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The following excerpt from Chimerica by Anita Felicelli is reprinted here with permission of the author and the publisher, WTAW Press. 

Chimerica – Chapter 1

When I woke the morning after Ross moved out, the house was silent. No sounds of our kids getting ready for school and racing up the stairs, no sounds of Ross banging pots and pans around the kitchen, and no whir of the coffee grinder before he brewed me a pot. My skull was throbbing and my tweed skirt was cutting into my stomach. Two bottles of wine into the night before, I had forgotten to draw the crimson drapes or change out of my work clothes. My laptop rested next to me on the bed, still open to a website about Malagasy lemurs. From the bed, I could see the sunlit green hills of Oakland, irregularly studded with sprawling houses and eucalyptus trees and wood sorrel. It was the same panoramic view to which I always woke, the same splendor, but I was alone. Again. As a child I decided I would never let myself feel as lost as I felt after my mother killed herself, leaving me with a workaholic father and a younger sister to raise. And yet, here I was again, waking up alone in a large too-quiet house.

Eager to throw myself into trial preparation for an all-consuming copyright lawsuit Turner v. Eustachio, I showered and slipped into other clothes. I blow dried and flat ironed my unruly black curls. When I padded down the hall to the kitchen, I noticed that the painting my younger sister Julie had made for Ross was gone. No huge loss as far as I was concerned—it had been one of her weirder, more colorful canvases from a controversial graduate school exhibit entitled The Existential Crisis of Brown Folk that left me speechless and mildly irritated—but there now was a darker-colored square where the painting had hung, where sunlight hadn’t bleached the walls, a square that reminded me of a day more than ten years ago when the house painters had left and our young, excited family moved into a new home. 

In the kitchen, I started the coffee maker. Roasted coffee was slowly dripping into my ceramic cup when the phone began beeping and vibrating. I glanced at the text message. It was from Nick Evers, my lover and a named partner at the firm where I worked: We need to talk.

My palms started sweating with anticipation. I texted back: What’s going on? The last thing I wanted to do was talk, excavate what we meant to each other. Evers knew Ross had left—was he wanting to discuss moving forward? Part of me thought yes, he wants to move forward, I should move forward. This is new. This is someone who doesn’t already know how hard intimacy is for me—a chance for a fresh start. But the other part, the deeper part, suspected my kids blamed me for blowing up our lives together, and knowing they could be right, I wanted to burrow under the covers of my bed in shame. It was dangerous to speak out loud about this—about how I felt or how they felt. I was numb to being left, and I wanted to keep my emotions underground, wanted to avoid shining any sort of conversational spotlight on the subterranean things I knew were messy and irrational and overwhelming. Instead I told myself: nobody meets the right person at age nineteen, and at least you still have the comfort and thrill of work, and with Spencer’s support, the possibility of the biggest win of your career so far.

It was a minute before Evers replied to my text. I stared at the phone willing it to beep again. I had already poured a cup of coffee by the time it signaled a new text. I’ll tell you when you come over. Instead of answering right away, I took a swig of searing hot coffee, scalding my tongue, and waited another beat in order to seem as mysterious and aloof as him. I texted back: After work.

The phone beeped. We should talk now.

Mechanically, I laid out bowls for Tara and Mike and Ross. I was pouring my cereal when I realized with a start it was just one for breakfast. One is the loneliest and all that. I stared into my empty bowl. Its pale porcelain surface reflected my face, and with no work to focus me, the rage I’d been trying to suppress—at myself, at Ross, at how little I’d been able to accomplish in my life so far—flashed through me. I shoved the bowl off the table. It cracked on the floor. There was nobody for whom I was performing, so I left the pieces and the cereal where they had fallen to be swept up later. I grabbed a protein bar and my briefcase, and headed to the office, but in my rush to escape the gloomy, hollow silence of the home that had once meant so much, I forgot to text Evers back.

“Spencer wants to see you right away,” our brunette receptionist said as I strolled into the lobby. Usually I started working immediately, and met Spencer for lunch or an evening drink to talk strategy. Wondering what he could possibly want to discuss first thing in the morning, I hurried down the hall. Inside one of the offices, I overheard two junior associates speaking in hushed tones. The quietness of their voices, their smug, speculative cadences, caught my attention, and I paused to listen before passing the open door.

“Shocking that Evers got fired.”

“Can they do that to a partner?”

“It depends on what their agreement says …”

I continued toward Spencer’s spacious corner office at a slower clip. I should have called Evers back. I turned right into Spencer’s office. A short, broad-shouldered man in a crisp white dress shirt and pressed slacks, he was gazing out of the enormous plate-glass window that faced west onto the brick beacon of the Tribune Tower with its triangular cap, the pale mint-green of an oxidized penny. 

Sunlight glinted off the gold type on the dark red leather of the codebooks and the glass faces of framed lithographs of California farmworkers and antique local maps that adorned the walls. On the front lip of his desk were items of hockey and football memorabilia and trinkets from grateful clients. One row behind these knickknacks sat a photograph of Spencer on the ice in his skates, with an arm casually slung around the governor’s shoulder. Both wore protective hockey gear: they were an alliance of two of the most powerful men in California, still in some ways a Wild West of reinvention, the last frontier of genius hucksters and lone gunslingers. Pride swelled in me—I belonged to a premier firm run by someone powerful—this was a place where anyone could be the star she was meant to be, even if she didn’t fit the script of what power looked like. 

 Before I could say anything, Spencer spun around, and started speaking, “Maya, eight years ago your father convinced me to bring you on board, to give you a chance. You know how much I respect your father’s judgment—he’s a hell of a lawyer. I thought, no problem. You’d last a year, then scurry out of this business as fast as you could, the way most of our associates do. But instead, you proved yourself as an associate.” He sat down and smoothed back his silvery hair.

“Thank you.” 

Spencer crossed his arms and breathed deeply, as if he were holding back a violent barrage of words. His gentleness and restraint were entirely uncharacteristic and unsettled me—this type of care from him was far worse than a slap. “Let me finish. To no one’s surprise, you’ve proven to be a hard worker, one of our hardest workers. I was ready to recommend to the other partners we promote you after this case.” 

I was ready . . .  He had seen me as heir to his legacy, but why the past tense?

“Thank you. You’ve been more of a father to me than my own father has. I appreciate the confidence you’ve had in me and I know I would never have come so far without your mentorship.” Perhaps I hadn’t been effusive enough about how grateful I was; perhaps I hadn’t suggested what was true—that the work I did at his firm was necessary, that it was saving me, that it gave me a place to belong. Did he need to hear that? 

“Before your ethics were called into question, I thought this trial would be your last step toward making partner.” He rubbed his temples.

Ethics. A chill passed through me. They had never worried me because I saw Spencer had no qualms about them—he was sure of himself and I had trained myself to appear just as tough as he was. But I knew I’d committed any number of very minor ethical violations, so many morally ambiguous courses of conduct shading over into just plain wrong—all violations I could argue my way out of, of course—that I couldn’t really narrow down the possibilities enough to issue a plausible denial. 

The room darkened; it was only the sun slipping behind a cloud, but my vocabulary contracted as the light pulled away. I could tell from Spencer’s gentle demeanor, he was talking about something corrosive. The affair? Must be. He didn’t even think I was worth the harsh criticism; he didn’t even see me as his equal. In all the time I’d spent being mentored by him, I never realized he saw me as less than him. 

**

Anita Felicelli is the author of Chimerica (WTAW Press) and Love Songs for a Lost Continent (Stillhouse Press). Her essays and criticism have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, Salon, the New York Times (Modern Love), and elsewhere. She was born in South India and grew up in the Bay Area, where she lives with her family.  

 The following excerpt from The Dragon Lady is reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury. Copyright 2019 Louisa Treger.

The Dragon Lady

1

Catherine, 1990s

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget, yet the smallest thing takes me back to the time the Dragon Lady was shot. I was thirteen years old and living on a forest reserve near the Mozambique border. My father, a naturalist and forestry consultant, visited her regularly, but it was the first time he had taken me.

Her house was long and low and painted white, with a turret on one side. It was like a castle in a storybook, unexpected and incongruous in a remote Rhodesian valley. The interior was all hushed, cool spaces and we had to wait a long time for the Dragon Lady to see us.

At one point her husband, Stephen, came to talk to us. He had a stern face, but there was a glint in his eyes while he spoke to Dad about the new trees he had planted. I had a boys’ comic tucked under my arm and he wanted to know why.

‘Cathy doesn’t like girls’ things,’ Dad told him. ‘She plays with tin soldiers and a train set.’

My father’s words caused a pang. I’d grown out of trains and soldiers a long time ago, but he hadn’t noticed. I was about to retort that I was too big for toys, but I saw Stephen was smiling; he found it funny. He left, saying that he had a meeting in town, but that his wife wouldn’t be much longer.

We sat in silence. It was hard not to fidget, and soon Dad suggested I go outside and have a look around. I walked onto the veranda and down a flight of steps, and found myself in a never-ending garden.

It was beautiful and eerie, not like a garden at all to me. My school friends had gardens with mowed lawns and tidy hedges. This was wilderness with paths and deep shade, dense with trees, ferns and flowering creepers. Under the spreading branches of an old cypress tree, I stumbled against a protruding object and nearly fell. Righting myself, I looked down and saw a moss-encrusted grave so small it could only have belonged to a young child. There was no headstone or inscription. The only decoration was a posy of white roses made out of porcelain.

A cloud slid across the sun, shrouding everything in a gloomy light. The wind came up, making the tree branches writhe back and forth. The dry rustling of their leaves was like a whispered warning and a chill snaked up my spine.Turning away, I hurried back to the house in time to see Dad and the Dragon Lady exiting the back door.

I stopped at the edge of the lawn to watch them. Her real name was Lady Virginia Courtauld – Dad called her Ginie. She was gesturing and calling to a gardener to show him something.Tall and thin, she wore a long- sleeved blue dress; her face was in shadow under a large hat.

Beneath the swish of her dress I could make out the infamous tattoo. It was this that had earned her the nickname Dragon Lady, though the creature on her ankle was in fact a snake: a savage thing, heavily inked in black, its head rearing up, jaws open, ready to strike. People whispered that it went from her ankle right the way up her thigh and no one but Stephen knew where it ended.

I had the vague impression that she was agitated or anxious, fidgeting and walking up and down; her voice was vivacious, fractured. I was used to observing my own mother’s unhappiness and I saw something there that reminded me of her.

The monkeys in the treetops started up a tremendous disturbance; shrieking and chattering, flinging down gourds from the oyster nut vines that split open as they smacked the ground, scattering seeds over the grass.

‘What’s bothering them?’ asked the Dragon Lady, shading her eyes with her hand as she looked towards the trees.

