Spring 2026

Issue 21

poetry

creative nonfiction

fiction

Poetry

Cemetery Walker

Arielle Arbushites

There was a time I was a cemetery walkerwith my small son in a stroller,

and as we rolled thoughtful through

the blades of grass on paths between the graves

of those great and not so great, I came up

with a custom.

On any given day, I’d look for that day’s date

before the hyphen etched into the stone,

worn by time and terrain.

Happy birthday, Esther, I’d whisper

to the soul beneath the soil. Happy birthday, Henry.

Little celebrations thrown into the air,

whatever the mantra, whatever my mood—

I’d imagine their lives, reflect

with a storyteller heart, upon

how long they’d been gone

as I ticked off the years on my fingers

and the baby cooed or babbled.

Keys hidden in my throat turned

to unlock connection as I spoke to the dead,

and the ships cut their ropes and rushed

toward the tide to meet me.

On any given day, especially at twilight,

when the deer ran cautiously through the headstones,

I’d look for that day’s date

in the spot behind the hyphen

and think of how brutal the day must have been

for those who loved the soul beneath the soil.

Anniversaries are always a scar shaped like a kiss.

Precious prayers sent into the void,

I’d travel onward with my shadow friends.

These days my son walks on his own two legs,

backpack heavy with American childhood

into a school that makes us flinch as the double doors shut.

I think of how I once whispered strangers’ names to stones

and pray today’s date won’t be some future headline,

carved into some nearby sepulcher.

The news tells me children are taught to hide behind desks,

shrinking to stay alive

when all I ever wanted for him was for the world to be his oyster.

The raw fear in schools is so ordinary—

rain falls so often we stop looking up at the sky.

I once sought names worn down by weather—

now I dread how quickly they are carved

for lives that never had the chance

to struggle against seasons.

I blow blessings into the air like dandelion dust

the way I once did among tombs

and send them trailing behind my child

like invisible companions

so the shadow friends keep watch and report back.

Perhaps all those birthday wishes whispered to souls beneath the soil

were rehearsals for the way I love him now—

holding his life like a candle cupped against the wind,

knowing every step into the world is both miracle and memorial,

and that even as I walk among the living,

I am always practicing elegy.

Dos Chicanos

Tomás Baiza

A blow off.

You dogged me—como se dice in San José.

Does your LA-themed poncho

Make you more Chicano?

Does my leather jacket

Make me less?

Our tattoos tell two stories

Of two pasts,

De dos senderos

Toward the objective fact that

Neither of us could ever call ourselves 

“Mexican”

Because your people are not from 

There

And mine are, but long enough ago for

la madre patria to sneer:

Good luck with that, refugee.

Pinche sell-out.

Ahora estás por tu cuenta—

You’re on your own now.

You quiz me on my Spanish,

And there,

In that look,

That tone in your voice,

Comes the judgement

And the mockery

That once would have ended

In bloodshed,

That once sent a boy to the 

Hospital

With broken ribs and

A destroyed face,

And for decades made me

Wonder: Is that what it means

To be Chicano?

To inflict pain?

Or to let the pain eat you

Alive 

From the inside until

It hollows you out and erupts from

Your mouth in words that

Might be

English or

Might be

Spanish or

might be both, but

Will always assault the ears as a

¡Grito!

There is a place for both of us

In this world where

We can wrap ourselves

in the clothes 

That we want,

Wear the tattoos 

That we want,

Speak the words 

That we want,

And pronounce todas esas palabras 

Como se nos dé la gana, cabrón.

I catch your eye and

You look away.

You dogged me—as we would have said 

In San José.

¿Es lo mismo en Los Ángeles?

Te apuesto que sí.

Porque something tells me

That we’re

A hell

Of a lot more alike than

You want

To admit.

Ubermensch

Camdyn Bass

I didn’t indulge in what the church had to say
in the way that my grandma Eakin had prayed I would.
I was told it was intended for me to live
my life for god on the promise I’d get into heaven.
I would sit in my seat,
relieved to be done hugging strangers
who never held on long enough for it to mean anything,
and while everyone’s head bobbed and bent,
as they kneeled and stood,
while they listened and sang,
I would sit still and wonder about all of the things here, on Earth

Sin.

he said.
             Sin and Sin and Sin– that’s all the Earth can give, forgiveness can only lie with Him.

But that felt wrong.
                              Don’t you see? Thieves and beggars litter our community– sin!

he grew bigger within the Cathedral.
The man sent by god,
armored with warm ornate robes,
speaking low on the poor man who lays his head against the church door every night, searching for that same warmth,   this same god,     promised to give.

A superiority complex coated and dripping in crosses and verses and hymns.

Oh! You Pretty Things, if only you knew then that God is deaf,
and I met him once without ever having to bear a cross.
He sometimes stays in Pittsburgh and smokes cigarettes with strangers outside on the church steps while He waits for His bus.
He has foggy eyes and poor penmanship and not once did He ask for my name.
I stood there with Him,
after lighting both darts,
after inhaling deeply,
and asked,         Can you read lips?
On a tattered piece of paper He pulled from His pocket He wrote,    I read minds.

I smiled and thought, Are we allowed to be sitting here?

He smirked, but His eyes were looking beyond me, and we sat for a while
in a sort of silence that sounded holy,
and when His bus finally came, just after He sorted out His change,
He hugged me– long enough for it to mean something.

Responding to Struggles of the Moment

Ace Boggess

Her father in the hospital

returns to his usual languages

of say-everything-at-once &

do-everything-at-once.

We laugh at the gallows.

I drive her back & forth,

spin, dizzied, return home.

I need a moment

to remember who I am,

or was, so grab my guitar,

purge it of a layer of dust,

tune its corroded strings.

I play in bed on my knees,

numbing; I play in prayer,

sing away a world.

topsoil (1959)

Erica Breen

1. Claude sold the mineral rights

They pushed it aside, into a mountain range

along the bottom of the field—

excavators scooped gravel,

a long parade of trucks hauled the ancient riverbank

away. “Hundreds of truckloads,”

the foreman recounted to my father, thirty years on—

of course, trucks were smaller then.

Many of the drivers grew

up on farms themselves—

yet, when they were finished,

someone neglected

to respread the precious top—

2. of his most productive field

Claude’s father dead, his wife fled

his mother fumed and took in washing

while he farmed alone

sweating to repay

the mortgage that his father took

to buy Claude’s ag degree: thirty-five years

he struggled with that loan

lien on a river valley farm, deep sandy loam,

buried treasure: subsoil drainage

highway engineers could dream

3. for gravel, to the highwaymen, leaving

They built an interstate, I-91

long wound unwinding

across farms and hills,

mined mountains of gravel so cars

would travel smooth

and fast, never mind

Earth stripped bare of grass—

Other families had their farms subsumed

by eminent domain. They watched

their fields and houses razed,

moved into town, buried

bitterness under highway’s grade—

4. five acres of barren sand

topsoil, a farmer’s medium

washed down from its unseeded mound,

settled into grass at the edge of the trees—

a neighbor leased the field, took one pass with his plow,

glanced behind, saw dry sand rolling back into the furrow—

raised the bottom and drove away,

never looking back.

Nocturne With Quiet Woods (Hours Before Autumn)

Spencer K.M. Brown

Shadows dance Atlas in circles across the moon-lavished lawn.

The barred owl we’ve come to love croons a call and response to his errant barks.

Tonight the air stirs hot and cold like a fever, summer breathes in as autumn exhales.

The woods are dark and deep, they are lovely now—furred dreams laid upon emerald moss.

Boughs of poplar and walnut hold their color like my wife cradles our little son,

Not letting go tonight, not until nature demands it.

At such an hour, I’m spared of assaulting thoughts, cracking dreams like summer clay,

As if the night conspires and pretends I’m still asleep.

No thirst right now, no Golgotha of the heart, no myrrhed wine to ease my days.

Midnight in the foothills, I allow myself to remember good things.

How I’ll always remember them—no one, not even ghostlight, can take that away.

Atlas dances—there come howls and howls. How many thoughts does a forest hold,

How heavy such a burden as that, how delicate and necessary.

I think of calling Atlas in, of sleepwalking back to bed.

I think of kissing your shoulder, telling you to come out, listen for autumn to arrive.

Trailer-Park King

Hailey Duncan

Ole Smoky Razzin’ Berry Moonshine

stains the already pissed-on, shat-on living room carpet.

The dog that my father had spent his entire disability check on

has grown fond of marking its territory on the wood-paneled hallway walls.

Ants live in the mold that grows in the corners of the shower,

cigarette ashes are pressed into the seat of the porcelain toilet.

My father considers himself the king of this tin-roofed tuna-can domicile.

The plush brown recliner from the downtown thrift is his throne.

The king indulges in homemade lasagna and FOX News.

He also partakes in the frivolities of Mary Jane, Sunday night football, and planting tulips.

The king once told me that if I ever brought a black boy to his castle, he’d beat me bloody.

The king once told me that my 15-year-old body was worthy of an older man.

The king, as wise as he may be, is unaware that I prepare his eulogy every time I bathe.

His liquor-lathered liver only needs to fail once more to spell his demise.

I am scared that one day, this tuna-can lifestyle will be what suits me best.

I am scared that the crown on my father’s head will fit mine just the same.

I am his seed.

His royal blood runs through my veins.

Highway Angel Encounter

Sarah Ellis

The coyote rock came alive

in the halfway highway light

and wind twisted the asphalt

to twin continents shifting,

a cold concrete Pangea.

Then high beams like a hundred eyes

howling whole-heartedly bent the earth

back to its most basic name,

and a satellite order of orbital oracles

cut closer to the rime of the sky

with every crease in the horizon line,

and a voice like a smoke-soaked gun

heaved out of heaven, its deadbeat doxology

dancing down a strip of sidewalk

torn from her turbid suburbia.

Be not afraid, breathed the beat of her

wings, this was always holy ground.

