FICTION

Phillip Gardner | The Looking Game
Gary L. Bishop | Hood’s River
Elana Bauman-Carbrey | Gertrude and the Quarry Men
Susan Snowden | Choked Up
Jocelyn Ashworth | Berry Black
Christiana Louisa Langenberg | Standing in for God

NONFICTION

Curtis Bauer, Sebastian Matthews, Ryan Walsh | from Walking the Morning Line: A Year of Correspondence Between Three Poets
Susan White | Eggs

POETRY

Alex Grant | The Strongman
Alex Grant | The Dwarf
Cathy Allman | A Review From Heaven to my Children
Teegan Dykeman | Fog
Thomas Rain Crowe | Free Will
Thomas Rain Crowe | Chaos Theory
Caleb Beissert | Like Sheol
Caleb Beissert | The Jericho Bird
Gene Auprey | Heights Attained
Gene Auprey | Winter Fare
Naton Leslie | The Catnap
Kathleen Groll Connolly | Memories of a Tree

Cover Art ”Blue Donuts” by Lonnie Busch

FICTION

Steve Almond | A Jew Berserk on Christmas Eve
Sara Claytor | Queen of Egypt
Anne Corbitt | That Summer, In Color
Joseph Meigs | The Calling
Shane Alan Noecker | St. Paul
Mary Lynn Reed | The Game I Loved

NONFICTION

Christine Arvidson | Fifty Cents An Hour
Susan Jo Burwen | Trout and Consequences
Alisa Wolf | Gray Areas

POETRY

Patricia Anne Elford | Poison Oak
Keith Flynn | Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds
Keith Flynn | Tipping Point
Donna Issac | Strength
Janice Townley Moore | Beginning Homer’s Iliad Once Again
Jed Myers | Smoke in the Mountains
Augustus Napier | Serviceberry Time
Robert Randolph | Old Knife
William Rushton | Love’s Amusement
Sarah Anne Loudin Thomas | How To Bury A Dog
William H. Wandless | The Widow’s Garden

Cover Art “Back, Again” by Geoff Stein. See more of Geoff’s work at www.geoffreystein.com

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

FICTION

Gary Fincke | Cassius Clay, Live, on Bowling for Dollars
Todd A. Whaley | Like Pigeons
Hadley Boyd | Saturday at Clive’s
E.M. Dalton | Fired
Mary Rudy | Lily
Brian Railsback | If You Were the Only (novel excerpt)
Lisa Lipkind Leibow |Lessons from a Squirrel
Gay Leonhardt |The Present

NONFICTION

Margery Kreitman | Circa 1960
Andy Douglas | Sin Bravely
Susan Knox | Remember Me
Patrick Hicks | On the Rez

POETRY

John M. Anderson | Lefty Lucy
Gregory W. Randall | A Sort of Rhapsody
Derek Henderson | Sprung
Pamela Davis | Flocking to Chapel, Lunar Eclipse
Jean C. Howard | The First Poem of the House
Sharon Mitchell | Sacred Solace
Nancy Simpson | In the Nantahala Gorge
Centa Theresa | Thinking About My Mother on the New Year
Suzanne Comer Bell | Pot Liquor
Laura Wine Paster | Old Miners
E. K. Mortenson | Tree of Knowledge

Cover art by Lonnie Busch

It started with a girl named Naomi Welling. A ranch hand found her on a riverbank, stripped and blue. Our parents had kept the most horrible details of the slaying from us, but we knew what the word murder meant. In school, at the beginning of each year, Mrs. Cranberry made us take turns reading the Ten Commandments. She once asked me to stand and read Commandment number six: thou shalt not kill. The archaic law was an easy enough concept to understand. Once a man decides to take the life from a creature, he can’t give it back. The process is irreversible. There is no restitution for such an act.

None of us knew Naomi Welling, so her murder felt removed. Mr. Dark existed as a chilling story, ripe for speculation. Most thought a drifter must have slain the girl. I suppose it’s difficult to accept that someone you know—perhaps even the man next door—could be capable of such an act. It’s easier to remove oneself from the evils that men are capable of. As it turned out, Mr. Dark was not a drifter.