At that instant, a loud noise splintered the air. I only realised it was a gunshot when I saw the Dragon Lady’s body jolt violently and the garden boy screamed. She seemed to bow down and one hand went out as if she was reaching for something. She toppled over with a choked cry and I saw the wound in her side. Her body tensed and convulsed, her limbs sprawled gracelessly, blood spilled onto the ground.

For a few moments, there was an unearthly stillness. Then things moved quickly: my father was bending over her, his ear by her chest. He stripped his shirt off and pressed it to the wound, trying to staunch the bleeding. Blood poured out regardless, soaking through the fabric, a scarlet rosette blossoming grotesquely on khaki.

‘We must get her to the hospital – quickly!’

A servant came running with blankets and they lifted her, a limp shape wrapped in soiled blue wool, and hurried her away. Moments later, I heard the cough and rattle of our truck start up and speed off.

I leaned against the rough bark of a tree and watched a pair of red and green lizards darting through the grass. High above, a company of hawks circled in a flawless blue sky. With my teeth, I took hold of a ragged piece of skin at the edge of my thumbnail and pulled. It came away in a long strip. A drop of bright blood welled up in the cuticle and ran down my thumb, though I felt no pain.

I waited for my dad, but he did not come back.The light deepened and spread, staining the trees gold and casting stripes on the grass where it slipped between them. The glow lingered on the treetops, while the shadows of dusk began to creep over their lower branches. A bird called and crickets started up a low, persistent creaking. Two poodles appeared and made their way towards the house, agitated. They paused by the rust-coloured stain the Dragon Lady had left on the grass, sniffed at it and started to lick it. I realised that they were as forgotten as I was.

**

Louisa Treger, a classical violinist, studied at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and worked as a freelance orchestral player and teacher. She subsequently turned to literature, earning a Ph.D. in English at University College London, where she focused on early-twentieth-century women’s writing and was awarded the West Scholarship and the Rosa Morison Scholarship “for distinguished work in the study of English Language and Literature”. Louisa’s first novel, The Lodger, was published by Macmillan in 2014; her new novel, The Dragon Lady, is out now with Bloomsbury. She lives in London.

The following text is excerpted from First Cosmic Velocity by Zach Powers, published August 6th by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Zachary J. Powers

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan–1964

Nadya had been the twin who was supposed to die. But she lived, and it was her sister, the other Nadya, who’d departed. The Chief Designer placed his hand on this Nadya’s shoulder and squeezed. He meant it to comfort her, but it had also become a superstition of sorts. The first time, at least, he had meant to comfort her. Since then, it was for his own comfort. No launch had ever failed following the gesture. This calmed him in a way the vodka never could.

The bunker walls were bare concrete. The control panel, a patchwork of different metals, unmatched switches, knobs and dials like a hundred varieties of flower, faced the wall opposite the door. A half-dozen engineers manned positions at the console, and as many as that stood behind them. The Chief Designer knew only a few by name.

Had Nadya lost weight? He remembered her being meatier, muscles sculpted. She still trained back then, he supposed. No need for that now. Perhaps he simply misremembered. This was only the fifth time his hand had so much as grazed Nadya over the years of the program, once for each launch. Hell, he even managed to touch his wife more often than that. His wife and son, how long since he had last seen them? He looked at the countdown clock.

Some of the engineers called the Chief Designer Medved because they did not know his name, but also because of his breadth. The large scar on his head, too, befitted an animal. The gouge ran from just above his right eyebrow deep into the territory of his balding pate. He would never discuss its origins. Half his teeth were artificial, the incisors grayed like an old cheap saucer.

He slid sideways through the narrow space at the end of the control console to the bunker’s periscope, a box of raw metal with goggles protruding from the side. The distance shrunk the R-7 rocket to toylike proportions. Only the top showed above the great tulip framework of the launchpad. The four metal buttresses, gripping the rocket like a vise, would not fall away until the thrust reached a certain level. The pad’s design had been Mishin’s. Or was it Bushuyev’s? The Chief Designer could never remember.

Beyond the pad spread sprawling flatness, The Kazakh steppe like something from a nightmare, one where he would run and run but never seem to make progress. Down range had become a graveyard for spent rocket parts, dropped early stages, shrapnel from the occasional explosion. Not as occasional as the Chief Designer would have liked. Some of the younger technicians took trucks, vintage from the war, and searched for souvenirs. Mars had returned once with a piece of metal sheeting, the skin from a failed rocket, with a red slash painted on it like a wound. It was the tip of the sickle. He had searched for the hammer, Mars said, but the steppe was a big place. Or a non-place. After a certain point, a thing’s vastness diminished its identity.

The Chief Designer did not look at the landscape, however. He scanned the sky, grimacing at the gray roiling over the horizon. He had received word of a storm surging across the steppe, the kind that would muddy the whole complex and postpone the mission.

“There’s only so much of nature I can conquer at once,” he said, speaking the words as if through the periscope. No one in the control room heard him.

The mission had already been delayed once after a single centimeter-long wire shorted out. Of the kilometers of wires, hundreds of vacuum tubes, and thousands of other little electronic devices, all it took was the tiniest glitch to ground the whole thing. The Chief Designer hated that faulty wire, sometimes he even hated the engineers who had installed it. In his more generous moods, he would congratulate the engineers on the foresight of the indicator light. Left unrepaired, even that forgettable span of wire could have destroyed the whole rocket. The fuse was always tiny compared to the explosion.

The Chief Designer squeezed back around the console. Mishin, or was it Bushuyev, handed him the bottle of vodka. No glasses this time. For the first two launches there had been glasses, so that a successful launch might be toasted. By the time those launches actually occurred, however, there was no vodka left. They had drunk it all in the waiting.

The Chief Designer gripped the bottle with both hands and gulped down a mouthful, like a man emerging from the desert, scared that the substance might turn to illusion if he did not down it fast enough. He passed the bottle to Mars at the communications terminal quickly, so that the liquid’s rippling would not reveal the tremors shooting through his body. Mars took a sip and passed the bottle along.

The radio crackled with static. An exhaled breath. The Chief Designer shoved himself next to Mars and took the microphone.

“T plus one hundred,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“I feel fine.” The voice came small and tinny from the speaker. “How about you?”

A round of subdued laughter crested through the bunker.

The voice belonged to Leonid, crammed inside the little globe of the Vostok capsule perched atop the R-7. It was the first joke the Chief Designer ever remembered him making. At least this Leonid. The other one had been trained to tell jokes, to be normal. More than normal. He was the socialist ideal incarnate. As if an ideal was something that could be trained into you. Sometimes the Chief Designer thought of them, the two Leonids, as the same person, but then that was the whole point.

Nadya slipped around the console to the periscope. She didn’t press her face against it, but stood back, observing the small image of the rocket, fish-eyed by the lens. Speaking of ideals, thought the Chief Designer. How old was she now? Twenty-five? The original cosmonauts, the Vanguard Five, were all the same age, give or take a year. Nadya was the only one among them to achieve grace in a jumpsuit. Her blond hair so fine. He wondered what the other Nadya’s hair had looked like in weightlessness. The first human in space, and no one had thought to take a picture. No one had thought to ask.

The only time Nadya’s grace had failed her was the day before she was scheduled to launch. The little white dog Kasha, herself trained as a cosmonaut, had darted under Nadya’s feet in the hallway. The Chief Designer had been there, along with Mishin and Bushuyev, walking from the training center toward the mess, discussing the logistics of launch day, though all of them knew the procedures so well by then that any recapitulation was pointless beyond even the usual levels of redundancy the engineers favored. Nadya seemed to rise up, over the top of Kasha, and then toppled to the beige-tiled floor. She looked down, her face seemingly stretched by surprise, not pain. Kasha sat beside Nadya, as if protecting her. Nadya hovered her hand above her knee and said simply, tragically, “It’s broken.” The Chief Designer remembered the electric shock those words had caused to pulse below his skin. That was his last clear memory of the first launch.

Now he stood, looming over the control panel like the rocket over the pad, both figures, to look at them, unlikely to ever leave the ground. His finger floated above the ignition button. Could he press it again? After the first launch, he had always pressed it himself. Whoever’s finger did the work, though, the ultimate responsibility was his. It was his button, his rocket, his cosmonaut. No, he would not press it again. He would remove his hand, scrub the mission. He would stand on the scaffold of the launchpad as Leonid emerged from Vostok. He would welcome Leonid home like a son, though Leonid had never actually left the ground. Like Nadya. Like the Nadya who survived. What had her sister’s hair looked like in space?

“We never think to ask the right questions,” he said.

The Chief Designer mouthed the final numbers of the countdown: pyat, chetirii, trii, dva, odin.

He pushed the button, and the engines, all twenty of them, lit as one.

**

Zach Powers is the author of First Cosmic Velocity and Gravity Changes, which won the BOA Short Fiction Prize, and his work has appeared in such places as American Short Fiction, Black Warrior Review, The Conium Review, and the Tin House blog. He co-founded the literary arts nonprofit Seersucker Live, led the writers’ workshop at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home for eight years, and spent a decade in television with the Savannah Morning News, winning four regional Emmy awards. He is Director of Communications for The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and lives in Arlington, VA.

The following story by Esperanza Cintrón is reprinted from Shades: Detroit Love Stories, published by Wayne State University Press.

The Crossroad

The church is full of Grandma; her long white box sits on a pedestal in the front. I can see her dark-brown face peeking out, the tip of her nose and a shiny chocolate cheek. There are lots

of flowers, carnations with stiff pink bow ribbons. She liked carnations cause they last a long time. Roses, white and red, and loose-petaled yellow flowers are spread all around the box and across the stage circling the preacher’s place. They smell pretty, sweet and fresh; I don’t know where Momma is. I can’t see her nowhere.

Wide, round, purple, blue, and black Sunday best hats nod, making soft waves that wash over rows of ladies in navy and black dresses. Every once in a while, there’s a splash of green or deep purple or a man pressed tight in a dark suit and tie with a high-buttoned white shirt and brushed-back hair. An old, old lady with balled-up, brown-paper-bag skin is sitting across the aisle from us. She is wearing a wide navy hat with a big puffy, organdy flower pasted right on the front. She is humming a slow song that I can’t make out. Her voice is rusty and wet.

I’m sitting on a bench scrunched between two church ladies wearing white uniforms. Crocheted doilies are pinned to the breast pockets of their crispy dresses. Pearl-like buttons go all the way down the front; only ankles in white stockings and thick-heeled shoes peek out. One of them keeps pressing my face against the crocheted doily on her pocket. It’s stiff, not soft like it look. I try to wiggle my face away so I can breathe better, but the other church lady’s bosom is guarding the other side. I stare down at the tiny white pearl-colored buttons on her wide white lap.