And the barrier between the bowl of

the sky and the blood of the earth burst,

first in fevered fettering, then for freedom,

then was still. Her wings drew close

like plastic bags in glassy water,

soon swallowed by the rearview’s sallow hue.

Twenty-Nine Days

River Houser

East Tennessee autumns are marked by two distinctive things: football season, which remains the focal point of nearly every family event, grocery store, billboard, and local news cast between the months of August and December, and the wildfires. The wildfires are incommunicable. Forever scorched into the mind: the image of my car, parked on top of the hill and myself, feeling the helpless desperation stretching inside my body like some terrible supernova, like dough, collapsing in on itself and stretching and again and again and— Close your eyes. I want you to put yourself there:

Suppose that you have looked at the same mountain every single day of your entire, minuscule life. In time you might have come to believe that the mountain would always remain the same. After all, this mountain has been here for hundreds of millions of years. This mountain has taught you everything you know; has protected you; has kept you fed; has kept you warm. The news cameras do not love it the way you do nor can they see its wounds. Of course you are going to be there with it now. Somebody has to and it should be you. You have always needed to see these things through.

Now suppose that the drive up the mountain is as heavy as the smoke that still hangs in the air. This is not the normal kind of smoke, either, not the kind that is supposed to be there. Ten thousand acres razed to the ground. Fourteen dead. Two kids with matches. News outlets release an aerial photograph and the char takes the shape of every horror story you’ve ever heard about the Wampus and haints. From that high up ten thousand acres of this mountain is like a grease smudge on a skyscraper. On the ground, where you love it, you feel the heaviness of it all settle like ash in your lungs.

Smoky Mountain home.

Shadows cast in orange glow.

Another dry year.

On Being a Legible Black Woman

Mera Baid

Cursive isn’t taught anymore so my hand releases a straight line

here and there, wishing upon a dot or cross, these accents

give access to how my heart beats, that it is a groove to dip into,

relax in, not to pump blood through this collective vessel

but to groove to, grow from, connect these dots and form

a tapestry that follows the sequence of numbers that settled

us here, when we were our ancestors’ answers to the call

of heavens on earth, spiraling into codes and fonts that mirrored

each other, reflective through the horizon, bringing pirates

who parrotted our punctuation, but couldn’t end our sentences.

Food

Jim Krosschell

I. Abundance

The truck from Augusta arrives, backs up,

swings out the man-high pallets stacked

with waxy, forty-pound “banana” boxes —

cauliflowers the width of silver platters,

purple onions, tomatoes,

red and yellow peppers, bags of apples,

carrots still coated in dirt,

zucchini so big that six fill a box —

a cornucopia of free.

We get to work,

unstacking, sorting the boxes into groups

for the pantry inside,

and the backpack program at the schools.

II. Fellowship

Walking, tottering on canes, rolling in wheelchairs,

the elders arrive for the weekly hour of fellowship.

Today is the last Wednesday of the month,

so there’s the usual happy confusion

at the hall’s only door, the boxes coming in,

rhe people coming in

to claim their seats, with friends

or alone.

Angels pour coffee,

butter the muffins and zucchini bread

if they see help is needed.

They’ve set vases of wildflowers

every few feet on two long tables,

and they josh, cajole, sympathize

with the recitals of medical woes.

III. Security

We have never known hunger.

When we were small, food just appeared.

When we were grown, Visa was there,

wrapping our lives in plastic

as tightly as the peppers and cheeses

in the cold cases of supermarkets,

where we no longer wander so blithely.

IV. Hunger Tariffs

Who knew that nearly thirty percent

of Americans formally volunteer?

The media would never report

what must be innumerable

acts of kindness such as this,

one small island community

in one small state

turning to themselves for help,

blunting the cruelty

of government thugs

against the one in seven of us,

the fifty million poor, sick, and old,

who are food-fearful and frail.

No More Doors

Hania Qutub

When I was growing up we heard about God

closing a door and opening a window

when times are tough

We waited 

sure in our faith 

that someday a window would open for us

because in Gaza all the doors had closed

entrapped within its walls my people languished 

with rationed food and dirty water

for generations

When the doors closed to the Palestinians, no windows opened for them

Caged in by land 

surrounded by a thick cement wall built by the Occupiers

Caged in by sea 

surrounded by bombs if they attempted to fish or sail in the Mediterranean

They languished for years in their outdoor prison

An entire people encircled by a wall with 3 doors

And the world around them flourished and moved on

And the nations beside them decided it is time to make their own peace 

Because the people who needed peace the most were nicely locked away

behind doors that did not ever need to open

again

And when they tried to march peacefully to remind the world

that they wished for open doors

The March of Return

their kneecaps were blown to pieces by the Occupation Forces

doctors, nurses, and journalists were shot 

in the knees

old and young were sniped

in the knees

And no one saw their suffering

Disabled so they could no longer walk 

to any doors

A nation of canes and wheelchairs

And when they tried to fly over the doors

in slipshod air bicycles

Without hope for a present or a future

in a miserable show of desperation

The other side was waiting

And Crimes against Humanity was assigned to an entire people

who for 105 years had lived through the most unimaginable crimes themselves

But they were now for once collectively “guilty” 

And instead of the Occupation opening the doors for them

to go back to their homes

to reclaim the land stolen

from their fathers and grandfathers

They sealed them off permanently from the world

No food, no gas, no electricity, no water

Only bombs and snipers and quadcopters and explosive robots and white phosphorus 

And they blew up all the doors to their churches, schools, and mosques

And they blew up all the doors to their hospitals and universities

And they burned the tents that had no doors

In Gaza all the windows are now always open

In Gaza there are no more doors

In Gaza God has opened the skies instead

for the Palestinians to ascend

to the heavens above

The Book of Inventions

SM Stubbs

Isn’t alphabetical, it’s chronological,

it begins with Knife and ends with Cloning.

We started with a tool that cuts pieces of things

from themselves and arrived at removing

pieces of ourselves to create more selves.

We are the prototype for more of us

which is how procreation works, but this

is different. This leaves out the messy fluids

and emotional blackmail afterwards.

It would be nice to have more sheep for wool

and shish-ka-bobs, but we do not need

more humans. We can’t handle us as we are:

solitary, complex, prone to depression

and tantrums. The three separate times

something scratched my eyeball crippled me.

How would I console myself if there was

another me? When an unstable man

stalked us on the streets of Brooklyn, hissing

that he meant to end me, he held something

sharp at his side. Though scared,

I worried most about my wife, wanted her

to survive the encounter without her organs

punctured or her flesh rent and torn.

As a Scout, one of the first badges you earn

grants you the right to carry a blade.

On camping trips after lights out, I’d slip

into my shoes, grab hold of my knife 

and head out in search of a wheelbarrow,

a flush toilet, a typewriter, an assault rifle,

a bottle of aspirin—anything to protect us

from what we’d already invented

thinking somehow they’d make us whole. 

Creative Nonfiction

Fifty-Six Thousand Square Miles

Adnan Adnan

I am Bengali. I am sentimental and I read a lot. If you find Bengalis living in a dumpster, you will also find a few books next to them. That’s how we are!

The novel Chhappanno Hajar Borgomail (Fifty-Six Thousand Square Miles) by Humayun Azad hit the bookstores in late winter of 1994. I’ve heard of the book, I have seen the book, but I was not able to buy the book yet. I went to my favorite bookstore, Jessore Book Center, and almost had a fight with Halim bhai, the owner.

“I am your best customer. How come I do not have a copy of the Chhappanno Hajar Borgomail yet?”

“There are others.”

“So I am not your best customer?”

“I did not mean that. Others knew about this book long before you did and there are hundreds of people on the waiting list already.”

“I don’t know how, but you have to get me a copy. I do not care how you make it happen.”

“Have patience! I will see what I can do.”

“I need one today. I want to read it today. They are all reading it. You are making me late.”

“I just told you I will see what I can do.”

“How much do you want?”

“It’s not about the money. There are people I have to listen to. You know there are powerful people that I have to deal with. You are my friend and I know you want the best for me and I too want the best for you. But there are others who are not my friends, but they have influence over me. To keep my business going I need to satisfy them.”

“I still need a copy of that novel. I am your best customer.”

“I might be able to find a way. Let me talk to someone and see how it goes.”

“Talk what?”

“If you pay a little bit more, then I might be able to find someone who has already read the book and will be willing to sell it to you.”

“Who is that?”

“I do not know. Let me find out.”

“Can you find out now?”

“You don’t take no for an answer do you!”

“I do not. You know that.”

He opened his notebook and looked at the names, the folks who had already purchased the book and the folks who were still waiting to get a hold of a copy. He took his time and then finally identified a couple of names.

“I think these guys might be willing to sell.”

“Names?”

“Mr. Basir and Mr. Hasan.”

“Address?”

“Relax! I will talk to them.”

“Give me the address. I will go right now and ask.”

“They might find it offensive if you ask.”

“I will be polite. I think they would love to see a young boy like me willing to do all this to get a hold of that book. They might actually appreciate it. Readers love other readers. Don’t they?”

“I will give you the address, but promise that you will not bother them. If they say no, then step away. I will work with them later in the day. They will most likely come by in the evening, they often do.”

“I promise.”

I went to Mr. Basir’s house who had purchased the book more than a week ago. He lived on the outskirt of the city. It was difficult to find his house. It was behind an oil mill, and no one really knew who he was even though he lived there for a very long time with his family. He was a Professor of Philosophy at Michael Madhusudan College.

I knocked at the front-gate. A little girl of about nine or ten opened the door.

“Is Mr. Basir home?”

“Yes.”

“May I talk to him? I have an urgent need.”

“Not right now. He is in his studies. He is not to be bothered during these hours.”

“Tell him Mr. Halim sent me for an urgent matter.”

“What is it about?”

“I can only discuss it with him.”

“I will go tell him. Stay here. I don’t think he would talk to you, but please wait here.”

I waited for a long time. She came back.

“Abba will see you. Please come with me.”

I entered the house and followed her to the study. Mr. Basir was reading a book and he had tens of books open on his desk.

