals are always the more valuable, more life-giving),
sheep for wool, and my grandmother’s carder and her spinning wheel.

Just in case.

Listening to Marilyn
made cash money and all that goes with it airy-fairy, unreal, meaningless,
if real trouble comes.

About the Author

Deborah Hedd (a.k.a. D. Jean Young) works and writes in the small town of Deer Lake in Newfoundland, Canada. Her books include the young adult novel, Quicksilver Summer and a historical fiction book about Deer Lake, Pathways Through the Ages. Her short fiction, nonfiction and poetry has appeared in print and in e-zines. She enjoys encouraging other writers and promoting literacy, especially in her home town and has helped compile, edit and publish several local anthologies. She thrives on sharing ideas, challenges and victories and thereby multiplying the potential of all involved. You my visit her online at www.nfld.net/jeanyoungfinancial

Unlocking Mother by Del Sandeen

The castoff locs lie the casket next to the woman’s body like a lover. They look almost forlorn, as if wondering why they were beside the woman and no longer crowning her head. Mourners passed by and once in a while, a hand would reach out and graze the locs with no fear before withdrawing.

The woman in the casket is my mother. Those are her three-foot long locs lying beside her. I’m the one who cut them off her head when she was dying.

It seems crazy to me now to remember how I thought of my mother’s hair when she told me she had cancer. Before I spoke one word, before wondering about the chemo, I reached out; my hands felt like they were reaching across a vista. I wrapped my fingers around a dozen or more ropes and held them like they contained all the unanswered questions of the world.

I cried thinking about them.

“I want you to cut them off,” she said and it was like hearing “Cut off my arm.”

“Why?” I asked even as she pressed the scissors into my protesting hand.

“No need in holding onto them anymore.” A quiet settled between us, stubborn and unyielding, like a heavy body.

“Where should I start?” I finally asked, cutting the quiet like I would soon cut her hair. With resignation.

“Doesn’t matter. And hurry up,” she said, her eyes closed to me, a bit of impatient crossness in her voice. Then, softer, “I don’t want to change my mind.”

With each snip, I felt the task was made more difficult by the thick unwillingness of each loc to be cut. Every snap of the scissors closing was a harsh rasping in my ears. When I finished, she didn’t ask to look in a mirror.

“You need to go to a barber and get it shaped up,” I said, hated scissors still in my hand.

She ran a hand over her bare head and smiled. “I feel so light,” she said. But I don’t, I wanted to say. I felt like I’d just killed someone. The locs lay in a mournful heap around our feet and I imagined that if they could, they’d weep.

“Don’t be sad, Olivia. It’s just another step in my journey. And another step in yours, too,” she said.

I didn’t want to go on this trip. She became lighter. And I became heavier.

“You are a good daughter,” she’d said to me so many times. To know I was facing a future never hearing those five words again brought an emptiness that was crushing. So much pain from something no longer there.

Near the end, when she lay in the bed with fuzzy, inch-long hair surrounding her face like a gray halo, I would stare at her while she slept. It was difficult reconciling this thin, transparent woman with the strong, energetic one who’d raised me. Who are you? I wanted to ask. When I placed my hand upon her cold one, mine felt monstrous and huge next to the pricked skin of hers. Her coloring was no longer the deep brown of rich earth, but held an undercurrent of grayness, of ashy sickness.

Why? I asked her God, my God. Why must you take her? I took the silence as a personal affront, a direct blow.

“What is so dreadful about my hair that someone would call it dreadlocks?” She’d asked me that once and I’d felt slightly ashamed. I’d told her that some friends of mine had been making fun of me, of her. No one else’s mom had locs; everyone else did the fashionable thing of wearing relaxed hair in the latest styles. Some of my friends’ moms seemed to think my mother had lost it after the divorce. Why else would she stop combing her hair and begin to wear it in long ropes about her beautiful face?

“This is how God made my hair and how he made theirs, too. They would know that if they’d stop frying their hair,” she said. “You go tell them that.”

Of course, I didn’t tell my friends that. I straightened my own hair, although my mother hated it.

“You used to straighten yours, too, you know,” I said. “Don’t remind me. That was when I was an oppressed slave to society’s idea of what’s beautiful.”

I shook my then seventeen year-old head. After Daddy left, she took to saying stuff like this and it wasn’t until years later that I tried to understand her.

“So what am I supposed to call your…hairstyle?”

“Just locs. Locs of hair.” Later, after natural hair became vogue again and some people knew the power it held, and others just jumped on the latest bandwagon, I realized what a visionary she’d been.

She never complained. As I sat in the sterile hospital room, sweater wrapped tightly around my shivering body and watched the nurse prod my mother like a branded cow, sometimes I looked away. Other times, I stared defiantly.

“You’re hurting her,” I said once when the nurse couldn’t find a vein and she kept poking and sticking. The nurse ignored me and when I looked for support from my mother, I saw her heavy-lidded eyes were closed to the both of us.

After the nurse left, my mother’s voice drifted across the room, tickling my ears like a dragonfly’s wings. “You’re a good daughter. So concerned.” A vapory smile sat on her lips.

“I hate to see them sticking you like that all the time. It’s painful.”

“It won’t be much longer.”

“Don’t say that.” I could feel the tears, always waiting, forming a line.

“Olivia, you’re going to have to be strong. For my sake, please. For everybody. For your daddy, too.”

Daddy. I hadn’t given him much consideration during Mother’s last days. I felt like I could only focus on one thing at a time and she was the nucleus of everything; he would just have to stand back and wait his turn. When they divorced, I was fifteen. “Finally,” was all Mother said. She’d stuck it out because of me. She never said so, but I gathered the information on my own, stolen bits and pieces from her sisters, his sister. Mother had been hurt by him and my allegiance was to her. I felt I had to protect her from him, from other men, from anyone who wanted to hurt her. So I placed a wall around the two of us and even Daddy wasn’t allowed in.

He began to come by the hospital, shyly. At first, I was very cold toward him, impersonal, almost rude at times. He never said anything about it, about my nastiness. Perhaps a part of him felt it was deserved. Anyway, we never discussed it.

Once, he asked to speak to my mother alone, so I waited outside of her room. Through the slatted blinds in her window, I watched, like a thief watching someone else’s dream. He was so stiff, first standing at the foot of her bed, not daring to go nearer. Later, when I glanced in again, he was next to her, very close. Then she reached out and took his hand. It was forgiveness she gave him. He cried.

“You have to forgive your daddy,” my mother said. I was quiet, knowing this was coming, but waiting for her to bring it. I sat and stared out of the window, knowing every parking space and rooftop rock by now. Six floors up we were, sixty feet closer to heaven.

“I’ll forgive him,” I said.

“Before I go.”

I hung my head, a brief spark of anger shooting her way for bringing it up again. I know you’re dying, I felt like screaming, do you have to remind me all the time?

“Before you go,” was what I said.

I talk to her sisters. One of them looks so much like my mother, I can barely stand to look at her when we talk. It’s too jarring to do, so I look at my other aunt and my mother’s near-twin doesn’t mind.

“Livvy,” the older one says, using that name only she was allowed to use, “it’s gonna be all right. You’ll see.” She pats my hand. “She loves you so much, you know,” Near-twin says. “She’s going to miss you just as much as you’re going to miss her. But she’s always going to be with you. In us, in your daddy, in yourself. So long as you live, you’ll have a piece of your mother with you.”

Again, the tears. Why did they have to say things like that? I cried so much, I hoped everything would dry up. They held me, not seeming to mind the mess I was making of their clothes, their skin. They held me like I was their own good daughter.

Was I glad later I’d cut her hair when the chemo left her nearly bald? Soft gray patches of cotton adorned her head, but she never hid under scarves or hats. She said it was all a part of her, of who she was, and whoever loved her would have to love her like that, bald, skinny, and everything.

“I want you to let go,” she whispered and it was the last thing she said to me. Let go of what? I wondered. Of her? Of my anger? Of my grief? What? She never answered.

Those last days, I got through by not thinking. I just kept busy, busy cooking, busy cleaning, and busy making arrangements. Daddy wanted to help, but I wouldn’t let him.

“It’s all right between us,” I told him, so that he wouldn’t think I was still angry.

He was grateful, but I had no time for his gratitude.

Her sisters stayed with her a lot so that I could tend to the business end of it all. How does one make a business of death, I’d wondered before, but living through it made it all clear to me. She slept a lot those last few days and there came a time when I longed for it to be over. Just take her, I prayed to her God. Just let her be at peace.

When she opened her eyes for the last time, those large eyes in the skinny face making her look like a baby animal, I knew she was too weak to speak. My aunts hovered around like lost children. She smiled; I smiled back, trying not to cry again and wet her face. Then those eyes closed and I was thankful.

I miss those locs of hers. I don’t watch the casket lid close, I don’t watch the box lowered into the ground and I don’t stick around to see the men toss dirt over her like she was something less than special, someone who shouldn’t be in the ground but be raised above it. I only hold one loc in my hand, one I kept after the cutting, one which I’ll take home and place somewhere special and safe. When I unlocked her, she became free and although I didn’t know it then, she set me free with her.

After the funeral, everyone went back to my aunt’s house. It was too loud for me, so I stood in the backyard, winter wind preventing anyone from joining me. I stood without a coat, so I thought I heard a few whispers of “Someone take Olivia a coat” or “She’s gonna freeze out there.” No one came, though. I took a perverse pleasure in standing there like that, obstinate and falsely brave. I looked to the sky, but saw no signs of my mother. Are you up there? Will I ever see you again?

“Olivia,” a voice said. I jumped, then relaxed (and felt stupid) when I saw it was only Daddy. He put an arm around my shoulders and I let him. I didn’t fight him, but just stood in his hold like we’d never been apart.

“Maybe you don’t think I miss her as much as you do, but I do miss her,” he said. I know he does; I know he’s sorry for all the years we didn’t have together. And I want to honor my mother’s memory in letting go of it all.

“She told me to let go,” I told him.

“Let go of what?” he asked after a moment.

“Of everything, Daddy. Of everything.”

I don’t know if he understood, but it didn’t matter. Maybe he’d understand later; even if he never did, I did what she’d asked of me. I kissed him on the cheek, cold lips on scratchy skin, and went into the house. Looking back, I saw him standing there, looking into the sky, as if to see her one last time. She’s not there, I wanted to say. She’s not in that one place you’re looking; she’s everywhere and everything.

The single loc sits in a box, a mahogany box specially made with scarlet satin inside. The loc is coiled like a gray python. I look at it sometimes and try not to think that it’s nothing more than dead protein. It holds a life to me. So I look at it, sometimes touch a finger to its coarse softness, and think of her. This loc would probably love to still be on her head, I think, but I’m glad it’s not. I’m glad I unlocked her and am able to hold onto one piece. It’s not much, but just enough.

Years after my mother died, I started my own baby locs. They’re tiny, no more than an inch long and they’re rebellious and strong. They grow their own way and do what they want. I cultivate them like a farmer tends to his beloved garden. My hair is black and wiry, each kink fighting to be heard. As the locs grow and begin to hang, I enjoy the feel of them against my cheek when I shake my head, the way they fall on the back of my neck when I throw my head back to laugh. Later, I love the way they graze my shoulders and when I look in the mirror, I’m always struck by how much I now look like my mother. My aunts and Daddy remark on it, too. I look more like her now than her near-twin does because my aunt has short hair. My locs are thick like ropes on ships; they could pull the world, I like to think.

When my locs were hanging down my back and I sometimes sat on them, I took the mahogany box to the cemetery. Lying down in front of the tombstone, I dug a small hole and laid the box in it and covered it, patting the dirt with my hands.

“I’m returning this last one to you,” I said to the stone (Roberta Bailey, 1942-1999, Beloved Mother and Sister). “I don’t need it anymore.”

I hoped she was happy to have that last piece back to herself.

About the Author

Del Sandeen is a freelance writer who lives in sunny Florida with her husband and three children. She is currently seeking a publisher for her debut novel.

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