I have on new black patent leather T-strap shoes and my turquoise-blue dress with the long waist. Grandma called it my jazzy dress, said it looked like one she used to have when she was a girl. She showed me how to wear the long beads that came with it. When I tried the dress on in the store, Grandma took the necklace and put it around her neck. She wrapped it so that one part was close around her throat and the other hung down to her waist. Then she put one hand on her hip and pretended like she was chewing gum while she took the long part of the necklace in her other hand and twirled it around. She winked at me and said that’s the way the fast girls did it. I laughed, and then she twirled the beads around again and made a cockeyed face. I laughed harder because she looked so funny. Then she picked me up and twirled me around. The beads feel smooth and bumpy. I smile.

I hear Momma somewhere crying. I turn to look for her, and she’s there in the aisle held up by two ladies in white. Momma’s face is red and crumbly, her mouth open wide, crying. Her friend Belle is coming up the aisle behind them. “Diane,” she call out to Momma. Momma shake loose of the church ladies so she can hug Belle. Momma crying on Belle’s shoulder. Belle hug her back. Old sloe-eyed Deacon Harris—that’s what Grandma used to call him cause he was always trying to get with Momma—come up behind them and hand Momma his handkerchief. She take it and blow her nose. “Diane. I got her,” he say and try to take Momma from Belle, but Momma won’t go.

“I want my momma.” I start crying. “I want my momma.” I’m standing on the wooden seat trying to climb over these church ladies, but they won’t let me get to my momma. One of them is holding me by my waist, making me even more hot and sweaty, and this other lady is blocking my way. They won’t let me get to my momma!

This lady saying, “Baby come on sit down here with me. You can’t have your momma right now.” So I scream and cry and scream louder because I want my momma, and she right there and they won’t let me have her. Shh, the lady in white croon in my ear. She try to rock me against the bumpy smoothness of her dress pocket as she wipe my nose with a handkerchief.

“Don’t Sister Greene look good,” my other keeper say. “Swanson did a good job. Sister Greene would be real proud.” I peek out at Grandma, who is looking pretty and peaceful, and I quiet down because I know she would want me to.

“A good woman,” say one of the church ladies, “tithed ’til it hurt, and all those kids. She deserve a nice send-off.”

A crew of church lady nurses stand along the back wall, hands behind their backs, a line of straight white posts holding the church up. I’m wondering where they keep the cold rags and smelling salts they give the people who faint when they get the Holy Ghost. 

Grandma would be standing there with them if she wasn’t resting in her pretty box bed. Her hair is all shiny and curled like when she get it done on Saturdays. I smile and remember how Grandma used to say getting her hair done once a week was her one indulgence. A treat, she said it meant, like the little brown bag of penny Squirrels and Banana Splits she used to give me when she came home from the beauty parlor. Grandma was always teaching me new words and other things, like the capital of Colombia is Bogota. Colombia is a country way down south. She liked to read and tell me about other places. Bogota. I like the way the word sounds in my mouth.

Uncle Jeff is sitting up straight and crisp in his white Navy uniform. His face is quiet and serious; his mouth a straight line. He nod his head up and down every time Aunt Jamie whisper something in his ear, but he won’t turn to look at her. Aunt Jamie look nice in the dark-blue suit she borrowed from Momma. Uncle Ronald is sitting next to her with some lady I don’t know. Momma say every time she turn around Ronald got a new girlfriend. Uncle Ronald paint crazy pictures with weird mismatched colors. Momma say he can’t see straight cause he always high on that reefer, but Grandma say he just trying to make sense out of this crazy world.

The organ music start, Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves. We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves. The people in the choir stand up. One of my keepers take my hand, and we stand as we sing along with the choir. It sound good, full and loud, and I smile because Grandma is smiling. The preacher’s black-and- purple robes swirl around him as he take his place in front of the tall stand that look like the thick trunk of a tree growing out of Grandma’s box. “We have come together this day to celebrate the life of this good woman, to rejoice in the fact that we were fortunate enough to have this gracious woman touch our lives. Let us begin with a prayer of benediction, a pronouncement of His divine blessing.” His words sound like a song as he bow his head and stretch his palm out to us.

We bow our heads too. I can feel Grandma’s warm palm squeezing my hand, reminding me to be quiet, to bow my head and let the gentle beauty of prayer wash over me.

**

Esperanza Cintrón is the author of three books of poetry that include Chocolate City Latina, the 2013 Naomi Long Madgett Award winner What Keeps Me Sane, and Visions of a Post-Apocalyptic Sunrise. She is a native Detroiter of Puerto Rican descent who holds a doctorate in English literature and teaches at a local college. Shades: Detroit Love Stories is her debut short story collection.

“We Were Geniuses” first appeared in The Provo Canyon Review, now defunct. Both stories below are excerpted from Like Water and Other Stories and reprinted here with permission from WTAW Press and Olga Zilberbourg.

We Were Geniuses

We were geniuses. It was our birthright. Our parents were geniuses and, in many cases, our grandparents and our siblings. They worked in the areas of functional analysis, algebra, topology, group and probability theories, solved Poincaré conjectures and Hilbert problems, named countless theorems after themselves, and won chess championships. We were destined to follow in their footsteps. So what if we weren’t geniuses in mathematics? By the age of fourteen or fifteen, it was clear that we were deficient in that department. We simply had to apply ourselves to other disciplines. As we went from physics to programming to chemistry to biology to history to language and literature to geography, we watched each other carefully for the signs of the budding genius. We knew exactly what it would look like. 

During one spectacular ping-pong match in the school basement, Misha and I, playing in tandem, defeated a pair of clearly superior players. Our opponents were a year older, and they had been seen practicing their master strikes on each other every day during lunch break. To win against them was an effort of supreme concentration and nonverbal communication; as Misha hit the ball with his paddle, I could predict the trajectory two moves ahead, not only where the ball would land on the opposite side of the table, but also the position I needed to take to deflect the next shot. Misha had a strong serve and he could cut, but I could spin with such power that after hitting the opposite side, the ball would ricochet back to ours before one of the opposing players could reach it. 

This game was genius, and if only we wanted to become professional ping-pong players, we would start serious training the very next day. But what did sports matter in the world where we could be using mathematical methods to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity or build time machines? When the game ended, Misha and I shook hands and went to the neighborhood bakery to share half-a-dozen doughnuts. Misha told me about his brother who was an astronomer, discovering new planets every day. I told Misha about my grandmother who had registered a patent in the method of transportation and storage of nuclear waste. 

“What do you think you will apply yourself to?” Misha asked, a standard question we asked each other twice every day. All of us except for Lena 2, who was still studying music because she claimed that a woman’s true voice didn’t settle until the age of twenty-two. We thought that she was brave and not very clever putting her eggs into one basket. What if her voice turned out uninteresting? At the age of twenty-two, her options would be limited and she would be pretty much destined for a life of mediocrity. And this was the daughter of a man who designed supersonic jets! Misha and I pitied her. Misha was dejectedly considering going into programming or computer science, and I was all but settled on the study of theoretical physics.

At the ages of sixteen and seventeen, our search grew desperate. We went to school every day with the idea that it was either now or never. I started cutting classes to attend lectures on quantum theory. Misha signed up for every computer club in Leningrad. The pressure was getting to us. At home, instead of doing homework, I read science fiction. Misha played computer games and called me to report his scores. On the phone, we made fun of Lena 2, who earned perfect scores on tests in history and language and composition classes. At the end of that school year, Misha told me he was in love with Lena 2 and it was mutual. 

Sometimes, it seemed like the entire world was against us in our efforts. Our final exam in mathematics was scheduled on the same day the Beatles movies “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!” would be shown on the big screen for the first time. These movies were thirty years old but new to us. We’d heard they were genius. The theater was located in our school yard, and the poster announcing the event teased us daily with its neatly stenciled red and black letters. Our parents and grandparents and siblings were thrown off their abstract trains of thought into lengthy suppertime discussions of the cultural implications of this screening. We made mix tapes for each other and taught ourselves to play the Beatles songs on our guitars. Misha learned to play the guitar so he could accompany Lena 2’s singing. I figured out the chords to “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You.”

We came to feel that the importune scheduling of the exam was a form of censure by the school administration, and a test of our will and desire for change. We sent a delegation to negotiate with the principal, and the principal promptly found work for the members of the delegation, polishing the parquet flooring in the hallways with wax. In the spirit of the times, we looked for drastic solutions. On the day of the exam, as the teachers began handing out booklets with our assignments, the twenty-two of us, girls and boys in our proper brown and white uniforms, stood up and marched out of the classroom. 

In orderly ranks, two by two, and some of us holding hands, we proceeded down two flights of granite stairs, through the arched hallway, outside, and into the movie theater. We were united in our goals and this was our strength. If all else failed, our parents and grandparents and siblings would have to advocate for us with the school administration. All of their abstract calculations and self-named theories predicted that the times were changing. We were geniuses.

**
**

Sweet Porridge

My son, a beginning reader, brought home an illustrated book by the Brothers Grimm. The fairy tale, hardly two hundred words, begins with a little girl, who goes to the forest and there meets an old woman. The woman gives her a magic pot and teaches her to say “Little pot, cook”—and the pot cooks sweet millet porridge. The girl gives the pot to her mother. The mother, experimenting with the pot while the girl is away, forgets the incantation to stop the cooking, and so the pot goes on and on until the whole town is flooded with porridge. But the porridge is so sweet and delicious, the villagers don’t mind. They eat. The end.

This fairy tale meant a lot to me when I was a child. Growing up in the Soviet Union, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my grandmother. Even before I was tall enough to reach the stove, I was asked to stand on a chair and stir the round yellow grains as they thickened with milk. Of the several porridges my grandmother rotated for our meals, millet required the most stamina. Semolina developed clumps easier, but was ready three minutes after the milk boiled. Millet required nearly constant stirring for thirty minutes, reaching with the spoon deep to the bottom of the aluminum pot, lest the gluey mix burn. As a reward for the physically difficult and tedious job, I got to lick the spoon. The drawing in my edition of the Brothers Grimm tale depicted a clay pot set in the middle of a wooden table, no stove or stirring required to cook the porridge. I remember losing myself in that picture, trying to imagine what it would’ve been like to not have to lift a finger to have plentiful food to eat whenever I wanted it. 

My son, born in the United States, is reading this fairy tale in English, and certain details from his version strike me as unfamiliar. Following a hunch, I search online for the text of the Soviet translation. True enough, the two versions are different. In the English tale, a close translation from the Grimms’ German, the girl is poor and pious. She goes to the forest to gather the berries when she and her mother run out of things to eat. The moral is unstated but clear from the order of the sentences and the causality that order implies. The old woman, handing her the pot, saves the girl from starvation and rewards her piety. 