A year passed before Mr. Dark struck again. A postman found Marcus Quigley, a 14-year-old, dead in the forest just outside of Missoula. He had been stabbed repeatedly with a short-bladed knife. His shirt had been torn off, and his skin had been slapped hundreds of times with an open palm. With Markus’s murder, the legend of Mr. Dark blazed afresh. Sheriff Flannerly reinstated the curfew; we could no longer play after sundown. With Markus’s murder, the drifter theory faded; Mr. Dark had to be one of our own.

Mr. Dark struck again and again over the three years leading up to May of 1893. He had killed three young men, six girls, and one elderly woman before Flannerly finally caught him. Mr. Dark turned out to be Jericho Riley, a 24-year-old redhead with perfect teeth and a clear complexion. Jericho lived in Breakwater. I didn’t know him personally, but my father had gone to school with Tim Riley, Jericho’s father. I sat up at the top of the stairs one night and overheard him talking to my mother about Jericho. My father said Jericho’s father grew up hard, always in trouble with the law. Tim had married young and abused his poor wife with brutal beatings and even more brutal words. My father knew about Tim’s son, Jericho, and had felt sympathy for the young man. “I knew he would go nowhere,” I heard my father say to my mother as I sat at the top of the stairs, “but I never imagined he could kill.”

I walked to school with Chad Philbin, one of my best friends. I asked him about the case; his father sat on the jury. Chad wanted the case to end so his father would stop snapping at him for little things and grounding him for being out at the creek after dusk. Chad told me that his father didn’t talk much about the case, but he could see the weight in his father’s eyes.

We all wondered if the jury would hang Jericho. To me, even at 11 years old, it seemed obvious; Jericho had killed at least three people. It seemed only fitting that he be punished in the same way he had tortured his victims. If I had been on that jury, I would have walked lockstep with the 11 others, because that is exactly what they determined. After 25 minutes of talking it over in a private room, Chad’s dad and the rest of the jurors decided that Jericho should die for what he had done. Only thing was, Jericho, mass murderer or not, grew up in Breakwater. When it came down to it, none of the adults could bare the thought of aiming a hunting rifle at the boy’s heart or putting a noose around his tallowy neck.

She was a stranger to herself then. She stopped, awed by the intricately wrinkled hollows around her eyes, the translucent skin stretched across her nose. She stood in front of the glass, arms around herself, mouth slack with surprise. Where’s Hallie? she thought until her mind cleared. What has that old bat done with Hallie?

But then she moved at the same time the hag in the mirror did, and it was like waking from a dream. In a second, faster than you could nod or realize, Oh, yes, of course that was a long time ago, she remembered. Her full bladder hummed inside her, and the kitten rubbed itself against her shins. She was no longer a young woman, a teacher who lived with her brother in a brand new house on Carlisle. And Terry was no longer a handsome, toothy boy who charmed without trying. They both had white hair and arthritis and no one but each other.

Once she had climbed the stairs to knock on Terry’s door, gone to the bathroom to put in her dentures, filled the cat’s bowl and placed it on the mat at the kitchen door, Hallie had renounced the past and was consumed by small chores that demanded all her courage. She put the coffee on, her fingers slow and unmanageable, lagging behind her intentions like stragglers on a tour. The striped can of drip at the back of the cupboard evaded her, so she settled for instant. She fried the eggs, even though Terry hated them that way. It hurt too much to move her wrists in the small flourishes it took to scramble.

She set two places at the dining room table, one on each side of the large water stain in the table’s center. Years ago, in an uncharacteristic gesture of apology or thanks, she’d forgotten which, her brother had left a vase of lavender peonies there. The deep, permanent whorls she found when she lifted the glass days later changed with the light. Sometimes, in the afternoon, they took the shape of a huge, Chinese fu dog, with flared nostrils and bulging eyes. Other times, especially mornings, they curled themselves into a group of girls running, their hair streaming across the tabletop.

When she heard Terry in the kitchen, Hallie knew he’d come down too soon. She found him, bending toward the sun in the window over the sink, his skinny wrists like bird joints, the tale of his navy blue nightshirt spilling from under his sweater. “Dirty Old Man,” she told him. “Don’t go telling me it’s too cold for a shower.”