He smiled. I smiled.

“What is it about? I only have a few minutes.”

“My name is Adnan. I am fourteen years old. I love to read great books. Mr. Halim sent me to you to inquire whether you would be interested in selling your copy of the Chhappanno Hajar Borgomail. I would like to buy it. I have been looking for a copy for days.”

“You read books like that?”

“I read everything.”

“This is not an age appropriate book for you. I do not think your parents would approve of it.”

“They do not check what I read. I am free to read whatever I want.”

“This is an adult book. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“And they would not mind?”

“No.”

“Where do you live?”

“Our house is on the Ghope Central Road right in front of the Rafik’s Rice Mill. Sheikh Afsaruddin is my grandfather and Rabiul Alam is my father.”

“I will discuss it with your parents on Friday and if they approve it, I will let you borrow the book for two weeks. I do not feel comfortable selling the book to a fourteen year old. I am very pleased to see you here. I am very proud that young people like you go through all this hassle to read a book. I am very happy about that.”

“That’s a long way out.”

“If you would like to read the book, you have to wait. It is a superb book. Something new in our language. Something never been done before. Have patience!”

“You will come by on Friday?”

“Yes.”

I then went to Mr. Hasan’s house. He lived at the other end of the city, almost in the countryside. He worked for the Bangladesh Power Development Board as an auditor.

“I am still on the waiting list. I do not want to give up my spot.”

“How about you give up your spot and I read the book in a day and then give it to you?”

“You are a fanatic. I understand. You are just like me. We are fanatics! I like your proposal. I like it very much. Let me do that. I will get the book first. I will read it right away and then give it to you.”

“There is no chance then?”

“No chance at all! By the way, what else have you read so far?”

“I read everything. I mean if it is good, I will read it.”

“Have you read Rabindranath Tagore?”

“Yes.”

“Kazi Nazrul Islam?”

“Yes.”

“Bankim Chandra?”

“Yes.”

“Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay?”

“Yes.”

“Jibanananda Das?”

“Yes.”

“Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay?”

“Yes.”

“Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay?”

“Yes.”

“Manik Bandyopadhyay?”

“Yes.”

“Sunil Gangopadhyay?”

“Yes.”

“Shakti Chattopadhyay?”

“Yes.”

“Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar?”

“Yes.”

“Michael Madhusudan Dutt?”

“Yes.”

“Satyajit Ray?”

“Yes.”

“Mahasweta Devi?”

“Yes.”

“Humayun Ahmed?”

“Yes.”

“Ahmed Sofa?”

“Yes.”

“Syed Mujtaba Ali?”

“Yes.”

“Ashapurna Devi?”

“Yes.”

“Samaresh Majumdar?”

“Yes.”

“Al Mahmud?”

“Yes.”

“Shamsur Rahoman?”

“Yes.”

“Ahmed Sharif?”

“Yes.”

“And you are only fourteen?”

“Yes.”

“You have great parents!”

“I do.”

“Who is your favorite?”

“Almost all of them!”

“Top three or top five? No?”

“I think Nazrul, Jibanananda, and Shamsur Rahoman deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature. That’s all I can say!”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely!”

“You have very good and refined taste in literature.”

“Thank you.”

“We should discuss literature moving forward.”

“I would love that!”

I went back to see Mr. Halim. He was busy selling Chhappanno Hajar Borgomail. It was selling like there was an emergency of some sort. It was a phenomenon I’ve never witnessed before.

“They do not want to sell it!”

“Were you polite to them?”

“Very.”

“I found someone who would sell but he wants ten times the price!”

“Ten times?”

“Look at it! People are buying it like the world will end later today.”

“I will pay ten times! Can you get me the book right now?”
“Yes.”

I am Bengali. I am sentimental like that!

Cocaine Under Her Fingernail

Grant Patterson

Growing up, my dad was very strict about me getting my hair cut. Every week I had to get a short, clean haircut. A cut that my parents deemed professional. What profession I was preparing for at eight I’m not sure, but I was prepared. Getting me to get a hair cut each week was like trying to put a dog in a kennel when they know it’s coming. I had to be tricked. My dad would come up with the lamest excuses to just get me out of the house. “Hey, son, will you run an errand with me?” “Hey, son, I’m gonna go grab some food—let’s go.” Even just “Hey, son, let’s go for a ride.” He wouldn’t lie to me, only slightly deceive.

We would go to H-E-B, get some fried rice, or just get out of the house. But if it was Saturday, we almost always would end up at the barber shop. The goddamn barber shop. The worst was when I fell asleep in the car and woke up outside of the shop. We’d wait for each of us to get a cut while I listened to old men talk about absolute nonsense. My dad never indulged in the conversation—he’s always been okay just sitting in silence. I don’t have that skill set. I’d look at everything in the room each time. The dart board, hair on the floor, old leather swivel chairs, hair washing stations that were rarely used, the tools sitting in the blue Barbicide. Hearing Judge Judy, Judge Mathis, Law & Order, or if I was lucky, Jerry Springer playing aloud like background music from an old semi-color TV.

I’d impatiently wait in one of the 3-4 chairs Black barbershops tend to have in their “lobby”. Upset that I’d been deceived once again. It was time to spend (or waste) a few hours to look professional for my 3rd grade-classmates. After upwards of an hour of waiting, it would be my turn. Hey Mr.… I’d say as I climbed into the chair, sleepy from eating the chicken and donuts my dad had tricked me with. Still unsure if the juice was worth the squeeze, the bib front cape thing would be tightened around my neck. A 30-something-year-old Black man would ask me what cut I wanted, my dad would tell him, and he’d get to work.

He’d have to grip my head tight as I tried to turn my head to see the TV. I had to know if that day's man was or was not the father. The barber would ask me about how life was. Often not much had changed considering I’d been there the week before. He’d typically try to impart some of his hood wisdom on me by the time he got to the edge-up.

The edge-up is the most crucial part of the Black man’s haircut. If mistakes are made, we can’t just comb it over as others can. We must shave it and start over. I’d sit frozen during this part of the cut. No way I wanted to face ridicule for being bald at school because my ass couldn’t sit still. After the cut was finished, he’d hand me a mirror. He’d let me check the front and the back of my head like the haircut was for me. The cut wasn’t for me. It was for my parents. So they could look at their son and be proud. Not think of their only son as unkempt or bummy.  A sign for them that somebody cared.

I’d give him back the mirror, accepting the same haircut I had for the first 17 years of my life. He’d rub my hairline with at least 70% alcohol, burning the hell out of my pores. I was used to it, but each time the stinging practically brought a tear to my eye. My father paid the barber as he cleaned up the little hair that was dropped. I’d head towards the door, waving goodbye to each barber as I left. I’d feel my burning scalp filled with that day's new hood knowledge.

One lesson I received when I was a bit older was: “Grant, watch the women you hang out with. If you don’t want to do drugs, don’t hang with women that do drugs.” He continued, “One time I was partying with some strippers. We went to a hotel room after, and one had some cocaine under her fingernail. She put it up to my nose, and she was fine as hell, so of course I did it. That’s how I started doing cocaine.“ I didn’t quite know how to react to this advice. On one hand, it was sound. On the other hand, I was finding out too much. I’d never thought about sniffing cocaine from under strippers' fingernails. But at least I knew when the situation arose, which it still hasn’t, I’d know how to handle it.

Driving home after, the freshly cut hairs would be stuck to my forehead, neck, and lining my ears. The consistent Texas sweat would paste hair to my skin in the hot sun. The small hairs would itch in my collar, and I felt the warm leather pressing on my freshly shaved head. I’d accept my balded fate in silence as I looked out of the window, ready to be home. In the silence I’m sure my dad was plotting the next week's lame excuse to get me back in that damn chair.

Grant Patterson is a writer based in Mexico City and author of Café Comunidad (2025), available in ebook and audiobook. His work has appeared in Everything Matters Press, Poetry Habit, and Ritual. 

What Fire Doesn’t Burn

Kelsey Erin Shipman 

The first place I ever learned to read people was in a plywood shack off Jacksboro Highway, where the gun lived next to the cash box and the customers brought their own beer. For a decade of my life, I spent school holidays manning the counter of my family’s fireworks stand in a small town west of Fort Worth, Texas. The shack was cramped with pink carpet stapled over warped boards and a hole in the floor. It was shabby, but it taught me how danger and desperation announce themselves long before anyone opens their mouth.

By the time I was twelve, I’d already watched fistfights erupt over spilled beer, drug addicts gum their requests for change, drunk cowboys leer at me and my prepubescent sister, and my family’s yearly income vanish into sticky fingers. That’s why we kept a pistol by the cash box—you never knew what the ten days before July Fourth might bring.

Ben, my mother’s longtime boyfriend, grew the fireworks stand from a one-window shack into an eight-window operation that functioned as a community center. In a town of barely a thousand people, the stand became a local landmark and was regularly featured in the local paper. Ben was so good at the business that he earned an entire year’s income in the two weeks when it was legal to sell fireworks in Texas.

Imagine a man who quoted Noam Chomsky while sporting a long, thin braid down his back. Ben looked like every other man in that corner of Texas—a trailer, a pickup truck, a rat tail—but he was unlike the customers who assumed he was one of them. He’d grown up in rural East Texas around people just like them, which meant he understood their rhythms, their suspicions, and how to stay out of trouble. In that part of Texas, belonging could save you.

Outside the stand, Ben was someone else entirely. In the nineties, Ben worked as the overnight groundskeeper at a hospice center where my mother volunteered as a nurse for patients with HIV and AIDS, many of whom were former drug users with active warrants. When Fort Worth police periodically raided the place to make their monthly quotas, Ben locked the doors and refused to let them haul out the sick and dying men. It was there that he first met my mother, another liberal, drawn to the same work and the same people.

I grew up hearing stories about how Ben helped shuttle refugees from El Salvador across the border as part of a Quaker-organized rescue network, and how he’d “hold his nose,” as he put it, organizing for conservative Democrats in North Texas. None of that made it into his daily persona at the fireworks stand. He hid the parts of himself that would’ve made him a target, the way progressives in red states learn to do. A good thing, because fireworks season in Azle, Texas was high-stakes theater.