The Soviet-era Russian-language version omits mentions of both piousness and poverty. Soviet children were supposed to be atheist, so references to religious belief were routinely excised from old books. The girl goes to the forest to gather berries. Period. The old woman asks to have some berries, and the girl shares. When the girl gives the woman some of her berries, she is rewarded with the magic pot. The Soviet state took care that its children didn’t starve; so, at least on paper, poverty didn’t exist. There’s no explicit mention of hunger, but even the well-meaning censor could do nothing about our everyday life, which revolved around the quest for gathering, growing, making, and in other ways, procuring food. Food was the top preoccupation of adults and children alike. Hunger was supplied by the context. We understood the awesomeness of the old woman’s gift, but instead of a morality tale in which the girl’s piousness and need are recognized and redeemed, we, the Soviet children, received a nonsensical transaction in which the girl’s small kindness earned her an exceptional prize.

Rereading the story at dinnertime, alternating each sentence with a bite of his buckwheat with mushrooms, my six-year-old breezes past the word “pious,” but he wants to know what it means to be poor. 

“Don’t you know?”

“Poor means that they don’t have any money. But what does it really mean?”

He’s looking at a picture where the girl and the mother are sitting at a wooden table, staring at each other across the empty tabletop.

“They don’t have anything to eat,” I explain. “The girl must be very hungry, and she goes to the forest to gather berries to eat.”

“But look,” he says, pointing at the details of the drawing. “Look at the clothes they have on. Look, there’s a stove, a table and chairs. They have a house.”

“Imagine that they are peasants and nothing grew that year. Yes, they have a house and a stove, but nothing to cook on that stove.”

“But if they were really poor, they wouldn’t have a house,” my son insists. 

“The book says they are poor. That’s why the girl goes to the forest to look for berries.”

“I like berries better than porridge.” This sounds like a change of subject, but I know what he means. If the girl can have the things she likes, life can’t be that bad. She’s not really poor. 

“Porridge is yucky,” my son says and pushes away his half-finished bowl. 

I suppress my frustration as I always do. My grandmother would call him spoiled. He has never had to lift a finger to have food on his plate. I’ve never told him how I feel when he refuses to eat the food I make for him. But I know that a different world awaits him, a world of plenty, and to prepare him for it, I have to be patient while he learns to navigate his choices. He actually loves buckwheat; it’s one of his few staples. Once a month, I make a trip to a Russian store on the other side of town to buy the groats that are roasted just right. 

“So, you think the girl made a bad exchange? You’d keep the berries?”

“The girl was cheated,” my son says, resolutely.

Later that night, when he’s asleep and I stand over the sink and finish his leftovers, I wonder if, perhaps, misreading is in the nature of reading, particularly when it comes to fairy tales. The more I think about this story, the more vividly I recall that, as a child, I was very suspicious of the girl’s motives. She must’ve divined, somehow, that the old woman had something special to give. No matter how good and generous the girl was, she couldn’t have parted with her berries that easily. I wouldn’t have. The forest near the house where I spent my summers was tall and dark, and the bilberry patches were few and far between. By the time I stumbled onto one, most of the berries had been picked over by our neighbors. It took an entire afternoon of crouching to gather half a basket, and after I was done, my back and legs ached from the strain and itched from mosquito bites. No, no. I would’ve kept the berries for myself. The magic pot, too. If I’d ever gotten my hands on a pot like that, I would never have shown it to my mother or my grandmother. I would make a secret hiding spot for it under my bed and wake up in the middle of the night to eat the porridge. I might feel guilty, but I would sleep better with my stomach full. 

**
Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut Like Water and Other Stories comes out September 5, 2019, from WTAW Press. She is the author of three story collections published in Russia. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Common, and Electric Literature. Born in Leningrad, USSR, she came of age during the country’s disintegration, when the fall of the Iron Curtain created unprecedented travel and educational opportunities. Among the first in a wave of post-Soviet youth to study abroad and in the United States, Zilberbourg attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Goethe Institute in Germany, and San Francisco State University, where she earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature. She has worked as an associate editor at Narrative Magazine and currently lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children. 

**

Image: Flickr / Nick Webb

7.13 Books permits The Other Stories to use the following excerpt from Besotted by Melissa Duclos:

Besotted excerpt

Love didn’t run around at night, searching the faces reflected in plate glass for someone she used to know. Love didn’t get her feet dusty, couldn’t tolerate the creep of grime up her shins, the slick of puddles on her soles. When Love stood quite still, as she so often did, she could feel the pull of mountains and rivers and half-constructed skyscrapers and eight-lane highways and movie theaters and the quiet parks with their untouched grass circling around her bowed head. 

Was I scared of Love? Of course. In my experience she was overly forward and easily frightened, the cause of both self-doubt and delusions of grandeur. But maybe this time things would turn out differently. Isn’t that what people always believe? 

I knew that left unrequited, Love could never be happy. But there were limits to what I could do to satisfy her. Love spoke softly, and so I tried to quiet the world around us. I stopped making plans to go out. No more drinks at O’Malley’s or Zapatas, Blue Frog, or M on the Bund when we were feeling fancy. No more dancing at Park 97 or Guandii. No more house parties with costume requirements. Fall edged closer to winter and I promised Love we would hibernate. 

“Why don’t we go out?” Liz suggested more than once, but Love was too fragile to entrust to a crowd of expats. Liz didn’t go without me. I believed that meant something. There were afternoons when she brought a book to Starbucks to unwind by herself. But she always came home for dinner. Until one night she didn’t. I set the table for two, but the plate across from me remained empty. Love sat beside me, tapping a long fingernail against the oak table. 

Eventually I cleaned up. There’s nothing more pathetic than a woman sitting amongst the detritus of a ruined dinner. I left the wine out, though. Drinking seemed my only option. 

I had a mouthful when the door finally opened; I swallowed quickly, then hiccupped, and coughed. 

Liz gave me a funny look. “Hi,” she said slowly, looking as though she expected me to pull a weapon from under the table. 

“Wine?” I offered.

She looked relieved. It was, I guessed, a normal thing for me to have said. 

“Long day?” she asked as she sat down at the table. 

“Weird one,” I answered, though I didn’t know what I meant. 

“What did you do?” She looked around the room, as though there might be evidence of something. 

“Just hung out for a while. Read a bit. Cooked some dinner.” Cooked you dinner, I wanted to say, but stopped myself. 

“Are you boycotting restaurants now?” 

I laughed nervously. “No. I’m sorry…” Even as I started the sentence I wasn’t sure how 

it would end. “I wanted to make things homier around here, so you wouldn’t get homesick and leave.” It was plausible enough. 

She laughed. “Don’t you think you should’ve asked me what I missed from home before you started trying to recreate it?” 

“Okay, so what do you miss?” Say snuggling, I willed. Say secrets in the dark. 

Liz’s long hair fell over her faces as she stared down at the table and I wanted to grasp it and pull it toward me. Her fingers tapped against the stem of her wine glass and I wanted to lick them, imagining they would taste like honey. 

She didn’t tell me what she missed. “We should sit on the couch,” I suggested, interrupting the silence. I felt like a teenaged boy waiting to yawn and stretch my arms across my date’s shoulder. Ridiculous, but somehow it was working. She sat first and I followed, sitting close, leaving almost an entire cushion of the couch empty. She didn’t fidget though or look uncomfortable. 

“Your hair is really beautiful.” I actually said that, and then waited for Liz to cringe and slink off the couch, back to her own bed, away from me and my creepy compliments. But she didn’t move. Or, she didn’t move away from me; instead she turned and leaned back, flinging her hair across my lap. 

“Oh, do you like it?” she laughed, shaking it. 

“Yes, very much,” I whispered, but she didn’t hear. She was drunk and laughing, had collapsed completely onto my lap. I was afraid to move, afraid to ruin it. I did run my fingers through her hair, though; I couldn’t resist. Liz closed her eyes and purred like a cat. I closed my own eyes, too, focusing on the feel of those strands. 

It may seem that Love gets lost easily, wandering off after the aroma of pork dumplings, pan-fried and served steaming, or running frightened from the crash and pop of fireworks meant to scatter only old ghosts. Most of the time, though, Love stays put; if she seems lost it’s only because she can be hard to recognize.  

“Have you ever been in love?” Liz asked. 

I could’ve told her about Alice, whose gloss-coated lips turned me into a child with the sticky remnants of elicit candy around my mouth. After Alice there was Heather, who tasted of mushrooms sometimes, other times grapefruit; who rubbed peppermint lotion into my feet, up my calves; whose metallic green car reflected the sunlight off its trunk as she drove away.   

“No,” I answered, because the truth was too complicated to explain. 

“I have,” she replied, and I shrugged.  

“Have you ever had sex with a stranger?” 

I snorted. “I mean, not a complete and total stranger, ‘I don’t even know your name’   kind of thing. But definitely, ‘I just met you tonight and we’ve talked for an hour, and I’ll never see you again.’” 

“I haven’t.” Liz wasn’t pausing for stories. “Have you ever had sex in public?” 

I blushed, but Liz’s eyes were still closed, so it was okay. “Are we playing this game now?” 

“Yes.” 

“Fair enough. Semi-public, I guess. Have you?” 

“Yes. Your turn.” 

I knew exactly what I wanted to ask. Two more questions and I’d do it. 

“Have you ever had sex in a car?” I said. 

“Yes. You?” 

“Yes.” 

“Have you ever had sex on a plane?” 

“No.” 

“Me neither.” 

I exhaled loudly. “Have you ever kissed a woman?” 

“No,” she answered, and I could tell from the pause at the top of her breath that it was a different kind of no. “Have you?” 

“No, but I’ve always wanted to.” This was a lie I shouldn’t have told. 

“Me too!” Liz squealed and sat up. She was so drunk I wondered for a moment if I should stop the game. But I believed because I wasn’t a man, I had nothing to force on her. 

“So… should we?” 

“I suppose we have to,” I answered. 

“Okay, wait.” Liz adjusted her posture, pulled her hair away from her face, licked her lips. “Okay, I’m ready.” 

I leaned forward; Liz met me halfway. We pressed our lips together, softly: top lip on top lip, bottom on bottom. At first we didn’t move. She was like a child, playing at something she didn’t understand. And then suddenly she understood. Our lips parted and I pushed my tongue through until I felt the gleam of Liz’s teeth. 

We separated a moment later, the kiss that satisfied the constraints of our game complete. We leaned in again. Have you ever kissed a woman a second time? Have you ever run your tongue along her jawline before pressing your mouth to the quick pulse in her neck? 

