Tag Archives: SUNY Geneseo

by | December 29, 2014 · 6:37 pm

Bibi Lewis

In Jackson Heights, My Father Outsmarted Puberty

next to LaGuardia runways, spent his summers keel
against terminal shells, smoking

5 cent cigarettes while the bottoms
of his shoes melted to tarmac.

He flirted with flight attendants who drew giveaway pens
from the pocket of their uniform-mating call

to give him six-digit phone numbers scrawled
on grease stained peanut bags.

& at night he slumped over the shoulder
of the LIE, kept his eyes

fixated on polished stones in Cavalry
cemetery: a Queen’s response to her older sibling’s skyline.

Golem in the Backseat of Our Parents’ Blue Station Wagon

Facing behind, we stare into eyes too focused on rain
to see us: children with oversized scowls, my seatbelt
crushing  heather  green  wool  coat  (two siblings too
large),  his fingers pointed into fleshy laser gun.  Hips
calloused  to  collapsible  third  row,  feet  tangled  in
ripped yellow of old ikea duffel.  My good time is  not
interchangeable  Sunday  morning talk  radio  or mid
twentieth  century  architecture.  Stagnation  at  sixty
miles per hour: finding sand between creases of felted
velour seats in late December

Bibi Lewis is a senior at SUNY Geneseo, originally from New York City. When she isn’t writing, she can be found knitting or rambling about feminism. She was published in Gandy Dancer 1.2. She would gladly share a lemon bar with Gertrude Stein or Michael Chabon.

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by | · 6:16 pm

Brandon Rumaker

A Solitary Zebra is Helpless Prey 

The clock read 1:46 AM.

I’ve been sitting here for six hours, Roger thought as he glanced at the clock sitting on the corner of his desk.

There was not much else on his small desk, just a few notebooks. The room was eight feet by twelve feet with white walls that had not been repainted in at least a decade. Most of the chipped paint was covered by posters of African soccer players, whom Roger still referred to as footballers even after years of living in the United States.

Roger stood up and stretched, knowing that he still had another hour or two of studying left for the night. He gazed out his window at the silhouette of the tree that leaned against his building. He could tell it was a particularly windy autumn night because the branches were massaging the brick wall of Roger’s building. It was a large house that had been transformed into an apartment building through diligent renovation and students in need of shelter.

The scraping sound of the tree harmonized with the whistling of the wind to create a song that reminded Roger of the music of Pépé Kallé. Roger received his name in honor of the inspiration for some of Pépé Kallé’s music, the footballer, Roger Milla. The day Roger Milla brought the Cameroonian football team to the Quarter-Finals of the World Cup, Roger Nzuji was born. “You were destined to be special,” Roger’s father told him four years after that World Cup. “You were born on a day that Africa was able to stand out for talent, bright as the sun. Milla was at the center of that light. So are you.”

Roger’s father, André, stood tall like the maize they were harvesting. Looking up at his father required him to crane his neck so that he was facing the sky. His few memories of André were all of a smiling man gazing down at him, the closest humanity could get to a re-creation of God’s protection.

“We saw your spirit within moments of Cameroon defeating Colombia. Milla showed the world that any one of us can be blessed. The second you were born, we all knew you were destined to carry the name.”

The words faded from Roger’s mind as he began to hum the song “Roger Milla” by Kallé. The music filled the air with a peaceful atmosphere that could not be penetrated by the gloomy November night.

As he hummed, he couldn’t help but think of his brothers, Daniel and Emmanuel, both of whom were working in the fields of the Congo at that very moment.

 

“I win!” Daniel always shouted out after scoring the last goal in their childhood football games.

“You got lucky,” Roger always said back with a smile.

Daniel was a year younger than Roger and quickly developed footballing ability that made Milla proud. Roger himself did not acquire his namesake’s gift for football, but he still played to pass time and bond with his brothers.

Emmanuel was born two years after Daniel. There were two other siblings, but neither survived. The last child never even had a chance to see a sunrise. She died in their mother’s womb, taking their mother with them. Their mother’s death happened soon after the dictator, Mobutu, fled the country. After the Democratic Republic of Congo shed the name Zaire in a naïve attempt to evolve. After the civil wars began.

Roger had a natural curiosity and work ethic that stood out. After their father died in the war, the brothers united and began to work on their small maize farm with dreams of leaving the death surrounding them. Only Roger was destined to leave.

“We were lucky to learn English,” Daniel said one day while they were working.

The sun was burning directly over the flatland, leaving them with no shelter from the daylight blaze. They often spoke and sang to distract themselves from the heat when the meditative rhythm of picking maize wasn’t enough.

“It won’t be of much use here,” Emmanuel said as he gazed in the distance, searching for the locusts that were producing a drumming song that warned of crop destruction.

“It can help us get out. The camps sometimes have outsiders,” Daniel responded.

“Where would we go?” Roger asked his brothers, afraid to think about leaving behind the only place they knew as home.

“Away from the fighting.” “Away from the soldiers.”

“What would we do?” Roger knew that neither of the other two had an answer, but he had to say it out loud. They had discussed leaving before, but each conversation led them back into the Democratic Republic, back into waiting to be saved or be killed. They were tired of having no power. Roger regularly left the country for schooling, but he refused to leave forever without his brothers.

“We might not all be able to leave,” Emmanuel said quietly, his words almost inaudible over the locusts’ music.

“Roger, you were always the smartest. If we helped you leave, would you promise us that you would someday come back?” Daniel looked at Roger, waiting for a response.

Roger was surprised by the question, but he could tell by his brother’s tone that this was something Daniel and Emmanuel had discussed in secret for some time. Maybe they hadn’t even said a word to each other.

All three of them knew Roger would have the best chance beyond the farm. He had gone to school for years in Ghana but always came back to help with the maize. Daniel and Emmanuel never went to school. Instead, they worked as hard as they could so Roger could focus on his studies—harder than the winds currently drumming on his apartment window.

 

He could no longer focus on his biology textbook so he sat on his bed knowing any attempt to study would only cause frustration. He looked around at his room and thought about how different it was from home. He had a radiator and an overhead light, both of which seemed incredible to him at first. He didn’t understand why people would continue working after dark, or live in a place that required fake heat to be comfortable.

“I doubt you would even recognize me,” Roger said to himself, thinking of Daniel and Emmanuel, who were still surrounded by grasps for insignificant power.

“Power,” Roger said. He had personal experience with the difference in power between the rebels in Africa and the government of the United States. It was clear each time he met someone new.

“I’m from the Democratic Republic of Congo.” “Where’s that?”

“It’s in Africa.”

“You’re from Africa? Wow!”

It was the same reaction from everyone he met. At first, it made him feel special or important. But after countless introductions to people, he felt embarrassed and learned to not even mention the name of his homeland. Africa was all one place to most people he met. He felt like he was a continental display.

“Good for you, making it all the way here.” “It’s fucking crazy over there.”

“You must be so strong.” “Do you miss it?”

“You must like it better here, right? All that war, it’s horrible.”

Roger wanted to be home. And each time he met someone new, he was reminded of the exact reason. He wasn’t from the United States and never would be. He would always be some fortunate soul who escaped the tragedy of Africa.

“You were born on a day that Africa was able to stand out for talent, bright as the sun.” His father’s words constantly guided him. The people he met far from home had good intentions, but they didn’t see the harshness of their own words.

“Africa is not a horrible place, there are just some bad men. It could happen anywhere,” he would say.

They would look at him with a smile that said, “Definitely not here.” “I’m going to go back someday,” he would add.

He would get two responses.

“Really?” and “You’re crazy.” They would always try to joke about the idea, not realizing that Roger’s home was more than just a house to return to at the end of each semester.

“I want to help my family and my community. I don’t think that makes me special.” Roger was always surprised at how there was no sense of community at his school. Everyone was so focused on their own ambitions and goals.

They don’t need to worry about protecting their family here, he would think. He hated how he was considered unique for having a desire to help others, to improve his home.

The other person always became friendlier while talking with him, as if living in Africa was the most interesting thing on the planet. But he knew being an African in America made him stand out, even among actual African-Americans.

“This is not your world, you are only visiting,” Roger would remind himself. “Six more years and you’ll be where you belong.”

Roger was studying to become a doctor. He knew that trying to stop power-hungry fighters was dangerous, even before they acquired deadly weapons. He still bore scars from directly confronting rebels. So he decided that the best option to help people was not to cause more violence, but instead keep everyone alive and healthy.

Many of the refugee camps were a biological nightmare, filled with a cycle of disease and death, a pendulum’s endless swings created from a tiny push. The camps needed clean water, more medicine, and more food. But most of all, they needed toilets.

Diarrhea in the United States was something people made jokes about, but in the camps it was deadlier than sadistic soldiers. There was no treatment available, so one case would quickly spread through the camp, causing severe dehydration and, eventually, death. There was no clean system to remove waste, so the disease sat in the open. The smell of feces and corpses rotting in the heat was unbearable, at least for the first few weeks. After some time the smell became like the buzzing of locusts, ignored but ever-present.

 

“We can’t stay here,” Daniel had said shortly after arriving at one of the refugee camps. It was filled with hundreds of colorful plastic tents all clumped together with no organization. The tents looked more alive than the people inhabiting them.

“There is nowhere else,” Emmanuel responded as he looked straight down, trying not to see the disorder and disease around him.

“We can survive,” Roger said in an attempt to motivate his brothers. “It will get better! We will change things. We won’t let the fighting happen again.”

“Really?” Emmanuel looked up at his brother, his face a valley of hope and fear.

“Yes, I promise,” Roger said with a smile that revealed two missing front teeth.

The three brothers were forced to leave their farm when rebels from Rwanda began terrorizing the country in retaliation of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the leader who overthrew Mobutu. Their father left to protect his country, to protect his children. Like Kabila, André Nzuji would not survive the war. Roger was seven.

 

Roger wiped his eyes as if they were webs filled with spiders. Yet he couldn’t stop those spiders from crawling down from his eyes, past his chin, and to the floor below him.

“I miss you,” he said to his father. He said it to his brothers, too. Anyone he met from home. He was an outcast in the United States, and each day only got harder than the day before. More work, more responsibility, more thoughts of his family. Most of all, there was more doubt.

The spiders were released from his eyes and began to fill the room and take on lives of their own. Roger imagined them slowly climbing the posters of some of his idols and the posts of the bed. They climbed his legs and covered his body, a river of squirming brown and frozen white thread, covering him to his neck. He was paralyzed and began to hear his heart beat louder than any drum as a brown mass rose from the sea of spiders.

He was gazing at a J’ba Fofi, a spider he had only heard of, but had never seen before. It was similar to a tarantula, but larger. It rose like a person doing a push up and slowly turned toward him. Its body was roughly three feet long with legs long enough to span Roger’s head and toes. The J’ba Fofi began to slowly turn towards him until the two were staring directly at each other. Roger could not see its features in detail as his tear ducts were still creating more spiders.

But he did feel nausea as they began crushing his whole body, as if every cell in his body was being choked. He couldn’t breathe or swallow and his body became incredibly sensitive. The room was brighter, the spiders were louder, and each one of the thousands of legs was distinct on his skin.

