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Before the first strike of the chisel, she was stone. Ten sweat-grimed men worked quickly cutting into the ribs of a mountain that held more graves than most. Their rusted winch snapped dragging her out of the quarry, killing two and injuring a third. Eventually the foreman, a bow-legged man forever gnashing at his cigar, coaxed new workers into hauling her the final few feet. Then, heaved onto a truck, she was driven to a warehouse in the city she used to overlook. “What d’ya think of her?” Cigar slapped her flank. A young man in a misbuttoned waistcoat stepped forward, his lips parted. “Beautiful.” Droplets of humidity from his breathless panting settled onto her rough surface. “Good. Now pay me for lugging her ass outta there. Killed two of my best men.” The young man reached deep into his trousers pocket and extracted a billfold. His pale, thin hand proffered a selection of notes. “If they were your best, why are they dead?” She remained there, absorbing talk and exuding moisture, for two days before the thin, disheveled young man collected her. Chills coursed through her at his tentative first touch. “I’m Arthur,” he murmured, his cheek laid gently against her. “I’m a sculptor.” He traced a line down her side; the fingernail scraping at her. A tiny shard came away. He flicked it to the floor. “I’m going to make you magnificent.” Arthur’s studio, once she arrived, felt cool, though the men straining to move her sweated in the afternoon sun. Finally ensconced in the middle of the empty room, the men laughed and slapped her with damp handkerchiefs. She groaned, shifting her weight imperceptibly. Then, they left. For days. Time fragmented here. Not one seamless transition from morning to afternoon to evening and beyond, time was punctured, and punctuated, by the sharp clops of horse hooves and the whining grind of car engines. She felt the sun weakly, through grimy windows set high in the walls. Metal roofing repelled the elements. When Arthur returned, alone, he carried hammers and chisels. He accepted delivery of a table; the accompanying stool arrived a week later. Pencils and paper moved about endlessly as he sketched, capturing her in both her current form and the one he dreamt for her. “Would you like to see what I am going to make of you?” Arthur held up a sheet roughly lined with a woman’s form. She shrank from the sense of what he was showing her. The lines were brash and arrogant, thick tumbling scratches vying for dominance. He tacked the drawing on the wall and began to sweep. Then he sharpened his tools. Finally, he seemed bored of preparations. He struck. She perceived no pain. Instead, she sat amazed as chunks of her former self piled around them. Listening to the hammer strike the butt of the chisel, she became aware of angles and curves, lines and planes. “Your brow will be high,” Arthur murmured, “And your chin strong. You are to be defiant. But you will be beautiful, my darling.” He stroked her with the back of his hand. “I will make you extraordinary.” As he chipped and chiseled away, casting more and more of her to the floor to be swept away into the refuse pile behind the warehouse, she felt herself slipping away. The one she had been, in the mountain, under the water, was gone. She would be new. The spirits she carried ran in fright from this unfamiliar thing. And to frighten the ancient ghosts, she must be terrible indeed. The sun left and when it returned, Arthur stumbled in retching on his own doorstep. He sank to the floor, his back against the door, his jacket soaking in bile. “I hate that man,” he muttered. “My little piece. That’s what he called you, my love. My little piece.” Arthur rolled into the room, smearing vomit across his shirt. He landed flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. “He asked me, ‘Son, what is your little piece to be called?’ Do you want to know how I answered?” He paused. “Of course you do. You are waiting with baited breath,” Arthur snickered. “I said, ‘Father, dear Father, my little piece will be called Medea.’” Arthur craned his neck to look at her. His bleary-eyed stare clung to her like algae. He rose, stumbled, careened to the cabinet. He yanked the doors open and, having pulled too hard, followed the momentum and fell to his knees, giggling. Every move reverberated through her. Digging around, discarding rags and papers, Arthur produced a bottle of sherry that he held aloft. “Huzzah! A lesser quality than Father’s but so be it.” He tugged the cork out and drank deeply, spilling some down the front of his stained shirt. He gulped, coughed. “That’s you, my love. Medea. Do you know the story? Angry with her husband for running around with another woman and killed their children. That’s it. An old story.” Arthur swung the bottle around him by the neck then placed it to his lips and guzzled the rest. She shrank from him. He dropped the bottle with a clank and a crack. His arms swung out wide; he dropped his chin to his chest. She, now Medea, thought he’d fallen asleep, crucified by drink. But then he began to laugh, a deep rasping erupting from his chest. He lifted his head. Tears snaked down his face. Then, a small jig in his hips, a movement that she nearly mistook for a step toward her. He inhaled, sucking through his mouth, and he leapt. Landing on his toes, he leapt again. And again. He whirled, winding a trap of stale breath and stink until she was surrounded. She felt him, rage bleeding from his mouth, grief welling like a river behind a dam. He laughed harder, the sound hardening, becoming a brittle cackle. The cackle became a scream. Arthur collapsed to the floor. Medea wished she could do the same. Another trip of the sun and a young woman burst through the feeble door. She clicked in on heels like knives. Arthur lay curled around his vomit-soaked jacket on the floor. A broken bottle lay at Medea’s feet. The young woman, a parasol gripped in her fist, tapped his forehead with the toe of her shoe. “Get up,” she commanded. Arthur snored. She rapped his temple with her foot. Once, “Will.” Twice, “You.” Thrice, “Get.” She delivered a hard kick to his shoulder. “Up!” Arthur snorted. Rolling onto his back, he reached for her. “Ugh, Arthur!” She pranced backwards, avoiding the grubby hands. “This is ridiculous.” She slapped the sides of her dress with her gloved hands. Medea watched her eyes dart in disgust landing, finally, on Medea herself. “This is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen from you, Arthur.” She sneered. Medea groaned. Arthur sighed, forced himself slowly to his knees, then his haunches. He crouched there, his blood-shot eyes staring balefully at his creation’s feet. “Margaret, she’s not finished yet.” His voice scraped out of his throat. Margaret sniffed, yanking her gloves tighter. “It’s heavy, coarse. The stone is mottled, not a good quality. There is no finesse, no artistry. And worse, I feel nothing when I look at her. No rage, no passion, nothing.” The