I paid attention for signs of hesitation—a nervous laugh or a gasp that sounded more like terror than pleasure, a flinch or a pulling away—but noticed none. My fingers lifted her shirt slightly and touched her waist, tracing delicate patterns of curling ivy around her belly button. In response she ran her hand up the back of my neck, nestling her fingers around the roots of my hair and pulling, not so hard that it hurt, but it surprised me nonetheless. I was expecting more timidity from her. 

“You should take this off,” she whispered, tugging at the bottom of my shirt, surprising me again. It was the first either of us had spoken since the game had ended. Or maybe this was still part of the game.    

I felt the sudden urge to retreat to my bedroom, where the curtains blocked out the neon twilight shining through the windows. I wanted to bury us under my thick comforter—never mind the sweat—so we could feel but not see our bare legs pressing against each other, our soft bellies, our breasts. I was afraid to pause, to give her any time to question what we were doing, but I was more afraid of staying where we were. Though our living room was entirely private, our front door locked, I felt too exposed.    

I took her hand and stood up. It could be a test—a chance for her to giggle and hiccup and tell me she was getting sleepy. But she hooked her finger in my belt loop. She followed me to bed. 

Love remained curled at the end of the couch, slicked with sweat and shivering. 

The next morning when I woke up, she was gone. 

**

Melissa Duclos’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, The Offing, and Bustle, among other venues. She is the founder of Magnify: Small Presses, Bigger, a monthly newsletter celebrating small press books, ad co-founder of Amplify: Women’s Voices, Louder, a series of writing retreats. She has an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Portland, Oregon with her two children, small cat, and even smaller dog, and is at work on her second novel and a collection of essays about heartbreak and writing. Besotted is her first novel. 

Señora van Bumberchen’s School for Girls

Angge lost her parents to Spanish fire. She remembered the little volcanoes erupting on her mother’s body, the smoke wafting from the craters, the spirit fleeing. Her father had moved quickly. She remembered the thrust of the kalis against her left flank. She was told that her father had intended to deliver the fatal plunge, and that if her twelfth rib had not gotten in the way she would have bled to death. And then the Spanish lieutenant had rushed in, took aim, and with one shot blew her father’s head to bits.

“Here, God’s truth,” she said, anxious to provide evidence of her tragedy. From the folds of her skirt she fished out a piece of her father’s skull. The shard of bone had yellowed over the years. It gave her greater comfort than the scapular that the nuns placed around her neck.

“I believe you,” said Señora Van Bumberchen. “But I cannot take you in.”

The señora sought out destitute orphan girls and put them up in a large house on Calle del Beaterio. As she passed by Señora Van Bumberchen’s house Angge would press her ear to the wall and murmur softly along with the chorus rehearsing the sounds of the Castilian alphabet. At the Chinese market where Angge sold needlework, the señora often came to collect itinerant market girls. Not once did the señora approach Angge. Unable to contain her impatience any longer, she had gone to the big house on Calle del Beaterio and asked to see Señora Van Bumberchen.

“The needlework, Angge. Only the nuns of Santa Clara could produce such elegant needlework. My school is open to all but I cannot admit you as a ward. You belong to Santa Clara.”

Señora Van Bumberchen’s meaning was clear. She had petitioned Madrid for royal recognition for her fledgling school and the route from Manila to Her Majesty’s ears was long and tortuous. She was not about to make enemies especially one as influential as the Abbess of Santa Clara.

“I simply wish to learn my letters,” said Angge. “For fourteen years I’ve served faithfully at the convent and I don’t see why the Abbess would deny my humble request. Doña Sonsoles left a provision in her will for my education. She also promised that I would be free to leave the convent after her death.”

Señora Van Bumberchen studied the fragment of bone that rested on Angge’s palm. “Bring me the will and I shall see what I can do.”

#

Santa Clara was flanked by unlikely neighbors: the military hospital to the left and to the right the foundry where the Spaniards forge their cannons. Perched along the banks of the Pasig River, the convent was surrounded by a high wall to block out the impudent gaze of the outside world. If it weren’t for the lugubrious notes of the Sunday choir wafting from the walls or the servants trudging in and out of the gates, one would think that the stone edifice was but a massive tomb.

“What took you so long?” grumbled Trinidad as she eyed the unsold needlework in Angge’s basket.

“And a good evening to you, Sister,” Angge replied. Trinidad’s frown deepened. As the daughter of old Indio nobility, it irked Trinidad that her blood was not considered pure enough for holy calling. She had sought admission to Santa Clara but instead of becoming a bride of Christ she was appointed governess to several young girls, mestizas born to Spanish friars and Indio women, who were left in the convent’s care. At that moment there were a dozen such girls at Santa Clara: the youngest was abandoned at the convent shortly after being weaned from the breast, and the oldest was approaching her sixteenth year.

“They are not to be seen by anyone from the outside. And if they try to leave,” the Abbess had instructed, handing Angge and Trinidad a whip, “you are to bring them back.”

Angge kept her whip in her cell, untouched.

“The sun is almost gone. Come on now.” Trinidad thrust her lips in the direction of the squat wooden house that served as the kitchen. For supper there will be broiled sardines and tomatoes and fern in vinegar. Service must be prompt. After vespers the nuns must be served and everyone else ate in the kitchen after the refectory was cleared. The older mestizas rallied around Angge, eager to be useful and hoping for bits of gossip from the outside. Angge tasked the girls with gutting the fish while she swept the ashes from the stove and got the fire going. The girls worked quickly, feeling their way through the entrails as they watched Angge with rapt attention. Despite their exuberance Angge could not help but imagine Trinidad’s husk of a face on them. It hurt to think of it. They will inhale the smoke of the kitchen fire all their lives, their hands rank with fish blood, and they will grow old and die within the convent walls.

One said, “Is it true, Angge, that the fashionable señoritas have given up wearing the tapis over their skirts?”

And another: “I heard that no one wears stockings anymore. Is that the fashion now? Why must we take pains to cover up when no one can see us here?”

“Ay, stockings in this infernal heat,” muttered another, a frail girl called Dolor. Angge noted a faint flush on the girl’s cheeks and the beginnings of a clawing in her voice. She reminded herself to take a glass of vinegar water to Dolor before supper.

From her corner perch Trinidad let out a sharp hiss that cut through the chatter quick and clean. “You fools care for nothing but frippery,” she cried. “I should sprinkle salt upon your knees as you say your prayers tonight.”

#

After compline the chapel was dark and empty, illumined only by a half coin of moon peeking through the high glass windows. Angge set her candle down and lowered herself on the marble floor. She stretched out her sore legs and pulled her skirts up to her thighs, grateful for the cold tile on bare flesh. By the time she had washed and dried the china, tidied the kitchen, and extinguished the lamps in the hallways, her clothes had stuck to her like a second skin. Without the murmuring nuns – who seemed perpetually feverish underneath their habits – the chapel was cool and tranquil. If she breathed deeply enough she could detect the vegetal musk of the Pasig.

She leaned against the wall and felt the names of the dead press against her back. The eastern wall of the chapel housed the remains of Santa Clara’s women and there they remained secluded in death as they were in life. Angge turned to the gravestone on her right and gently traced the carved letters with her finger. S glides with ease; O merely goes around; N is three rapid slashes. She had committed the patterns to memory. After her mistress died Angge kept her company every night.

“The time has come, don’t you think?” whispered Angge as she rubbed away a streak of dust on the gravestone. “I’ve waited long enough.”

Something in the pews moved. Mice, perhaps, or a footfall? Angge did not expect any of the nuns to be about. It was a little past nine and there were five more hours to go until matins. She pushed down her skirts and lifted the candle above her head. It formed an islet of oily light around her. First there were pale feet in felt slippers, then a small, wary face with eyes that shone dark amber in the glow. It was a young girl of about ten.

“I’m lost,” she said.

“You must be one of the newcomers,” said Angge, trying to remember if Trinidad alerted her about any new arrivals. They were used to receiving entrants at odd hours. Some were dispatched to the convent within hours of their birth. Others were stolen from their mothers by trackers who were handsomely paid by the friars. The Abbess herself preferred to admit her new charges after sundown when there were fewer prying eyes.

The girl went on, “Sometimes I walk in my sleep and I wake up in strange places. I get confused.”

“The little ones do that a lot,” Angge assured her. “It takes time to get used to this place. Let me take you back to your cell. You must rest.”

The girl stepped closer and lowered herself on the ground next to Angge. “I cannot sleep. Can I stay here with you?”

“Yes, but not for long. We should not be up and about at this time of the night.”

“Then why are you here?”

Angge patted Sonsoles’s gravestone. “She hates to be alone. And it would be rude not to bid her good evening before I retire to bed.”

The child turned to look expectantly at her, eager to hear more, but Angge grew quiet, lost in the fog of memory.

Upon his return from the Moro war the Spanish lieutenant had presented his aunt Sonsoles with a half-broken child. He had dug out the howling girl from the mess of bodies and sailed with her to Manila. The ship surgeon sewed pieces back into place and predicted that the stab wound on the child’s left torso would never completely heal. “The wound of Christ,” declared Sonsoles, who was apt to see miracles where they did not exist. Yet the wound closed in on itself. Angge’s father, a Moro chieftain, had maneuvered the kalis in order to mimic the appearance of a lethal injury. He knew that the Spanish troops took young survivors to be raised in Christian households. But underneath the pile of smoldering flesh his daughter refused to play dead. In Manila, the old faith was rinsed off in baptismal water and the child was named Angustias. A suitable name, thought Sonsoles, for one destined to suffer from lifelong agonies.

The widowed Sonsoles had been in the grip of a withering when Angge was brought to her. She suffered from unexplained hemorrhages, a mortifying affliction for one so devout, and when she withdrew to the convent of Santa Clara she took her young servant with her. Angge remembered Sonsoles enveloped in a swirl of white, stretched out on the ground in the shape of a cross, her cheek against the dirt. Angge, a small, slight child, had helped her corpulent mistress back to her feet while the nuns looked on.

Sighing, Angge shook herself out of her reverie, rose to her feet and stretched out a hand to the girl. The child’s warm, soft hand felt like velvet against Angge’s calloused palm. It won’t be long, she thought, until Santa Clara will make quick work of its prey.

#

In her office, the Abbess thrust a sheaf of papers at Angge. “I cannot find it. Show me the clause providing for your education and your liberty.”

As she received the papers from the Abbess Angge met her gaze. They glared at each other, and the murmurs that Angge often heard in the cloisters began to amplify inside her head with a menacing persistence.

