Ruben Rodriguez

A Craving

The whole place smelled of beef—bloody meat. Tammy had come to the carniceria six days in a row. A back corner griddle sizzled and popped with meat spared from behind butcher glass. They double stacked the small corn tortillas to cover with healthy bunches of chopped meat, cilantro, and onion. Five dollars bought five tacos and a tall plastic cup of jamaica.

Tammy’s cravings brought her here. A loud place full of commotion with two plastic tables and three plastic chairs crammed against the wall nearest the cooker and opposite the long meat case. She’d munch tacos and watch the people shop.

Some, she saw everyday. An old woman in a familiar blue dress looked at her, and then squinted at Tammy’s round belly. The first couple of times, Tammy worried that the woman might be cursing her baby, but the tacos were so good, Tammy ignored the thought and tried to ignore the old woman too.

A handsome young man with a reversed ball cap and scar across his lip would come in for his daily tall cans and a bag of chicharron. He smiled once at Tammy, and she returned his smile wondering what his name might be. She wished she could reach out and grab the young man, feel his rough worn hands in hers, but he was out of her reach.

The woman who kept permanent sovereignty behind the counter initially cooed at Tammy, for a pregnant woman is adored in all cultures. As Tammy’s cravings brought her back again and again, the woman behind the counter only forced a smirk. Her narrowed eyes asked, What are you doing here, wedda?

In the parking lot, Tammy often stood a moment next to her car. She looked across the street into a park. The jungle gym covered in frisky little monkeys their mothers huddled together or displaced upon benches. She’d hear the high pitch squeals of the children leap across the road. The baby would kick, and Tammy would lay a hand on her belly and whisper, Soon child, soon.

An MFA student at CSUSB, Ruben Rodriguez writes, paints, and wastes his time at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains. He is the fiction editor of The Great American Lit Mag. Many of his stories have been deemed fit for consumption by the likes of Reunion: The Dallas Review, TINGE, The Nassau Review, ZAUM, theNewerYork, and others. He is the author of the chapbook, We Do What We Want (Orange Monkey Publishing, 2015). You can find him at www.rubenstuff.com.

Christian Shepherd

Red Sunset

Part One

Adam stood a precautionary three feet away from the edge of the grassy hillside. This distrust of heights had very recently snuck up on him; he used to hang his feet over the ledge without a giving a single thought to the consequences of a misplaced step. It was quite the contrary now, as he looked over the edge, he had decided that it was at least a six-story drop to the bottom, riddled with plenty of rugged weeds and stubborn shrubbery to ensure ample amounts of scrapes, gashes, and bruises if you found yourself falling down the steep incline. The thought of it intensified the usual tightness of his chest.

The sunset had already fallen below the mountain range in the distance, but that didn’t bother him. Adam had always preferred the subtle red hue of a post-sunset/pre-nightfall sky to the blinding yellow that the sun was always so eager to offer. The red sunset had fallen onto a nearby mahogany tree and highlighted small withstanding carvings that he had made with her when they were kids.

This hillside was a place where all the neighborhood kids gathered to play and fight despite numerous grim warnings from their parents to avoid the cliff. Not many of them listened. The path they used required a hiking and squeezing through terrain that adults were to unadventurous to take to ensure their children were having no misadventures of their own. The path had become even more overgrown and unnavigable since his generation had abandoned the cliff side haven.

Adam remembered the evenings that he would spend with her on the cliff side alone when all the other kids in the neighborhood had gone home. Memories he had forgotten about, jokes between the two of them, moments of weakness, anger, and sadness; countless occasions came resonating back to him and he smirked when he remembered that they spent more nights together on the hillside while they lived here than nights they didn’t. He was just a boy back then, with short black hair and light skin. He was average height for his age, but was in good shape from playing sports. Adam had always felt as if there was nothing distinctive about his appearance; no freckles, birthmarks, or other physical attributed to separate him from everyone else.

It had become their tradition, even a secret between the two of them. Adam would often leave early and come back when she was alone to avoid explaining their daily routine to their friends, who, as most kids their age would, would give them a hard time about spending so much time together.

It had started by accident one evening when Adam had climbed to the hillside alone. He had just moved into town a few months prior and this hill had become one of his favorite parts of the move. This particular evening, he was surprised to see a young girl he recognized from the neighborhood brigade of kids sitting right next to what he had become to think of as his personal tree.

Adam wasn’t sure how to react that evening. He hadn’t made any friends in his new neighborhood and lacked the courage to walk up to the kids he would see outside every day. In fact, if it hadn’t been for her hair, a deep, soft red with curls running past her shoulders, he might have turned around and left without muttering a single word.

As it was, Adam stood immobilized by the way her curls matched the faint red in the sky. Before long the young girl had turned around and noticed Adam behind her. No syllables came to mind for him to utter, let alone fully formed words or sentences. He unwillingly left any chance of conversation between the two of them up to the red-headed girl.

“Well hi there,” she said, catching Adam off-guard despite the fact that a few sizable moments had passed since they had made eye contact. “I didn’t know anyone else came here.”

Adam wasn’t sure how to respond. Her tone and body language were non-existent and he couldn’t be sure if she was upset that he might have intruded on her what could have been her spot for a lot longer than it was his.

“Yeah, I actually just started a few weeks ago,” he managed to wrench out. “I moved
here not too long ago.”

The young girl smiled, but Adam could barely recognize her expression through the shadows on her face from the sunset behind her. It was hard for Adam to look in her direction without being blinded from the last bit of the day’s sunlight.

“It’s nice isn’t it?” the young girl asked through her smile. “I have been coming here for as long as I can remember. I grew up in this town.”

Adam again found himself at a loss of words. The blinding light was doing its fair share of diverting his focus. To remedy the situation, he began walking towards the girl and took a seat next to her. When he finally found his seat on the cliff side he turned his gaze and was able to focus on reciprocating the conversation.

“I grew up in a bigger city than this one,” he began. “I never really got to see anything like this where I used to live. I doubt there was a spot like this there anyway.” She turned her head away from his direction back towards the sunset when he tried to look at her. When he realized she wasn’t planning on looking back, he matched her gaze and focused on the hills that were fading into a darker green as the sunset made its way down.

“Well you can come and see it every day now,” the girl said to him as she placed a hand on his far shoulder. It felt warm and familiar. He had never liked the old city he used to live in. It was too busy and chaotic for his taste. The slow pace and serenity of this small town was a much better fit. She looked at him intently and gave him his first chance to examine her face.

She had clusters of even spaced subtle red freckles throughout her nose and cheeks. Her teeth were straight, but like most kids their age; they were too big for her face. She wore big squared black glasses that slid down her nose regularly and her lips were the same tone as the freckles that decorated her face, chapped from playing outside in the wind. Her skin was the same tone as his: a light complexion, making the red accents throughout her face apparent. The large square glasses left plenty of room to see her hazel eyes, which were focused right at him.

“Yeah, I can,” Adam murmured under his breath as he returned a small smile. “What is your name anyways?”

“Emily,” she said as she once again turned her face away from Adam, replacing the veil of shadow across her face. “The other boys call me Em.”

“I like Emily. I think I’ll stick with that.” Adam had caught himself leaning forward to get another look at her face when he realized he was dangerous close to losing his balance on the cliff side. “My name is Adam,” he said, finding his balance as he spoke.
Emily brought her half-clenched hand to her mouth as she smiled. “Adam, I like that name too.”

“How old are you Emily?”

“Fourteen. My birthday just passed a few days ago.”

“That means you are older than me.”

“I guess so! How old are you?”

“Thirteen, my birthday is in about a month.”

“Aw, the little baby!” Emily joked as she lightly pinched Adams cheek. “Are you looking forward to your birthday party?”

“You are barely older than me,” Adam said. “I already had a party in my old neighborhood. It doubled as a going away party, so I don’t think I’ll have another one.”

“Why not? Maybe your new friends want to celebrate with you!”

“Well…I haven’t made too many new friends here yet, since school hasn’t started and I haven’t been able to meet anyone. You are actually the first person I have met from this town.”

“Why haven’t you come outside? We are out here every day.”

“I don’t know,” Adam mumbled. “I have been busy unpacking and helping set the…”

“You should come out and meet everyone else tomorrow. We usually team up and play baseball or hike through the hills.”

“That sounds like fun,” Adam said as he smiled. “You guys usually meet up at the bottom of this hill right? You sure they won’t mind?”

“Yep, right at the bottom where you first have to go through to come up here. No I’m sure they won’t. Just a fair warning though, you better get used to losing to a girl in baseball. All the boys have a hard time with it at first.”

Adam laughed and stood up to brush the grass that had collected on his jeans. “I think I will be alright, especially since I was already planning on letting you win anyways.”

The two sat and enjoyed the rich red tint of the fallen sun, occasionally glancing towards the darker, bluer side of the sky to spot a falling star, or what they would later figure out to be airplanes flying at dusk.

“Looks like the sunset is almost gone. I should probably get back home,” Emily said.

“I didn’t realize how late it had gotten. My parents are not going to be happy…”

“Mine either! I have been late a lot lately. How about we meet back up here tomorrow to watch it again? Only this time we will make sure to leave earlier,” Emily said as she headed down the path.

“Sure, as long as we aren’t grounded. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You are going to come tomorrow right? To meet everyone else? Don’t make me go and ring your doorbell.”

Adam smirked, “Don’t worry, I’ll be there.”

“Good bye Adam, see you tomorrow.”

Adam stayed for another few minutes. “How could I not come?” he smirked to himself.

***

The morning of anticipation had arrived and Adam found himself walking towards a large group of people he did not know. He scoured the group looking for the red head of Emily to introduce him as he got closer and closer to the edge of the hill.

“Hey there,” a tall, pale boy said. “Are you the one who just moved in?”

“Yeah, just down the street. I have only been here for a little while.”

“Well, what took you so long to come out?”

“What does it matter? I’m sure he doesn’t want to answer a thousand questions,” said a petite blonde girl from the back of the group.”

“I’m not picking on him or anything Elizabeth,” the tall boy. “Anyways, what’s you r name? “

“I’m Adam.”

“Oh good, you don’t have the same name as anyone else here. That would have been annoying. I’m James,” he said as he waved to Adam.

“Nice to meet you,” Adam said, returning the wave and looking at the other fifteen people who were standing behind James.

“You are kind of shy aren’t ya?” said a black haired boy who was standing next to Elizabeth.

“What makes you say that?” Adam said, a little annoyed at the boy’s comment.

“You took longer than a month to come out and meet us. I was sure you would never come out at all.”

“Well, sorry to disappoint you. I ran into Emily and she told me to come meet up with everyone. Where is she anyways?” Adam directed the conversation back to James, who he had already decided he liked a lot more than the dark, bold person in the back.”

“She is probably coming late like always. That’s Peter by the way.”

“Have a crush on her already?” Peter asked.

“What do you mean?”

Peter walked up close to Adam and shoved his finger into Adam’s chest. “I said you have only been here a day and you are already crushing on someone?”

Adam was thrown off. “It’s a little fast to crush on someone isn’t it? Why would I have a crush on her anyways…”

“Why wouldn’t someone have a crush on me?” Emily panted as she ran in from behind the crowd. “You met everyone already? Don’t pay attention to Peter. He is an idiot.”

“Way to back your boyfriend up,” Peter said as he walked slowly back to the crowd of kids, who were now engaged in other conversations.

“I haven’t met everyone, but I have met these two.”

Emily went on to name all of the people who were waiting on her arrival. “Now that you know everyone, what are we doing today?”

“I think we decided on baseball today right?” James said.

“Or we could go ride shopping carts again…” Peter chimed in.

“That was a stupid idea last time. It hasn’t gotten any better,” Emily said.

“Let’s just head to the field. We still need to pick captains,” James said quickly, stopping what seemed to be an inevitable battle of words between Emily and Peter. They all started walking together, grouping up in twos and threes to fit on the sidewalk.

“I’m glad you came. You are going to like everyone here. We always have a lot of fun. Sorry about Peter, he can be a little dumb at times.” Elizabeth had followed Adam to the back of the group.

“It’s fine, and thanks. I’m glad I came too. It’s been a while since I’ve played baseball.”

“Have you played on a team?” James asked.

“At my old school I did. I was planning on joining the team when school started.”

“You should, a lot of the boys play for the school. You will know plenty of people there.”

They continued to talk about Adam’s old town and a few of the people Adam would come to know very well. It was only a few blocks to the field.

“Alright let’s break up,” James said.

“Make sure you aren’t on my team Adam,” winked Emily. “I have to make sure you let me when remember?”

“Yeah, I don’t think I am going to let that happen after all. Elizabeth just told me you haven’t lost a game in a couple months. How are you getting so lucky?”

“Who said anything about luck?”

Adam was the first to bat on his team. He walked up to the small hole in the sand that marked home base and Peter lined up with him at the pitcher’s mound. Adam watched the ball release and hit the ball cleanly over the fence. Emily threw up her arms as the ball passed her overhead. Adam looked at her and smiled.