I watched him shift identities seamlessly. He could talk prayer circles with church ladies, deer hides with good ol’ boys, and litter sizes with dog-breeding grandmas. They all loved him for it. Shirtless teenagers spilled out of pickup trucks and offered him warm Bud Lights like a tribute. And when a group of rough-looking men pushed to the front of the line, Ben would lengthen his vowels, lower his voice, and become the kind of man who might have a boot knife. He wasn’t lying, not exactly. He was performing. And in a place where trouble traveled fast, performance was the way Ben kept us safe.

What none of the customers ever saw was how fast he dropped the act. They’d walk away and Ben would roll his eyes. “A lot of these people have never been housebroken,” he’d say after someone ashed a cigarette on the counter or a kid took a backhand. He didn’t mind taking their last dollar, but he struggled with the way hard lives made hard edges.

Ben often ricocheted between contempt for customers and an almost compulsive need to intervene in their lives. Sometimes that looked like a free bag of fireworks for the grandkids, and sometimes it looked like offering a job to the most desperate people, even when it was clearly bad for us, the two teenage girls from the suburbs.

James was often one of the last customers to leave the stand at night. An adult meth addict, he had a stare that felt like a hand sliding somewhere it shouldn’t. Half his front teeth were missing; his face was deeply weathered and permanently flushed, messy blond curls shoved under a trucker hat. He perpetually smelled of sweat and carried the breathless, startled energy of someone always searching for his next fix. He worked for us one summer, as did his traumatized girlfriend, who often showed up at the stand with fresh bruises.

James lingered around my sister and me. He leaned against the siding, letting his eyes rest on us too long. I was afraid of him and pitied him at the same time, and I never wanted to be left alone in his presence. I learned to narrow my eyes, cross my arms, to stand like the kind of girl who would shoot first and never ask questions. No one intervened. We were left to manage our own fear, the way children often are when adults confuse proximity with supervision.

At the end of that summer, we discovered five thousand dollars missing from the cash box. Even then, Ben let James move into the empty trailer behind the stand, next to Jay, a retired, half-blind handyman living out of a similarly abandoned camper. Our land filled with lives Ben tried to hold, even when holding them cost the rest of us.

Sometimes, Ben brought in his friends from the city to help at the stand. Grayson, an actor-artist with almost no idea what any firework actually did, improvised elaborate descriptions with absolute confidence. “This one is fabulous—dazzling colors, loud crackles, you can’t leave without it.” When a man came looking for a fountain called Dreamer, Grayson picked up a Reflection and said, “They changed the name and spruced up the packaging, sir.” The man bought it without hesitation.

Karl, a photographer new to fireworks, treated the place like a living anthropological exhibit. He adored the shirtless, toothless, tattooed country characters far more than the rest of us. Quietly peeking around corners with his massive camera, he snapped shots of everything: shirtless men in cutoffs with trunks full of artillery shells; barefoot kids shoving Black Cats in their pockets; tired grandmothers corralling punky adolescents with M-60s.

And then there were Brenda and Linda, a lesbian couple with matching blonde hair whom I adored. Brenda was tall, with deep laugh lines, and could sling a fat box of artillery shells over one shoulder. She was one of the first women I ever saw outwork any man. Her pet iguana, “Ike,” was my favorite creature on earth, and my sister and I would fight for the chance to go to their house to see him in his floor-to-ceiling enclosure munching on trays of fresh produce.

If the customers had known the crew behind those windows—artists, queers, liberals, oddballs—they might have peeled out of the parking lot. Instead, they assumed we were one of them. That was the trick. Or the con. Or maybe, as I’d later understand, the performance required to stay paid and unharmed.

Standing behind the counter, I began to see how want moves through a body. People with no shoes and no teeth handed over whole paychecks for explosives that would burn out in minutes. Children who’d lost fingers to fireworks returned to the stand year after year. Men drunk before noon counted nickels for a single string of Black Cats. I used to wonder why the poorest customers spent so much on something so temporary. But poverty teaches you to take your joy fast, loud, and all at once. Before anyone can take it from you.

My favorites were always the barterers. One man who’d been coming to the stand for years often traded his woodworking for fireworks. Once he brought us a beautiful, handmade oak cradle and asked us to “keep it in the family.” The kids across the street often showed up with a sack of homemade barbecue. We’d get jars of pickles, buckets of fried chicken, and every now and then a fresh snow cone melting down the sides of a Styrofoam cup. Poor people will give you their best stuff; rich people just give you money. I learned that at twelve.

Fire danger was constant, the kind of background hum you got used to until it roared to life. One afternoon, Ben lit a broken bottle rocket and shot it from his bare hand. I remember him chuckling like a kid as it sputtered, shot upward, and arced across the highway. His grin vanished when it dropped into the tall grass on the other side of the road and flames leapt up in a hungry line.

My mother shouted for me to find my sister, her voice sharp with panic. Grayson, tall, lanky, moving like a cartoon character in crisis, took off across Jacksboro Highway with a clunky, water-based fire extinguisher, dodging cars as he ran. Somehow, the flames never hopped the asphalt. They died out on the far side of the road, leaving a blackened patch of grass and all of us shaken.

Another day, teenagers from the lake (the “rich” part of town) rolled up in a lifted truck wanting illegal bamboo fireworks. Of course, Ben had them in the back. He let the boys shoot them off on his land behind the stand for a premium price. They tied a bundle of bamboo sparklers together to make a homemade “bomb;” it spiraled into the air like helicopter blades and landed a hundred feet over our fence in a patch of pine trees. One went up in a whoosh of orange flames.

The third fire was the one that scared me most. My cousin, only five at the time, dropped a morning glory sparkler in the dry grass in front of the trailer. Flames raced across the field in seconds. My mother panicked and told us to fill pots with water from the kitchen sink. We darted back and forth, sloshing water across the smoke, until Ben came barreling up the driveway yelling, “Grab the hose!”

But the moment that cut deeper than any fire came from a different kind of danger. A sharply dressed Black man and his young son were leaning against the counter comparing fountains when a drunk local planted his pale arms on the plywood and asked, “Hey, y’all got any n—-chasers?”

The air went still. Even the ever-present whine of cicadas hushed.

Ben lifted his eyes. “Sir,” he said, “those are called whistle chasers. Only idiots call them that.”

The Black father slid a little to the right, placing his body between the man and his child.

The drunk blinked. “Oh, uh, well I’se always called ’em that. Ever since I’se a kid.”

Ben’s disgust sharpened. “Well,” he said, “no one I know calls them that. Oh wait—there was this one other idiot who used to call them that…”

That insult landed a little closer. The man blinked, confused, considering whether he’d just been called stupid twice. He muttered something and shuffled to another window. In another fireworks stand, off another highway, things could have gone very differently.

By then I’d learned the stand was a place where you could witness the full range of human gratitude and cruelty in a single hour. It taught me how to read danger before it had a name, how to scan for exits, how to adjust my voice and posture to keep myself safe. But it also taught me there are moments when you don’t adjust, when you choose who you are instead.

If my childhood had a classroom, it was that shack with the pink carpet and the loaded pistol. And the lesson that stayed with me was this: even in the most combustible places, there are ways to hold your ground without blowing everything up.

running away home again to dar es salaam

mike sluchinski

i sat there and the aroma of diesel first then cooking with palm oil then after a few moments the rain and a rainy season and a sullen progression to a dry time so dry that you or anyone really can smell the clay outside the city it cakes up the clay does and parched side roads and drying river beds give off this earth smell and that’s how it all starts my memory of dar es salaam that

was my home my first real home before i was dragged back to canada yes those were times before the famine in ethiopia and also at a time when things were getting better for these cities these former colonies these new cities to many but old very old also to many more it was a memory and place of sultans and it’s always a choice to go back in time to home and it’s always the smell of diesel and that lurid kind of pumpkin palm oil orange oil that smell of it cooking or grease from exhaust fans and back alleys that’s how it starts and once i go i take some time to go back and i still feel that way africa and africans haunt me and haunt my dreams but the haunting

is an invitation because it’s grand that trip that journey back i follow that river and i trace the banks and i go back but the only thing to compare it to is a haunting because those bare words like ‘transported back’ are not justice to the situation my life but i want this haunting and there’s no fear involved none and i’d go back and i do go back and sometimes smoke does it for me also you know that smoke or charcoal smell not the fires of the northern pine in canada because it’s a different scent so very not the same as those harder woods or drier woods or tropical under the equator cook fires and yes in dar es salaam you can still see some cook fires and there’s a regular

call to prayer too and if you’re lucky you’ll hear it again and again and your days you can count your own prayers no matter religion i pray every time i hear it and it makes my own faith stronger and in that connection that conduit i feel like i’m attaching my own wires to the power line hitting that energy you know it the city the life and sometimes the animals that live there too i’m scared of the bats and it’s not hard to see them but mostly they stay under the eaves and so even that seems orderly but dar es salaam that’s the first place i go to and the place i was taken i hope i can forget it and i really do i try not to think about it and even then when we first came

back to the snow and cold and those people yes they’re sure different from africans and even as a

kid i tried running away from the snow and the winter and the canadian jokes about the cold and it was never funny and they seemed to be just barely surviving when the place we went to help we went to help dar es salaam and everyone said they were poor and they really weren’t they spent time living sometimes hard and sometimes well but even with all the animals and at that time animals still ate a lot of people every year or attacked them whether they were lions or hyenas but the africans and that city that city that wasn’t what it was supposed to be they lived and so the aromas carry me back and no kidding diesel doesn’t smell great but it starts my

journey back home back to a place and a people who lived and spent their time living and that’s the difference the real difference and i don’t care if you disagree but if a kid can tell the difference in a people and in their outlook or in their worldview or whatever flashy words they make up to describe culture or way of life these days well if a kid can tell the difference and still pack a suitcase and run away back to africa and dar es salaam don’t you think that’s home i mean nobody wants to have to just survive and with six months of winter that’s all the people do and it’s shaped them to fit that and don’t bother telling them that i already did and they didn’t and don’t listen no they don’t they get defensive and say if you don’t like it they say get lost go go

get lost go back and so then that’s all i can really do and so i will go back it’s not easy maybe it’s not easy to live there and some they scramble they scramble for food and a job but i look around and i smell diesel and i take the time to get carried back i go back in memory and after so much time it’s no mirage and so i just need to get back home to dar es salam it’s not a cold place but canada is just so cold and hard that there’s warmth in the air in dar es salaam and i hope i can run away again and i’ll see smiles and hear the call to prayer again in dar es salaam

Ghost in the Mirror

Ailee Sutton

Clayton was born with the weight of a saddle he had never worn. His head thrummed with hoofbeats that once were his. His ears rang with the cheer of a crowd he had never seen. His heart pulsed with the love of a woman he had never met. And his body shuddered at the eyes of an industry he had forever changed. How can you attempt to replicate once in a lifetime greatness? By cloning one of the greats himself.