The eyes lie still, and yet —

“Show me the clause, Angustias,” repeated the Abbess, abandoning the Tagalog that she used with the servants and speaking now in her Castilian tongue. “Or do you not understand what clause means?”

Angge caught sight of the familiar S and O and N but the rest of the letters meant nothing to her. She stared hard at the pages as though the force of her will would, through some magic, unravel the meaning hidden beneath the ink. Rage set her insides alight.

“I swear on the doña’s soul. She made a pledge.”

“Bless her, but the will says otherwise. She drew up the will in 1849 right after she entered Santa Clara. It says here that you are to be bequeathed to the convent upon her death. That is all.”

Fury now gave way to a cold, sodden weight. “It cannot be. There has to be another will. She must have drawn up a new one before she passed away last year.”

“I have no power to change what is written here, Angustias. If you wish, you can pursue the matter with the courts. But for now, you belong here.” The Abbess held out her hand, and as Angge knelt to kiss her ring she imagined the Abbess’s severed finger between her teeth. The Abbess’s blood would be as bilious as her person. She would not spit out the bone — she would grind until her jaws break.

#

On her way home from the Chinese market Angge rushed to Señora Van Bumberchen’s house. “If you cannot accept me as a ward, I beg you, admit me as a paying student,” she said as soon as the señora appeared at the door. She felt a brief flash of terror when her words tumbled out, for she had never owned a single coin in her life and the city’s jails overflowed with debtors. Payment was not going to be a small matter. In exchange for her services the convent provided lodging, nothing more. She would have to find a way. The Pasig teemed with merchandise: fish free for the taking, and, she thought with a shudder, boatmen willing to part with a coin for a brief interlude. If it had to come to that, best be a learned whore than an unlettered muchacha.

“And the will?”

“Please,” cried Angge. “Let us speak no more about the will. You have my word that I will not cause you any trouble with the Abbess and I will not leave Santa Clara, not until after I prove my truth. If I have to, I will take the Abbess to court.”

Señora Van Bumberchen could not help but feel a begrudging respect for Angge. If Angge fled from the convent, the dreaded guardia would hunt her down and there would be no mercy for an Indio, especially one who incurred the wrath of the Abbess of Santa Clara. The girl was clearly not intending to escape; instead, she was preparing herself for what would likely be an interminable fight. The señora considered the uproar that would ensue if her efforts to aid a lowly Indio servant, at the expense of her compatriot the Abbess, would ever come to light. But the death of hope would weigh heavily on her conscience, and it was a far greater burden she would have to carry for her remaining years.

#

Like people, letters had names, and each letter had its own recognizable sound, and that was the key to understanding them. For Angge they were like people she had long wished to befriend. The letters came together to form words, and words became phrases, and phrases grew into sentences.

In lieu of quills Angge collected stumps of charcoal from the stove and practiced her letters on the chapel’s marble floor, wiping them away with a damp rag when she was done. Paper was scarce and costly — she saved the precious sheets that Señora Van Bumberchen handed out and she hid them underneath her cot. On marble, the clean lines showed an increasingly confident hand.

“With the jota you breathe slowly and gently,” instructed Angge, “as though you are blowing at a wound to ease its sting.” Crouched next to her on the ground, the girl watched the squiggles of charcoal take shape on the gray marble surface.

“J-U-A-N-I-T-A,” Angge read softly.

The girl squealed with delight. “May I give it a try?”

“Dios mío, lower your voice. Now. Your grasp must be firm. Let it flow from the wrist.”

The girl eagerly grabbed a piece of charcoal from Angge and copied each letter with a careful hand.

Angge nodded her approval and poised her charcoal over the marble. “Excellent. Now, what follows after Juanita?”

“What is that thing that must follow my name?”

“Your father’s name must go after yours.”

“I don’t know who my father is. And if I don’t have one, why must I carry his name?”

Before she became Angustias she was known by another name and the names of her father and her father’s father followed hers. She belonged to them, but she could no longer remember. One day, if the memory returns, she will write down the names.

“You can choose how to be called. After admission the nuns give up the names by which they were known to the outside world.” Angge shone her candle at one of the gravestones and slowly read aloud. “Sor Benedicta del Santísimo Sacramento. I remember her. Poor thing did not last long in this place. Here’s another. Sor Pilar del Espíritu Santo. Ah, the sister was from a different time. She died in 1738.”

The girl cast nervous glances around her. “We mustn’t call out their names. If they hear you they might come back.”

Angge snorted. “Come back here for what? It’s nicer where they are.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Don’t be silly. I talk to Doña Sonsoles all the time but she doesn’t show up.”

The girl shook her head and inched closer to Angge.

“Very well. Come now, we must get going. Can you hear the roosters? Soon the sisters will be up.” Angge gathered her stubs of charcoal and rose to her feet. The ache in her limbs came creeping back but it no longer mattered to her. In her letters she forgot about the day’s labors. For the last few months she had been spending her afternoons at Señora Van Bumberchen’s school. In the evenings she sat with the girl in the chapel, swearing her to secrecy, as she went over her lessons.

Each letter and each word brought Angge closer to her purpose. She must see Doña Sonsoles’s will with her own eyes. Angge believed with all her heart that her mistress did not intend for her to rot away at the convent. Sonsoles had bequeathed her substantial fortune to Santa Clara and the loss of one servant would be of little consequence to the convent’s coffers. Angge was determined not to let the Abbess push her deeper into the dank recesses of Santa Clara.

#

Angge woke up to the sound of the nuns’ fading footsteps as they processioned back to their cells after matins. She lay in her cot unable to sink back to sleep. The cool of the early dawn began to creep into her bones and she wrapped her thin blanket tightly around her. She waited until the last shuffle faded into silence, then she got up, lit her candle, and went to check on Dolor. The sickly girl had been confined to bed with yet another fever. She paused at the door of Dolor’s cell and took in the fetid air in the small, windowless room. In the candle glow Dolor’s hue took on an alarming yellow gleam. Angge laid her hand on the girl’s forehead. The heat nearly seared her skin.

Angge rushed to alert Trinidad, whose cell was a few doors from Dolor’s, and she sped along the narrow, dark corridor that led to the Abbess’s room. Her candle flickered as though the dark was licking the flame with a wet tongue. The thing that came to the door bore a halo of untamed hair, and it was utterly devoid of blood, almost fluorescent in its pallor. Angge caught a flash of what seemed like a feral green eye. She stepped back as though retreating from an animal that she had interrupted in the midst of a feed.

“What is it?”

“It’s Dolor,” stammered Angge, straining her eyes for a better glimpse. Perhaps her sight was failing her. Perhaps the miasma emanating from Dolor’s illness was clouding her faculties. She slowly lifted her candle but stopped herself, uncertain of what the light might reveal. She had never seen the Abbess without her black habit. For the first time in her long years at Santa Clara she felt something like fear grab hold of her, and it was a cold, bony claw that massaged her innards with malicious glee. She thought about the uneasy whispers that lingered in the cloisters and the hush that would descend upon the nuns when the Abbess swept past. When the Abbess finally emerged from the room in full regalia, Angge trailed behind her and held the candle aloft lest the Abbess melt into the shadows.

Inside Dolor’s cell the Abbess pushed aside Trinidad, who was kneeling by the girl’s bedside, and she pressed her thumb against Dolor’s neck. She turned to Angge and Trinidad.

“I must go and seek the Provincial’s counsel. Keep an eye on the girl.”

It was understood that the Abbess cannot call for a surgeon without prior approval from the order. Any outsider brought into the convent must be trusted to keep his silence.

Trinidad flung herself at Dolor. “God have mercy on your soul, poor child.”

“You will kill her soon enough with that talk,” muttered Angge. She arranged Dolor’s blanket around her to trap the fever beneath the bedclothes. With luck, it will find its way out of Dolor through her exhalations; otherwise, the surgeon must slice open a vein and let the fever trickle out of the body. She set about preparing the room for the surgeon.

Trinidad sobbed and hiccupped loudly.

“For the love of God, Sister, don’t go choking on your own tongue now!” Angge yelled. “Make yourself useful. Here, wipe her forehead while I boil some water.”

On her way to the kitchen Angge passed by the Abbess’s office, which was at the end of the hall that housed the dormitories. She stopped in her tracks, the air seething through her ears, as she realized her opportunity. She listened for the sound of stray footsteps and the walls echoed back only silence. Blood pounded against her skull. If she must do it now, she must do so with haste. She approached the Abbess’s office and slowly pushed the door. It opened with just the slightest protest. She lifted her candle and quickly scanned the room. The shelves were stocked with leather-bound folios and on the desk lay an orderly pile of papers. Where did the Abbess keep the will? She reached for the papers on the desk and read as fast as her abecedarian eyes could manage. She felt her heart about to burst not only from the illicit thrill of breaking into the Abbess’s office but also from the intoxicating pleasure of comprehension.

The desk papers were simple lists of needlework made and sold. She turned her attention to the folios on the shelves. She grabbed one and leafed through the pages. It was a list of dates and names, some of which she recognized:

Gertrudes, b. 1847, entered 1847

Asuncion, b. 1848, entered 1849, d. 1857

Gregoria, year of birth unknown, entered 1852

Dolor, b. 1848, entered 1852

Lucia, b. 1856, entered 1862

Intrigued, Angge flipped back to the first pages and ran a finger through the list of names. She knew that the nuns of Santa Clara had been keeping the friars’ children for years, long before she and Sonsoles came to the convent. Her finger stopped at a familiar name.

Juanita, b. 1820, entered 1830, d. 1831

Angge put the book down. She wanted to believe that her eyes were betraying her, just as they had at the Abbess’s room. Perhaps there was a madness creeping within the convent walls, some sort of delirium brought about by the presence of illness. She read the name again, read it a few more times, and whispered it out loud to be certain.

She did not turn around. She recognized the presence behind her before it even spoke. She thought of the nuns that slept the sleep of centuries within the convent walls. Even beasts spit out bones. Santa Clara, a famished witch, carried them within her until they crumbled to dust.

**

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the course of his research on the history of the four-hundred-year-old Real Monasterio de Santa Clara de Manila, Filipino historian Luciano P. R. Santiago discovered archival records pertaining to young girls who were reared in the convent. Only their names, dates of birth and dates of entrance at the monastery were recorded, without mention of their origins. Long presumed to be the illegitimate daughters of Franciscan friars and Filipino women, these girls grew up and died in the cloister without ever venturing out of Santa Clara.

**

Clara Kiat’s fiction has appeared in Luna Station Quarterly. She has recently completed a collection of short stories, The Country Belongs to the Indios, set in Manila during the final century of Spanish colonial rule. She is at work on a novel. Born and raised in the Philippines, Clara currently lives in Madrid, Spain.