This was not the first time Roger felt the entire world become unbalanced. Soon after arriving in the United States, he had fleeting moments of strong panic, as if he was still at that refugee camp, and he would relive moments he prayed he could forget. Sometimes he would spend the entire day angry and unsure why. All it took was a car speeding by, someone using a knife, or yelling and he would immediately feel himself collapse like so many regimes in the Congo.

He could never predict when the fear would return. His father had taught him what fighting an unwinnable battle would lead to, so he surrendered to the emotions until they passed. He watched this enormous spider, fascinated, as it turned towards the window and slowly began to back away.

What could be out there that would make something like you afraid? Roger wondered.

Then he blinked.

And the J’ba Fofi was gone.

The other spiders began leaving through any crack they could find, either in the wall or under the door, as Roger calmed down and wiped the tears from his eyes.

The J’ba Fofi and its children were just reminders of the world that Roger had left behind and would never be truly a part of again. He had fully immersed himself into academia and there seemed to be no turning back.

 

Roger had been able to wade through the ocean of academics with the assistance of Dr. Regina Graceman, his academic advisor.

When Roger walked into Dr. Graceman’s ofice for the first time, she was intensely reading an article on her computer, only half-facing Roger. Roger immediately noticed that her desk appeared to be a storage facility for various articles and essays, which stood out in comparison to the ofice itself. The ofice had shelves of books and journals that were alphabetically organized by author and then by title.

“You want to go to med school?” Dr. Graceman asked Roger during their first of many conversations.

“Yes,” Roger said with determination as he shifted his weight, so that the uneven legs of the wooden chair he was sitting in were properly balanced. Dr. Graceman turned towards him in her green swivel chair to look at him carefully. He had only been in the United States for a few weeks and was still adjusting to the new culture.

“Do you know how the process works?” Dr. Graceman asked with some confusion. She was a tall blonde woman with hazel eyes and a large mole on the left side of her lip. When she spoke, the mole danced in time to her voice.

“Process?” Roger asked her, trying to ignore the mole.

“Yes, you have to go through an undergraduate education first. After that you can apply to medical programs.”

“Under…I don’t know what that is. I’ve only taken classes on occasion before. I was only told that I would be studying to be a doctor.”

“Basically, it’s a way to indicate that you’re intelligent and capable. Not everyone can just become a doctor. It requires considerable work.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t quite understand.” “There’s a system and—”

“No, I mean the word, indicate. I don’t think I have heard it before.” “Oh.” Dr. Graceman was silent for a moment as she gazed into the depths

of a yellow and green coffee mug hidden from Roger’s view. “Is English your first language?” She asked.

“No, French. Français.”

Roger quickly realized that despite having leraned enough English to get by in the Congo and his classes in Ghana, he was not ready for the

language of science. He could handle the material if it was in French, but it took him a while to learn it in English. After a year, he had made considerable progress with the assistance of Dr. Graceman. She had found French copies of his textbooks online and introduced him to some of the French

professors in the language department. Roger compared the language within the English textbook to the language within the French book. It was a tedious task, but he would refer to each book as one of his brothers in order to remain focused on why he had come to the United States in the first place. Emmanuel was the French book, Daniel was the English book.

But these textbooks were not really his brothers, and Roger continued to struggle.

“What happened?” Dr. Graceman asked after Roger failed a test. Roger had gone to Dr. Graceman’s ofice repeatedly over two and a half years, but never to discuss one of her tests. “I know how hard you work; this isn’t like you,” she said.

“I don’t know,” Roger said quietly, staring at the yellow and green coffee mug, which had become a symbol for stability. It was the only object in the ofice that Roger knew for certain would be there the next time he visited Dr. Graceman.

“Are you doing okay?” she asked, regaining his attention. Roger frequently talked to Dr. Graceman when his stress became too much for him, but he would not talk about his problems unless she directly asked. He didn’t want to seem rude by interfering with her work, so he would never initiate.

“I can’t focus. I can only think of home. I tried to study, but I couldn’t. Even during the test, it was only home,” Roger said, looking at her with squinting eyes.

Dr. Graceman sighed, mulling over the piles of papers covering her desk. “Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now. No changing what happened.” She smiled at him. “One bad grade won’t ruin your chances. Once you start going for interviews, they will know that you have talent,” she said to him.

“A zebra never loses its stripes,” he said to her with a smile.

He had only seen zebras a few times in his life, when he was around five or six years old. He remembered talking with Daniel about why they looked so strange.

“Zebras avoid getting eaten by making lions dizzy. When a lion or a scary animal attacks, they all run around. They become one,” Daniel had explained.

 

“When they’re scared, you can’t tell where one starts and one ends,” Roger mumbled, still sitting on his bed. “Zebras aren’t meant to be alone.”

The memory of Daniel explaining the survival skills of zebras helped though. Roger began to smile as he imagined a younger Daniel teaching a lecture on zebras to university students.

Was Daniel five at the time? The thought appeared as suddenly as the spiders had disappeared.

The only reason Roger even knew his birthday was because of the World Cup, and he hadn’t figured that out until after arriving in the United States. How old would they be?

Roger continued to think of his siblings, his source of strength. Without them I couldn’t be sitting here right now, Roger reminded himself. And with a wipe to his face, the last spider creeping was flung off.

He looked over at his biology textbook, considering the option to study once more. Medicine had been his way out of the Congo; now it was going to be his way back in.

 

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by | · 5:27 pm

Sarah Christ

Welcome to Joe’s

“Are you going to stare at the truck all day or actually help?” my boss, Jane, snapped as she struggled by me with a pouch of queso flung over her shoulder. “Sorry,” I said quickly, reaching down to grab hold of the black beans. “I was just deciding what to bring up next.” “Could you decide a little faster next time?”

Every Monday I was in charge of bringing the truck shipment up from the loading dock to our back stockroom at Joe’s Taco Shack. Then I would play Tetris to fit all the oversized containers in our walk-in refrigerator.

The black beans came in clear containers that I had to use two hands to carry. I stared down at the watery tub, where the beans stuck to the plastic sides and little black specks floated in the liquid. I wasn’t even sure they should be considered beans. They were more like pellets that Joe’s liked to pass off as something edible.

I ground my teeth as I followed Jane’s bleached blonde ponytail upstairs. She hated me. From the moment I showed up for my first day of work two years ago, all Jane could manage out of her mouth was criticism.

It wasn’t just her personality, because my coworkers could do no wrong. Oh Jake, you forgot what a Homewrecker is? It’s okay, that’s a tricky one. But the moment I burned a quesadilla during my second week, I became, for her, the reason that people thought fast food workers were incompetent.

I couldn’t prove it, but I always assumed Jane held a grudge because I had a bachelor’s degree in communication. She had been working at Joe’s since she was a teenager and had climbed her way to the head management position. She’d been a manager for over ten years now and she was proud of it. She thought all of higher education was corrupt, and would tell anyone who’d listen that people shouldn’t waste their money just to get a piece of paper they could frame and hang on the wall. Sometimes I thought she might be right.

Even with a degree, I was working here the same as she was. But I tried not to think like that because it depressed me. In their promotional materials, colleges always promise that an impressive percentage of their graduates get hired within the first year. They never mention the people like me who are working at minimum wage jobs, thousands of dollars in debt, nine months after graduation.

I watched as Jane piled the queso bag on top of the others in the corner. She wiped the sweat from her hairline where her brown roots were starting to show through. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she hated me because she was a middle-aged woman who still couldn’t figure out how to dye her hair properly.

“Hey, Jane, I’m supposed to go on break at one. Do you think you can finish the truck by yourself?” I gave the bean container a shove. I was trying to squeeze it in between two basins of guacamole. There was clearly not enough space, but I pushed, determined to make it work so that I didn’t have to walk and get the ladder from the closet to reach the top shelf. I swung my hip against the side of the container with force. The corner hit the lip of the shelf, causing the container to tumble out of my hands towards the cement floor.

Shit. I felt like I was in slow motion as I automatically stretched out my hand to try to catch the falling container. I watched my hand move under it, knowing it was a bad idea but lacking control to stop it. The ridged cap hit my palm and bent my wrist back past a ninety-degree angle. Pain wound around my spine as I cried out and reached down to grasp my wrist. The container hit the ground at the same moment I lost my balance on the slick floor. The bean juice flooded out as the cap got thrown across the room, and I landed in the puddle.

“Are you okay?” Jane asked.

I rolled sideways, still clutching my wrist in pain. I didn’t notice that my hair was soaking up the grey juice like a sponge, or that black beans covered my white work shoes. Why did the black bean containers have to be so damn heavy?

“Are you okay?” Jane repeated, a little more forcefully this time.

I looked up and found Jane staring down at me with a slight worried expression on her face. She was probably concerned they would have to pay me workers’ compensation. I realized how pathetic I must have looked, sitting in a pile of black beans on the floor of the walk-in fridge. I surveyed my wrist. It didn’t look broken, but the creases in my skin were a fiery red. I moved my wrist cautiously. It hurt if I bent it past a small range of motion, but it was probably only sprained.

“I’m fine,” I said when I managed to sit up.

Jane looked at me with her eyebrows raised. I grabbed my wrist self-consciously and fought back a grimace as pain shot up to my elbow. Jane watched me for a second longer, then let her gaze fall to the beans scattered across the floor.

“That was fifty dollars worth of black beans,” she said quietly, shaking her head.

I bit my lip and swallowed a retort that maybe if the fridge was better organized, I would have been able to fit all the containers easily without spilling them. I knew the time and place to pick a fight with Jane, and sitting in a pile of black beans that I had just spilled wasn’t it.

“Clean this up and finish the truck. Then you can take your break.”

I nodded meekly and Jane left the fridge without another word. I flicked a black bean off my knee. I hated that a dumpy manager at Joe’s thought I was incompetent. I’d been in the honors program in college and graduated with a 3.8 GPA. How had this become my life? I hobbled out of the fridge and over to the broom closet. The mop and bucket were behind the ladder near the back corner. I slammed the ladder out of the way with unneeded force. It was the ladder’s fault this had happened. If it hadn’t been so far away, I wouldn’t have had to shove the container in between those two bins of guacamole.

The mess took me forty minutes to clean up. The black beans had flown everywhere and refused to be picked up by the twisted threads of the mop. I had to bend down and pinch them off the ground individually, then throw them into the bucket. My college friends would puncture a lung from laughter if they could see me now, picking black beans off the floor of Joe’s.

“Isn’t Alex supposed to be here?” I asked Jane after I put away the mop. Jane looked up from her paperwork. She had a deep scowl on her face

that caused the skin around her eyes to scrunch into crow’s feet. I noticed those the first time I met Jane, except I had incorrectly assumed that she got them from laughing too much, and figured she had to be a happy boss.

“I was wondering if he could finish the truck,” I said when she didn’t respond. “My wrist is sore from falling and I don’t think I can carry the rest of the stuff upstairs. I could work the register for him, though.”

Jane looked down at her paperwork. “It’s just Marisa on the floor today. We can’t afford to have you being the only one making the food, so you’ll have to make it work.”

I ignored the fact that she had just insulted my ability to put together tacos. “Where’s Alex?”

“He called in this morning to quit. Didn’t even give two weeks’ notice.” My heart felt as if it had been pinched between the slits of my rib cage.

“What? Why?”