"He looks so much like Scamper, when I walked into the stall and looked at him, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.” Even Charmayne James, owner of the legend himself, could barely tell the difference between the two horses.

Scamper didn’t know he was destined to change an industry – a sport spanning a near century. Thanks to Yellowstone, most think barrel racers crazy because of the horses they ride and the cowboys they date. Barrel racing requires three turns in a cloverleaf pattern around three – often metal – barrels. Knock one down and you receive a five second penalty – a death sentence in a timed sport decided by hundredths of seconds. Madness comes with the territory. Even when the women are winning, rodeo is a man’s world. Constantly walking the line of femininity, cowgirls cannot falter when things go wrong. The time clock doesn’t care how much you’ve sacrificed. The crowd doesn’t care how much is weighing on you. Go out and win, or you’ve got no place on the rodeo circuit. The expectations placed on them are insatiable — to win without wavering to prove again and again that they belong in a space never designed for them.

Rodeo sells itself as the last frontier of freedom. It’s a stage for the untamable spirit, where man and beast collide in raw, elemental competition. The deeper you go, the more the seams show. It’s not about wildness. It’s about the illusion of it. There’s nothing spontaneous about a 14-second barrel run that took five years of training to perfect. The rodeo world romanticizes unpredictability but demands consistency. We cheer for the cowboy who “hangs on,” the girl who “lets it fly,” but only as long as they hit their marks. Step outside the bounds and you're no longer a legend in the making. You're a cautionary tale.

The horses don’t run wild. They run circles. The riders don’t get free. They get scored.

It’s a culture that rewards control masquerading as courage. The fastest times come from the most micromanaged of bodies. Horses bred for sprint are shaped by hands that know how to push and when to punish. We prize grit, but only if it’s palatable. Only if it wins.

The Roslin Institute in Scotland gave birth to the first mammalian clone. From the somatic cell of an adult sheep’s mammary gland grew Dolly. What was destined to nourish an infant instead nourished an entire scientific community, advancing technological capabilities past what was ever considered possible. Mammary glands nourish and give. Well, they gave and we took – suckling the beauty of creation straight from the source. Dolly’s creation shifted reproduction into production; mother into machine. A gland became a womb, and Dolly became a whole from only a part. There’s a sick sense of irony in the fact that Dolly Parton’s breasts were the inspiration for the name of said scientific miracle. “We couldn’t think of a more impressive pair of glands,” claimed one of the lead scientists. That’s where we started. That’s where cloning originated. Watering down a monumental creation of life through layers of grotesque artificiality. It oddly makes sense that the first men to clone a mammal viewed the female body as just a shallow amalgamation of parts. Dolly was never made to live a life. She only proved that life was possible.

No one knew Scamper would amount to anything. He bucked off every rider that dared grace his back. At a mere seven years old, just barely matured, Scamper had seen his fair share of auctions, being passed from one old cowboy to another. By the grace of god, a feedlot worker in Clayton, New Mexico took pity on him; whether he saw something special in Scamper or it was dumb luck, the worker brought home a future National Finals Rodeo barrel racing champion and his twelve year old daughter’s ticket to victory. In 1984, at the age of fourteen, Charmayne James and scamper won their first NFR – the first in a streak of ten consecutive NFR championships, a record they still hold today.

No one could have predicted he would have made rodeo history by winning an NFR round bridleless. On his way through the alley, on rodeo’s biggest stage in the world, a screw came loose on Scamper’s bridle, causing the entire headpiece to fall off. He and Charmayne never missed a beat, relying solely on trust and passion to secure a round win. Imagine a race car losing its steering wheel mid lap, yet the driver continues to navigate well enough to win. This was a once in a lifetime moment, and the reason Scamper was the first horse ever inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame.

He is one of the rodeo Greats. Anyone who had the chance to witness him knew it. He was the type of horse you only come across once in your life. A cowboy’s pity, a young girl’s ambitions, a horse’s pure potential – all forces that shaped Scamper into the subject of legends.

I don’t have the power to know if this was pure circumstance or a fate determined by something greater than us all. I won’t pretend to know or play the role of a god who does.

I question if everything Scamper had done, every record he broke, is lessened by his duplication. What does it mean to commit a crime against nature? Scamper carved his name into history, tirelessly chipping away to engrave his legacy, shaped by chance and heart. Clayton’s name was written before he was even born, built not by bolts and lightning but cells in a petri dish.

Using animals for breeding stock is the way of life in the livestock industry. If it has good genetics, you breed it. If it doesn’t, some still breed it. A stallion may go his entire life with only a handful of rides under his belt. A broodmare may never see a saddle. Producing high quality offspring may be the only responsibility these animals ever have, and that is rarely challenged in the industry. Is this really any different?

Was this an act of selfishness on Charmayne’s part? A desperate attempt to cling to the past before it was even gone? Scamper was alive and well in retirement at the time of his cloning. What sort of desperation is trying to outrun time. Naming the duplicate after her hometown, a constant reminder of where everything began. Cloned horses and their offspring are unable to be registered under the American Quarter Horse Registry, history itself rejecting artificial greatness.  Clayton’s one destiny was to be a sire, to build a dynasty, but even that is beyond his reach.

The industry does not blink at breeding for perfection, but it flinches at cloning. The same people who meticulously select sires for their bloodlines turn away from Clayton, as if a body made of Scamper’s cells is somehow more unnatural than the generations of engineered breeding that came before him. If Scamper’s greatness could not be passed down the usual way, was it ever something that could be passed down at all?

Perhaps it is unfair to presume the existentialism of a so-called “lesser being” – to inflict my own empathy onto a horse that knows not what he truly is. Clayton wakes up every day to a barn full of doting grooms. He never has to fear an aggressive hand against him. He has the finest accommodations money can buy. Maybe he is just another face in the stallion barn. Maybe Clayton knows he is loved.

But does he know that love is conditional? There is love ingrained in his genetic makeup, threading within each cellular structure, but it wasn’t truly his.

Does he know people flock to him only because he is the closest they will ever come to greatness? That they view him as merely a living artifact?

Does he know that people only pet him behind his ear because they are in awe of the way he bristles just as Scamper did? The weight of expectations weigh far heavier than any saddle ever could. The ghost of a rider on a ghost of a horse.

The physical body is there, made of cells that already existed once. The inside — the heart — cannot possibly be the same. Scamper’s greatness didn’t lie in his DNA any more than it lied in the dirt of his hooves. You cannot clone the life that shaped him. If Clayton is Scamper without the forces that shaped him, how can he be Scamper? Always behind, following the footsteps carved through blood — never shedding any of his own.

If Dolly was meant to prove life could be replicated, Clayton was supposed to prove greatness could. No one ever expected her to be anything other than she already was. Every day she breathed she accomplished her job. Her tragedy was sterile. If she hadn’t survived birth, the scientists would have counted the trial as a failure. She was attempt #276. At that point, scientists had become accustomed to defeat. They may have been disappointed, but they would have moved onto #277. No mourners for a failed sheep clone. Clayton never had that. He was always destined for more.

Clayton isn’t tragic because he is a clone, a duplicate. He is tragic because he is singular in a way that no one could ever understand. He is a shrine of muscle and blood. He may never amount to anything more than a reflection of a reflection. He lives in limbo; too close to Scamper and yet too far.

But that’s all we really are anyways – just replicas of what came before. Maybe there is absolutely nothing more special about Clayton than any gangly backyard bred feedlot horse. He is a product of the expectations set in front of him — no different than any other. And maybe Clayton is luckier than the rest of us. Freer. Because we know he is as such. The rest of us discover the futility of expectations far too late.

Fiction

Time as a Spiralling Mirror

Rory Gallagher

Dan is fifteen. He holds a paintbrush in one hand and a bucket in the other. The weight of himself rests upon a ladder, of which he has climbed to the top. He is meticulously reinvigorating the coving where the wall meets the ceiling, with nearly-white paint. Chips and flakes of previous artisans’ handiwork float to the carpeted floor below. Float down to Jim who holds the bottom most rung of the ladder. Jim is a local vagabond, pot-bellied and balding. He gave Dan this here job, a reinvention of a hotel, so that it may be purchased by the right outside influences. They are two among many at work. Afterward, the two rest in the front doorway. The sun is still high and beats down on them from above. The two reflect on how much work has been and how much is yet to be. Jim gives Dan a loan of his beer, claiming that there’s no better thing after a day’s work. It is the first time that Dan has tasted a beer, and it is sweet and it is satisfying just as Jim had said. In a month’s time the hotel will be bought. In another two it will be sold again. From here it will lie dormant, never to reopen.

