2021 Truckee Meadows Community College Reno, Nevada
The Meadow is the annual literary arts journal published every spring by Truckee Meadows Community College (TMCC) in Reno, Nevada. Students interested in creative writing and small press publishing are encouraged to participate on the editorial board. Visit www.tmcc.edu/meadow for information and submission guidelines or contact the Editor-in-Chief at meadow@tmcc.edu or through the English department at (775) 673-7092. The Meadow is not interested in acquiring rights to contributors’ works. All rights revert to the author upon publication, and we expect The Meadow to be acknowledged as the original publisher in any future chapbooks or books. The Meadow is indexed in The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses. Our address is Editor-in-Chief, The Meadow, Truckee Meadows Community College, English Department, Vista B300, 7000 Dandini Blvd., Reno, Nevada, 89512. The views expressed in The Meadow are solely reflective of the authors’ perspectives. TMCC takes no responsibility for the creative expression contained herein. Cover Art: Build by EE Rankin, https://www.eerankinart.com/art.html www.tmcc.edu/meadow ISSN: 1974-7473
Poetry Editor Lindsay Wilson Prose Editor Rob Lively Associate Poetry Editor Arian Katsimbras Editorial Board Erika Bein Rebecca Eckland Melissa Godwin Jeannie Harkema Marina Leigh Erek Lively Virag Nikolics Rebecca Obinique Erick Rangel Raeanne Walker Technical Consultant Ron Marston Cover Art EE Rankin
Table of Contents Nonfiction Shaun T. Griffin When the Oligarchs Are Gone 98 John Ballantine West Texas Moonrise 188 Fiction A.M. Potter Have You Come Here for Forgiveness? 15 Saramanda Swigart Untitled Requiem 38 Karly Campbell The Burden of Memories 67 Oreoluwa Oladimeji Plan B 70 Alex Moore Sakura’s Promise 96 Mark Wagstaff All Water is Cold Water 112 Meredith Kay For Everything There Is A Season 133 Thomas Christopher Pheasant Hunting 163 Eileen Bordy Driving Cattle 166 Poetry Joseph Fasano Lines Written in a Time of Pendemic 8 Childhood 52 Lisa Zimmerman A Spring Cold Day During the Covid Lockdown 10 Doris Ferleger Pandemic Conversations with
My Grown Son, 1742 Miles Away 11 Nancy White Pivilege 13 The Worn 103 Dhwanee Goyal a child’s tale 14 Charlie Stookey Phases of the Moon 28 Jeffrey H. MacLachlan Used to Smoke/Gave Up Smoking 30 Savannah Cooper Inner Rot 31 And Now the Moon is Rust 32 T. Dallas Saylor Numb Kanji 34 Michael Angel Martín Euphoric Recall 35 An Abundance of Caution 95 Steven M. Smith Are You Happy? 36 Suzanne O’Connell The Dusty Road 37 Kira Mastalka Autopsy 49 Justin Tran What it Takes for Boys to Suffer 50 Jory Mickelson God’s Judgment 54 Beautiful Country 187 Jessica Jeanette Survivor 56 Jessie Janeshek Defrost. Gnosticate. Don’t Write Back Either 57 Skyler Osborne Exodus 59 Domain 93 Lenny DellaRocca Ever After 61 Richard Baldo Plastic Gravestones 62 Sierra Hernandez Broken Faces 63 Terrell Tissychy-Ortero Swallowed Whole 65 John Sibley Williams The Confession 84 Christopher Muravez Confession 85 Meredith Davies Hadawy A Flight, A Thunder 86 Susan Landgraf Ghosts You See, Those You Don’t 87 Babafemi Babatunde Instances of Lost Aphabet and Names 88 chisaraokwu Mama’s House 90
Joanne Mallari Frigate 92 Savannah Slone The Smiths (un)cover songs, bioluminescence, & otehr weird parties 94 Karla Linn Merrifeld Shades of Blue Out of the Blue 104 Max Heinegg Encounter 105 Melanie Perish Black Coffee,White Peaches 106 Marcia Arrieta Teaspoon 107 Daniel Moore Island Linguistics 108 Natasha Pepperl We all have a Heart 109 Susan Johnson Meanwhile the River 110 Emily Hyland The Rain Made Me Stay 111 Ode to the Water 131 Michael Chang How Long 127 Jeremiah Zuniga Gender Fluid 129 Salvagers 150 Ellis Elliot To my Black Ballerinas from their White Teacher 130 Peter Grandbois Burning 132 The blue door 161 JoDee Renae Home from High School 148 Dianna Sion My Friend Called Me Today About Her Daughter 151 Donna Emerson She Runs Through Rooms 152 Richard Robbins Before 154 Brian D. Morrison So Many Wouldn’t Make It 157 Brian Lutz Atlas 159 Theresa Monteiro New World Symphony 162 Jerrod E. Bohn Anhedonia 179 Jeffrey Alfier Driving the Delta North 180 Tobi Alfier Leaving the Desert 181 Michael Estabrook But the wind doesn’t make the curtains move 182 Mark Sanders The Overdue Payment 183 Ballade: Canoeing Calamas Creek Nebraska, 1976 184
Lori A. Howe Cadralor #5: “Driving” 185 Cadralor #4: “wells” 186 Contributor’s Notes 192
8 The Meadow And if the world isn’t burning, it’s burning. Fourteen days in quarantine, and my love and I have danced, each night, in the living room—slowly, of course, for the bones ache and the fevers come, the dry cough that scares us half to madness. But we’re well, we say—even the ghosts inside us—and anyway the heart is impenetrable, isn’t it, clothed in gold like the Pope who knelt himself in a ring of fire, in the days of faith, the better to be kept from Heaven’s judgment? The fleas went up in flames, and he stayed down with the living. Living room, we say, and isn’t that all we ask for, these days, some space to tend our souls and keep our peace, some space to lean back, by evening, with that forbidden cigarette, to close our eyes as the brook beside us babbles poems and the lords of money do their best to do death’s will? Seven times we haven’t watched The Seventh Seal, Bergmann’s hymn to this world, not the other, not to see Lines Written in a Time of Pandemic Joseph Fasano
The Meadow 9 the light inside the pilgrims’ eyes when Death arrives, at last, to show them what it is they’ve always almost been. I’ve so much left to say, is something I would have said, when I was young, if I were knelt in chains among that crowd, if I were face to face with what they see, but it’s evening here, the moon has come— and now I hear my good love’s feet climbing up to stand behind this door, her country voice of open grains and grace that asks me if I’ll open when I can— and I can, I am, I do, I open up and take her in my arms and dance our stumbling way into the dark and lie with her in fever on the floor and rise again, and listen to the dark, the dark that has no reason not to rise, the dark that keeps no secrets but the wind, the simple wind, which gives, and takes away, and carries off the fragrance of our hair— and vaster things—the dead, the lost, the gone, the flocks that turn above us for the spring, the geese that cross above us in the night to find a world they trust will still be there.