“Yeah, Emily…I’m definitely not going to let you win.”

Part Two

Adam and Brendon made their way to the usual spot where everyone met up after everyone had a chance to go home and unload their backpacks and folders. It was a sunny day in the middle of May, so Brendon had opted to change into some shorts and a tank top to enjoy the weather. Brendon was taller than Adam by an inch or two, but was noticeably thinner all around. His brown hair was brushed to the side in a messy, impromptu comb-over.

Adam had decided to stick to his jeans and t-shirt, but did pick up a plain black baseball cap and threw it on backwards as he walked out. The hat had kept his grown out hair in place. He had bulked up from playing baseball in high school and from growing a “non-human” appetite, as his friends had branded it. Emily had often gotten annoyed how he could eat whatever he wanted without losing his tone.

“Where is everyone?” Adam asked.

“Probably up in the hill drinking like they have been doing for the past few months,” Brendon answered. “They are up there more often than not nowadays.”

“You would think they would get tired of it after a while.”

“It seems to be all they care about lately. You can’t even suggest doing something without one of them offering to bring alcohol.”

“It’s starting to get old to be honest. At least it isn’t everyone caught up in the mix though,” Adam said as a few of their other friends turned the corner to meet them.

There were three of them. Elizabeth, the kind blonde girl who now had a few of the same classes as Adam, was among them. They were all within a year or so from 17, Adam and Brendon’s age.

“I guess we should go up there, now that we are all here,” Brendon said.

“Do we have to go? Why don’t we just head over to the park or something instead?” one of the boys asked.

“They are still our friends, we shouldn’t just avoid them,” Adam answered.

“I’m not really in the mood to deal with it today…” the boy protested.

“Let’s just head up there. Maybe they are up there waiting for us,” Elizabeth said as she put a hand on Adam’s back. Adam took a keen note of the gesture. Elizabeth always knew how to cheer him up when there was an issue amongst the group or when he was obviously troubled. Lately, Adam had been pretty outspoken about a lot of things his old group of friends were getting into and he often found Elizabeth comforting him when Brendon wasn’t up to the task. They exchanged a subtle smile before Adam gestured for her to go on ahead before him.

They walked up the hillside where their group had been meeting since their elementary days. They began hearing the loud and obnoxious voices of the rest of their gang. Adam was the last in the line as they joined their tipsy friends on the hillside.

“Hey! Just in time, we are about to open the next bottle!” said James, now a tall, lean young adult who many would have pinned as one of the leaders of the group a few years ago. Since half the group started partying and drinking, the usual group of twenty or so neighborhood kids had split in closeness.

None of the freshly arrived took James up on his offer. Each of them mumbling a “No thanks, I’m good,” or a “Not tonight” as they took found a comfortable boulder or trunk to sit down on.

As Adam walked into the fray, his sight was immediately shifted to a red-headed figure behind James. It was Emily, and she was chugging a can of beer from the hand of another old friend of theirs, Peter. Adam never really liked Peter; he was always getting the group to go along with his plans to cause trouble around the neighborhood. When they were younger he had convinced most of their friends to run out to different pay phones in town and hang the phone up while they were still being used. Adam looked away as Emily finished the can and as she turned around and noticed Adam she choked on the last bit of the drink in her throat.

“Careful Em,” Peter said. “Don’t go drinking like a girl now.”

“Shut up Peter, no one asked you to talk,” Emily snapped as she set the can down and found a seat directly across from Adam and Elizabeth, who were sitting next to each other on the same log. Once the noise from Emily and Peter’s scuffle settled down they started their usual routine of picking on and joking about each other as alcohol was passed around for those who chose to drink it. Emily did not take another drink, and

Adam had avoided eye contact with her throughout the length of the evening.

When the street lights came on over the hill everyone began to lift from their spots to leave for the night. This was more out of habit than necessity now that they were older. Adam stayed in his seat and said goodbye as everyone passed by him; he exchanged the customary fist bump with Brendon and Elizabeth leaned over to hug him and he noticed that the hug lingered longer than a standard farewell hug. He stayed and waited for the red sunset to come in over the mountain side.

“Hey.” Adam heard the familiar greeting. It was Emily, here for their usual meeting. “Oh you are here; you wouldn’t even look at me today.”

Adam didn’t say anything. He kept his view on the sunset with his arms in his pocket.

“You could have at least said hi.”

“Emily, you know how I feel about how the half of our group has been acting lately.”

“Then why do you still talk to them?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not the only one doing it. You still talk to everyone else who is. You are even talking to Peter, and you didn’t like Peter to begin with.”

Adam didn’t respond. It bothered him that his other friends were drinking, partying, and getting into trouble, but it tore into him deeper whenever he would see Emily involved.

“Emily, you should know I care about you more than them.”

“Well, we are best friends aren’t we?” Emily said as she wrapped her arms around him.

Adam smirked and turned his head back towards the sunset. Best friends; the brand of their relationship since a few weeks after they met.

“By your choice, not mine.”

“Well, look what a grumpy boyfriend you would be right now if you had it your way.”

“As opposed to the grumpy best friend you love dealing with?”

Emily giggled as she rested her head on his back. “You know I care about you, I told you that already.”

“Oh yeah, I remember clearly,” Adam began and he started chuckling. “I remember I told you that I cared about you about a dozen times before you finally understood that I meant in a ‘more than a best friend’ kind of way. Sometimes I worry about you Emily.”

“Well, how was I supposed to know? It was the same as any other day we come up here,” she said as she shoved his back in, her default reaction when she didn’t have a witty response for someone teasing her. “I hope you remember how I replied as well as you remember how long it took me to understand what you were saying.”

“Don’t remind me,” Adam replied as he put a dramatic hand up to his forehead and pretended to lose strength in his legs.

Emily laughed and caught his weight, “You are my best friend and I feel the same way about you, but you don’t like it when I go out to parties and drink now. You will be even more upset if we got together.” Adam grumbled and picked up his own weight again. He slung his head back to Emily’s shoulder behind him and Emily kissed his cheek, a habit she had picked up ever since Adam confessed. “Besides, Elizabeth seems to be close to you lately. You probably would prefer a girl like her anyways…”

Adam ignored her comment. He looked back to the sunset, which was now deep in its color and casting the final shadows along the hills. He grabbed her arm and pulled her in front of him, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. She put her hands on his arm tried to keep poking at the topic of Elizabeth. Each time, he would squeeze just hard enough to make extra air come out mid-sentence and continued to ignore the comments through her laughter.

***

A few weeks later, Adam walked into the graduation party at James’ house with his hand in his pocket, fiddling with the note he had written for Emily. He looked around to see his close friends gathered together as well as many other people from their year at their high school. Most of them were either holding a red plastic cup of ambiguity or tightly gripped a can or bottle of beer to show off. He had decided to have a drink himself to celebrate with his friends.

“Glad you finally made it,” James snuck up behind him as he finished pouring the contents of a cold, wet can into a plastic red cup of his own. “I was starting to think you weren’t coming.”

“I just got caught up,” Adam said. “Why would I miss one of my best friends graduation party? This is going to be one of the last chances we have to hang out together.”

“I wasn’t sure if you would be okay with the drinking part,” James replied, smacking Adam on the back. “You have been giving us a hard time about it, but it seems like you are over that now.” James pointed to the red cup in Adam’s hand.

“I’m making an exception for our graduation,” Adam said as he lifted the cup up to eye level.

“I like it,” James said. “Glad our little business woman is letting her hair down.”

Adam rolled his eyes at James’ joke. “Where is everyone anyways?”

“Well, everyone is mostly out in the backyard…”

Adam could read the discomfort in his friend’s voice. “Is Brendon out there too?”

“Yeah he is,” James said, pushing Adam towards the door. “Want to head out there?”

“Why are you shoving me out?” Adam said, wearily. “What’s going on?”

“Well…”

“Spit it out, James.”

“Emily is…upstairs.”

Adam’s stomach clenched. “Passed out?”

“No…Peter is also upstairs.”

Adam’s fingers began to tremble. He felt cold and furious. He mechanically began his ascent up the stairs into James’ bedroom.

There’s no point in going up there.”

He continued until he found himself holding the doorknob. He knew it wasn’t locked; James’ lock had been broken for at least a year when he had stayed the night at his house. His heart raced and he opened the door swiftly.

“WHAT the hell…” Peter had said. He had jumped off of the bed. His shirt was missing and his pants were unbuttoned and falling off his hips. Underneath him was Emily. Her red hair sprawled around untidily. She had no shirt on and was doing her best to cover the white bra she was wearing. Her skirt was hiked well above her waist lane as she did her best to scramble it back down. When she looked up to see who had barged in, her eyes began to tear. She threw on her white blouse over her skirt and stumbled to him as she pushed Peter aside.

“I didn’t think you were coming Adam…” is all Emily said. Adam could smell the liquor and beer on her breath, bringing him even closer to vomiting.

“What the hell are you doing Adam? Can’t you tell we are busy?” Peter wasn’t drinking heavily tonight. Adam could make out that much. He was buzzed from what he assumed was a few beers. Peter began to walk up to Adam once he had put his shirt back on; he came close enough for Adam to realize that he had put his shirt back on backwards, revealing the white tag below his neckline. The next thing Adam knew, his fist had caught Peter right on the nose. He followed Peter as he fell down and struck him once more in the mouth when he hit the ground.

“ADAM!” Emily had yelled.

James had managed to make his way to the room already and was able to keep Adam from delivering anymore blows to a lethargic Peter. Adam looked down at Peter who was bleeding from his mouth and nose and up to Emily who was sitting on the bed crying. He shoved off James and paced out of the house. Downstairs, he found himself ducking his tears away from the curious crowd of onlookers. His fist and wrist throbbed as he opened the front door and left the party.

He didn’t want to go home this upset. He made his way towards the cliff side where he always went when he was upset. He pushed through the dry shrubs that the group had yet to knock down. He finally made his way to the top and looked up at the dark sky and hills that looked violet in the moonlight. He grabbed his wrist as he fell onto a log near the cliff. He wasn’t there for long when he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder.
Adam jumped at the touch. He hadn’t noticed anyone had walked up here. “I figured I would find you here,” a soft-voice said.

Adam looked up to find Elizabeth’s face. “Were you at the party?”

“Yeah, I was.”

“I’m guessing you know what happened.”

“Well, Peter walked out bleeding all over the place and Emily couldn’t stop crying. I left pretty quickly after that, but I can guess what went down. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

She took a seat next to Adam and put her arms around him.

“Wasn’t prepared for that,” Adam replied, chuckling a little bit.

“Was there something between you and Emily?”

“There was, but there definitely isn’t anymore.”

“You deserve better than that Adam.”

Adam didn’t respond. Her hand had grabbed his and was now holding it tight. He had always felt affectionate towards Elizabeth.

“I wanted to tell you on graduation day, but I never got a chance to say it…” Elizabeth started. “I sort of…like you?”

Adam was caught off-guard and couldn’t help but chuckle at her phrasing. “You like me? Like the third grade kind of like?”

“Shut up Adam. I don’t know how else to say it.”

He noticed the soft blush of her cheeks even in the soft moon light. “Elizabeth…”

“I know. You have feelings for Emily. Everyone knows.”

“Well…that’s news for me.”

“After tonight it’s pretty much confirmed for everyone.”

Adam laughed again. “I guess that’s true.”

“Have you ever had feelings for me?”

“If I am being honest,” Adam started after a few moments, “I have. I just have only seen Emily in that way for a long time.”

Elizabeth smiled and looked away. He looked at the blonde girl who had just confessed to him. He had always been comforted by Elizabeth and they had always had a good time when they were together. They got along well, and Adam couldn’t help but notice how pretty she had grown over the years.

“What if we tried giving us a shot?” Elizabeth asked.

“After everything that happened today? You know about Emily and everything is going to be awkward in the group after today as it is.”

“I don’t really care about that. If they want to make it a big deal let them. It’s completely up to you. I have feelings for you and if you said you have felt something for me…maybe it could work.”

“I don’t want to do that to you. What if it ends up bad for you?” Adam had to fight the urge to just say yes. He wasn’t sure why he wasn’t more against the idea. “I can’t just get together with Elizabeth. I might get hurt in the long run…I’m not even sure what those feelings for her mean,” he thought to himself.

“At least we tried right?”

Adam stood up from the log and walked away from the edge of the cliff. He couldn’t stop smiling at the idea. “Elizabeth, will you be my girlfriend?”

She turned around and smiled. “Will I be your girlfriend? Is this the same guy who made fun of me for saying ‘I like you’ ten minutes ago?”

“Cut me some slack, I’ve never asked this before…” he said putting his arm up behind his head. Before he had a chance to lower it, Elizabeth had made his way to him and leaned her face into his. She left a less than an inch for Adam to travel. He leaned in and coupled his lips to hers. She softly grabbed his swollen hand in hers as they spent the rest of the night at the cliff side, finally leaving when the bright yellow sun had risen.

