Susan Min

Good News

Waiting to hear whether a lab mate’s family was killed
in the earthquake in China, a little on edge because
he can’t currently get through to them, I’m recalling the time
he wore all red because it was the first day of the year
of the snake and he was a snake and if he didn’t wear
his red hanes sweatshirt and sweatpants to work his
demons would come back this year to haunt him. It was odd
that he could be so superstitious and scientific, but for
a moment I wondered if his boxers weren’t red that day.
I don’t feel guilty when I’m disappointed to find out that
his family is alright, that the earthquake was actually a
hundred miles away, that life is still achingly the same for
everyone I know and everyone they know in California
and China and the whole unchanging universe.
It’s sick of me to want pain to come rattling into people’s
lives like this just to relieve the pressure of my own monotony,
it doesn’t have to be pain, it could be something like a
moon landing, just something wondrously real.

Susan Min was born and raised in Chino Hills, CA and attended UC Riverside as a creative writing major. She is currently working on her first book. Her website is susanmin.com.

Kathleen Alcala

La Otra

She had never thought of herself as “la otra,” the Other Woman. All she knew was that she had loved him better, and it was only natural that he should leave his fiance and marry her.
“But that was a long time ago,” she would laugh when telling this story to Sirena, who seemed fascinated by her abuela’s past. “Back when the animals could talk.”
Anita had not been looking for a husband in those days. She already had too many men in her life – five brothers and a widowed father. She cooked and washed from dawn to night, then got up and did it all over again. When the house burned down along with half of the town, it was a relief – there was nothing to wash and nothing to cook. They had no choice but to join up with all the other refugees and walk north.
Some of the men stayed to fight. Her oldest brother, Manuel, stayed with his sweetheart’s family to defend what was left of the town. But the soldiers did not want the town. They wanted more soldiers. Both sides. Men and boys were compelled, forced, conscripted and dragooned, so that brother ended up fighting brother, father fighting son, uncles fighting nephews. It was all mixed up. The crops were deliberately destroyed three years in a row, and finally they had eaten all the seed corn. Better to walk north, where the Americanos were paying good wages.
“Bring extra money, and bring extra shoes,” was the advise Celso, who led the travellers out of town, gave to them. People brought a lot more than that, but most of it was lost along the way.
The first place of any size the family came to was Guanajuato. Los Guanejuatensos were not known for their friendliness to outsiders. In fact, the last time people had come to try to make themselves at home, they were herded into the granary and set on fire. This was in colonial times, when the Spanish rule had become unbearable. But the worker who had carried a stone on his back to deflect the bullets so he could set fire to the door of the granary was still a hero, El Pípila. No one remembered his name, just his pock-marked face.
Introspective people, used to the darkness of the mines and the insulated feel of their valley, they did not speak unless spoken to, offer information or help unless asked directly. It was here that the bedraggled Don Barcielego dragged his exhausted sons and daughter. By then one of Anita’s brothers had developed an infection. He had cut his foot on the walk, and the laceration refused to close and had begun to smell. The other members of the group said to leave him, that he would die of gangrene. Out of desperation, as she saw her brother get sicker and sicker, and her father begin to despair, Anita inquired if there was a curandera who could help him. A gnarled old woman, for Anita was at the age when she assumed gnarled people were old, came and cleaned the wound and wrapped it in a poultice made of local herbs. Then she suggested that the family pray to el Señor de Villa Seca for intervention on behalf of the ailing brother. No one in the family had heard of this Señor, but they prayed, nevertheless.
Whether it was the prayers or the poultice, the brother got well. Her father would not allow Anita to go to the church of Villa Seca to give thanks, but when he understood that it was in the mountains going north, he agreed that they could all stop on their way to El Paso del Norte. The brother who had been cured, who had a gift, painted a retablo of thanks on a broken piece of wood and left it there.
Sirena’s abuela claimed not to remember much more of the trip. She said she remembered going into towns and begging people for water. She remembered falling asleep while walking, she was so tired. She remembered hiding for hours in the ruins of a building, all of them trying not to make a sound, while armed men – soldiers or policemen, were around. She remembered a town up north that seemed almost deserted, until they found an old woman who showed them a fountain with water. How good it felt to wash her hands and face, her hair, let the water run down the front of her dress. Thirty-eight people started the trek, and thirty-two finished it. Anita remembered that one person died in his sleep, and they found him cold the next morning. Another began to panic during a time of needed silence, and was held down until he no longer moved. She does not remember what happened to the others. Maybe they stayed in some of the towns along the way, or died, or were carried away by a flock of birds.
Sirena watched her grandmother intently when she told these stories, trying to glean from her grandmother’s face and hands what she did not understand in words. When Anita got to the part where she described the missing as possibly being carried away to heaven by a flock of birds, the little girl’s mouth would go slack with amazement. When she got older, that expression was replaced by a sorrowful smile, the trademark expression of the Diamantes.
By the time they crossed the border, they were all as thin as could be – puro hueso – all bone, Anita would say, holding her fingers a quarter inch apart to show how thin they were. Not like I am now, she would add, patting her comfortable belly fat.
Sirena would just laugh at her tiny grandmother. Next to her, Sirena felt large and awkward. It was hard to imagine her abuela surviving the long walk, the hunger and thirst, the uncertainty of death waiting for them at every crossroads. But Anita Diamante greeted every dawn with the cautious optimism of a survivor, throwing water on her front steps and sweeping her walkway down to the sidewalk. Let the day bring what it will, she seemed to say – God willing, it will find me here.
As hard as it was to get her grandmother to tell the story of their migration to the United States, it was even harder to get her to tell about how she met her husband, and took him away from his intended. She did not tell this story to Sirena until she was older – old enough to know better, old enough to have gained the sorrowful smile.

After all their travails, and several false starts, Anita’s family went to work picking oranges in Southern California. They settled with other refugees on ground too high and rocky to cultivate, but close enough to meet the foreman at dawn in the orange groves. Anita’s father and brothers built a one room stone house with a cooking shed on the back. Anita asked for one window on the wall facing the street that was a little larger than the small, high windows on the other walls. This had a piece of tin that fitted inside of it to close, fastened by a piece of wire. In summer, Anita took down this shutter and sold aguas frescas to people walking by. Later, she began to sell a few canned goods, and after a year she had a small store where the orange pickers and farmworkers could obtain a few goods near their homes from someone who spoke Spanish. By extending a little credit until payday, “Anita’s Tiendita” became popular in the neighborhood.
At first, her father was nervous about Anita being home alone all day with cash in the house, but she assured him that she knew how to handle things. He got her a dog they named Flojo, after the mayor of their town in Mexico. When her father saw how much she was able to make, enough to save, he allowed her to handle all of the finances for the family. Anita was the only one who could make change and count to ten in English. On Fridays, she was accompanied to the bank by her four brothers, where the American clerk nervously counted the small bills and wrote out a receipt under their watchful eyes.
With all of this brotherly love and attention, Anita despaired that she would ever marry and start a household of her own.
Whenever her grandmother got to this part, Sirena grew pensive, staring deep into the pattern on the carpet to hide the feelings she knew would show in her eyes.
“Pero ya, mira,” her abuela would say, drawing Sirena’s attention back to the story. “One day a car drove up and parked across the road. A Model A. A man was driving, and he got out to help a girl from the other side. She was well-dressed, but she acted completely helpless in climbing out of the car.”
Here her grandmother would flop her arms, like a rag doll. “But once she got on her feet, she grabbed the man’s arm like he was the big prize. I could tell that he was embarrassed by her, and I knew then that I would make a better life mate than she!”
Abuela would cackle in remembrance at this point, and Sirena would smile in anticipation of the rest of the story.
“It turns out that they had come to our place in the woods to tell us about hygiene. Hygiene! As though, just because we were poor, we didn’t know how to take baths. She talked to the women, and he talked to the men. But she was so embarrassed, and used such funny language, that no one knew what she was talking about!”
“You went to the talk?”
“Seguro que si! Of course! I had to find out what was going on.”
Sirena squirmed in delight. Anita was fully animated now.
“Afterwards, I went up to that man – and I could see that he was handsome, too – and I told him that I could do a better job than that girl.
“He gave me this look – the way you look at something to see if it has more value than it appears to have.
“You think so? He said. All right then. Here is the address of the next talk. It is right next door here, in Corona. And here are some of the brochures that we give people. Take them home and read them, and if you still think you can do a better job, come to the next talk.
“And so I started going around with him, giving the talks. I was from the people, so I knew how to talk to them in their own language. And then we got married.”
Sirena knew there had to be more to the story than that. Like how her father let her go. And what happened to the store, and all her brothers. But she also knew that was all she was going to get out of her grandmother today.
“Bueno,” said her grandmother. “Let’s go to Pancha’s for lunch.” Pancha’s Comida Mexicana was about two blocks away, on a busy commercial street, but they could walk. And her grandmother could order anything she wanted, on the menu or not, and get it. Sirena never turned down a chance to go to Pancha’s with her grandmother. Pancha’s offered tamales and hope.
The scuffed linoleum floor, a fake brick design, held six small tables and a counter. Sirena’s grandmother favored a table by the window, not too far from the kitchen. Settled with sugary hot teas, Sirena ventured another question.
“What was he like?”
“Your abuelo?”
“Yes.”
Anita looked outside to the parking lot, as though she could see the Model A on the hot pavement. “Like I said, he was very handsome. You have seen his pictures. He was handsome enough that people admired him when we passed.”
“They weren’t admiring you, too?” Sirena teased.
“No, of course not. You see how I am. Maybe they admired me for having him.” Anita held up her hand as though she had something important to say.
“But he was also kind. He was very good to me, not like some other men were to their wives.” She stirred her tea for a minute. “In those days, no one said anything if a man hit his wife. It was his right.”
“Some people still think so,” said Sirena.
“I know. But it is not right. At least now, women can ask for help, can get protection if they need to. Then, if a woman had children to protect, her parents might take her back, at least for awhile.”
“Otherwise?”
Anita looked at her sharply. “Otherwise, she put up with it, or had to survive on her own.”
Panchita came out from behind the counter to greet her grandmother. “Como estas, Anita?”
“Bien, bien gracias. Recuerdas mi nieta, Sirena?”
Sirena nodded and smiled. “Hola,” she said.
The older ladies had a ritual they had to go through each time, no matter how many times Sirena had been introduced. They would continue to discuss her as though she was not present.
“Ay si, La Sirena! Que guapa esta! Como movie star!”
“Si como no. Y su hermano tambien.”
“De veras que si? Y donde viva?”
“En otro estado, muy lejos. Ya tiene esposa.”
“Y Sirena? ya tiene novio?”
“No, todavia no,” said Sirena, jumping into the conversation before her grandmother could say anything.
“Bueno,” said Panchita. “No se importa. No te preocupas.”
After taking their order, Panchita left the table, and Anita could see that Sirena was, nevertheless, distressed.
“Take your time,” she said, patting her hand. “You will know when the right one comes along.”
“I hope so,” said Sirena.
“In the meantime, enjoy being young. Don’t let viejas tell you what to do.”
Sirena smiled, her first genuine smile all day. “I won’t,” she said, “except for you.”
“Andale,” said her grandmother, laughing, as their steaming bowls of menudo arrived. Both stopped talking to eat.
When she had her fill, Sirena’s grandmother sat back in her chair, patting her mouth with her paper napkin. “She tried to have me killed, you know.”
“Who?”
“La muchacha. La otra.”
“The fiancee? The one you took him away from?”
“Yes. But that is another story.”

❧

Kathleen Alcala was born in Compton and grew up in San Bernardino, California. She is the author of five books of fiction and nonfiction, and teaches Creative Writing at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. “La Otra” is part of a collection of stories about Sirena Diamond. More at http://www.kathleenalcala.com

Ryan Mattern

Chute Dogging

Strange, but I don’t recall anything about that day. Not the dip before the Hidden Valley offramp that made me flounce every time I drove over it. Or the mini-blimp for Hickory Joe’s rope-tied to the unmoved pickup truck in the gravel parking lot. The thing used to scare me as a kid, the way it lit up at night like something from a movie about space invaders. Did I roll the windows up at I drove past the egg ranch, or had I let its stink linger in the cab? I know exactly how it smells, I could trace the arc of its intensity with my finger the farther you got down Pedley Road. Not from today, but from all-time.
I don’t remember if I parked in the driveway or on the street, if I remembered to stay on the walk or if I trampled the August-ruined lawn Gina had been trying to reinvigorate. I don’t remember making eye-contact with the photos in the hallway; the one with my parents after their Thoroughbred, Admiral Cooney took first at Fresno, my father in aviators snaring the reigns, Cooney wreathed with succulents, my mother looking away, an impression of a cigarette in the way her hand is bent up at her side. Another, me on the top bar of the corral resting my boot heels on my grandfather’s shoulders after my first chute dogging. The wedding, Gina all teeth as usual. Me too, smiling like a man who doesn’t know anything.
I could see all of those things. No, not with my eyes. They came one after another, polaroidic and yellow in my memory. Lying down on the floor beside the bed, I waited for Gina to come home. I wondered if I’d tell her how it went, about the CT of the brain and how it looked like a wad of used chewing gum. On the left side, a shadow like two snails fighting that the doctor said would kill me. Or would I tell her about the first bull I took down when I was seven, dig out the old buckle and shine it up nice?

Ryan Mattern is an M.A. student in the Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Davis where he also co-runs Fig & Axle, the graduate student reading series. He earned his B.A. in Creative Writing from California State University, San Bernardino, where he won the Felix Valdez Award for short fiction. His work has appeared in The Red Wheelbarrow, Superstition Review, Black Heart Magazine, and Poetry Quarterly, among others. He is a member of poetrIE, a reading series dedicated to showcasing the literary voices of California’s Inland Empire.

Lawrence Reeder

The Last Weekend in October, We Should Go Camping

We have been married for two years and
have never once gone camping:

to place those foil lumps onto breathing
coals –you would shape mine into a swan.

the arrival at night
under a leaky faucet sky

We have never sat wrapped in the blanket
your mother made, waiting for our souls’

to clamor at our tent’s pieces
while they lie lifelessly on the ground;

warming supper to sizzle and send signals
across the camp that it is ready. We have

or stuff a cooler full of essential
camping food, or carelessly add wood to

never sat tearing at those charred lumps, like
a neatly wrapped gift on Christmas morning.

an already feverous camp fire, where you
would toss cut up kielbasa, onions, peppers

& potatoes into tinfoil,
then shield your eyes

Lawrence Reeder currently attends Cal State University San Bernardino, and is working to obtain a Bachelors degree in Creative Writing. Afterwards, he plans to work towards an MFA. Lawrence lives in Redlands, CA.

Elisha Holt

The Clear Light

The vibration of molecules
in the empty space
of a bucket
in a cupboard below the kitchen sink.
Air spills over the brim
as drops of water leak from a loose pipe.
Each drop of water, a red thought,
a needle in the arm
of a man dying in a white room.
In between each drop, the air is unstirred.
In between each thought, the man rests in stillness.

Geology

For Virginia Holt Martin and Walt Pratt

In ’97
a flash flood
washed out a section of the highway
in Red Rock Canyon,
collapsed the pavement
into a flow of grey slush.

I thought of this
as I waited in the doctor’s office.
Stared at the vermillion carpet
as she told me the cancer
had spread to my bones.

I thought of how the wind
scoured a hole straight through
the red center of a boulder.
The photo I took of my son
smiling back at me through that rock window
the time we went hiking
along those oxidized sandstone cliffs.

I thought of my wife,
the slight dimple in her left cheek,
her hair that shined like obsidian
and flowed down the full length of her back.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell them,
said I feel like going to the beach.
I stood knee deep in the water with my boy,
let a handful of sand slip through my fingers
to be pulled into the receding tide.
I told him, flesh is like this.

Waking

You wake in the night remembering
that your father is dead,
as if the news was only just told
to you. And in the absence of light you vision
a flat land, Joshua trees
like contorted shadows,
tumbleweed giving texture to the dark.
You remember the time when you met in the hall
and his surprise when he stood
within a foot of you. You knew then
that he could no longer see.
And now you
are going blind,
each year growing dimmer, the past
growing brighter in your mind
until waking in the night to visions
of what’s passed
is all that sight has left to you.

Elisha Holt is a poet of the desert’s edge. He was born in San Bernardino and raised in the rural Palo Verde Valley, on the Colorado River, in the shadow of the Big Maria Mountains. He currently resides in the cresting winds of Hesperia, California. His work is forthcoming in Badlands and The Pacific Review.

Michael Tesauro

Where I Want to Be

         In regards to the old house, this is the outcome: a trial. And the fighting is really just over the skeleton of what we lost in the Old Waterman Canyon Fire. In regards to Danielle, my wife, well she passed not long before our house was taken up. She’s passed and I’ve accepted it. I’ve accepted that she will not be here with me, nor with the children. This is one of things you hear about when it happens to other people. When you hear about those people, they seem to recover okay. That’s the place I want to be in.
         Even so, I need to say that I’ve been without her some seven months and two weeks. Three days too. At first, it was like she was still in the house, in the pictures, in the closet, everywhere. When the flames took the house, it was like the smoke pillars that hung around the neighborhood were even more of a reminder. But unlike the smoke, Danielle has a mother and a father. Well maybe God or whoever is the parent of the fire, but that’s something existential. I don’t know. Her parents, the Walnuts, like the nut they’re involved in my business.
         See, the property was in Danielle’s name. We put it in her name because I had some bad credit.
         The land is almost an acre, it seems bigger now though. The remains of the house were torn down by way of city ordinance. Now it just looks like a simple plot of earth and it’s spotted with glass and bricks. To me though, Danielle lives there. It’s like she’s alive in the place that was her garden, or where my stoop was. I know she isn’t, but I remember all of it when I see the bare land.
         When I tried to tell the kids how I felt, they thought it was weird. They need their distance, their own mourning time.
         The Walnut’s never did enjoy the thought of me being the sole link to their grandchildren after Danielle passed. My hands are rough and thick and the thought them being laid on her in an intimate way drove them into some dark place. I heard it once she, Mrs. Walnut or Bette as she liked to be called, was on the phone with some other blue hair and she described the level of sickness she felt knowing I was connected to her name. For Christ’s sake, me and her girl were married. We had kids and I put a ring on my wife’s finger and provided for her. I’ve always been faithful to Danielle, even now. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.
         The Walnuts started sniffing around my affairs right after Danielle died. They knew the property was in her name. They knew we didn’t believe in wills. She didn’t. I don’t really care about these formal things one way or another. But they knew it wasn’t willed and they came after the property. Even the fire was an afterthought.
         So one day I wake up to this knocking at the front door. I had been at my new place for a time.
         But not long enough for someone to know where I am, minus the kids of course. They’re doing their own versions of family life in other cities and other states. I get out of bed, pop my knees, slap my belly and the like. These morning rituals make life feel worth it. After that I dress and go to the door. I see this kid on the other side. He’s just this weasel of a kid, maybe 20 and something years old. He’s fiddling around on the stoop. I can feel my chest.
         I open the door up.
         “Yeah?” I say.
         “Mr. Harkin?” says the kid. “David Harkin?”
         “Yeah,” I say. “What is it?”
         He hands me a thick envelope. The manila folder feels like a sack of stones in my arms. It’s easier heavy, or I’m just that old.
         “What is this,” I say.
         The kid looks at me strange. His mouth is open like he’s going to say something important. He doesn’t. He steps away from me then turns and walks. He’s gone.
         I push the door close and shut away the world. I open this envelope. It’s the papers, a lawsuit for the property. I don’t know what good they’re taking the land would do, but they’re making their bed with the decision.
         There are a few lawyers I know from around. Calling them seems like the course my life is going down. I met one when Danielle died. She was a friend of hers from college. Maybe I’ll call her Jan, Joan, something like that. I have her number written down somewhere. I’m going to try and fight this.
         That much is obvious to me. If I win, seeing that look on the Walnuts’ faces would be worth it enough.
         If they are going to wage some war against me, I’m going to at least fight back. Even if I spend the insurance money on a lawyer, that’s enough. Danielle would like knowing I fought back. Maybe I’ll go look at the property later. I hope I find her there in the emptiness. I always do.
         When I toss the folder on the wood table, it doesn’t make a sound. There is a heavy stillness to the room. With Danielle gone, the open space around me always seems bigger. She would deal with one of these types of crisis with a small smile, a quiet wave of her hand. Do I start to think about this as a crisis? There aren’t really big or wild things at stake like most crises. The kids are safe, which would make this an uncrisis to Danielle. She cared about them more than almost anything.
         I shuffle around for my phone. The damn thing is stuck in my pocket like it always is. I need to sit. The cool of the wood chair feels real in my hand. The cool of the flat wood table feels smooth against my forearms. Hell, if this is what my life has come to I’m going to sit with my head in my hands until some sort of sunshine comes around.
         Danielle used to come and find me like this after a sour day. She would come on the palms of her feet, not making a noise as she floated across the kitchen floor. Her hands would reach deep past the skin of my neck like she was plucking some chord inside my chest. Her touch was something mystic to me. The kids never got it when I tried to talk about it after she passed. They didn’t get the dimness of her touch. She had soft hands, Ted would say. But that’s all he could really articulate on the matter.
         I sit at the table for a time, until something settles inside of me. I’m going to call my buddy Frank. He had a pretty sharp lawyer after he was served. I don’t think calling any of these women lawyers Danielle knew would do a thing for me one way or another. I don’t want to sit through those interactions with them as they let whatever knowledge of me by way of Danielle run through their heads.
          She talked to this Jan woman when her and I lived apart for a few months. How would I go about that situation? A phone call? Email? Christ, I don’t even know how to use the computer my kids bought me. A handwritten letter maybe. I’m at something of a loss on this.

         I wake up sometime past midnight. Or at least I think it’s around midnight. That’s a good, solid time to base my days around. Midnights and afternoons. These time markers have a definite passing to them. When I’m awake, the space between midnight and afternoon grows like a stretch of desert. I’m up hours and hours before noon. At times, the sun hasn’t woken up either. I fall asleep hours and hours after midnight.
         I see Danielle in my dream. Usually, I throw myself up in a fit of nerves because I think she will be next to me. She never is. This time though, I see her in our old house. The place burns around her and the walls slip away. She wears the silk of her blouse she had on the first time we made love.
          Something peels off her She calls out to me with her eyes. Maybe this was why I woke up. I know this image will never be.
         My knees do this noise when I slip on my robe. It’s like I’m on autopilot, already walking out to the kitchen. I’m at the table. The manila folder is slight to the touch. There is conclusiveness in its smooth coating, like I’ve already lost the case.
          The papers have my name in bold. Their name in bold.
          Danielle’s name in bold isn’t the part that gets to me. It’s the fact they call her my exwife.
          Like hell we weren’t married when she died. We weren’t even separate or fighting. Those last years together were like the first years of dating. Maybe she knew she was going to go?
         They say cancer consumes the body’s right to live. Like a fire, it eats at the cells. Attacks the cells, like the doctor said. Danielle’s was of the pancreas. I didn’t even know what it was before hers was attacked by the cancer. Consumed. She went fast, like our house did. Three months. The doctors called that a fast one. A fast one, like it’s some kind of object that can be measured by speed.
         Sometimes I want to go that fast—
          But the house went in three or so hours. That’s what the neighbor told me. He watched from his own house, which was relieved of it’s own significant portions. Somehow, I see the neighbors lasting garage and my lone chimney as a testament to our collective failures as men. We were all unprepared.
          I sign the papers, which say I will be in court on a certain day at a certain time. I’ll give those old bastards hell. If they think I’ll lay down and eat from their palms they’ve got another thing coming.
          My heart stretches inside my chest. I should get some air.
         I call Frank. We agree to meet at the cantina. He’s got his own legal things going on. Maybe he can give me insight.
          In my room, I throw on some fresh jeans, a sweater. My boots are dirty, but they were a gift from Danielle. I pull them on too. Danielle looks at me from the full size mirror. There she is, pinned up in the right corner by a strip of tape. She is in her best dress, the floral one with a green hue. I called it her Macy’s dress. She bought it after seeing it on display. I took this picture on a Wednesday. I took this picture outside the Asian fish market on Tippecanoe. This is my favorite picture of her.
          She looks at me, like she does when I see her in my dreams. Or if she comes to me when I’m driving. She can tell me I’m getting fat from her spot in the right corner of the mirror. She doesn’t have to lie. If I can see what I’m becoming, she can see it too.
          The kids say I should take the picture down. Maybe put it in a frame or some place nice.
          Never.
          I’m out the door and heading to see Frank. I feel like he’s going to be depressed like he always is. I drive to see him anyway. The last conversation I had was with the kid who served me papers. It’s good to talk to people, Danielle would tell me, be social. I can’t be your everything, she would say, one day I’ll be gone.
          How did she know?
          I used to take this drive often. Before Danielle, when Frank and I drove this way every Friday night. We would park on top of Little Mountain Drive and look at the stars, chuck beer off the cliff, and yell into the emptiness. Now I just see smog and the lingering smoke that covers up everything beautiful.
          The sky looks like a empty movie screen tonight, like a bright and interesting picture will pop up soon. I imagine I’m going to see giant faces with huge white mouths as I get further away from the smog.
          I’ve been in the house too long.
          My engine is on its last feet. This parking lot is on its last feet. A drink will put this business with the Walnuts to sleep for now. Everything feels like it’s on it’s last feet.
          Inside the bar is the usual old business. Beer, sweat smell, bar hags, and Frank Allen sitting in his stool at the far right corner. He has Bob Seger going on the radio.
          “Old man,” Frank says. “You’re looking terrible.”
          “Hey asshole,” I say.
          He gives me a beer. He places his hand on my shoulder. His grip has gotten weak. I can feel each dance and calloused mark like the roadmap of his decline. But still, it’s something familiar. These hands held my drunken body above porcelain toilets. This man held up my wife’s casket at the funeral.
          “Good to see you,” he says.
          “Likewise.”
          “The kids?” he says.
          “Ted lives with his girlfriend,” I say. “Shawna’s at college.”
          The kids are 19 and 21 respectively. Frank knows the boy better than he does Shawna. But then again, most of us know him better than we know Shawna.
          Shawna, my eldest, moved out when she was 17. She had the notion that she was something of a woman already. Danielle left Shawna with too many of her likenesses. I hadn’t heard from her in over a year before Danielle’s passing. I know they talked everyday, but that talk was secret a part of the female mystery.
          “Ever getting things straight with Shawna?’ Frank asks.
          “Not really,” I say. When my wife passed away, Shawna’s mother passed away, and the only thing that kept us in relations is gone.
          “Shame,” he says. “She was a dear.”
          “She’s somewhere else in life.”
Danielle was the reason Shawna and I forced ourselves to make conversation. She is my child, my first born, and I love her but it’s always been hard. Danielle knew how she worked. She did her best to get us to talk before Shawna moved out. Mostly it was Shawns and I throwing dumb words at a wall, hoping they would stick like some game show segment.           Mostly though, our conversations fell flat.
          Game over.
          I try not to indulge Frank in my issues with Shawna’s lifestyle and ‘roommate’. He pushes the subject once or twice more before letting it slip away. This is the bar life. This is what a widower is expected to do when the other things he is expected to do falls apart.
          Frank and I are at the cantina late. We’re at the end of a growing day, a day without end or finality. We drink to problems neither of us knows how to face like men. We drink to bad backs and slipped disks. A few more beers and we go outside for a piss. We move through the wooden door like it’s the last threshold to the real world. My beer runs through me. In the open, under the smoke bombed sky, San Bernardino slips from me.

         If the sun were anyone, it would be a dictator on a morning like this. Frank and I wake up in the back of his truck, laying on top of a spread out sleeping bag. Last night went to shit if my headache is correct. But hell, I can do this as a retired widower. Bette Walnut said retiring at 55 is unsavory. I’d like to see her live a little. Danielle’s life insurance plan takes care of the kids just fine. I’m sitting on a nice pot of retirement pension, savings and some money I have in the stocks. But the land will be the last I hear from Bette. Whatever the outcome, win or lose, that woman and her husband can go be of the dirt for all I care.
          “Get up,” Frank says. “We’ve got goat’s stomach to eat.”
          “Have your menudo,” I say. “I need coffee.”
          Frank pulls himself up to the side panel of the truck bed. He perches over a toolbox and lights his cigarette.
          “Honestly Dave,” Frank says. “How are you doing this?”
          “Doing what?” I say. My stomach does aerobics.
          “Dealing.”
          “I just am.”
          “You haven’t cried,” Frank says. “You haven’t cracked. What’s going on?”
          “I’m dealing as it goes.”
          “She’s gone Dave,” he says. “You have to accept it.”
          “I do,” I say. ‘I accept it more than you know.”
          “You don’t say her name out loud?” he says, his voice touching around me. His face is bright.
          His mouth is open for the words to speed out.
          Frank doesn’t talk at breakfast. He laps up his tripa and hominy like it’s the food of the gods.
          These Aztec painting on the wall look real and terrifying. Him and I and our girls would come to this Mexican joint after drinking and dancing when we were young. We would meet up in the morning for breakfast the next day. I guess Frank can settle his two cents as much the kids can about Danielle’s passing. Him and his Lynn knew Danielle just as long as me.
          Frank looks at me and says, “Don’t shine me off Dave.”
          “Okay.”
          “You don’t talk,” he says.
          “What the hell am I doing now?”
          “Since it happened,” he says. “You talk less and less. Let it out man. Lynn worries about you. Your kids worry about you. Hell, I worry.”
          “I’m fine.”
          He stirs his soup around, the red flakes of chili powder float to the top. He is quiet and I am quiet. We finish our meal in silence. I decide to call this lawyer woman that Danielle knew and get legal advice. Winning the land won’t bring my losses back from the dead. It won’t be the Lazarus act, but it’s something. I could use a little something these days. That’s where I want to be.

