June 2026

God made me an atheist. To disagree would be heresy.

JEREMY ERIC TENENBAUM, FOUNDING EDITORwith ALEC CALDER JOHNSSON, KELLY RALABATE, and MEG MUNRO

Please subscribe to SORTES through Patreon

SORTES is supported through the beneficent Patreonage of

IRIS JOHNSTON • JOHN STEIGERWALD • JONATHAN MCLELLAND • KELLY RALABATE • PATRICK EBNER • ROBERT POPE • AND SHEILA MURPHY

SORTES is indexed or abstracted in EBSCO

JOIN THE SUAVE SORTES MAILING LIST

Please direct submissions, letters, and ombudsmanry to

sortesmagazine@gmail.com

From PHILADELPHIA, the WORDSHOP of the WORLD

Cover and Events Images: Manual of Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki, 1969

Chris Klassen
“So You Can Be Compartmentalized”

Question number one asked: What do you want out of life?I think the most important thing is helping people, the young girl entered, typing lightly. She was approximately fourteen years old. Her classmates, she saw when she glanced up, seemed already to be keyboarding energetically so she looked back at the screen that stared at her and wanted its emptiness filled and she began a second sentence. For my life, her new words said, if I could bring assistance to people in need, that would be good. I'd like to travel to places where living is difficult and maybe work to make it a bit easier. I saw a show on tv once that talked about a poor country where too many people didn't have clean water. If I could go there and help build wells, that would be good. Or if I could become a nurse, I could help them medically and treat their sicknesses and their diseases and bring them ease. Everyone deserves ease, I think. Even where I live, there are people with no homes and no food and no ease and they sleep on the street. Maybe, if I was a nurse, I could bring them some ease too, without ever having to travel too far. I don't have to be a nurse, that's just a possibility. But I think helping people, in whatever way possible, that's the most important thing. So that's what I want out of my life. The girl took a deep breath.Question number two asked: What do you have to do to achieve your goal?I think, the girl answered with flowing fingers typing, just by wondering about my goal, I've already started to achieve my goal. When I see homeless people and I pay attention instead of just turning away and I know that I want to help them as soon as possible, that's the start of achieving my goal. In fact, once I did even more than that. When I was out walking with a friend and we had just bought a snack and we were eating and walking, I saw an untidy-looking woman with pants with holes and a stained shirt and she was just sitting on a bench staring so I walked up to her and gave her my snack and she smiled. That was me helping people. I'm going to do more of that, I promise. As long as I keep doing that and I keep learning about where I can go to help, whether it's close to where I live or at the other side of the world, that will be progress towards my goal.Question number three asked: Who will you talk to in order to get assistance with your goal?I will talk to my parents first, in fact I've already talked to them a little bit. They are very kind and I know that they help people whenever they can. They both work hard during the day so they don't have a lot of time but I know that they have helped in our community with special volunteer projects like clean-up-the-litter days and donate-your-old-clothing days. I've helped out a bit on those days too. When the days are over and we are having dinner, we've talked about it and I know that helping like that made them feel good. So I will talk to them more and get their opinions. And I will also talk with my teachers if I feel they could help me. They would have to be interested though. I don't know for sure if they're interested in me or my opinions.Question number four asked: What steps will you take to earn your first million dollars?The girl raised her head and looked over her screen towards the front of the classroom at the test administrator who was sitting at the desk motionless with eyes staring and she recognized immediately that interrupting the silence with a concern about what she had just read would be unwelcome. She resumed her typing and answered the question her way, feeling a flush of anxiety. I don't know, she began, what steps I would take to earn a million dollars because I'm not really interested in earning a million dollars. I've never thought about it. It's not my priority. I read once that very little is required for a happy life. It was just one person's idea, I know, but I liked it. So I don't have a goal of earning a million dollars or ever being rich. If a million dollars came to me somehow, I guess it would be great because I could share it. But I can share other things, even things that don't need money at all, like comfort and kindness. So that means I don't have any specific steps to earn a million dollars.Question number five asked: How long will it take you to buy your first mansion?This time the girl raised both her head and her hand and she extended it high and, after a few moments of non-acknowledgement, she waved it gently, trying kindly to get the attention of the test administrator. When she was finally addressed, she was told to put her hand down. She was told brusquely that the test could not be interrupted with any questions. She was told to stop trying to get attention and to resume with her answers, and when she attempted again to interject, the administrator's response was firmer still and even more aggressive and she was warned that no more outbursts would be tolerated. The girl tried to say that it wasn't an outburst, it was just because she was confused. The administrator spoke louder again and told her to shut up and answer the questions. Her classmates stared, unmoving, and she began to type, fearfully and honestly, and she answered, I don't want a mansion, I only want relative comfort. A mansion would not comfort me. A mansion is, in my opinion, unnecessary. Owning a mansion is like bragging to the world and being insulting to the less fortunate at the same time. Why would I brag to people who are struggling when I could help them instead?Question number six asked: In your mansion there is a big closet. What will you acquire so that you can fill it?The girl sat still and felt a burst of anger and felt her face flush, then she looked to her left and to her right. Her classmates were still typing, it seemed energetically. She turned back to her screen and read question number six again and then pressed the return key multiple times, hoping to be able to skip ahead, but a large prompt appeared and informed her that she could not leave any spaces blank. I don't want a mansion, she then entered, I told you that already.Question number seven asked: When you have the option of collecting either expensive jewelry or expensive clothing, which would you choose?"This isn't right," the girl blurted out loudly. "Why do we have to be rich?""Complete the test silently," the administrator rebuked. "This is your last warning."The girl answered question number seven. She typed XXXXXX. She typed XXXXXX for questions number eight and nine without reading them.Question number ten was the last question. Its font was red as a warning, not black like all the others. It began by announcing its finality: This is the final question. Then it stated: Your answers are very important. They will be used to place you on the educational and vocational path that is best for you based on our analysis. Then it asked: Would you like to edit any of your answers? Then it stated: Once you submit, there can be no revisions. And then it automatically reverted all the way back to question number one.The girl re-read her answers with mixed emotions, sure of their truthfulness but, at the same time, wary of their possible consequences. She didn't edit anything or soften anything or eliminate XXXXXX. She scrolled through quickly, arriving again at question number ten, where there was now an additional line allowing for comments. I am not changing anything, she typed, I have made my comments. She inhaled deeply and clicked Submit and saw her words disappear behind a large blue processing circle that spun multiple times.The screen turned black briefly, then a message appeared in large red letters and a mechanized voice spoke, loud enough for all to hear: You are not compatible, it said, your answers are disobedient and you will be compartmentalized. Please await further details which will direct your future development accordingly."What does that mean?" the girl asked out loud. Her classmates were staring at her. No one felt ease."I said no talking," the administrator replied.

David Levine
“Sand In The Microwave”

For eleven years, always in late spring, Michael camped at Assateague, a barrier island off the Virginia coast. He studied the horseshoe crabs during their spawning season. Wind-filled, his lone tent sat on the upslope of the beach. Marram, sea oats, and American dune grasses rustled like a bead curtain behind his tent.Bent over, the water sluicing around his waders, Michael followed the crabs up the beach. He calipered their shells. In his latest journal paper, Michael showed that acidified ocean waters had thinned them. His conclusion: ocean acidification from growing carbon emissions would wipe out the crabs.Their hardened shell bunkers were doing far less for them. During the spring spawning months, the crabs lumbered from the water, exhausted. They came up on the sand, often doubled up with a male crab riding the back of a female. They edged past his tent like moving dinner plates and reached the dune grasses to make their nests.Every year, fewer of them reached the dune. Their shells had become like rice paper. Dust to dust. Carbon to carbon. Once gone, their atoms would be the one thing in the dust pile to live on. Picked up by other creatures still living.Knowing Michael was working on the Assateague beach, his faculty colleague emailed him a Reddit posting. He urged Michael to read it that minute, which he did inside his tent:Check out the Oppenheimer movie. The scientists wondered…If an A-bomb was detonated, would it ignite the atmosphere and kill all living creatures? I worked out the chemistry and calculations…Start with Assateague Island beach sand. The right stuff. It has the perfect proportions of silicate, garnet, feldspar, and broken seashells…Add my secret sauce. Thimblefuls of inorganic oxides and sulfates. Lethal! The right stuff for igniting the atmosphere…Pour half-a-liter of my secret sauce on the sand. Put the concoction in the microwave. Three minutes at high power. Should be enough. No more, no less. To our extinction, the Vulnerable World Practitioner.The posting included a photo of the 1954 atomic bomb test on the Bikini Atoll. Michael was born a year after the photo. He knew that the 1950s were an annihilating decade. Everywhere, the concrete fallout shelters, the hunt for spies, the bomb drills at school. With every dawn, radioactive clouds were expected on the horizon.Studying the photo, Michael decided the bomb cloud was like an equilateral triangle. Its three sixty-degree corners, stable, perfectly balanced. For Michael, a marine crystallography chemist, it was even more spectacular knowing such geometry appeared on the planet, even if man-made and barbaric.Near midnight, a new spring moon gloried on the water. The varnished pink in the clouds had disappeared hours before. The night waves crowded to the shore. Like passengers rushing to an open subway car door.Beside the waves, Michael heard another noise outside his tent. Curious about it, he pulled up the canvas flap. A half-dozen bonfires burned on the beach. At each, someone held a flashlight while two others shoveled sand into cheap plastic buckets."What are you all doing out here?" Michael asked, having walked from his tent to the bonfire and people nearest to him."Sand in the microwave." A man next to the fire answered him. He kept his flashlight pointed on the shovels and his head angled toward the beach.In the guttering firelight, his face was bumpy, disordered. Michael thought it was like the rind of a jackfruit -- an unsmooth face that had been places."So you read the Reddit post?" Michael asked him. Taller than Michael, the man blocked the white daze of the spiral galaxies in the night sky."Of course. A super genius!" Straightening, he turned his head, like that of the lighthouse beacon a mile up the beach."So you're all going home…to do what? Mix different chemicals with the sand? See which one does the trick?""Something like that," the man replied. Michael saw his face better in the firelight: not burned or scorched by the sun and wind, more likely corroded by them."Create an extinction. I assume that's what you're doing here."Michael thought about the photo in the Reddit post. The supernova-sized blast was three and half times brighter than the sun. Blinding light. UVs rocketing into eye retinas."The threat's enough," the man said. "You just have to make people believe the threat."Extinction was Michael's thing. The threats that came with extinction, too, for that matter. The ones that always came before the event. Kind of like hors d'oeuvres served on a silver platter before dinner. Before the big breath-taking extinction."You know the horseshoe crabs are coming ashore tonight," Michael announced."What are they doing?""They'll be heading to the dune. They're coming up to spawn.""Baby horseshoes. Can't wait to see 'em!" The man smiled at Michael, which was a sight he'd never forget: that smile on his red-fisted face."Your bonfires will blind them, once they see them. The fires will scare them back into the water."Michael knew it began that night. The full moon would draw them from the water to the dune. They would face the bonfires. Blinded by the firelight, they would skitter back into the water and not lay their eggs. The end of the line for the crabs."Never saw an eye on a crab," the man replied. "Our fires aren't a problem."They had ten eyes, in fact, delicate eyespots, which dotted their arthropod bodies. Whatever he said to the man, it would be denied. Besides, Michael saw that there was too much danger hulking inside him.Michael walked back to his tent. Stopping, he looked at the water and waited for their arrival. They had survived five mass extinctions. But now, he wondered, their extinction would be in the man's hands.The blinding light: sand in the microwave.

Forest Arthur Ormes
“Last Words”

Ever since my first grade, I had watched them face an auditorium containing the student body and faculty of the primary, junior and high schools of Joshua Cove County. Every year afterwards, I witnessed their numbers dwindle. Eight remained my third-grade. I counted five my sixth. Only three survived when I reached my sophomore year. By the time some of our own Joshua Cove High School graduates started coming back from Korea in the summer of '53, there were none leftI remember that year. When it came time for the annual ceremony, the school principal appeared on stage to announce that the last two remaining Civil War veterans in Joshua Cove County had passed from this life. We all bowed our heads in prayer while the principal thanked God for the sacrifice made by those who now belonged as much to the ages as Lincoln.And so they were gone. All of them. Except one. And every teacher and student who sat in the audience that day knew the one exception.John Westlake was born in Brimfield, Massachusetts. He died in Joshua Cove, Illinois. He had no known survivors. The front page of The Joshua Cove Chronicle declared that Mr. Westlake -- Sergeant John Westlake -- was a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. The chronicle referred to the historical fact that President Abraham Lincoln had hung the medal around his neck for capturing a Confederate general single-handedly during the battle of Gettysburg.In life, John Westlake had refused to attend the annual ceremony at Joshua Cove High School. For the twelve years I attended, the school officials pretended as if the only Civil War veterans left in the surrounding counties were those who consented to sit upon our auditorium stage. Finally, when he no longer had the power of choice, they pulled out John Westlake's memory in public ceremony. His death was announced not only in the front page of The Chronicle, but in the city newspaper up north. His burial was a public ritual. I know, I was there. Along with the mayor of Joshua Cove, the congressman from our district, one of our United States senators, plus four score and more citizens from fifty surrounding miles. All of them attending the funeral of a man who had been actively forgotten since before I was born.Back when he was alive -- and I was going to school -- I lived with my widowed grandma along Dekalb Road. She was over seventy, still active and alert. I had a vague memory of my father who had been tall and attentive and worked as a reporter for the Joshua Cove Chronicle until nineteen forty-three when he got drafted and sent to Europe to fight Hitler. He never came back. My mother took off after she got notified of my father's death, leaving my father's mother to raise me. My mother's parents had died during the depression. There was no one else.

Every spring, I'd see John Westlake getting dragged along by a plow horse through the crooked rows of wheat, harvesting what had been growing from the same land since Civil War days. By October, the field was empty, John Westlake standing in the middle of it, raking up fallen husks.In October of my eleventh-grade year, I came down with mumps. My grandma would stick her head into my room to make sure I was studying my lessons. Sick or not, my education had to continue. She was strict, but fair. I had my algebra book in front of me, my American history book under the blanket. The latter being my strong preference with a particular interest in the Civil War. It was during this time, when I was reading about the battles of Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, that I came to a full appreciation of what I had living down the gravel road from me.My first contact came end of October, after I had recovered from the mumps. When John Westlake noticed that I was staring at him, he waved me over to the plowed-up field where he was breaking up clumps of dirt with a pitchfork. As I walked up, he began barking: "Peanuts! Goobers. Fresh roasted peanuts!"He shot me a mischievous smile. "Candy. Sweet sugared-candy!"By way of an answer to my surprised, puzzled, look, he added: "Used to sell peanuts and candy in the movie houses and burlesque."As if that was sufficient explanation, he resumed breaking up clumps of dirt. I turned and head for school.He was standing in the same field, holding the same pitch fork, when I walked past a week later. He motioned me over with a nod of his head. I tramped across his field, dirt caking my shoes.The old man looked me up and down, smiled, chewed on his toothless mouth, then began telling me about the time he got pushed into working on the stage of a burlesque show. I settled in to listen, making up a tale I could feed Mrs. Goldman, my teacher, as to why I arrived to her class late.He had been selling peanuts in the audience when the burlesque-show manager told him the clown had skipped town. He ordered John Westlake to fill the position. Every weekend afternoons and evenings, John Westlake had to stand on the stage wearing a clown's outfit and painted face. He would squeeze a rubber bulb in his pocket and his clown's tie would stand up stiff as a stud horse's pecker while, on cue, three pretty girls in high heels and shorts strutted across the stage.On one Sunday afternoon during a performance, a woman wearing a purple high-necked blouse strode down the aisle, pointed a finger at a man sitting in the front row and shouted: "You have a wife and children waiting at home!" Instead of having her removed, the manager had the stage lights pointed directly on her. Suddenly the audience began laughing. The woman pursed her thin lips, her high cheek bones and Roman nose turned red beneath the heavy glare of the lights. She stared straight up at John Westlake and declared: "A fine contribution to this shameful place!" Then the woman turned and marched up the aisle and out through the theater doors. When the audience began to applaud, John Westlake looked down and realized that he had inadvertently squeezed the rubber bulb. His clown's tie had been sticking up stiff as can be throughout the entire event.Though he needed it, he quit that job the same day. He said that woman reminded him of the most tragic woman he had ever laid eyes on. When I asked him who that tragic woman was, he called me a "nosey runt," and told me to mind my own business.I stomped off, reviewing my excuse for Mrs. Goldman.