10 The Meadow A Spring Day During the Covid Lockdown Lisa Zimmerman The lake is so flat and dull this morning it is a weight unto itself, the sky above it white and silent, the virus also, and invisible. I have told it to leave me and my older husband alone. Right now he is simmering tomatoes, onions, cheerful yellow peppers, and vegetarian sausage in a big orange pot that squats over a ring of flame. No, he is not singing. Yesterday, or the day before, he raked the old grass into small sheaves of last year. This year’s tiny blades rise in slow green beneath my feet as I walk the young dog out to the lake’s edge. We startle a Great Blue heron from the cattails and he carries our surprise across the water as he flies. On the path a strolling neighbor steers his black dog in an arc away from where I stand with mine. We wave to each other across an expanse of held breath, our hands lifting briefly into the clear air between us.
The Meadow 11 Pandemic Conversations with My Grown Son, 1742 Miles Away Doris Ferleger 1. My son says, I can feel the pleasure you get from speaking about this or that, but sometimes it seems you go away. Into your own world. Don’t notice I’m not with you. It makes me feel lonely. I say, I’m sorry you have felt left. Lonely. It makes so much sense. How far away—I can find myself. My son says, Wow. I can imagine it now. Being a dad with all best intentions of not hurting, yet knowing my child will inevitably feel hurt by me. The pang of it. 2. These pandemic months have made me almost brave enough to say to my son:
12 The Meadow In case I die soon and fast, please know in addition to loving you, I thank you for all you’ve taught me, especially for the times you would ask for my silence while we sat in the same room together, the kitchen especially, and you’d be just about to dive into a dinner plate full of delicious brown rice you’d cooked in a new, quicker way, leaving the lid off, adding water over and over the long grains you’ve dusted with cumin and crushed red pepper and maybe cinnamon, my tongue still determining the surprising flavor, and you’d proffer a perfect number of spoonsful, placed in the little bowl hand-painted with wild red roses at the bottom, because you know I like measured amounts and because I am prone to tossing leftovers, which makes you more than cringe for the planet and its people, especially now in these pandemic times. I think of Dad, how he would have been relieved I finally followed his advice on how to be with you: Try silence, he said. Cook together. Or just taste what he has made. How quietly he shows his love.
The Meadow 13 Privilege Nancy White The dog barks in its sleep. Green to my left, to the right, a sea of black. A history of worry, but lately the dark’s grateful. How good not to be young, good to have a house, and food, and weather, fine shoes in the closet, the closet itself, the shape and the smell of it, corners full of quiet. The hallway. The driveway, a highway, friends sleeping wherever they are. I have a flute, a book, a table which I light with my grandmother’s lamp. Its red belly has kept me company since she died. A barred owl cooks for you who cooks for you and coyotes have gathered to chitter and prowl the top of the hill together. You, breathing, amid laundry and axes and windowshades none of it important but all of it there if we need it.
14 The Meadow a child’s tale Dhwanee Goyal the end starts with me and the lake of our city behind us. we met here once in the undergrowth of an afternoon, slinking in like battle cries with our little child feet, lying shrouded inside the earth and thinking, what must it be like on the outside. nails giving way to crusty backstreets and blisters, the city refashioning itself, scrawling lamp-posts on paper in the heat of the night, wind unfolding its tresses above the sea. us, made of black thread, vapor skin, foreign tongues. us biting into glass, our friends raining upon the ground. voices softer than the flesh that has betrayed us. they make art of this now, those temporary nights and the condensed faces of the nameless like, maybe this will last a little longer. we’ll make histories of this sometime.