Dan is sitting in a café. He is on a first date with a girl named Lily. They’re both twenty-three years old. Lily is a few months older. They’re drinking cheap wine despite it being 2pm in the afternoon. In an hour they will be back in Dan’s unfurnished flat. It has been like that for some time and will be like that for some time more. In another hour still, the two will be in Dan’s bed, having just slept together. Dan says aloud that he is a lucky man, he always will be. Lily admires that attitude, and says that people think too much on their own suffering. Naively, Dan says that life is suffering. And as soon as we realise that, suddenly, it isn’t. Lily says the only suffering we ought to think about is that which is far from us. Dan thinks she is talking about death, but she is speaking geographically.

Dan is walking home with Danny now. They’ve got the same name. They are as brothers, unrelated. They are passing between them a small bag consisting of half a gram of cocaine. The other half is already in them. Danny asks Dan if he believes in God and in heaven. Dan says he doesn’t, but that he has enjoyed some spiritual teachings, even if he doesn’t really believe it all.

Dan is in Lily’s now. They are sitting cross-legged on her velveteen sofa, with green entwined trimmings, like tassels. There are many pieces of art on the walls. Some are original. Many are reproductions. She bought a painting of a woman with her back facing the canvas, tying her shoe. She is naked from the torso up. Her face isn’t visible, yet she is forlorn. Lily bought the piece the week previous. She hadn’t bought a piece for some time before that. She is explaining to Dan that they cannot be together. She is almost angry with him. She explains that sometimes love just isn’t enough. Dan believes that all things in time bend towards love, like flowers to the sun. They have tears in their eyes and their fingers are interlinked.

Dan is standing in the front room of Danny’s childhood home. His mother lies in a six-foot casket before them. Of this, she fills five-feet and three-inches. Danny’s father refers to him as ‘Dan’, as does his sister. This makes things confusing for Dan, who turns his head anytime the name is called. Danny’s wife Sara also calls him ‘Danny’. She is kind and small like the woman horizontal. This makes Dan feel better.

Dan is standing opposite Lily now. It is their wedding day. She is telling him she loves him, in words that aren’t her own. He replies in the same fashion. They are now one in the eyes of something greater, if only that of the attendees. They are both smiling. They are surrounded by each other and those they love. It is a good day.

Dan is standing at the head of a dining table in the home he purchased a year and six months ago. Lily has been pregnant for three of those months. He holds in his right hand a glass half full of an expensive wine. He cradles it in his palm like a goblet. Sitting to his left is Lily. Further down the table is Danny, who is sitting beside his own wife Sara. The rest of the table is populated by those cherished few. All ears are fixed on Dan, all mouths beaming. No one has said anything for a moment, then Dan does finally. He says that sometimes he likes to jump ahead to the end of his life and imagine what moments in time might appear to him as he lies dying. He says he hopes that this is one of them.

Dan wakes up to the sound of wailing. He is resting on his side, clutching his slumbering wife. They are nestled like cutlery. The wailing is coming from the next room over. The wailing is coming from his daughter, June. She has been alive for seven months and thirteen days. Her teeth have started to come through, of which she has but two. The hair on her head is blonde. He suspects it will darken with age. He gets up gently, so as to not disturb Lily. He goes through to the next room. He doesn’t pick June up but instead climbs into her cot with her. They are nestled like cutlery. He kisses her and sings to her softly, a rock ballad he first heard as a young man. He changes the lyrics so that they might be applied to a daughter.

Dan and Danny are fishing now. And they both have young sons, not yet teenagers, who are fishing too. The boys are mostly concerned with the rods, not the fish. They walk home together the four of them, having caught nothing. Dan holds his son’s much smaller hand as they scramble across rocks. On the way home his son sees a puddle and knowingly, submerges his whole foot in it, shoe and sock and everything. Dan scolds him and asks him why he did it. The two walk lone-handed for the remainder of the journey.

Dan is at his dining table again. It is Christmas. Soft jazz emanates from the radio on a shelf behind him. He is wearing a purple crown, unsheathed from the winning end of a party cracker. He is holding one end of a different party cracker now. His son is holding the other. He loses this time. It’s okay. His daughter June is spending her first Christmas with her own family. Anne scrapes what hasn’t been eaten onto one plate and brings it to the kitchen. Dan’s son explains that he will be spending New Year’s with his girlfriend. This is okay too.

Danny sits in the hallway of Dan’s home now, hunched over on a fold out chair, his fingers interlocked with his own. Sara is gathering for him, something to eat. He can see her from where he is sitting through an open door to the kitchen. Dan is lying horizontal now in the room behind Danny, to which he has his back. He is wearing a shirt and tie, and he has taken off his jacket. Anne comes out from within the room her husband lies in now and walking around Danny, she turns to face him. Danny doesn’t look up. Anne asks him if he’d like to come in and see for himself. She rests a gentle hand on his shoulder. She is a kind woman. This makes him feel better. Danny explains that he can’t go in there. “I just can’t go in.”

Pressure-Treated

J.M.C. Kane

My brother drinks the same beer our father drank, holds the bottle the same way—thumb over the label like he's hiding evidence. I drive two hours every other Sunday because our mother asked me to, and because my daughter likes his kids.

He rebuilt the deck himself. Pressure-treated pine, four-by-fours sunk in concrete he mixed by hand. It's level. I checked. He saw me checking and didn't say anything, just handed me a beer and told me the Bengals were getting their asses handed to them again.

We don't talk about the years he didn't call, or the night of the DUI when he did, or how he paid for the Camaro. His oldest daughter looks like our mother did in the pictures from before we were born—dark hair, shoulders that hunch forward like she's apologizing for taking up space.

He asks if I want to help him replace the deck stairs before winter. I say sure. He nods, sets his beer down, walks to the truck for the Sawzall.

I watch him work. He measures twice, cuts once, doesn't need the level because his eye is better than the tool. When the blade binds, he doesn't force it. Just backs it out, adjusts the angle, tries again.

He hands me the tool, says he needs a break. Lets his hand stay on mine a moment, and then a longer one. I feel the sandpaper of his fingers; my nose flinches from the stench of booze.

I set the saw against the stair edge and engage the blade. It twists in my hand, gouges, and locks. He nudges me aside. “Goddammit,” and then he calls me what he’s always called me.

My daughter runs past, chasing his son through the yard, her braid snapping behind her.

He asks if I'm staying for dinner.

I say yeah.

My mouth tastes like pennies.

The Bengals are down by twenty.

Rupture

Katie Licavoli

July 9th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

The promise of blue skies and a 90-degree day in Northern Michigan drove tourists to Lake Huron's beaches like flies to a sun-ripened trash can. Some locals resented the increasing hordes of visitors flooding Michigan’s beaches each summer, but not her. The food on her table and the roof over her head depend on them. That's what happens when you own a generational ferrying business that runs from April through October—weather permitting—in a lakeshore, tourism-reliant town like Mackinaw City. For a business like hers, the profits made in seven months are as vital as a heartbeat. They will make or break you.

Business was good this year. Every ferry ride sold out, every ticket booked for the next two months. Her brother—her business partner—all but forced her to take the day off. “A day at the beach,” he’d suggested. So, heeding his advice, she’s at the beach. Acting like just another one of the flies.    

In her faded navy one-piece, she eases into Lake Huron, her feet moving over white sand, polished pudding, and speckled Petoskey stones. By waist deep, goosebumps flesh her skin. Drawing a breath, she closes her eyes and dives, plunging into the icy, inland sea. The cool water floods her with dopamine. It’s high, all-consuming. She surfaces, flipping over and floating, backstroking deeper into the lake, eyes closed, chin tilting to the sun. Nothing, she thinks, beats a Michigan summer.  

Weightless, she drifts, water cradling her as the sun kisses her cheeks. When she finally swims back to shore, it’s only because the growl in her stomach signals it’s time for lunch. Perhaps she’ll finally try the new brewery in town. Her brother has boasted about their Dunkle and pan-fried walleye, and today seems like a day for a patio beer.  

The water is to her knees when she realizes she is alone in the lake. Looking up, she sees the other swimmers have evacuated and are nestled in small pods along the beach. They point out behind her, murmuring, brows furrowed. She turns to see what they are looking at, but finds only normalcy. Blue sky and sun. The Mackinac Bridge, grand in the distance. Speed boats vrooming by, sailboats and freighters gliding. One of her ferries, filled with passengers, cuts across the water, leaving behind it a cascading fountain of spray. It isn’t until she looks beneath the bridge that she sees what is captivating so many others. A cloud of blackness, an unnatural iridescent sheen, spreading across the water as fast as spilled ink on a page.  

Her heart thuds wildly. No, she think. It can’t be.  

“Dad!” a young girl yells behind her. “Gross! What is that?!”   

“I don’t know, honey,” the father replies. “But I don’t think we should be in the water any more today.”

The father starts packing up their towels, mashing them into his backpack alongside bags of Doritos, a couple of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, soda bottles, and a pair of floaties. There are signs posted every half mile along the beach threatening minimum fines of $250 for littering. They were installed by the state last summer.

When she reaches the shore, she pauses, overcome by the overwhelming urge to imprint the image of the still clear, untainted water lapping over her toes. She lingers a moment longer, then, with effort, steps forward. 

On the beach she finds her towel and wraps it around her shoulders. She joins the crowd and looks out over Lake Huron, watching the blackness crawl its way across the water without anything out there to stop it. The young girl and father stand a few feet away, the daughter now digging in the sand at her father’s feet.  

“Do you think one of the freighters spilled something?” he asks.

She doesn’t know if his question is for her, or for anybody listening.

Eyes locked on the blanketing mass killing her livelihood by the second, she utters, “No, it’s not a freighter. It’s Line 5.”     

“Line 5?” he asks. “What’s that?”

“An oil pipeline in the Straits of Mackinac. It looks like it’s ruptured.”   

Her remark appears to baffle him. A silent beat passes before he asks the question she and so many others have pondered for decades.  

“Why would anybody put an oil pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac?”   

#

July 10th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

She talks to others. She watches the news. She tries not to panic.

She learns that the 70-year-old pipeline ruptured in several places, and when the company, Big Oil, that owns the pipeline, tried to shut off the oil supply, their equipment malfunctioned, over and over again.