He grinned then, faint spots of color spreading across his face, roses on old wallpaper. “Cold enough to freeze piss, Hallie,” he told her, the way he always did. Then he helped her get the mugs down and they drank their first cup of coffee. They drank standing up, side by side, staring out the window.

“You know damn well there’s no such word as axer,” he said, eyes fixed on the glittering stalactites clustered along the phone wire that stretched from the house to the pole on the corner. It was still early in the winter, but northern New York had already had three major snowstorms. The last one had left the front yard desolate and hushed as an altar.

Scrabble was a bond and a wedge between them. Every night they played, and every morning Terry rehashed and regretted. “We always add er to things,” Hallie insisted calmly. When they were little and played “rocks, scissors, stones,” her brother would slap her hands if she won. He’d wait until their mother turned away, then strike quickly, cunningly. When Hallie cried out and her mother turned around, Terry was all innocence, hands in his pockets, huge doll-like eyes sparkling with good will.

“I just let you have it,” he told her now, steam waffling the air above his Patriots mug. “Hell, Scrabble’s only a game.”

“A game I won,” she said. She didn’t look at him, pressing her fingers against the sides of her own mug, feeling the warmth, wishing it could reach her feet. They poured themselves refills and carried them into the dining room, but Terry hardly touched his eggs. He only pushed them to one side of his plate…

Jimmy Clemmons is a fellow who’ll hit three Blazing Sevens on a slot machine at the Greek Town casino in Detroit to win the jackpot, but since he doesn’t read well, he doesn’t understand he’s supposed to play three quarters to win the full amount, but he will laugh at himself nevertheless. He’s the kind of man who will come into your bedroom at your father’s home after you’ve just buried your son, murdered by a man in Wichita, Kansas, and put his arm around you while you stare at nothing. He will let you know he’s your friend.

I was thirteen and it was cold as hell. Clemmons and I stood in front of Club Eleven. We’d worked up the courage to go inside to look for his mother. He hadn’t seen her for two days, and he was hungry. No food in the refrigerator. No food in the cupboards. Butch was sixteen and at his girlfriend’s. He said he’d seen them once through a crack in the door, his brother moving on top of her, grunting. “I saw her tit,” Clemmons said.

“What’d it look like?” I said.

He squeezed his own tit, spit on the sidewalk. “They were talking about some girl they knew at school. My brother called her a slut.”

“Think she’ll be there?” I said.

“The slut?”

“Your mother.”

“Hard to say. She goes to the Eastgate Bar or Gabriel’s, makes the rounds.” Clemmons’s mother was usually with a woman he called Aunt Peggy, but they weren’t related. “If I can get some money from her, I’ll buy us a pack of smokes. Then we’ll go skating.”

Jimmy Clemmons could stop on a dime and skate backwards just as fast as he hurled his body forward across the ice, making everyone get out of the way. We spent hours at the pond behind the high school football stadium until the lights went out at ten o’clock. The pond drew us there most every night during winter, like a shiny pearl you can’t stop looking at.

The bar scared me. “We can’t go in there,” I said.

“Don’t be a pussy.”

When we walked into the bar a blast of warm, sticky air hit us. Voices cackled over a jukebox playing Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife.” Smoke rolled toward us. Several people at the bar turned to stare. “Close the fucking door,” a man said.

We saw his mother. There was neon everywhere: on the sidewalk in front of Club Eleven; in a sign blazing Pabst Blue Ribbon over the bar; neon in the shape of beer bottles hanging on the wall. There was so much red and blue light it turned the faces of people into Halloween masks.

Earlier that week Clemmons asked me if I wanted a piece of cake. His mother bought a chocolate cake. It was growing dark, and I knew I was supposed to be home when the streetlights came on, but the idea of cake lured me down the block to his house. “Sure,” I said. “Cake sounds good.”

I find it shameful and disconcerting that no one took the time to teach Clemmons to read—the system failed him, but he can take apart a car engine and put it back together. He can make things out of wood, do plumbing and electrical. His real job is driving a truck sixty hours a week and he’s good at it, wheeling around building and construction sites in Detroit because he knows the city like the back of his hand, like he’s got some kind of built in global positioning device. He can tell you the shortest routes between two destinations anywhere in metropolitan Detroit. He doesn’t fit the stereotype of a bad boy gone criminal because he had a difficult childhood. He still calls me about twice a month to tell me how things are in Detroit, how there isn’t much work to be had, and even if he could get a job at one of the auto plants, he’s too old. There’s a quality about his voice, the voice of those disappointed by life. He calls me to ask if I remember skating at the pond.