Part Three

Adam woke up to his phone alarm’s obnoxious disaster siren. The sun was had risen enough to seep through cracks in the curtain right into his eyes. It was a daily reminder of how he much preferred the soft red it emitted in the evening, but in did help him wake up faster. As he turned off his alarm he looked over to his left and was once again blinded by the reflecting sunlight from her blonde hair. He looked away and rolled out of bed.

“Up already?” Elizabeth mumbled. “You were up late last night. It’s only 7:00 in the morning. Come back to bed.”

Adams eyes had finally adjusted to the light enough to look over at her on his way to the closet. “I have a group presentation before lecture today. We are meeting up to put some final touches on it.” Elizabeth rolled back over as Adam finished tucking his shirt into his slacks.

“What time are you done today?”

“I have to go to work afterwards. The hospital has a lot of procedures planned today, so I won’t be home ‘til around six.” Elizabeth tucked her head deeper into her pillow and curled up tighter in the blanket she was now in sole possession of.

“Don’t pout at me,” Adam said as he walked up to her side of the bed. “I don’t want to go any more than you want me to. Besides don’t you work today?”

“Eleven to five. So I’m going to be here all alone for the most of the morning.”

“Ellie, we both know you are just going to sleep it away,” Adam chuckled. “I have to go. Do you want to go out to dinner when I get back from work today?”

“You aren’t getting off that easy. You’ve been gone this entire week. One dinner together on Friday night isn’t going to cut it. You aren’t allowed to do anything work or school related this whole weekend.”

“Oh I’m not allowed?” Adam laughed, catching her playful humor. “Alright, fine. No work or school stuff this weekend.” Adam knew he couldn’t get away with what he was promising. He would just have to stay up after Elizabeth fell asleep and sneak some work in.

“This isn’t going to be like the last time you made this promise. Where you were answering emails throughout the day and staying up late to finish work. You need a break.”

Adam got a little annoyed. Finishing up a Master’s Degree and working nearly full time at the hospital wasn’t exactly a care-free task. He just couldn’t unplug himself the way she was asking. “I’ll try and finish as much as I can today. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish it all and have the entire weekend to spend,” he said as he reached over and kissed her. “I’ll see you tonight alright?”

“You haven’t told me where we are having dinner.”

“I’ll text it to you during the day,” Adam said, tying his tie as he ran out of the door.

***

Adam had yet to fill out the last round of patient updates before he was able to leave for the day. He might have been able to finish everything properly if he would have been able to get to work on time, but he ended up being the last of ten groups to present for a class that went forty-five minutes over-schedule.

“I’m running behind at work. Finishing as fast as I can…be there soon,” he texted Elizabeth, the time stamp read 6:53. He glanced over at the last message he wrote to her: “Let’s meet up at Little Italy at 6:30.” Little Italy was 20 minutes away from him. He hated himself for picking such a distant location, even if it was her favorite restaurant.
His phone immediately buzzed back, “Okay.” she responded. It took ten long minutes for Adam to finish and he wasted no time racing to Little Italy to meet Elizabeth. When he arrived, her water cup was empty and her usual soft smile was nowhere to be found.

“Hey Ellie. Sorry I’m so late,” he said as he found his seat in the crowded restaurant. The low grumble of conversation and small tinks from the silverware filled the air as he took off his coat and checked his watch, now reading 7:27. Almost an hour late. “Have you ordered yet?”

“Adam what took you so long? I have been sitting here for an hour.”

“I couldn’t leave work without updating patients’ files. I was late as it was since my class ran forty-five minutes after it was supposed to.”

“Same old thing then, huh?”

“I’m afraid so,” Adam said, noticing an above average irritability level. “Are you okay?”
She waited a few moments before responding. “No Adam. You seem to be too busy for anything other than school and work lately, not that it’s your fault. I understand what you are trying to do and how much strain it is putting on you. It’s been an issue for a long time now, and it isn’t going to stop any time soon, is it?

“No, it’s not. It isn’t going to slow down or get any easier any time soon,” he said solemnly. “It isn’t fair to you. I know that. I can’t blow off school or work, the only place I can pull time from is from home.”

“Maybe you should be focusing on those then, without distraction. You don’t have the time to be close to anyone right now. I am going to school too, remember? I also work a job. It may not be as demanding as yours, but I make sure to have time whenever you make your own.”

“Elizabeth…” he muttered. The cold tinks of the silverware and grumble of conversation quieted as he listened. They weren’t spending any time together and weren’t as close as they used to be. He had silently come to terms with this long ago. “You are right. I don’t want to drag you along. It’s been tense between us for a while now and I figured this was inevitable. If you aren’t happy where you are, I understand completely if you want to be somewhere else. It’s going to be hard if you do leave, but you do deserve to be happy.” Adam saw the tears trickling down her face. “Don’t think I don’t care about you Adam. We have been together since we graduated high school. Six years now right?”

“I know,” Adam said, feeling a throb in his own throat. “I hope you know I care about you too.”

They managed to leave the restaurant before they lost a hold on their emotions. On the way home they talked more than they had in the last few months. Adam told Elizabeth about new colleagues he had been hanging out around at the hospital and Elizabeth had updated Adam on the newest developments on her co-workers and their complicated and intricate relationships. Elizabeth packed her stuff that night while Adam had left to take a walk around their city. She left early the following morning.

***

“Adam, can you cover the patients on East Wing? No one is over there to check on them,” Dr. Freeman, the Resident Doctor of Adam’s group of interns asked.

Adam had just set down a large stack of files he needed to organize before he took his lunch. Normally, he would have asked if there was someone else to cover it, but since it was Dr. Freeman, he figured he could earn a few points and keep his paid internship safe with a little extra work. “Yeah, no problem. I’ll get right over to it.”

“I appreciate it Adam. You have been doing good work around here.”

“Thanks Doctor,” Adam replied, hiding the disappointment of his lost lunch from his face. The rounds took him around an hour to finish. It was around 1’oclock when he was finally able to take his half hour lunch.

Adam went through his email and responded to a few messages as he walked past the hospital’s parking lots and onto the crosswalk. He was headed to an Indian restaurant he frequented during his lunch hour. As he looked up as he was about to cross the street, a streak of long red hair caught his peripherals. He straightened his gaze toward the red and found himself staring at Emily.

She was dressed in short heels and a black office skirt paired with a white, tucked in blouse. She wore a black cardigan and a lanyard was roped across her neck. A small bag with what looked to be an SLR camera was hung from her left shoulder and her right hand was gripping a small notepad.

Emily didn’t notice Adam, who hadn’t moved from the sidewalk until she was halfway across the street. When she across the sidewalk she ran up to him and hugged him, making sure to not stab him with the long lens of the camera. “Adam!”

“Emily? Wow, it’s been such a long time. I thought you were out of town?”

“I was for a couple years. I was in New York. I finished my degree and went over there to do an internship. I just finished and decided to come back here a couple weeks ago.”

“I don’t even know what you do! Are you a hot shot photographer now or something?” he asked pointing to the large SLR camera.

“I’m actually a Journalist. I’m here covering an event at the hospital in the children’s wing.”

“A Journalist? When did you decide to go into that field?”

“Around halfway through college. I just sort of stumbled into the field and fell in love with it. So what are you doing? You seem to be pretty important yourself,” Emily said as she gave him a nudge across the chest, looking down to his button up shirt, tie, and slacks. “I never took you for a suit and tie kind of guy.”

Adam laughed. “I didn’t expect to be either. I am actually doing a paid internship here while I work on my Master’s Degree. My Undergraduate Degree was in Microbiology so it was a good fit. I am looking to eventually be a medical researcher and writer. I have to look the part.”

“Wow, pretty ambitious career choice you got there.”

“Yeah it eats my time pretty dramatically. It’ll be worth it in the end though I hope.”

“I’m sure it will be. It was for me. I went practically two years without having a weekend to myself. I loved all the experience I got from it though. This new job is almost as demanding.”

“Well hopefully you will have some more time to yourself now that you are back.” Adam lost track of what he was saying. “Are you free this weekend at any time? We should go have dinner.”

His stomach dropped as he realized what he had just suggested. He had almost started to rectify his mistake by suggesting lunch instead when she replied. “Sure, I actually have Friday night free. How about then?”

Adam pulled out his phone to look at his calendar: Friday night 5-10, Meeting with Dr. Freeman and other interns. “Sure, how about at six?”

“Sounds good to me. Here take my number so we can decide where at later on. I actually have to get going though. Make sure you call me and let me know where at!”

She scratched her number on a piece of the notepad, ripped it off, and handed it to Adam. “It was really good to see you!”

“You too,” he said as she ran off towards the hospital. He looked at his watch, 15 minutes left for his lunch. “Worth it,” he smiled to himself.

***

“Wake up Adam. You are going to be late.”

“How is it possible for anyone to wake up earlier than I do,” Adam mumbled as he wrapped a pillow around his head.”

“It’s 6:45, barely earlier than your usual time, plus I have been waking you up at this time for like a month now. Don’t you have to be at your school early?”

“Yeah, but they can wait the fifteen minutes…” An accelerated pillow found its way to Adam head.

“Wake up,” Emily said through squinted eyes, weaponized pillow at the ready.

“Last time we did this you lost.”

“A fluke.”

“Put the pillow down.”

“Then get up. Let’s have coffee before we have to leave.”

“You are leaving early too?”

“I have an early morning event to cover. News doesn’t sleep in.”

Adam propped himself up out of bed and out of the beam of sunlight that was managing to find his eye. “I have to find better curtains,” he thought to himself.

“French Vanilla or Hazelnut?” Emily asked as she sat on top of Adam. Adam grabbed her waist and threw her back into bed. He kept his arms around her so she couldn’t leave. He looked up to Emily’s hair, which was reflecting the sunlight that broke into Adam’s apartment. It wasn’t the obnoxious yellow he couldn’t stand, but a subtle red.

“French Vanilla,” he said as he got up to get dressed. It took him ten minutes to get to the kitchen.

“No World War 2 siren alarm today?”

“I turn it off when you stay over. Your pillows are alarming enough.”

She nudged him on the shoulder as she handed him his coffee. “What time will you be home today?”

“I should be done early today around five. Want to go out to dinner tonight?”

“I have an event to cover this evening at five. It’s sort of an upper class wine party. I have to go to make contacts.”

“So you will be there all night?”

“Probably. You should come with me to it. I could use a date.”

“I don’t know, it sounds like a stiff crowd.”

“You are a trying to be a medical researcher. This is right up your alley.”

Adam laughed at her sarcasm. “Sure, I’ll go. Where at?”

“I’ll text you the address. Finish your coffee so you aren’t late.”

Adam arrived to the address Emily had messaged him at 5:30.

“Hey there cutie,” Emily greeted him as they met up outside. “I’ve already been inside talking to some people.”

“Yeah, sorry about running late. I was stuck dealing with a stubborn patient. Are these people hard to talk to or…?”

“Compared to the other people who will be here you are early so don’t worry about it. Thank you for coming though.”

They walked inside to the party where the first thing that welcomed Adam was the sound of a string quartet. A gentleman took Adam’s coat and a few steps later a glass of wine was offered to the pair of them.

“Thank you,” Adam said as he took the large glass of wine.

“No thanks, I actually don’t drink.” Adam looked over to Emily. It was the first time they had brought up the topic and Emily smiled at Adam’s surprise. Nevertheless, Adam went on to sip his glass of wine throughout the night.

They only stayed for about an hour, long enough for Emily to meet everyone and introduce herself as a new reporter for the newspaper. Luckily, no one at the party was in the medical field, so he was saved from having to actually communicate with anyone for too long. Adam managed to finish his glass right on time and placed the empty glass down as they walked to Adam’s car.

“Did you drive?” Adam asked.

“I took a cab; I figured I could just go to your place again tonight.”

“Yeah, of course. Wait right here, I’ll pull the car up.”

Adam jumped in the car and drove to the sidewalk to pick up Emily.

“You sure you want to drive after the wine?”

“I don’t really feel anything. I should be fine.” Emily didn’t protest it any further.

“I’m happy you are back, Emily.” “I’m glad to be back.”

“You know, your apartment is kind of expensive. You could save money if you found a roommate.”

Emily looked over to him curiously. “Are you suggesting something?” she asked through squinting eyes.

“I think I could use a roommate too. Any ideas?”

“Are you asking me to move in?” Emily grinned.

“I’m saying you could if you wanted too, you don’t have to feel pressured-“

Emily took off her seatbelt, leaned over, and kissed him. “I’d love too.” Adam let out a sigh of relief and looked down to Emily. He hadn’t felt anywhere near this excited when Elizabeth had moved in.

“So you don’t drink anymore?” Adam asked.

“I haven’t since my first year of college.”

“What made you want to stop?”

“I just got focused on other things. There wasn’t really any time to drink with how busy I was keeping myself. I definitely don’t miss it though. When did you pick it up?”

“My last year of undergraduate studies. It’s only ever been wine and champagne.”

“Wine and champagne? Seventeen year old you would cringe!” Emily joked.