Days later, Line 5 is still pouring oil into where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet, and as the lakes have always done, their powerful currents carry their water, now slick with oil, north and south, east and west along Michigan’s coastlines.  

“Catastrophic.” “Environmental disaster.” Those are the words the news keeps using. “For the community, the economy, the wildlife, and the lake’s ecosystems,” they elaborate. “Corrosion” and “improper pipeline maintenance” by Big Oil shoulder the blame.   

For years, her community and much of the state of Michigan has fought to have Line 5 shut down and removed from the Great Lakes.

There has to be another way to meet the state’s propane needs, they suggested.

There has to be a safer way, they petitioned.

It violates tribal treaty rights, they declared.

This will be disastrous, they said.

            But Big Oil countered. 

Shutting down Line 5 will hurt local economies, it warned.   

It saves people money, it argued.

It’s exceptionally durable, it insisted. 

It’s reliable and safe, it promised. 

#

July 13th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

Each day she and her brother gather on the beach alongside other locals, news crews, and gawkers who have come to watch the growing mass of black sludge creep its way through the Great Lakes.

Emptied of freighters, speed and sailboats, and her cherished ferries, all of which have been ordered to be docked until further notice, the lakes look bare. Lifeless. Those are the words that come to mind when she looks at her Lake Huron.  

Her brother carries a pair of binoculars everywhere with him, and seated together on a towel, they take turns passing them back and forth. While he watches the oil stretch its way across the water, she wrangles with incessant thoughts about the future. 

 Each day, seated along the shore, she spots another she knows. She sees the man in the grease-stained ball cap who owns a chain of smoked fish shops around the area. She sees the father and twenty-something son who make their living taking people out on fishing charters every summer. She sees the now white-haired couple who owns Bonnie’s, a local tourist hotspot famous statewide for always having twenty types of pies on rotation and “the best Friday night fish fry in Northern Michigan.” She sees the woman a few years younger than her who runs Darling Anne, the cruise service that takes tourists out to watch sunsets under the Mackinac Bridge. She sees the grandmother who never can stop bragging about her twelve grandchildren, and who for 40 years has owned the most popular bed-and-breakfast in town. She sees local tribal members who, more than her—more than any of them—rely on these waters. Their ancestors have been around since the Great Lakes were just the Great Lakes, and that was enough, and long before a pipeline was ever laid into the earth in the pursuit of efficiency and economic gain.   

#

July 15th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

She is in her office, planted behind her computer, where she’s been researching for hours. 

Nearby, a cold coffee sits untouched, alongside a sandwich, recently delivered by her brother. Its oily residue has permeated its white paper packaging.

Her office is dark, and the computer screen casts her in blue light she’s heard will strain her eyes and trick her brain into thinking it’s daytime, but that is the least of her worries. She scrolls, reading article after article, engrossed in what she’s uncovered about Big Oil. 

They are a foreign company with a net worth of over 90 billion. In the last thirty years, they have had over 1,000 spills, pouring a predicted one billion gallons of crude oil into lakes, rivers, tributaries, agricultural land and wetlands. This is not their first spill in Michigan.

In July 2010, a 41-year-old pipeline owned by Big Oil experienced a six-foot rupture that sent over a million gallons of crude oil into Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River in Southwest Michigan. It took eighteen hours for Big Oil to learn of the break, which polluted nearly 36 miles of the river that was an ecological haven. The spill was on every news channel. Over 4,000 mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles needed to be rescued, cleaned, and rehabilitated. Nearly 150 families had to be permanently relocated for fear of health concerns due to their proximity to the spill. Locals reported experiencing nausea, headaches, coughing, and difficulty breathing. Today, that same spill has come to be known as one of the largest inland oil spills in the history of the U.S. It took nearly five years to clean up, and both the spill and cleaning efforts forever changed the river’s ecosystem.

The same year the river was considered safe, Big Oil made a public statement claiming their efforts made the river cleaner and healthier than it was before the spill.  

She rereads their statement again, and then again and again, wondering, what will they possibly say about this?

#

July 16th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

            She was up until three in the morning reading about Big Oil. She spent the night at her office and awoke unrested, eyes bloodshot, desperate to return to Lake Huron.

            She turns down the street leading to the beach and finds it barricaded off. A large crowd floods the street and overflows onto the beach. The crowd is chanting and waving brightly painted signs. These people—activists, her brother calls them—began arriving in the days following the rupture. Each day there are more of them. She has no idea where they are coming from.              

They have made themselves at home, setting up tents along the beach, collecting driftwood, and building bonfire pits that they sit around late into the night.

They act as if the lakes belong to them, and like their lives depend on the water, too.

Though they have been threatened, they refuse to leave.

“They mean well,” her brother says.

A young girl with dreadlocks and tattooed legs stands in front of a news camera, shaking a sign into its lens that reads “TAR OUR SANDS, BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS.”

All day long these activists wave their signs, talk into camera’s and into their phones. They walk around, passing out pamphlets to anybody who will take one. They are about climate change, these pamphlets. She knows, because she took one and read it. It is these pamphlets that tell her these activists are not locals. For if they were, they would know better.

She sees a couple pushing a stroller past them, but one of the activists—a skinny man with curly hair down to his shoulders—shoves a pamphlet aggressively at the couple. She hears him say, “there’s still time, do it for your child.” The couple takes the pamphlet, and then quickly walks on. She sees them glance at its cover, their expressions twist. They round the corner, passing by a trash can, and chuck the pamphlet in.  

#

July 17th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

Each day, downwind of the activists, she gathers on the beach with her brother and hundreds of others who, like her, have been driven out of work by a thing none of them ever wanted in their waters.

They do not come to the shore to change anything, though God knows they would if they could. They don’t come searching for attention or sympathy—that’s not the Northern Michigan way. They come to the shores of Lake Huron each day because the water is where they’ve spent their life. The water is what they know. The water is home.

So, they sit or stand or pace alongside the water as a 270-foot-deep pipeline changes everything. They watch as throngs of dead walleye and salmon wash ashore. They watch as seagull’s white coats darken from oil. They watch as tourists flee Michigan’s beaches, pinching their noses at the smell of crude-soaked air while they hurry to return to where they came from. 

“It only employed 116 people,” her brother says.

The woman who run’s Darling Anne is seated beside them. “They predict it’s hemorrhaging 23-million gallons of oil per day into the water,” she says, although everyone knows this already. It’s all over the news.

The man with the grease-stained ball cap who own’s the local smoked fish shops stands nearby. He shakes his head, and then takes his hat in his hand, exposing thinning hair. “It’s our backbone—these waters. Us and fifty million others.” He kicks at the sand. “A $6 trillion economy across the Great Lakes Region. Yet it still wasn’t enough.”

Beside her, her brother drops his head into his hands. 

She rubs his back, like she did when he was young. But unlike then, she does not tell him everything will be alright. Instead, she looks out over the water as she broods over the question she just can’t seem to get out of her mind.

Was it worth it? 

Katie Licavoli lives and writes in West Michigan. She is in her final semester of earning her Master of Fine Arts in fiction through the Mountainview Low-Residency program, where she is currently working on her debut novel, a contemporary coming-of-age/sports story, alongside a Michigan-based short story collection.

The Water in the Middle

Josh Price

“Hey,” I say, “This is the place I almost died that time.”

She’d wanted to come up to Indian Valley for ages but I was always too freaked out by the drive to come with her.

I hadn’t put two and two together that I’d been to the place before, until we finally came, or more to the point she finally convinced me with a valium to come. I don’t like one lane roads, windy or straight.

We were standing in almost the exact same place that I’d been so drunk that time at my friends bachelor party (my face in stagnant water, on my knees praying and dying, unmoored, staring at an upside down sky), except now there was hardly any water in the lake, just a puddle out in the center blowing clouds into the face of the world.

Clouds are birthed out here like stars birthed in darkness. I am just another weather phenomenon, falling into the sky where nobody remembers to breathe—face-planting into the mud with no idea how deep the bottom goes. Everyone suffocates trying to find out.

I feel like maybe we should tell someone we are out here. When I pull out my phone (Ha!), I don’t have service. I ask if she has her phone on her before it occurs to me what a dumb question that is. Of course she does.

She checks hers, and she doesn’t have service either. “It’ll be fine,” she says, and she is off, stooping to look at the flora and find lizards hiding in the shade of dead bushes. She always wants to explore the world. I always want to define it.

I’m looking around for the campsite where we had the bachelor party, using the bathrooms as a point of reference, trying to remember the person I was then (and how I became that way)—standing at the edge of something I want to understand but don’t know what.

I walk out to where the water used to be. When I get out onto the dead lake, I’m by myself and I’m looking at the benches and the fire pits and now it feels like there’s no one else here and maybe there never was.

I look back, and I can’t see her. My adrenaline dumps and I fight the urge to run towards the bathrooms. She’s just behind the building and out of my line of sight, but isn’t this the kind of place where psychos do meth and rape people?

I call out to her—scared like a little kid—and hear a “Yeah!”

I holler, “Just checking!” feeling embarrassed for being me. My dad always called me a Nervous Nelly. The mind can make you believe anything if you let it and you definitely shouldn’t do that.

I wondered what went on in her mind when she explored the world inside her.

I began walking out towards the center of the old lake again. Dry as bones. Already hot. Cracks in dried mud crunching under my work boots; I wished I’d worn the cross trainers I leave in the trunk of the Nissan with our go-bags, but I don’t feel like going back to the car to get them.

I see where the ground is much darker. That is where the mud will get thicker. Still looks like a little puddle from where I am, but it’s probably a good 30’ feet across.

The mud is stickier. I’m afraid of knowing whatever it is I’m after, but can never stop myself once I’ve started. How deep is it?

My boots are heavy, wet mud sticking to them now. My heart is heavier and I don’t know why other than everything is either sorrow, or terror, or boring.

I take another big step and hear a sucking noise as my boot goes all the way under the muck. I feel a jolt of real fear. I could die here. It could take a while. It could be painful. A while is a long time when you’re afraid. Maybe that’s why my childhood seemed to take forever.