Alex was the one good thing about this job. Jane seemed to despise him as much as she hated me, so I always felt like I had someone to complain to. He was only a year or two older than me, and had graduated from Kendell Culinary College. He had dreams of becoming a head chef and hated working at Joe’s as much as I did. When we got bored, we would race each other to see who could make a taco the fastest, or bet on how long we could disappear to the bathroom without Jane noticing. I honestly can’t say I blamed him for not taking the job seriously. He knew how to make crème brûlée and was stuck putting together burritos at a semi-fast-food joint.

“He got a job at Bonefish Grill as the junior chef.” “Of course he did,” I muttered without thinking.

Jane looked at me, her face scrunched slightly in confusion. I ignored her. I thought Alex and I were supposed to be friends. I shook my head slightly, trying to shake away the hurt that Alex had told Jane about the job before me. Jane opened her mouth as if she was going to say something, but then shook her head and turned her attention away. She started typing on her computer, her fingers tapping the keys furiously. I watched her fingers blur in motion for a second. It’s not that I wasn’t happy for Alex. I had tasted his cooking; he deserved to be a chef. I just didn’t like the feeling of being left behind.

“I’m taking my break now.” A sliver of bean juice dripped down my forehead from my hair and I wiped it away with the back of my hand.

Jane looked surprised at my statement. She stared at me for a second and I was taken aback by her expression. I had expected a fight, but Jane wasn’t wearing her normal scowl. I examined her face trying to place what was different. Her features seemed softer somehow, her mouth less taut, and her eyes weren’t squinting. I felt my heartbeat catch in my throat as I realized Jane felt sorry for me.

Jane nodded slowly. “Okay,” she said. “Have a nice break.”

I walked out of her office without a word, feeling worse than when I had been sitting in a puddle of black beans. The break room had blank white walls with a strip of red around the top towards the ceiling. I thought that was an attempt to make the room look Mexican. Jane hadn’t done much to decorate here other than throw a sombrero on top of the fridge. It was the same sombrero she made us wear when she was on a power trip, although she insisted it was fun for the customers. My locker was in the back corner of the room, past the table holding the microwave and a pile of plastic forks. I tried to open the locker with my left hand, since my right wrist was still throbbing, but the door was stuck on the paystubs I had neglected to empty out of my locker for weeks now. The door wouldn’t budge and I gave up, slumping down into a chair. I wasn’t hungry for ramen again anyways.

Even with the door closed, Marisa’s squeaky voice yelling, “Welcome to Joe’s!” crept through the slit in the door whenever someone came into the restaurant. I squeezed my ears tightly, trying to block out the phrase, and thought about how much I disliked each and every one of those words.

“Welcome to Joe’s!” Who came up with that idea? Why did they think people would like being shouted at as they entered a restaurant? The customers were just hungry and wanted food.

My phone vibrated on the table and I looked down at the screen to see it was my mother calling. I groaned. I pressed the silence button quickly and a pain shot through my wrist at the sudden movement. I cradled my wrist in my lap with my other hand; I didn’t have the patience to deal with her right now. I loved my mother, but she had a tendency to trap me on the phone with pointless chatter for at least forty-five minutes when she called. I stared up at the red stripe, not really seeing it. I was wasting my life in this godforsaken place. This wasn’t what college had prepared me for. I was twenty-three years old. I was supposed to be an adult by now, not living paycheck to paycheck and eating free Joe’s I snuck home for dinner because I couldn’t afford anything else. I should be a PR representative by now, making a name for myself. Instead I was working for an hourly wage. My phone vibrated again and I looked down at the screen. Damn it.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Becky, honey, I called you three times yesterday and you never returned my calls.” My mother’s shrill voice echoed through the speakers.

“I know, I’m sorry. What’s up?” I asked.

“It’s Aunt Linda and Uncle Jon’s fiftieth anniversary next weekend and it’s at Valley Oak Inn, so Linda needs to know if you’re coming. I told her you probably would be there, but you know Linda. She needs to know for sure.”

I rolled my eyes. My mother had never liked my dad’s sister. Aunt Linda liked to lead an extravagant lifestyle, even though she worked as a secretary at a high school, and it drove my mom crazy. Linda and Jon hosted Christmas Eve dinner at their house every year and sent out fancy invitations with RSVPs on them. My dad had to write and mail the RSVP back because my mom refused to, claiming normal families use the phone.

“Yeah, tell Aunt Linda I’ll be there,” I replied. There was no reason not to go: free food, and watching my mom interact with Aunt Linda was always fun. Plus, I knew my mom would throw a fit if I said no.

“It’s next Saturday at seven, so you can come home first and we’ll drive over together. Linda wants all of us to wear cocktail dresses. Honestly, I don’t know who she thinks her family is, because I don’t know one Taylor who owns a cocktail dress other than Linda—”

“Listen, I’ve gotta go, Mom,” I interrupted her. Her voice was starting to give me a headache.

“Is everything alright, Becky?” she asked, completely ignoring my attempt to get off the phone. “You sound tired.”

I paused for a moment, trying to figure out how to answer that. I considered telling her how horrible my day had been, that I hurt my wrist and that Jane made me pick up a whole tub of black beans off the floor.

I settled for telling her the bare minimum: “It’s just been a rough day at work.”

I glanced up as one of my coworkers, Angela, walked into the room. She smiled and waved enthusiastically at me. Angela just started last week, and I had yet to see her without a smile plastered across her face. I gave her a small smile back. She was a sweet girl, even if she was too happy.

“You’re always complaining about it there, honey. Why don’t you look for a better job?” my mom asked.

I closed my eyes and let the silence between us be my answer. I knew she was just trying to look out for me, but I was aware of the limitations of my current situation without her reminding me.

“You can’t let those interviews haunt you forever,” she said.

“I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve told you,” I snapped. She always had to bring up the interviews. Always. I grabbed a fist full of my bangs and twisted them around my fingers until my scalp was stretched out tightly. It’s in the past, I reminded myself. In. The. Past. I took a deep breath and tried to force the frustration back down into the pit of my stomach where I had buried it.

I was newly graduated when I had gone to my first interview. I had barely been out two months and I hadn’t even received my diploma in the mail yet. I walked into the office with a confident smile and my public relations portfolio tucked into the briefcase my parents had bought me for graduation. I had been to all the career workshops at school and knew confidence was key. If I thought I was going to get the job, so would the interviewers. I shook their hands, firm and quick, as I’d be instructed.

The interview went well, or so I thought. The interviewer was an alumnus of Ohio State as well, so we reminisced about home football games for at least twenty minutes. I knew how important it was to network, and I thought we really made a connection. I left more confident than when I had walked in, shaking his hand and nodding with a smile when he told me they’d give me a call. For the next two weeks, I carried my phone around with me religiously. I even brought it into the bathroom. But once two weeks had passed, I took matters into my own hands and called them. The secretary who picked up had a ring to her voice that reminded me of a bell. She told me a decision had not been reached yet and I would receive a call when it did. I hung up, satisfied, but another week passed and I still didn’t get a call. I called the bell secretary back, except this time when she answered my question her voice resembled a gong more than a bell.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Becky, but that position has been filled,” the secretary said, pity seeping through the microphone of my cell.

I hung up, irritated that a secretary felt the need to have pity for me. I shrugged it off; I would just have to apply for another job. It was okay.

For the next few months, I interviewed for at least a job a week. Sometimes I would get a second interview, but ultimately they always ended in rejection. Every time I heard that dreaded phrase—“the position has been filled”—I wanted to bang my head against a wall in frustration. I tried to stay optimistic, but I felt like I was in a boxing match and the job market was destroying me, one punch at a time. After three months, I was finally defeated. I walked out of my last interview frustrated to the verge of tears. I just knew they’d choose someone else. I managed to hold in my tears until I got to the car. I called my mom, sobbing, barely able to see the steering wheel in front of me, much less drive.

“I’m never going to get a job, Mom,” I managed between sobs.

She tried to soothe me, but I was inconsolable. I drove home and curled up on my bed. It’s been five months since then, and I hadn’t applied for a job since.

On the phone now, my mom was oblivious to my distraction and still talking. I concentrated on the rapid rate of her words to block out the meaning. I didn’t think she was even breathing. “Just because you didn’t get those other jobs doesn’t mean you never will—”

“Actually, I got a job.” It was word vomit. My mouth sagged open as I tried to comprehend what I had just done. “You did?”

There was no taking it back now. I swallowed the pool of acid that had collected at the base of my throat.

“Yup.” I tried to steady my vision by concentrating on the small burn mark on the corner of the tablecloth.

“Oh, honey, that’s great!” I heard my mom jumping up and down, her feet pounding out a fast rhythm as they hit our squeaky kitchen floorboards. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“It’s not official yet. They have to do a background check first, but I pretty much got it.” The lie rolled off my tongue effortlessly. It was the fantasy I had been telling myself for the last five months. In those moments at night before I really fell asleep, I would let my subconscious drift into a world where I got that phone call telling me that I was, at last, a true professional, that they wanted me to be a part of their team. That I was, in fact, good enough. “I’m so excited for you!” I almost couldn’t stand the level of shrill my mother’s voice had become. “What’s the job?”

“A PR firm based in the city. They’re a startup company.” I needed to stop. I wasn’t in my fantasy; this was real life. “I’ve got to go, Mom. My break is over.”

“Okay, but you should come over to celebrate when you’re done with your shift. We’ll get out the champagne!”

I numbly agreed and hung up. She sounded so happy. How was I going to tell her that it was all a lie and she would still have to tell her friends that her daughter worked at Joe’s? My foot tapped repeatedly against the tiled floor. Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud.

“Congrats on your new job!”

I jumped at the sound of Angela’s voice. I had forgotten that she was in the room. She was smiling at me again, except this time I didn’t smile back. I felt like I was going to throw up.

“Uh, thanks.”

“So, when’s your last day here?” Angela asked.

I opened my mouth but no words came out. I looked up at Angela’s smiling face, blinking rapidly. Maybe I could tell her I was still going to work weekends. Or I didn’t start my job for two months. Maybe she would forget.

All of a sudden, Jane stuck her head into the break room, “Break’s over. I want the truck finished in the next fifteen minutes.”

I smiled at Angela meekly and rushed out of the room before she could demand an answer from me. I walked to the truck in a daze. I guess I was finally a complete failure. I was the girl who lied to her parents and coworkers so she didn’t seem pathetic. I tried to bring the rest of the truck up, but my wrist wouldn’t support the weight of the boxes and I kept fumbling them. Jane finally gave up and sent me to the dish room with a shake of her head. I walked away from her without a word, happy to be dismissed to the one place that I liked in this restaurant. I had no idea what I was going to do next. My mom had probably already told everyone about my new job, and I was positive Angela would let it slip before the end of her shift. Angela wouldn’t mean any harm. She probably thought I wanted everyone to know. Why wouldn’t I? I thought that the emptiness of the dish room might give me clarity or help me snag a PR job in the next twenty-four hours.

I liked to wash dishes because I preferred it to yelling at customers as they walked in the front doors. The dish room was in the far back corner of the restaurant, so no one ventured back there very often and it was quiet. I slipped the rubber gloves onto my hands and closed my eyes, enjoying the silence, only interrupted by the hum of the water heater in the corner. Maybe if I stayed back here, no one would find me and I could just hide forever. I shook my head at the childish thought.