Adam smiled. “Seventeen year old me didn’t know the meaning of stress.” Adam looked at Emily who kept a subtle smile on her face. In the next moment, her smile turned to panic.

“Adam!” she screamed as she pointed out of the windshield.

He had let the car swerve into the opposite lane while looking at Emily. They were now staring a diesel head on, just yards away from each other. Adam slammed on the brakes and tried to swerve out of the way.

When Adam woke up the airbags were deployed and every window on the car except for the backside window was shattered. His head was bleeding and his chest throbbed. He looked to his right and Emily was not in her seat. He shoved his door open and ran in front of the car. Emily was lying on the ground to the left of the scene.

She had a large gash along her forehead and was lying on a blanket of shattered glass. Her arm was wrapped unnaturally behind her, motionless. The diesel driver had not suffered any injury and was already checking her neck for a pulse. The look he gave Adam could only mean there wasn’t one. The driver called 911 in a panic as Adam stood unable to move.

He looked down at Emily and watched the blood as it ran across the ground. It was a deep red. The sunset had just begun to go down. The light shadowed across the wreckage and across Emily. The blood, her red hair, and the sunset blended together as the tears started welling up in his eyes. He went down, wrapped his arms around her, screamed, and then cried.

He did not let go of Emily until a police officer pulled him away. He was forced to recall what had happened for the report, and was asked to blow into a breathalyzer. He was halfway to passing the legal driving limit.

A few weeks after the crash he decided to go visit the place him and Emily met. He took her small notepad with quotes and scribbles that were never used, and a picture of them as kids that she had put up in Adam’s apartment. When he finally made it up the hill he walked to the tree they had carved their names into. He put the picture and the notepad there at the bottom of the same tree and walked within a few feet of the edge of the cliff. He looked on as the red sunset cast its final light over the hillside.

Christian Shepherd is a student, writer and journalist working out of the Inland Empire. “The Red Sunset” is his first published fiction short story. He is currently working on a fiction novel that he hopes to see finished by the end of this year. At the completion of his degree, Christian wants to document the unique stories of the residents of the Inland Empire. He has been published in traditional and online newspaper outlets and online e-sports blogs.

Aaron Bagnell

The Byrd of Orson Wells

The Byrd parked his bike and cut the motor in front of an old wreck of a factory on the outskirts of a little town called Orson Wells, CA, just east of the Salton Sea. The town’s population was 58 and falling. There wasn’t even room for him to stretch his wings anymore, but he stayed there anyway.

The chain-linked fence that defined the property did little to set it apart from the encroaching desert. The steel had rusted to the color of oxidized earth; weeds protruding from the ground wound their way through the links until the two were as good as one; gaps along the fence allowed all forms of sinewy creatures to walk and crawl across the barrier with little hindrance, until the factory remains became no more than another piece of a hardened landscape.

He scanned the warehouses and offices and two pillars that were the old smokestacks.  Nothing really looked like what it was, but The Byrd had visited this site enough times to know what everything once had been. His father had died in the spring of 1982 working at this factory and The Byrd was drawn every year to the same spot.

It had once been a nitrogen fixation plant, which took the element from the atmosphere to make nitrates both for agriculture and for war. It was funny how a single substance like that could create or destroy depending on whose hands it was put in, like how an accident might result in a place where these highly virulent compounds were synthesized by men who often didn’t even possess formal educations.

Joseph “Jo” T. Byrd was one of half a dozen men killed in an explosion at the plant that occurred in the early morning hours before general operations commenced. And due to the close proximity of the buildings to each other it turned out it would be difficult to determine where the explosion had originated, so the investigation really went no further. The cause was never determined either. Someone had probably been negligent, but it did no good to go sullying his family’s name now.

The Byrd was born Edmund J. Byrd in November of that same year to the recent widow Martha Marie Byrd. His only inheritance was a few pieces of his daddy’s bike that hadn’t been completely blown to bits with the rest. These had served as the basis for the bike The Byrd rode to this day.

Jo Byrd had worked at the plant for twelve years as a foreman who oversaw the deliveries of workplace essentials, like toilet paper and antibacterial soap and copy paper and coffee creamer. His family, like the other families of the victims, received a small pension that provided five hundred dollars a month to the main beneficiary for the rest of his or her life. It was a pittance, but nobody tried to sue for more. Everybody just wanted to forget it, even though they couldn’t, what with the burnt out husk of the factory visible from their backyards.

It never did get rebuilt. The company that owned it allowed itself to be absorbed by a large energy conglomerate to avoid bankruptcy. In less than six months it had been fully liquidated, its assets sold across the border where cheap Mexican labor kept fertilizer manufacturing tantalizingly profitable. The remains of the factory lay undisturbed, dry-rotting in the desert air. To the old they served as a gruesome memorial, but to the young they were no more than an ash and steel playground. Every few years a group of high school kids would get wasted and sneak on out there to look for ghosts, and one or two would always end up seriously injured and have to be taken to a hospital over in Indio or Palm Desert.

The Byrd had a tender recollection of losing his virginity in one of those half collapsed storage buildings splayed out before him, in a room reeking of ammonia, rolling around on a floor littered with debris, with a girl whose name he wanted so badly to say again. Her family sent him letters from time to time, but he never had the nerve to reply. He chose not to remember the sterile lights and smells in the months that followed their first night together, all the hospital visits that ended with him sobbing at her bedside without any idea how to stop. He did remember the shard of glass that he accidentally rolled onto on that particular occasion of love making. To this day part of it remained stuck in his left ass cheek, reminding him with a little sting.

Taking one last look at the rotting desert, The Byrd started the motor of his bike and headed back for town.

***

The bar was empty except for The Byrd, Scarlett and Noela. Scarlett had a rag in her hand that she constantly ran up and down the counter, trying to get a nice shine out of a surface that was nicked and scratched from over a decade of serving patrons with idle hands, jaded men living in a town with no work and no escape, who didn’t mind carving their frustrations into senseless wood so long as Scarlett wasn’t looking.

The Byrd sat at a table against the far wall with Noela, saying nice things about her hair, how it looked like she must have gotten it done, insisting that she must have gotten it done even after she told him several times that she hadn’t, how it made her look like Meryl Streep. He liked making women feel pretty. He thought it was about time they realized that they were.

Noela, giggled at what The Byrd had just said, forgetting for a moment that she was twenty years his senior. Reaching across the table, she grabbed his hand and squeezed. “Byrdie, be my Valentine.”

“I would, but it’s May.” he said.

“It’s a better time to ask. Before anyone else.”

“There’s no good time.” He pulled his hand away. “I’m no saint and you’re no sick kid.”

“But I’m love sick.” she said.

The Byrd pushed his chair back and rose out of his seat. “Well I’m just sick of this.” He swept his arms around. “All this.”

“Hey, Ed if you don’t like the place you can get out.” Scarlett said as she bustled over to the table to wipe it down.

“Scarlett, you know I like your bar. It’s the only decent thing left here.”

“I wasn’t talking about the bar.” She worked her elbow furiously, trying to polish away years of wear in moments.

“I’ve got nowhere to go.” The Byrd said.

He had everywhere to go. Now that his momma was gone, nothing kept him tied to the town. It was dying anyhow. Give it another decade, wait for all the old timers to pass on, and Orson Wells would cease to exist. It was like the Salton Sea itself, everything that gave it life slowly evaporating away until nothing remained except dust.

Scarlett looked ready to say something as she abandoned her work and threw down her rag, but then the screen door flew in with a clatter, wire mesh fluttering as the door finally caught on the warped wood floor. She sighed and went over to drag it shut.
“It’s getting worse, this wind. I know it, and I’m sure you all can smell it.” The air carried the scent of the Sea, a smell like no other. It wasn’t just the perpetual rot. The Sea smelled like a factory, chemical, industrial, but it was not well ordered, controlled, so maybe it was more like a warfront, mustard gas drifting in every direction, indiscriminately killing. Who knew what long term cancer rates would look like? Asthma already occurred in the town at twice the national rate.

“You know they can smell it in Los Angeles and San Diego now, from time to time I mean.” Noela said, looking through the chicken wire that segmented the front window into a thousand empty stares.

“I don’t smell anything.” The Byrd brushed past Scarlett and pulled back the screen door. Sticking his head through the doorway he surveyed the empty street and all the empty buildings lined along it, waiting for people and things, for motion and light, to fill them. In an hour or so the sun would set and the dark would be absolute. Already the shadows had fully overcome the vacant storefronts. Next would be the bar. The wind threw up dirt, tossed his hair around. He breathed in, heavily. “It’s going to be a good night.”

***

The night settled in quickly. No matter how much light and heat the day brought, the night always stifled these in a jiffy. Without the hot press of living, breathing people, quartered close and snug, just a few feet from each other in their apartments and homes, darkness prevailed in cold, lonely silence.

The Byrd lay on the couch with only the television to light the house. It was a 1987 Higure Brand television with a 17 inch screen. The knob stuck and the clicker was broken so it only came on when he could stand to watch Mexican soap operas. His Spanish was getting pretty good. He understood when Carla called Hector a canalla presumido for cheating on her with their maid, Lucia. Then again, it was pretty clear from the pig noises she made at him.

In one sudden movement The Byrd was sitting up and leaning towards the television screen. Carla had got him thinking about his momma, the way she used to act when she’d walk into a bar filled with at least twenty intoxicated men and be able to handle the situation all right. Nobody ever got fresh with her twice. On the T.V. screen Carla slapped Hector across his face and he fell to his knees in a plea for forgiveness. She slapped him again and then kicked him in his rear as he fled from the room.

When he and his momma received the results of her tests and the doctor told them she had stage four lung cancer she just shrugged and said to him, “There ain’t nothing that ain’t dust or that won’t soon be.”

She died a little over a month later and he buried her using the last five hundred dollar check she ever received.

***

He rode over to Bert’s Place around noon the next day. Bert’s was a store that sold whatever junk you needed, sort of like a general store in the old west. Except the nearly empty shelves never got replenished anymore. Once a thing was gone it was gone for good. So Bert only traded with care. A person had to need something especially bad for Bert to give it away.

The Byrd entered the store without knowing what he needed. He only had this inexact feeling that Bert had something for him. It had occurred to him last night, while thinking about his momma, that the only person he had ever seen her friendly with was this squat old man called Bert. He could only recall a single instance of this happening but it was enough to get him thinking about it since it had happened only a week or so before she died.

He and his momma had been sitting in the shade of their front porch on one of those days when it was hot enough to get a person to risk breathing the outside air. Bert had come rolling up to their driveway in his dusty pickup, gotten out without even closing the door of the cab and walked over to the bed of his truck. “I found it,” he said, his voice trembling like a stalk of Burro-Weed. The Byrd’s momma told him to go fetch Bert a drink, which was her way of telling him to get out of their way, so he went inside and watched them from the window, half concealed behind a drape. His momma jogged down the driveway, clutching her chest in the way he had grown accustomed to seeing her do, all the way to where Bert was standing. He patted her on the shoulder with a big, calloused hand that made her withdraw her own hand from her chest for a moment and place it on top of his. Then they moved over to the rear of the truck, where it became difficult for The Byrd to see much of anything, except the bobbing of Bert’s head as he threw down the tailgate. And his momma had appeared a moment later walking back up the driveway with little arroyos winding through the dirt on her cheeks, hands planted square on her waist and a smile threaded on her lips. When she reached the porch she turned and waved as Bert got back into his pickup and drove off.

The inside of Bert’s place was perhaps even dustier than the desert outside. As he walked over to the counter every step The Byrd made left an imprint on the floor clear enough to read his brand of boot. Bert didn’t see him. He was too busy reading a volume on the carburetors of mid-century vehicles. The Byrd got his attention by ringing a bell placed in clear view on the countertop with a sign scrawled in marker taped in front of it that read Ring for Service!

Bert looked up on the second ring. “Sorry, finishing my sentence,” he said and rose to greet The Byrd. “What do you need?”

“Dunno.” The Byrd looked around the shop. “Not much left.”

“Yeah, well.” Bert moved around the counter to get a better look at The Byrd. “I don’t have much time left either.”

The Byrd leaned against the counter and focused his gaze on Bert so that each man saw the other’s face dead on. “You remember me?”

“Naw.”

“It’s been a few years.” The Byrd said, bringing his face a little closer. The lighting was bad, so he thought it might help. “You knew my momma. Mrs. Martha Byrd.”

There was a pause.

“Yeah, I did.” Bert said.

“I came here for something.”

“You haven’t told me what you need yet.” Bert scratched his head. “Feel free to take a look around but I wasn’t really planning on parting with anything today.”

“I want to see whatever you showed my momma.”

“What’s that?”

“That was the first time in a long time I’d seen her smile or cry.” The Byrd said, edging closer. “It was the last too.”

The two men looked at each other unblinking, each waiting for the other to speak. The Byrd’s hands pushed into the edge of the counter as he leaned back against them, trying to focus on this pressure instead of on the one inside him.