Michael Tesauro is Masters of Fine Arts Candidate living in Redlands, CA. He calls the Inland Empire his home. This, and the heat, are his inspiration. Other works can be found in the Wilderness House Review, the Sand Canyon Review, Carnival Literary Magazine, and quarterafter journal.

Yelizaveta Renfro

A writer and photographer, Yelizaveta P. Renfro’s work has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review, Witness, Reader’s Digest, Blue Mesa Review, and in newspapers. Her short story collection, A Catalogue of Everything in the World, is available from Black Lawrence Press. She lived in Riverside for more than twenty years and has since lived in Virginia, Nebraska, and Connecticut. View more of her work here & here.

Michael Singh

A Sun Setting as it Rises

I was cradled by earthquakes.

Nursed by the arms
of California,
she put me to rest
on terrain
shaking with
life:

each bloody pulse
fueled a heart
birthing from
poppies in
an unabashed
full bloom,
blush fading
with the rise
of the moon.

Her soil shifts
beneath us
constantly,
tiny shivers
pulsate a
lone heartbeat
wailing its
pale affections
throughout every
pore contained
in the decaying
cracks of concrete
(here we dance
on the edge
of our collapse
knowing the ground
bellows a
warning song
as it vibrates
beneath us).

Our toes are worn
from the steps
as we try to
remember
our moves
try to forget
we were cradled
by earthquakes,
four walls
oscillating
within each box
protecting uneasy
feet gliding
us towards
the horizon;

A sun setting as it rises.

Michael V. Singh is a recent graduate in Theatre from the University of California, Riverside. During his undergraduate studies Michael was involved in numerous productions, the most recent being poet Juan Felipe Herrera’s play Stars of Juarez where he served as both a stage manager and (later) as an actor. He has previously been published in Literary Laundry.