I pull my foot towards me, but because the boot is stuck and I’m lazy and don’t tie my laces tight my foot comes out of my boot. I put my hands out behind me as I fall, to keep from landing on my tailbone. I scrape my hands in the crusted dirt. I sit there wondering how much time is in an instant when I hear her calling me.

I turn and she’s running towards me, eyes bugged out. My ears are ringing and my brain feels like it might as well stay out of this. I think fear might be older than everything.

“We need to go!” she yells.

“What’s wrong?”

“Fire! My mom! We have to go, now!”

Shit. Not again.

I get up, and she’s already running back to the car. I gallop after her, too late now to go back and get my boot.

#

            So yeah, of course there was another fire, and it had gotten away from the firefighters (not their fault), and of course it was down where her mom lived—a place that was hard to get to and if we didn’t get there fast we might not be able to get to her at all.

I was doing my usual restless-and-angsty thing and she was doing her usual stoic, I’m-totally-not-screaming-inside thing.

            She was driving too fast. I felt like screaming, slow down!

Traffic slowed in front of us. She did scream, then. We all did these kinds of things when the truth revealed itself. I didn’t want to say anything. Whatever I chose would be the wrong thing to say, no question.

Traffic stopped.

“Must be a car wreck up there.”

She didn’t say anything. She and her mom were really close. This danger to her mom was terrifying her. I was probably just jealous of how close they were, because my mom died.

When we finally got passed the wreck, and got to town, she screeched the tires around corners, doing 60 in a 35. Yikes.

 “Hey, we don’t want to get pulled over,” I said, “or we won’t get there at all.”

She took her foot off the accelerator.

“Do you want me to call her?” I asked. “I could, I mean, she’s probably okay…”

I especially didn’t want her to feel afraid; I didn’t want anyone to feel afraid. Just because I’m a shitty person does not mean that I’m a shitty person.

“She doesn’t have service,” she said, and I heard that scream inside her throat, getting restless, wanting to Kool-Aid man out of her mouth and into the void.

“Shit,” I said.

We get into the avenues and the roads are filled with cars. We weren’t going to be able to get in. The fire was ten blocks away.

I take off my lone boot. I hop out of the car, pop the trunk to put on the trainers. I fall on my ass in the process, get up and jog through the gulley. I get to her mom’s place in five minutes. By the time I do the fire is only a few blocks away.

Her mom is sitting out front in a lawn chair like she’s waiting for a bus. She’s calm, sunglasses on, smiling, drinking a can of Racer 5.

My wife pulls up in the car moments later. I’m not sure how she got here so fast and maybe I don’t want to know. I could feel her twitching, seeing her mom so calm. My wife knew nothing of calm. She was wired the opposite.

I was twitching too because I was trying not to laugh.

Her mom gets into the front seat, hands me my boot.

“Where is your other shoe?” She asks.

“I dropped it,” I say, but she misses my joke.

I go to put her things in the trunk but it’s full with our bags already and I have to get into the back seat with her bags taking up the whole back seat.

People are mostly gone from the avenues, except for the occasional die-hards who refuse to leave and wind up making firefighter’s lives harder. We get out easily enough and we’re back out on the road without a problem. My wife is reading her mom the riot act over the drinking, which I think is funny. I interrupt, to ask my mother-in-law about her roommate’s dogs.

“Rita took them,” she says, and she says “Rita” like you’d say a bad word. I laughed. I mostly thought everyone was a bad word, too, so I totally understood.

“Who cares if she wanted to have a beer while she waited?” I say.

It wasn’t normally me standing up for my mother-in-law, and to be fair she consumed at least twice as much alcohol as she copped to—or that was what my wife and I figured, at least—which meant three times as much as anyone should. I used to drink like that, too.

My wife looks at me like she just had the same thought. Her mom laughs, which sometimes sounded like insults.

“Mom!”

“What?” my mother in law says. She cracks open another beer and swigs it. I snigger in the back seat. I’m sort of jealous. I want to drink, too, but that was why I’d quit. I always turned into that guy at the bachelor party. All it took was time.

“What are you going to do, anyway?” I ask. “You’re under mandatory evacuation, right? Where is the shelter?”

They both look at me.

OH…

She’s staying with us.

We’re back out on the highway, headed to our house.

I look down at the road as we drive. If I threw the door open, rolled just right...

I look up at my wife scowling at me in the rearview. She looks away sharply when her mom cracks open her third beer.

“Mom!”

“What?”

#

When we get back to the house the dogs go spastic, making anguished noises and acting like they haven’t seen us in years. Then when they see grandma they act like we never existed. They are traitors to their country.

I sag onto the couch, sigh; go on Amazon and order a new pair of boots.

I look outside, towards Mt. Baldy, and the clouds are billowing out of Indian Valley like stars being born.

The End

You Showed Up, That Counts

Heather Richmond

The lake didn’t care about funerals. It breathed mist across the dock, soft and slow, like it had every Saturday morning. Jude stared into the fog, half expecting to hear his brother call out to him. Tobin had always led. Jude had followed. The funeral had made it official. The lake made it real. His older brother. His best friend. Gone. Tobin would never tease him or throw his head back with a boisterous laugh when they did something stupid together. Jude swallowed hard, forcing the feeling down the way he always did when things got too big to name. Now he had to be the oldest brother. Whether he wanted to or not.

 He straightened the too-big jacket on his shoulders, as if adjusting it might make the role fit better. Jude hadn’t changed; his slacks still held the crease from the service. Silence settled around him, his black shoes rooted to the dock. Everything about him felt wrong, except for the familiar weight of the fishing pole in his grip.

Eli stood behind him, eyeing the tackle box they’d found tucked in the alcove behind the Beech tree. Tobin’s secret spot. The bark was slick with dew, and a pair of sycamores leaned nearby like eavesdropping uncles. Eli undid the first few buttons of his dress shirt and rolled up the sleeves. The black fabric clung to his elbows, damp and defiant. He shrugged into his blue hoodie and zipped away the uncomfortable reminder. Eli walked back to the stump where he’d placed the tackle box and gently opened the lid, as if it might break, or as if Tobin might still need it back. Everything was still there—hooks, sinkers, the half-used spool of fishing line. And Tobin’s lucky green lure. He held it up. The lure winked like it hadn’t heard the news.

“I wanna use it, Jude,” Eli said.

Jude’s voice was flat, almost brittle, “It’s not lucky anymore.”

Eli didn’t answer. He knelt beside the tackle box, fingers fumbling with the lure. He tried to tie it onto the line too quickly and the hook bit his thumb. Eli hissed, pulling back as a bead of blood welled up. He stared at it, his thumb pulsing.

The sting pulled up a memory: Tobin, kneeling on the dock, last year. A victim of the same kind of catfish hook. “Every real fisherman’s got one,” he’d said, holding up his bleeding thumb with victory. Eli laughed then. He didn’t now.

He wiped his hand on his jeans and tried again. His knot was crooked; his cast was worse. The lure slapped the water like a mistake. The line jerked sideways, unwilling to follow.

“You’re not doing it right!” Jude’s voice cracked like a defeated branch snapping through the air, and birds scattered.

Eli froze. His lip trembled. His hands stayed mid-air, unsure.

Jude exhaled, unclenching his fists. “Sorry.” He rubbed his forehead, then softened his voice, “sorry, let me see.”

They knelt together. Jude showed Eli how to loop the knot, and how to flick his wrist. Eli cast again. This time, the line held, and the lure danced. It skimmed the surface like it just remembered how.

A tug. The rod bent. Eli reeled, arms shaking.

“Hold it steady,” Jude said, reaching behind him to brace the reel.

“I am!” Eli grunted, the line jerking again.

“Let it run a second—then pull.”

Eli wrestled the rod upright. A palm-sized shimmer broke the surface.

Jude unhooked it gently. “Well, it’s too small to keep,” he said.

He lowered it back into the lake. The fish flicked once and vanished. Eli dropped the rod and cried; his knees buckled beneath him.

Jude didn’t speak. He wanted to say something, but nothing felt right. He sat beside his little brother, watching the ripples fade. Jude steadied himself before touching Eli’s shoulder.

 Jude’s thoughts drifted, unspooling like the line off a reel. It came back to him then—Tobin’s voice, the splash. Barefoot on the same dock, Tobin held up a fish no bigger than his hand.

“You gotta act like it’s a monster,” he’d said. “That way it feels important.”

He’d made Jude pose with it, grinning like a fool, while the fish flopped in his grip. Later, Tobin had let it go.

“Too small,” he’d said. “But it showed up. That counts.”

Jude blinked hard. He’d been about eight then, just a year younger than Eli now. The memory pressed against his ribs. Then he hummed. It was the tune Tobin always sang while fishing—half melody, half nonsense. It had tattooed its way deep into his bones. The wind shifted. The lake answered in circles.

Jude paused, his voice lost. His shoulders softened. Tears fell. Grief vibrated through the armored shock he’d been wearing. He let the tears land where they wanted.

They sat like that as dusk settled in. The fish had swum away. Jude coiled the line slowly, eyes on the water.

“Think Tobin woulda caught something today?” Eli asked.

He didn’t say anything at first, just handed over the rod.

 “If not, you’d have caught something for him now that we know you’re a real fisherman,” he said, rubbing the top of Eli’s head just like Tobin used to do. His hair, neatly combed that morning, now stuck out in defiant tufts.

“Mama’s gonna make you fix that,” he said.

Eli placed the tackle box back in the nook behind the Beech tree. “For next time,” he whispered, while he tucked it away like a memory.

Jude pocketed the green lure. He wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

They walked in step, their loafers soft against the gravel.

“I messed it up,” Eli whispered.

“You didn’t mess it up,” He met Eli’s eyes. “You showed up, that counts.”

Eli’s eyes brightened and he hummed Tobin’s tune.

Jude turned back once, just to look. The lure in his pocket felt heavier than it should.