On the night he invited me to his house for a piece of cake, daylight faded behind Lincoln Elementary where Clemmons went to school. I didn’t care that he couldn’t read; he was my friend and books were not that important to a couple of thirteen-year-old boys.

The door to Clemmon’s house was always open. No one had a key. The house was dark. He told me to be careful because the kitchen light was the only one that worked.

I was afraid of his brother. “Is Butch home?” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Clemmons said, “I won’t let him kick your ass.”

I saw the cake on the table when Clemmons flipped the light switch. It took a moment for our eyes to adjust. Then it seemed as though the cake moved, as if it pulsed in the bright kitchen light. At first I thought it was a trick of vision, but then I realized it was a mass of scurrying cockroaches running across the table and down its legs to the floor, like a puddle disappearing under the baseboard.

“I think I’d better go,” I said.

“I guess you don’t want any cake,” Clemmons said with a laugh; I laughed too.

“See you tomorrow,” I said.

“You want to skate?”

“Sure.”

I thought about how cold it was walking back to my house. A shiver ran through me, but I knew it’d be warm at home. I knew my father would be settling in to watch Maverick, a bag of potato chips in his lap, a Pepsi nearby on a TV tray. I knew they were going to ask me if I had fun at the pond. I knew I’d say it was a great time, and then slump onto the couch with my father and dig into the bag of potato chips.

There would be a warm blanket on my bed, a small radio on a shelf over my head, its dial glowing yellow. Tomorrow I’d go to the Edgar A. Guest Junior High and read Huckleberry Finn. Clemmons would skip school. From my room I heard my mother and father talking, then I fell asleep.

on this fairy tale dance floor, alcohol
pixie dust swirling and I lie to
this man, his fingertips
telegraphing

a blurry desire in the uncharted
space between our bodies. I don’t

speak Spanish but understand
bailamos, the tambourine
need for movement against flesh.

Shakira, my hips aren’t
perfect but the gyrating path

from nape to navel is a road
map from Colombia
to Columbus.
I am angling to be

discovered. Between your pulsing
lovers-words I learn the lengths
of his body. He must know
by now how this make-believe
night could end:

my hair pillowed over his revealed
stomach, skin that was cool

shimmering warm to my taste,
my bare legs chaired over
his thighs, my hips
trying their

lies again and again, testing
their choices. There are endings
more satisfying than
happily ever after.

So, it is to the writers tirelessly sending their work that we dedicate this issue, our fifth. We hope you, our readers, find some stirring writing to end your summer days and carry you into fall. I would like to take a moment to thank Stephen Schonewolf and Allie Mathews for being on call this summer as editorial assistants. Zack Harding, our Managing Editor, was instrumental in reading and research, and we wish him well in future endeavors. Hats go off to Craig Buchner, our Associate Editor, for his keen eye. He will be missed as he takes on graduate school and edits fiction for Fugue. Ken Chamlee, Brevard College’s resident poet, has graciously accepted the position of Poetry Editor beginning with our next issue. Finally, once again, our gratitude goes out to Brevard College for giving us a home.

So writers and readers, my long gravel drive awaits you.

FICTION

W. G. Scherban | Dangerous Men
Arthur Hondros | The Soloist
Margarite Landry | Touch
Louise Hawes | Paradise Island
Christine Flanagan | Pageant
Craig Nybo | The Mechanic

NONFICTION

John Ferrone | Hard Road Home
Wendy Fox | The Fire Time
Allen Learst | AWOL

POETRY

Hugo Gutiérrez Vega | Mirage, Crime Sheet Photo
Brent Martin | Walking to the Hampton Farm with a Bad Hangover on a Cold January Day, Ferryman
Susan Lefler | Witching Time, Each Father’s Day I Think
William Kelley Woolfitt | The Beautician’s Secret
Kenneth Chamlee | The First Ten Minutes of the Local News, A Face to Meet the Faces
Teneice Durrant Delgado | Goldilocks Confronts Shakira
Terri Kirby Erickson | County Fair
Diane Shipley DeCillis | Mr. Right

Cover art, “Mr. Gallery Man,” by Sandro Sabatini. You can see more of his work at: http://www.quovadisart.it

I am sprawled in the back of my grandparents’ 1972 brown Nova. My
grandfather rides in front, teaching my brother to drive. My brother is
nine, and I can’t even see his head over the seat.

“Now ease up on the gas when you get to the top of the hill,” my
grandfather says.

As the car lurches, I look back toward the house. My grandmother
stands at the bedroom window, wiping her hands on the dishcloth in
her hand.

“Easy, ” my grandfather says as we head down the other side of the
hill.

“What if we see a policeman?” I ask.

“Old Hubert’s the law over here in Canton!” my grandfather says.

“Brake, son! Brake!”

The car screeches to a stop.

“Now let’s go up to the top of that hill, and then you can turn around
in the church parking lot.”

My brother is concentrating, and he is careful to signal before he turns. After a couple of days of practice, my grandfather will decide that my brother is ready to drive to town, and that will become one of our rituals—a trip to the store on the corner of Trammel and East Main to buy candy cigarettes and Fruit-Stripe gum.

At the crest of the hill, as the pavement ends, I see the garden below, the cornstalks gently swaying, my grandmother’s pink peonies in the front yard, the June apple tree sagging with fruit. I ease down the driveway and stop to let my grandfather out. He fumbles with his seat belt, then the door handle, gripping the window as he pulls himself onto the gravel. He waits for a moment until he finds his balance. My sons tumble out of the back of the van and gather their bags, filled with all the vital adolescent equipment—DVDs, cell phones, iPods, an Xbox, an entire suitcase full of video games. It is the beginning of what we have come to think of as “our shift,” our time to stay with my granddad while my grandmother is in a nursing home recovering from a broken hip.

Although it is early July, the heat is already oppressive. It has been weeks since it has rained here, and the moisture hangs in the air, sticking to our hair, our shirts, our glasses. The heat is especially hard for my grandfather, who, at eighty-nine, is slowly succumbing to emphysema and congestive heart failure. In addition to that, he is hard of hearing and almost completely blind. It has been three weeks since my grandmother’s fall, and it will be six more before she can think of coming home, so over the next several weeks, I’ll make this trip again and again. Sometimes I come alone, but, more often, one or two or all three of my children come also. On good days, we enjoy this time that we have together—this fleeting summer lull—this unsolicited respite from
our routines.

My older son, Avery, has just turned fourteen, and, in between cell phone conversations with his girlfriend, he plays Johnny Cash tunes on his guitar, his long blond hair falling into his eyes, while my granddad sits in his recliner chewing tobacco and tapping his foot. My younger son, Emery, will be twelve in a few days. He and I wander through the garden among the rows of vegetables my dad planted in the spring. We carry armfuls of corn back to the picnic table, and my grandfather places three lawn chairs close to the bench so that the three of us form a circle. Together we pull shucks from the corn, the only sounds the ripping of the husks, the clank of the cobs against the metal as we toss them into the pot. In the sultry stillness, my mind wanders back to another summer day, over thirty years ago.

My brother and I race into the pet store and stand before the cages, staring at each furry little body, trying to determine which one is the most robust. Finally, we agree on a brown one with especially bright eyes and a long pink tail. The sales clerk hands him to my brother, who dangles him by the tail and drops him into the cage. This one, I think, is going to be a good one.

The gerbil’s cage sits on my lap on the way back to our grandparents’ house. When we stop, my brother reaches for the cage. The gerbil is not moving. My brother reaches his forefinger through the bars and pokes him. Nothing. I begin to cry as my grandfather gets out of the car and goes to the basement for a shovel. My brother carefully lifts the cage and heads to the top of the hill behind the house. I follow closely behind him.

We already have what amounts to a pet cemetery here above the June apple tree, and I cry quietly while my grandfather digs the hole. Then, my brother opens the cage and dumps out the stiff little body. He covers him with wood shavings, then fashions a miniature cross out of two sticks tied together with some dead grass. He pokes the cross into the dirt, and we stand back together, solemnly contemplating the row of crosses…