The Meadow 15 Have You Come Here for Forgivness? A.M. Potter As a small girl, Alannah Walsh thought her most important chore was to rescue bugs found in their upside down, end-of-life agonies. When she was four, her father had waited patiently for her to flip an uncooperative hermit flower beetle onto its spiky legs. Then he had gently chided her for interfering with the insect’s life cycle. From then on, Alannah let death run its course, but made it her business to ease the suffering of the doomed by shifting their tiny bodies from sunlight to shade or building minute death houses out of leaves. Twenty years later, Alannah was still watching the ground for flailing legs, still building tombs for her smallest neighbors. But it wasn’t a beetle that caught her eye on this dawn ramble around the property. She’d spotted the beginning of a blood trail and knew she’d spend part of her day burying a half-eaten something, most likely a goose or rock chuck. They were too far south for bears, but mountain lions came down from the red dirt hills to hunt. The sky was full of hawks, vultures, and eagles and, earlier that week, a pack of feral dogs had grabbed a local farmer’s pregnant ewe. This abundance of predators was one of the reasons Alannah was so diligent about making rounds before the gates were opened to visitors. Those bringing flowers to a dead lover shouldn’t be confronted with an eviscerated marmot. There were places where the blood had poured and thickened into viscous strings, but mostly it had dribbled slowly from its donor. Alannah always enjoyed the pattern of blood drops on pennywort. Circle on circle, rust on emerald, the effect was carnivalesque, like a trail of miniature whirly pops that had fallen from a child’s Halloween bag. She followed the blood drops as they meandered under the watchful eyes of two owlets and over top of the town’s latest skateboarding death. Taking a sharp left, the lollipop trail led past seven members of the
16 The Meadow Simmons family who had failed to vent their water heater. It then jumped nun row and headed into the back of 18B. This was Alannah’s favorite place in the cemetery, a section that her grandfather had set aside for mercy graves. An “unknown man” had rested beside an “Indian woman” since 1972. Alannah’s most beloved Shamrock Bear had gone into a hand-carved box with the toddler found frozen into a rest-stop waste pit. Here, in the hills of Idaho, a half-crippled elfin gun-runner from Belfast had brokered final peace for the poorest of the poor. For most, he had gifted them with the only real-estate they would ever own. Alannah followed the drops back to the northern boundary of 18B and the security fence designed to keep the living from the dead. No animal carcass had been dragged through the wires, leaving fur and blood on steel barbs. This carcass was human and buried in a shallow pit in the shade of a straggly piss elm. The grave was so shallow that busy paws and sharp teeth had already uncovered one leg. Blood soaked denim had been torn aside to reveal the knee joint, gnawed clean and glistening in the sun. She sat down on Virgie Claiborne to think. It would be easy to conclude that the midnight grave diggers had been careless, having no qualms about supplying protein to a parade of winter-thin carnivores. In reality, though, they had probably been more ignorant than negligent. This time of year, they would have hit pore ice at about seven inches, and it took a solid foot of dirt to hide rot from the sensitive nose of a coyote or cougar. Best of intentions aside, digging a functional grave with spades would have been impossible. Alannah could make this all go away in an hour or two. She had a backhoe equipped with a frost tooth to cut through the frozen ground. She had two gravediggers on call who would willingly bury the truth and the legal complications that went with it. But she also had a man, woman, or child who would disappear into the ground forever. No name on Find A Grave, thus no wistful decedents clutching plastic roses. No name on a folder in the District Attorney’s office and no justice if the death had been intentional. Alannah stood and fingered the cell phone in her sweater pocket. A
The Meadow 17 call to law enforcement would bring the death circus, an especially ugly piece of “out there” into her sanctuary. And with it would come a man she’d been avoiding since the eighth grade. Pale and wispy girls who live in small town cemeteries don’t have friends. At least not living ones. Alannah’s mother had helped her learn the Greek alphabet so she could greet the stern looking men and women pictured on the tombstones in 6A and B. At ten, she’d studied the Japanese tea ceremony and sown a kimono so she could perform the ritual for the residents of section 14. Survivor’s guilt had kept her away from the babies and children until she learned to imagine their joy in her company and in the little beaded trinkets she made for them. If her grandmother was to be believed, Alannah was the shadow child left by fairy beggars in exchange for a silver coin and a sip of red ale. Mind full of poetry and angst, ears full of music, she had fluttered like a heath moth through the midnight cemetery. In all seasons, it had been a wonderland filled with squirrels and rabbits, woodpeckers and magpies, and twenty thousand immovable friends. At school, however, Alannah Walsh was the shadow child who hadn’t been ransomed from the underworld. By thirteen, she had become colorless and cobwebby enough to earn the unimaginative nickname of Elvira and to be serenaded by badly hummed renditions of The Addams Family theme. Even the weird kids shunned her once they learned she wouldn’t be their ticket to high-stakes shenanigans in the cemetery. When she stopped a pack of Junior Varsity football players from stoning a wounded Canada goose, she became a leper. One of those fourteen year olds was Gaelan Newman. In the ridiculous tradition of small town, small school deities, he never travelled without an entourage of worshipful boys sucking at the popularity teat. To Alannah, though, he seemed like a herd-bound beast surrounded by oxpeckers. Circling and diving, they picked off the ticks and scabs of an ill-fitting, molting coat of arrogance. Roaming the cinder block hallways,
18 The Meadow banging on lockers and posturing like puffed up toads, the boys seemed both ludicrous and dangerous. After the goose incident, Alannah Walsh became their special project in the annals of junior high cruelty. Gaelan Newman became Alannah’s first experience of blind hate. “What about all those dead people your dad has over there, Elvira? Do you get to see them naked? Do you ever go down on them? Mmmmm, too bad I’m dead, or this would feel soooo good!” It had been the last of many intricately barbed hooks Gaelan had cast. He’d hook and yank and Alannah would tear and bleed. Anyone watching the show would have credited Alannah with the dignity of an ice queen, but her rage had twisted and bucked inside her for months, looking for any outlet that would keep her mind from capsizing completely. She began carrying broken glass in her pocket and her fingers were a bloody mess. She started fantasizing about flying at Gaelan Newman and ripping out his jugular vein with her teeth. But that moment was the end of it, the day that Alannah’s profound anger finally slipped its leash. And Gaelan had had his own seeping wound and a blind spot that made him vulnerable to the attack. She took him out. “No, but I watched my father stuff cotton up your mother’s ass. Maybe she enjoyed that. Maybe that felt soooo good.” The minute the words left her mouth, she watched him cave into himself. It was as if his bones had been removed and his organs savaged with a trocar. She remembered being astounded that two eyes could hold so much astonishment and confused pain. His good time friends had scattered like roaches and Alannah left him standing alone in a hallway so empty that the wall clock echoed. They had assiduously avoided each other through the high school years, not an easy feat in a school with a graduating class of eighty-four. “Can you show me where you first noticed the blood?” He was older, of course, more man than boy. He’d traded gym clothes for a suit and tie and the smog of crankcase oil and recycling testosterone for Old Spice. Either he’d finally shed
The Meadow 19 his adolescent arrogance or learned how to hide it. He seemed almost human as Alannah walked him toward the cemetery’s lower drive. “I had one of the deputies walk the perimeter. The padlock on your western gate has been cut.” He squatted over a thick rope of coagulated blood. In the first full light of day, the pennywort was no longer pretty candy but blighted weed. “My guess is they were carrying the victim on some sort of makeshift litter and it had a hole in it. That’s where you get the drops. But the guy in back was shorter than the guy in front, so when they went up a hill,” he gestured at the incline that led from the lower drive to the north side of the property, “the blood gushed out the back end.” Alannah nodded. He’d always been smart. Having the personality of a tarantula hadn’t kept him from the high honor roll. Being a criminal investigator for Ludlow County was the perfect career choice for someone so smart and inherently devious. “Do you still live on the property, Miss Walsh?” “Yes, with my folks. Do you need to talk to them?” “Briefly, to see if they heard or saw anything. My guess is that this has nothing to do with anyone who lives or works here. Most likely a convenient dump spot for someone with an inconvenient corpse.” His cell phone must have vibrated because he pulled it off his belt and held a brief conversation. “They’ve got the dirt off him. Looks to be a young male, Caucasian, early to mid-twenties. Are you still, I mean, would you be comfortable, I mean, you can’t be too squeamish…” Alannah let out a slow breath and stared down at her hands. She had a spider web of thin white scars on her palms and fingers from the days of broken glass. Still wispy and cobwebby in her long black dress, she easily could have been cast as Elvira, more at home with ghostly whispers than the living and breathing. She felt a rush of adolescent angst that should have evaporated a decade ago. Instead of looking at Gaelan, she busied herself brushing cobwebs out of Lyle Girard’s birth and
20 The Meadow death dates. “I’ve never had a squeamish moment in my life, Detective Newman. You of all people should be aware of that.” He had the grace to blush and it was his turn to brush dust off the top of the Girard upright. The honed Portland limestone had never looked so tidy. “I’ll probably get put in protocol time-out, but would you mind taking a look at him? See if you recognize him. It will save you a trip to the medical examiner’s fridge department.” Two deputies in brown uniforms broke off conversation as Alannah and Gaelan approached. One deputy elbowed the other who responded with a supercilious smile. A third deputy, ginger haired and baby faced, tipped his hat at her and stared at the ground. Alannah recognized him from the burial of his nine year old daughter. He’d been okay until the line in the coffin brochure that said, “Please add 6 inches to the height of your child for the proper fit.” Alannah remembered thinking that you’re never really grown up until you’ve sobbed in front of a stranger in a cemetery office. A man in a light blue jumpsuit and paper booties, presumably a coroner’s investigator, was vigorously patting down the corpses rump in search of a wallet. The body had evacuated and when he was rolled on his side, several species of beetles, having imbibed on the runny feces in his underwear, ran drunkenly into the sunshine. “No ID,” he told Gaelan, “I’ll roll for prints when I get him back to the office.” “Cause of death?” Gaelan asked. “You can’t see it from your angle, but he’s got a nice hole in the back of his head, big caliber, at least a .38,” said the man in the jumpsuit. “And he’s a doper,” he added, tugging one stiff sleeve up to reveal a skinny, ruined arm. “Hope he never needed a transfusion, because he didn’t have a vein left standing.” Alannah studied a face that seemed to be made of frozen gray playdoh. He was young. Blue eyes open, lips curled back over crooked and decaying teeth. He’d probably had a goofy smile, Alannah thought sadly. A goofy smile that would soon slough off and land in a puddle under his chin. A thick keloid
The Meadow 21 scar ran across his forehead, cleanly bisecting his right brow. “Do you know him?” Gaelan asked softly. Alannah started to shake her head, but stopped. There was something there, someone there who her mind was trying to bring forward from the past. Then she had it. In Playdoh flesh, the boy’s cleft chin looked weak and misshapen. In bronze, it created a beautiful, whimsical dimple. “Come with me,” she ordered, and started across the rows at a run. One of the deputies was so startled that he actually unsnapped his holster. The others stared at her fleeing figure with open-mouthed astonishment. Luckily, Gaelan Newman, running to catch up, was too winded to say all the nasty things he was no doubt thinking. Crossing into one of the older sections of graves, Alannah stopped and pointed at one of the most expensive, and most haunting, statues in the cemetery. “My God,” Gaelan whispered. He wasn’t staring at the woman, forever frozen in the act of running on bare feet. He was looking at the two little boys holding her hands, identical in their bronze cast innocence and big eyed beauty. They were the forever children of Evelyn Ludlow and one of them had come home. In the Walsh house, daily life happened in the kitchen with its high ceilings, pastel blue walls and wonderful smells. Alannah’s mother was chopping onions and carrots while her father sat at the table, peeling and carving potatoes into perfect wedges. Alannah loved to watch her father work with his hands, but that hadn’t always been the case. When she was eleven, Alannah discovered that her waif frame fit perfectly in the window well of her father’s embalming room. After thirty hellish minutes on the school bus, she found solace in her private world behind the oleander bushes. Her quick mind worked to make sense of her father’s actions in the dark little room below the old chapel. At dinnertime, she would watch his hands—watch them carving meat or sopping up gravy with bread slices—and remember where they had been and what they had been doing to the lifeless forms
22 The Meadow stretched out on his old fashioned mortuary table. She smiled, remembering the afternoon that her shadow had betrayed her at the window. “If you want to watch me, Alannah, you’ll need to understand my work.” He had handed her a copy of Barnes’ The Art and Science of Embalming: Descriptive and Operative and a medical dictionary so thick she could barely lift it. After much reading and long discussions, Alannah understood that his big white hands were no longer performing secret rituals in the basement of a defunct chapel, they were performing a service for people with broken hearts. People desperate for one last look at the face they fell in love with. Given their history, Alannah could only guess what Gaelan was thinking. Her father’s fingers had been someplace that no son should ever have to think about. “Daddy, this is Gaelan. He wants to hear the story of Evelyn Ludlow and her boys. I told him that you’d be the one to tell it.” Just for a moment, Ian Walsh looked lost. Then his dark eyes seemed to light up in recognition of the name. His face flooded with sadness. “It was a dreadful accident. She went through the windshield. I tried suturing, but there wasn’t enough left to work with. In the end, her father decided on a closed casket. That was for the best.” Gaelan had his notebook out. “Can you tell me about her sons, Mr. Walsh? What happened to them? Ian Walsh looked warily at Gaelan. “Are you a reporter? I never talk to reporters, son. Grieving families have enough pain without seeing it splashed on the front page of the Ludlow County Gazette.” Alannah stole a carrot from her mother’s cutting board and crunched. “Gaelan’s a policeman, Daddy. He’s here to find out what happened to the Ludlow boys.” Ian Walsh sighed. “Nobody knows what happened to them. When the police and ambulance got to the accident, their father was unconscious, their mother dead, and the boys were gone. There was blood in one of the car seats, but not enough to indicate that the child had been seriously injured. Their
The Meadow 23 father never regained consciousness and I heard that their grandfather started stockpiling cash for a ransom demand that never came.” “What next?” Alannah asked, walking him back to 18B. They were just in time to see the body disappear into a thick white plastic bag. “Next, we wait until the medical examiner does his thing. Maybe we’ll get a print match and the kid will be a third generation pig farmer from Iowa.” Alannah smiled. “Instead of a third generation potato farmer from Idaho? I know you saw the scar above his eye.” Gaelan sighed, “I know. In just the right place for a little kid cut by flying glass in a car accident. And I agree that the resemblance to the statue is uncanny. But I want more to go on before I tell Randolph Ludlow, aka the man who runs the whole damn county, that we found one of his long lost grandsons in a shallow grave with a bullet in his head and, oh by the way, he was a junkie. If I were you, I’d be ready to throw a cemetery welcome party for my boss, because he is going to stroke out.” Alannah watched him drive away and began walking the cemetery perimeter on evening rounds. It was ridiculous to believe that wrought iron and barbed wire would provide security in a town designed to bore teenagers stiff. There were the pseudo-Satanists with their magic markers, dollar store decals, and sacrifices of half burned pink hair. There was the “I dare you to do me in the graveyard,” crowd with their used condoms and bright futures of soiled diapers and child support payments. The companion crypts were a favorite target of vandalism as were the larger Mormon stones with their temple carvings. Oddly enough, the chapel and embalming room had never been targeted. The kids Alannah chased out of the cemetery postured like pufferfish, but apparently God and the reality of bodily fluids scared the Bejeesus out of them. For the first time in a very long time, Alannah visited Caroline Greenburg Newman. “Your boy seems to be doing
24 The Meadow alright these days,” she said, straightening the listing silk flowers in their bronze vase. The flowers were relatively new and Alannah was glad that someone had been visiting. The pancreatic cancer had hit hard and fast, leaving the woman dead before her thirty fifth birthday. Alannah had hidden herself behind a bigtooth maple to watch the funeral. Gaelan stood beside his father, cub and grizzly, both of them shrugging and plucking at the fabric of ill-fitting suits, both staring into the short lived sliver of light between casket and grave wall. Gaelan flinching every time his father exhaled. Sitting beside Gaelan’s mother, Alannah finally saw it. Could it really have been so idiotically simple? Bully begets bully? Terror begets terror? It would go a ways in explaining his career choice. Alannah bet that law enforcement was full of men who had once been helpless little boys in brutal families. Men desperate for a chance to finally save the day, save their mothers, and bring down the family monster. Eight days later, Alannah was thinking that it was a good thing that Mr. Christakos had put in an exedra bench for Mrs. Christakos, because she needed to sit down and ponder some things. Like how she was going to get through another meeting with Gaelan Newman without breaking down. The oldest wounds seeded the foulest infections. “Good morning, Miss Walsh.” He sat down beside her and it took a minute for her to realize that he was humming Mr. Rodger’s “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.” She cracked up. Then they sat in silence contemplating the beautiful day, the stately loblolly pine sheltering the Veteran’s section and the five turkey buzzards roosting in it. “Is it my imagination, or do those birds smell?” he asked, wrinkling his nose. “Those birds smell,” she answered. “Let’s walk. What’s happening with…” Alannah hesitated, not sure how to finish the question. “With Dylan Ludlow?” Alannah slowed her pace. “Really?”
The Meadow 25 “Really. We got a DNA sample from his grandmother. Normally, we’d be waiting months for results but money greases all kinds of squeaky wheels. DNA came back to Dylan Ludlow, fingerprints came back to a Sammy Gibson, recently of East Salt Lake. “Drug deal gone bad, as they say in police shows?” “More like family life gone bad. Sammy was their problem child, drugs, burglaries, in and out of jail. Then one night he broke into his family’s house to steal their new flat screen and his old man shot him in the head.” Alannah winced. “And why did they dump him in my cemetery?” “Two reasons. One, they didn’t want to have to shell out for a burial or cremation, so Gibson conned one of his drinking buddies into helping him move the body. I saw the transcripts from the Salt Lake detective’s interview. The old man said, and I quote, “The little bastard’s dead, he don’t care if he gets a fancy box or not.” “Good grief,” said Alannah. “Let me guess the second reason. They didn’t want anyone digging too deeply into family history and realizing they had two too many kids.” “Bingo. Mr. Gibson finally admitted that he and Mrs. Gibson had driven up on the accident on their way home from a liquor store run. I was hoping for a real human interest sob story, like she’d always wanted kids but couldn’t have them. But no, she thought the kids were kind of cute, so she told her husband to snatch them. Alannah stooped to pick up a stray soda can and they detoured to one of the cemetery trash barrels. “Are they going to be charged with taking the boys?” “Statute of limitations is long gone on the kidnapping but there is no statute of limitations on voluntary manslaughter in this state. DA’s going to argue that they left Mrs. Ludlow to die in that car. They’ll bring in expert witnesses to look at the hospital and morgue records and say that the paramedics could have saved her if they’d been called in even a few minutes earlier.
26 The Meadow “Is that true?” “Nah. She was dead on impact, but, unless I miss my guess, those records are going to disappear long before the case comes to trial. The Gibsons are toast.” “I’m almost afraid to ask,” Alanna said, “but what about the brother, Dylan’s twin?” Gaelan smiled. “Alexander. He’s the bright spot in this awful mess. First year resident at Salt Lake Regional Medical Center. He’s driving up this weekend to meet the family. Don’t be surprised if he stops in to discuss burial plans for Dylan. “I wonder if I’ll recognize him.” Alannah said and Gaelan laughed. “Anyway, the department wants to thank you for helping us out, Miss Walsh.” “You can try for my first name, Gaelan. If you slip up and call me Elvira, I’ll forgive you.” He was silent for a full minute. Then he said, “Will you. Forgive me?” He had stopped walking and stared at her. “I was such a bastard to you back then.” “True. I’m working on it. Will you forgive me?” “Please, I had that coming.” “No,” she said, putting her hand lightly on his forearm. He flinched, but didn’t pull away. “You deserved something, but not that. Never that. You met my father Gaelan, surely you can tell what kind of man he is by how he talked about Evelyn and her children. That he never had anything but the deepest respect for the dead. It was his life’s work, to ease the suffering of the bereaved in whatever way he could.” Gaelan was starting to shake, but she held on tightly to his arm. Without planning it, they had come upon his mother’s grave. They were close enough to see her birth and death dates. “And he could never explain it, and I can’t either, but he believed he was meant to help the recently deceased along their path to wherever they were going next. Maybe there was some tiny shred of being left that could hear. Maybe a kind word could help the sad and wounded rest. What I said to you that day
The Meadow 27 was monstrous. What I should have said, Gaelan, was that my father treated your mother with great tenderness. He gently brushed her hair, and put makeup and pink pearl nail polish on her. Then he put her in her favorite dress. I remember, it was pink and it tied in the front with a flowered belt. And the whole time he was with her, he was talking to her, telling her how pretty she was going to look for her husband and son.” Gaelan Newman was crying now, and they walked until he was done.
28 The Meadow Phases of the Moon Charlie Stookey The new moon is a cat’s claw in the night sky. Clint C. Ricketts Beneath Thunder Moons and Corn Moons, she names her four rescued cats, Moon Beam, Moon Light, Moon Shadow, and, of course, Moon Shine. The phases of the moon are tattooed on the nape of her neck “to honor the mystery and permanence of the moon over time. It’s reliable.” It’s so easy to turn the course of her disease into the curse of the disease with its hungry ghosts. No glass Japanese floats lie atop the scarred nightstand but earrings, ER receipts, doubts, matches, butt ends of relationships. She regrets the drunken, meth-fueled fights with her husband, who later committed suicide. “Killed himself over...whatever. Me, all that lottery money, heartache, whatever.” Moonlight creek sings to Cottonwoods in the darkness. Grief waxes and wanes. When loneliness strikes, she writes lamentations: Full October moon Drowns pinpoint constellations.
The Meadow 29 I miss your bright eyes. The riptide from the fifth of a gallon a day floods the road of good intentions. Its ebb leaves tide pools of anxiety and depression ripening in a sour stomach. Each morning’s hangover brings the pounding of relentless reality, the ever present eternal goddam now. Last night’s shame haloes her head in hangover vises. She pukes. Starts the hands-and-knees search party for dimes or quarters or pennies for a half-pint of mercy. She ignores the snorse of an anonymous cowboy under a throw and the spray of clothes. She wipes withdrawal’s sweat from her face, swipes at the brain fog. The riptide created by her moons leaves an empty curse. She flings the empty purse of promises into the furthest corners of cobweb resolve, another tourist attraction. When the new moon slides between sun and earth, the eclipse covers her soul like a shawl. She peers into the silvered glass of the detox bathroom mirror, where a stranger greets her. A shadow of comfort arises when she strokes her new moon, colored and frozen on her neck.
30 The Meadow Used to Smoke/Gave Up Smoking Jeffrey H. MacLachlan Soviet poster, 1960s Used To Smoke I resemble dead Abe Lincoln under a harvest moon. This pearl rifle sprays smog rounds without a clip. I fantasize about cometing my truck through Berlin’s Wall in explosions of jackdaw brume. Witnesses glimpse my sullied left elbow out the window and two blazed Belomorkanals fogging like a dual muffler. An East German beauty leaps into my cab and we share thorough kisses that crackle suppressed wildfire. Gave Up Smoking I resemble a baby-faced Malenkov. I don’t ache for smoke I don’t ache for smoke I don’t ache for smoke. My tastebuds and sentences are true. My toothy smile never convinces. I rehearse in the mirror every morning, but I spot thirty-two tiny cigarettes factory sealed. Toddlers squabble at dawn, you’re fine. Wife volcanos tea with molten soil, you’re fine. Highway potholes mangle tires, you’re fine. The diesel scent the diesel scent the diesel scent. I fantasize that trucks around me deliver Belomorkanals and they detonate for cyclical congestion.
The Meadow 31 She says the sky will grow dark for days, that somewhere someone drinks blood like wine. She says the world is tipping, balanced on a knife edge, and when will I realize I’m wrong about everything? Her house is in order, although an absence of dust is not the opposite of crumbling. The dogs bark at every stranger that passes, and she tells me that I am blind when I’m afraid of how clearly I see. Taps her ear, lets the voices kick in again, wiser, all-knowing. The flowers against the house are dead, the mailbox leaning like it’s tired of standing. Last year the condos across the street went up in flames, but this year it looks like no fire ever touched them, like they’ve stood firm and solid for decades, like there isn’t mold crowding the corners, water that crept in when the roof was gone, when the gutted rooms with their abandoned furniture stood naked against the rain. Inner Rot Savannah Cooper
32 The Meadow And Now the Moon is Rust Savannah Cooper Gray snow crushed against the curb. An extinguished sparkler in a tin bucket. I’m no good with endings. We touched something cold and sharp in each other, so maybe this is best. A quiet exit. No lights ringing the stage, no voices murmuring in the back of a crowded bar. We never did share a bottle of wine, but you sipped my Long Island before stepping into the late October streets. The claws of a cat ticking along the windowsill. Your voice dancing between glitter and starlight. I take nothing back, not a second. Close my eyes and count, slowly, to seven. I’ve walked deep in caves where daylight choked and died, thought of rockslides and trapped miners, saw no difference between the dark behind my eyelids and the world around. But I heard your laugh, the way it cut
The Meadow 33 through the stagnant air. We slept on the living room floor of someone else’s apartment and woke to stumble through the woods like lost boys, strange and kindred. We found something in that spring, resurrected in the fall, and it lit the sky.
34 The Meadow Numb Kanji T. Dallas Saylor With August heat-hazing the end of summer’s tracks, our elderly friends have given you and me a dirty weekend at the St. Regis. Nightfall, cooler but no less humid: we’ve swum, bathed, fucked, bathed, and dressed again, so we cut rum with soda and flop down on embroidered shams to watch Shinkai’s film 5 Centimeters per Second: the springtime rate of falling sakura petals, which remind Akari of snow. She waits out the late-winter blizzard for Takaki’s train, shivering off to sleep in the countryside station, but it gets later and colder, the snow stalling city, country, and all the rails between. Shaking my third drink, I watch the wind assault the connecting platform, snatch up Takaki’s letter right out of his pocket: his words dissolve into steel tracks, bare pines, dark snow.
The Meadow 35 Euphoric Recall Michael Angel Martín Following a bout of cotton fever, I grab by shattered phone and read your text: “Meet me at a Wendy’s for a Frosty.” Change of plans. Let’s split a bag for now. Draw bleach into a single rig by turns. Tided over, we can glue-gun pairs of googly eyes right on brims of hoodies. I can’t believe you said “subvert the art of puppetry.” What if we hit up Churchill’s just as the crew is tipping out, and beg Carmen for a five. A standup draftsman, you’d thank her with a portrait penciled by the particolored flicker of a busted jukebox. Fuck those noise kids litigating beer debts as they circuit-bend a Furby. Yeah, it’s jump-out at the spot today, a siren-haunted sunup. We can do it. Pulling up, the Cutlass heaving, curse the bagmen as they reach into our windows, snatch the shades right off our stupid faces.
36 The Meadow Are You Happy? Steven M. Smith The visiting mother embraces her daughter-in-law in the back yard at the patio table. Its shattered glass top replaced with a half sheet of plywood. The offset umbrella above them tilted to the west. The afternoon sun is singeing the uppermost limbs of the dying oak. The in-ground pool is anticipating another steamy midnight when the teen-age couple hops the chain-link fence and nervously, yet cautiously, climbs down the ladder into the troubled deep end, stirring with their hips until the chlorinated water sloshing between their thighs becomes a sparkling froth in the starlight. Air traffic controllers have keyed the blue sky with vapor trails. Some sirens in the distance. The lonely coonhound the next block over is wailing. Elvis Presley is singing “Suspicious Minds” for the divorced nurse in her upstairs bedroom across the street. A mourning dove is cooing on their ridge vent. A squirrel is vandalizing their bird house. Just now the daughter-in-law slips from her mother-in-law’s loosening embrace. They both swivel in their patio chairs to view the middle-aged man in baggy swim trunks sprawled out on his cracked resin lounger, eyelids sunburned shut, persistent flies buzzing around his wide-open mouth, mustard-stained lips smacking between snorts, pieces of hot dog buns and relish and elbow macaroni litter his chest hairs, hands knotted up and twitching on his belly. Wedged into his crotch is a half empty bottle of IPA—its eleven empty brothers tossed for dead in the weedy grass.