We were into November now. John Westlake had waved me over as I was heading home from a long day of classes. He was asking me if they had gotten around to teaching me any "real history" at that so-called school I attended. I answered that my school was probably big enough to contain twenty of the schoolhouses where he got taught the same "real history" they taught me."Lies! All lies!" he said."Then tell me the truth… if it's all lies!" I snapped back. "Instead of telling me about peanuts and clowns and women in high heels! Tell me your… 'real history.'"The old man's mouth began to quiver. He gave me a look I can't put into words. He reached down, grasped a handful of dirt, squeezed and rolled it through his fingers, raised his nose to the wind like a hound sniffing. And then said: "It'll be mild upcoming winter." He paused. "So you want to know about real history?"

I arrived the following Friday at seven o'clock, just like he had instructed. I stepped onto the wooden pallet which served as a porch, knocked, and waited. A gruff voice answered."Open it. Door's never latched.""Close it tight," the gruff voice ordered.I could see John Westlake propped up in a chair next to a wood-burning stove. The pump in the old man's sink was not out of the ordinary back then.It was more shack than house. A wood-framed bed occupied a small room behind the old man. The dim light from the kerosene lamp revealed a pair of dark, baggy pants and a faded blue flannel shirt. One of the old man's hobnailed shoes was untied. I watched the other shoe, as if separate from its owner, slide closer to the stove."What are you studying in that school you attend?""Algebra, English literature, American history, Biology, Civics.""What kind of work might all this so-called learning get you when you finish your education?""I want to become a reporter, sir. Like my dad. I was hoping studying literature would help get me into a good school of journalism out east, but my… 'undisciplined mouth,' my grandma calls it… got me a C in Mrs. Goldman's English literature class last year.""How did you manage that?""Mrs. Goldman called me crazy when I told her I saw you nearly every day of the week on my way to school. She said John Westlake… that is… you were found dead in your shack a few years ago. When I answered that it must be your ghost I've been talking at all this time, she threw me out of class. I had to go see the principle before she'd let me back in. That's how I got a C.""They call that education!" he exclaimed."A grade C in English doesn't get you into the school of journalism," I answered."Hard for a boy… when he's got no mother or father to argue his side of things.""The other kids told me… Mrs. Goldman's been real touchy ever since the war when her son….""War! Which war!""The war my father got killed fighting Hitler in!" I blurted.The old man lowered his head."A lot of brave men died in that war. I'm sorry your father was one of them.""It's you they call brave, Mister Westlake. Sergeant John Westlake. Hero of Gettysburg. With Lincoln himself …."The old man began chewing on his toothless gums."What kind of reporting do you plan to do, once you finish … this school of journalism?""I'm not sure I'm going to get accepted into a school of journalism. Not with a grade of C in English literature."I stared at the wall behind the old man. The flame from the kerosene lamp flickered. His shadow faded, then sharpened into a clear silhouette. The old man stared at me with a pair of half defiant eyes. His face tightened.Finally, I said: "You invited me here for a reason, Mr. Westlake?"His eyes blinked. He shifted around in his chair, gave a scrutinizing gaze to the shadowy figure on the wall, then turned back to face me."Before I leave this world, I need to tell my story to somebody. May as well be you. If you put real effort into writing it up, the story could get printed in the Joshua Cove Chronicle. Might cancel out that bad grade you got and get you into one of those schools of journalism."John Westlake turned inward, as if reaching deep. "I ain't a hero, son. Never have been."And then he began.

"It was no different at Gettysburg. The same fear of getting thrown into another battle. None of us knew… would not even have guessed… at the history of it."They had us marching because the rebels were invading the North. Lee leading them.""Every man without a set of bars on his shoulder was thinking how all Johnny Reb had to do to keep winning the war was to let the dust and heat and dysentery that was killing us do the rest of the fighting for him. It didn't help to think that the same weather and disease killing us was killing him."'Another rout,' we told to one another.The old man paused, as if he was calling upon reserves of energy he had stored especially to tell this tale."As soon as we heard rifle discharge, my regiment got put in reserve. I knew we were in for a row. Out of pure habit I started listening for the whistle of cannon ball."Our captain ordered ten of us to step out. We received orders to flush out some sharpshooters from a farmhouse within shooting range of some hill one of the generals had decided was important enough to send good men to their deaths. The captain walked away, leaving us alone. We all stared at one another. Just stared…."We checked our rifles. Looked at each other. One fresh fish gave a quick, hollow smile. Then we started moving toward the farmhouse."John Westlake shook his head. "Sharpshooters," he uttered."Two of us got shot dead in our footsteps before we got close. I say, 'we,' because you leave a part of yourself with them when one of your own gets killed. Another got shot before we realized the captain had told us wrong. Not in the farmhouse. A whole nest of them in the trees! Another rifle shot. The fresh fish went down. The rest of us panicked and started running. I threw my rifle down and tossed my haversack to run faster."I didn't stop running. Not until I came into a clearing and saw that house. I was alone. The rest had run off in another direction.

"She was sitting in a brown cushioned chair as I entered the house. Reading from a bible by an unlit lamp set upon the side table. Her brown skirt and full-neck purple blouse gave her high-bridged cheekbones and high-bridged-nose a handsome quality."I would have removed my hat out of respect, but it had fallen off when I had panicked.'Mam,' I said as I stepped cautiously forward. Then I realized it. I was greeting a dead woman. A small, round wound just behind the left eye. Her bible set gently on her lap, as if she was pausing to ponder a verse she had just read. A narrow line of blood had flowed from the wound, and caked."'Mam?' I repeated, knowing the futility of it."I put my face in my hands and started to cry."I lifted my head to stare around me. The day was getting on. I stood alone with this handsome, innocent woman. Did she have a husband? How would word get to him? Or had he been killed, too? I wanted to touch her wound as if my hand could render tender resurrection. I offered a prayer instead. Rather than recite from my feeble memory, I gently lifted the bible from her lap. She had been reading Corinthians. Chapter 15. My eyes fell upon verse 24:'For He must reign, till He hath put all enemies under His feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.'""I never thought… never dreamt… to hear those words again."The old man's shoes shifted slightly."It didn't end for me there. I didn't get a medal for throwing down my rifle."I could hear cannon fire as I made my way back. I figured it had to be union cannon because of the direction and sound. At the top of the hill, I looked across and saw a dozen horsemen disappear over the ridge. I started running in their direction."At the bottom of the hill I found a rebel officer pointing his pistol straight at me. When I raised both my hands to show I was without a weapon, I saw that what was pointing a pistol at me was no less than a Confederate general."I stood in front of him, ready for the bullet. Then that rebel general grasped the barrel of his weapon and said 'Sir. I am your prisoner.' And he surrendered me his pistol."I stared at his gun in my hand."'I removed the bullets,' he added."That general stared down at the stripes on my sleeve. He let out a contemptuous grunt.""'Sergeant,' he told me. 'You are obliged to take me to the commander of your regiment.'"We headed in the direction of the dust and cavalry I had seen riding over the ridge. That rebel general began getting so far ahead of me that he had to slow himself for me to catch up."He led me into the first Union camp he encountered and told the first officer he saw to go and fetch a certain… General Crenshaw. The officer hollered at a captain who stood in a circle of officers staring over a map set upon an old table."Much later, to my astonishment, that rebel general and another general I took to be General Crenshaw stood in an open nearby field. They were talking and laughing like two friends getting drunk in a tavern."I realized, as I stood there surrounded by rifle fire, cavalry entering and leaving the camp, within earshot of a field hospital where I could hear screams of all kinds, knowing that I could be dead before the day's end. As I stood there, I realized that rebel general didn't want one piece of the fighting coming up."I watched General Crenshaw write out a message and hand it to the major. The major told me to surrender the rebel general's pistol. Then he ordered me to rejoin my company, immediately. 'You'll be needed,' he added."I followed on foot behind a lieutenant who had been ordered to escort me and General Crenshaw's message to my company. When we arrived, the lieutenant personally handed General Crenshaw's message to the colonel of my regiment. My captain called me over and ordered me to explain what happened to the ten of us sent to flush out those sharpshooters. I told him how the sharpshooters were in the trees, not the farmhouse. We got shot up and I got separated from my squad, losing my rifle and haversack in the process. I remember how relieved I felt when he told me I was dismissed. Losing your rifle was evidence of cowardice. Men got shot for cowardice."John Westlake sighed a moment."The next day my regiment was brought up quick to reinforce three divisions fighting off a rebel charge. Thousands of rebel soldiers charged our grapeshot, canister, bullets thick as rain. Before they died, the rebel soldiers opened up their trousers in order to ascertain the severity of their gut wounds. I haven't forgotten that sight … haven't been able to forget it all these years."

"One year, eight months and two weeks later, I found myself on special leave in the nation's capital, sitting at a chair in a room inside a grand building housing the president of the United States. General Crenshaw's message which my captain had sent with the lieutenant had been a recommendation for the Medal of Honor. That rebel general had told his friend, General Crenshaw, that the company of rebel soldiers accompanying him -- believing that regiment of Union cavalry I had seen were ready to charge from over the hill -- had abandoned their general in panic, leaving him standing before me, Sergeant Westlake, to whom he had surrendered his pistol. He didn't mention I was without a rifle. My captain never addressed it. He wasn't stupid… that rebel general. He needed to make a hero of me in order to hide the plain truth of him. I dared not contradict his story for fear of revealing my own cowardice.

"Six of us sat in a row of wooden chairs. We were waiting for President Lincoln to enter. Five days previously Lee had surrendered. The capital was still celebrating."I watched the old man stare off into the distance."It was Good Friday."We had been anticipating his entrance, and yet… when President Lincoln entered, his appearance seemed… unexpected. Next to Mr. Lincoln, the secretary looked even more a runt than you are."I turned my head slightly and could see the president taking a medal from one of the six boxes the secretary grasped in his hands. The president presented the medal to the first man. As he presented the second, I could hear the President saying, 'Thank you, thank you.'"Then I saw him place the medal around the third soldier. I turned my head and saw no stripes on the soldier's sleeve, no bars on his shoulders. Mr. Lincoln stooped, and shook that soldier's hand half a dozen times. The fourth soldier accepted his medal stiffly. The president looked tired and worn. By the time he made his way to the fifth man, I could see a kind of glow in Mr. Lincoln's face. When he stepped in front of me, I heard the secretary whisper, 'This is him, Mr. President.'"Mr. Lincoln took a step backwards."'You not only caught the varmint,' he said, 'but you brought his pistol back to boot.'"A smile joined the other lines upon his face. He stepped forward and shook my hand.""And then he was gone. The secretary hurried us through the door, down the stairs and out into the street where the six of us headed in different directions without a word spoken to each other."I would see Mr. Lincoln once more."

"The dome to the White House was still under construction. There was mud on the bottom of the women's elegant dresses. Mud on the toes and heels of the men's leather shoes. Shoes were something I noticed in those days. A lot of soldiers suffered terribly for the lack of a good pair of footwear."And there I was… Massachusetts man in uniform… a medal recently hung round my neck… living with a falsehood.""It was part of their fashion… this capital's people… to have soldiers escort their daughters to the theater. The father of a certain Miss Sarah Russell had provided me with tickets so that I might escort his daughter to the one thousandth performance of Our American Cousin. I remember the tickets: Section E, numbers 167 and 168."Miss Russell and I saw Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln as they arrived. The play was interrupted, the entire audience rose to their feet and the orchestra struck up, 'Hail to the Chief.' Miss Russell whispered in my ear how disappointed she was at General Grant's absence from the presidential party."Suddenly the old man blurted: "'Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal -- you sockdologizing old man-trap.'"For a moment, I was afraid the old man had lost his wits."That poor, pathetic joke came from the last act of the play," he explained. "The President must have told better jokes on his worst days.""I recognized it as a small weapon discharge immediately. Then I heard a scream. I looked up toward the presidential box and saw smoke. Mr. Lincoln was slumped in his chair. A handsome man jumped down to the stage. He raised a knife in the air and shouted something about tyrants in Latin. He fell again, then lifted himself from the floor and dragged himself away. Screaming and crowding followed. I could hear Mrs. Lincoln screaming hysterically. Moments later, the leading actress was at Mrs. Lincoln's side. They began to carry the president down the stairs. They carried the president past Miss Russell and me. I could see blood all over the president's open collar.""A captain hollered he needed a fifth man to help carry the president. He pointed at me. I excused myself to Miss Russell. I moved forward and grasped the right side of the president. At the stairway leading to the street, the captain unsheathed his sword, raised it, and cried: 'Clear out! Clear out, you sons of bitches!' He cleared a path for the president."We began carrying the President toward the boarding house across the street. Once, during our passage, the young doctor attending Mr. Lincoln stopped us and cleared the blood from the president's head wound. The door of the first house was locked. At the next house, a man with a lantern motioned for us to enter. When we finally got the president into the room, we lay the president on his back across a wooden bed. The captain told another soldier and me to guard the door."Soon afterwards, Mrs. Lincoln arrived. Her husband's legs were hanging out from the bed he was so tall. When she saw them shift the president diagonally across the bed so he would be more comfortable, Mrs. Lincoln began screaming: 'I killed him. I killed him.' A short time later, the president's son arrived. When he saw his father, he began to sob. The president's secretary entered. A man I learned was the Secretary of War arrived and immediately began dictating commands as if he was the new head of government. Later, during the night, he called me over. 'Keep them out of here,' he ordered. 'Give the other guard my orders.'"It was early morning now. Mrs. Lincoln had been quieted. The surgeon-general of the United States had arrived. He again checked the president's pulse and announced it was weakening. The young doctor who had been attending to Mr. Lincoln continued to hold his hand. The room was crowded with government officials."That is when I saw it. A slight… just a slight tightening of Mr. Lincoln's hand around the grasping hand of the young doctor. I saw the young doctor bend forward. He placed his ear to the president's mouth. No one seemed to take any more notice of this gesture than they had the same gesture he had been offering all through the night."But I noticed. God help me, but I noticed. Mr. Lincoln -- the young doctor's ear to his mouth -- moved his lips slightly.""A few minutes later the surgeon-general announced that the president's breathing had stopped. A minute later he announced that the president's heart had stopped beating. Shortly after that, the Secretary of War declared the president dead."The other guard was told to leave his post. Then I was dismissed. A dozen soldiers all carrying rifles had entered and were standing guard around Mr. Lincoln's body. Behind me, I could hear the Secretary of War dictating to Mr. Lincoln's secretary: 'Give it to the newspapers. Immediately!'"Outside, it was just getting light. The falling rain grew less intense as I began walking. Ahead of me, the figure of the young doctor appeared. He held his hands to his face, sobbing. I watched him remove a blood-soaked cuff as I approached."'Sir?' he said, startled.""I understood why he was frightened. Throughout that night the Secretary of War had been issuing declarations that the remaining rebel government had sent out assassins to murder the entire cabinet. The doctor could have taken me for an assassin in union uniform. That is how things felt that terrible night.""'I stood guard at the door all night, doctor,' I said, trying to relieve his fear. 'I guess you did not notice me.'""'Oh yes,' he said. 'The sergeant at the door who….'""'I saw him move his lips, doctor. His last words. You heard them. Please…. I've fought all this time. As much for what he said ….'""The sight of Mr. Lincoln's blood as the doctor removed his other cuff gave me pause."'I will keep these cuffs all my life,' he said."He looked at me and smiled."'You must be tired, Sergeant. You should….'"'Please, sir.'"The doctor sighed. 'Sergeant, it wasn't…. I'm not sure if what I heard was no more than the president's death gasp.""'I saw his hand squeeze yours. His lips… moved.'"The doctor lowered his eyes, then stared sadly into mine."'I can't be sure… but… I believe Mr. Lincoln said: "Last enemy… destroyed… be death.""He began to cry again. Then he turned and walked off into the rain."I have never forgotten those five words."John Westlake shook his head, stared up at me: "There's your story, son. Real history.""Mister Westlake…."He raised his right hand. "No," he muttered, shaking his head. "No." He pointed his head toward the door for me to leave.I raised my hand."Get out," he said, before I could speak.I gave an extra tug as I pulled the door closed behind me.