words spewing from Margaret’s mouth washed over Medea. “She’s not finished yet, Margaret.” Arthur’s teeth snapped as he bit off her name. Margaret shook her head, the feathers of her elaborate hat swishing side to side. “It doesn’t matter, Arthur. You are far enough along. There should be something there.” Arthur grunted. “Shut up, woman.” Margaret clicked her tongue. “You’re an imbecile. Or mad.” She caressed a ribbon tied to her dress, flattening it against her skirt. “In any event, I won’t marry you.” Arthur lifted his face. Heat rose through Medea’s feet, through the folds of the garment carved into her legs. She wanted to twist away. But she had nowhere to go; nothing to relieve the pressure she felt. Arthur rose, his eyes fixed on those of his fiancée. Margaret slipped a ring off her finger and held it out. It sparkled in the dusty beams of light filtering through the room. Medea pulled herself in, away. Arthur snorted, turning his back. Margaret dropped the ring to the floor, a shard of sunlight flashing off the metal as it fell. She strode through the door, slamming it shut behind her. Arthur picked up a hammer. When he was finished, Medea had a face. The cleaves and hews were sharp, cutting against the humid air surrounding her. She felt stung, her stone weeping. The harsh sandpaper he took to her next forced more of her to crumble. He gave up when the dust began to irritate his lungs. Throwing his tools at her feet, he barged away, not bothering to lock the door. Medea exhaled. But she could not settle. Striations of rock vibrated. Minerals throbbed as they forced their way to the surface. No longer her old self, she couldn’t control her own rock. Those pieces, mixed in, vied for their own shred of sunlight, should it ever come again. The next morning, Arthur sanded more gently. “You see my love; you see how they treat me?” Sober, refreshed, he had come dressed in clean clothes and smelling of lavender. She remained rigid. The air in the studio hung rank and stale, though the front door stood wide open. She swelled in the humidity. Yesterday’s emotion hung in the air, its own cloudscape. Medea absorbed it all. “I am but a pawn to them.” He wiped dust from her eyes. “They think I’m stupid, a fool, laughable.” Arthur took a short rasp to her chin. “They think I’ll get this out of my system. Finish my little piece, work for Father. Or take up the law, God forbid.” Arthur gently stroked her cheek. Medea felt a prickliness at her surface. He continued, “Mother cries that her boy is obstinate. She raised me better.” Arthur peered into the eyes he’d shaped. Medea stared back. Moonlight crept through the windows that night. The shadows thrown onto the floor chased each other, melded together. “Marble is quite soft, my darling,” Arthur had told her once, his hand draped over her shoulder, “that’s why it’s so easy to shape.” But he’d carved severity. Medea stood upright; poised to step. One arm hung by her side; the hand gripped a knife. The other reached, fingers outstretched, palm open. Her shoulders were squared, her chin set firm. He’d cut lines around her eyes, forcing her expression into one of anger, menace. “Shall I paint you?” Arthur caressed her cheek. “Perhaps jewels?” He laughed. “Something that sparkles.” He told her the story of Medea again as he polished her with a cloth. Told her how she’d tried to fool Jason into thinking he was forgiven; that she’d wanted to kill him too. When he got to her face, rubbing gently over her nose and cheeks, she allowed her eyes to follow his hands. It amused her that he felt it, jumping, startled. That night, she marveled at the power surging through her arms and shoulders, the energy in her legs. She examined the strength of her back, found herself tall, proud. She noted the defiance in her jawline. She felt the intelligence behind her eyes. The next morning, something in Medea’s breast fluttered when she heard Arthur’s key jerk into the lock. He yanked the door open. “There you are, my dear. Sleep well? I did. I did, yes, thank you. How do I look?” He twirled in front of her. His new coat flaring out just above his knees, the thread glistening. Medea admired him, her sculptor. The flutter quickened and a pulsing throb spread from the center of her chest outward into every line and curve carved into her. As she gazed at him, the bright patent of his new leather shoes sending shards of light in every direction, she thought, for now she could think, of dashing herself to the floor, setting free the thrashing being trapped within cold rock. “I have a meeting now, my love, a very important meeting.” Arthur giggled. He ran a fingertip down her arm. “Your new master is buying me lunch.” The creases around Medea’s eyes deepened. She watched as he gazed into her face, seeing nothing. In the center of that pulsing throb, a hole opened.  “Yes, my love, you are to have a new home. What do you think of that?” He placed his cheek into her outstretched hand. His delicate skin warmed her. The flutter seized, spasmed. Her gaze moved with him as he stepped back. Ice from the harshest winter wound down her back. Her throat, a piece of anatomy that until a moment ago merely lacked air to cry out of its own accord, squeezed shut. “Ah, my love. I’ll visit.” His gaze, pride knocking against her, fed the rage already etched into her face. He lifted his hand to her cheek, pressing his warm palm against her. His face loomed closer as he brought his lips, chapped and smothering, to her own. She felt the kiss, meat against stone, and a shudder surged through her. “I am ridiculous.” Arthur breathed into her face, a moist breeze settling over her. “Well, my love,” Arthur pushed away from her, “I am off. When I get back, I’ll have your new owner ripe and ready. Do make an effort.” He smacked her hip and scurried out, banging the door behind him. Medea remained in the center of the room. Arthur’s excitement buzzed through her, every crystal vibrating. She fought the emptiness opening wider, deeper. She moaned, minerals grinding. A great wrenching feeling overwhelmed her and Medea found muscle and sinew. She twisted. The arm shackled to her side tore free. Arthur spun back into the room. “So sorry, my love, forgot my umbrella.” He waved. Her arm rose. The knife lifted; its point sharp. He raced back, heading for the door, brandishing his umbrella like a sword. Medea groaned forward. Her body stiff, cumbersome. Fingers tightening around the knife she could not put down. Arthur stopped, eyes growing, jaw working. His umbrella fell to the floor. Medea ground toward him, grasping, rock springing free. A voice, older than the fury scored across the planes of her face, asked her to stop. She could not. She would not. Resistance at the end of the knife. Man’s skin a thin barrier to his stomach. His blood warmed her hand. Janel Konzer is a fiction writer living in Michigan. She drinks far too much coffee and knows far too few crows. Her hearing is terrible, a good thing considering her house is very loud.

wisps of my mother’s Latin  haunt my head while  my fingers caress the water’s surface and I cross myself  In the name of the Father, the Son   et Spiritus Sancti in the sanctuary, old women  peppered across cedar pews rosaries wound round their knuckles  chant to our Lady  making grace bloom in my dusty heart though I never belonged here as a child, I prayed to the moon and now leave witches’ ladders  to unravel back into the earth in the ivy patch behind my shed yet the quiet feeds me musty incense cool granite pillars  still whisper a little like  the divine in the tiny girl  corners of my mind God is not the building and is enough to get me through with some kind of peace  until evening Jeanette Barszewski received an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in Literary Mama, Cooper Street, O-Dark-Thirty and  Elixir Verse .  Jeanette is a queer writer currently residing in Hamilton, NJ with her family. She enjoys old-lady hobbies like gardening and making art out of pressed wildflowers. You can find out more about her at www.jeanettebarszewskiauthor.com

“Jimmy!” Grant whispered. He grabbed his sleeping brother’s shoulder and shook him. “Jimmy, wake up!” Jimmy groaned. He opened one eye and looked at the Darth Vader clock next to his bed. It was 3:05 AM. He rolled over and pulled his Star Wars blanket up over his head. “Go away,” he mumbled. Grant yanked the blanket away from Jimmy’s face and shook him again, with both hands this time. Jimmy planted a hand on Grant’s chest and pushed him away. “Stop, I said!” “You have to get up!” “Why?” “Something’s wrong with Mom.” Jimmy sat bolt upright in bed, immediately wide awake. His heart slammed against the inside of his rib cage. He reached over and turned on the lamp, squinting against the sudden brightness. “Again?” He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Grant nodded solemnly. His lower lip quivered. “How do you know?” “I got up to pee, and I saw her.” “Where?” Grant pointed at the ceiling out in the hall. “Up there.” Jimmy pressed his cheek against the door frame, edging just close enough to the opening to see sideways into the hallway outside. “Is she there?” Grant asked. Jimmy shook his head, then closed the door. He turned to his little brother. For the first time, he noticed that the sleeves of Grant’s Spider-Man pyjamas were two inches too short. He was growing up so fast. He’d be seven soon. “Are you sure you saw her?” “Yes!” “Okay. I’m going out. You stay here.” Grant’s eyes went wide. He shook his head. “Uh-uh. I’m coming too.” “You know what can happen when she’s like this.” Grant nodded. “And you still want to come?” Grant hesitated, then nodded again. “Okay.” Jimmy put his hand on the doorknob, then paused. “And you know what to do if–” “I know, Jimmy. Let’s just go, okay?” Jimmy took a deep breath, then opened the door. He stepped quietly down the hall towards their mother’s room. The hardwood floor was cold under his bare feet. Grant stayed two steps behind him. He had grabbed the stuffed Spider-Man doll from his bed, which he now clutched tightly to his chest with both arms. Jimmy kept his eyes on the ceiling as he walked. He glanced sideways into the shadows of the stairwell. There was nothing there. Nothing he could see, anyway. A floorboard creaked under Jimmy’s foot. He froze, listening. There was a faint rasping sound coming from the direction of their mother’s bedroom. It sounded like breathing. Grant reached out and tapped his brother’s shoulder. Jimmy drew in a short gasp and spun around. “What?” “What if she won’t come down this time?” “She will.” “But what if she won’t?” Jimmy put his hand on his brother’s shoulder and looked him in the eyes. “She will.” Grant nodded. Jimmy turned and continued slowly down the hall. Grant followed. The door to their mother’s room was open. The moonlight from the hallway window softened the darkness just enough for them to see to the foot of her bed. The covers were tossed on the floor. Jimmy crept up to the door, then turned to Grant. He lifted his fingers to his lips. Shhh.  He pointed at Grant, then to a spot on the floor, against the wall outside the door. You. Stay. Grant nodded. He stepped back against the wall, to the spot where Jimmy had pointed. He hugged his Spider-Man doll to his chest even tighter. Jimmy leaned into the doorway. His eyes scanned the ceiling. There was nothing there. He relaxed a little and stepped into the room. The bed was vacant. A single pillow was in place on one side. The other side was empty. Jimmy tried not to, but he couldn’t help but look at the wall at the head of the bed. It was crisscrossed with paint roller marks, from a recent paint job. The work looked hurried and careless, like whoever painted it was more concerned about covering something on the wall than they were about aesthetics. “This is all your fault,” a voice whispered. Jimmy spun around. It was his mother. On the ceiling. Just like Grant had said. She was pressed into the space directly above the bedroom door. Jimmy had walked right underneath her. She was laying on the ceiling just as effortlessly as a person might lie on the floor. It was as if gravity had inverted itself. As if the world had been turned upside down. But just for her. Her back was against the ceiling. She had her knees drawn up to her chest, with the soles of her feet flat against the wall. Her arms were spread wide like a crucifix. Her fingers were cramped into claws, fingertips digging into the plaster. Jimmy could see the veins in her arms. They stood out against her pale skin like rivers winding through a winter snowscape. Dark liquid pulsed through them, as if her blood had been replaced with crude oil. The same thick black lines branched upwards from the neck of her t-shirt, climbing her neck and spidering into her cheeks and temples. Even the blood vessels in her eyes were black. She was clad in nothing but an oversized Yankees t-shirt. It was worn thin and faded with age. Jimmy recognized it immediately. It had been his father’s. “Mama,” Jimmy said, his voice steady. He held his palms out in a calming gesture. “It’s alright. It’s just me. Jimmy. Come on down now, okay?” “ALL. YOUR. FAULT!” she growled through clenched teeth. Long drips of spittle dangled from her blackened lips and dripped on the floor. Grant’s face appeared at the edge of the doorway. Jimmy made a subtle gesture, a quick flick of the wrist. Stay out.  Grant drew back into the hall. “I know you’re upset,” Jimmy said. “But it’s going to be okay.” His mother’s lips drew back from her teeth in an animal snarl. Her gums were black too. “He never wanted you.” A warm flush heated Jimmy’s face. He shook his head. “Daddy was sick, Mama. And you are too.” “NO!” she shrieked. She thrust her legs against the wall, propelling herself across the ceiling until she was directly above Jimmy. The speed and suddenness with which she moved were startling. Jimmy stumbled backward, falling hard on his bottom. The back of his head hit the nightstand. Out in the hall, running footsteps receded into the distance. Jimmy rolled his head sideways. He could see under the bed, past the dust bunnies and lost socks, straight through to the open bedroom door. A tiny masked face was looking back at him. Grant’s Spider-Man doll. It was on the floor in the hall. Jimmy rolled his head forward again. He was on his back, looking directly up at his mother as she hovered against the ceiling overhead. Her eyes blazed with irrational fury. Every blood vessel in her face oozed with black liquid, fracturing her visage like the face of a shattered china doll. “Get out of here,” she seethed. Rapid, hot breaths whistled in and out of her mouth. Jimmy climbed to his feet. “Mama? I’m going to reach for you now,” he said. He slowly raised his arm towards the ceiling, fingers open. “I want you to take my hand.” “No,” a small voice said. “Don’t touch her.” Jimmy looked to his side. Grant was standing silhouetted in the bedroom doorway, clutching something small and black in both hands. A gun. It was their father’s revolver, the .38 he had kept in his nightstand in case someone tried to break into the house while they were sleeping. It was meant to protect the family. It didn’t. After their father was gone, their mother had moved the gun downstairs, to a box in the hall closet. She couldn’t bring herself to discard it, despite what he had done. It was the last thing he had held in his hands before he died. It was all she had left. Jimmy and Grant weren’t supposed to know where the gun was hidden. But they did. Grant pointed the gun up at their mother. The weapon looked huge and heavy in his tiny grip. Jimmy kept his one hand extended to the ceiling. He held the other out toward Grant. He kept his eyes on his mother. “It’s okay, buddy. You can go back in the hall. She’s going to come down.” “I don’t want her to.” Grant’s voice wavered. He tightened his grip on the pistol. “I want her to be gone.” “Then do it!” she spat. “What are you waiting for?” “No!” Jimmy said sternly. “Grant, don’t do anything. Just go out there and let me handle this.” Grant put his finger on the trigger and took a step into the room. “It’s her  fault Dad’s gone. Not yours. Not ours. Hers .” “It’s nobody’s fault,” Jimmy said. “He was sick.” He reached his hand further towards the ceiling, almost on his tiptoes. He wiggled his fingers. “Mom, come on. Take my hand.” Tears spilled from Grant’s eyes. “Don’t. Please. What if you get sick too?” “I won’t,” Jimmy insisted. He turned his head and looked at his brother. “Look at me. I’m not lying.” Grant looked at Jimmy for a long beat. His brother’s gaze was steady and sure. Grant’s grip on the gun slackened. His arms relaxed. He lowered the weapon towards the floor. “Good,” Jimmy said. He looked back up at the ceiling and raised his arms back up to his mother. “Mom? We love you, okay? Both of us. Me and Grant. We’re here for you. Come on. Come down.” His mother’s face changed. The fury in her eyes slowly flickered out. The black liquid began to recede from her face. The color of her lips faded from black to grayish-blue. A sob racked her chest. She reached down from the ceiling towards Jimmy’s outstretched hands. Their fingertips brushed, then intertwined. Jimmy gently pulled his mother down from the ceiling. She descended slowly, horizontally, as if being lowered by strings. As she came down to his level, he turned her and guided her onto the bed. Her head settled onto the pillow. Her breathing relaxed. Her eyelids fluttered, then closed. The bedsprings squeaked as her full weight sunk into the mattress. It was over. Jimmy brushed her hair away from her face with his fingers. Her skin was cool to the touch. The black liquid was gone from her veins. Her lips were pink again. Jimmy planted a gentle kiss on her forehead. Then he walked over to Grant and took the gun from his hand. Grant let him. “Let’s put this away,” Jimmy said. “For next time?”  “There won’t be a next time.” Jimmy put his hand on Grant’s back and guided him out of the room. He pulled the door closed quietly behind them. It latched with a click. Jimmy bent down, picked up Grant’s Spider-Man doll, and handed it to his brother. “Don’t forget this.” Jimmy led his brother back to their bedroom. Grant climbed into his bed. Jimmy pulled the Spider-Man blanket up under his brother’s chin. Grant yawned, then looked at Jimmy. “You’re sure there won’t be a next time?” Jimmy smiled, then nodded. “I’m sure.” Grant smiled back, then closed his eyes. He rolled over to go to sleep. Jimmy straightened up and looked down at his brother. Behind Grant’s ear, there was a tiny spiderweb of black veins. A trickle of black liquid leaked from Jimmy’s nose. He wiped it away with his sleeve, then lifted the gun. Warren Benedetto writes dark fiction about horrible people, horrible places, and horrible things. He is an award-winning author who has published over 260 stories, appearing in publications such as Dark Matter Magazine, Fantasy Magazine , and The Dread Machine ; on podcasts such as The NoSleep Podcast, Tales to Terrify , and Chilling Tales For Dark Nights ; and in anthologies from Apex Magazine, Tenebrous Press, Scare Street, and many more. He also works in the video game industry, where he holds 50+ patents for various types of gaming technology. For more information, visit  warrenbenedetto.com  and follow @warrenbenedetto on  Twitter  and  Instagram .

“Why is this night different from all other nights?” – From the Passover Seder Here I lie, chad gadya on my hospital bed counting my blessings  on my left hand. I think of the life, the life I have lived, the life and beyond, a river unending that I soon will cross. Then they come to me there these three wise men: a rabbi, a friar, a brahmin priest. We all chant om , and within I seek shanti that since youth I had lost, the straight path in the wood. We slip through the wood to lie in green pastures by a path unending and the comforts of His rod. Then comes down to the valley the shadow of Death, that with Chokmah I perceive as some old-new friend. And then in my haze the friar comes forth, whispers love of the Lord down into the river before my hospital bed. And so here I lie, chad gadya , and I have known them all: the cat and the bull, the dog and the ox, the fire and the rain, God and mankind. And so here I lie, chad gadya , with no zuzim   to pay the ferryman Charon. At the river unending that I soon will reach, I will pay Charon with the tale of my life. Would that he likes it, tale of chad gadya , that I give to him on the banks of the Styx. I have no zuzim but a story to tell, of chad gadya , who could count all his blessings only on his left hand. Raymond Turco is a poet and playwright born in Hackensack, NJ, USA. He writes poems in English and Italian and has a special affinity for European history, travel, surrealism, magical realism, and absurdism. The author of nine stage plays, he has published his poetry in the Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow , Lothlorien Poetry Journal , and with Bordighera Press, among others. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Cliffside Park Arts Association and is the organization’s Director of Literature. His first chapbook, Rays of Light and Darkness , was published with Finishing Line Press in 2024.

I smelled him before I saw him, the pungent draft of maraschino and cigar smoke smacking sobriety into my rum-drunk skull. Three days on the island. La Républica de Cuba. Three days exploring a city frozen in time. Three days huffing gasoline fumes whilst narrowly avoiding collapsing balconies, vengeful pedicabs, and the internet. Three days drinking, heavily. He settled onto the stool beside me, off-white guyabera shirt soaked through, his body’s condensation a higher proof than the cerveza on my lips, swollen face an echo of the lumpy travel pillow I’d abandoned on the plane, his beard the color of sun-bleached bones.  The picture of a man who had found himself and promptly spent decades trying to forget.  The bartender slid a cracked highball glass in front of the Old Man and poured him a daiquiri. You don’t meet many americanos in Cuba, so whatever gutter this fermented Falstaff dragged himself out of, I thought it fortuitous; of all the rum joints in Havana, he chose this one. My inner stereotype got the better of me and I blurted out in my best Midwestern patois, “I hope your day’s going swimmingly, amigo.” “Fuck your adverbs,” the Old Man muttered. “Pardon me?” “A man has no need for adverbs. I drink. I fish. I drink again. It doesn’t matter how I do them. It only matters that they’re done,” said the Old Man. He belched and sipped his daiquiri. “You don’t like words, do you?” “When they’re clean, sparse, like a…” The Old Man stopped himself, “You almost had me there.” He raised his daiquiri into the air and I toasted in kind. But before I could bring the drink to my lips, the Old Man had slurped down his libation and ordered another. His eyes landed on my half-full glass. “Pussy,” spat the Old Man. He followed this invective with a belch to rival any thunderclap. The hours ghosted by on a broken wall clock, hands forever announcing twelve forty-six. I had barely made a dent in my sixth cerveza, but the desire for a Dark ’N’ Stormy interlude was growing stronger by the minute. I held up an index finger to announce my intentions when I caught the Old Man gazing at me through glassy-eyed delirium, irises fixed on my face while his eyeballs swam in their sockets. Perhaps he’d taken offense to the peach-fuzz disaster pathetically sprouting from my upper lip. I’d left my razor back home, regrettably, and all spare dinero had been allocated towards the forget-her fund. “Fuck you,” he barked. “Why?” I squeaked. The Old Man’s guts gurgled. A cherry-flavored hiss bubbled up through chapped lips. The bartender, seemingly fluent in his hoary incoherence, appeared with a fresh daiquiri. I again attempted to flag down the man, but a meaty paw grasped my neck and another clawed open my jaw while he funneled a fresh daiquiri down my gullet, most of it getting in my eyes. Temporarily blinded, I screamed for help, but all I got in response was the Old Man’s reply. “Quit your bitching and take it like a man [ belch ] You might just grow some real hair on your face.” My correct estimation at the cause of the Old Man’s ire brought no calm. I wiped the sugary sap from my eyes and felt hate in the back of my throat; the inchoate rage had triggered my reflux. I wanted to hit this man, to beat him senseless, to pound his fat face with my fists until his frontal lobe resembled raspberry jelly. My fingers clenched with feral instinct, I shoved the stool aside… blood throbbed in his temples. The American grabbed his cerveza and shattered the end against the bar top, the Old Man burped again, prepared to be unmade by the jagged ridges of the broken bottle … “That’s the spirit! You’re finally writing like a man. That’s some terse narration,” the Old Man bellowed. He smacked my back, and the bottle dropped from my hands, fracturing on the floor. He grinned, teeth nearly splitting apart his face. A ruddiness returned to his cheeks. A stability to his vision. My bloodlust appeared to have brought the Old Man back from the brink. Even his beard seemed fuller. “I just want to drink in peace,” I begged, my rage forgotten. “Hogwash! You’ve just scratched the surface, hombre.” His voice boomed, propelled by sheer force of personality. “Have you seen the Malecón?” I had not. The Old Man’s eyes came alive, “Then to the Malecón we shall depart, tout de suite!” He flung his glass against the back bar and dragged me out the door, followed closely by the bartender’s curses. Havana was drowning in a nameless tropical depression. We stumbled down rain-soaked streets, past concrete buildings swollen and sallow, bricks bulging under the water weight. Mildewed cabbage and broken bits of caulk, tire treads and castoff vitamin bottles, a diluvian cavalcade bobbed to the surface of one-time gutters, now flooded arroyos. The entire city was topsy-turvy, smothered by an inverted ocean. The Old Man greeted the tempest with brio, a smile never leaving his face. The wind whipped stinging droplets against my body, but I soldiered on after him. “You study the Sweet Science?” I shambled along, ignoring his query. The Old Man stormed into a darkened building and returned moments later with another daiquiri; his manful catechism continued unabated through dissonant gulps, “Hasn’t been the same since the damn Queensbury Rules. Gloves are for the opera!” he thundered, “Why take the sport  out of the godforsaken sport?!” I thought of answering and thought even harder of not answering. The Old Man conjured a cigar from his pocket. “Conjured. You write like a bitch,” he said, teetering on his feet as he futilely attempted to light the limp cigar, “Sure you got a dick down there?” Unsuccessful at making fire in a rainstorm, the Old Man tossed his soggy cheroot into an eddy. Lighting briefly lit the tableau. “Let’s wrestle.” He tore off the guyabera, his naked torso carpeted in a thick white shag. Sinewy muscles tensed under layers of paunch. Before I could utter a syllable in response, the Old Man enveloped me in his boozy essence and quickly hugged the breath out of me. “Uncle,” I whimpered. “You don’t get to give up that easily.” I passed out. An undetermined time later, I awoke, senses blunted by the acrid permeation of diesel fuel and the endless drone of Soviet-era car horns. The storm had rolled westward. A dark memory on the horizon. What I at first assumed to be a palm tree providing shade was the Old Man, arm braced against a rusted hatchback, letting loose a steady flow of brownish urine that pooled between the cobblestones adjacent to my forehead. I leapt to my feet, instantly cured of my hangover, but my hard-won vocabulary had been lost somewhere in the deluge. I only managed a meek grunt and what I hoped was a look of flabbergasted confusion. “No one cares about your damn Thesaurus. You sound like a foppish Brit who misses his mummy. De-flower that prose.” He hocked a loogie into the piss stream. “You want the people to read your words, use words the people know. That’s what Odets missed. Fitz. All of ‘em. Your audience, they want to hear themselves. They want to recognize their lives in your self-important bullshit. We’re all narcissists at the end of the day.” The Old Man tucked away his member and continued onward. Our heathen hajj had taken on a different tone, that impromptu wrestling match had awakened the Old Man’s competitive edge; his joyful fecundity mutated into grotesque sport. It seemed every moment not spent dodging traffic was interrupted by another brazen display of physicality: Shot-putting bricks against crumbling façades, deadlifting parked cars, crushing cinderblocks with discarded rebar. The competition devolved from there: foot races across derelict construction sites, an impromptu push-up-a-thon, and many one-sided exchanges of insults… At this rate we would be waging a thumb war before we reached Plaza Centro. “I’m gonna go back to the hotel,” I muttered, “My feet hurt.” The Old Man brought his forefingers to his temples, aimed skyward, exhaled sharply through his nostrils, and charged me. I had sobered considerably since the bar and easily sidestepped him. He tripped on the uneven pavement and tumbled to the ground. A weary torero and his sad old bull. “I’m done playing. Enjoy Cuba,” I said. The Old Man wiped mud from his bleeding knees, “So that’s it, scrivener? You’re giving up?” I saw him, finally. Surrounded by ruins. Crumbling facades. Derelict. Left behind. The past decays, yet remains, in shambles, but it remains. Piles and piles and piles and piles. It occludes. Clogs. Chokes. It stops up the damn drain. To concinnity and beyond! I stood in a landfill, no longer Cuba. The tectonic plates of human history, shifting atop the sediment of forgotten heroes. A sad entertainer spinning plates. He’s weary. He needs a rest.  I’ve lost it, the metaphor. Gone. Slipped from my grasp. The meaning. Conveyance. What was I trying to say? What am I trying to say? “That you’re a hack,” barked the Old Man. Take two tablespoons of the past. Grind it. Into dust. Add a pinch of salt. One cup water, and simmer. For an hour, for two, for a century, and from that primordial soup, pour into a mold. Let dry. You’ve made a brick. Now build the world. The Old Man stood naked while the city collapsed. “Your words are his words, are their words, are mine. The  is the . And  is and . They don’t care what you have to say,” he roared. He was right. So I buried him in language. Expressions. Smilies. Adjectives and allusions. Voltas and stanzas and epithets. The entire span of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Roget’s for good measure. He dropped to one knee, the sheer sparsity of his being crushed by the overwrought prose. The Old Man wrangled a loose adverb, twisting it with his bare hands into a meager pronoun, but he was no match for the onslaught of words. A vicious onomatopoeia gashed his throat. Blood gurgled from the wound and with it leaked a single word, “Pussy.” He collapsed into the linguistic swarm. I watched for a while, as the starving mutts of Havana picked at his bones though the razor-sharp bits of satire, scarfing down loose dialogue and dactyls. Then I walked back to the bar. Goodbye, Papa. D.M. Harring is a neurodivergent writer obsessed with exploring the mundane horrors of our Kafkaesque timeline. He previously wrote for ABC’s The Company You Keep and FOX’s Rosewood and has developed projects for CBS, Warner Bros, and other media companies that will likely be swallowed up by Netflix in the near future.  His fiction has appeared (under various aliases) in Bards & Sages Quarterly, Adelaide Magazine, The Oddville Press , and will be featured in the upcoming anthology, The Beauty in Darkness , by Dark Moon Rising Publications. His award-winning, debut short horror film, FLOATER , has played at festivals across the globe.

I hated so much in my life and still became something beautiful when I died. Here, slotted in the rock, I flow out. I’ll erode what’s underneath me until it curves like a body again, until I can feel again.  I still remember the sensation of my arms, tied to the bony horns of that bull, I called her “Anti” because she reminded me of Antiope, with the big nose and fat calves rippling from blackened feet. I was slung across Anti’s face, spine compressing, navel flexing outward. And they beat my legs through my robes; sometimes they missed because of Anti’s blind thrashing. I died on top of Anti, and I melted into water.  They beat me like I beat Antiope, which they had never seen, but some feeling in their soul drove them to my same anger.  I hated so much in my life, but when I died, I lived on  through the flow of the world and the water. There was so much breath in the water. So much oxygen I felt like I was punctured from the inside. Anti bent down to drink from me, drenching my abandoned rope. I was so horrible, I believe, and I was still rewarded with beauty— isn’t that everyone’s worst dream? Emily Clara Jarecke is a young writer from the Cleveland area. She enjoys taking photos on her aging Nikon camera, listening to rock music, and playing the drums.

Numb and in a quandary—  Dazed, disengaged, stymied.  Here is your birth chart,  which I have calculated  and drawn by hand.  I deliver it by hand.  One can’t be too careful.  There is much here about  fear and loss of control.  Take this mosaic, these  jagged bits for in it  I see gossamer sails  filled with the moon-lost wind  ride the ragged waves. Richard Denner (aka Jampa Dorje): Printer-Poet-Yogi-Monk. Born 1941 in Santa Clara, California. Berkeley street poet in the 1960s. Graduated from University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Impresario of D Press and Kapala Press ( www.dpress.net ).  Completed traditional Tibetan Buddhist three-year solitary retreat at Tara Mandala in Colorado. Now lives in Ellensburg, Washington.

Kate looks nearly translucent under the stage’s spotlight. But she knows this. She doesn’t wear a getup like the others. No tattered cloak, candlestick prop, bone jewelry clacking together. She uses subtlety and juxtapositions to craft the uncanny. Like, how she’s small in frame, even frail. And then, as usual, the audience will be surprised when her voice booms. Nothing about this moment is about me. Nothing ever is. Nevertheless, she recreates the moment I fell in love with her. And I still love her, but my resolve just has to survive this last performance. Then, I can let go. I sit in the front row with the other storytellers’ spouses. The crowd is large. Bigger than the usual competition. For the literary horror fan, there’s household names here. There’s also a cash prize, but Kate never cares about money. She only cares about her craft. She cares about it obsessively. To the point she called off our engagement three separate times. During each faux breakup, she would cry in my arms. It’s inherently miserable to be a storyteller , she'd say. Those dramatic episodes seem pretentious to me now. But I was warm then, so I’d smooth her thin hair. I’d tell her I didn’t care that she’d lock herself away for days to write, that her nightmares paid the bills, that she never wanted kids. What an idyllic idiot, but I understand my mental gymnastics now. She saw me like no else has and so I made all the concessions possible. During the good times, I’d lie in her arms and marvel at the feeling of being read like a story book, and she’d whisper that she doesn’t read me. She’d say she listens, like all good storytellers do. Kate lowers the mic. The projector flashes the red words in Blackadder font, “Presenting: Kate Zelenskaya.” She’s always used her maiden name for her authorship. For the first time, I let it bother me. A woman behind me whispers, “Ableman, Hatahali, and now Zelenskaya! This might be the best Halloween of my life.” In the meanest of spirits, I imagine turning around and saying, “And, this is going to be the worst Halloween of Zelenskaya’s life.” But the uncertainty of that actually being the case, after all is said and done, sinks me back into a state of malaise. A malaise which I thought anger would propel me out of. It’s like standing in an exposed field. An empty one where a fog has rolled in; air too dense to breathe. I think I’ve been here and breathless for a long time. “I dedicate this story to my husband, Foster.” She doesn’t even know where I’m sitting and so she smiles into the sea of strangers. “His support knows no bounds.” The fog in me becomes too heavy for even a scoff. She straightens.  “'The Language of Angels' by Kate Zelenskaya.” She’s a master of pauses; she’ll cock her head and tilt her right ear up. Looking at the audience with side eyes, it’s like she’s considering whether or not they can handle the tale. It’s like she’s giving them a chance to cover their ears. She’ll never not be beautiful like this, despite what I’m feeling. “This is the tale of how fallen angels created their language. For the sake of ease, we’ll call the untainted angels the Virtuous and the fallen angels, well, the Fallen. But right now, they’re falling, cast from Heaven and… Falling…”  She does her signature pause, but something is different... Her eyes emptily gaze at the ceiling, rather than being enlivened by the audience’s attention. She must not be on her A-game tonight. “Falling… Yes, through clouds pregnant with darkness. The Virtuous dip in and out of the masses of clouds, plucking at their forsaken siblings’ wings. Lighting strikes, scattering the Virtuous, scathing the falling. Yes, they’re falling…  “Now, they hit the ground and become the Fallen. They land in rolling fields of thorns, tearing their crisped skin further, gouging out their eyes. They untangle themselves, struggling to stand, wings unwilling to give a single flap. They look like hell.  “Despite the Fallen’s deep pain, a pain down to the quick, this is not enough punishment in the Virtuous’s eyes. The clouds part and a terrible bright light shines. The Virtuous swoop to torment more. The Fallen are running to hide in caves, jungles, even drowning in the deep sea. The Virtuous eavesdrop on the Fallen's escape plans and thwart the hideouts before they are built. The fallen are…drowning…” She’s scattered and stalling. Again, she tilts her head and this time her face scrunches. She’s running the pause too long as the audience shifts. My knee-jerk reaction is to worry, but then something mean in me feels like it’s being fed. Kate nods slightly and continues.  “The Tower of Babel was abandoned recently, so the Fallen are making a plan. A plan to find a new language which the Virtuous cannot understand. Forget what they told you in school about the ages of languages. In our story, it is well known that the Abrahamic divine speak Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic. And so, the Fallen seek the animal teachers of the land for a new language.” “First, they dig for the snake. His tongue appears and is followed by his large gray body. He’s digesting something rabbit-sized. He teaches them how to slither and hiss, promising them the language is too airy for the Virtuous to utter. But, in their eavesdropping, the Virtuous learn to speak it and find it delightful. They call it Latin. “So the Fallen leash a wild dog instead. Reluctantly, she teaches them to growl and howl. ‘The nuanced reverb is too low for the Virtuous to hear. Now please let me go,’ she says. But again, the Virtuous can hear it and find the deepness heavenly. They create Akkadian.  “Growing tired, the Fallen approach a thrush high in the trees. They beg for help, and so she teaches them how to coo and caw so quickly that surely the Virtuous won’t be able to keep up. But of course, the Virtuous can keep up and they find the quickness tantalizing. Tamil is born. “Tears fall from the Fallen’s eyeless sockets. The little thrush cries too. She knows what it is like to be tormented by hawks, and so she jumps onto a Fallen’s shoulder and whispers, ‘There is another like me, who makes such a terrible sound that the Virtuous will find no pleasure in it.’ She guides them to a group of trees bathed in the full moon’s grayness. Shadows of the Virtuous encroach onto the moon. They stay close, eager to collect another language; however, they scatter when a piercing noise drags its nails against the chalkboard of the night. The Fallen are afraid too, until a harmless barn owl swoops down to a nearby branch. ‘You needn't ask. I hate them too,’ he says…” Silence again. Kate becomes more pale and translucent than I thought possible. She’s not only blanking on lines; she must be losing it too. Too many late nights. Too much isolation. Too much giving nothing to the people she supposedly loves.  Then, she locks eyes with me. She knows where I am sitting now. “The barn owl says, ‘I hate anything that plucks another’s wings.’" It’s not an accusation. It’s an apology. This time, she nails the pause and continues.  “'Take my language, but under one condition. Promise me; it is to be the language of fear. It’s the only way to keep predators away.’ The Fallen promise and learn the language well. Their wings grow able again and they swoop and shriek in the night. The Virtuous cover their ears and are frightened back to heaven for good. Now no longer prey, the Fallen take on a new name; the word ‘demon’ has an ultimate strength to it, don’t you think? Truth be told, you all already know the language well. Let us speak it…” Kate lets out a piercing scream directly into the mic, which causes the mic to scream back. In the audience, reactionary screams echo and hands fly on top of ears.  Her lips tremble centimeters from the mic. We, the audience, recover and eagerly await the ending lines of her story, the ending that will make this clusterfuck make sense. However, the silence is stale and she lingers in that crooked neck position, like she’s dead and hanging… Then she whispers, “Thank you.” And walks off the stage as a handful of confused claps commence.  I don’t feel my usual triumph for my wife tonight. Rather I feel a tinge of embarrassment; the only heat in my empty field of malaise. Mentally and emotionally I can’t escape the field. There’s no wind to blow away the fog. No water for the dusty plans. I always thought Kate stood beside me here, but all along it was just a lifeless scarecrow. We drive home in silence.  “I think that may have been too much...” Kate says.  “Probably…” I have nothing else to say. No reassurance left to give. “I just didn’t know the story would go there,” she says. An ember falls and finds the driest plant in me. It all starts to go up.  “What do you mean? You locked yourself in the room for nearly a month. Treated me like a ghost when you did bother to come out. Treated me like I’m nothing!”  I don’t know when I started pounding on the steering wheel, but I can’t stop. “And now you’re saying you did all that just to make shit up on the spot? You’ve been blowing up our marriage just to improv, Kate? You’ve been hurting me, for what? For nothing!” The fire goes out before it really starts, like rain is falling. I mean, rain is falling from my eyes. I look at her. I don’t know if she’s giving me a dramatic storyteller pause or just not listening. These days it feels like she’s too far away to hear me. She smiles sadly and says, “Storytellers are the best listeners.”  “Kate, I don’t know what you mean… I’ve never known what you’ve meant by that.” “I mean… it screams, Foster,” she says. Her eyes look hollow. Her own rain is falling. “ It won’t stop screaming, Foster. It used to, but now it never stops.” “What do you mean by it ?” I ask.  “I suppose maybe I can tell you about it now. Now, that…” This isn’t a theatrical pause for once. This is raw emotion.  “I wanted success, so I prayed to God. That’s what the Greats said. 'The words are where God is.' But no words came, and so I looked in the opposite direction. I looked at something fallen and I think it looked back at me… But it doesn’t give the stories gently, Foster. It speaks in screams… It screams, and screams, and screams!” She repeats herself until she’s screaming and thrashing in the passenger seat, so I pull over. I wrap my arms around her to make this stop. I almost believe her, but concern can’t grow here anymore. She is an award-winning liar, after all.  When she stops, her cold and wet cheek presses on mine. I finally say it. “Kate… I’ve already started filling out the divorce paperwork.”  I expect a whimper, but she’s silent and I feel her head cock upwards. I decide to be enveloped one last time in her artful pause, the quietness where everything she fails to say lives. This is the only way she tells me that she loves me. But for the first time, I realize something… She isn’t pausing… She’s listening. I don’t know if she shivers or I do.  Then, she says, “I know. The screams of our story have always sounded especially sad.” Sunny Olds lives in her hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah. Her livelihood is construction; however, her personal life is enriched by literature, reading her cat’s tarot, and writing. Her prose appears in Soft Star Magazine , while her poetry is featured in Aberration Labyrinth and Half and One .

The altar here is a bait box on a cold deck. The wharf is  our pilgrimage road. We worship ships lost at sea and the children who grow up around an absence. Each morning, the gulls dive into the wrecks and pull up dreams.  In the grace of fog and foul weather,  we bless the lobster trap our loaves and fishes. We are never salt-starved. Brackish backwater corrodes our coins and the rockweed clings  to the shoreline like the jinx  of a witch, a jeteux de sorts casting her spells like lapwing birds over the white line of the horizon and circling us in fog like sin eater’s breath. We survive by our wits and soft-shell clams in tidal surf. We regret nothing, but pour  the unused salt back into the sea. And work until birth. George Moore’s poetry has been published in The Atlantic, Poetry, North American Review, Colorado Review, and Stand . His collections include Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015) and Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FutureCycle 2016). A finalist for The National Poetry Series and nine Pushcart Prizes, and retired from the University of Colorado, Boulder, he lives with his wife, a Canadian writer, on the south shore of Nova Scotia.

Where will you find another  Garden now the storm falls  in folds of black crepe, bars  of the wicket door are closed  with a padlock, forever you’re  the lonely runner in the rain?  The turtle is slow, the eel fast,  the tarot woman said, raising  two cards to the screen. Already  you’ve lived a thousand years  in ten and so many miles still to leap, to climb the six steps  of some hexagram that’s both your life and a river, a current  running through and past you. Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher and writer/editor. His fiction received the James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation, and his poetry the Prospero Prize from Sharkpack Review .

My wife was giving our young son a bath one night when he raised a toy helicopter above his head and said, “I saw God from my helicopter.”  “What did God say?” Shelley asked.  “I couldn’t tell. His lips were moving, but the helicopter was making too much noise.” In his bed later that night, after reading him a book, I watched Jesse close his eyes and thought maybe this was a night without questions. But then he said, “Daddy, when are you going to die?” I hated questions like that. I was afraid of death anyway. Why was this child trying to pin me down about it? I inhaled, groped for a rational answer, exhaled. “I don’t know. I hope I won’t die before I’m a hundred.” “Maybe a hundred and nine,” he said. Jesse had just seen a TV report about a person who’d died at that age. I said, “I’ll live a good long time on this earth, then I’ll die and my soul will go somewhere else...to be with God. Many people call it Heaven. And I’ll wait for you and Mom to join me there.” “Will you die before Mom?” “Probably, because Mom’s younger than me.” He touched my hand. “I hope you and Mom die at the same time, so you won’t miss each other.” I felt tears come to my eyes as I kissed his forehead and said goodnight. He said, “Just stay two more minutes.” He always played this trick, and I always complied. In a lifetime, I thought, what was two more minutes.  Later I thought about Jesse’s death-together statement and whether a child could have expressed such unselfish love without help from God. Maybe he did communicate with God occasionally from his helicopter. Many of Jesse’s questions about God and mortality occurred at bedtime in a narrow room with cracked plaster walls that were the scars of my childhood.  Shelley had covered the cracks with a poster of historical locomotives, a print of a dad holding an excited child while pointing to a shooting star, a Mary Englebright print of children tending a garden, and colorful wall hangings. A mobile of the planets hung from a spackled ceiling. As I did each night, I sat beside him on his bed during the fifteen minutes that he required me to stay after our story time ended. It was ironic, I thought, that once I’d been a child who prayed in this same bedroom. Initially my prayers were the normal “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Later I prayed that God might cure my father’s mental illness, that God might prevent him from killing Mom and me and my sisters in this old house with the rattling windows. I decided God was either deaf or didn’t like me. As I matured, I prayed only when I was in trouble but was never convinced of its efficacy. “What’s God ?” Jesse asked. “Where do you go when you die?”  I didn’t know how to respond to a three-year-old’s inquisition about the deity. Rabbi David Wolpe, the author of Teaching Your Children About God , says, “When a child asks a question about God, they are not coming to you as a blank slate. They already have thoughts. It’s more valuable to evoke what they think than it is to insert something and pre-empt their own thoughts.” Jesse’s incessant questions were nerve-wracking, as if the lack of a scientific explanation meant I was a failed parent. “If you fly into space, will you see God?”   Shelley told him God is both internal and external. This confused him. He said, “You can feel Him, but you can't see Him?  Right?”  On one bathroom occasion, he and I were shaving together and brushing our teeth when he claimed we did the same things, because we were made by the same company.  “We’re all made by God. He’s the same company.”   I was reluctant to begin an intellectual discussion about God, or a biological lesson on how humans are actually created. I thought loving Jesse meant learning how to respond to his questions with love and compassion that I’d never known as a child. I felt troubled that I didn’t have answers that might satisfy him.  On Sundays when I was a boy, my mother drove my sister, Donna, and me to the Congregational church in our rural village to attend Sunday school. She left us there, bought a New York Times  at the town’s one store, and drove home so my father could read the sports pages. In the church basement, Mrs. Firmin taught us that God loves little children. She said His son, Jesus, loves little children. We sang about how Jesus loves us. I didn’t understand how God and Jesus could love me. Jesus was dead, and God didn’t know who I was. Mrs. Firmin said God was everywhere and knew us all and would protect us. But I wasn’t sure whether God heard my night prayers. If He did hear me, I wasn’t sure He had the power to prevent my father from going haywire as he had while arguing with Mom, accelerating our old Pontiac to ninety miles an hour and threatening to kill us all. I hadn’t understood what God’s love meant then and was no wiser about it as a parent. Jesse was born after medical science said Shelley’s many surgeries meant she probably couldn’t have kids. So I believed God might have intervened then, if just to prove doctors were neither infallible scientists nor prescient gods. Shelley and I didn’t read the Bible or teach Jesse any rote prayers. We simply held hands and closed our eyes for a moment before supper. I told Jesse that we used this time to thank God for all of our blessings. I suspected he thanked God for cheese pizza.  One day Jesse insisted on seeing a dead mouse that I’d trapped in the cellar. He looked it over, but didn’t say much until bath time. “Does a mouse go to mouse heaven?” he asked.  “I don’t know.”  “Does a mouse go to the same heaven cats go to?”  “I don’t know.”  “Do cats and mice go to the same heaven we go to?”  “I don’t know...I’ll let you know when I get there.”  “Can you do that?  Let me know when you get there?”  “I don’t know...but I’ll try real hard.”  Shelley said, “In heaven, people don’t communicate by talking...they communicate by thought. I read that somewhere.”   “What about communicating with someone on Earth?  If Daddy doesn’t talk, how will I hear him?”   “I don’t know. If Daddy gets there first, he can let us know.”   “Will you get there first, Dad?”   I pretended I was preoccupied with washing the dishes. “I don’t know.”   “If you get there first, will you let us know?”   “Yes, I’ll try real hard to let you know.”   Shelley took him into the bathroom, the door of which was located next to the kitchen sink where I worked. I could hear him continue to interrogate her as she gave him his bath. Suddenly she bolted from the bathroom. As she passed me, she whispered, “I can’t take it anymore.”  When he emerged, I explained the difficulty of answering questions about heaven, because we knew about it only from books written by people who said they died for a few minutes, went to heaven for awhile, and came back because they were still alive.  “How did these people know they were in heaven?”  “I don’t know. Maybe there was a sign there that said heaven on it.”   “Dad, how do you spell heaven ?”  What was I thinking when I told Jesse this stuff about heaven? Was it important to give him a simple stock answer, the traditional viewpoint, instead of “I haven’t got a clue?” I wished sometimes I hadn’t mentioned heaven. Maybe I was telling him what I wanted to believe instead of saying I didn’t know what came after death, if anything. That I didn’t feel a bible thumper’s conviction about the afterlife made me something more egregious than a Doubter.  It made me an incompetent father afraid to present my son with feelings of doubt and insecurity. Dads were supposed to know everything, and so I tried to hide those feelings.  Jesse is thirty-six now and has been flying small planes for a couple years. On one of those flights he sent photos of an older Mooney M20 plane that a retired gentleman wanted to sell. After having the plane inspected by a trusted mechanic, Jesse purchased it. But not long afterward, he was taking it for a short flight just west of Albany when the engine began to lose power. He was able to fly it another hour and land at his home airport before any catastrophe. Although Shelley and I were shaken when he called to tell us, I want to believe my sister, Donna, still protects him as she did during his racing years. When Jesse was a small boy, she’d recorded NASCAR races and watched them with him whenever she visited. Though cancer took Donna’s life too soon to see him race dirt bikes and Mazda Miatas, I became convinced God had appointed her to be Jesse’s guardian angel during his days of spills and crashes. It has taken many years for me to find God’s love in a society that has many different viewpoints of the deity. He has helped me survive cancer and a heart attack. He has allowed Shelley to survive a heart attack. I am now confident He will be with Shelley and me when our final day arrives. Maybe, as Jesse wished years ago, God’s final act of love might be allowing his mom and dad to hitch a ride to heaven at the same time. Kurt Schmidt’s work has appeared in the Boston Globe , Bacopa Literary Review , Discretionary Love, Barzakh Magazine, Eclectica Magazine, Storyhouse, Please See Me, The Examined Life Journal,  and others. He is also the author of the novel Annapolis Misfit  (Crown Publishers). He lives with his wife in New Hampshire and is currently finishing a 30-year memoir about parenting a risk-taker. www.kurtgschmidt.com

what writes itself on the surface of the stream  reveals its lungs in concentric circles  to me tethered to the bank  as pale gold leaves let go of the trees surrender to the current yesterday the ripples in the creek  felt like god speaking but today only tadpoles wriggle in the shallows I plead the divinity  in the water anyway  need to know when this melancholy intrinsic as breathing  will leave me sometimes I crave complete quiet deep dark and black but each day I trust drink from the cup  walk in the sunlight beside the river Jeanette Barszewski received an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in Literary Mama, Cooper Street, O-Dark-Thirty  and  Elixir Verse .  Jeanette is a queer writer currently residing in Hamilton, NJ with her family. She enjoys old-lady hobbies like gardening and making art out of pressed wildflowers. You can find out more about her at www.jeanettebarszewskiauthor.com