The Meadow 37 The Dusty Road Suzanne O’Connell Nothing happens in the town where I live. Almost true. Señor Segundo’s horse did smell something once. It ran down the main road out of town. And I won the Lotería with the El Melón card. My prize, a box of guavas. Also, little Felicia fainted one Easter on the church pew. Her new hat fell to the floor. I live with Grandma and Brother. Grandma is on a dusty road of forgetting. “Mijo, what day it is?” We make potato tacos for sale. She slices the potatoes thin. Fries them in hot oil. Sprinkles on hot peppers and salt. Wraps them in tortillas. My job is to roll them in thick paper. My brother, who they say at school is slow, answers the door and yells, “Cliente!” “What day it is, mijo?” Grandma asks as I collect the pesos at the door. “What day it is, mijo?” Grandma asks. “It’s Sunday, Grandma.” On Sundays we take a blanket to the stream. We bring potato tacos and checkers. We watch the bugs and birds play over the stream as the sun, an orange bird, sweeps the sky. I don’t mind that nothing happens. I am happy enough.
38 The Meadow Untitled Requiem Saramanda Swigart The hate is a small, blurred, abstract thing, and it still pulls at me like one of the smaller black holes—invisible but deadly with mass. There isn’t quite enough of it anymore, but it has brought me again to this terrible event horizon. Invisible, whispers the hate that despairs, and I adjust the scope. Control, whispers the hate that triumphs as my finger depresses the trigger, feels the small, almost erotic give that indicates that I’m a fraction of a centimeter from devastation. The modified bullet in the chamber is eager for its release. After I deploy it there will be nothing left—it will vaporize a two-meter radius around him. His bones will shatter and they’ll find his DNA in the walls and ceiling. This, the lead-up, used to be the sweetest part. My whole being held in my index finger, control of which separates life from oblivion. I do the ritual that divests me of my former name. I am Viola Geist, I think, collector of oaths. I repeat the phrase. I put the mantra to music. Collector of oaths. It is my requiem. I flow easily through the waking world as through a dream. I go from liquid to solid in the dark, flowing unnoticed between the streetlights. I follow him with my sights, my finger calm and dry on the trigger, my mind serene aside from the ambient roil of hatred that churns, subliminal, in its background. I sing the requiem, a simple murder song that shakes the contents of my mind and lets them settle, meaningless, all around me, like shrapnel. This is how I was taught. He’s been checking his phone for the last fifteen minutes. He has an untucked shirt, pants undone but still on. Perhaps he still mourns the one who didn’t love him—the pain whose consequence is not only the trauma of at least twenty-two
The Meadow 39 girls under sixteen, but is this as well, Viola-of-the-last-resort. She who is charged with vaporizing him from the earth he’s scorched after a court of law acquitted him for the third time. I watch him pace before his granite counters. Why do rich men’s kitchens all have those tomb slabs? He has that certain slant to his shoulders. I know it well. A man whose whole physical being is devoted to shoring poison against the psychic rust in his heart—he makes himself better with others’ worse. (Like myself). Damn. The thought interferes with the rhythm of my battle hymn, unsteadies my hand. I force the thought flat until it joins the slipstream of my hatred. He’s on the phone now, his temple shining, his hands roving. A mammoth abstract oil painting beside him that, though it contains luminous hot pink and magenta swirls ever falling toward a central vortex, seems to make the space more, not less, cold and sterile. He gestures, the kind of gesture that generally accompanies an obscenity. Best wait for the call to end. I keep his head squarely in the reticule as he paces, hunched over the phone. The smallest pressure is all it will take. There, now, a monster; next moment, a miasma, less than nothing, a mist in the air that the light shines through. An acid memory that will forever corrode the minds of those who survive him. (Or a victim). Janice—that’s the name she gave, not the one her parents gave her—told me through her sobs that her one daughter had hardly slept since he held her and her sister in the wine cellar of an empty house for thirty-six nights, and that her older daughter took her own life rather than go to court about it. “Please,” Janice hiccupped into the phone, “be our Angel of Death. Find peace for the only child I have left.” Apparently she and four other parents of survivors and dead alike had pooled
40 The Meadow their resources to pay the premium “Aegis Fee.” I work for SafeGuard and our Aegis services don’t come cheap. I told her what I always tell these days: “No one feels better for it.” She hiccupped again. Not crying now. Finally she said, “I will.” It’s what they say. It’s what they think. I know because I thought it too. There’s a network of associates after the defiler is dead. Our premium service means we take down the lot. The society matron who procures the girls, recruited from public pools and schoolyards and summer camps where she is a donor. The real estate agent who provides homes that are lying fallow before they’re sold, with empty wine cellars and attics and fallout shelters and groundskeeper’s quarters. The social media influencer who hypes his Coding Camp for Girls on her tween-friendly site. The lawyer who got him off three times by shaming his victims into silence—buying off their parents—exploiting legal loopholes. “I don’t kill women,” I told Janice on the phone. She inhaled. Paused. “Juniper didn’t tell me that.” “But it’s policy,” I said. “No women. Not because women can’t be evil. But we don’t kill our kind.” “OK,” she said. “They just go free?” “Certainly not.” Juniper would be working the back end on the associates. She and the handful of back-end girls were in charge of the humiliations; the exposures; the lost fortunes, siphoned through back channels to women’s shelters and rehabs and support groups, or for funeral services and the like; the photographic proof sent to places of work, family members, the press. Viola Geist is not an accidental name. I chose it from the pool of recently deceased whose identities we take when we are reborn. I like it because it sounds like “ghost”—one of
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