I started the water and let it run until it became hot. I never thought that I would say I enjoyed washing dishes. My mom used to have to threaten me as a child so I would help her clean up after dinner. But at Joe’s I discovered there was a precision to washing dishes. If I pointed the nozzle at the exact right angle, I could clean a dish in one spray. Every dish was like a puzzle that only I could solve. I picked one up and focused on the rhythm of my method: dish, spray, turn, dump, dish, spray, turn, dump. I spent the last hour of my shift in that rhythm, not letting myself concentrate on my thoughts.

I rushed out of the building when my shift was up. The cold wind made me shiver as I stepped outside. Snow was starting to fall from the clouds and the sky was an overcast grey. I looked up at the falling flakes and blinked them away as they fell on my eyelashes. I needed a cigarette. I dug into the bottom of my purse with my uninjured hand, trying to locate the pack I kept hidden in the pocket for emergencies. It was a habit I had picked up in college and couldn’t seem to break. My fingers reached desperately across the smooth fabric but found nothing. You’ve got to be kidding me. I shoved my keys in the driver’s side door and flung it open. Here was one more thing I wanted and couldn’t have.

I got in the car, turned on the defroster and leaned back, waiting for the heat to clear my windshield. I rubbed my hands together and closed my eyes, letting the silence envelop me. For a moment, I thought about going to my parents’ house and having a glass of champagne. My mom would have the crystal champagne flutes out that we used on holidays. She would fill us each a glass and our flutes would make an off-tune melody of chimes as we clinked them together to celebrate my accomplishment. A combination of pride and tears would fill the corners of my mom’s eyes as my dad proposed a toast. She would lean over to grab my hand, her skin clammy against my ice-cold fingers.

“I always knew that you could do it,” my dad would say, reaching over to give me a hug. He would squeeze just a little too tight like always, and I would let my face sink deeper into his chest, so that my breath caught on the snares of his wool sweater, pretending it was real and sharing their thrill. Even if it was just for a minute.

Sarah Christ is currently a junior at SUNY Geneseo pursuing a double-major in Communication and English (Creative Writing). Originally, she is from the small town of Palmyra-Macedon. Her guilty pleasure is watching the Buffalo Bills play on Sundays. She was published in Gandy Dancer 2.1, and she would love to sit down with her favorite childhood author, Gordon Korman.

<< Window Seat                    3 Pieces of Flash Fiction by Joshua Keller >>

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by | · 5:06 pm

Jim Ryan

Window Seat

Hanna slides a dollar bill into the slot, where it is accepted with a beep. “Thank you, sweetie,” the woman behind the wheel says. It’s 6:35 and still dark outside as Hanna makes her way toward the middle of the bus, where the heaters are. Glad to be shielded from the February air, she will be at the community college in an hour—a commute that would take her only twenty minutes if she had her own car. She is self-conscious of the fact that she is still without a driver’s license at nineteen, but this is made slightly less embarrassing by the fact that she can’t afford a car anyway.

Hanna is normally the first one to board the morning bus, since West Springs is the farthest point from the city and the last stop on the route, but today there is a young man with a neck brace sitting in one of the seats closer to the front. As she makes him out in the near-darkness, her eyes meet with his for a second. Blue under-lighting from the seats glows faintly against his wide stare, and his beard is pressed out by the brace as if it grows horizontally from his chin. She catches her breath slightly and lowers her eyes as she finds a seat several rows behind the man with the brace.

Hanna slides over toward the window and fogs the glass with her breath. A heavily-bundled couple walks by the bus, holding hands as they pass beneath a street lamp, and Hanna wonders for a moment who would choose to go for a walk at this hour. Maybe they will be leaving for their respective jobs soon and this is the only time of the day when they get to do whatever they want. Hanna remembers how she and Thomas used to go for walks, how on their last walk she had reached her hand into the small space between them and he didn’t close the gap with his, how during their following walks they had walked a little farther apart. Soon the couple is out of sight and the street returns to its usual morning inactivity.

Hanna opens the thick notebook she holds in her lap. It contains everything from class notes to meandering thoughts and drawings. Each page is marked with a colored sticker that indicates its category: blue for notes, yellow for parts of stories and poems, green for the pages she shows to no one else. Flipping to the last page marked in blue, she confirms that she’s done all she needs to do for today’s classes. She keeps her coat wrapped close but pulls off her knit hat, planning to replace it with headphones from her backpack—she will slip them over her ears, turn up the volume and drift off until the bus gets close to the college stop. But before she can get comfortable, a body drops into the seat next to her with the swoosh of a Nylon windbreaker.

“Hey, you wanna talk about something?” the man with the brace asks. Hanna turns to him—he’s very close to her now. He must be in his late

twenties, and his face looks like it’s been left out in the snow too long, blue eyes etched with red. He is staring at her expectantly, not blinking.

No, she does not want to talk to him, but she has nowhere to go and she has a feeling he won’t take no for an answer. “Um, sure.” Hanna rests the headphones on her lap.

“I really need to smoke a fucking cigarette,” he says, in a way that she guesses is supposed to seem conversational. “You know what I mean?”

“I don’t smoke,” Hanna says, moving her eyes to the back of the seat ahead of her. She focuses on the pattern of crisscrossing colored lines in dark- blue fabric. Maybe if she doesn’t feed into what he is saying, he will give up and leave her alone.

“Yeah, that makes sense. It’s really shitty for your health. Still, I’ve been on this bus for a while, now, and I’m starting to really need one.”

Hanna sees that his hands are shaking and imagines that cigarettes aren’t his only vice. There is a lighter in his right hand that he keeps flicking, hard enough to cause a faint spark, but not to bring a flame. She has the urge to tell him that he probably shouldn’t fidget with a lighter on the bus, but she doesn’t.

“Broke my neck,” he says. “Never should have gotten on the horse, I guess, but I really wanted to. Mom said, ‘You better not do that, honey,’ but I did, anyway. That’s pretty much why I’m where I’m at now. Dad kicked me out of the house. Can’t work with a busted neck, ya know, so I lost my job at the Sunoco station. And who am I gonna sue for this?” He taps a fingernail on the brace—click, click. “Am I gonna sue the farmer because I jumped bareback onto his fucking horse?” He raises his eyebrows at Hanna, his gaze jumping back and forth as if considering alternatives. “Well, am I?”

“No, I suppose you aren’t.” Hanna looks up at the driver’s rear-view mirror, which seems so far away. The driver apparently has her eyes set firmly on the road, and Hanna can only see the rim of her blue hat. Hanna presses her body tight against the cool window, if only to put a few more inches between her and the man who has cut off her passage to the aisle. The bus passes over the river, and Hanna gets a quick look at the water through the bridge’s guardrail, pushing onward as if refusing to freeze—it has someplace to be in a hurry.

“You’re damn right I’m not,” he says. “That shit I was doing is illegal to begin with.” He looks around for a minute as the bus comes to a stop just past the bridge.

Maybe he will get off here, Hanna thinks. But he doesn’t. She turns again to the window, her breath forming veins of frost on the glass. They have reached Platt Falls, a step closer to the city. A church stands near the busstop, and she can see a man carrying a briefcase stepping through snow toward the bus. Soon they continue to roll, and the man with the brace looks to Hanna again.

“I have no home right now because my father kicked me out of my own house. I’m homeless. Does that sound right to you?” His eyes bear down hard at Hanna this time, and she feels a knot tightening in her chest. He looks so angry. At his father, at her, it doesn’t seem to matter.

“No, I guess it doesn’t.”

“I’ve got a good mind to severely lower his quality of life.” He reaches up with his left hand to scratch at his chin. “I mean, my life is over. I have no money and I can’t even nod my fucking head. Just spent my last bit of cash on this box of cigarettes and the fare.” He starts to laugh with his chest heaving like he’s trying to hold it in. The noise of his laughter eventually trails off.

Hanna thinks there is something particularly menacing about his choice of words: lower his quality of life. She imagines that he is riding to his parents’ house now, where they are probably still sleeping. Would he knock down the door? Or quietly step through the house and into the bedroom before pouring gas over his father and igniting him with that lighter he is still flicking? The fire department would find two roasted bodies—the father and the mother both consumed by the flames. Or maybe the fire wouldn’t kill the mother right away, and she’d live out the rest of her short life, unrecognizable, in the burn ward of the city hospital.

The man is still in her personal space and isn’t showing signs of leaving anytime soon. They come to two more stops without change. People walk up and down the aisles absorbed in their routines and seem to not even notice him. They zip and unzip coats. They talk on cellphones. It is like the man with the brace is a ghost placed on the bus just for Hanna.

Hanna wonders if he will stay with her until she gets to the college and if he will follow her off the bus. At five feet, five inches, and probably only half his weight, she feels she is too small and thin to defend herself against him, even with his broken neck. She thinks of the fork that she packed with her lunch—maybe she can get it out of her bag without him noticing and then stick it in his eye if he comes at her. But that thought disturbs her as well. The idea of seeing the contents of his eye slop out across his beard and over the white plastic and Velcro of the brace makes her queasy.

“Anyway,” he says, “my name’s Brian.” He shifts the lighter over to his left hand and reaches his right over to Hanna in a friendly gesture. His eyes are creased in the corners and the anger seems to have relaxed out of them somewhat.

“Hanna,” she says. His hand feels surprisingly soft as they shake, not like she expects. But what did she expect? Brian lets go of her hand with a tremble and continues flicking his lighter.

Then he’s getting up from his seat next to Hanna and rushing toward the front of the bus. “Shit, that’s my stop. Stop the bus!” he says. He’s already pulling a cigarette from a rather crunched-up box and shoving it between his lips.

Hanna looks to the empty seat at her right, almost expecting that Brian will have left something behind, but there is no trace of him except the slight smell of cigarette smoke, which fades in moments. It’s only after he steps out through the folding door and the bus starts moving again that she notices her hands are shaking, not unlike Brian’s.

 

Hanna slowly makes her way down the hall connecting the administrative building with the geoscience classrooms. The financial aid offices are on this hallway, and there are lines of people shifting around like worms. Sunlight bears down through the windows on the opposite side of the hall as restless students type text messages and shuffle papers and listen to music through fat headphones pressed into baseball caps, afros, and bedheads.

Nearing the end of the hall, Hanna needs to nudge through one line of students to reach the hall where her class is. She bumps her elbow into a tall boy wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, and he turns around, seeming to make eye contact with her for a brief second.

“Oh, hi; excuse me,” Hanna says.

But the boy is already facing back toward the windows, staring into the distance. Hanna’s face feels hot and she keeps walking. As she passes the last group of waiting students, she pulls her phone out to check for messages, though she knows she doesn’t have any.

She arrives at Human Geography five minutes early. Professor Laney is a tall woman with blonde hair who can’t be out of her twenties, yet has a surprisingly deep voice. Hanna thinks she is nice, even pretty, but not necessarily the best teacher. Professor Laney once said that limited crude oil supply is not really a matter of concern—if we just keep digging, we’ll keep finding more oil, no problem. Hanna had wanted to challenge Professor Laney on this. What about the millions of years it takes for animals to fossilize into the oil we use? How can that be sustainable? But, just as Hanna had started to raise her hand, a boy toward the back of the room spoke up: “Amen to that! I’m so sick of hearing about this so-called energy crisis,” and she had dropped her hand back to the desk.