**

Image: Flickr / Nina G

The following excerpt from Moxie by Alex Poppe is reprinted here with permission from Tortoise Books.

Moxie – exerpt

I smell it before I see it. Can’t see anything behind the big bag of supplies I’m carrying. Was feeling accomplished that I remembered to buy Moxie-necessities on the way home before the smell of dog piss bitch-slapped me across the face when I opened my front door. At least Moxie skirts the puddle instead of running through it. I follow her lead. It’s easier than cleaning it.

Moxie noses my calves as I fill her bowl with dog food and set it near her impatient tail. ‘Sorry for the wait.’ Pour myself a Black Label and sit to watch her eat. Doggie gulping noises permeate the kitchen. ‘Slow down girl. A lady picks.’ I don’t pick. I point. At junk food in supermarkets or bakeries. I look and point and pretend I am going to eat something delicious, something bad for me. Sometimes, looking is enough. At least I’m not a puker like some models. I went to the souk that day to look at the dried fruits in the spice market. Wanted to point at rings of pineapple and wedges of mango and garlands of dates. Wanted to pretend I was going to eat them.

Moxie settles herself by my feet. She looks at me with these wide-open eyes. There’s a lump pushing up my throat, and I am tempted to kick her. Her blind trust fucking pisses me off. Grabbing my drink, I open the kitchen window to sit on the fire escape. The night hushes.

The sky has gone inky. From its depth, a single star watches. Looking at my reflection in the kitchen window, I see a faceless girl staring back at me. I want to wake up in her body. There’s a hard, blank feeling inside me. I should sleep. When I was an up-and-comer, I never slept. Didn’t want to miss anything. It’s different now.

The sheets are cool as I slip in between them. Fucking hate sleeping alone. I sleep on only half the bed. Used to love it, back in the day when there were a lot of admirers. Back then, I needed the quiet. Now the quiet riots. Rewind and rewrite tonight as my fingertips stroke my stomach. I am not a boyfriend thief, so in my version of reality Aaron does not have a girlfriend who lives with him. My fingertips tickle up to pinch my nipples. My tits are full, my nipples erect. He says I am beautiful, not was, because he sees past the candy shell. Because he misses parking lot salsa lessons and being read to in the bathtub. My hand slides down. Inside I am smooth and slippery. I roll over and grind my pelvis. Pictures flash – Jeff’s cock, sucking Aaron’s bottom lip, some guitarist’s head between my thighs. Tongues pushing more and more and more. My pelvis hooks. An extended present tense. I taste the pillow with my grimace. My body slackens. The ability to speak returns. There is the static noise of silence. My pillow smells sad. I miss so much: middle-of-the-day sex and lying face to face sharing a pillow. Fuck, I miss resting my cheek against my hand. The pillowcase irritates. I turn over toward the window. The sky has lightened. Four black birds fly in a diamond formation against a white sky. How do they stay together? Even lovebirds get divorced. Flying is a cool superpower, but I would choose instant regeneration.

My mouth tastes the way the front hallway smells. Fucking need to take care of the Moxie mess. Like now. I am on my hands and knees with paper towels and piss-soaked journal pages before breakfast. Living the life. Fuck, I miss maid service. That was a great perk of living in model apartments. The agency puts five young hopefuls in a too-small space, competing for the same jobs, and expects them not to kill each other. There is always an odd number of housemates: provides a built-in moderator. I lived in one in Paris. Between the hair-pulling and the tears, there were some moments.

Vive Le Paris! Jeff came over for a visit. All the other girls are like mad in love with him. Who wouldn’t be? He’s like totally hot and nice and cool and 24! Plus, French Vogue just hired him. And he likes ME! He says he like “discovered me” and he’s real proud of it. Mom would FREAK if she heard that because she was my first agent. Anyway, I don’t care because it is summer, and I’m in PARIS, and the night sky goes on forever, and I’m in love!!! I haven’t said it yet or anything because I’m not like totally stupid, but it’s love.

On Friday nights parades of people skate around the Canal Saint Martin. We usually watch them from our balcony. Zaina and Elena (Zaina is from Beirut and has the best hair. Elena is from Kiev and is the skinniest.) got booked on the same shoot and bought us all blades! (They had ten pages of editorial for Italian Elle! Jealous ☹) I haven’t scored anything as big, but I feel like it’s coming. On Monday I have a go-see for some Pirelli calendar. Whoever that is. Anyway, we drank some Voov Cli Co champagne, donned our skates, and off we went. It was electric. The five of us held hands as we skated, a daisy chain of pretty girls. Nobody was elbowing each other out. I feel like we’ll be friends forever.

But the really big news is this. Wait for it ☺. Jeff and I. Hee hee hee. I was really scared because I knew it would hurt, but Jeff was really gentle and patient and like showed me what to do. I was so embarrassed that I didn’t know, but I think he got off on that. That he could make me the way he wanted. I finally feel like I belong to someone.

Jesus Fuck.

There is the clip-clip-clip of tiny paws behind me. The soles of my feet receive a tongue bath. ‘Morning Toe Licker,’ Picking up Moxie, I breathe my dragon breath in her face. She barks. ‘Let’s go buy a ball.’

Fuck, that sun is bright. Moxie has decided to take her morning dump in front of the entrance to the Brooklyn Fleas. She has no shame. Of course not. She’s not the one bent over, picking up warm squishy dogshit with a sandwich baggie.

‘Jax! I’d recognize you anywhere,’ a voice addresses my ass. ‘Girl when did you get a dog? You can barely take care of yourself.’

‘Yesterday.’ Turning around, I spy Frieda’s locks before I spy Frieda. Everything on Frieda has been added: hair, fingernails, breasts. She’s a trannie makeup artist with an identical twin brother named Frank. I wonder how long it took for their mother to stop calling ‘Boys…’ when she wanted both of them. ‘This is Moxie. Moxie meet Frieda.’ Frieda’s one of my few before and after friends.

‘How you feelin’?’ She takes my chin and turns my face to look at both sides. Her silver bangles jangle. ‘Did you see the doctor I told you about?’

She gets away with touching my face because of her six-inch height advantage. And because she was on that Marrakesh shoot. ‘Yeah. Yesterday.’ I wriggle free. She was having tea with a carpet seller at the hotel at the time of the blast. She visited me almost every week during my recovery to give me a mani/pedi. No one asked her to.

‘Girl, you look like shit. Even for you.’

Can’t argue with that.

‘When’s the last time you ate?’

‘This morning.’

‘Liar.’

She’s right. ‘So don’t ask.’

‘Want to have brunch?’

‘Can’t. I have shit to do.’

‘Right. Like you’re so important.’ Frieda never sugarcoats it.

‘Fuck you. I have to get Moxie a ball.’

‘So get her a ball after. Girl, starving yourself to death is going to take a while. ODing is much quicker.’

‘Fuck you. I don’t starve myself.’ Besides, I’ve already decided on hanging. If I were to.

‘Fuck you.’ Frieda sounds like a junior high cheerleader. ‘Fuck you.’

I don’t sound that whiny.

‘Fuck you-ou.’ Frieda’s bopping about as she sings it. ‘Fuck youuu. Hoo-hooooo.’ She grabs my hands and makes me dance along with her, snapping my rubber band. ‘Class bling. Let’s go to Meatballs. You can drink your lunch. Like Moxie, I need me some balls in my mouth.’ Frieda’s laugh sounds like a delicious secret.

Bending down to ruffle Moxie’s fur, I hide my smile. Sometimes it’s easier to give in.

✴

After brunch, liquid and otherwise, Moxie and I stroll through McCarren Park. Frieda has a date. Dating – more like snacking. I don’t know why Frieda appointed herself my fairy godmother, but I am grateful. She’s hooked me up for a prop styling gig next week, which is good because I need something to do.

What the fuck am I going to do with the rest of my life?

Me: Hi. Is this Lost and Found? I’ve lost my way.

Lost and Found: Have you checked the places you were? You probably left it there.

Me: I can’t go back to where I was. They won’t let me in like this.

Lost and Found: I know. Look, it’ll turn up. I always find my iPhone at the wine bar across the street from my apartment.

Me: Can you just look? It’s shiny gold and leads to the top.

Lost and Found: Aren’t you special? Those are one in a million. Yeah, no. It’s not here. You should have taken better care of it in the first place.

Me: But, it’s not my fault it’s gone.

Lost and Found: Isn’t it?

Me: Look, do you know where I can buy a new one?

Lost and Found: Do I look like Information? Kindly step aside Ma’am. You’re holding up the line.

Shit, my rubber band is gone. That bitch must have lifted it during the “Fuck You” dance. Despite her Emily Post posture, Frieda’s always had sticky fingers.

An African drum ensemble starts up on the far side of the park, grabbing Moxie’s attention. She’s strong when she wants her way. A small group of people gather around the musicians, dancing. I recognize Jules playing a modest drum near the center of the cluster. Jules is a protest artist whose big moment came when Jay-Z bought one of his paintings. That moment went. Jules’ hands slap the drum skin, his long, thick fingers splayed. Feeling a tickle rise between my legs causes me to look away from his lapping fingers. I dated Jules for a minute, a lifetime ago.

‘Hey, do you want to dance?’ An unfamiliar voice calls from behind.

I turn toward it and fix on a face volcanic with acne. Glittering eye contact. ‘Sorry, I have to go.’

✴

Back home, I feed Moxie and sit with my friend Johnnie Walker. I need to kiss someone in the worst way. To put all of who I am into lips and tongue and touch. Kissing is underrated because it’s all about the before. People rush that. They don’t get that kissing is hope.

Who am I kidding? I need to lose myself in a good lay. Shut out thought and time and place for however long intense foreplay and a heroic orgasm last. I swear, I am ready to call an escort service and order a totally hot guy who stares not and sexes sweet. Not like the last hookup who grabbed a pillow to smother me as I came, and then squirted in my face as he lifted the pillow. I choked and he laughed. Like I wasn’t a real person. To him, I was only the shape of one. I don’t expect breakfast, but some people are too rough to fuck. It’s a fine line deciding whose standards are low enough. Like it fucking matters. In the dark you become whomever they want. Then in the end, you’re left with who you are. Jesus mother fucking Christ! I can’t stand it inside my head.

With nowhere to go, I go to Alat’s.

Sans Moxie, I sit at the air-conditioned bar and watch Alat work. He doesn’t say much to anyone. He’s probably killed people. How he does not drink the entire contents of the bar baffles me.

‘I feel you watching me.’ Alat has his back to me polishing glasses. Must be his child soldier instincts kicking in.

‘No, I’m not.’ I smile like a receptionist at his back.

‘Why are you always here alone?’ He picks up a knife and starts cutting lemons.