I don't know why, but I never walked into the offices of The Joshua Cove Chronicle that morning. Instead, I placed the brown envelope containing John Westlake's story in a cardboard box, then shoved the box into the corner of my closet. Four weeks later, John Westlake was found dead in his shack, just like Mrs. Goldman had said, only seven years premature in her obituary. Over the decades, that brown envelope shared company with dozens of newspaper clippings I had written. Eventually, the brown envelope got removed, and the old man's story taken out. Real history, as John Westlake used to call it.

Christiana Drevets
Three Poems

“Novalis In The Salt Mines”

his lyricism ended and began in the salt mines.
letting his mind skate along the cold tons of rock overhead,
considering the planets above him rocking stubbornly into orbit.sitting by the mirrored lakes, he plunged his tired hands right into them.
relieving the ache from so many hours underground.
tunneling into the hushed auditorium, avoiding the chords of a more practical asteroid.he was a man who spoke the hard words and did well in business.
the kind to summon the orchestra before the coda had been written.
the kind of man to catch his soul in the backwards net of an early death,but he spent those young years in a pocket of deep earth making poems.
tending ideas against the brass and thundering sound of the brine pump.
hearing the ragged echo of men's breathing against the cavern walls.when he was walking lone and tired through those weeks.
and saw the other men's backs bent in labor,
he thought they looked like flowers pressed down by a flat wind.some nights when i am under the same spell of the whole world dreaming,
i cast out the net of my memory
and pull in the stark image of the field above those salt mines.where a man is standing before me with his hands out.
while the rain comes down to be a coat for the mountains.
and ice forms in the high elevations where the pools lay green and shallow.and of course he is saying some words, but the wind keeps on carrying them downhill.
i see his teeth glinting in the light of his lantern. all i can do is give him a red hymnal.
and hold his name for several moments, even after his face has washed away.

“Queen Of Cups”

you could be many things and none of them fury.
in a darker grimoire, a foggy inhalation.
signs of life: breath tic, drool drop.
see, your want is a hook newly greased.
so you await the wracking future.
given sink, assume clogged pipe.
given pain, assume the bare flesh happening.
okay, one word comes back like a lodestone.
that want is a glimpse of another world's register.
your scale does not fit life but.
incidentally your sky is a gorgeous sky.
if so, let the wrinkling happen.
it's true one impulse never ripens.
okay, that's a mask you are wearing already.
your frames may be tired of holding the stories.
you are spilling out but is that breaking.

“August Night With Violins”

I walk to the tomb without you and it's hot out
Hard slant of summer with a coat of sweat all down my throat
The spark bugs are out and I didn't expect them to be
Their yellow, caustic glowing carpets
The ground in a sort of surprise electronic fieldOk, I am floating through the natural electronic
While mosquitoes take their greedy pulls at me
And I don't blame the mosquitos but I wish
I could be out longer without their aggression
Or I wish you were here and had thought to bring bug sprayOr I wish there was something about spark bugs
That didn't seem doomed to be put in a jar
Their hovering bodies half disappearing
In every other moment
Into the high glass jar of a child's metaphorOnly to be rediscovered when they light again
But this time in a different pattern
A levitating transparency, resisting blueprint,
Or perhaps purpose. And didn't I wish
I felt that same steady light burn through meIt's the heat of the summer and last year
You were here with me
Sometimes early when others were piling into bars,
The same bench was waiting for us
By the river like a covetous ideaAn idea waiting to be had by two different people
At the same time. And we could gladly slip into it
Going hysterical during a google image search
For a close-up photo
Of the mouth of a sea anemoneIts perfectly fivefold, architectural shape
Which would then cause us to grow sober
At the depth of the ocean
Miles where things we knew no name for
Crawled and blistered and perhaps were immortalWe might laugh then about all of our siblings
Being named after men from the bible
How the tomb of a warring man said Let Us Have Peace
How a frog which had eaten a spark bug
Had started glowing from the insideBut this year when the summer
With beautiful hair flies towards me
It's not a faint dose of mortality
She spells out with her
Wrinkled and radiant hands

Souvenir Irimaso Shimwa
Two Poems

“Fax To The Phone”

We played after rain when we were kids,
my friend, oh how we change!You went and got baptized at puberty,
the harvest enjoyed a good ride
on your bike when spring came.
You still took it to market,
but gin and gossip you also learnt;
i hope the old ladies who kept poison under
their bed sheets didn't teach you envy, friend.i went and sweated for the diploma;
in town, i learnt to use napkins
in ways that conceal the nest i flew from.
Pretty women my eyes have seen,
and towers too.
i now dress my shoulder in coldness
and my voice's necklace is presumption.you made time so you married,
i want name so i stay up late.

“And I Concede”

I built a mighty city in the ruins of history;
I tilled this barren land until the morning dew
fell off my face and paid for their inequities.
Now you plough; now you make wine.You can't make a home in the prostitute's house,
But you visit in the blindest hour of the sun.
A burglary for a book you can't read --
You long for a cry of praise
From these people you'll rule over,
But you have no ears nor heart.A backbone is a fable in a foreign language;
You don't understand.
A man now and a feather later --
For thirty pieces of silver, you sold your honor.I was king to my land, and now, on your sword,
My body will fall.
But not my soul, for it can't be killed by
An unrefined hand

Tushar Sen
“Brush And Blood”

“Pandemonium, Iteration ∞”

They did not fall.
They were recompiled.Gravity was a suggestion
deprecated in the first war.What you call Hell
is an architecture problem --
load-bearing ambition,
infinite recursion of will.We built columns to hold up the idea of ourselves.
They glow because collapse is expensive.Satan is not a figure.
He is a protocol --
root access granted
to the most persuasive failure.Around him:
processes humming,
millions of obedient fires
executing eternity without complaint.No screams.
Noise was optimized out.Only a low red latency
between desire
and consequence.Look closer --a staircase assembled
from abandoned versions of prayer,
each step warm
as if something once knelt there.Those are not demons.
They are iterations.
Each one convinced
this version will stabilize.But the city keeps expanding,
because error scales faster than correction.Bridges reach nowhere
and call it expansion.
Light leaks upward
and calls it progress.Above --
(if “above” still compiles) --
someone once defined heaven
as an unreachable constant.We replaced it
with a moving target.Now even rebellion
runs on schedule.Even ruin
has governance.Even fire
needs permission.And still --at the center,
the protocol loops:build / burn / build / burnuntil the system learns
there is no outside --and continues anyway.

“The Last Supper By Leonardo Da Vinci”

The table is already arranged
before the words arrive.
Bread set in measured pieces,
hands within reach of it.
Plates hold their shallow certainty.
The cloth falls without crease.
Leonardo gives us the Holy Grail --
and leaves it nowhere on the table.
Cups are set before them,
ordinary, repeated,
each holding its portion of wine.
Nothing gathers. He speaks it plainly.
Not accusation --
only a placement
that does not choose its host.
And the room shifts.
A hand pauses mid-reach.
Another withdraws.
One leans forward
as if closeness could undo it.
Each man turns inward
to locate himself
inside the sentence.
One of you.
The words do not repeat,
but they continue --
moving across faces
without settling.
Bread is broken without hunger.
Wine is lifted without thirst.
The act of sharing has already failed.
What could have been held
in one vessel
is already dispersed among them.
He does not name him.
That is the mercy --
and the fracture.
For now, the betrayal
belongs to all of them,
circulating without rest.
Even the one who knows
cannot contain it alone.
His hand remains
near the same bread,
the same small cups,
as if nearness
could still resemble belonging.
Nothing is undone.
The table remains.
The bodies remain.
The night does not intervene.
Only this --
a moment held open,
where each man sits
beside what he might become,
and cannot leave
without carrying it.

James Entworth
“Just Like Spearmint”

I thought there was a kind of victory in leaving the hospital the same as I arrived, unbroken and all potential. A nurse wheeled me out of the delivery room into a long hallway leading to reception, where families waited to claim new members. My hands grasped metal instead of flesh, and I realized they'd made the hallway so long to give each new mother a few more moments with her baby, before all the others had their turn. Under different circumstances, each crack in the tile we passed over would have been one step closer to letting go.On the way home, we drove by a man singing on the street corner for pennies. I was sprawled out in the back seat -- the baby was so late that I couldn't fit in the front -- and through the window I watched the man's long, bony fingers move delicately over the frets on his guitar.Mom used to say it was funny how a guitar had to be hollow inside for it to work. She'd take my hands in hers and guide them over the strings, since she knew I never practiced.When we got home, my husband asked if I'd like some pennyroyal tea with honey -- he said it tasted just like spearmint. I said no, since I don't like honey in my tea.

I wasn't there when they did it. They put me away, in a hidden place. My husband said that was a mercy, but I thought if I'd been there I could have at least looked and seen what they'd taken. And checked when they pulled it out whether its eyes were closed or open.After a few days in the hospital I was home again. The dishes had piled up while I was away, and my fingers were raw from scrubbing. I could smell the pennyroyal from inside one of the cabinets, so I took a leaf out of the jar. Just to see what it tasted like.Through the window I saw a robin in the birch. Had a twig in her beak. The twig was nearly the size of the bird, and I thought she looked silly, strutting cross-eyed along the branch. As I watched her, the pennyroyal started to dissolve in my mouth. I looked down at the cabinet and saw that my hand was underneath my shirt. Felt it on my skin, tracing the scars that ran up the length of my belly. My fingers glided over stitches like frets, and I smiled at how my seams were sewn so tight that none of me could ever leak out.

Russ Bickerstaff
“Apartment 1A”

Okay. Here it is. Don't mind the smell, they've been cleaning the carpet. And they've painted the walls again. It should go away in a few hours. What I'm saying is that it doesn't always smell like this. Go ahead. look around. That's a new air conditioner. We've got free internet here just like all the others. So you see that the apartment is more or less like the rest of them. It's a little smaller, but the layout's more or less the same. This one has been empty for a while, mostly because they're charging the same amount for a slightly smaller apartment. They won't let me bring the cost down for anyone. (I'd asked.) Kind of a tough sell, but a cozy space for the right person.I'd been the right person not too long ago, actually. I'd actually been renting this place myself as an extra apartment for a while. No, really -- I don't have to tell you this, but it'll probably explain. It's actually kind of a funny story. The guy who lived here before me was schizophrenic. The state decided he was functional enough to live outside of the mental health facilities and they set him up with this place. The company does that on occasion -- helps us fill out the places that aren't full and makes sure we've got steady cash flow coming in from all the apartments. Anyway -- they set this schizophrenic guy up in this apartment.He seemed like a nice guy. Actually kind of reminded me of my mom for some reason. Always real quiet. Thick black beard with streaks of grey in it. And these really, really thick glasses with thick black frames. Seemed like a perfectly normal guy. Not crazy or anything, but then I guess if he he was crazy enough to look crazy, they never would've let him out of the state mental health place.Guy moves in, He's got his state-assigned job doing whatever it is that he's doing. Regular phone calls from his social worker. The whole bit. Couple of months later, the tenants above him were playing their music loud. I don't know--the acoustics of the place are weird. I'm not going to be hearing them down the hall but right below? It might've been really deafening or whatever. So they're playing their music real loud. And he was hearing it downstairs. He was annoyed or whatever, so this guy went upstairs with a table leg and beat one of them to death. No joke. By the time I got there it was all over. The cops came by, said hello and took the guy into custody. The guy was sent to prison and we had to clean-up.The place was a mess. But there was something strange about it. It's not just that he was a hoarder--it's that he was hoarding things in the apartment that actually made use of more space than was technically in here. I know it sounds strange, but it's the truth. Evidently he was placing things in here in just the right way that it actually bent the space around the apartment. I know--I wouldn't believe me either. You really would have had to see the place before...I knew a couple of people in the university who were in advanced theoretical physics. They knew a few guys who had other specialties and they actually came in and looked around. Evidently he'd placed things in the apartment just right so as to expand the space inside of the apartment without doing any structural damage to it. It's like...advanced theoretical stuff. They say the ancient Egyptians were working on something like that with the geometry of the pyramids. Messed-up stuff. So this schizophrenic guy was working on the same type of thing. Place the right things together in the right ways and the space grows.Place WAS a mess, though. Anyway -- the guys at the university said it was deliciously paradoxical (I think were the words they used) and that they would love to study it some more. The property management company was okay with me holding onto the place so long as I paid rent and it became kind of a weird facility for advanced study. Weird thing was that they didn't even ask about it or anything like that. They just sort of let it be. And that got me wondering a whole lot about what kind of company I'm working for, but anyway... they just kept excavating this huge space inside the apartment. Before long they were all living out of the space in their own little cluttered, sweaty house or mansion-sized sections of it. Evidently they turned enough corners to find what seemed like kind of an infinite space inside the apartment. At first it just looked really, really big. Then they found the tunnels and mountain ranges and things. Messed up.Of course, the space itself ended up having personality and communicating with us. It only makes sense, I mean like... if you fold a piece of paper in just the right way it looks like a horse or whatever. Well evidently if you fold space and expand it in enough ways it starts to gain a personality. Go figure. Difficult to explain exactly how it was, we just knew what the space wanted. It didn't speak with words. It spoke with everything else. Kind of hard to explain. And no it wasn't like... god or whatever. It was just some guy. Just some guy who didn't actually exist like normal people. Kind of a dick actually. But this weird otherworldly entity -- it's one of those douche bags you just need to help out just so you can shut him up, y'know?The voice would only say weird and cryptic things at first. Could've sworn I'd heard it recite some Jim Morrison somewhere in there. But that wasn't weird. It was just like... sharing the space with a really weird roommate or something. It got a little weird when it started asking us to do things. And I thought the whole thing was a little creepy, so I started to clean-up. Whole sections of the infinite maze of junk started to collapse. The voice of the space was pissed off at first, but then it started getting less and less frequent. And now the place is completely cleaned-up. Haven't heard anything here in at least a month, but I haven't been hanging out here as much, so who knows?Anyway, like I say, it costs just as much as the rest of the apartments in the place, but you never know. It's a little smaller, but place things in here in just the right way and who knows? I mean, it happened here once before, right? I mean -- you don't have to go listening to any voices or anything crazy like that. But y'know: put the couch in just the right way and the TV in just the right way and the coffee table and who knows? You just might end up getting a little bit more out of this place than you'd think.

Peter Uttal
“Sweet Dreams, Janjak”

Janjak Bertin was ugly. In all his seventeen years, nobody ever looked him in the eye, except his manman, Marie.Marie Bertin was petite and pretty, with rich bronze-brown skin and straight white teeth.She was a seamstress and a prostitute.In the daytime, she took in sewing, and in the pitch-black night, she went down to the docks where the tourist ships came in. She was not alone in this; there were throngs of muddy-black women who would do anything, anything, for one Haitian gourde, about twenty cents in US currency.Beyond the shadows of the cruise ships, they squeezed the men's crotches and put their index fingers in their mouths and made slurping noises. They couldn't speak English or French, and were in fierce competition with each other, so this groping and sign language were about as discreet as they would get.Marie Bertin was no different. Her sewing, no matter how much she did, never bought enough food for the two of them. Together, they lived in an improvised hut made of scrap wood, scrap metal and cardboard, no bigger than six feet on a side, barely high enough to stand up in. No electricity, no plumbing, no water, and no floor. Lying in the dirt were two grass sleeping mats, a discarded steel auto wheel that they used to burn their charcoal in, a dented cooking pot, and a metal bucket. A clothesline from corner to corner, with a simple red dress hanging, completed the list of their furnishings.Janjak's ugliness was due to a severe harelip, through which you could see his awful twisted teeth. And he had a golf ball-sized growth below his left eye. The pressure and pain from it closed the eye shut. Nobody knew what caused it. Janjak had never seen a doctor, ever.The neighbors thought he was cursed.Marie Bertin did not come to prostitution because of a lack of morals, or faith, or strength. The simple fact was that Port-au-Prince had no work to offer, no industry, no factories, no government services. Some money could be made in painting primitive pictures for sale to the tourists. If a woman couldn't paint, she became a prostitute.Janjak tried many times to get work, but people would not look at him, much less converse or offer employment. Mostly he stayed in the shack. The only other place he felt comfortable was in the darkness of the ten-centime movie theater, which was the only affordable entertainment for illiterate people who had no electricity for television. Sometimes he helped with the sewing. Marie brought food and water. This was their life, until the winter of 1977, when disaster struck. The great dengue fever epidemic had come to Port-au-Prince.Marie lay on the dirt floor, delirious from fever. "Zo mwen yo! Zo mwen yo!" she cried. "My bones! My bones!" Haitians call it the bone-break fever, because it makes your bones hurt so badly it feels like they are breaking.Janjak tried to hold her still, but she shook too violently. He felt her head. It was hot as a loaf in the oven. Her rag of a nightgown was completely drenched. She was screaming now, but he could no longer understand her."Wait here Manman, I will run and get a doctor!"Janjak ran. He ran out the door. He ran downhill between dozens of ramshackle huts, so close together that he had to keep his arms tucked in to avoid tearing his flesh against the jagged walls on either side. He ran through the neighborhood of rough concrete houses, small ten by ten foot boxes set thirty inches apart on all sides, again with his arms tucked in, not only to avoid grating his skin off the bones, but to avoid touching the overpowering stench of urine that developed when six or eight or ten people shared a cubicle with no plumbing and had to urinate between the houses.He ran by the water spout, a jutting pipe that shot water out for three hours a day, while hundreds of people waited in line with their buckets, jugs and jars, waiting to bring drinking water to their tiny hovels.He ran by the river, or what used to be the river. Now it was covered twelve inches deep in the feces of the thousands of people from the huts, who had no other place to do their business. The stench was so thick he could taste it on the sides of his tongue.Now on level ground, he ran past dozens of tiny hovels until he reached the narrow, dusty street.His chest burned, his sides cramped, but he kept on running. Past the junk yards, past the "restaurants" (usually several workers waiting in line before a cauldron hanging over an open fire).He ran past the shops where the Arabs had rolls of textiles piled to the ceilings. He ran past the open-air market. He ran past the office buildings. He ran past the police station.He ran into the emergency room of the hospital.There were people everywhere. Sitting on benches, leaning on walls, lying on the floor. All shaking, shaking, shaking. Teeth chattering, moaning, yelling, screaming for help.Janjak knew what a doctor looked like. He had seen them in the movies. The white coats. The white coats. That black thing around their necks.He found one on the emergency room floor."Doctor, you must come with me! Manman m, li pral mouri!" he cried. "My mother, she is going to die!""I'm sorry," he mumbled, turned his back, and continued tending to his patient.Janjak grabbed the doctor's arm and pulled. "Manman m, manman m!" he shouted, tears rolling down his distorted face.The doctor looked at Janjak's face for the first time and started. "Jesus!" he said, before he could stop himself.Two large men pulled Janjak off the doctor, hustled him out into the street and dumped him into the dirt. Janjak went face first. He could taste the dust, feel the grit on his twisted teeth.Desolate, he ran back to his house. He wanted to stop to buy two aspirin pills, but he had no money.When he got back, panting and wheezing, his mother was still lying on the dirt floor, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. She was no longer shaking. She was perfectly still. He grabbed her hand. It was limp and cold.He sat and wept.Janjak had no friends. The other teens did not like to look at him. He had no living relatives. He didn't know who his father was. Maybe his papa ran away when he saw his baby's twisted face. Maybe he was one of his mother's anonymous customers. She had never mentioned Janjak's father. Janjak had asked, but never got a reply. Now there was nobody to ask.He was alone.Janjak touched his mother's forearms. He touched his mother's calves. They were still warm.He sat. He had nowhere to go. He had no one to tell.His mother's forearms got cold. Her calves got cold. Then her thighs, her upper arms. Her forehead. He sat for hours, until the last bit of heat left her torso. He sat all night, weeping occasionally.

The next day he went down to the pipe with his water bucket. He waited in line for an hour. He filled the bucket to the rim and headed back home.He took off his mother's filthy, tattered gown, and washed his mother's body, now heavy with death. He washed her arms and legs. He washed her naked torso, trying to avert his eyes. He turned her petite body over and washed her back. He rolled her back over again.His mother had two dresses: a tattered white shift, which she wore during the day, and the red one, the special dress that she wore on her nightly trips downtown.He took the red dress from the clothes line and put it on her. It was slow, heavy work. He folded her hands over her chest. He found two centimes in her purse and put them on her eyes.How would he bury her? He didn't know.Then he remembered. Under his mother's sleeping mat, she had buried a coffee tin, with her meager savings inside.Using his bare fingers to claw at the earth, he dug it up. There were fifty-three gourdes inside, just enough, he hoped, to buy a coffin.But he didn't know where to buy one. He sat and wept again.

All along, the neighbors had been hearing Janjak's cries through the almost non-existent walls of his hovel, and they knew: the ugly-face boy's mother was dead.Fearful of being cursed themselves, three neighbors, short, stout round-faced women with brightly colored scarves on their heads, went to see Ernst Miot. Ernst was a houngan, a vodou priest.Ernst was a tall, handsome, dark-black man, with wide shoulders and a strong, striding gait. "Don't worry. I will take care of it," he said, "You will be in no danger from the ugly boy's curse."Ernst Miot had many duties. He presided over rituals to contact or calm the loa. He healed the sick. He prepared potions for all kinds of purposes. He foretold the future and interpreted dreams. He performed animal sacrifice. He created spells, and offered protection from spells initiated by others.Ernst, unlike a Catholic priest, was not supported by a church, or paid a salary. He charged his clients for individual services, and that is how he made his living.That evening Ernst Miot went to Janjak's tiny hovel. Each sat on a dirty grass sleeping mat. "Don't worry about the funeral," said Ernst, "I will take care of that. Give me what money you have, and I will take care of the coffin for you."The next morning, Ernst appeared at Janjak's door with two men who were carrying a plain pine box. It was completely rectangular, made of rough-hewn lumber. It resembled a shipping crate. Ernst went into the hut, and emerged carrying Marie's cold, stiff body. He gently placed it in the container, and one of his men nailed the top shut. They carried her away. Janjak followed, head down.Janjak's neighbors stood and stared as Janjak and the three men disappeared down the narrow alley between the decrepit shacks. The alley was just wide enough for them to pass. When they needed to negotiate a tight corner, they had to steeply tilt the pine box.Janjak followed Ernst and his two men to the graveyard, where a grave was already dug. The men set the long pine box next to the grave. Ernst spoke at length, gesticulating wildly, while the men went to get the shovels.When Ernst finished speaking, the men gently lowered the box into the grave and began shoveling. All this time, Janjak stared, a vacant expression on his face.When the men were done, Ernst asked Janjak, "Are you hungry?"Janjak had not eaten since the onset of his mother's illness, two days before."Mwen grangou," answered Janjak. "I am very hungry.""Come then, to my house," said Ernst, "And you will eat."Janjak was grateful. He had never been invited to eat at anyone's house before, and he was so dreadfully hungry.He followed Ernst to his home, which was constructed of cinder blocks and had a corrugated steel roof. It had several windows. The windows had no glass, but they had white cotton curtains, and wrought iron cages for protection from intruders.Inside, the floors were carpeted wall-to-wall with squares of woven grass mat. Ernst sat Janjak down at a mahogany table while Ernst's wife warmed some griot (deep fried pork bits) and fried plantains. Ernst went into the kitchen and prepared the lemonade himself.Ernst returned to the living room with the plate of food and glass of lemonade, and set them in front of Janjak. He left Janjak alone to eat his lunch. Ernst knew that Janjak would prefer it that way, as eating griot with a severe harelip can be a difficult and messy task.When Janjak was finished, Ernst returned and said, "Well, young man, I guess it is time for you to return home. I will walk with you."Janjak said, "You have been so kind. Thank you for the food. And thank you for helping me with my manman. There is no need for you to walk me home. I can find the way.""Please," said the houngan, "It is the least I can do."They left Ernst's house walking side by side, but soon had to walk in single file to negotiate the narrow pathways in Janjak's humble neighborhood.As they approached Janjak's little hut, Janjak suddenly felt weak and exhausted. His legs turned to rubber. Ernst quickly grabbed him around the waist, and hoisted Janjak's limp arm around his broad shoulder.Half-carrying, half-dragging Janjak, he struggled between the last few houses. Entering Janjak's shack, he gently laid him down on one of the grass mats. He folded Janjak's arms across his chest, and left silently through the door.

Janjak lay and stared at the ceiling. What is happening to me? he thought. I feel so strange, so weak.There's something wrong with me. Am I sick? Do I have the fever?No, I do not feel feverish. My head is not hot. My bones do not hurt. Yet I feel so strange.I'm thirsty. I think there's some water left. I'll…I…I…can't…move. Oh my god, I can't move!I can't move my arms! I can't move my legs!Mwen bezwen ѐd, he thought. I need help."Help! Help!" he shouted. "Help! Help!"But no sound came out. His tongue was still. His lips were frozen shut. His chest didn't heave.Help! Help! he screamed. But the scream was only within his head. Inside the shack, it was silent.I need to think. I'll close my eyes and think.I…can't…close…my…eyes. I can't close my eyes! I can't close my eyes!What is happening to me?Janjak continued to think and panic and silently scream throughout the night. At times, he ran out of thoughts, and inside his mind, he quieted down.He could feel his weight, feel the pressure of the bedroll against his back, feel the mugginess of the Haitian night.From the corner of his eye, he saw something moving at the bottom of the makeshift wall nearest his head. It was dark in the hovel, and the moving thing was black, about the size of a two-liter soda bottle.A rat! he thought, Oh my god, it's a rat!I'll throw something at it! Where's the bucket?I can't see the bucket. Wait. I can't move my head. I forgot. My god, I can't move my head! I can't move! I can't get the bucket!The rat! The rat! He's coming closer!The rat slithered lightly against Janjak's shoulder, and then his neck.What is he doing? He's sniffing my face. Why? What is he going to do?The rat put his forepaws on Janjak's cheek. He sniffed around Janjak's mouth. His nose. His eye.The rat dropped to all fours. Janjak could feel him sniffing his ear.Suddenly -- The rat bit his ear! He took a chunk right out of it!My ear! My ear! Janjak screamed, soundlessly. My god, my god, he's eating my ear!I can't do anything! He's eating my ear!Janjak silently screamed as the rat took a bite from his ear, paused, and then took another, and then another. The ear was almost gone now. He could feel the warm blood dripping down the back of his head.The rat stopped eating for a moment, and began sniffing around Janjak's head again. And out of the corner of his eye, Janjak saw something moving around the hole where the rat had first entered.A rat. Another rat!And… another! And another! And another!Janjak could make out at least six rats. And then more. And more.He smelled their rancid, musky odor.They surrounded his head, his arms, his legs, his bare feet. They climbed on his chest. He felt their weight.I've got to move! I have to scare them off. I have to let them know I'm alive. But…I…can't…move. I can't move! I can't move!!!Janjak braced his mind for the pain in his arms, his legs, his feet, his neck. But there was none.And then…the rats were gone.They didn't turn and creep away. They didn't scatter. They didn't move at all.They were just…gone!Was I dreaming? Was I asleep? How do I know if I'm awake or asleep if I can't close my eyes?Janjak continued to stare at the tin roof. He tried to relax his mind. He tried to think. Hours passed.How did this happen to me? Did someone put a spell on me? But I've never heard of a spell like this one. I must be sick. But I have never heard of a sickness like this one, either. What is this?Perhaps someone will discover me here and bring the houngan. He will be able to help me.Janjak stared at the roof. Gradually he could see some sunlight peeking through the tiny holes in the roof, through the big cracks in the walls. It was morning.A face and broad shoulders entered his line of sight.Ernst! he shouted to himself. He would have smiled if not for his wooden facial muscles. The houngan! He will help me!The houngan bent down and felt Janjak's forehead. "Cold," he muttered to himself.Then, as quickly as he had entered, Ernst was gone.Where did he go? wondered Janjak. He must have gone to fix up a potion. He'll be back. He's going to save me. Thank god, he's going to save me.Time passed. Janjak began to wonder why it was taking Ernst so long to return. But was it a long time? He had no way to measure.Some time later, Janjak heard some footsteps working uphill between the shacks. Heavy footsteps. Must be men. He heard the men put down something heavy outside his shack. Someone entered.Once again, he saw the familiar face and broad shoulders. Ernst, he thought. He's come back to save me!

Then, with one arm under Janjak's shoulders and one under his legs, Ernst lifted Janjak, shifted his weight for a better grip, and carried his limp body out the door.Thank God, Janjak thought, feeling the early morning heat on his skin, but where is he taking me?Ernst gently laid Janjak in the long pine box his men had brought.A box, Janjak thought, Why is he putting me in a box?Slowly it dawned on him.Oh, no! They think I'm dead!No, no! I'm alive! Look at me! I'm alive! I can see you! I can think! I'm alive! Why can't you see that? Please! Please! Listen to me! I'm alive I tell you!Janjak continued to silently scream as the men quickly slid the top over the box and began nailing it down.With the sound of the banging, several neighbors gathered, and stared."He died during the night," said Ernst. "We will see to it that he is buried."Bon debak, the neighbors thought, Good riddance. But they said nothing, not wanting to speak ill of the dead, especially within earshot of the houngan.The men carried the heavy coffin down the sloping passageways between the huts, tilting it as necessary to get around tight corners. Once, the men dropped one end of the box. Janjak was not hurt. He was too terrified to feel any discomfort.After a long walk, Janjak felt the men put his box down on soft earth and grass. They picked up the box again, and soon he had a sensation of being lowered. Then the box bottomed out again on a harder surface. Some rocks made a screeching noise against the bottom of the wooden box as the men slid it into place.The first shovel full of dirt hit it just over Janjak's head. It didn't dawn on him immediately, but a small amount of dirt fell between the slats of the wood directly above his face. It sprinkled on his nose and in his eyes. It stung, but he couldn't blink.They're burying me. They think I'm dead.Help, Help! he screamed soundlessly. Help!In his own head, he whimpered, Help. Help. I'm alive. Please don't bury me. Please…Janjak heard each shovel-full hit the surface of his coffin, each making him feel more and more desperate. The men continued until the surface of the grave was level with the craggy grass around it.He tried to see, but there was no light inside with him. It was black; blacker than death. Inside his head, wordlessly, he screamed and screamed and screamed. The shrieking went on for hours, without a word or thought.The boy felt only terror. He had no more thoughts. Janjak had gone insane.There was no way of telling how much time had passed before Janjak heard shovels digging out the earth above.Two men hoisted the box out of the grave as Ernst stood and watched. They pried the lid off and tossed it to the side.Janjak saw the stars. It was very late at night.The houngan ripped open the boy's rancid button-down shirt, and rubbed some sort of salve into his chest. Janjak's mobility slowly returned, but not his sanity, nor his will to live.The houngan bent over Janjak's face, and said loudly, "Rise up!"Stiffly, the youth clutched the sides of the coffin, and slowly hoisted himself to his feet."Follow me!" the houngan roared at Janjak.Janjak haltingly followed Ernst to the rear of a small white pickup truck.The boy had no thoughts. His "mind" was empty, blank.The taller of the two men shouted at him, "Get in the truck."Janjak clutched the side of the pickup bed and hoisted himself in. There he stood, dumbly, bolt upright, in the back of the truck."Lay down," commanded the man.Janjak obeyed. He laid himself down in the flatbed and stayed perfectly still.The shorter man stuffed a thick wad of bills into Ernst's hand, turned, got in behind the steering wheel, and drove off.It was a long, bumpy ride on the rocky, twisted dirt road.They arrived at a sugar plantation, and the man commanded Janjak to get out of the truck. Slowly, unconsciously, the boy rose to a standing position, stepped over to the tailgate, sat, and pushed off. He lurched to a standing position, and stood, mute, for a few seconds."Come," the man said to Janjak, and Janjak followed him to the edge of the sugar cane field.He put a machete in the boy's hand, and commanded, "Cut!"Janjak stood mute.The man impatiently grabbed the machete from Janjak's hand, and cut a stalk near where it meets the ground. He threw the cane aside. He cut another cane, and threw it on the first one.He put the machete back into the teenager's hand, and repeated, "Cut!"Janjak cut one stalk, and then another, and then another, throwing each one on top of the pile."Good," said the man. "Keep on cutting."And Janjak kept cutting, for a long, long time.At dawn, several other robot-like men joined him. They began cutting without a word, just as Janjak was doing.At noon, the man who had driven the truck returned with some bread, and threw a big piece to each of the workers. The bread landed near their feet, and each clumsily bent down and picked it up. They ate, silently, thoughtlessly, chewing very slowly. When they were done, they began cutting again.The man instructed Janjak, who resumed cutting like the others. Slowly, mindlessly, he cut and cut and cut, long into the night.The plantation was quiet and isolated, surrounded by a craggy wilderness. The owners had cut down all the trees for firewood and lumber, leaving nothing but the high, impenetrable underbrush behind. Janjak and the other men were left completely alone, but for the overseers who periodically arrived to feed them and haul the sugar cane off to market. No visitors ever came.The men slept in a ramshackle hut, without a bed or even a mat, on the dirt floor. They ate and relieved themselves in the fields. They never spoke, not to each other, and not to their captors.Janjak continued to lurch laboriously through the endless cane fields, without a word, without a thought, without regret, until he was too old to chop, bend, and carry.Janjak Bertin and the other unmissed men, people with no family or friends to raise questions, were never seen again.

Author's Note: Inspiration for this piece originates from my personal experiences, in the 1970's, as a teacher in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The story itself is based on actual events described in the 1985 book, "The Serpent and the Rainbow," by Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis. In his dramatic book, Davis documented his Haitian field research project, in which he investigated the work of actual vodou practitioners for possible applications in modern pharmaceutical production. Davis reported that on very rare occasions, a houngan will indeed turn a man into a zombie. The poisoning and the process of being buried alive while fully conscious, leaves the unfortunate person so badly brain damaged that he no longer has a will of his own. Hulking, mute, empty of volition, he is secretly taken to a place in the high mountains and used as a slave, usually on a sugar plantation.

Melissa Gish
“A Series Of Perfectly Reasonable Decisions”

A True Story... More Or Less

Chapter Ten

Sunday, 7:23 a.m.

Spider Rob did not have a conventional kitchen.He had one in the architectural sense -- four walls, a floor, a ceiling, a sink, a stove -- but the resemblance to anyone else's kitchen ended at the doorframe. Braided ropes of extension cords and power strips were tacked to the walls, and every surface not actively engaged in the preparation of human food had been colonized by aquariums, wire cages, and plastic terrariums, most fitted with heat lamps. The combined effect of all those lamps was a layered reddish glow that turned the room warm and dim and faintly prehistoric, like being inside the world's smallest and most specific natural history museum. Visiting Spider Rob's kitchen for the first time was an experience people tended to describe afterward using the word 'surprisingly,' as in: 'There were surprisingly few incidents,' or 'I was surprisingly fine once I sat down.'Along the far wall, four-tiered wire shelving units held a rotating population of creatures at various stages of their lives and their relationships with one another. Tarantulas occupied three tanks on the top shelf, each one motionless in the particular way that tarantulas are motionless, which is not like anything else being motionless. A dog being motionless is waiting. A cat being motionless is plotting. A tarantula being motionless is simply being a tarantula, which is its own complete and sufficient condition. Below them, two kingsnakes moved in their slow, deliberate way around the perimeters of their enclosures, gliding with the unhurried confidence of creatures who understood that patience was not a virtue but a hunting strategy. A fat vinegaroon occupied a corner tank, its whiplike tail standing at attention behind it, its pincers resting on a piece of bark with the meditative stillness of something that had been around, evolutionarily speaking, since before the concept of stillness existed.On the lower shelves, the food chain made itself felt. Mice in varying stages of growth occupied a series of stacked bins: mothers with pinkies in one, fuzzies in the next, full adults in the last -- progressing from one end of their lives to the other in full view of the animals that would eventually eat them, which seemed cruel until you considered that the mice appeared entirely unbothered by this arrangement. A cricket enclosure hummed with the dense, papery sound of several hundred insects conducting the business of being insects. On the counter beside the coffee maker, in a small tank that most houseguests pretended not to see, a bark scorpion the color of old honey sat motionless on its rock. Spider Rob had made his coffee in the company of the scorpion for going on three years and had long since stopped registering its presence, the way you stop registering a smoke detector or a neighbor's wind chimes -- things that are simply part of the atmosphere of your life.Spider Rob leaned against the counter now, mug in hand, and looked out the window at the scrubby acreage behind his house. The sun was just clearing the horizon, laying long shadows across the caliche flats and the juniper. It was going to be a clear day. Cool, the way October mornings are in the high desert, the kind of cold that burns off fast and leaves the air feeling laundered.He finished his coffee, rinsed the mug, dried it, and hung it back on the mug tree. This was something his wife had stopped doing, apparently on principle simply because he'd reminded her to do it several times. He soon noticed that she stopped doing a lot of things in ostensible defiance. He had to admit that her death was not unwelcome. He folded the dish towel, hung it over the stove handle, and then went to the shed for the shovel.The spot he'd chosen was at the edge of the property, where the kept land gave way to the wild stuff: creosote and prickly pear and the occasional dead yucca standing up like a letter of complaint. He drove the shovel in with his boot, lifted, turned. Drove it in again. The ground was hard calite, the way desert ground always is, as though the earth itself had decided years ago that it wasn't interested in being opened up. Spider Rob had dug in this ground before. He knew to go slowly, to let the shovel do the work.He was not in any hurry. It was Sunday morning, after all, and the subject of his task certainly wasn't going anywhere. The cactus wrens were singing in the early light, which made Spider Rob smile. And really, the grave didn't need to be deep. Just deep enough.

Chapter Nine

Saturday, about 8:55 p.m.

Nobody came. It had been over twenty minutes. What was taking so long? Lindy finished the cigarette, stepped down to the concrete walk, dropped the butt, and crushed it out. She pulled her cardigan tighter across her body, feeling the weight of the gun in the pocket, and waited some more. She checked her phone. She walked to the end of the walk and looked up the street, then down the street. She went inside, checked the back door lock, came back to the front porch, and looked up and down the street again. A cat crossed under a streetlamp and disappeared between two houses.She went back inside.She opened the cabinet under the sink. A bottle of 1800 tequila sat next to the Dawn and the Comet and SOS pads. Lindy didn't think about booze the way she didn't think about her fire extinguisher: she probably won't need it, but she's a person who believes in being prepared. She retrieved the bottle from under the sink, found a glass, and poured two fingers. She set the glass on the counter and stood with both hands flat on the kitchen tile, doing the thing she did when she needed to slow herself down, which was to notice five things she could see. The glass. The bottle. The window above the sink, dark and reflective. The dish rack. The small laminated card on the refrigerator that said, in her own handwriting from several years ago, THIS TOO SHALL PASS, which she had put up after a difficult quarter at the library and never taken down.She picked up the glass and walked back toward the front door. Headlights moved across the living room window. She set the glass down on the coffee table and went to the front door.One officer. He was medium height, somewhere in his late thirties, with a flashlight and a badge and the expression of a man who had, over the course of his career, been called to a great many situations that turned out to be something other than advertised. He introduced himself as Deputy Jimmy Donner, but Lindy already knew his name. She'd known him since he was in grade school. She was a librarian, after all.Lindy looked past the deputy at the street. His patrol car sat at the curb with its lights off, making no particular statement about the urgency of the situation."Where is everyone?" she asked. What she meant was: where was the sheriff, the state police, the FBI, the forensic investigation team, the people who showed up when someone found a body?With the measured patience of a man who had made this explanation before and thought nothing of making it again, Donner explained that he was the responding officer tonight.Lindy led him through the house, pausing at the junk drawer to pull out a small flashlight, and then out the back door and across the yard. At the gate, she stopped and pointed her flashlight at the dumpster, keeping the gate between herself and whatever was in there. Donner walked past her, shone his light into the dumpster, and moved the beam carefully around the interior, taking what Lindy considered an unreasonable amount of time about it. Then he turned to face her."Is this the correct dumpster, ma'am?" he asked."Yes.""There's nothing in this dumpster but trash bags, ma'am."Lindy crossed the alley and looked in herself. Trash bags. A flattened cardboard box. The square darkness of the dumpster's interior gave up nothing. Her own split bag lay on the ground at her feet, its contents scattered and partially crushed into the gravel."It was here," she said. She was acutely aware that this was precisely what a person who had imagined the whole thing would also say, which caused her to say it with considerably more force. "Right here. Looking at me.""Someone was looking at you?" Donner asked, with the careful neutrality of a man taking notes in his head."Yes." Her words tangled. "I mean . . . no. I mean, I saw an eye. Looking up at me. But it was dead. The eye. I mean the . . . the person was dead."Donner took a deep breath, and with the diplomatic composure of a man delivering a verdict he'd already reached, he told her that late at night, when we're tired, our eyes can sometimes play tricks on us. Then he touched her elbow, not unkindly, the way you'd steer someone away from a goose dropping they hadn't seen, and guided her back through the gate. At the front door he gave her his card and told her to call if she needed anything further. He delivered this offer with the same unruffled evenness he'd used for everything else, reading from an internal script he'd long since memorized: patient, competent, and exactly as helpful as the situation, in his estimation, required.Lindy closed and locked the door. She looked at the card. Deputy James Donner, Eddy County Sheriff's Department. She sat down on the sofa and took the revolver from her cardigan pocket. She thought about unloading it but instantly decided to wait until morning. She set it on the coffee table and looked at it for a moment. Then she drank the tequila in two long swallows, set the glass down next to the gun, and sat in the full blaze of every light in the house, absolutely certain that she had not imagined a single thing.

Chapter Eight

Saturday, about 8:30 p.m.

Deputy Jimmy Donner had been sitting at the red light at Main and Lea. He was halfway through a gas station granola bar that tasted like compressed sawdust held together with the memory of honey, when his radio crackled.Dispatch. A woman on Orchard Lane reporting a 10-54.He reached for the radio. Just then, a truck ran the red light directly in front of him.He recognized it immediately: Muriel Bryant's 1969 F-100, baby blue and white. It had one headlight out. Donner dropped the granola bar onto the passenger seat, put his lights on, and pulled a U-turn. The truck turned into the bowling alley parking lot.He radioed his location and activity."The 10-54?" came the reply."Hold," Donner said. "I'll head over next."He walked up to the driver's window and was caught by surprise when he saw the driver was not Ms. Bryant but rather Lewis Lake, a semi-retired land surveyor who worked with Donner's father and had attended many a Sunday barbeque at the man's home, sharing beers with the entire Donner clan. Lewis always had a firm handshake and a firm opinion. Tonight he was keeping both hands on the wheel with deliberate calm. Muriel Bryant sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead."Hey there, Jimmy," Lewis said."Lew." Donner moved the flashlight briefly to the passenger seat. "Ms. Bryant."Muriel said nothing. She continued to face the windshield."You went through that light pretty good," Donner said."I did." Lewis accepted this without argument, the way a man accepts a weather report. "I apologize for that. I was distracted."Donner let the word distracted sit between them for a moment. In his seven years as a deputy, distracted had served as the opening sentence of some of the more interesting conversations of his career. He moved the flashlight to the truck bed."What've you got back there?"Lewis and Muriel began to answer simultaneously, then stopped simultaneously. Lewis tried again. He said he'd been helping Muriel clean out her shed and they were taking some things out to Spider Rob's place. He explained that mice had invaded Muriel's shed and Spider Rob had agreed to store Muriel's belongings in a better place. He said all of this in the measured, reasonable tone of a man who had spent thirty-two years telling landowners things they didn't want to hear and had learned that if you delivered bad news in a calm enough voice, people often accepted it before they'd quite understood what it was.Donner pulled his flashlight away from the truck bed, switched it off, and tucked it back into his duty belt. He looked at Lewis. Lewis looked at Donner. Muriel looked at the windshield."A'righty then," Donner said. "Watch those lights, Lew.""Absolutely."Donner walked back to his cruiser. After he finished his granola bar and washed it down with a cup of coffee from this thermos, he turned around, pulled out of the parking lot, and headed toward Orchard Lane. He drove without hurry. He was good at without hurry. It was, in many ways, a skill that had served him best.

Chapter Seven

Saturday, about 8:20 p.m.

"Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?"Lindy had run straight through the back door and across the living room for her phone, which she'd left on the coffee table -- a small mercy, since she was in no condition for a search. She told the dispatcher, in a register several notes above her normal speaking voice, that there was a dead body in the dumpster behind her house. The dispatcher, who had the practiced calm of someone paid specifically to have it, asked her to stay on the line.Lindy said she would. She did not.She went to the bedroom and retrieved from the lockbox in her nightstand drawer the .38 revolver she'd owned for eleven years and fired exactly twice (both times at a paper silhouette at a range in Artesia, and both times off-center, which the instructor had charitably attributed to nerves). She loaded it the way her ex-husband, Wes, had shown her, a process she remembered the way she remembered the words to songs she hadn't heard in years: imperfectly, but well enough. Then she dropped it into the front pocket of her cardigan. It was heavier than she always expected, like a bar of lye soap but with significantly more consequences.She went to the kitchen and opened the junk drawer, which was less a drawer and more a physical record of every decision she had postponed since moving into this house. Beneath a petrified rubber band, a menu for a Chinese restaurant that had closed in 2019, a birthday candle, the charger from something she no longer owned, and a coupon for ten percent off at a tire place she'd never been to, she found a crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights. Three remained. She had quit in May. Five months and eleven days ago, not that she was counting, but she hadn't thrown the pack away, which she understood now was the act of a woman who knew herself better than she admitted. She took the cigarettes and one of the approximately thirteen lighters also living in the drawer, and went to the front door.She turned on the porch light and stepped outside.The neighborhood was quiet. It wasn't the silence of absence but the silence of everything having agreed to stop. Most of the houses were dark. A few windows glowed: the blue aquarium-light of a television, the warm amber of someone still up for reasons of their own. The street ran empty in both directions under the orange wash of the sodium lamps. Somewhere to the east, behind the houses, a coyote yipped twice, and then the quiet settled back in like a cat returning to a warm chair.Lindy paced the length of the porch. She took a cigarette from the pack, put it between her lips, and lit it on the third try. When she inhaled, the smoke hit her lungs like a personal insult. She coughed, bent at the waist, eyes streaming, the cigarette dangling from her fingers. When she straightened up, she was watering freely from both eyes and her chest felt like it had been reorganized.Five months, she thought. Five months and her lungs had apparently spent every day of it becoming aggressively unaccustomed. She smoked it anyway, in small, careful increments, watching the end of the street where the lights and sirens would eventually appear. The revolver sat in her cardigan pocket like a stone. The night sat heavy everywhere else. From somewhere in the direction of the dumpster came a sound she had no intention of investigating. Nothing came down the street. She finished the cigarette and dropped it on the porch step, her hand slipping into her pocket to feel the cold metal, and waited.

Chapter Six

Saturday, about 8:10 p.m.

Muriel drove. Lewis rode in the passenger seat and said very little, which had been his primary mode of communication since arriving at her house and seeing the truck and saying, flatly, 'I know who to call.' He had said nothing further on the subject of who he was calling, and Muriel had not asked, because she was forty minutes past the point where additional information felt like something she could manage.She pulled the truck slowly down the alley behind her street, headlights off, navigating by the yellowish light of the corner lamp. When she drew up alongside the dumpster -- the one with a bouquet of painted flowers that now looked, in the dark and from this angle, like a cheerful obscenity -- Lewis got out without a word.He climbed into the truck bed and grabbed the tarp. He swung himself over the edge of the dumpster and bent forward with the matter-of-fact efficiency of a man who knew that the least complicated thing ever to do was to simply do it. From inside the dumpster came the sounds of rearranging: the soft compression of trash bags, a grunt, a scrape. Then he climbed back out into the truck bed, crouched at the tailgate, gripped the tarp, and pulled.The suspension dipped. The truck creaked in a low, domestic way, like a house settling.Lewis came around to the driver's door and yanked it open, startling Muriel."Move over," he said. "I'm driving."He put the truck in gear, rolled to the end of the alley, and turned right onto the city street. Then right again onto Main Street, which ran straight out of downtown Carlsbad and became Highway 62 and went on into the dark in the direction of the Guadalupe Mountains and the stretch of highway where, some hours earlier, this whole evening had been set in motion by an event that neither of them had yet found the right word for.Muriel apologized. She had been apologizing steadily since Lewis had arrived. Lewis told her to let it go. She said she didn't know what else she could have done. He said he understood that. She said she was sorry about dinner. He said it was fine. Muriel recognized his tone: it was not entirely fine, but he had clearly decided to absorb it.It was around this point that he drove through the red light. He just didn't see it. That was the honest answer. He was not, in that particular moment, a man whose attention was on the traffic signals of downtown Carlsbad.The cruiser at the intersection had its lights on before Lewis had fully cleared the intersection. It pulled a clean U-turn and came up behind them. Lewis pulled into the bowling alley parking lot and put the truck in park."Let me do the talking," he said.

Chapter Five

Saturday, about 7:55 p.m.

Lewis had been planning a nice dinner.He'd had it fully arranged. Muriel's flight landed at four, she'd be home from El Paso by seven, he'd arrive at seven-thirty and they would go to El Rancho for enchiladas. Lewis was a man who liked a plan the way other men liked a good chair: he didn't think about it much, but he noticed immediately when it wasn't there. He had spent thirty-two years as a land surveyor, which is a profession built entirely on the principle that things should be where you say they are, and this had left him with a limited tolerance for variables. But then she'd called from Seattle and said her plane had been stuck on the tarmac; she needed another half hour.He knocked on Muriel's door. She answered it wearing the expression of a woman who had recently made a significant decision and was now on the far side of it, in the territory where the decision had been made and could not be unmade and the only remaining question was what it was going to cost her.She told him something had happened on the drive home.He came inside. She gave him the shape of it, not every detail, but enough. It wasn't her fault, she kept saying. She hadn't known what else to do. Lewis listened the way he listened to field data that was coming in wrong: without expression, without interruption, with the full attention of a man who needed to understand the problem before he could tell you how bad it was. As he listened, he felt the enchiladas at El Rancho receding into an increasingly hypothetical future."You can't just do that and think you'll get away with it," he said finally. It was not the most empathetic thing he could have said, but it had the advantage of being true, and Lewis, when pressed, would always choose true.She asked him to look at the truck.The garage held Muriel's 1969 Ford F-100 Ranger the way a reliquary holds a bone: with dedicated space, appropriate lighting, and the unspoken understanding that the object within was not to be touched by people who didn't know what they were touching. The truck was baby blue and white, and Muriel's relationship with it was the kind of relationship that made people who didn't understand it slightly uncomfortable and people who did understand it slightly envious. It had the solid, pre-digital integrity of a machine that was exactly what it looked like and had never been asked to be anything else.What it also had now was a caved-in right quarter panel, a headlight frame cracked like an eggshell, a headlight that was not so much shattered as distributed, and blood on the paint. Not a smear. Not a trace. Blood. The kind that announced itself."What were you thinking?" Lewis said. The question had no real interest in an answer. It was what you said when you needed a moment to absorb something before you could figure out what to say next.Muriel's eyes moistened and ran her index fingers lengthwise under her lower lashes. Crying was not a thing she experienced casually or often, perhaps twice a year, and only when she had earned it. Lewis took it seriously.She asked him to help her.He stood in the garage and looked at the truck for a long moment, doing the internal arithmetic that the situation required: the distance between where things were and where they needed to be, the materials available, the time in which to work with them. He was good at this kind of calculation. It was, more or less, what surveyors did."I know who to call," he said at last. "But we're taking your truck. Not mine. I don't want a single molecule of this near my vehicle." While Muriel went inside to get her keys, Lewis made the call. A minute later, he walked out to the curb and retrieved a tarp from the box of emergency materials he kept in the back of his Bronco. He was, after all, a man who had learned that the world occasionally required things of you.Muriel got in the driver's seat. Lewis folded his six-foot frame into the passenger side with the stoic acceptance of a man boarding a flight he hadn't planned to take, and they backed out of the garage.

Chapter Four

Saturday, about 7:40 p.m.

The homes in Carlsbad, New Mexico, have concrete block fences along their back yards, buried deep and built solid for one very practical reason: rattlesnakes. The desert doesn't observe property lines, and a rattlesnake, given the choice between the open scrubland and a tidy yard with water and plenty of food that entices mice, will choose the yard every time. A concrete fence sends a message the desert understands. On the other side of those fences runs a wide gravel alley, and roughly every four houses along the alley there sits a communal dumpster: big and beige, the color of everything in Carlsbad that was installed by a committee. The dumpsters served residents who haul their trash out through their back gates as well as the raccoons who have learned that the buffet is always open.Lindy had been covering for Darla for a week and a half, and though she'd never had a bad word to say about the woman, she sure did now.Darla had worked the reference desk at the Carlsbad Public Library for four years without incident, which is to say four years of being exactly the person the library needed her to be: competent and present and reliably there. But then she had met a man named Cody at a mutual friend's barbecue in September and that had been the end of that. By the close of October she had eloped with him to Las Vegas and sent Lindy a postcard at the library that read: SO SORRY!! CODY IS THE ONE!! The postcard had a picture of the Strip at night on the front and smelled faintly of sunscreen, and its two exclamation points per sentence were not, in Lindy's assessment, in any way proportionate to what Darla had done. Cody, it emerged through subsequent texts that arrived at increasingly long intervals, worked the oil fields. He was a roustabout, a word that belonged in a nineteenth-century novel about men with mustaches and no fixed address, not in a text thread explaining why your colleague would not be returning to the reference desk on Monday, or Tuesday, or at any point in the foreseeable future.Lindy had spent the week doing the work of two librarians, which is to say the work of approximately four people, because librarians do not merely answer questions; they conduct what amounts to a continuous, rolling negotiation between the public and human knowledge, and they do it while also managing a building, a collection, a budget, and no fewer than three ongoing interpersonal conflicts among the volunteers. She had cataloged a donated collection of agricultural pamphlets from the 1940s that smelled of tobacco and a previous century's optimism about soil management. She had assisted a man who was absolutely certain he'd returned a particular book three months ago and was absolutely astonished that it was not on the shelf. She had photocopied encyclopedia pages for a woman taking a night class. And she had fielded seventeen separate questions about the printer, a machine roughly the size and temperament of a toddler, equally prone to inexplicable meltdowns, each of which could have been answered by reading the laminated sign posted directly above the printer at approximately eye level.Saturday had arrived like a parole. She'd cleaned the house like she was reclaiming territory -- the floors, the bathroom, the kitchen counter, which had accumulated its own archaeology of the week in coffee rings and unopened mail. Three loads of laundry. Now it was nearly time to settle into her recliner with a book, and there was one task left. She switched on the porch light, hoisted the trash bag, and walked across the yard. She unlatched the gate, swung it open, and stepped out into the alley. The street lamp on the corner cast its sodium glow over the gravel, turning everything the color of old photographs. She crunched across to the dumpster that faced her property -- the dumpster with a bouquet of pink flowers with green stems painted on its front. She swung the trash bag up and prepared to heave it over the rim.The light caught something.Glassy. Round. Milky.She froze. Her arm still raised, the bag hanging from her fist, she looked directly into an eye set in a dark face that the shadows had reduced to pure shape. It stared back at her with the fixed, absolute indifference of something that had moved entirely beyond the concerns of the living.The bag swung from her hand, struck the rim of the dumpster, split along the seam, and delivered a week of her domestic life onto the gravel at her feet. She did not stop to take an inventory. She was already running.

Chapter Three

Saturday, about 7:30 p.m.

The garage door hadn't finished closing before Muriel was in the kitchen with the scotch. She was not, as a rule, a woman who drank alone; she was fifty-one years old and part-owner of a yarn shop on Canyon Street; she worked at the library and had opinions about fiber content and zoning ordinances that she was prepared to defend at length, and she was regarded by most people who knew her as sensible. Grounded. The kind of person you called when you needed someone to drive you to a medical appointment or talk you out of a bad haircut decision. She was currently in the middle of another kind of bad decision she'd already made and was drinking her boyfriend's scotch, which suggested that the 'sensible' reputation, while not unearned, was not the whole picture.She poured. She drank. She poured again.The problem, in its most compressed form, was that there was a dead individual in the back of her truck.The problem, in its fuller form, was that her truck also had a caved-in quarter panel, a destroyed headlight, and blood on the hood. She drank the second scotch and went back to the garage.The body in the truck bed had not improved in her absence. One limb lay bent at a wrong angle in a way that made Muriel feel unwell. A broken neck. And the eyes, fixed and catching the fluorescent garage light with the dull, milky indolence of someone who had finished having opinions, seemed to regard the ceiling with placid indifference.Muriel stood in the garage for a while, the smell of death reaching out of the truck bed with absolute spatial confidence.Then she got in the truck. She drove slowly, without headlights, down the alley behind her block, feeling, not for the first time tonight, like a character in a film who has made a series of choices the audience could see coming. She needed a dumpster that wasn't behind her own house. At the far end of the block she chose one.As she slowed, she noticed the dumpster was oddly wearing painted pink flowers on its front. She slid the truck flush against the dumpster and killed the engine. Then she hauled herself up into the truck bed and confronted the problem. What followed were approximately four and a half minutes of activity that Muriel intended never to describe to another living person. There was leverage. There was repositioning. There was a moment of profound physical indignity. And then there was a final heave that came from somewhere south of muscle and north of desperation, and the thing went over the rim and landed heavily among the trash bags with a sound she filed immediately under things she would not be revisiting. The dumpster was more than half full. She looked at what she'd done for a moment. One moment, no longer. And then she drove home without once looking in the rearview mirror.

Chapter Two

Saturday, about 6:50 p.m.

The dumpster had been tagged again. Lindy noticed it while taking in her laundry after dinner. The light on the corner had come on, illuminating black, overlapping letters in a style that was either street art or vandalism, and Lindy, who had worked in a public institution for thirty years and had opinions about what belonged in a public space, had decided it was vandalism.She put the laundry basket down, went to the back porch closet, and pulled a string that woke the bare bulb. The previous month she'd painted over a tag on her friend Gloria's dumpster, on the other side of town. Different dumpster, same story, same thick black signature of someone who apparently felt the world needed more of their tag and less of whatever had been there before. She'd bought the paint specifically for that job: one can of pink, one can of green, colors she'd chosen because they were cheerful and because covering an act of aggression with something cheerful struck her as the correct response.She walked through the gate and across the gravel and stood before the dumpster. Thirty years of mounting library exhibits -- affixing labels, hanging panels, composing visual arrangements that had to be clear from six feet away and interesting from three -- had given her a steady hand and an instinct for how things should sit in space. She shook the green can. She started with the stems, long curving arcs rising from the base, and continued with oval leaves. Then she built blooms over the stems, working from the outside in, the way her university art teacher had taught her.When she stepped back, she was surprised to find she was pleased. It wasn't the Sistine Chapel. It wasn't meant to be. It was a beige dumpster in a gravel alley in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and it was wearing pink flowers, and that was enough.She capped her cans, walked back through the gate, and carried her laundry inside. Behind her, the dumpster stood in the evening light, wearing its flowers almost as if they belonged there.

Chapter One

Saturday, about 6:45 p.m.

The drive from El Paso to Carlsbad is a hundred and sixty-three miles of the kind of landscape that teaches you things about yourself: mostly that you are small, the desert is large, and the distance between where you are and where you are going is best understood as a spiritual condition rather than a navigational one. Muriel had made this drive many times over the years and had developed a deep, uncomplicated affection for it.She was in excellent spirits. The Flock Fiber Festival in Seattle had delivered on every front. She had bought two pounds of hand-dyed merino top -- one colorway called 'Thunderstorm,' which was a deep bruised blue-gray shot through with violet, and one called 'Autumn Understory,' which was the color of the forest floor in October -- from a dyer in Oregon whose Instagram she had admired for two years and who turned out, in person, to be exactly as warm and obsessive about color theory as her feed suggested. She had attended a supported spindle workshop taught by a woman from Sacramento who had learned the technique from her grandmother and spun with the offhand authority of someone to whom the connection between raw fiber and finished yarn was as natural and unremarkable as breathing. She had had such a good time that she didn't mind the trip home, being seated next to a very unhappy baby or the delay on the tarmac.The sun had dropped behind the Guadalupe Mountains around 6:15. The desert light went out all at once, the way it does -- not a slow fade, not the lingering, performative sunsets of other landscapes, just a switch, the sky deciding it was done. The highway and the mountains and the creosote flats all resolved into the same dull gray, and Muriel turned on her headlights and settled into the last hour.She had about thirty minutes to go and was thinking about the Autumn Understory when it happened.Something enormous exploded out of the ditch on the driver's side. There was no gentler way to describe it: it detonated out of the earth, hit the quarter panel of the truck with an impact she felt in her back teeth and both shoulders, bounced off into the oncoming lane, and came to rest in the road thirty feet ahead of her. She hit the brakes. The truck shuddered to a stop, fishtailed slightly, caught.She sat with her hands on the wheel for a moment. Her heart was doing something that would make a monitor in the ER scream and flash red.She couldn't see what she'd hit, or rather, what had hit her. She inched the truck forward until a dark heap came into view. It was large. Larger than she expected, and she hadn't been expecting anything. In the headlight beam it looked like a figure in a voluminous gray overcoat with two bare legs splayed at angles that no living person's legs should make and one long arm twisted underneath the body at a suggestion of wrongness that made her stomach drop through the seat and through the floor and somewhere into the asphalt below.She switched on the hazard lights, and they began to tick in the sudden quiet like a metronome. She got out and walked toward the body. She nudged it with the toe of her boot.Not a coat. Feathers. And not an arm. A neck. A long neck. A neck of truly unreasonable length, folded against the road in the loose, boneless way of something with no further use for its own skeleton. And an eye -- open, fixed, staring up at the darkening sky with an expression that, if you were inclined to read expressions into the faces of dead birds, could only be described as philosophical."You gotta be fucking kidding," Muriel said, to the emu, the highway, the mountains, the desert, the rancher who hadn't closed the emu's gate, and to the universe equally.The emu, which was dead and therefore beyond the reach of this observation, said nothing. Its eye caught the headlights and glinted.She couldn't leave it in the road. You could not leave a hundred-and-thirty-pound bird in the middle of a two-lane highway and simply drive away. Muriel had a clear moral position on this, and the position was: no. She grabbed a leg and pulled. The emu moved five inches. She pulled harder. Four more. She was five-foot-two and a hundred and five pounds, which meant the emu had her beat by more than a third, and it had the additional advantage of being entirely limp.Headlights appeared to the south.She went back to the truck and flashed her headlights. The approaching vehicle slowed, then stopped. A pickup truck, two young men in the cab, the driver maybe twenty-two, his passenger a few years older. The driver rolled down his window and looked at the emu in the road with a quizzical expression.Muriel explained what had happened, not punctuating herself so she could get it out as quickly as possible. She pointed at the emu. She pointed at the ditch. She made gestures that she believed communicated 'please move that bird off the road before another car hits it.' The men conferred in Spanish. Muriel understood approximately eight words of Spanish, and this conversation appeared to contain none of them. The driver smiled and nodded.He pulled over and turned on his own hazard lights. Both men got out. One took the legs. The other tucked his arms beneath what would have been, on a human, the armpits, and together they lifted the emu with the confident ease of men who were used to lifting and moving things. Muriel thought: good. They're going to put it in the ditch.They did not put it in the ditch.They swung it once, twice, for momentum -- the emu describing a brief arc in their headlight beams, its long neck swinging freely, its legs trailing -- and deposited it with clean efficiency into the bed of Muriel's truck. They stepped back, smiling and looking pleased with their work.Muriel made a sound that was not a word in any language.She pointed at the ditch. She said please in English. She deployed all eight of her Spanish words, none of which were the ones she needed. The men smiled at her with genuine warmth. It was the sincere, uncomplicated smile of people who have done a good thing and know it. They waved. They got in their truck. They drove away, leaving Muriel standing on Highway 62 in the dark with an emu in her truck and the specific, clarifying feeling of a person who has just watched their last option disappear over a hill.She stood there for a moment longer than was useful.Then she got in and drove north, toward Carlsbad, and tried to construct a plan that did not involve scotch.She could not.

Contributors

CHRIS KLASSEN lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. After graduating from the University of Toronto and living for a year in France and England, he returned home and worked the majority of his career in print media. He is now writing exclusively. His stories have been published in numerous journals including SORTES, Queen's Quarterly, The Coachella Review, Amethyst Magazine, Literally Stories, Vagabond City, Dark Winter, Ghost City Review, The Raven Review, Toasted Cheese, and Mobius, among others. He has two novels available through Dark Winter Press.CHRISTIANA DREVETS is a poet from Southern Oregon living in Queens, New York. She writes about horror, dreams, and other mysteries. Her work can be found in Inverted Syntax, Quarto Magazine, Red Ogre Review, on Poets.org, and forthcoming in Bloodletter Magazine. She has an MFA in writing from Columbia University.DAVID LEVINE is a writer living outside Salt Lake City, UT. His fiction stories have been published by Literally Stories, October Hill Magazine, The Thieving Magpie, and The Brussels Review. He is also a proud member of the 91 year old League of Utah Writers.FOREST ORMES’s childhood was spent in an Illinois orphanage. During his adolescence, he was on probation with the Indiana Department of Corrections. After being recommended for a Rhodes Scholarship at Roosevelt University in Chicago, he obtained a Master’s Degree in Social Work at the University of Illinois. He then worked as a bilingual therapist and addictions counselor serving the Chicago area. Forest’s stories have appeared in Amazing Stories Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, The MacGuffin, Ginosko, and Consequence. His story “The Training of Zebras” was nominated by The Meadow for a Pushcart Prize. “Charlotte of Caen” appeared in shortstory.substack in November 2025. In the same month, Fiction on the Web published, “Merry Christmas, Harriet Francis.” He and his wife have resettled from Chicago to a farmhouse in the central Plains.JAMES ENTWORTH writes from Los Angeles, which he prefers to his former haunts of Dallas and London. In his free time, James enjoys walking along the beach, playing chess (often poorly), and writing film reviews. This is his first published story.MELISSA GISH is a Minnesota writer of dozens of juvenile nonfiction books on natural history and, when the mood strikes, a bit of quirky fiction. She teaches online English courses for a rural West Virginia university, holds an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and recently founded Sabre Lake Publishing, indie home of Between Earth & Sky: Writings on Wonder and Wilderness.PETER UTTAL has spent much of his life immersed in alien cultures, a journey that started at age 14 with a year-long backpacking trip across North America. He later learned five languages to support his assimilation into more than 30 countries where he has lived, worked, or trekked. His mosaic of experience includes managing logistics for two airbase construction projects in the Middle East, conducting cognitive research with ASL-signing chimpanzees, and jamming on homemade guitars with a ring-necked Kayan Lahwi tribeswoman in Thailand. “Sweet Dreams, Janjak” stems from his year teaching in Haiti, where a houngan’s potion cured his dengue fever – after all Western treatments had failed – and opened his eyes to another reality stranger than sci-fi.RUSS BICKERSTAFF is a theater critic and aspiring author living with his wife and two daughters. In over ten years of covering the theater scene, he has reviewed more than 1,000 shows. In addition to his work for The Shepherd Express, he maintains his own reader-funded Milwaukee theater blog. His short fictions have appeared in more than 30 different publications, including Hypertext Magazine, Pulp Metal Magazine, Sein und Werden, and Theme of Absence.SOUVENIR IRIMASO SHIMWA is a writer and entrepreneur based in Kigali, Rwanda. His work has appeared in Rivener Literary and in his free time he enjoys drinking strawberry yogurts and listening to music.TUSHAR SEN is a finance professional who also engages in sustained creative and scholarly writing. He is the author of Pandora’s Box, a collection of short stories available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Audible. In 2020, he wrote and produced the short film Zulfi, which screened internationally and received 22 laurels across film festivals. His poetry has appeared in Lekh, Indian Review, Writers Resist, SpecPo Verse, Flora Fiction, Ecological Citizen, Military Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Afrocritik.

Support ArtWell

SORTES supports local, charitable, and community-based groups. Here's one important organization that SORTES supports:

ArtWell

"ArtWell was founded in 2000 to respond to the chronic community violence in Philadelphia by introducing a preventive, educational, arts-oriented approach to reach underserved communities and youth facing discrimination, poverty, violence, and the everyday challenges of growing up. Our mission is to support young people and their communities through multidisciplinary arts expression, education, and creative reflection to celebrate their strengths, thrive while facing complex challenges, and awaken their dreams."Charity NavigatorThe people who have worked on this publication support this cause and we urge you to as well.

Learn More & Donate!

Thank you!

Submission & Contact

SORTES is the very model of a modern major journal

Find us here and there:

To submit contributions, comments, questions, or suggestions, please email

sortesmagazine@gmail.com

The Dashing SORTES Mailing List

Join our debonair mailing list for news about upcoming issues, in-person events, performances, and whatever else we dream up to make all our lives more complicated and exquisite:

SORTES is?

SORTES is a spinning collection of stories, poems, songs, and illustrations to help while away the wintery June nights. It’s an oddball grabbag wunderkammer mixtape offering distraction and refreshment.We have neither theme nor scene. Each issue is its own creature. We publish both the sufficiently strange and insufficiently boring: swart stories, hoity poetry, magical surrealism, beatnik travelogues, hard modern haiku, pulp, fantasia, antibiography, crooning balladeering, experimental sentimentalism, and grainy sideways photography.We also host online readings, old time radio performances, and other beloved gimmicks as they occur to us. Previous issues are available via the site’s Archive link.

Submitting

SORTES considers unsolicited submissions of poetry, prose, illustration, music, videos, and anything else you think may fit our format. Feel free to poke us; we’d love to find a way to publish dance, sculpture, puzzles, and other un-literary modalities.SORTES is published quarterly. Each issue includes approximately ten works of lit, visual, or performance art. We like a small number of works per issue: artists and readers should have a chance to get to know each other.SORTES, you’ll notice, is primarily a black-and-white publication, and we like to play with that (by featuring monochrome videos and photography, for example), but we’ll happily consider your polychrome submission.Submissions are ongoing throughout the year. We consider artists with both extensive and limited publishing experience. We accept simultaneous submissions but please inform us if your work has been accepted elsewhere. We publish translations and reprints on a case-by-case basis; please send us a note describing your interest. And while there's no restriction on the number of pieces you can submit, please have a heart.There’s no need for an extensive cover letter or publication history but please tell us who you are, what kind of writing or art you do, and a bit about what you’re sending us. There are no formatting requirements for text submissions. There is no fee to submit. Please send submissions as email attachments whenever possible; multimedia submissions may be sent as links.

Rights

You asked and we provide: what's up with publication rights and ownership?Simple: When you publish with us, you give SORTES one-time publication rights for your work. You retain all rights to your work after publication. Work published with SORTES will remain available via our online Archive.While SORTES retains the right to link to or excerpt your published work, we do not have the right to publish your work in new formats (including print). If we would like to pursue publication of your work in new formats, we'll ask you and hopefully agree to terms.

Mahoffs

SORTES was created by founding editor Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum and emeritus editor Kevin Travers. Current editors are listed in our masthead, Many of us live in Philadelphia, some luckily do not, but we invite writers and artists everywhere to live the SORTES fantasia.

Events

SORTES regularly offers readings and performances. For upcoming events, please check here and our Facebook page.

Coming Soon Enough

SORTES 26 Live

Sunday, July 19, 2026
7pm

To quote Walt Whitman or maybe William S. Burroughs, it is not your nakedness but your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent! Then again, would Whitman or Burroughs have said that if they spied you in the bath?What I'm trying to say is: join us for SORTES 26 LIVE, featuring this issue's elegantly couture crowd:Chris Klassen • Christiana Drevets • David Levine • Forest Ormes • James Entworth • Melissa Gish • Peter Uttal • Russ Bickerstaff • Souvenir Irimaso Shimwa • Tushar SenThe Zoom will be open to all. Your host will be Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, undressed to the nines.

Zoom Link

Meeting ID: 890 2754 8595
Passcode: 620653

Facebook Event

Radio SORTES

SORTES Expeditions

EXCITEMENT, ADVENTURE, AND REALLY MILD THINGS

SORTES Expeditions discovers places that are already there! We organize small teams to explore city streets, village squares, shopping malls, bus stations, downtowns, and byways with the mission of freshly seeing places we’re bored of seeing.And after the expedition, each team member produces field notes and one work of art in any medium for SORTES to publish.

Please select an Expedition listed below.

#1: Philadelphia, Passyunk Avenue

JOIN AN EXPEDITION OR MOUNT YOUR OWN EXPEDITION

If you live in the Philadelphia region or would pilgrimage to Philadelphia, consider joining us for a future Expedition. Ideal candidates include social scientists, public introverts, people who own reasonable walking shoes, and anyone who devotes the most passion to the least important. Please let us know if you're interested.Or maybe you're interested but live in a lesser non-Philadelphia location? Organize your own Expedition! SORTES would be delighted to collaborate with you. We would lend organizational expertise, templates for field reports, and other guidance -- and you can publish your field notes and art on SORTES. Please let us know if this sounds foxy.

RETURN TO EXPEDITIONS LIST

#1: Philadelphia, Passyunk Avenue

Overview

The SORTES expedition team undertook a inaugural pedestrian exploration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between October 25, 2025 11:00 am ET and October 25, 2025 5:00 pm ET. Our primary territory spanned East Passyunk Avenue between South Street and Broad Street. This territory, while for generations known to cartographers and inhabited by populations both indigenous and nonnative, had never been systematically chartered and documented. Team members ranged from experienced to novice pedestrians. Activities included individual notation, photographic and videographic documentation, paper rubbings, pastry sampling, and participation in the East Passyunk Avenue Business Improvement District’s East Passyunk Fall Fest, coincidentally occurring during our travel. While not all team members accomplished the summit, each voyager returned home safely.This expedition was made possible through the generous donations of our individual team members.Team field notes and media documentation follow.

Territory
Passyunk Avenue, South Street to Broad Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Date and Time
Saturday, October 25th, 2025
11:00 am to 5:00 pm ET (appx)

Team
Jeremy Tenenbaum: Chief
Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer
Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media
Ellie Miller: Navigator / Sherpa and Medic
Daniel DiFranco: Camp and Equipage Manager
Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher
Judy Davidson: Communicator

Scheduled Itinerary
11:00am Assemble at base camp
11:15am Orientation, acclimatization, travel, operations
11:36am Mid-ascent camp: Triangle Tavern, Passyunk Avenue and 10th Street
12:23pm Summit camp: Passyunk Avenue and Broad Street
12:30pm Begin return trip
12:50pm Mid-descent camp: To be determined
1:15pm Famous Deli
1:45pm Base camp return / post-expedition debriefing: Tattooed Mom, 530 South Street
Post-expedition activities

Art

Jeremy Tenenbaum, Expedition Chief

"Mount Passyunk"

This sculpture represents the expedition course, mounting Philadelphia’s Passyunk Avenue from South Street to Broad Street. It's a simplified abstracted grid; in reality Passyunk, a noted diagonal, strikes Broad at a brazen angle and cross-streets intersect at angles as well. It also reorients the intuitive perception of the street, flipping north and south, and suggests a “climb” (despite the actual flat elevation).The sculpture is formed on a metal sheet, bent at the ends, encased in clay sheets. Due to my inexperience working with clay, the sculpture cracked as it dried. I considered repairing the cracks with fresh clay but worried this might cause additional harm. I also considered Photoshopping the cracks and lying to the world, as I usually do, but others convinced me to be true to the work and myself.

Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer

"The Ballad of Passyunk Ave"

A musical tribute to singing cowboy Marty Robbins

The day was bright and promising for seven traveling souls
On a journey through South Philly and the mysteries it holds
Typewriters and hardware, fresh cherry cheesecake,
Downing drinks outside of The Triangle for a break...But round Passyunk & 8th, we grinded to a halt,
Victims of a local man and his verbal assaultTurns out you cannot walk down Passyunk Avenue
without a Deadpool lifeguard stranger ranting at youWe had found ourselves outside of his family’s auto store,
His initial approach was jovial, but underneath lurked something more,
Deadpool mask pulled down with lifeguard shorts around his waist
As his tone turned sinister, the wary travelers braced.Talk of simulations and grand conspiracy,
Of how beings in the Matrix can never be truly free...The ranting and the raving was the opposite of brief
And to prove his final point he unplugged our chief.Over time the lecturing lost any sense of fun,
From a man with a rubber chicken holstered instead of a gun.
Eventually we all broke free and continued our hike,
Escaped conversation hostages from a man who’s not quite right.All the way to Broad Street our caravan pushed on,
Documenting wildlife and culture with abandon.But beware -- you cannot walk down Passyunk Avenue
without a Deadpool lifeguard stranger ranting at you.

Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media

Alyssa Shea - soft coercion of highly constructed environments

"soft coercion of highly constructed environments: east passyunk ave"

Inspired by not only the act of walking down Passyunk Avenue, I also turned to my library to process the experience and to frame the construction of my video: Rebecca Solnit's Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas ("...any significant place is in some sense infinite, because its stories are inexhaustible...a place is only an intersection between forces converging from various distances..."). A 1984 pamphlet from Schuylkill Valley Nature Center that was tucked inside an old book of Philadelphia walking tours, picked up from a Free Little Library on one of my daily walks about the city ("abiotic factors / adaptations / communities / energy flow / material cycling / populations"). Dolores Hayden's The Power of Place (where James Rojas is quoted, "...the central core of the enacted environment is motion."). And lastly, Chris Kraus's introduction to Jane Dickson in Times Square ("...a fascination with how human beings navigate the soft coercion of highly constructed environments."), from which my video derives its title. The audio is a breakbeat mélange of didgeridoo, flute, autoharp, and field recordings from the expedition to channel the intersection of forces at play along Passyunk.

Daniel DiFranco: Camp and Equipage Manager

"nowsitrightbackandhereataleofawalkingfourhourmile"

Passyunk, I learned, is a Lenape word for "in the valley." Now it's all concrete, blacktop, and signs. This earth shitten landscape wants to be dirt again. Everything seems to be in its last bloom, screaming to exist. Wouldn't it be nice if we, friends, could go hand in hand and fall into the sky already shadowbound on a perfect October day?

Judy Davidson: Communicator and Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher

I was inspired by our Day on Passyunk to go back and find some quotes I had saved while on a long journey with Lenny [Davidson] 20-some years ago.

Author	Source	Quotation
Miles Morland	A Walk Across France	"There is a great peace at the start of a long journey. The end is so far away that all you see is the journey itself. You think of nothing else."
Tim Parks	Italian Neighbors	"As so often in Italy, the picturesque is combined with a sharp edge of danger."
Sign on a hotel room door	Levanto, Italy	"Dear Sirs we inform you that the room is to be vacated before 10 AM. On the contrary the room will be debit."
Frances Mayes	Under the Tuscan Sun	"Most trips have an underlying quest. We're looking for something. What? Fun, escape, adventure--but then what? ... Once in a place, that journey to the far interior of the psyche begins or it doesn't. Something must make it yours, that ineffable something no book can capture."
Cheryl Strayed	Wild	"I had arrived. I'd done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I'd always tell myself, though I didn't know the meaning of it just yet."
Judy Davidson	Sabbatical Travels (unpublished notes)	"It's sunny up here over the North Atlantic. The trip was long enough that I got past the need to go home a while ago, but by yesterday we were tired... We couldn't enjoy another restaurant meal. Wonderful, wonderful as it is, Paris, too, is in the real world and I'll now return to mine."
Gertrude Stein	As seen in a daily cryptoquote puzzle	"You look ridiculous if you dance. You look ridiculous if you don't dance. So you might as well dance."

As Roy Rogers and Dale Evans sang so long ago, happy trails to you.

Field Notes

Jeremy Tenenbaum, Expedition Chief

Time	Location	Notes
11:17am	Passyunk Ave and Bainbridge St	Planter with LEGO interpolation. 6 bags of cedar chips. 2 Zagars within view.
[Untimed]	Philadelphia AIDS Thrift, Passyunk Ave & 5th St	[Cat Hanson Box] [notebook writing unclear]
[Untimed]	Passyunk Ave & Bainbridge St (appx)	742 mural
[Untimed]	Passyunk Ave & Christian St	PoMo brick shutters.
[Untimed]	Passyunk Ave & 8th St	“Deadpool Lifeguard” encounter: L. Davidson engages, Shea engages, "Deadpool" "unplugs me" [from The Matrix].
12:37pm	Mid-ascent camp: Triangle Tavern, Passyunk Ave & 10th St	Note: 1 hour later than projected itinerary
[Untimed]	Lost sight of DiFranco and Miller
[Untimed]	Statue of Joey Giardello (Legendary Philadelphia Boxer), Passyunk Ave & 13th St & Mifflin St	L. and J. Davidson diverged from team. Passerby asks Tenenbaum for location of “benches.”
[Untimed]	Passyunk Ave & Mifflin St.	Edit: K. Ralabate, Archivist: Mouse incident: Shea and Tenenbaum, kneeling to record crayon rubbing of local manhole cover, unintentionally trip human-sized Mickey Mouse afflicted with misfortune of being unable to look down.
[Untimed]	Summit camp: Passyunk Ave & Broad St	Team reduced to Tenenbaum, Ralabate, Shea. Note for posterity indicating team members and course buried in planter
[Untimed]	Statue of Joey Giardello (Legendary Philadelphia Boxer), Passyunk Ave & 13th St & Mifflin St	Rejoined L. and J. Davidson
[Untimed]	Fall Festival shop tables, Passyunk Ave	Rejoined DiFranco and Miller
3:16pm	Philly Typewriter, 1735 E Passyunk Ave	Davidsons diverged from team. Stated intention to reach Broad Street, taxi home.
3:35pm	ACME parking lot, Passyunk Ave & Dickenson St	Brief camp at corner. Team reduced to Tenenbaum, Ralabate, Shea. Note spiky seedpod [empty] and blackened bananas
[Untimed]	Shot Tower Coffee, 542 Christian St	Diverged course to briefly camp. Communication from DiFranco and Miller to meet “in 10 minutes” at Base Camp.
[Untimed]	Base camp: Passyunk Ave & South St	Rejoined DiFranco and Miller
Post-expedition: [Untimed]	Taco & Ramen, 615 South St	Dinner. Team minus Davidsons
Post-expedition: [Untimed]	Cry Baby, 627 S 3rd St	Drinks. Team minus Davidsons
Post-expedition: [Untimed]	Various	DiFranco and Miller stated intention to “get a nightcap” elsewhere nearby. Shea stated intention to meet husband at The Last Drop Coffeehouse. Tenenbaum and Ralabate return home.

Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer

Fig 1. Expedition Points of Interest
Fig 2. Expedition Findings

Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media

Photos

Videos

Rubbings

Sketches

Found

Ellie Miller: Navigator / Sherpa and Medic

Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher and Judy Davidson: Communicator

Odd Lots

A Proper Mast-Lashing

Philosophies and Phrases for Debased Phases

or Aphorisms for Schisms or Epigrams for Pigs and Rams

The first lie we're taught is existence of sin. The second is we shouldn't have it..
Drinking, like religion and suspicion, is only dangerous in excess or less.Sex and love are each admirable but together inconceivable.The problem with good taste is that there's too much of it. A surfeit of quality is the tedium of heaven.From birth I easily succeeded. Only through great effort have I failed, albeit not very well.Sobriety is the only impediment to intoxication.Poetry lies to make truth seem plausible.Don't deny yourself a fantasy because reality is flawed. Fiction is a valid form of fact.I derive from a long line of the dead. In fact, everyone I know comes from dead stock. All living people have survivor's guilt.I assume all interactions are loving and flirtatious except those that are.The body makes us human but adornment is denial of the body and denial of the body is civilization and civilization makes us human..
It's later than you drink.I'd like to die while I'm young enough to appreciate it. I may not have traveled much in life but I expect to travel reasonably far in death.La petit morte is more manageable and repeatable than la morte grande.Intellectual property fences in the ocean. Wit belongs to any qualified thief.A friend is just a stranger you've met.Morality says A is right and B is wrong. Ethics asks you to choose between C and D.A nickname given for not drinking is a soberquet.Marry the myopic and live beautiful forever.Decency is the most popular hypocrisy.Religion revealing the historic is a useful mooring. Religion revealing the mystic is abusively boring. Religion is only useful when unbelieved..
My only regret is having been born a man instead of a book.An epicurean, voluptuary, and hedonist walk into a baroque...My mistakes are my best and only qualities.It's best to be hated by the wrong people.We always knew the world was round. Through vast effort we taught ourselves it was flat. Then through much more effort we taught ourselves it was round. And we've never learned our lesson.Fear is not, and the only, convincing theological argument.Life exists to create life but death exists to create thought.I'm queer in every sense except the homosexual.I'm an atheist because I'm too moral not to be.Great minds kink alike..
All evil is caused by children or what they become.
.
.
.
Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum
Editor
June 13, 2025

Correspondence

SORTES invites readers and contributors to fight amongst themselves. Please talk with us! Comment on stories and poems, letters, and the SORTES demimonde in general by emailing

sortesmagazine@gmail.com

Title

“Text.”

Name, Date

SORTES Riposte

Shop

SORTES is a mostly online journal, as you know, but every so often we can't resist existing.

Spectral Annual 2024

Here are four ghastly cards celebrating the tradition of sharing ghost stories at the end of the year. Each card features original eerie illustrations and newly-commissioned horror stories:-- Irina Tall's illustrations
-- Kailey Tedesco's poetry
-- Luke Condzal's historical existential story
-- Nick Perilli's familial ghost warmer, and
-- Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum's fraternal horror.Keep them, mail them, trade them, resell them once supplies inevitably exhaust.

Annual 2023

The SORTES Spectral Winter Annual 2023 revives the tradition of haunted holiday fiction. This beautifully crafted 44-page paperback anthology features ghastly short stories showcasing a dead man’s special deliveries, a judgmental seaside specter, the pains of an aging table-rapper, the heartwarming war on the poor, and the electrifying end of the year / world, as well as poems celebrating the Jersey Devil's unsung siblings. Authors include Daniel DiFranco, Jean Zurbach, Kailey Tedesco, Max D. Stanton, Mordecai Martin, and Nick Perilli. The Annual makes an ideal holiday present for any dear friend or family member who loathes the living.

SORTES Sampler 2

A SORTES Sampler 2 is a slender tasty book collecting weird fiction by Max D. Stanton, surrealist collage art by Danielle Gatto Hirano, and a poetry cycle by Uri Rosenshine. It’s a handsomely designed but affordable little snack of a book. We have incredibly limited copies on hand, and every day they become incredibly more limited, so leap today.

SORTES Sampler 1

SOLD OUT

A SORTES Sampler 1 was our first attempt to make the ephemeral real. It contains a dystopian farmstead fantasy by Iris Johnston, paper cutout art by Abi Whitehead, and a Coney Island noir by Mordecai Martin.

Or delay your delicious fulfillment and

Buy In Person

When in Philadelphia, please gobble up your copies from:Brickbat Books, Head & Hand Books, A Novel Idea on PassyunkPlease note that not every publication is sold in each location. If these fine stores are sold out, march to the counter and sweetly demand more SORTES.

Chris Klassen “So You Can Be Compartmentalized”

David Levine “Sand In The Microwave”

Forest Arthur Ormes “Last Words”

Christiana Drevets Three Poems

Souvenir Irimaso Shimwa Two Poems

Tushar Sen “Brush And Blood”

James Entworth “Just Like Spearmint”

Russ Bickerstaff “Apartment 1A”

Peter Uttal “Sweet Dreams, Janjak”

Melissa Gish “A Series Of Perfectly Reasonable Decisions”

Contributors

Support ArtWell

Submission & Contact

Events

SORTES 26 Live

Radio SORTES

SORTES Expeditions

Please select an Expedition listed below.

Team Jeremy Tenenbaum: Chief Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media Ellie Miller: Navigator / Sherpa and Medic Daniel DiFranco: Camp and Equipage Manager Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher Judy Davidson: Communicator

Jeremy Tenenbaum, Expedition Chief

"Mount Passyunk"

Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer

"The Ballad of Passyunk Ave"

A musical tribute to singing cowboy Marty Robbins

Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media

"soft coercion of highly constructed environments: east passyunk ave"

Daniel DiFranco: Camp and Equipage Manager

"nowsitrightbackandhereataleofawalkingfourhourmile"

Judy Davidson: Communicator and Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher

I was inspired by our Day on Passyunk to go back and find some quotes I had saved while on a long journey with Lenny [Davidson] 20-some years ago.

As Roy Rogers and Dale Evans sang so long ago, happy trails to you.

Jeremy Tenenbaum, Expedition Chief

Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer

Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media

Photos

Videos

Rubbings

Sketches

Found

Ellie Miller: Navigator / Sherpa and Medic

Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher and Judy Davidson: Communicator

Odd Lots

Archive

Shop

Subscribe

Patreon

Chris Klassen
“So You Can Be Compartmentalized”

David Levine
“Sand In The Microwave”

Forest Arthur Ormes
“Last Words”

Christiana Drevets
Three Poems

Souvenir Irimaso Shimwa
Two Poems

Tushar Sen
“Brush And Blood”

James Entworth
“Just Like Spearmint”

Russ Bickerstaff
“Apartment 1A”

Peter Uttal
“Sweet Dreams, Janjak”

Melissa Gish
“A Series Of Perfectly Reasonable Decisions”

Team
Jeremy Tenenbaum: Chief
Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer
Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media
Ellie Miller: Navigator / Sherpa and Medic
Daniel DiFranco: Camp and Equipage Manager
Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher
Judy Davidson: Communicator