“Good morning, everybody,” Professor Laney says. “It’s good to see all of your lovely faces.” She turns off the lights and uses her laptop to project a PowerPoint presentation, just as she always does. The PowerPoint lulls Hanna into a stupor with charts and bulleted points about birth-rates, death-rates, GNPs and GDPs. Hanna knows she should pay attention, take notes, and engage with the material. These are important things to learn, after all—there is a lot going on in the world, and she should try to be aware of it. But she finds her thoughts drifting back to the morning’s bus ride, to the blue under-lighting between the seats, to the man with his neck brace, to the feel of Brian’s hand gripping hers. Hanna looks to the girl sitting at the desk to her right, whose chin is planted in her palm as she stares at the projections. Professor Laney clicks forward to the next slide, and Hanna sees the colors reflected on her neighbor’s glasses flip in unison with the image on the screen.

On the ride home that night, she reads part of Elie Wiesel’s Night, trying to make some progress on her homework for her class, Literature of The Holocaust. As usual, Hanna’s the last one remaining on the bus, and the driver decides to make a stop at McDonald’s before driving by her block to let her off. Hanna watches the driver’s heavy gait as she makes her way across the parking lot to the glass box of a restaurant, the glow from inside McDonald’s casting a broad shadow in her wake.

Hanna wonders if Thomas ever watched her as she walked away from him. Would she have looked resolute to him? Or just alone?

She has replayed the moment over and over in her head: Thomas is wearing his glasses as he sometimes does when he is in too much of a rush to put in his contacts. They stand outside the room where they have statistics class together and where they have just finished taking the final exam.

 

“Hey, I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” he says. “And now that we’re done with finals and everything—”

He trails off, his fingers messing up his short blonde hair. “What’s wrong?” Hanna says.

“It’s just that I know we’ve been hanging out less, lately. Talking less and everything.”

“Yeah. Well, we’re done with classes now. More free time to do other stuff.”

“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about,” he says. “I’m going back to work now, and I’m sure you’ll have a lot going on too. Neither of us is going to be around the campus for a while, and we obviously don’t have class together anymore. What I’m trying to say is that it probably won’t make sense for us to try and keep hanging out.”

“Oh,” Hanna says. The pain in her chest is worse, and she’s staring down at the floor, at the flakes of bluish and red color in the smooth tile and the bands of shiny metal separating one square from the next. That’s what their relationship has been reduced to: hanging out.

“It’s not that I’m mad at you or anything. Really.”

Thomas’s voice sounds like it is coming from far away and Hanna can’t bring herself to say anything. What could she possibly do? Ask him to please change his mind and keep seeing her? No, she thinks. If she has to ask, then it isn’t worth trying. She’s already lost him.

“Say something?” he asks.

“Okay,” Hanna replies. “I understand. What you’re saying makes sense.” She makes herself look back up at him. He looks uncertain, not of whether he’s making the right choice, but of whether he has properly let Hanna down easily.

“So, are we okay? I mean, are you okay?” he says.

“Yes, I’m fine. See ya later.” Hanna turns and walks down the hall, away from Thomas. Her arms are crossed in front of her, gripping the straps of her backpack. She listens for Thomas to say goodbye back to her, or tell her to wait, but she hears nothing except the relieved voices of other students leaving the final exam.

After several minutes, the driver is back in her spring-cushioned throne, filling a cheek with some apple pie as she pulls a lever to shut the folding door. “So sorry to keep you waiting, honey,” she says. “Woman’s gotta have her sustenance, you know?”

 

The bus continues rolling and Hanna reads a passage from Night about a group of people who were hanged in Auschwitz before a sea of onlookers. One of them was a small boy—a “sad-eyed angel,” Wiesel calls him—who struggled and dangled there for some time before dying. He was simply too light for the rope to do its work quickly. Hanna finds herself thinking something this bad could only be the product of a stray, dark imagination, but reminds herself that it is real and wills herself to see it that way. However she tries, though, she suspects she will never understand how bad it was, and she is ashamed of herself for this.

After stepping off the bus, Hanna makes the short walk down her street to the house. The sun has dipped below the horizon, but the sky is still partially lit. As she gets closer to home and a pinecone crunches under her foot, it seems that all the color has drained from the world. But, surely, it will be back in the morning. After all, she has no reason to feel sad—her life is comfortable, safe.

Dinner is leftover spaghetti. Her dad pulls it from the fridge in a Tupperware that had belonged to Thomas. He made her cookies for her birthday late last year and she never remembered to give the container back. She offered to bring it to him, but he said he didn’t care—he had more like it. Hanna still suspects that he wanted to avoid seeing her again.

Her dad twists his fork in his spaghetti, scraping the tines against the Pyrex plate, making her cringe. “Something wrong, munchkin?” he says, wiping tomato sauce from his neat beard.

“Nah, Dad. Everything’s fine, just a bit tired.” And her eyes are back on the Tupperware.

It was just luck that Hanna met Thomas at school. Growing close with him was like an alignment of the planets; she is sure it won’t happen again.

Hanna is alone on the bus, slipping in and out of sleep, as usual, listening to the same old songs on her iPod, even the ones that remind her of Thomas that she never seems to get around to deleting. Like the previous day, there is no sign of Brian. She wonders if she just imagined him being there, if there was never really a man who dropped into the seat next to her and shocked her with his words and the click of his lighter between thumb and fingers. The more she considers the possibility, the more likely it seems. After all, she’s been getting very little sleep lately on this schedule, getting up before the sun every day and going to sleep after midnight. Isn’t it possible for people to hallucinate when they are sleep deprived?

1 2 >

<< A Bit about Nothing                    Welcome to Joe's >>

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by | December 19, 2014 · 1:04 pm

Suraj Uttamchandani

Why Not Know More?

It is still awkward in the house. Shanti Jana leans one arm on a broom as she stares at a calendar on the refrigerator. It is colorful and government-provided, orange marking the days of trash pick-up and green marking recycling. She places a dark brown finger gently on November, running her finger across the rows until she hits today’s date. Her wedding was in August, which means that it has been almost four months since Rajiv, a stranger who spoke perfect Hindi but took his chai with too much milk, arrived at her family’s house in Mumbai. It has been three months, then, since she stayed up all night whispering with her mother about whether this was what he wanted, certain that no man would want to take her and her barrenness to America. It has been two and a half months since she woke up in Boston and it has been one hour since she last wondered if her husband was happier living in bachelorhood in America before his parents required that he pick up a wife in India in much the way you stop by the market to pick up chilies and lamb to make for dinner.

Rajiv comes home from the university every night at six o’clock, although once in a while he holds a review session for an Introduction to Physics exam or helps a student who is having difficulties with a problem set. It has not yet been a full semester, so Shanti doesn’t know if this will always be her husband’s pattern. She lets tonight’s dal boil as she considers this. She has only been to the university once, on the first weekend she was here—the walk was short but it was chilly—and she did not much care for it. It was efficient to the point of excess. Glass windows. Fancy new computers. Whiteboards with markers. The whiteboards are perhaps the strangest part, she thinks. She has never seen erasable markers before.

As she adds coriander to the pot, the increased pungency of the kitchen is comforting. Cooking is her most sensory connection to Mumbai since she has come here. The house is small enough that she hears keys turn in the front door’s knob, since the lentils are no longer boiling so loudly. Rajiv walks into his house.

“Hello, Shanti,” he says in Hindi. He is cordial but not romantic. Her response is friendly with an afterthought of trepidation: “Hello.”

“How was your day?” he asks, as though they have just learned the routine in a Hindi class and are practicing it with a partner for the first time.

“It was nice. I walked to the market. The fish monger gave me a good price.”

“Is that what’s for dinner?”

“It’s Monday.” Her response doesn’t compute for Rajiv. Since he is not trying to hide his confusion, she continues, “I cannot cook meat in this house on Monday.”

Her family has made a long-standing observance of this. For generations, they practiced vegetarianism on Mondays and the purnima, the full moon. Her parents have warned her to be flexible with regards to her new life in America, but this is one issue on which she cannot remain docile. After all, she thinks, I should not have to cook an animal merely because my husband has been in America longer. She has no objection to Rajiv eating meat on these days, but she refuses to prepare it. “I made dal,” she suggests, and moves to set the table. He sits.

 

She arrives at his office in Alan E. Case Physics Conservatory at the edge of campus with Thai food in a wrinkly brown bag from Phuckett Express. Shanti has wavered slightly from her adherence to an Indian-only diet and is no longer offended by the idea that there might be other good cooks in Massachusetts. She has grown bored of the house and its daily emptiness, so she has taken to bringing lunch to Rajiv and sitting with him. Their talk is still a rare thing—she does tell him a joke that she read in Miss India this week and he laughed—but she often watches as he works out equations on a whiteboard using symbols with which she is unfamiliar.

She cannot stop herself from wondering about the validity of his conclusions. They look believable, but how can he deduce perfectly how much cooler a hot plate will be in three hours or how fast a ball will fall from a balcony? There is something about her husband’s work, she thinks, that is ludicrously unbelievable. There is so little consistency, so few rules. She is in America now, she recalls, and does not know whether this fact proves or disproves her theory.

 

She convinces Rajiv to drive her deeper into the heart of the city, where the cinema has started showing foreign films. A Bollywood movie is playing and Shanti is very excited at the prospect of going. Rajiv, for his part, prefers Hollywood films.

“It will be fun!” she says.

He replies, “Shanti, I have to grade these tests.” She says, “You never take me out.”

“I didn’t know that mattered to you.”

The room is silent for a quarter of a moment before Shanti feels guilty. He has, after all, provided for her for half a year now.

“It’s not important,” she says. He gets the car keys.

 

Boredom permeates the house as Shanti puts the Windex back under the sink. She has only just recently begun to consider the possibility that the house is too small. It can only be cleaned so many times before it fails to get messy again. In the stagnancy, her thoughts go to little ones. Little ones would run around the house, crying, screaming, needing. She would spend thoughts on their education and values and happiness. They would smile and sob often, bundles of blankets that cannot control their emotions. Little ones would make the house messy.

She thinks about what she would name them until she knows she shouldn’t think about it anymore. Four years ago, her body simply stopped ovulating (her mother checked her temperature daily to make sure). Her parents took her to a hospital deep in Mumbai, where the British doctors still were, and they told her that she was barren. Shanti learned long ago that there comes a point where you must stop thinking or you will unravel, and if you cannot produce life you must at least retain your own. She speaks out loud. “Meh ma kabhi nahi bun sakti.” It is a phrase she is too familiar with: I can never become a mother.

She goes to the tall bathroom mirror, checks that the sari she is wearing is decent, and leaves the house, stopping at Frank’s Deli to pick up sandwiches and chips before she arrives at Case. After their quiet lunch—she mentions a new recipe she came across this week, and Rajiv expresses interest in trying it—Shanti begins walking home. The library building lies in the auxiliary of her vision every day, but today it pulls her focus more so than usual. She checks her watch but there is nothing she needs to get back to, so she wanders in.

The lobby overloads her senses. There is a couple kissing, pecking each other lightly on the cheeks until their lips finally meet. There is a clattering of the new ivory keyboards. A bell is chiming every few seconds to indicate an elevator arriving on the main floor. She cannot conceive of someone being able to get work done here. After a minute, she turns around and returns home.