‘I’m not always alone. Yesterday I had Moxie.’ And Aaron, sort of. ‘You’re always here alone. Why doesn’t your girlfriend ever visit you?’ Figure girlfriend is the safer bet.

‘My wife is at home with our sons.’

Eights words tell me more about him than half as many months of patronage. Where’s his ring? ‘Did you meet her here?’

‘Muslim women do not usually frequent bars.’

Who knew he was religious? ‘Did you know her from Somalia?’

‘She knows about my past.’

‘That’s not what I was asking.’ Of course, I deny it.

‘Then what?’

That lump is back, clogging my throat. What I really want to know is how he put himself back together. Half-true. I want to know how to put myself back together. Johnnie Walker isn’t telling.

‘Jax, it’s time to grow up. You’ve had so much more than most.’ Alat’s eyes are shiny; his voice is not unkind. ‘Beauty doesn’t feed you.’

Uh, in my case it did. My before-life purls like a junkyard mobile.

‘Who are you going to be?’

I have no idea. I used to be so many people.

**

Alex Poppe is the author of the debut novel Moxie (2019) and the story collection Girl, World (2017). Girl, World was named a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, and was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize. It was also awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction from the Eric Hoffer Awards. Her short fiction has been a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Family Matters contest, a nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and commended for the Baker Prize. Her non-fiction was named a Best of the Net nominee (2016), a finalist for Hot Metal Bridge’s Social Justice Writing contest, and has appeared in Bust and Bella Caledonia. She is an academic writing lecturer at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (soo-la-mani) and is working on her third book of fiction with support from Can Serrat International Art Residency and is an artist in residence at Duplo Linea de Costa.

Music and text for this episode were composed by Joel Woolf and written by Anthony Jones, respectively. The audio was first published in Neon Bedrooms and the Light From Your Mother’s House, and is used here with permission from Jones & Woolf.

The Red Ghost

I’d just finished having sex with my ex-wife when I heard about the Red Ghost for the first time. We were talking about getting back together in those days and I was laying in her new flat outside Rome, playing with those dark, dark curls of hers and trying to forget about all the nastiness and ugliness that had spread between us.

Those were the days when I thought Cleo and I might still have a chance, even though her life had already skyrocketed so far past mine that all I could do was hold onto her for the night and hope I’d made love to her just right enough for her to forget about how badly I’d fucked everything else up.

“Haven’t you heard?” she said, brushing my hand away and picking up a tabloid she had lying on the floor.

“There’s a new hero in Italy.”

. . .

A year later I’d heard plenty more about the Red Ghost. He was in the tabloids all the time by then. I never read the stories but I’d see his name in the headlines, usually when I stopped at the old newsstand on Via Arno or the cafés near the courthouse, which always carried the low brow stuff. I didn’t think people were taking the rumors seriously but I’d have these strange moments—times when I’d be sitting with an espresso, staring into space long enough for another lone customer to see me and think I was longing for company just as badly as they were. They’d come up to me, these people who drank during the day and wandered into cafés alone, and within five minutes it was clear that all they really wanted to do was talk about the Ghost.

“Well, what do you think?” they’d inevitably say, gesturing toward the tabloids or showing me something on their phones they’d dredged up from the internet. “Can it really be true? A hero in Rome patrolling the city from rooftops, just like in the movies?”

I normally shrugged them off or gave them a blank stare. Sometimes I even invoked my heaviest brogue—or at least, what I remembered brogue sounding like from my childhood—and told them, “Sorry friend, I’m just visiting from Dublin. I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”  

That normally did the trick, although some of them would keep at it, as if I wasn’t there at all, going on and on about the possibility even after it was abundantly clear there was no person on Earth I’d rather be talking to less.

Still, no matter how intrigued these people were about the Ghost, I always figured it was just curiosity about the supernatural or boredom with their own lives that fueled their interest. It wasn’t until Sofía showed up at my door that I finally met someone who had one hundred percent belief in his existence. And nothing I could ever say to her would change her mind. She was a disciple of his, you might say. How else could you describe it? The types of risks she was willing to take to make contact with him were really quite shocking.  

. . .

She came to my apartment for the first time a week after Easter and the only reason I remember that was because it was exactly seven months after Cleo left me and just over a year since Ana Gonzalez had disappeared for good.

My apartment was in the south of the city, in an old building on the outskirts of the Nomentano District—a few stories above some small apartment units and a Chinese restaurant on the ground floor.

I guess I should mention that my apartment was actually a small, run-down office. A Russian accountant had been renting the unit before me and according to the owner, he’d had a little book-keeping business there for years until one day—poof—the Russian disappeared. He’d even left his desk there, which was the largest piece of furniture in the place, and I’d gotten in the habit of keeping most of my clothes and other personal items inside its massive drawers.  

Even though I’d been there for almost three months, I kept telling myself it was temporary—that I was just sleeping there until I got some work and cut down on the prescription drugs enough to get back on my feet.

For the time being though I had one of those sofa couches you could pull out and turn into an even more uncomfortable bed. Most nights I didn’t even use it. I just laid on the hardwood floor with a sheet and a pillow and dreamed the same dreams I’d been having since I punched a Carabinieri Lieutenant in the face and lost my job in homicide.

But all that is neither here nor there.

What I’m really trying to tell you about is the first time I met Sofía and how I came to be involved with a fifteen year old girl the way I did.

. . .

Of course, the first time I saw her I didn’t know she was fifteen.

I had no idea how old she was.

She was wearing one of those light blue blouses that were common in the Catholic schools of Rome at the time but she’d cut the sleeves off and the fabric was fraying around her shoulders. She had on a black skirt that hugged her hips and black tights beneath that. Her eyes were dark as well with heavy mascara and her hair had been dyed a shockingly bright shade of red. She was carrying a backpack and she didn’t even knock. She just walked right in.

“Are you Detective Drake?” she said.

I looked up at her and blinked slowly. It was past nine o’clock and I’d just run through a fresh vial. I hadn’t been expecting anyone. I was in my undershirt, leaning back in my chair and watching the sun go down on Rome through my window, slowly getting very high on a percocet and oxycontin blend that I’d crushed and snorted and washed down with a bottle of beer.

“I used to be,” I said finally.

**

Anthony Jones studied Creative Writing at UCLA under Mona Simpson and David Wong Louie where he was awarded with the Ruth Brill Scholarship for excellence in fiction. His work has been published in several literary journals, including PANK Magazine and Chicago Literati, and he has forthcoming work in F(r)iction. Together with Sydney-based composer, Joel Woolf, he founded the group Jones & Woolf, a music + lit duo specializing in audio fiction. Their first album, Neon Bedrooms and the Light from your Mother’s House came out in December, 2018.

**

Image: Flickr / Leanne Poon

The following flash pieces are taken from A Girl Goes into the Forest by Peg Alford Pursell (Dzanc Books, July 2019) and are reprinted here with permission from the author and Dzanc Books.

A Girl Goes into the Forest

Tentative, curious, uncertain, alive, she followed him into the woods, moving in the direction where perhaps she imagined the rest of her life waited for her. So ready for something to happen. The old secret cottage had fallen to the ground. He acted as if that surprise of the disintegrated shelter was inconsequential, and spread a thin jacket over the dark forest floor for her. To lie down was harder than it looked to be; wasn’t everything? A thick scent of pine needles. Sour smell of mildewed ash. The moon rose. White and tiny, smeared into the fork of a naked branch overhead. Wind chattered like teeth through the trees, their trunks containing hundreds of years of memory. In this new dimension of light and shade, she lost track of who she’d been before, of the home in the town with cracked streets, concrete and glass, sun-scoured spires. Beside her, he said nothing. A troche on the tongue of the needful earth, she lay, thick thirsting roots deep underneath. This was something for the body to feel. There is so much for a body to feel before it goes, returns to its simplest elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur. Full night must eventually come on. Its deeper chill. They might remain. Together. It might turn summer and she’d have survived the season. Or the earth might be soothed, some want eased.

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Old Church by the Sea

I hadn’t visited the abandoned church by the sea in many years, not since that day with my teenaged daughter. She’d reached that age of awkwardness, so painful to see, when people had begun telling her to calm down, to lower her voice, to walk, not run. I’d brought her to this confused Eden, huge boulders in the garden, cold shadows, the infinite space of sun. Sad jasmine crawled everywhere, even over the dilapidated fence deteriorating as if the weight of the flowers had caused its demise. I’d imagined we would run and play as in a game of tag, like we had when she was younger, as if we were two butterflies in the tall grass.

She wore dark glasses and sat on a stone bench where a white cat lay sleeping. I didn’t dare believe she was looking at me behind those lenses. Her chin tilted up, and I decided she was examining the distant countryside: yellow grass spread with repeated cows, the bay a shimmering backdrop of monotony. A quick wind stroked my bare arms and prodded dark clouds across the sky. It began to rain.

We made the long drive home in silence, her ear buds in place, the tinny chords of her music reaching me behind the wheel. We neared the close-by village where at the street corner, under the overhang of the roof of the grocery mart, a group of five men sat as if hypnotized. My daughter’s head abruptly swiveled, stayed fixed in their direction until we made the turn and left them behind.

How the imagination can forge something from a moment!

Here now the burning light of day rested in all its blue brilliance on the remaining stained glass window of the church, miraculously still intact. The sun bleached only the tips of the wild grasses, while closer to earth darkness churned like sea reeds. Heavy clouds clung to the distant hills speckled with their animals.

Inside the old church it was almost possible to hear what people do to one another.

I always think I’ll circle around to the exact explanation for what went wrong. Having and wanting at the same time, that’s what it was to carry my daughter inside me. After, I was emptier than I could ever have imagined, I thought then. Then, when I thought I would have the chance to tell her one day.  

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Note to a Ghost

After you died I wandered the nearby field. Twilight. Your cat ran up to me with a bird’s heart in its mouth. I wanted to make something more out of that than what it was. You know what it was. The way you knew to let out your first cry: how you were there and not, how it’s a witness who hears and translates raw sensation voiced in the tone. It’s only natural, as in leaves abandoning the trees to fall at your feet, as is the bleeding red moon tonight, scientifically explicable. Beast, bird, botany, being—all knowable.

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Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes Into the Forest, forthcoming from Dzanc Books in July 2019. Her debut collection of stories Show Her A Flower, A Bird, A Shadow was the 2017 Indies Book of the Year for Literary Fiction. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Permafrost, Joyland, and the Los Angeles Review, and her microfiction, flash fiction, and hybrid prose have been nominated for Best Small Microfictions and Pushcart Prizes. She is the founder and director of WTAW Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary books, and of Why There Are Words, a national literary reading series she founded in the Bay Area in 2010. She is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto.