Author: Post Road

A Canoe of Light and Time with the Dog

by Levi Rubeck

Who should I name?
Dad wants his box

of ashes to read Still
Kickin’ it in Heaven

He lent me a book about
how to let your eyes go soft

to pick up auras around others
like blooming cathode rays

To start an astral projection
you must hover above

yourself to manifest and
witness your own body

before turning away from it
Imagine the working spirits

over the river rending their
bootstraps to lift a foot

I’m out looking for dad in a canoe
of light with time for the dog

---

Levi Rubeck is a poet and critic living in Somerville, MA. His first chapbook of poetry, Lunar Flare, was published in 2017 by Argos Books. He edits and writes on videogames, music, poetry, and more for Unwinnable monthly, and his links can be found at levirubeck.com.

Walk

by Mina Austin

When he’s ready, Dr. Morris, veterinarian, lifts his stethoscope and speaks down from his six feet of height. The barn has held its breath while he’s communed with Chad’s insides, where fluids trickle, then cascade like the flush of a toilet. The barn around us has stood for over a hundred Pennsylvania horse years—for other owners, other horses. Tall sliding doors still wall away the weather from the barn aisle. Light bulbs burn yellow, but a sunlit shaft through a stall window outshines them, bits of dust exploding through it. This time Chad hasn’t thrown himself to the ground to roll, a horse’s try at self-management of pain.

“We need more information,” Dr. Morris says. He’s cared for horses here for twenty years, still looks the same with his headful of dark hair that has a curl, conservative cut. He gives it a gloss of what could be Brylcreem, several dabs, if that product isn’t buried along with its mad little radio jingle. It’s a small vanity. He is less modest about his value, his brains, vet school–honed by the University of Pennsylvania. This morning, forty minutes late, he stepped through the people door cut into the double barn doors and saw immediately the horse he was here to examine wasn’t stalled and waiting. I watched anger draw his features together in the center of his face in a forbidding, congested way, Is there somebody in charge here? But he corks up the irritability, and what I end up saying is nothing, having arrived after all this time at the art of nonresponse, so we pass from what isn’t an exchange to the horse himself. Dr. Morris has never missed a diagnosis.

“Horses have episodes of colic surprisingly frequently, all the times we don’t see,” Dr. Morris says now, turning to speak. He peels away the three-feet-long clear plastic glove that has made the passage through Chad by way of a monstrous, generic hand shape splayed wide. I stand straight to listen. “They’ll eat something in the pasture, usually early spring or late fall, when there’s less of what’s appropriate. And it causes upset. So I wouldn’t be concerned, but this is not a normal rectal exam. There’s gas that’s not exiting.” Where was the gas, I didn’t ask. How could he palpate gas, track its recalcitrance? I waited for the proposal I didn’t want.

“Chad might benefit from a workup at Sullivan County,” he says, meaning the well-known large-animal hospital nearby. I say nothing. Dr. Morris says nothing. Better that I not say I will let summer dry out to fall, let the light die in successive weeks on into winter, go on objecting with silence since there is nothing I can say that he will not argue into irrelevance—before I commit Chad to a trailer heading that way. Things went very wrong for another thoroughbred, a gray color I could never define, who walked up the trailer ramp here in order to get to the hospital. Horses must be trained to walk up a trailer ramp. They distrust its black hole at the top, and question by way of their nervous system whether the owner has a decent reason for this passage up a narrow bridge to the unknown. I can’t forgive myself for the gray thoroughbred’s trust in his new home, in me.

The summer does dry out, the light does diminish in an unpleasantly calm way, as if with the tools of euthanasia, and I have to admit Chad hangs on the edge of not better. My employee, Emilio, reports now in the shorthand we both use, verbs hamstrung by tense and agreement when switching each to the other’s language, Chad no finish grain. Emilio might be sixty, a man stooped from work, but wiry, a star marathon runner in Mexico. He reads, writes English better than anyone who has worked here, but freezes under the chill of Dr. Morris’s orders given in that thinned, acidic voice, move the horse to the left,to the right,back him up,stop,that’s wrong. What Emilio hears are sounds that shatter in the air, undecodable.

Walk, is what is clear among Dr. Morris’s words. Walk is what to do for symptoms of colic. Chad’s unfinished grain is a symptom. So is the small mountain of shavings out in the run-in shed. These mean Chad has cocked his forefoot like a backhoe, dragged the stuff back, lifted the hoof up and forward again. Then the repeat: the lift, the reach, the dig, until there’s nothing more to move but the dirt of the run-in floor. Pain drives him to it. Because he can’t speak, Dr. Morris explained of Chad once, with unusual intuitive flare. Facts drive his own thinking.

At ten one July night, the mountain of shavings out in Chad’s run-in is high. Dr. Morris gets the call. Walk:Emilio executesuntilhearrives. We bring Chad to his stall. For the next two and a half hours, the doctor is a different person, the vibe of impatience gone. He proceeds through deliberate movement: to shoot Banamine in a vein in Chad’s neck to blot out pain and its tension. He draws a bucketful of sudsy-looking warm water, oiled, and inches a long plastic tube into Chad’s nostril and down his gullet. A make-or-break moment, the passing of the tube. Chad tolerates it. Then, on to the pump. It heaves water up, soughing as it works the air. Dr. Morris works the handle, his sleeves rolled up just so for the slop of water against the bucket’s sides. The scene has an old-fashioned feel: the farm outside tucked into darkness, the simplicity of the tools of pump and bucket, the lights in the barn that burn their yellow tonight through misty rings of rain not yet arrived. He could pass for a happy man, for whom the horse’s need is all-absorbing, with the blight of his own personality irrelevant.

Were there an impaction of manure, the pumping and oily water would shovel it along the horse’s intestines, and out. But there isn’t, ultimately, and Chad’s symptoms are not speaking clearly.

Walk: if Chad could concur in this order, would he? I would have said yes, the way he cooperates. The way the walk always produces manure. Manure puts a check in the column of better, rather than worse. He’d been here for three years, a pleasant, subdued thoroughbred who’d transformed to boisterous good humor after he arrived and stretched into the big fields here, the attentive care. I’d met him at his old place, a dirt paddock crowded and confined, limited turnout. His owner said he’d self-loaded the day she transferred him here. Meaning, when she arrived with her trailer, he walked, unattended, toward the dark that waited past the rattle and bang of the metal plank.

Now, he’s a less confident, less happy horse. To run a hand down his back, or along his rib cage, makes him flash his tail in the air, not the approval of a dog’s tail. The horse owner needs to hear, instead, don’t touch me. If a horse appeared to think clearly, was it thought? No thought without speech, was the theory back in the day, when I might have tackled Noam Chomsky.

Chad’s ribs were standing out too much. He was losing weight. Dr. Morris didn’t allow him more grain. He didn’t allow any grain, when symptoms struck. Cut the next feeding out. Then cut down the one after that. “Your enemy is grain,” Dr. Morris put it. “It’s what upsets the system of this kind of horse.” But what about the weight loss? “He should be able to maintain his weight with hay,” he said. Chad ate hay but wanted grass. It was too hot out, the dark brown of his coat a sponge for the sun. To escape it, he retreated to a corner of a run-in shed for three-quarters of the day. What if I could help get his weight up and preempt the colic by night walks and grazing?

On a night early in August, I tried. “Here we go,” I said. A horse can acknowledge, or not, the forced cheerfulness of here we go as he’s led into the dark, alone, away from the herd. His willingness reflects the way we want their well-being, as if tied to something inside of us that’s constantly at risk of being harmed.

The tight circle of my flashlight made what lay beyond it darker. An insignificant gate gleamed in front of us, a lightweight wire mesh—narrow and hung so that if we didn’t get through in time, it could swing back fast through its closing arc to swat him on the rear, so that he’d jerk forward, step on my foot.

The bridge was next. Its rails were there for him, but also there to make him spook, twitch to the side. This could slam me into them.

“We’re going to douse the flashlight, give the light here a chance,” I said to him once we stood safely in the pasture. The air was summer thick. Above us, stars looked sparse and random, delivered by slingshot. Under my feet: complete darkness, unseen orchard grass. I felt off-balance. My rubber boots could have been planted in water. Now I could hardly see Chad. He was eating. Through the lead line, I could feel the yank.

The sluggishness of minutes made the air thicker, hotter. I wore an old Laura Ashley hat, its brim brief. But I was glad of it when wings large enough to batter the air to a hum moved over my forehead. Six, eight inches, wing tip to wing tip, in slices of greater darkness whirred, then shot off, a very real, investigative presence, or induced from the dark and a state of anxiety.

“Write down the colic episodes,” Dr. Morris had said. They could blur or blend from one to the next, or evaporate, as did whatever had flown and hovered.

He hadn’t repeated his recommendation of Sullivan County Hospital. Sullivan County, where people trailered from hours away for its excellencies. Standing here with Chad out in the pasture, I couldn’t remember a single excellence, certainly not for the gray thoroughbred, silver when he arrived, the color of sky at first light. His coat had just been buzzed. The thoroughbred’s name: one of those lineage-assembled names, Wise Talk. The guys who worked here then called him Sabio. He’d had a moderately successful local racing career.

Early in his time here, he’d been standing by the pasture fence, parallel to it. On the other side, my young goats, new to my place, ignored my voice as I tried to get them to follow me back to the barn. I called, shouted, walked back and forth. They kept their heads in the spring grass. Wise Talk’s stance was attentive. Then he made a sudden break. A racing start. Standstill to gallop, it had nothing as to speed. But the goats, the goats: startled, they broke into their own reckless, racing start and scrambled toward me. Their Nubian ears flapped. We made our way to the barn. I looked back at Wise Talk. The way he regained his stillness, the way he held his head, all four feet squared up, showed a certain complacency. Done. Solved. What was his action if not a thought executed?

Now, in the dark, Chad stopped grazing and looked outward in the meditative way a horse looks inward. The rich reek of manure rose, confirmation. I welcomed it. The smell meant there were molecules of gas in the air. So couldn’t the gas, in fact, exit?

“Now you’re talking,” I said out loud, as the eastern sky glowed with radioactive light, then produced a moon, almost full. Chad took longer strides. The moonlight redrew on the ground in pen-and-ink the fence rails and posts we passed. It rescalloped the shapes of trees outside the pasture, traced them across its interior. It made a colorless world, but the pasture grass itself picked up a glow of sepia, its edges finally visible and clear-cut.

Chad was close-coupled, as they say, with a short back, massive chest, legs on the short side. No one would have tried to put him on the track. Under the moon’s radiance, he became almost stately, his expression serene. His average coat took on the look of satin. I studied him from the side as he grazed. His ribs still cast shadows, deeper.

“I want to have a conference when Antonio is here,” Dr. Morris called to say. “If Chad’s having an episode every week, we’re not making any progress.” Antonio’s English was not much better than Emilio’s, but he was as tall as Dr. Morris, and not easily intimidated. The appointment: cancelled, one of Antonio’s children sick. What might interrupt the next conference? Anything would do. Anything to cheat the vet, undermine his effectiveness by avoidance; to subvert evidence, play for time, for a break.

We displayed the calendar when Dr. Morris did come the following week. He spoke with a voice no longer sour and condescending (and I’m going to ask you again,he used to say as a point of inquiry, is it the right leg or the left). He always spoke with reduced volume, a little menacing, implying the volume would be deployed shortly, but today he sounded enthusiastic in an unfamiliar, wholesome way, in a way I couldn’t identify. Like a coach?

“I think what we should do is treat him as if he has ulcers,” he said. “Do you remember how he had ulcers over a year ago? They were a four, which is the maximum of severity.”

I hadn’t thought of the ulcers, that they could happen again. “No scoping?” I asked, of the procedure of sedation and tubing that was Sullivan Country diagnostics, brought home. A team of doctors, husband and wife specialists, put the horse out on the floor in your barn in the aisle, an act of faith with a signature required, acknowledging that something could go wrong, a puncture of the intestine.

“No,” he said. “We go straight to treatment.”

One tube of ulcer medicine a day.

“That’s what we’re going to do,” Dr. Morris said. He bent his arms, swung them forward in that jolly coaching motion. Here we go, his move registered.

“He stick his head into other horses’ feed,” Antonio said one day in September. We stood in the barn aisle. Chad was outside. He was on the medicine. No episodes of colic. I thought of how he looked, and what horse people called the top line. This was Chad’s back, stem to stern. It looked on the verge of sinking. At his rear, on that top line, a bone stuck up, something that must hinge the skeleton underneath for bones and muscle to arc down to either side to set up as the drivetrain of rear end and back legs.

“This is it,” I said. “Enough. We’re going to increase his feed.” I said to add a cup of this grain, a cup and a half more of the other grain, to what he was getting in the morning. We had to add grain carefully. Cuidadosamente,I said. Estilo conservativo.

Two weeks later, Chad looked better. Were they adding feed just in the morning, as I asked? No, Antonio said. Every meal. All four meals. He looked alarmed as he watched my face. So they’d upped even the four o’clock, the feeding that was meant to distribute the third feeding’s total.

Jesus Christ. It was a massive increase for delicate digestion, a massive management error to conceal from Dr. Morris. But there’d been no symptoms of colic. And look at him in the pasture, where the afternoon sun hung low in October and hit his sides with warmth but not the heat that used to send him back to his run-in. He had a massive barrel, that part of the horse from shoulder back to his rump, everything within his rib cage, essentially, and never were there ribs so wide-sprung and hard to cover. He was doing it. And that bump at his rear, the skeleton hinge; his flesh there, too, rose up on the way to engulfing it. His chest, always broad, looked ready as a warhorse’s for full armor. Fall around us was in full tilt, lances out at tree tips that held yellow banners tearing up and off in a south wind: the browned yellow leaves of willow oaks flying by; the broadness of hickory leaves, gold. And the larches in the swampy meadow hanging on in shrill mustard with some green needles still tight as tight.

At night the sky was clear, the constellations unreadable, cold sparks on imaginary lead lines, taut, stretching this way and that. There was not so much need to walk and graze with Chad, but I did. In early November, heavy mists gathered halfway up a rise of the pasture to the south like a long, ghostly hedgerow. Saturn, if I had it right, moved away from a comradely spot to the side of the moon and slipped farther westward. In that direction, just beyond the fence that closed off the biggest pasture, the mist found a different home. It rolled itself up along the ground to something the size of big loops of wire on top of a penitentiary wall.

Chad raised his head to look into it. He began to track what he saw. His head moved precisely and evenly, left to right. It could have been resting on a level. I saw nothing. He saw something. Surely it wasn’t deer. Chad had had enough of deer, a grouping of does scattered once in a light rain lying around thirty feet away from us like dogs.

What if it were something else, a single file of horses? The gray thoroughbred, Wise Talk. He’d be the first in line, healed, another chance at grazing, his coat and bones reconstituted from a dissolution that had left him formless as mist. I could hardly stand to think again of the weeks of his nonhealing, finally the release from that hospital to come home. The bars of his hospital stall had looked like jail, where he stood shifting from front foot to front foot. Why? Something was wrong. “Oh, he’s just—” What? What had one of the staff there said, as she refused to look at me? She looked away because Wise Talk was foundering, an inflammation that causes a certain bone in the foot to rotate, the grotesquely named coffin bone, its turning unbearably painful. They were discharging him to come home to die.

He could be out there, leader of all the horses I’d taken in who’d gone down, eventually, with gallantry; the big draft horse, a Percheron, one hind leg forever crippled en pointe, like a ballerina. Chad went on watching whatever he was seeing. His expression remained curious and evaluative. His head followed the line of motion through the mist, until he could track it no farther. Yet a sense of connectivity remained in the air. He’d had an offer. It came from the field and those moving shapes. “Not yet,” was what he said back.

---

Mina Austin lives on a farm in Pennsylvania with her rescue horses and goats.

Strange Moons

by Annie Raab

Let’s not bother ourselves with origins. 

Move to Chicago, they said. The pizza is great, the drivers are levelheaded, and the winters are beautiful! It is hurts-to-breathe cold when I move into the apartment on the fourth floor, the first available in a twenty-unit building—a classic architectural Goliath with lead paint on the walls and hot, clanging radiators. I spend the first night taking stock of items the previous tenant left behind: a sponge under the sink, a sock in the bathtub, three beers inside the fridge, and a spider plant on the windowsill in the living room that has been, all this time, thriving in solitude. As for my own possessions, I have very little. A box of winter clothes, kitchen oddities, books. But all this can be replaced and I wouldn’t mind so much. I feel I have already set along the path of leaving no mark at all, and I have come to terms with this gradual anonymity. 

Across the street from my doorstep, there is a fenced-in park, where a birdbath stands frozen beneath a cap of white snow, the stone an identical color to the trampled slush in the road. For now the sky is low and empty. One gray tone across the whole swath of city tinted a different gray. I pull on my winter layers and exit down the switchback stairs to check the mail. There’s nothing inside my little brass door embedded in a wall of little brass doors, so I walk to the overpriced bodega. The older of the two men calls me dear. “Hello, dear.” “Thank you, dear.” “Have a nice evening, dear.” The younger one speaks soft and in a flirty way. The shelves are arranged in a confused system: Chapstick by the Gatorade. Toiletries chipside. An embarrassment of salsa con queso crowding out stacks of cheap eyeshadow. The store is arranged as if to remind the customer that everything lost can be replaced. I buy a tube of Aquaphor.

“Thank you, dear,” the old man says. I wave goodbye from the door. 

January. 

When I stay inside, I pass the days like this:

I eat oatmeal with peanut butter.

I watch snow fall outside the window.

I smoke weed.

I write reminders to myself.

I listen to ELO while cleaning the apartment, and, sometimes, I feel a rare elation.

For twenty minutes a day I like to stretch by planting my palms on the floor between thin, dried rings of boot-dragged slush. I do headstands against the wall. The room flips over and I am balanced up and nearly straight. I hum the notes of a song. It sounds like “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” at first but ends in a tuneless uncertainty. I kick my feet up backwards. First, I had to convince myself there was nothing to lose, which is its own type of work. This is all life is: a cycle of beginnings. New origins create new sensations, down to the faint taste of radiator air, down to the daily tasks and reminders and brief wish to reverse the circulatory course of blood by living upside down.  

I write down my reminders on little paper scraps that I lose on the train. Losing them isn’t a problem—I remember what most of them say. 

Laundry detergent-green. Job at CTA? 

Book idea: two dishonest people. 

A dog thinks the purpose of everything is for her (use this?)

Next time I will (incomplete)

The winter has revealed the essence of a new reality—a truth is discovered, but behind that is another truth, a truer truth. And behind that truth is another. Some might say this truth theory imitates the structure of an onion, where every new layer is more potent than the last. Maybe not infinite, but more layers than an onion should contain. But I say this is more like finding mold behind the wallpaper and finding rot behind the mold, and maggots writhing beneath the rot. I dress for the bitter cold like the smallest nesting doll, the one who protects herself with thin replicas of herself, and the train takes me and my little reminders away over the city as every layer all at once.

When I leave the apartment, I ride the train to the sculpture park and walk the narrow paths between arrangements. There is a bronze sculpture by an artist who died in the 1980s. I know, through my observant, solitary walks, that there is a partial impression of his fingerprint on the inner curve of the bronze, just about the height of my knees. The snow stops falling when I arrive, and I crouch down to examine the fingerprint and think about how inside that fingerprint lies man’s desire for immortality. On my knees, I rub the fingerprint until the snow comes off and the bronze glows like a January sun behind the clouds. I press each finger into the dent to interpret the artist’s mark, but the casting has altered the impression, made impenetrable a thing so soft and fleeting. I stay at the park rubbing the sculpture until my fingers go numb and then walk back to the train station, back to the apartment to do more sloppy headstands and wonder what happened to my boundless ambition.

There are mornings when it does not matter what the room looks like before I open my eyes, the backs of my eyelids themselves a vivid, open room. It is an ultra-temporary amnēsia. There are mornings when a cough in a dry room calls forth the word aspirare—to breathe. Opposite of, yet related to, angere, yet both exist at once inside the anxius. The anxius experience episodic panic. Panic—with the coy etymological Pan—who lurched out of sleep in a fit one noon hour and was thereafter linked to sudden discord in lonely places. 

Snow falls in little flakes down the cones of light along the street, and I take this to mean the snow will fall heavy until morning. And then I think, I need provisions. I get stoned and walk to the bodega, weave through shelves of food packed together like good friends, dense and abundant. Hello, dear. Good to see you. Thank you, dear. Along the counter, the older man has itched through various scratch-offs. The penny is still pinched in his hand. I thought I’d be a lot richer by now. Thought I’d be a whole lot smarter, too. I pay for my Cheetos and mints. The street light sets the falling snow ablaze.

Is this what it feels like? To slough off identities overnight, wake up oily and raw to a new persona—or worse, the one you’ve been hiding all this time? It is a cold combination of guilt and fascination to live inside this peeled form. What was I hiding? Why won’t it go back in? Where are those protective layers?

There is an art to it—to changing very quickly. The art is paucity, in creating a deficit in all your inner dimensions. I am at a point in my life where everything I thought I could do didn’t quite work out, and I’m still here. That makes me invincible. 

Pan wakes up from sleep and riots. Sirens wake me up in bed. Over the phone, my mother says this: “You are getting to know the real adult version of yourself.” All at once, pieces of the new self now appear to orbit around the old self, as if I’ve birthed strange moons.

What happened to all that abundant time?

“Hello, dear. Thank you, dear,” the man says with a nod. The snow covered the street all night. I awoke again with a bloody nose, a burst of red shards in the tissue. An excretion from the body, from the cellular walls inside. Excernere, the matter sifted out. Plows scrape along the street and the door chimes as it slams shut behind me. Goodbye, dear. Thank you again. 

The spider plant now lives in the kitchen. I yank at the brown leaves and poke fingers in the soil, soft with a layer of dust on the surface. I run the sink and leave the plant under the tap while I tie my boots to leave again. Water bubbles up to the surface and runs over the sides of the pot, making dark flecked rivers in the basin. 

Many eons ago—I’m not sure how else to mark cosmological time—a little life blinked a steady, reliable light. Now when I look at that life in the distance, it appears faded and lost in the surrounding dark. There are few stars above so close to the city, but if you have ever lain on your back in an empty road and turned your dry eyes upwards, you might have seen these disappearing stars. The ones that shine bright until you look at them straight on. Or maybe they’re moons. 

I am not a careful woman. But I work at it each day.

I do simple exercises when the snow melts. I jog up and down the back steps of my building, my boots clanging against the metal stairs, past the wide windows of the four flights over and over until I break a sweat that chills my brow. I jump rope in the alley behind the bodega, under the bare paradise apple with a wind chime missing two tones. I jump for four minutes when the air warms up midafternoon, and each time the rope swings the compressed arc above my head I hear a sound like nuts falling to the pavement. When I stop to catch my breath I turn around to face the paradise apple and a large pile of shit—human or dog, I do not know—on the ground beside the dumpster. There are cuts in the shit. Shit on the rope, shit scattered in several directions. Early spring snow comes down in fragile blossoms. I go inside.

The sun comes out for six days in a row. The spider plant has grown. It sits in the north-facing window above the radiator, drying out, hoarding daylight. A little shoot has overshot its reach and rests on the windowsill, a scrawny bit of green vine. I bike to the lake and travel along the path. A cold wind blows across the sand, but I take off my shoes and socks, push up my jeans. The water is a sharp, arresting cold. I splash my face and forearms, slap it on my forehead, the back of my neck. Gulls drift over the distant white knife of a sail. Inside me, a quiet charge is building. Out comes the paper scrap and pen. The wind whips it from my hand. Do not cling to the old world.

Now that it is spring, I no longer take the train. I smoke a partial joint and ride my bike around the city. Everyone is beautiful on a spring evening. Hello, gorgeous. Hello, handsome. It occurs to me I am probably not leaving a mark as permanent as the sculptor, but that I will leave something behind. Little scraps of paper, maybe. A very old spider plant. Or maybe the mark I leave behind is not part of me at all—a wayward electron that spins away from my private gravity, becomes attached to something new. 

I stop at the other bodega ten blocks away from home and buy a can of beans, two large tomatoes, and a four-pack of craft beer. 

“No fui el primero ni último que le ha tocao, me queda clara ya,” the cashier sings with the radio. He bops his head along and holds the beat with finger guns. The propped door lets the music outside and the spring inside. “Eighteen thirty,” he says. I swipe my card and he points his dancing fingers at me. “Mala costumbre!” he continues at the register, rips the receipt off the teeth, gives me a finger-gun beat goodbye. I flip the sunglasses up from my chin and mount the saddle, point my spinning tires home. 

I take the side roads and drink a beer at the park. Sections of it are rewilding. The pond fills up with lily pads and stiff green cattails poke through the water’s surface. Proud wood ducks swim their ducklings around the beer cans, the algae blooms, the vagrants hidden among the tall grass, asleep. I do not know if life contains a secret key which will unlock meaning if we find it in a hurry. But I do think the key to happiness is curiosity. And I do think the key to curiosity is slowly coming to accept that our fingerprints will not last forever. I drink the beer while propped on one elbow in the grass. I shed a layer and wipe mud from the bike with the toe of my shoe. Sun dogs line up in a planetary row above. 

I was wrong—the sculpture was not a permanent fixture, but part of a year-long loan. I might have known had I paid more attention to the signs, which certainly is not the first time I have neglected to see the details. But it is sad to see the sculpture go, sad to know the artist’s fingerprint will be there for the whole life of the art and I may have been the last to think of it for a long, long time. 

Perhaps it’s not so bad. The sun is too orange on the day the sculpture is moved and the bronze has been defiled by spray paint. I lean in close to read the text—a wonky glyph in powder blue. It says “$NAKE EYE$” on the flattest plane. I copy the writing as close as I can on a little scrap of paper and put it in my pocket. The preparators haul the artwork away on a crane and I wave goodbye from the ground, watch it orbit out of view onto the back of a truck. And then the truck carries the sculpture away and I think if the artist were alive to see this today, he might insist on riding too, on pressing his finger gently into the divot untouched by time and material. He fits his thumb into the flesh of the bronze, and artist and sculpture become electric—at last—with the bonds of a long-separated valence.

---

Annie Raab is a writer and art critic in Milwaukee. Her work has appeared in Tripwire Journal, Timber, Cream City Review, The Southampton Review, Booth, and more. She is the winner of the inaugural Susan Neville Prize in Fiction and manages an arts writing platform called Cormorant.

Move 37

by Heather McHugh                                          

The uttermost’s
a figment of

addiction, like
the pre and post

we think we deepen
takes or leapen data with.

And zounds! the charge
fulfilled, a mount

to measure—two hands up—
I give some tiny overcrop

to every moon. Or call it
newer, older, golder, blue.

The freedom to say all
becomes the blur

of seeing sound
aligned, unwise,

with our two turns
of mind who for

the life of us could
never bear the being

clapped or even just yclept
alone: could never count

for less, nor yet for Ever-
more be bound.

---

Heather McHugh lives in a modest Olympic Peninsula settlement with an immodest joy in her companion and a gratitude for rain. Her books of note are Hinge & Sign (an old Selected), To the Quick (because she still adores the cover), and a collection of literary essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality. Two new books are forthcoming, poetry and prose.

The Deepest Blue

Huan He

We did not know
the name of the blue flowers

everywhere: they fell out of the dirt,
hosing the air with a thirst

for life! They shot their
wishing leaves to raise the ground

a bit farther, if only moving
a tiny scratch—I fell, and you kissed

it to make it best not better,
the way there were flowers

everywhere when a gust blew
us over, face forward,

into the bush,
into the field,

into the horizon,
into the expanse,

until we did not know
our names.

All Too Familiar

by Shy Watson

It was the era of the mothman sightings, and Helma wanted a guardian to stand by and assuage her fears. The government had no problem giving free food to all the men and women who couldn’t stand holding a job, but when it came to a real, imminent threat, one of nobody’s choosing, Helma was left to fend for herself. She had paid her taxes, hadn’t she? Where was the National Guard when she needed them? Where were convoys to protect her streets? Oh, how she longed for spotlights to scan the mountains like a stage. Helma’s favorite televangelist, Peter Knight, shouted through her television set, “Repent! Repent!” The mothmen, he warned, were demons, sent to serve their master, Lyndon B. Johnson. 

Helma slept with every lamp and the television on. Gold-framed photographs of her three grandsons reflected the buzzing fluorescent tubes in the hall. Betty Boop magnets secured newspaper clippings of Joseph McCarthy’s face to the fridge. Helma was grateful for that patriot Lee Harvey Whatever, but Johnson was barely an improvement. Forget the war on poverty. How about a war on tramps? She despised the Communists who threatened to ruin her way of life. Her husband Elmer had been a strong man, a decent man, a man who had worked his way up to become Natrium’s plant manager down in Proctor and constructed them a nice Sears home up in Wheeling, the Norwich model. His life insurance wasn’t half bad either. 

Helma thought it a cruel joke that Elmer died of prostate cancer in the same year the Gleason grading system was devised. He had not been one to trust doctors and had repudiated all of Helma’s concerns. “Taking a leak gets harder with age,” he had said. It wasn’t until he saw blood in the bowl that he finally allowed Helma to accompany him to the hospital. He scored an eight on the Gleason. The prognosis wasn’t good. Within three weeks, the cells had spread to Elmer’s lymph nodes. Within two months, he was dead. 

The house displayed not a single picture of Helma’s daughter. She couldn’t believe Barbara had married a Democrat who took her last name and moved with him up to Cleveland, leaving Helma to spill oatmeal on the dover-gray broadloom and rot in her recliner all alone. Even Helma’s cat, Feathers, which she had gotten for Barbara, hated her. Feathers had adored Elmer, wouldn’t leave his lap. But ever since Elmer had died the year before, all she did was claw at the couch and piss on the bath mat. Barbara’s dorm in Morgantown hadn’t allowed pets, and then the man she married claimed to be allergic. That sissy. Helma wasn’t born yesterday. No one was allergic to cats. 

Rumor had it the mothmen fluttered from roof to roof and terrorized the streets with their glowing red eyes only at night. The sole daytime sighting was reported by an unreliable adolescent. At first, the mothmen had only been in Point Pleasant, but they had slowly infiltrated the surrounding areas. The lights, Helma reasoned, were worth the electric bill. And Raymond would be worth the eighteen dollars per night.  

Helma came upon Raymond in the classifieds two days after the first sighting in Proctor. The listing advertised a bodyguard, but Helma prided herself on spotting diamonds in the rough. His experience included one year as a bus driver, three years as a security guard at Food Machinery Corporation in South Charleston, and one year infantry in Vietnam. Surely, he was qualified for the task.

“One time a drunk smashed my bus’s windshield with a walking cane,” he told Helma during the telephone interview. “Didn’t live to tell the tale. I could wipe out any ol’ mothman. Easy.” 

Though he had been unavailable for the first two nights after the interview due to a preplanned turkey hunting trip, Helma was confident he would be an ideal overnight watchman. The boy must have been no older than twenty-five. 

The night Raymond was due, Helma spent all day getting ready. She hadn’t seen anyone but her girlfriends at bingo for over a week. Even those excursions had diminished, as she wouldn’t dare drive home after dusk. Barbara regularly condescended to Helma about how she shouldn’t be driving anyway, day or night, wouldn’t even let her boys ride in the back of Helma’s GTO. “Christ, Mom,” Barbara would say. “Relax on the brakes, you’re giving me whiplash!” 

Helma was astonished by how Barbara had reacted to her plan to hire Raymond. She had quoted some quack professor who claimed the mothmen were mere sandhill cranes, stopping by West Virginia on their migration down south. Helma had not raised her daughter to be so ignorant. It was clearly the fault of her spineless husband. Helma had lived in West Virginia all her life and had never seen a single damn crane, let alone one that resembled a demon. Besides, Ethel-from-bingo’s grandson had seen a mothman down in New Martinsville two nights before the Proctor report. He was a policeman, and Helma knew a policeman wouldn’t lie. 

Already made up, Helma opened her Lady Vanity case and plugged it in. While the rollers heated, she surveyed her dress collection and felt, as she always did, the transient pride that came with fitting into the same clothes she’d had since the ‘30s, forever a size 2. But today, she longed to appear modern, electing instead for a pair of periwinkle capris and a scalloped white top. She hung her bathrobe, embroidered Sunshine, on its hook, the last anniversary gift Elmer had given her. As she bent over to buckle the patent leather flats, she smelled the baked, chemical air of the rollers. 

Raymond’s knock was loud. He was an hour early, which Helma considered a good sign because it meant he was punctual. When she opened the door, she was startled by his height, which must have been a couple inches shorter than her own. He also looked a bit older than twenty-five, but Helma reasoned that the war had weathered him; the violence he’d seen had left trenches above his brows. 

“Raymond Bellhive at your service, ma’am.” 

His handshake was as hard as his knock, and Helma glimpsed the tail of a shark tattoo peeking out from under his sleeve. 

“Well, come on in,” Helma said. “Make yourself at home.” She handed Raymond a spare set of keys. “I would have had tea ready, but you’re an hour early. Usually my hair isn’t such a mess. Here, sit. I’ll put some water on the stove.” 

Raymond limped into the den and sat on the couch.

“No disrespect, ma’am, but I wasn’t early. Uniform Time Act. I can change your clocks. Been since Sunday.”

“That clown Johnson.”

“Amen to that!” 

Raymond resembled a toy soldier as he sunk into the floral tufted cushions. Helma recalled that Vietnam had quicksand. Or was it Africa? Feathers jumped onto Raymond’s lap and made biscuits along his chest before Helma turned away. The moment had somehow seemed private, had made her feel like a pervert, and she couldn’t bear to intrude. She filled the kettle and put it on the burner, then marched to the bathroom and ripped the roller cord from the wall. Raymond Bellhive was not handsome. He wasn’t worth getting ready for, anyway. 

Helma was uncertain if she was qualified to bless water, so she rang Pastor Jim. 

“I don’t know, Helma,” he said, “Call the Catholics.” 

The phone book rested on top of the fridge under a thin layer of dust. Helma wiped her hands on a kitchen towel and flipped the yellowed pages until she found Blessed Trinity. It was a Tuesday but worth a try. The phone rang and rang and rang. Helma scoffed. As if she needed more proof that the Catholics were behind the times. Not even an answering machine. 

The TV blared from the living room, so Helma plugged her ears and closed her eyes as she struggled to recall what was required. Natural source, salt, prayer. Their property was blessed with well water, which seemed as natural as anything else. Helma turned the faucet so hard water splashed out of the saucer and onto her shirt. It looked like lopsided lactation. But she had no one to impress. She reduced the stream to droplets and sprinkled in some Morton salt. Helma thought the salt girl was adorable, with her big umbrella and small yellow shoes. She decided she would buy similar shoes, perhaps before inviting her plumber over to fix the overzealous sink. Thomas was so square-jawed and rugged he managed to render the vocation glamorous. 

Whhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Helma jumped when the kettle whistled, overturning the saucer.

“Goddamnit,” she said. “Lord forgive me.” 

She poured the steaming water over two chamomile tea bags and returned to her consecration. She filled the saucer once more, sprinkled in the salt, hovered her palm over its surface, and bowed her head in prayer. 

“Blessed are you, Lord, all-powerful God, Christ who art in Heaven. I ask humbly for your service, may you assist me. To protect against the mothmen who art demons. Dear Lord, please repel these interlopers and offer an orb of protection around my home, myself, Feathers, and Raymond. In the name of Jesus I pray. Ah-men.” 

Helma placed her pinky into the salt water and stirred. 

“Want honey?” she yelled. She waited a moment but received no response. 

Helma crept into the den to find Raymond’s pygmy legs twitching on the coffee table as he watched television. Feathers nestled under his armpit. His shirt was coated in fur. 

“Mr. Bellhive, would you like honey?” 

“Oh no, ma’am. Call me Raymond.”

The channel was set to a Twilight Zone rerun, which Helma found rather inappropriate during this trying time. She went back to the kitchen and grabbed a tea tray. When she returned, Feathers had mounted Raymond’s chest again. She audibly purred. 

“Why don’t we watch something a little less sinister,” Helma said. “It’s almost sunset.” 

On TV, a group of leather-clad hunks were really aliens in disguise. Raymond turned it off. 

“You got blackout curtains?” he asked.

“God no, they hate the daylight. I’ve been sleeping with every light on.” 

“Ma’am, no disrespect, but these things are phototactic! That’s why they been soarin’ toward headlights and bangin’ against windows!” 

Helma hadn’t heard of the windows. Had they already visited her home? 

“I’ve got blankets in one of the guest rooms,” she said. “In the trunk.” 

Helma pointed Raymond in the right direction, then got back to her holy water. She fetched the hummingbird feeder from the front porch. The sun sank below the horizon, but the sky remained pink. She’d have to be quick. 

Under the sink, Helma kept Tupperware full of rotting grapes and cabbage. Moths had always taken a liking to Elmer’s flannels, so she cut a collar off an old green number and plunged it into the rancid pulp. She dumped the mixture into the feeder’s tank and filled the base with holy water like a moat. If a demon wanted to hover near Helma’s home, it wouldn’t go down easy. God’s power was great, Lyndon B. Johnson be damned. 

“Ms. Cotting.” Raymond stood in the kitchen doorway carrying quilts. “Are these what you meant?” 

“It’s Mrs., and they will have to do.” 

Raymond pointed to the bird feeder and scrunched his brows. 

 “It’s a trap,” Helma said. “Subtle enough not to attract from a distance, but if one ventures onto the property, it will be instantly lured.” 

Raymond opened the fridge, grabbed a Coca-Cola, and doused the contents of the feeder. “Moths love this stuff. And they hate smokes. Speaking of which, do you mind? I’ll bring

the trap.” 

Helma wondered if Raymond knew the difference between fruit flies and moths, but she knew better than to insult a man. She showed Raymond to the front porch though it was dusk. 

“Are you sure you want to go out there?” 

“I’ve seen the worst of it, believe you me.” 

Raymond held onto the doorway as he ventured outside, and Helma swore one of his legs was shorter than the other. She thought to check the classifieds again in the morning, then set to pinning quilts on the curtain rods. Barbara’s husband had miraculously managed to install a chain lock on the door after Elmer died, but for the last couple weeks, Helma had been lodging a crutch under the knob in case it hadn’t been adequately secured. She yawned. When Raymond came back, he brought smoke with him, which Helma hadn’t smelled since she last sat at the American Legion, winning nothing at bingo for the fourth month in a row. Elmer had smoked, but only cigars, which smelled much sweeter than whatever Raymond dragged in. He crumpled the empty pack in his fist, then threw it into Helma’s garbage can.

“Well, what’s it like out there?” she asked. 

“Warm. April showers bring May flowers.”

“You see anything?” 

“Not yet. Do you have a gun?” Raymond’s lids twitched. His deep-set eyes reminded Helma of Ovaltine. 

“Excuse me?” 

“Just in case.” 

Elmer had a gun safe in his study, but Helma hadn’t entered in months. 

“I think so,” she said. “Upstairs.” 

Raymond paused on the swell step and acknowledged Elmer’s framed portrait.

“Is this Mr. Cotting?” 

“It was.”

 Raymond’s footsteps plodded uneven and heavy behind Helma. His heft seemed incompatible with his stature. Maybe he was all muscle underneath, solid as stone. He climbed the stairs uncomfortably close to Helma, filling her with heat. The doorknob was cold in her palm. The air in Elmer’s study stood still. She had left it exactly as it was. Checks signed a year ago sat on the desk beside a single cigar. The oakmoss notes from Elmer’s aftershave exuded from the walls. The study was so evidently his that Helma nearly sensed his presence; his spirit felt closer than it had since his death. 

“Here’s the case,” she said. “I think the code is our daughter’s birthday, 10-4-43.” 

Raymond knelt down and twisted the lock. 

“Nope.” 

Helma struggled to think of what else it could have been, but nothing came. Raymond stared up at her expectantly. 

“I don’t know what else it could be,” she said. 

“Well, when’s your birthday?”

Raymond tried 5-13-19, but that was wrong, too.

“What about your anniversary?” 

And with 6-18-42, the case swung open, revealing a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol. Helma felt remarkably smitten by her deceased husband’s gesture. The man had only said “I love you” about a dozen times.

“Okay, well, now you know where to find them,” Helma said. She bent to shut the gun case, but Raymond wedged his hand to block the door. 

“We’re gonna need one of these downstairs.” 

Helma hated guns, had since she was a child when her father shot her rabid dog. “The shotgun would work,” she said. That was what her father had used, and it had only taken one shell. 

 “I’ll handle the guns, if you don’t mind,” Raymond said, with what Helma took to be an ex-soldier’s authority. He caressed the engraving on the shotgun’s receiver, bird dogs pointing at pheasants. “I love Remingtons, but this tube mag only takes two shells. Got the gas system built into the front. We’re usin’ the M14 tonight. Twenty rounds. Like riding a bike.” 

Helma shrugged. Raymond may as well have been speaking Mandarin, but she figured a gun would do better than his dilapidated body alone. He turned on the safety, checked the chamber, then loaded it. He pointed the barrel toward the carpet and Helma followed him down. Feathers meowed at the foot of the stairs and rubbed her head against the barrel of the gun. 

“She likes you,” Helma said.

“She’s hungry.” 

Helma was horrified to realize she hadn’t fed Feathers in what must have been two or three days. “Dear God,” she said. “You’re right.” Feathers nipped at her heels as she headed toward the pantry and knelt to open the bag of Friskies. Feathers hovered her head over the bowl so anxiously Helma had to fight her off to pour it in. A shadow fell over the pantry and Helma whipped around to see Raymond blocking the doorway with the gun in his hand. 

“Should I stay on the couch tonight?” he asked.

“Where else would you stay?”

Raymond shifted on his bowlegs. “You tell me.”

Helma had intended to dig through the attic for a cot. She knew there had to be one somewhere, but all of Barbara’s toddler toys along with every holiday decoration ever purchased crowded the space, rendering excavation insuperable. 

“The couch has a nice hide-a-bed,” Helma explained. “Just grab a blanket from the trunk.” Raymond disappeared into the guest room and returned with Elmer’s quilt, which his mother had made him. Helma hadn’t seen it since she packed it away on the morning of the funeral. She felt uneasy with the notion of Raymond cozied beneath it. “Is that the only blanket?”

“Last one. The rest are on the windows.”

It had been over a year, Helma reasoned, so she resolved not to be maladaptive. “Fine,” she said, relenting. Raymond helped her pull the handle that transformed the sofa into a bed. “What’s your wife think of you staying in another woman’s house?” 

Raymond chortled. “I’ve got no wife to think of anything.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“Oh, it’s fine. It’s not for lack of want. I spent my good years in the service and haven’t found me anybody yet. I’m ready and able.” 

“Did you have a lady before you enlisted?” It was rare for Helma to meet an unmarried man of Raymond’s age.

“Yeah, but she wasn’t very patient. Came back to learn she’d been running around on me.”

“That’s just awful. Young people these days have no sense of commitment. You’re better off. You’ll find a woman who’s worthy when God wills it.”

Raymond shrugged. 

“Well,” Helma continued, “this chamomile is getting to me. I ought to retire.” 

“Suit yourself, Mrs. Cotting. You think they’ll show Elvis’s wedding on the TV?” 

“I hope not. That boy’s an abomination.” 

“The man’s a legend,” Raymond said. “Besides, it’ll be good for staying up.”

Helma held the handrail as she ascended to her room. It disgusted her that a wedding could be televised. There was no more sanctity. She’d never forget when Elvis gyrated his hips all over The Milton Berle Show. Fitting that he was singing about a dog. Helma hated dogs. They possessed no discernment whatsoever. 

The batteries in the General Electric toothbrush were losing power, and, unfortunately, they were irreplaceable. The device rumbled with a couple pauses but still did the trick. Helma had often fantasized about pressing it against her cooch, but she wouldn’t dare for fear that Elmer’s spirit would look down from heaven. But this time the desire was too heavy. She resolved to turn off the light. It took less than one minute. 

The twin-sized bed was already made. Barbara insisted Helma downsize after the funeral, as she didn’t want her mother to suffer Elmer’s absence. If only it had been that simple. Helma had been inconsolable for months, incapable of consuming anything but instant mashed potatoes and Tang. She had prayed that God take her too, so at least she could be with Elmer in the afterlife. But God wouldn’t grant it. She supposed her purpose had not yet been met. 

Even with Helma’s head pressed to the pillow, she could hear the faint chatter from the TV downstairs. It was distracting. She imagined Raymond watching Elvis and resolved conclusively that Raymond was a dunce. She lay still, working up the courage to confront him about the volume, but her body was so relaxed she felt submerged in Skin So Soft. She wished she hadn’t waited so long with that toothbrush. Tomorrow she should draw a bath. Maybe try again if the batteries held out. If not, she could send Raymond out for new ones. That was nice to imagine. Helma unwittingly drifted off to sleep. 

The rifle’s blast startled Helma awake. She felt paralyzed and told herself repeatedly that it had only been a dream. Straining for sound, she realized the television was no longer on. The house was silent. Her heartbeat throbbed in her ears. She felt more awake than she had in decades. And then the silence transformed into a bloodcurdling cry. The mothmen were here.

 Helma hurried out of bed, covered her body with her embroidered bathrobe, and scampered down the stairs. On the swell step, Helma’s foot rang out in pain. She squatted and grazed a cluster of shards with her fingertips. 

“Raymond?” she called out. 

She stepped as wide as she could to avoid further injury and trembled toward the living room, where she found Raymond rolled tight in Elmer’s quilt and the gun on the ground. 

“Raymond,” she said, but he didn’t reply. She reached out to discover his face was drenched in sweat. His teeth chattered. Unintelligible sounds fell from his mouth, reminding Helma of a whimpering dog. Raymond’s legs kicked as if he were running, and Helma imagined him blood-soaked in camouflage, fleeing to a trench, the percussion of land mines pulsing through his legs. Helma stroked his hair behind his ear and cooed, “Shhhh, now. Shhhh.”

Raymond’s lids fluttered as he grabbed Helma’s forearm. His strength was undeniable as he pulled her on top of him and squeezed her desperately. She was unsure whether the wetness on her shoulders came from tears or sweat. With her face against his ear, she continued to coo, and Raymond’s fingers stroked the length of her arm. At once, his tremor ceased, and his breathing became uniform and deep. To Helma’s despair, Raymond’s wrist fell limp. 

Helma lay still for fear of waking him. She waited until Raymond’s next exhale, and then she began to breathe in sync. Their chests rose and fell together. It was intoxicating. In the dark, Helma’s thoughts turned toward Elmer. The man, like a saint, had never snored. She had often traced the contours of his face once the sun shone in with the morning. His stillness never ceased to make Helma marvel. It was as if he dreamt only of wool. 

Helma repositioned her cheek against the crook of Raymond’s neck. She experimented again with her breathing, this time inhaling the air that exited his nose. There was something sweet in it, like fresh-baked bread. She pined for Elmer as she hadn’t since his death. She bartered again with God. Lord, I will give you anything, she thought. Take my diamonds, my dresses, the white oak at the end of the drive. 

Tears burned under Helma’s lids as she reached under the comforter and pulled the fragment of glass from her foot. A rush of fatigue apprehended her, and, intertwined with Raymond, she was overcome with sleep.

It was still dark when Helma sprung to consciousness, startled to find herself cocooned within Elmer’s quilt against her watchman. Worried Raymond would catch her snuggling him, she shimmied slowly from his grip and crawled off the pull-out mattress. She fumbled invisibly in the den, sidestepped the glass, and returned to her own room, where she reluctantly tucked herself back under the twin-sized sheets. 

Helma awoke at 7:00 a.m. sans alarm as she did every day. The scent of coffee floated up the stairs. She selected her favorite silk nightdress, slid into her slippers, and sprayed a spritz of her most expensive perfume. The glass was gone from the bottom of the stairs. Elmer’s portrait hung nearly frameless with a dime-sized hole above the left brow. 

She forced the front door open to find the birdfeeder all but empty and cracked on the concrete beside Barbara’s embossed childhood footprint. The only remaining pulp was caked to the plastic, and the holy water left no trace. Feeling triumphant, she decided to call her daughter right away to boast about having been right. 

As Helma strode into the doorway of the kitchen, she was surprised to see Raymond’s legs on the table, a newspaper opened across his lap. The blankets had been removed from the windows. In the sunlight, Raymond’s hair looked gray. Smoke swirled from the tip of a cigar. When he turned to look at Helma, he appeared twenty years older and striking. His smile revealed a dazzling set of teeth. 

“Good morning, Sunshine,” he said in a voice all too familiar. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” 

Helma felt as if she would faint, but still, she managed to nod her head. 

---

Shy Watson is a writer and poet who grew up in Missouri. Her fiction appears in Fence, Southwest Review, Joyland, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from the University of Montana in 2023 and has since received support from Monson Arts and The Lighthouse Works.