 

Rajiv opens the door into the kitchen, and Shanti is glad of it. Her days are more humdrum than ever and she has grown to love her husband’s arrival, enjoying the uncertainty of it. There is a strange thrill in what Rajiv will or will not say on a given day. What mood will he be in: talkative or taciturn? Will the conversation be serious, or polite, or silent altogether?

She quickly concludes that today, Rajiv is talkative. He has picked up the newspaper from the kitchen table and is huffing at certain headlines. This is how he tries to convey to Shanti that there is something on his mind, and she knows this. She continues to play the game, ignoring his huffing until it is so clear that he is trying to get her attention that ignoring it for any longer would just be silly.

“How was your day?” she begins, in their usual way. “It went well. How was yours?” he replies.

“It was okay. Dull as usual.” Shanti’s sentiments are no secret to Rajiv. “It’s interesting that you say that. There was that faculty meeting today,

the one I told you about? The provost was going on and on about the general curriculum requirements. Professor Cohen, the head of the language department also spoke. It seems they are adding a mandatory foreign language requirement for all students.”

“Oh? So the kids will know not just American, but also English?” They laugh lightly.

Rajiv continues, “They’re teaching all the European languages, you know, Spanish and French and all that. But they want to have even more options.” The room is silent for a moment, since they both have a sense of where the conversation is going.

“Do you think that they would want someone for Hindi?” Shanti asks. “You have an interview next week with Professor Cohen.”

 

She has chosen a beautiful sari, one that she has never worn before. She performed a small puja this morning, and, with a red tilak on her forehead, she looks as though no time has passed since the day she immigrated to America despite the year between then and now. She carries a spiral notebook and the textbook she has selected—Namaste! A Friendly Introduction to Hindi Language and Letters—under her arm. The classroom is larger than she expects it to be and her figure in the front of it is not at all imposing. She lays her books out on the podium and the doors rattle as someone else enters.

Rajiv is smiling. Shanti imagines he is pleased with the way they teamed up to get her this job. She too is pleased.

“First day!” he begins. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m nervous,” she says. “What if they don’t understand me? What if I don’t do a good job?”

“Peace, Shanti. Come to Case after class and tell me how it went.” A student, the first one, walks into the room, and Rajiv switches to English. “You’ll do fine.”

With that, Rajiv shakes her hand and leaves the room.

 

She sits quietly in her office, unsure of what to do. The space is small but larger than the bedroom in which she grew up. She puts Namaste on the shelf, on its back since there are no other books to help keep it upright. She is out of things to do, so she begins to tidy the barren space, dusting it with the end of her sari. This task is quickly finished, so she looks up at the clock on the wall. She is supposed to be holding office hours, but it has been half an hour and no students have arrived for help. She thinks, would it really be so bad if I leave? Shanti sits at the chair, disquieted by the large desk before her, and begins to whisper-sing a bajaan under her breath.

“Repeat after me: Meh.”

“Meh.”

“Bharat.”

“Bharat.”

“Seh.”

“Seh.”

“Hoon.”

“Hoon.”

“Meh: I. Bharat. India. Seh: from. Hoon: am. Meh Bharat seh hoon: I am from India. Now, repeat after me: Aap.”

“Aap.”

“Umreeka.”

“Umreeka.”

“Seh.”

“Seh.”

“Hain.”

“Hain.”

“Aap: You. Umreeka: America. Seh: from. Hain: are. Aap Umreeka seh hain: You are from America.” Shanti pauses for a second, thinking about what she’s just said. The students’ pronunciation was particularly good.

 

“Professor Jana,” a declarative voice asserts, accompanying a polite knock on Shanti’s office door.

Shanti looks up to see Anna Johnson, a tall sophomore with curly red hair. She looks downtrodden and confused, as though she accidentally put salt in her tea instead of sugar. Her glasses make her look more intelligent, but she is skinny and looks fun-loving as well. “Can I come in?”

“Yes, of course,” Shanti says as she folds the newspaper back in half and places it in the corner of her desk. “Take a seat. What’s troubling you?”

“I have some bad news. I don’t know how to phrase it.”

Shanti wants to say, let me make us some chai and we can discuss whatever it is. Instead she merely gestures for Anna to continue.

“I have to drop Hindi.”

Shanti leans forward slightly, sitting on the edge of her chair. “Why?”

“My parents don’t want me to keep taking it.”

“Why?”

“We got into a fight about it last week over spring break. They didn’t want me using up credits on it since it doesn’t count for anything and I got Spanish credit from high school. I mean, I do want to graduate on time and, well, they’re paying for college so it’s their call. I’m sorry.”

Has Anna not been enjoying the class? Does she think it will never be useful? Shanti’s sadness becomes anger; why sign up in the first place when there are other people who might want this spot? She is suddenly confused. How does someone just stop trying halfway through the term? She chooses silence as Anna reaches into her knapsack and pulls out a manila folder. Inside, there is a small sheet of paper which she hands to Shanti. Printed neatly across the top, she sees Course Withdrawal Form, and then below it, Anna’s name and ID number in handwriting that carries a forced formality. She reads HIND 100—Elementary Hindi I and then her own name. Below that is a blank line, with small print under it that directs, “Instructor’s signature required.”

Shanti opens a drawer to grab a pen and briefly considers writing in Devanagari script, but decides against it and signs. “Have a good day, Anna,” she says, handing back the form as Anna stands and puts her knapsack back over her shoulder.

1 2 >

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by | December 12, 2014 · 11:59 pm

Devin Stabley-Conde

[In the Cross- Countertop Silence]

when 50-year-old men
grin like sharks, I want to crawl out

of my skin & into a suit
of armor. I am
nametag bold: Not Fucking
Around. I will graft
scales to skin: if I harden, maybe
sweethearts & honeys will

                                ricochet. If blood could boil
I would fuel my steps
with red haze, diffuse it
through my pores & pigment myself—
let the predators know I am
poisonous          to         the         touch.

Please, stand in my
how-can-you-be-a-size-six shoes
for eight hours. Listen to men
speak. Watch their hands
come   across the counter & weigh
a paycheck against
my pride:             a glass bottle:            a hurricane
against their heads—the barrier to lives I wish
I could make    men   live.

Devin Stabley-Conde is from Youngstown, NY and is currently a senior English (Creative Writing) major at SUNY Geneseo. If she could pick a fictional character to be best friends with, it would be Pippin from Lord of the Rings.

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by | · 4:20 pm

Chloe Forsell

Water and Light

Trying on her rings is the most frustrating thing in your world. They never fit. You slide the tarnished silver band, adorned with a single deep red stone, over each of your peanut-butter-sticky fingers. It falls off. You slide it over your tongue, close your mouth, and the ring can’t escape. Its smooth surface, like her pale hands, glides over your tongue, your teeth, your fleshy cheeks; it glides so effortlessly in your mouth that it slips through the small space at the back of your tongue, down your throat, into your peanut-butter-sticky stomach. You half-smile: the ring is yours to keep.

You wish to swallow your mother. Her hair is as garnet red as the stone; translucent hands show lavender veins, pink cheeks, sapphire eyes. She is a rainbow. You are dirt, earth—brown, brown, and more brown. It’s not a matter of beauty, though. It’s distance. Impossible distance.

 

When you were too young to be left alone, you walked the streets of Buffalo together every day, hand in hand. Everything was simple and beautiful and shining. The streets were full of beautiful, shining people and you wanted to touch and meet them all. You ran from the curb of the sidewalk and just before your tiny foot touched the road, she grabbed your arm, spun you around, and enclosed you in a warmth that you would search for for the next fifteen years.

After the move, she starts working full-time. You decide to leave your new apartment and walk to Grandma’s all by yourself. You put on your determination boots and slosh through puddles all the way there. You cross a street without a crosswalk, and as your tiny foot touches the road you wonder where her pale hand is, why you aren’t being flung backwards into the safety of her freckled arms. You walk on, and the distance between the two of you grows greater with every step.

In school, you’re surrounded by rainbows. The teacher instructs you to draw your family portrait. You pick out four crayons: scarlet, apricot, cornflower, and sepia. Your classmate looks over at your picture and raises an eyebrow. He raises the same eyebrow when you walk in with your mother for open house. Everyone raises an eyebrow. “Were you adopted?” This question haunts your childhood, and you avoid it at all costs.

 

Your half-sister is born with amber hair, cobalt eyes, and coral lips. In the hospital, she is wrapped in distant yet familiar freckled arms, radiating on a spectrum you can never understand. The two of them are just out of reach; no matter how far you stretch your brown arms, you can’t touch them. Your stepfather hovers in the background, a quivering, terrified cloud above the double rainbow. You hardly see him, though. An intense blinding kaleidoscope flows from the infant to your mother and straight past you.

The three of you go grocery shopping and you learn to walk a few paces ahead of them. You don’t hold her hand. You don’t look at shiny surfaces that reflect the differences between you and your blood mother.

On a rainy day in February, you and your mother look through an iris catalog and decide to draw imagined gardens that someday (with enough money, enough time) you might plant. You gravitate towards the deep pinks, deep purples. She circles and highlights the whites, the sunset reds, the summer oranges. You compare sketches when you’re done. Her dreamy layout with swirling lines, bridges, pergolas, glass birdfeeders, and wild clumps of vibrant irises is enough to make you forget that it’s a rainy day in February. Yours is simply rows of flowers, separated by thin paths. Unsteady lines that should have been straight prompt another question that will haunt you: “I really can’t draw, can I?” She doesn’t have to answer for you to understand that there is no way to reach the end of a rainbow.

At your sister’s first grade open house, you get the same looks. She and your mother stand hand in hand, both round, dewed in freckles, glowing in ROYGBIV. “That’s my big sister,” she says, and she’s so proud of you she doesn’t seem to notice her classmates’ confusion. You walk over to the display of handmade pictures hanging on the wall. Your sister’s is beautiful, full of swirling crayon lines and steady strokes of color that your peanut-butter-sticky hands could never have made at that age. You feel ten thousand worlds away. She grabs at your hand, but you pull away.

You spend years pulling away. Teasing. Fighting. The damage becomes nearly irreparable, but wasn’t that inevitable anyway? No matter how close you get, you’ll never reach.

And meteorological phenomena sure do stick together. Everything is your fault. “You’re older, you should know better!” You resent the way their colors fade into one unified gleaming crescent of disappointment—disappointment in you.

During these years, you put up with your stepfather because you have to. He has exploded from that quivering cloud into a dark, desperate rain. He stumbles up and down stairs and slurs his words and your mother pretends none of it is happening. You’re afraid when she goes to work and leaves you with him, not because he will hurt you, but because you’ve never been surrounded by so much gray. “Why do you stay with him?” Your words pour as hard and unfaltering as a heavy storm.

 

Trying on her rings becomes something you don’t care to do. You ask for your own rings. You ask for your own phone. Your own room. You ask for a lot. And you get it.
Your mother sings as she cleans, kind of a ritual (she loves to clean; you’re so messy). Her voice is only ever half there; severed vocal chords mangle each note. “You’re tone deaf,” you mock over the buzz of the vacuum cleaner. You belt out a clearer version of “Moonshadow,” though you’ve grown to hate Cat Stevens (and your mother’s other favorites). She keeps singing, smiling. You roll your eyes, plug your ears, sing over her until her voice is crushed to nothing.

She tries to do some things for herself. Pilates is what sticks. She pops in Maury Winsor’s twenty-minute tape and lies her round body onto a mat on the living room floor. You are young, a dancer, athletic, you keep up, no problem. You laugh at her efforts until one day, you make her cry. “I just want twenty minutes for myself,” she sobs. You reach out your arms to hug her, but she slips right through. No matter how hard you try, she won’t stop crying.

Years later, you’re propped up on the corner of the kitchen counter while the heat from the oven warms your legs. You look around at your sixth and final home—the water stains on the ceiling, the puckering linoleum tiles. You ignore the impeccable design, the tireless hours of painting, the renovations that your mother could afford. You only see empty spaces, places that are lacking: her inability to cook a good meal, her hot temper, her shrill cracking voice, her favoritism, her lack of education, her poor choice in men, the ways she has failed you.

“Why don’t you just quit?” You interrupt her as she complains about her third shift job at the nursing home. Her voice breaks a bit as she explains that she can’t just quit. She wanted to go to art school. She wanted to move to Montana. She wanted, wanted, wanted. She wanted a lot. And she got none of it. You can’t help but carry a heavy question on your adolescent shoulders: Does she want you? Did she ever?

With each haunting question, you retreat a little farther into yourself. You build your wall a little higher—high enough to block the lighted arc that stretches its colors and (possibly) longs to be near you.

Trying on her rings begins to have a certain appeal again, but not because they are hers. Because she has nice jewelry. You’ve begun to define her by what she has. “Oooh, can I have this when you die?” You don’t even flinch when you ask. Digging through her boxes of vintage jewelry, you’re always attracted to the things that shine the most. A sterling silver band with a large colorful stone is what has caught your eye. “Yes,” she assures you. “It’s yours. You can have it now.” You slide it onto your finger and ignore the hurt in her voice. Still digging, she picks up one of her favorite pieces. It contains no stone, no shine, just a gold band; engraved on it, the name ‘Nancy.’ “Who’s Nancy?”

“I don’t know. I got it in a lot of random jewelry on eBay.” At this point, you don’t even try to understand her. Her rings never fit. It’s still so difficult, so frustrating. You know she hears your eyes rolling.

Adolescence is fading, and you are forgetting. Forgetting to tell your mother when you will be performing in school concerts. Forgetting to tell her that you’ve broken up with your boyfriend of four years, that your best friend is moving away. Forgetting to tell her about your pregnancy scare, about getting drunk for the first time—so drunk that you have only the memory of concrete and lips. Forgetting to tell her when you’re going out, when you’re coming home. Forgetting to tell her of your accomplishments, of your screw ups. She’s almost evaporated into the sky, completely forgotten.

 

Your family from Georgia visits for the first time in years. You hate these things. People pile into cars to meet at the cousins’ farmhouse and you join, of course. It’s the same as always—beer and barbeque, the parents reminiscing about their pot-smoking days (as if they are over), playing pranks on Grandma, watching all the rainbows, some ugly and some beautiful, all in incredible prismatic layers of generational similarity. “Doesn’t little Erin look just like her mother?” “Debbie sure has her father’s eyes!” “Oh, Connor got that spunk from Aunt Sarah!” You spend the day in a mist and the distance is greater than you could ever imagine—they are just illusions, tricks of the eye. You are here. Where are they?

In the fading light, a drunken aunt approaches you and whispers in your ear: “You’re so quiet and soft spoken, just like your mother.” You brush it off. You’re actually pretty loud, anyway. Certainly not soft spoken. Right? You’re just quiet around them because they’re practically strangers. You think. What does she know anyway? But the words linger like a fine dew stuck to your skin. Just like your mother. Just like your mother. Just like—.

Your mother decides it’s time to go and on the ride home, you let her sing uninterrupted.

 

When your stepfather gets too drunk for the last time, she tells him to leave. She’s done and she means it. You sit alone in your room and listen to your mother and sister cry through the thin floors when he finally leaves. You wish you could cry, if only to be closer to them. But you can’t. They love him. You can’t help but think it. You can’t help but hate yourself. After fourteen years of gray retreating in a single moment, you can’t help but realize you love him, too. And all of a sudden, you can. You can cry.

All at once, you’re almost an adult, and you’re sickeningly nostalgic. The sky is changing and you need to ground yourself. After all, you’re more made of earth than anyone you know. You pull out home videos from when your hands were still peanut-butter-sticky. As you sit on the floor, eyes locked on a world you’ve nearly forgotten, you don’t notice the holes in the wall of your old apartment, the faded carpet, the lack of furniture, where she tried as hard as she could not to fail you. You notice her voice. It was beautiful—deep, clear, vibrant. It flooded the room with unimaginable hues. “Before the surgery, I could sing, too. Like you,” she sits on the couch behind you and remarks. She can’t see you overflowing onto the carpet, but she can sense your awe. Like you.

You desire to know more, to see the other half. Old pictures and stories occupy months.

“You were such a rebel.”

“I was just passionate, stood up for what I believed in.” Like me.

“Why’d you end up going to nursing school? Your art is beautiful.”

“I had no support from anyone. Your grandma and grandpa didn’t help me.”

“Did you go because of me?”

“No, not in that sense.” She sacrificed for me.

You want to ask, you want to ask so badly. It’s on the tip of your tongue. She touches your head with a gentleness that you recognize from a million times before and you know the answer.

 

One day, you hate that ring you picked out. It’s gaudy, atrocious. You ask your mother if you can look through her boxes again. This time, you pick out a smaller silver band with a thin oval opal resting in its center. “That’s my favorite, you know. Opal is my birthstone.” As the words leave her mouth, you are overcome with a terrible sense of guilt. “Yes, you can have it when I die,” she jokes. Except it’s not even a little bit funny.

Trying on her rings becomes easier with time. You grow into them, into her. It only takes a few months to begin to fill in the gaps of whole years, the gaps where things can’t touch because they’re destined not to.
You stop searching for the end of the rainbow—it’s just reflection, refraction, the perfectly angled combination of water and light.

Just water and light. Earth and blood and bone. Lavender veins; pink cheeks; brown, red, amber hair. Particles of matter that are just as much alike as they are impossibly distant. You turn your mother’s ring over and over on your finger, and you’re flooded with a familiar desire. You clench your teeth to keep from swallowing.

Chloe Forsell is a sophomore English (Creative Writing) and French double major at SUNY Geneseo. She was born and raised in a small town about an hour south of Buffalo, where she grew into a cat-loving, bike riding, pizza fanatic. If Chloe were to become best friends with a fictional character she would befriend the tree from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, because who could ask for a better friend?

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by | December 11, 2014 · 11:59 pm

Joseph O’Connor

On the Barber Pole

Outside, the red & white needle helixes like a lighthouse:—centrifuges clientele, unraveling
men from boys. A bell alarms as I pass through. Dip behind the dirty aquarium: sink into black
leather couch. Springs push relentless on my tailbone:—try to sperm their way inside. Waiting
makes my thighs sweat. Astroglide forward: Playboy spread like playing cards. Chin down:—
shades drawn over my poker face. Draw one. Lick my pointer:—the ladies oblige, open
their glossy insides [not as smooth as Barbie’s]. I could sense the sudden hair on my
tongue. I was speechless. The barber calls for me in a language I do not speak. No telephone-book
cushion: the firm support of two-thousand strangers. He sits me in front of myself.
Robes me in black. Vibrator whispers in my ears: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Dead cells pepper the air. Chin
up. Hands tell my temples where to look: left. Spins my head like a globe this way
and that. His stomach mushrooms over my forearm as he cleaves my veil. The shock
of buckle metal is cold electricity. He does not see me quake underneath. I do not see him shoot
warm cream on my nape. Sit still while his blade carves me into hard edges. I tip him three dollars
more than my father told me to.

Joseph O’Connoris a student of Literature and Gender Studies at SUNY Geneseo. He hails from Lynbrook, NY. His work has been published in a myriad of campus magazines as well as Gandy Dancer. He hopes to pursue a career in adolescent education after graduation.

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by | · 11:59 pm

Kathryn Bockino

The Most Feared Man in Italy

He crossed the street without trembling. All around, people eyed him sideways or kept their gaze directed at their own shadows. Their mumbled, incoherent apologies to him flew along with the breeze as he sidestepped their quivering bodies. He never once acknowledged their presence.

As he got closer to his destination, he silently regarded how those around him were getting more and more agitated. Some fidgeted their bleak-looking ties as others wrung their hands from within their pants’ pockets. The men kept their jaws locked into place as the blood from their already pale faces drained, drop by drop. The women picked at their stubby nails while glancing toward their companions, hoping no one would notice their lipstick fading from constantly licking their dry lips.

To Arturo Bocchini, he was just walking to work.

He had nothing to fear while walking near the Capitoline Hill. His shirt never clung to his back with sweat, and he never had to beg his stomach to keep its contents down in this part of town. Palazzo Venezia, the dreaded medieval-looking building coming up on his right, was what caused those around him to shake with dread. Arturo knew this, and stored everyone’s reactions in the back of his mind. He would be able to recall these facts at a moment’s notice if his boss ever asked. And, knowing his boss, he sure would be interested in knowing what the average person thought of him.

Palazzo Venezia’s beautiful balcony, which overlooked the cobblestone piazza, was something Arturo always liked to admire. It reminded him of his Italy: it watched over its inhabitants day or night, rain or shine. Sometimes, if the weather permitted, he would enjoy his espresso up on the balcony and let his mind wander, knowing that no one would dare look up.

Any other man who held his job would have smirked with this knowledge. They would chuckle at the poor, sad people around him; people who lived in constant fear of what was going to happen next in Italy. Any other person holding the amount of power Arturo had would stare back into a pair of frightened eyes and soundlessly convey that no, it was not going to be all right.

Arturo did not see it that way.

He was doing his civic duty and keeping the peace. He was being a good citizen and an even better employee. That was all. It wasn’t black and white to him. It was just what life was like in fascist Italy.

As his thoughts strayed to such matters, he didn’t even realize that he’d arrived at his objective location. His mind whirled with what he wanted to tell his boss first, but he knew Mussolini would want the most urgent updates right away.

It wasn’t always easy being the head of the secret police in Italy. But to Arturo Bocchini, someone had to do it—and at this point in his career and life, why not him?

 

My family likes to talk about Arturo Bocchini, our most famous ancestor. Any dinner at a relative’s house somehow always finds its way to him. Whether it’s the food on the table, the wine generously being poured, or whatever is on the news that evening, something always reminds someone of Arturo.

He’s not in any American history books or stories. If I were to skim a textbook, I would never find his name. I can ask any of my friends who claim to be World War II buffs, and they’ll just shrug their shoulders and say, “Never heard of him.” Arturo Bocchini is not a recognized figure in America.

But to my family, he is the celebrity of every hour. My dad, grandfather, and uncles love to discuss who he truly was. Was he the man the Italian government portrayed him to be? Or was he the man my family (those who were alive during World War II) knew?