“All right.” Bert led The Byrd down an aisle to a door at the back. It was marked with the same sort of sign as the countertop, except this one read Storage. No Peeking! Bert pulled a key from his pocket, jiggled it into the lock and turned it. Behind the door lay a dark gash that healed into dim shapes as Bert flicked on a single light.

The room had very little in it. There was a ladder and a hose, some old paint cans and not much else. Bert moved into the room and The Byrd followed, hesitant to believe that any of these objects could have had an impact on his momma but curious nonetheless.

“I found this when I was out scavenging in the desert.” Bert said, crouching in front of something The Byrd couldn’t identify. “It happens sometimes, where something that we think is lost comes back to us.”

“What?” The Byrd stooped over next to Bert and peered at what could only be described as a hunk of twisted metal.

“Help me get it into the light.”

The two men grabbed the object and carried it beneath the single overhead bulb. “It’s a motorcycle chassis.” The Byrd only realized this because some of the suspension was still intact.

“Found it almost a mile east of the old plant in a big patch of scrub.” Bert wiped his hand across his brow.

“This is what you showed my momma?”

“Yessir.”

“Wait.” The Byrd said. “I know what this is.”

“Took you long enough.”

“I thought it was destroyed.” The Byrd leaned down and touched it, feeling the cold metal as if checking it for a pulse.

“Nope. The thing rode the pressure wave right up into the sky.”

“What do you want for it?” The Byrd rose and dug his hand deep into his front pocket.
Bert looked straight at him and said, “I tried giving it to your momma but she refused. She said it was enough just to see it one last time.”

***

The Byrd stopped at the bar to say goodbye to Scarlett and Noela. Neither woman could believe that he was actually going. Scarlett chuckled and continued to rub down the bar with her rag. Noela straddled her chair and pouted her lips at him. “I really mean it,” he said.

“Really?” Scarlett stopped wiping for a moment. “No shit?”

The Byrd held up his leather knapsack as proof.

“What?” Noela looked ready to faint.

Scarlett moved over to the cabinet behind her and started rummaging around inside. “I know I saw it… here.” She pulled out a bottle of whiskey and thumped it down on the counter. “This is for you. A going away present,” she said. “It’s good stuff, so you better really be going.”

The Byrd took the bottle and nodded at her.

“Goodbye, Noela.” he called as he walked out the door.

“Byrdie?”

The Byrd walked over to his bike and looked it up and down. He’d asked Bert to bury his daddy’s chassis where he’d found it and Bert had agreed. There would be no marker, no trace. It had gone back to the dust. Now The Byrd only had to put the whiskey in his knapsack and ride off into the desert.

Aaron Bagnell is the son of a librarian who spent his childhood rambling around San Diego, CA. He currently studies Earth Science and Creative Writing at University of California, Berkeley.

James Silberstein

Auspice

The bird will tell his future, most likely what his heart already knows. She’s gone three days now—to town, or to Mary’s, or to some hairy arms—wherever madness goes. But she’ll come back.

A crow caws in the distance, too far to know for sure what it’s trying to tell him, so he walks the mile and a half to check the mailbox. His footsteps crunch the frozen gravel—the sound, dependable company. The cold mountain air helps him forget. For now, he can pretend the cold is only on the outside. He opens the mailbox to find it empty, except for the rust.

Mistletoe thrives in the stand of oaks across the highway. “Bloodsuckers,” he spits. Whenever he sees the parasite, he tries to cut it out with the chainsaw. But it’s been too long too late for those scrubs. If left after the kissing, mistletoe kills the tree.

Caw

He spots the black feathers and notes the direction, northeast—the crow perched among the ravaged oaks. He knows the time but checks the Omega Seamaster on his wrist anyway, finding comfort in the most reliable thing his father ever gave him. With this data—time, direction, and type of caw—he knows what crow is saying: A woman will come.

Caw: Later, her pickup will raise dust.

He’ll go to the truck to meet her, but he’ll wait for her to open her own door.

“I’m sorry,” she’ll say.

“I know,” he’ll say, not done believing her.

He’ll invite her inside, take her into his arms, and smell her for evidence, the soap not strong enough to cover the sweat from the long drive and the truck’s heater, but enough to wash away any other sins he wouldn’t want to know about anyway. She won’t wear perfume, like a dare to take her as she is.

“You’ve been chopping wood,” she’ll say, removing flecks from his hair.

“The splitter is broken. I’ll go get a new hydraulic line, tomorrow.”

“Maybe it can wait. Maybe we can stay in.”

“Maybe.”

“It’ll be cold tomorrow.”

“It will.”

“Yes,” she’ll say.

“I better take a shower, since I don’t smell as nice as you.”

“No, I like it.” She’ll move to him.

He’ll pull her in, tighter than he should, both of them trying to protect whatever tenderness they have left. They’ll barely make it to the bed, her hands tearing at his flannel, pine splinters in its fibers. He’ll feel the sticky of pitch between his hands and her skin. Her dress too thin for this weather, even inside by the stove, restraint will give way to heat, yield to fire, until they burn into that moment.

“Soha,” she’ll whisper, an inside joke from the first time they made love.

“Soha,” he’ll repeat after her.

They’ll lie quiet awhile.

“Did the birds tell you I was coming back?”

“They did.”

“How come I never met that old woman?”

“You did your own laundry.”

“I couldn’t afford to pay an old Tibetan witch to wash my undies.”

“She wasn’t very expensive.”

“Not everybody’s daddy leaves them enough money to—”

He’ll interrupt her, “Let’s not fight.”

“I’m not fighting.” Her eyes will widen.

Trying to reconcile, he’ll say, “Besides, she said she was repaying a kindness from a past life.”

“So that’s why she taught you to talk to birds, why she transmitted the ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ja-ka…”

“Kakajarita Sutra. Please don’t mock.”

“I’m not mocking. Remember I went to Dharamasla looking for moksha too.”

“And you found me.”

“It was you seduced me with all those big Sanskrit words.”

“You said you were my yogini,” he’ll say, remembering how her darkness brightened only when he held her.

“You should have known I was a crazy dakini,” she’ll say, and he’ll read the sorrow in her eyes.

“Maybe it’s not too late to fulfill our bodhisattva vows.”

“Maybe.” She’ll nestle in to him and they’ll fall asleep.

He’ll dream of Dhauladhar, the snow-capped range rising out of the Kangra Valley, once a symbol for what he thought he wanted—a far-out place to practice the meaning of the words he learned, karuna, shunyata, mahamudra.

For a while they’ll sleep soundly on the six acre California retreat, nestled at tree line among the Manzanita and mourning doves.

But Crow knows the difference between dream and reality. After being eaten by its shadow, the bird lost time—present, same as past, same as future. Crow knows what they’re capable of, always has, always will.

Caw: He’ll wake to hear her tearing up the closet for a lost glove, karmas and kleshas the conditions for her crazy.

He’ll get out of bed to shower. When he’s done, she’ll still be ransacking the closet.

Knowing she won’t stop until he says something, he’ll ask her to pass him a clean pair of pants.

“You never understand,” she’ll say.

“But I do.”

“Stop it! Stop saying that. You never let me feel the way I do.” She’ll have stuffed away the dress and be wearing his shirt, too big for her, making her furious action seem inconsequential, comical.

“You’re too busy telling me ‘I don’t understand’ to see how I always let you feel however you want.”

“I’m so tired of this.” She’ll leave the closet, strewing clothes behind her.

He’ll follow her. “You never give it a chance.”

“It’s not working.”

“You have no faith.”

“You don’t believe in me.”

“We should sit.” He’ll wave a hand toward the cushions on the floor before the hearth.

“I don’t want to.”

“Come here.”

“No.”

“It’s not too late to practice,” he’ll hiss through a clenched jaw.

“Means nothing.”

“You’re wrong.” He’ll reach for her.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Stop.”

“You don’t want me here.”

“Just stop it.” He’ll grab her.

“You’ve said it before—you wish I would leave.”

“Please,” he’ll say trying to soothe but merely agitating her more.

“Let go!” she’ll say, pushing, clawing.

Not sure whether to tighten or release, he’ll do both—one hand opening as the other stays tight around her wrist. She’ll fall to the floor. He won’t let go as she kicks.

The two will scream, never to be doves.

Shunyata means the essence of everything and Mahakaruna means great compassion. And the only thing he’s learned out here is how to listen to birds. The black wings flap but refuse to fly.

Seeing no other way, he closes the mailbox and walks back to the events he knows will come. His heart the kind of thing only a crow would eat.

James Silberstein writes and teaches in southern California. His grandparents owned and operated the Idyllwild Dairy in the 40s before settling Baldy Mountain Ranch off Highway 74 just before the turn to Pine-to-Palms. In her 90s, his grandmother still operates the ranch. It is a place of great inspiration for him.

Richard Luftig

Fishing for Pumpkinseeds

Chuck-E-Cheese was created for guys like me. Divorced men who see their kids on weekends. Men with children who as they get older don’t want to leave their friends in order to spend boring time with their fathers.

In my case Seth is six, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Kathryn and I have been divorced since he was three, that he is more like his mother than me. I’m an outdoor guy; I work as a line repairer for a cable company. An office job would drive me crazy. I hunt and fish—typical of a guy raised in northern California.

It’s like Seth was dropped to the wrong house by the stork. He stays indoors, playing videogames or doing God-knows-what on the computer, although Kathryn says she monitors where he goes on the web. He was born with lazy eye and has worn glasses since he was two. Maybe that’s what makes him hesitant to play outside. Yes, I know you’re supposed to accept your child unconditionally and really I try, but Seth has to know the rough-and-tumble kid I’d like him to be. I’ve tried hard to hide those feelings and be supportive. But maybe I haven’t tried hard enough.

Which is how I came up with the idea. I’d get permission from Kathryn to get Seth for the weekend and we’d spend time in some remote cabin on a lake. We’d take a boat out for a day of fishing. It would get us out of the video game-for-prizes pizza rut. And I guess far in the recesses of my mind, I hoped that getting Seth out of the city would help him develop an interest in the outdoors.

Of course, there was one gigantic, immovable obstacle to my plan. I had to talk Kathryn into letting him go.

I don’t want to make my ex sound like a witch. She’s a good mother. But she’s never let things go since the divorce. In a way I can’t blame her—I was having an affair with Lisa, and Kathryn found out about it by looking at my text messages. All hell broke loose. But I guess what really sealed it was when I refused to break it off with Lisa or go to counseling. I just gave up on the marriage. You know what they say about pissing off scorned women and Kathryn was scorned squared. Its great living in California: got half of everything, kept the house, took me to the cleaners in alimony and child support and tried to get full custody of Seth. At least the judge didn’t give in to her on that.

So, I swallowed hard and called to see if I could have Seth for the weekend. Let’s just say my worries were well founded.

“You want to take him where and for how long,” she literary hissed through the phone line.

“To a lake cabin in the mountains,” I said. “For the weekend.”

“You only have custodial rights for Sundays.”

“I’m aware of that,” I said. “I’m asking a favor.”

“Hell, you can’t even manage one day. Seth is all upset when you bring him home.”

Damn her, she was up to her old tricks, twisting everything against me. “That’s not fair. You know as well as I that Seth is obsessed about winning some big stuffed animal at the video parlor that’s going to cost me three-hundred dollars’ worth of prize tickets. I’m a good father.”

“Yeah, father-of-the year,” she said. “Except for the part about walking out when he was three.”

“That’s a long time ago. People change. I changed. Things move on.”

“Is your tramp going to be with you? I don’t need my son listening to sex orgies coming from the other bedroom.”

I wanted to reach through my cell phone and throttle her. “God damn it, Kathryn. Lisa is no tramp. I’m tired of you making cracks every time you and I talk.”

“She has everything to do with everything. She’s the person who broke us up.”

This wasn’t going well. “It’s just going to be Seth, me and the fish.”

I added a word I hadn’t used with her much since the divorce. “Please.”

There was a long silence on her end of the line. “Fine. You can pick him up Friday after school.”

She hung up before I was able to say thanks.

***

Like usual, I was late picking up Seth. I took a half-day of vacation time but even so I ran behind. I knew the cabin was furnished so I didn’t worry about bedding or camping gear, but I went to the toy store and bought some jigsaw puzzles and board games that I thought might interest him. Then I spent a long time in the grocery trying to buy foods that he might enjoy. I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t have a clue what my son liked. I settled on frozen pizza, canned ravioli, Count Chocula cereal and hoped for the best.
It was after five when I pulled into the driveway. Kathryn was pissed. I wasn’t much happier. We were facing a three-hour drive, much of it in the dark up a winding road. I figured Seth was tired after a full day of school and wondered how well he would sit for the long ride to the cabin.

He was in the hallway when Kathryn let me in, buried under a pillow, blanket and the IPad that his mother had bought him for Christmas over my objections. I was always amazed over how small and thin he was, now tiny under the pile of objects he was holding in front of him.

“I bent down and found an open spot on his forehead to give him a kiss. “Hi sport, ready for our big trip?”

“Like usual, you’re late,” Kathryn said, in a stage whisper. “He’s been waiting like this for over an hour.”

“Sorry I’m late, big guy. But you look ready to roll. Let’s get started. We have a long drive ahead of us.”

He handed me his things. “Seth, they have blankets and pillows at the cabin. You don’t need to take these.”

“He likes his own stuff,” Kathryn said. “It makes him more comfortable. He’s not used to sleeping in strange places.”

I looked at his IPad. “Son, I’m afraid this won’t work at the cabin. They don’t have internet where we’re going.”

He looked confused. “What are we going to do then?”

“We’ll be fine. We’ll fish and hike during the day. At night we’ll do a puzzle, play some games. And I brought marshmallows and hot dogs to roast over a campfire. It’ll be fun.”

He seemed unconvinced, and to tell the truth, I was beginning to lose confidence as well. I figured that once he tried it, Seth would become as enthusiastic about the outdoors as myself. But what if he wasn’t? This trip could turn out to be a disaster.

Kathryn handed me a suitcase as well as his sunhat and sunscreen. I was beginning to feel like a Sherpa in the Himalayans.

“I’m letting him go on two conditions. First, he wears a life jacket anytime he’s even near the water. It was on the news about some kid who drowned up there. Second, you call me at every day to let me know how he’s doing.”

I nodded.

“Phil, listen to me,” she said. “I’m not kidding. If I don’t hear from you I’m going up to get him myself.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call you first thing tomorrow morning. I promise, we’ll be fine.”
I wished my feelings agreed with my words.

***

Seth fell asleep thirty minutes after we started. That was all right with me because I didn’t have the skills of keeping a six-year-old occupied on a three-hour ride. Plus, soon after nightfall a thick, gray fog descended, cutting visibility to zero. I strained to see the yellow double line separating traffic and the white one on the shoulder so I wouldn’t drive into the mountain on some turns or off on the others.

Sometimes, when I was on a straightaway, I stole a glance in the rear-view mirror at Seth. He looked so small, almost delicate, asleep in the car seat, holding his pillow and blanket. I don’t know why but he was wearing the floppy sunhat that Kathryn had told him to put on. It was just like him to take her instructions literally. I thought how I had failed him. I wondered what Kathryn had told him about why I left. The marriage had been rocky from the start but the rules had changed the minute he was born. Did I owe more than I had put in? Should I have stayed no matter what? And how much pressure was I putting on my son to be like me? I refocused my attention to my driving in this all-encompassing fog and wondered if this whole trip was a mistake.

We finally pulled into the gravel drive after ten. Seth, bless him, was still sleeping soundly. I was exhausted. I carried him inside and was instantly hit with the musty smell. I cursed. This was going to bad for his allergies.

I staggered from room to room trying to find lamps. Half the bulbs were burned out or missing. Also, the place was freezing. I found a bedroom that had lights and decided that it was Seth’s room. I tucked him in, thankful now that he had brought his blanket from home.

I found the furnace. It was off. Damn, this owner had wasted no effort on my comfort, But wasn’t this what I hoped for, a weekend in the wild bonding with my son? I thought wistfully of a Holiday Inn with a heated pool. Maybe I was getting old.

Luckily, there were matches nearby. This was hopeful—at least the furnace probably worked. I lit the pilot, and it caught.

I cranked up the thermostat to stun and collapsed on the bed in the other bedroom.

***

Morning came cold but clear. Mist lifted off the lake in white tufts. I could see the rowboat tied up at the dock at the bottom of the hill. I sipped the steaming, black coffee from the vintage mug I found in the cupboard. I felt good and the day was cooperating.

Things were going to work out.

I woke up Seth and he wandered sleepy-eyed into the kitchen. “Geez, it’s early Dad,” he complained. “Mom lets me sleep as late as I want on Saturdays.”

I smiled, “Sorry sport. Fish get up early. So do fishermen. We have to get out there before it gets too hot. He sat down at the table. “So, what do you want for breakfast?”

He looked up. “Mom makes me waffles on Saturday.”

I felt a surge of panic. New problems. “Sorry, big guy. Nobody told me. I can make you scrambled eggs.”

“Yuck, I hate eggs.”

I thought for a moment. “How about cereal that turns the milk into chocolate milk?”

He brightened. “I can have chocolate for breakfast?” He hesitated. “Mom won’t allow me to eat that.”

“Then we won’t tell her. It will be our little secret.”

Seth smiled “Deal!”

We were all decked out and ready to go to the boat when I remembered that I promised Kathryn I’d call. The last thing I needed was her sending up the Mounted Police to haul Seth back to the city.

I turned on my cell phone and got the “out of coverage” message. That was something I hadn’t considered when I booked the place.

I searched every room for a land phone. There was none. Jesus, who rents a cabin without a phone?

I tried to remember if we passed any payphones last night. Maybe there was one at the camp store but that was on the other side of the lake. I didn’t want to waste an hour of prime fishing time looking for a phone and then arguing with Kathryn. Maybe one of the neighboring cabins had a phone. It was worth a shot.

I got lucky on the second try. The lady who lived there let me make the call. I almost couldn’t breathe from the cigarette smoke that permeated the place.

“Thanks,” I said, rejoining her on the porch. She was probably in her forties but looked older from the smoking. She was dressed in a red robe with blue sneakers. I wondered if she was a nut case or some sort of survivalist although in my mind the two weren’t mutually exclusive.

“No problem”, she said. “Looks like you and your boy are going fishing.”

I really didn’t feel like hanging around talking about the details of my life, especially if the fish were biting. “Trying to,” I said. “But I had to make that call.”

“Just the two of you then?”

I wondered what she was getting at but wanted to avoid further small talk at all costs.

“Yeah, sort of. Anyway, we need to get going while the fish are still biting.”

She rummaged through her robe pockets. I thought she might be hunting for a cigarette but she took out a newspaper clipping instead. “You make sure he wears a life jacket. One dead kid is enough.”

“A dead kid,” I repeated dully.

She handed me the clipping. “Yeah, three weeks ago. Some eleven year old boy takes his father’s boat late at night for a joy ride, the next day they find the boat floating empty in the lake. They’ve been dragging the bottom for the body, but as you can see, this is one big-assed piece of water that drops off into the dam. Kid can be anywhere.”

That must have been the kid that Kathryn had heard about on the news. I hope Seth hadn’t heard about this. He was wary of the water as it was. I didn’t him scared about the fishing trip even before it had begun

She took back the clipping and put it in her cavernous robe. “So, just a word to the wise; this lake can be more dangerous than it looks.”

I loaded up the rowboat with rods, reels, worms, every sort of lure imaginable to man. I also made sure to pack important survival provisions: soft drinks, Goldfish crackers, Gummy Bears and Little Debbie cakes. I figured if we didn’t catch any fish, I could still keep Seth entertained with the junk food. I’d deal with Kathryn’s wrath later.

But I couldn’t get the drowned boy out of my mind. He was eleven—Seth would be that age and it wouldn’t be that long in the future. Why did he take the boat? Did he have a fight with his father? Maybe he was estranged like I felt myself from my own son. I looked at Seth in the back of the boat. He was absorbed in dipping a twig in the water, watching it make small ripples and waves as I rowed. In his bulky life jacket he looked like an orange marshmallow.

I tried to push those thoughts away by rowing harder and faster. Now, more than ever, I wanted Seth to catch a fish, have a good time, and tell his mother about the special time he enjoyed with his father.

I found a small indentation in a cove that looked promising. The bank had a dead, rotten log laying in the water about two feet from shore. On both sides of the log, duckweed sprouted. All in all, a perfect hiding place for panfish.

I took the oars out of the water and rested them in the oarlocks. “This is perfect,” I said.

“Perfect for what?” Seth said

I thought he was joking. “Perfect for fish, silly. What do you think we’re out here for, elephants?”

As soon as I said it, I knew I had put my foot in my mouth. Was he serious? Had he forgotten what we were out here for or didn’t he care? It made me realize again how little I knew about what made him tick.

“What kind of fish are we looking for?” His voice was in a whisper as if he was afraid to ask anything stupid again.

“Pumpkinseeds,” I said, taking out his rod.

“Pumpkinseeds come from pumpkins not from the lake. Anybody knows that.”

“No, pumpkinseed is the name for a type of fish.”

“Why?”

“Did you ever carve out a Halloween pumpkin?”

Seth nodded. “Well,” I said, “they look like the seeds inside a pumpkin, fat and round.”

He still looked confused so I took one of the Goldfish crackers from the box. “Sort of like these,” I said.

“And are we going to catch them?”

I baited his hook and cast the line near the fallen log. “If you’re a good fisherman and do as I say.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Well,” I said, “most importantly you have to sit very still and be very quiet.”

He nodded gravely. “What else?”

“Do you see that red and white long thing sticking halfway out of the water? That’s called a bobber. If it starts moving fast up and down it means you have a fish. When that happens you reel in your line as quick as you can.”

I pointed to his seat for emphasis. “But until then you have to sit very still and no talking. You have to be patient. Okay?”

I would have had better luck telling a kitten not to chase a ball of yarn. Seth was up and down. When he wasn’t poking the tip of his rod in the water trying, as he said, to make the fish come closer, he was pulling on the line to make the bobber jump and reeling in the hook. I tried to remain calm and supportive but found myself more annoyed every time he did it which was every two minutes.”

Damn it, Seth,” I yelled, “You’re never going to catch a fish this way and will end up turning the whole boat over. If you can’t do like I say you’re never going to make a good fisherman.”

As soon as I said it, I wanted to hook myself in the mouth. Nice going, asshole, I thought. This is exactly what you didn’t want to happen.

Seth looked down at his feet. “Sorry, Dad. Maybe we should just give up.”

My mind raced, trying to save the situation. This day, this weekend, maybe the relationship with my son, seemed to be spiraling into the toilet. “Tell you what, why don’t you try casting the line. Then when you catch the fish, it will be really yours.”

He looked up, eyes wide. “Really?”

I knew I was taking a big risk but I had to do something. “Sure,” I said, trying to sound confident. “Just do it gently. You want to have your hook fall in front of that big log.”

I demonstrated with my rod. “Pretend that you’re tossing an egg so softly that the egg won’t break.”

Seth imitated how I held my rod but instantly, I could see disaster unfolding. Even before I could scream “no!” he brought the reel all the way behind his ear and let fly with a cast more appropriate for a deep-sea fisherman. Within seconds his tackle was past the fallen log and a good six feet up into a huge oak tree standing in the water a few yards from the embankment.

“Shit,” I hissed. “Now look what you’ve done. I told you to cast softly. What were you thinking about?”

He started to cry. “I want to go home,” he said.

The day had all turned to ash. I sat there totally lost, not sure what to do.

I looked up into the oak and tried to spot his line. I could see where it had gone in but the hook disappeared in its thick foliage. Almost any other time I would have simply cut the line and set up new split-shot, bobber and hook. But I thought I could dislodge the rigging from the tree. I knew it made no sense, but I believed that if I could save his tackle I could save the day.

I pulled in Seth’s line and that drew me closer to the tree. When the bow of the boat was against the fallen log I stood up and followed his line into the leaves.

I parted the branches. I could see now that Seth’s line had actually made it through the tree and was resting in the water about six inches from shore. All I had to do was guide his line back through the tree and out the other side to the boat, difficult but not impossible.

As I struggled to guide the tackle through the leaves something moved along the shore.

It was definitely an animal of some sort, maybe a large dog or a deer.

But something, I couldn’t make out what, made me reject both those theories. I struggled to see better. Then it hit me, the thing was upright and looking right back at me.

The thought struck me like some message from God that those evangelists on television always talk about. The dead boy.

I closed my eyes to clear my vision. When I reopened them the object was gone.

Nothing but tree, leaves and more leaves all along the embankment. I watched for a full twenty seconds but there was nothing.

I remembered Seth in the boat, and pulled his line up over the bank and into the tree. It felt heavier than usual but I figured there were dead leaves or some small branches attached to the hook.

I guided the line almost completely out. Then I saw it. A pumpkinseed. A large, fat, full panfish.

I brought the line into the boat. “Seth, look at this. You caught a tree fish.”

“I did?”

I laughed. “Yes, you did. You caught the first tree fish in recorded history.”

He stared at the fish. “What do we do now?”

“Well, I said, “first we take the hook out. Then we take a picture to show your mother.”

There was a silence. He seemed to be thinking. “Will the fish die?”

“If he stays out of the water,” I said. “But that’s what fishing is all about. We catch it and eat it for dinner.”

Seth didn’t hesitate for a second. “I don’t want him to die.”

I looked at the fish and then back to Seth. There were a lot of things going on here and I didn’t understand all of them. But I did know, maybe for the first time in a very long while, that how I responded was going to go a long way in defining my relationship with my son.

“I don’t want him to die either. Let’s put him back in the water and hope he has a full, long life.” I unhooked the fish as gently as I could and released it back into the lake.

I turned back to Seth and opened my arms. “Come here.”

“You told me not to get up.”

I embraced him tightly. “Just this once let’s break the rules.”

“You don’t like fishing very much, do you?” I asked. He shook his head.

“Neither do I. Not anymore. Tell you what? Would you like to take the boat back to shore and then drive somewhere and have a big pizza?”

He smiled. “And play video games?”

“And play video games,” I said. “After that, maybe we can watch a movie.”

He seemed to relax for the first time since the weekend began. I moved to the middle seat facing the shore and took up the oars.

But first I peered one last time into the woods where I had seen the strange figure.

There was still nothing there.

I began to row. I didn’t know what was on that shore. Maybe it was something, maybe it was nothing. I would never know.

Whatever it was, I was grateful.

“Fishing for Pumpkinseeds” originally appeared in The Literary Yard.

Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in Pomona, California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature and a semi finalist for the Emily Dickinson Society Award for Poetry. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines including Bloodroot, Front Porch Review, Silkscreen Literary Review, and Pulse Literary Magazine. One of his published short stories was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize.

Chad Greene

Oasis

Somewhere on the 62, we hit a rough patch and missed our exit.

We were driving along the northern edge of Joshua Tree National Park, searching for whatever dusty trail corresponded to the red line on the official map and guide labeled “Canyon Road.” As usual, Annie was the one behind the wheel; I, the one behind the map.

“Shit,” I said, squinting at a faded street sign receding rapidly in the rearview mirror. “That’s it.”

“Should I turn around?” Annie asked.

“Well, that might be quicker than driving around the entire world in order to get back there again,” I snapped.

Even in retrospect, it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when the tone of our ceaseless exchange of wry wisecracks had shifted from playful to … what? “Hurtful,” maybe?

No, that’s not quite right. Shit. I hate not having the right words. It’s frustrating. Like all those damn wildflowers Annie had been photographing since we paid our ten bucks at the Cottonwood Spring Visitor Center earlier that morning.

The “rainy season” that passes for winter here had lived up to it’s name for once, soaking the sandy soil with more than 35 inches and giving the region’s meteorologists – vestigial relicts of some archetypal television template from “back east” – something to actually talk about on the evening news. It was from one of them, a guy who apparently saw no irony in adopting the stage surname of “Rains” when his job typically consisted of repeating the words “67 and sunny” over and over and over again, that we had heard about the resulting wildflower bloom in the desert.

Annie isn’t one to bide her time. The next morning, a Saturday, we were lurching our way along the two-lane road that winds through Joshua Tree – Annie skidding to a unannounced stop on the gravel shoulder whenever she spied so much as a single bloom. Looking down as she fiddled with the settings of our new digital camera, she would charge headlong towards the flowering … whatever it was, oblivious to the spines protruding from the cactuses clustered around it.

“Ooh, what’s this one?” she asked, dropping into a squat next to a suspiciously lived-in-looking hole to snap a close-up of a white blossom drooping under the midday sun.

“I can’t be sure, of course, but from here it looks like a … flower,” I said.

“Right,” Annie sighed. “But what kind of flower, Hal?”

“A white flower.”

“Jackass.” Without standing up, she twisted her body backward to glare at me. As she turned, the rubber treads of her sneakers snapped a few flecks of gravel into the air.

“What?”

“I was just asking a question, Hal. You don’t have to be a smartass about it.”

“Well, how am I supposed to know what kind of flower it is?”

“You know everything. You’re, like, the master of useless trivia.”

“Well, I guess the names of flowering desert plants aren’t ‘useless trivia,’” I said.

“Because if they were, then you’d know, right?”

“Right.”

I’m a writer, a newspaper reporter by trade, so not having the right words to describe things unsettles me. I had barely developed the vocabulary for Minneapolis when we moved to Southern California because Annie was admitted to a master’s program in industrial/organizational psychology at Cal State Long Beach. Suddenly, I had to start from scratch again: the names of neighborhoods, of trees, of freeways … of flowers.
Most frustrating of all, however, was the fact that I didn’t have the words to describe what was happening to our marriage.

* * *

Underwear, I had finally decided, it was all about the underwear.

All you needed to know about the state of a man’s relationship, I had come to believe, could be divined from the way he handles his lady’s unmentionables at the laundromat.

Does the guy break out in a dopey grin as he folds those black silk panties, hold them gingerly with only the thumb and forefinger of each hand like he still can’t quite believe he’s allowed to touch them? Or does he wad up the cream-colored thong with one hand and toss it carelessly into the hamper?

Staring at the portion of Annie’s thong that peeked out above the waistband of her shorts as she hiked a few paces ahead of me on the rapidly ascending trail, I thought back to the other day in the laundromat, and decided that my own underwear-handling technique was drifting inexorably closer to the latter than the former.

At the crown of the rocky ridge, Annie and I paused for a moment to gulp lungfuls of the thinning desert air. I held out my hand. She looked at if for a moment, as if considering my wordless request, then passed me the plastic water bottle. As I tipped my head back to take a swig, Annie shielded her eyes with a freckled hand and scanned the valley below. The improbably verdant fronds of the “49 Palms” from which the oasis that was our destination took its name were, for the first time, visible to the east.

“Christ,” she said. “How much farther do we need to go? I mean, you don’t seem that into it, and … What the fuck?”

I choked on a mouthful of water. “What? What?” I spluttered.

“Those people down there,” Annie said, pointing to a group of hikers clustered around a large granite boulder several hundred feet down the other side of the ridge. “What are they doing?”

I squinted.

“Are those … sticks?” I asked, gesturing at the long, thin objects two of the people brandished.

With Annie leading the way, we scrambled down the trail to investigate, our already-caked sneakers stirring up clouds of dust that stuck to our sweaty calves and shins. As we approached, a bearded man – who was, indeed, grasping a gnarled branch – held up his hand, palm flat out in the universal sign for “stop.”

“Don’t you see ’im?” the man asked, nodding toward the rock around which he and his trio of companions had established a loose perimeter. “Big sonnuvabitch, good four feet long.”

Annie crouched down for a better look into the shadows below the boulder, but kept her distance.

“Hal,” she hissed, unbuttoning the back pocket of her shorts to retrieve the camera. “Look.”

The rattler – the first Annie and I had stumbled across during our frequent ramblings through California’s national parks – was coiled underneath that rock. As my wife scuttled around in search of the best camera angle, the rattlesnake and I engaged in a staring contest. I blinked first.

Looking up, I realized that I was only inches away from the source of the heady aroma of jasmine I had mistakenly attributed to one of the shrubs sprouting along the trail: a pair of shapely legs glistening with scented lotion. My eyes became instantly entranced by the way the taut calf muscles of the bearded man’s lady friend seemed poised on the edge of flight, shifting subtly beneath her tanned skin.

The first couple of years with Annie, I had assiduously avoided checking out other women. Those laughing brown eyes above her lightly freckled cheeks, the dirty blonde hair highlighted by hours in the sun – they had been more than enough for me. As things had begun to cool between us, however, I caught myself looking more and more.

Now, from the way the bearded man was glaring at me, it seemed as if he had caught me, too.

“You folks best move along,” he said. “My buddy and I here, we’re gonna try and pry that rattler out from under there. We were almost on top of ’im before we could hear the warning.

“That’s why it’s important,” he observed, using his stick to trace an idle circle in the dust that reminded me instantly of the white-gold wedding band I wore on my left hand, “not to stray from the path.”

I reddened involuntarily.

* * *

We continued our trek toward the 49 Palms Oasis with me in the lead, for once, as Annie was squinting down at the LCD display on the back of the camera, trying to adjust the lighting on the shots she had taken of the rattlesnake.

Although I hadn’t been able to find the words to describe exactly what was “off” in our relationship, the way I felt at that exact moment was easy enough to name: “protective.”

I could see clearly now, in a way I hadn’t prior to our encounter with the sidewinder, that the path in front of us was neither straight nor easy, that almost all of the rough-hewn rocks that defined its edges cast shadows large enough to conceal danger. The rest of the way to the oasis, I insisted on scouting ahead, on checking under each one before letting Annie saunter past, certain for the first time in a long time that, no matter how far the distance between us had grown in the past few months, I could bridge it instantaneously if I needed to throw myself between her and danger.

I began tugging at my ring with the thumb and forefinger of my opposite hand, which is a nervous habit I’d developed in the three years since our wedding, but it wouldn’t budge. As was often the case when hiking, the swinging of my arms had caused the blood to pool in my hands, swelling my fingers. And, suddenly, it seemed right that a wedding band wouldn’t be something that you could just pull off and on whenever you felt like it.

* * *

“I’d suck it out, you know,” I blurted.

“Suck what?” she asked. “The life? Out our marriage?”

“No,” I said, genuinely hurt. I stopped, turned to face her. She kept walking. I began to backpedal. “The poison. Out of the wound, if you were bitten by a snake.”

“Wait a minute. Suck the poison out? Aren’t you supposed to pee on me?”

“What? No! That would be if you got stung by a jellyfish. But I’d do that, too.”

“My hero.” She clasped her hands over her heart and heaved a melodramatic sigh.

“I’m just saying I would do it, is all. Whatever it would take to save us … I mean, you. To save you.”

“Smooth, Hal.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I’m a writer, not a speaker.”

Annie opened her mouth to say something else, but nothing came out. Instead her eyes widened, and she stared straight ahead.

I hadn’t heard a rattle, but I tensed my legs in preparation for a desperate dive. As my toes pivoted in the loose gravel, however, I saw that it wasn’t danger that had stopped Annie dead in her tracks, but beauty. The 49 Palms Oasis had come into view around the last bend in the trail.

* * *

There may not have been exactly 49, but that looked about right. A slow but steady trickle of water down the face of a granite crag had, over the decades, created a series of shallow pools on the terraced shelves below. Around their edges stood thick clusters of date palms, some of which had been recently charred – maybe by a lightning strike, maybe by an illegal campfire. But they stood there still, in all their magnificent improbability, with nothing else but high-desert scrub for miles around.

Who knew how the seeds had gotten there originally? Tossed over the shoulder of some litterbug hiking along the trail; crapped out of some buzzard soaring over the mountains. It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter at all.

The first step was a doozy, about four feet straight down. I slid over the edge, then reached back up and grasped Annie just above each hip. As I eased her to the ground, she braced her arms against the trapezius muscles to the sides of my neck, and when her brown eyes came level with my hazel ones, Annie smiled at me in a way she hadn’t for weeks, maybe months.

Without speaking a word, we knelt at the edge of the nearest pool and used the surprisingly clear water to wash some of the dirt from our hands and faces.

* * *

We sat side-by-side on a flat rock, taking in the beauty of our surroundings. And, at that moment, some words came to me at last. Our love, I saw, had been like something beautiful blooming in the middle of the desert: a rare occurrence made possible only by a uncommon combination of favorable conditions in an otherwise arid environment. I wasn’t yet sure if it would wilt quickly away in the harsh sun like that white flower, or withstand a sustained fiery embrace like those palm trees. But I knew that it had been beautiful once, and might well be again one day.

“I’m glad we came this far, Hal,” Annie said. “I’m glad we didn’t give up.”

“Me, too,” I said, reaching for her hand. “Me, too.”

A graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, Chad Greene is an assistant professor of English at Cerritos College. Whenever he isn’t planning lessons or grading papers, he is attempting to put together a novel-in-stories tentatively titled Trips and Falls.

Ryan Garcia

Rather Than Making You Go To School

You look over to your baby brother to make sure that he hasn’t lost his grip on his bottle. Your mother paces from room to room, throwing blouses and shoes every which way. She hopes that the interview promises her the job, the one she’s been telling you about for weeks. The job she’s talked about so much and with such passion that you begin to think that prepping and pounding out masa for a local panaderia is the best thing you can do in America.

Your brother, mijo, she says.

You look over to Miguel. He fell asleep with the nipple of the bottle hanging off his bottom lip, formula running down his little chest. You slowly take the bottle from him, and gently dab at his body with the bib. He’s wearing a plain blue shirt, and one of your baseball t’s as a diaper – a dark blue center, and black sleeves. Mamá ran out of diapers just this morning, and when she had asked you for a shirt for Miguel you handed her one thinking that she was going to be using it as a pillow or blanket. Not a diaper.

I’ll get the job, chiquito, she said as she wrapped it around his tiny bottom, we’ll get you more shirts. Okay, let’s get going.

You pick up Miguel’s carrier, trying to keep it steady with your 13 year old flaquito arms. Mamá turns to lock the door, then the gate, and walks in front of you. Her chanclas slap the cement the whole way out. You two approach the bus stop that stands just outside the complex and wait for the 38, heading towards the Fashion District. The little hole in the wall apartment you call home sits around the corner from Hollenbeck Park. You hear the quick hissing of the bus’ shifting gears come down the street, and lift Miguel’s carrier up off the bench. Mamá brings her purse up to her chest and begins to shuffle around for a couple dollars. The black rubber that lines the doors pop open right before you two.

Main and 12th, says the driver.

Mamá looks over to you and nods towards the door.

Up up up, she says.

You bring Miguel up to your chest and stretch your legs out in search of the first step, remembering to not put so much of the carrier’s weight on you that you go falling backwards. The sun begins to peer over buildings and beam into the bus as you walk down the aisle. Its color isn’t yellow, nor orange, but rather a multitude of citrus hues and shades that have swallowed each other, producing a color somehow only found in Los Angeles. You spot two empty seats towards the back of the bus and lift Miguel up as you inch your way over to the window. Mamá takes the aisle seat and helps you situate the carrier on your lap. As your bodies sway and dance with the turns of the bus, you watch the city come more alive with each passing block. Iron shop gates are lifted, owners begin to sweep entry ways, and the thump of mariachi rises and fills the air. On this side of L.A., it’s never too early to start blasting the mariachi; your own instrumental rooster, cock-a-doodle-doo’ing from shop to shop.

You grab ahold of the carrier’s handle as the bus begins to slow down along the curb. Mamá sits up and makes her way through the knees and purses that protrude into the aisle way, and you follow keeping a firm hold of the carrier. You both step down from the bus onto the sidewalk and, for a moment, take in the smells and sounds that swirl through the air just above your heads. Knock off colognes and perfumes are sprayed generously by shopkeepers onto tiny sticks of paper and practically shoved into the faces of passerby’s so as to allure them into a purchase, then you catch the scent of your favorite treat, one that you have always thought was made of the most oddly combined ingredients, but still produced a masterpiece.

Mamá, elote? you ask.

Aye, chiquito, come on we’re late!

You frown and look down to Miguel, hoping he’d feel your disappointment, wake, and start crying.

In a few years, you whisper, you’ll cry for elotes.

You walk in front of mamá for a few minutes before you come to the panaderia. She reaches into her larger bag and pulls out a pair of sneakers – immaculately white. Sneakers that she’s kept white and clean for such occasions; gently dabbing bleach on the soles and canvas after each use. She puts her hand on your shoulder as she reaches down to slip off her chanclas, one by one. Then steps into the sneakers she laid on the floor.

Okay, chico, she says as she stuffs the chanclas in her bag, let’s go inside.
She opens the door, and you find a small table close to the counter. You set Miguel’s carrier up carefully in the middle, trying your hardest not to rock him so much that he wakes. Mamá walks up to the counter and sets her items on top.

Hola? she says, Hola.

A small woman walks from the backroom to where mamá is standing. Their introductions are short before they start to take their conversation to the backroom where the woman had come from.

Thomás, she says, watch Miguel. Stay right here.

They walk away. You look down to Miguel, still asleep, and see your baseball-T coming undone. You reach in softly, placing one sleeve over the other so as to loop them around each other and knot them up again, bringing the shirt higher so that it doesn’t fall and wrinkle at his waist. He shifts gently. The bass from the mariachi outside continues to thump, the accordion now beginning to chime in on what feels like an impending solo. With your fingertips still grazing the t-shirt, you look over to the clock that hangs over entry way. 8:48 am. You exhale, stomach beginning to growl for elotes, and look down to Miguel whose hand now wraps around your index and middle fingers. You cross them in his palm.

Fingers crossed, carnal, you say, fingers crossed.

Ryan Garcia is a 27 year old MFA Fiction Candidate currently attending Cal State San Bernardino. His work has appeared in The Pacific Review.

School Libraries: A Place at the Table by Victoria Waddle

The table is twenty-eight feet long, and made of solid oak. Its top is a single slab of wood. As I fill it with hundreds of books that our high school students will browse today, I try to imagine the giant tree, felled eight decades ago, from which it was fashioned. I’m both intent on my task and bothered by something I saw in the morning news. The author of an article was lamenting that kids today don’t have empathy toward others. The piece was an argument for providing an empathy curriculum in schools.

Of course the teens at my school should be empathetic toward others. Yet I can’t imagine wasting time and dollars to implement an empathy curriculum. Diversity and equity are key to current educational goals, and as a high school librarian, the longtime teacher in me has decades of anecdotal evidence about what makes a teen care about others, thus welcoming diversity. At the top of that list is reading. So I am adding to the table the sort of books that a decade ago would have been difficult or impossible to come by: an autobiography of a Hispanic American Supreme Court justice (My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor); a book of interviews with transgender teens (Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin); a novel about a girl sent to conversion-therapy camp (The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth); a searing yet strangely poetic novel of PTSD and the Iraq War (Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers); YA fiction about a Muslim girl who wears a hijab (Does My Head Look Big in This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah); nonfiction that shows shy kids how really important their personal qualities are (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain).

The reading levels among these books are as diverse as the topics. From professional review resources, I cull low-level, high-interest titles for students who are learning English. I find the most popular graphic novels that will be a springboard into other reading. At the upper end, I include nonfiction that offers depth such as Deep Down Dark by Hector Tobar. I learn who the thoughtful, literary readers are and hand-sell tougher works of fiction such as Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. In between, I talk up countless titles of teen fiction, works that appeal to fans of realism, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance.

I spend so much time engaging teens with fiction because, as Barbara Kingsolver has stated, “fiction has a unique capacity to bring difficult issues to a broad readership on a personal level, creating empathy in a reader’s heart for the theoretical stranger. Its capacity for invoking moral and social responsibility is enormous.”

Time was when we bookworms were accused of not having any evidence for such a theory. But that changed when researchers Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley reported in studies published in 2006 and 2009 that fiction readers are better at seeing the world from others’ perspective.

Happily, access to literature provides teens with the opportunity to develop not just empathy, but rather the perfect trifecta of life skills: compassion; imaginative thinking; and the ability to analyze and evaluate, to engage in higher-order thinking.

The necessity of whole-brain thinking is often promoted in adult nonfiction such as Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded or Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. As Pink says, in a ‘conceptual age’ that demands its workers be creators and empathizers, people will need to fashion the big picture, forge relationships, and tackle novel challenges. So nurturing students with fiction isn’t, as some critics suggest, training them to be English teachers; it’s helping them blend their left-brain analysis of writing with their right-brain imaginative story capabilities. For students who have an innate desire to question and imagine, the library is one of the best places on campus where they can do so.

My book display table is immobile. It is so long and so heavy that it had to be built inside the library. Several someones would have to take a chainsaw to it before it would fit through a door. It has always been an emblem of the permanence of community and communion. Over the years, the community it has served has enlarged; the communion is becoming all-embracing. But like a vast banquet table where nothing is served without the behind-the-scenes work of the chef, a book collection that feeds the souls of students requires the skills of a teacher librarian, one whose goal is to lift individual students to the nearest rung of the literacy ladder and then help them climb.

Sonambulant Funambulist: Interview with Julie Brooks Barbour by Maureen Alsop

Julie Brooks Barbour is an associate poetry editor at the journal Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and a professor at Lake Superior State University. I’m delighted here to offer an interview with Julie along with a selection from one of her published poems which underscores the distinction of her poetry and lyrical interest.

Maureen: Where do you see the current scope/trends in poetry at this point in time and where do you see your poetry in that evolution?

Julie: I notice that contemporary poets are writing about pop culture, history, fairy tales, race and gender, but, of course, this list doesn’t begin to cover the subjects or issues poets are taking on. The scope is large and broad, and, I think, can’t be pinpointed to any certain trend, but if there is one, I’d have to say it’s that poets at this point in time aren’t afraid to take on difficult subject matter. Where do I see myself in this evolution? I write about gender issues, specifically those of women. I’m interested in the ways women are portrayed in our culture, whether through body image, fairy tale characters, ideas of motherhood, or domestic work.

Brooks Barbour’s poem “Stone” published at Rose Red Review highlights the sensuality, directness and underscores these poetic themes as demonstrated in the following excerpt:

“You are ageless, a perpetual girl. If a ship navigates

your waters, it will not be rocked. You will not be

the legend that folds its sails, that causes the wreck

on the shoreline. You are the easy route, devoid of rocks.

You are the way written about in logs and travel journals:

the sunshine, the stillness, the atmosphere of peace.”

Maureen: How do you balance your priorities when managing the multitude of roles you carry as a woman, mother, wife, educator and writer?

Julie: Each part of my life needs its own time and one thing cannot take priority over everything else. I work at switching gears between work and home, writing and teaching, editing and writing. Setting up boundaries between work and home keeps me balance, though I won’t say that my life is completely calm or that I stay that way. It’s important that I don’t think about how much I have to do, but what I’m doing at the present moment. I also have to remember to take time for myself, whether I’m reading a novel, watching a favorite television show, or watching the snow fall (which I do a lot where I live). Time to rest and refuel is important to me. During this time I might suddenly reflect on my work, whether that be teaching or writing or editing. Times of repose really energize me creatively.

Maureen: How does your teaching influence your writing?

Julie: Teaching influences my writing in different ways. Many times I’m inspired by the literature I teach, whether it be classic essays in my composition classes, poetry and fiction in creative writing workshops, or drama in an introductory literature course. Each semester I try to teach at least one text or a few pieces that are new to me so I can discover something about writing with my students. I’m also inspired by my students and their willingness to take risks with their writing, whether through form, subject matter, or genre. I may be a teacher but I’m also a student, constantly learning from other writers, and my students remind me just as I remind them that I shouldn’t steer clear of risks. (They also remind me to take my own writing advice, not literally, but when I hear myself give them advice and know it’s something I need to do, that in itself is a reminder.)

Julie Brooks Barbour is an associate poetry editor at the journal Connotations Press: An Online Artifact. Read the full poem at Rose Red Review.

Resolutions for Writers by Cati Porter

Here we are at the end of December and once again we are about to turn the corner into a new year. Many of us see this as a fresh start and set goals for ourselves for the following year. For writers, often this means setting out to finally write that memoir or that novel. To accomplish this, I recommend setting small daily goals. By breaking it up into bite size pieces, the project will be much easier to digest.

To forge a writing practice for ourselves, it is best for writers to carve out a few minutes from every day. If you’re a poet, this might mean writing a few lines of verse or even the first draft of a whole poem. If you write fiction, opt to write a paragraph or two. If your aim is to write the Great American Novel, this allows you to chip away at it slowly but steadily. Incremental goals are much easier to keep. And if on any given day you happen to have more time once the ball gets rolling, you can stay with it, but if not, you’ve at least met your goal for the day. Setting a timer helps.

For my part, early mornings—prime time for writing, where I wake long before my kids—are usually spent frittered away with a cup of coffee or three and surfing the net. What else could I be using that time for? So here is my resolution: I will write just fifteen minutes a day. It doesn’t sound like much, but if I keep it up then I will have written for 5,460 minutes by the end of the year. This morning, those fifteen minutes have netted me about three hundred words. If I were to do this every day, by the time the next new year comes around, I will have written over 100,000 words. And, voila! The Great American Novel—Round One. Sure, there will be false starts. Sure, there will be days when I flake out. But should I fall off the wagon, I’ll just hop back on and start again the next day. Or the next.

Like any goal, it is more easily met with the support of a routine, good friends, and maybe some prompting. To begin:

First, decide on a routine that suits you—writing in the morning, on the lunch hour, at night. You may need to try different times to figure out what works best.

Second, decide how you’d like to write. If you prefer to write longhand, you could treat yourself to a nice writing journal, but a yellow legal pad works just fine too, or you could be like Emily Dickinson and write on scraps of old envelopes or whatever is handy. You can even write using your phone. I have written using the notepad app on my iPhone, or sometimes directly into emails to myself.

Third, If you miss writing one morning, don’t fall into the trap of feeling like you’ve blown it for the day—even if you write at a different time, or for fewer minutes than you planned, at least you wrote! Allow yourself some latitude.

And if you’re looking for inspiration, here are a few places to start. Two of the leading magazines for writers, Poets & Writers Magazine and Writer’s Digest, both have pages with free writing prompts on the web:

– Poets & Writers Magazine “The Time Is Now”: http://www.pw.org/writing-prompts-exercises.

– Writer’s Digest Creative Writing Prompts page has new suggestions about once per week from the silly to serious: http://www.writersdigest.com/prompts.

Poets & Writers also has a page listing the Best Books for Writers: http://www.pw.org/best-books-for-writers with everything from poetry craft books to writing nonfiction to how to publish your memoir to Virginia Woolf’s writer’s diary to issues of copyright and other practical things. Some books that I have personally found useful: Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, John Drury’s Creating Poetry, and Finding What You Didn’t Lose by John Fox.

And it helps to have the support of like-minded writers. Being a part of a writing group is a great first step. Finding one can be a challenge, but there are many ways to go about this. First, look to your friends. You’d be surprised at how many people write. Also, you can look to the web—just type in “how to find a writing group” in the search bar. Or you could join one of Inlandia’s free writing workshops, which is a slightly more structured form of writers group, offering critique and craft tips in addition to the support of other writers, plus opportunities for publication and publicly sharing your work. With workshops in six different locations throughout the Inland Empire, there’s bound to be one near you.

Whatever you decide, if you begin the new year with some reasonable yet flexible goals in mind, by this time next year, you’ll have a brand new body of work to be proud of. I’m with you. Let’s go.

For more information about Inlandia’s writing workshops, please visit www.inlandiajournal.org/workshop.