The contradictions are endless, and already his name is slipping away from people’s lips. But when I watch my great-uncle Ralph slam his fist down, making the table shake with anger, and say that “the damn bureaucrats don’t know a damned thing,” it gets me mad, too.

I never knew Arturo, and neither did my dad. Yet, when we talk about him it’s as if he’s still around, still in the shadows, still walking up and down central Rome with his unflinching eyes.

It was 1922 when Benito Mussolini first became Prime Minister of Italy. World War I left the country in shambles, but Mussolini offered Italy hope. Italy was still a new country of sorts; unification of the area had only taken place a few years before, and the war cost the nation more money than they had spent in the previous fifty years combined.

The Treaty of Versailles, the treaty that was hypothetically going to settle the disputes of WWI, was supposed to give the country faith that its high unemployment levels and equally high inflation rates would soon be a tale of the past. However, as fate would have it, Italy was left out of most of the treaty, causing resentment to stir between them and the other European nations. Dishonored and disgusted, many Italian citizens blamed the government for not having the balls to stand up to the “Big Three” (America, Britain, and France).

The everyday civilian prayed that Mussolini would change the current government for the better, while the monarchy craved he would stop the disgruntled murmurs from those who were aggravated with their authority. He and the fascist movement promised the nation—and the world—that a new Roman Empire would soon come forth from the ashes. For all that Mussolini promised to his hungry citizens, obliterating representative democracy seemed to be a small price to pay.

What he aspired to was simple: “Italy wants peace and quiet, work and calm. I will give these things with love if possible and with force if necessary.” So the question ran through his mind; how does one lucratively achieve this goal?

Then Benito Mussolini met my relative.

 

Arturo Bocchini is my great-(great) uncle on my dad’s side. Sometimes when I talk about him I forget to mention one of the “greats,” but I figure people still get the picture. His family branch veered away from ours, with most of his kin still residing in Italy today. My great-great-grandfather moved to America after World War I, and we have all stayed here since.

My great-(just one) uncle Ralph was born in the United States and fought in World War II. He would joke with us around the dinner table that he sometimes wondered if he was flying over Arturo during the war, and if Arturo ever thought of him. The two men never officially met, but through other relatives they kept in touch and were informed about the other’s life.

It’s my great-uncle Ralph who tells me all about Arturo and the “truth.” He shakes his head, and breathes out family lore every time I visit. I love hearing about Arturo, about what made him tick, and want to become such an infamous man.

 

Arturo Bocchini did not grow up envisioning that The Milwaukee Journal would one day dub him the “The Most Feared Man in Italy.” He did, conversely, dream of becoming a lawyer, and was proud when he finally finished his law degree from the University of Naples in 1903 at the young age of twenty-three. Whether it was because of the economy, family problems, or just sheer curiosity, he took a different turn after graduating and quickly joined the Ministry of Interior under Victor Emmanuel III. Instead of trying to get people out of jail, he was now part of the security force (called Prefects) that threw people into jail.

In 1915, he was personally called to Rome to focus his already well-known efforts on the Fifth Division of Safety, as the General of Public Security. His reputation as a no-nonsense, tough but fair Prefect continued to expand until certain people in power began to wonder if he was the right man for the most laborious of jobs.

His influence spread near and far. Despite never being a member of the National Fascist Party, he was made Prefect of Brescia, Bologna, and Genoa after he finished his duty in Rome. All of his colleagues knew him as the man who could recall any fact or face within seconds, as the man whose voice never altered or stuttered, and as the man whose eyes never gave any emotion away. If Bocchini saw your wife through the window of a tearoom one afternoon, he could recall the exact address and time she was there weeks later.

Mussolini was no fool. He knew the second his hands brushed the intoxicating power he yearned for that certain people would have to go. Some people were kicked out within a fortnight of him stepping up to the plate in Rome. For others, he knew he would have to twiddle his thumbs before he could somehow get them out of the picture.

It took up to four years to completely overturn every government official, officer, and Prefect that might dare to question his authority. But by 1926 Mussolini had successfully morphed the Italian government into an impeccable pool of devout minions who would nod their heads at his every word.

On September 13, 1926 it finally became Bocchini’s time to shine. Over the years, everyone who was anyone in fascist Italy had learned that this was not a man to cross. And Mussolini knew this, too. After steadily moving up the ranks, it was time to get the Holy Grail of jobs: Chief of the Secret Police in Italia. This meant he would have almost absolute control over the inner workings of the Italian government—after Mussolini, that was.

 

During his reign, my great-uncle’s pride and joy was the creation of OVRA. The acronym seems to be lost to time, but one twisted tale says that Mussolini’s deepest desire was creating a police organization that would snare every single breathing Italian in its giant octopus tentacles. In Italian, piovra means octopus, and many wonder if the word somehow comes from that gruesome analogy. One can only shudder at the thought.

OVRA had two main objections. The first and foremost goal was to protect Mussolini. Bocchini was so successful with this task that after he assumed his position in 1926, no hopeful assassin ever came close to grazing Mussolini’s balding head. The second aim was to help create an illusion of harmony surrounding the fascist regime.

The men Bocchini recruited had special privileges that no other Prefect or police officer ever got; they were allowed to bypass the usual chain of command to get their job done. Bocchini himself handpicked the men who worked in OVRA—he looked for those who reminded him of himself. The organization was small, but scarily effective.

He asked these trusted men to look around. He asked them to watch the local coffee shops, to ask their wives what town gossip was going around, and to keep their ears open at Sunday Mass. Bocchini wanted to know what (not if) underground activities were taking place in the heart of Rome, in the countryside, and on the coast. There had to be people wanting to take down the fascist government, but where were they? Who were they? The neighbors? The teachers? The priests? Those with any suspicions were urged to go to the boss. Just like an octopus hoping to lure in unsuspecting fish, Bocchini knew how to hook his bait.

He had spies in foreign countries poking and prodding around. He tightened border patrol security to make sure no one got in or out. He, and his hissing friends, knew where you were, what you were doing, and what your sighs at night actually meant. No one was truly safe.

But did that mean if you were accused of traitorous behavior that you were immediately put to death? Not necessarily. While the death penalty was reestablished during this time period, only ten people were ever actually sentenced to death. Bocchini was able to keep Mussolini’s system in check without truly resorting to the chaotic, violent system of the Nazi SS.

 

To my great-uncle, it seemedas though his work was sincerely helping the country. That’s what my family continuously says. According to them, he thought in his heart of hearts that Mussolini was actually assisting the struggling, fragile country. I can’t answer one way or another if up until this moment he agreed with everything the fascist government did, but he loyally did his job. For the fourteen years he served as the head of the secret police, Bocchini was the only person to survive Mussolini’s changing of the guard. At one point or another, every other employee was dismissed, fired, killed, or fled. Bocchini was the only one who stayed in power. Perhaps it was because of how discreet he was in keeping his personal life separate from his work. Or maybe it was because of his marvelous administrative skills. Perchance it was just because Mussolini and Bocchini got along famously. All I know is that as Director of the OVRA, and Chief of the Secret Police, my great-uncle was the second most important man in fascist Italy.

 

In 1936 Germany and Italy created the Rome-Berlin Axis. On the first of November, Mussolini stood in front of a Milan cathedral and announced his glorious plan to the world. This shocked many, since it was well-known that Hitler and Mussolini did not truly trust one another. Mussolini worried that Germany’s territorial takeover would eventually make its way to Italy, but by this point that thought was only lingering—a meddling fly buzzing around. The new agreement meant that if war broke out, Italy would proudly stand beside Germany.

This was the start of Hitler’s influence over Mussolini. Little by little, notions that Hitler believed in crept their way into Italy’s politics. It is well-known that Germany was supplying Italy with military supplies and equipment, and so many wondered if Mussolini merely entertained Hitler’s polices to keep him content. Others wondered if Hitler’s dark web was finally just making its meal of Mussolini. Either way, by 1938 the Manifesto of Race was introduced to the public for the first time. The Manifesto of Race eerily resembled the Nazi regime’s Nuremberg Laws. It stripped Jews of their Italian citizenship and any position they held in government, made marriage between Jews and non-Jews illegal, forbid them from having any power in the military, and prohibited them from working in factories that hired over one hundred people.

These laws challenged many people’s beliefs and principles. Many non-Jews hated this new system and believed that Mussolini had gone too far.

 

I’ve asked my dad, my great-uncle Ralph, consulted books and newspaper articles, but I don’t know what exactly made Arturo switch sides. They don’t know. No one knows what made my relative one day realize that Mussolini wasn’t helping the country, but ruining its principles and ideas.

I once had a nightmare about Arturo. I was there with him, but he couldn’t hear me. I just sat on a creaky wooden chair and watched him pace back and forth for hours in his little bedroom in central Rome. When I woke up the next morning—very confused—I asked my dad what it could possibly mean.

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by | · 11:59 pm

Ashley Olin

If Miley Cyrus Were a Country

If Miley’s viewers were a country, they would be the fifth largest
population in the world—just ahead of Brazil. –Daily Dispatch

She licks me clean after I rowboat
her lime green fishnet arteries—
still hoarse

& sliming from the trek
under a tattooed tributary: reads love
never dies. She’s a series of detailed lists—

I forefinger how many while performing
acupuncture on the shellacked skin
beneath her breasts, often

forgotten—. A giant matrix
of hiding places: take refuge
in the crevices of her hip-bones, swamps

of her cheeks for you will be
unfound; if her mouth floods
I try to pinch her so she swallows. Her earrings

are park swings, double
as captain chairs when we travel. I
think she loves

me—sees everything
as overstretched dreamcatchers, covers
what she doesn’t like

with post-its. We are imperfect; I
patchwork her when she tears
using dampened skin fragments

from her lower lip insides.
We are an island—I, her only
inhabitant—. Her fingernails:

straws—thankfully I know
she will suckle me back in if
she sees I’m sliding out.

 

Un-Objected

You are only allowed to chart your pressurized melancholy
for three episodes of Netflix at a time. You might be

alone: stop being harassed by your cuticles. Build up
an immunity to dandelions—parasitic, derogatory—pull them

from between patio bricks and if you so choose not to
press them in vodka, throw them in the sea. Collect

pieces of seashells in prescription bottles. Give everything away—
one-egg frying pan (a few eggs), cat slippers for sick days,

your eyelashes—. These are the things you may keep.
Barbecue on the porch: allow your friend and her husband’s toddler

to cling to the side of your sundress. If in eleven
years he and his friends find you attractive (watch your legs

in Jimmy Choo)—don’t let your face turn. Sing
alone in your kitchen once everyone leaves, soak delicates in the sink.

You wake: raindrops kamikaze into Monday. You will hate
the way you sign your name on the rent check—will want to scatter

your ex’s floors with crescent finger nail clippings and watch him
walk barefoot. People will tell you to breathe and just smile

which will make you more furious than mold—if they ask
you your plans to settle down, say you have none: regardless

of how your knees might buckle
when you see him in a suit. Not a

ceiling—he is the sheetrock cut out of it
to make space for a chandelier.

Ashley Olin is a senior at SUNY Geneseo, majoring in English Literature but occasionally dabbling in poetry. She spends most of her time at Leg Up Stables riding for Geneseo’s Equestrian team, and can otherwise be found buried in reading at Starbucks. She would probably be best friends with Elizabeth Bennett from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

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