Kismet

Photographer - Tobi Brun

The concept of fate was deeply ingrained in my childhood. Growing up in a Muslim household, my parents would always say that everything happens for a reason, it was all God’s will. It was a pretty simple concept to grasp at the age of 8, it boiled down to all of the good things being rewards while the bad things were meant to make you a stronger person.

At the time I never really gave it much thought, I was just a kid, I was more focused on Monster High dolls and stealing clothes from my sister.

As I grow older, the idea of fate occasionally flits around my mind. Some days it’s comforting thoughts to know that there is always going to be something out there waiting patiently for me until it’s my time. It takes away some of the overwhelming pressure that constantly plagues me to make the right decision. On other days, the idea of fate is almost insulting, knowing that all of your decisions were predestined and predictable and there's no way out of it.

Honestly, I’m not sure if I believe in fate. 

—

My memory is something I pride myself on, it’s surprisingly accurate but only for stupid things. Song lyrics, artists' names, and small details from events take a decent portion of my brain space. However, one of my biggest specialties is remembering people's names. My siblings find it a bit odd that I’m able to recall their friend's names based on a few details and the mention of the name maybe once or twice. My friends find it especially weird that I’m able to remember almost all of the people I went to high school with who were in my grade. That’s saying a lot since my school is one of the biggest in the state, with my graduating class amassing almost 750 students.

In truth, I’ve never given much thought to my memory - it’s simply a part of who I am. Yet, my mind is cluttered with trivialities, leaving me yearning for the ability to recall things that truly matter.

—

I never considered myself a sentimental person. My older sister, on the other hand, gives out hugs and compliments with an easy smile while my skin crawls a little giving my friends a genuine compliment not under the guise of a joke. I still consider myself to be a genuine person, more in my actions than in my words, but I admire the people who are so willingly open and honest, they make me want to be more like them. There are times when I catch myself yearning for that innate sense of affection that seems to come so effortlessly to her.

Perhaps one day I’ll learn to embrace that side of myself too, to see the world through the lens of sentimentality and find joy in the simpler experiences.

—

Every year my friends and I drive to Duluth for a day trip to hike and sit on a beach. It usually turns into a chaotic trip, it’s almost impossible to wrangle almost 15 people. The trip to Duluth usually started in the early morning with excited chatter and constant bathroom stops. We split into three separate cars and began the three-hour trek. I drove the entire way which I preferred. The first two hours were quiet as everyone took advantage of the long drive and slept before we reached our destination. As we grew closer to our destination, the excitement began to pick up again.

The busy freeways eventually transformed into winding country roads, the only things going on for miles were cows and farmland. The roads were smooth and empty, the fluffy clouds painted a picturesque view, a feeling of serenity wrapped securely around us.

Eventually, we crossed into the land of no service, the calls to the other cars with our friends cutting out, leaving us disconnected from the outside world. Instead of feeling isolated, we embraced the freedom of the open road, rolling the windows down and blasting the music so loud I’m surprised we didn’t suffer from ear damage.

Amidst the wind blowing and the music, I caught a glimpse of Amina, a captivating presence known for her passionate expressions, as she opened the sunroof. Her face was illuminated by the clear sky stretching endlessly above us. In the backseat, Amna and Siham giggled like schoolchildren and I knew they were plotting something. A few moments later, I saw Siham, an admirably free-spirited and charming individual stand up and I immediately knew what she wanted to do. I slowed the car down, watching in the mirror as they lifted themselves into the sunroof, screaming the lyrics to Ethel Cain’s American Teenager as I drove down the empty roads. 

Usually, I’m a careful driver, scared to death of being pulled over, but my worries flew out the window along with Amina’s hat.  Exhilarated screams put a pause on the fun as I rolled to a stop so she could run out of the car to grab it. Amina came back grinning, holding the hat tightly as if she was scared it would blow away again.

—

The summer sun enveloped us as we gathered on Huda’s patio, relishing in the simple pleasure of sliced apples and easy conversation. We chatted about nothing, laughing loudly and pointing accusatory fingers about lord knows what. We sat and just enjoyed each other’s company, a nagging thought that our group would no longer be whole for three months as Huda, a perceptive and humorous individual, traveled abroad for school. During those three months, we texted and called as much as we could, but the choppy Zoom calls and awful service made the distance palpable.

That same summer, Yaa, whose aura mirrors the brilliance of the sun, and Amna, whose smile radiates joy to all around her, joined me on a trip to New York to visit my sister for a week, visiting landmarks, navigating the subway system and almost dying of heat exhaustion. Once the week was over, the desire for my bed was immense. After canceled flights and too many Uber to and from the airport, Amna, Yaa and I finally arrived home. As we waited for our luggage, the exhaustion from traveling finally caught up to me, however, it wasn’t stronger than the excitement I felt. We finally got the I’m Here text, and we rushed outside to spot the familiar Hyundai we knew and loved. Hurried feet carried us to the car, Amna reaching the driver's side first as she tugged open the door, pulling Huda out of the car. Our overexcited chatter filled the airport terminal, and other airport goers started, some with curiosity, others with annoyance as we took forever to finally pull out of the airport.

 A quick trip to McDonalds concluded our trip and we fell back into a routine of familiarity, making it as if the distance never existed in the first place.

—

The sky hung heavy with gloomy clouds, threatening to drench us as we wandered through Dinkytown. It was the eve of my first day of in-person college, and my friends and I were filled with excitement and anxiety. After enduring a year and a half of online school, we were dying to interact with new people and make up for lost opportunities from our freshman year. We also anticipated getting lost on the massive campus, and we planned a day to walk to each of our classes, practicing the route to ease some of the stress.

Despite my quiet objection, we found ourselves crossing the streets towards Raising Canes,         and my eyes connected with Yaa and Huda across the street. Yaa and I had known each other for years, meeting and becoming friends in high school. Strangely enough, my entire friend group attended the same high school, our paths hadn’t intersected until that moment, only speaking a couple of words in passing.

They joined us for lunch and we fell into an easy conversation, talking as if no time had passed. It was a curious twist of fate that had brought us together that day and it’s a moment we still reminisce about almost three years later. I often find myself pondering the what-ifs: What would’ve happened if I voiced my objections to Canes more strongly? What would’ve happened if we toured campus at a different time?

I try not to dwell much on the ‘what ifs,’ as the possibilities could consume my thoughts entirely. But that day, the forces of the universe were on my side.

—

The smell of dough and chicken permeates the air with a heavy scent, the sound of chatter and laughter filling my ears. I sat at the counter, listening to the different conversations being held around me, talks about work, and cheerful chatter. Muna, a girl whose wit and intelligence are unmatched, and Amal, a decisive and clever individual, argued about pizza dough and vegetables.

The Galentines setup this year was immaculate. Maeva, who possesses unparalleled warmth and sincerity, was kind enough to host and she set up the dining room. From the delicate streamers adorning the walls to the fragrant roses gracing the centerpiece, every detail spoke of love.

As the evening unfolded, the air buzzed with laughter and lighthearted banter. Conversations ebbed and flowed like gentle waves, carrying with them snippets of shared memories and inside jokes.

As I sat at the counter, surrounded by the comforting aroma of freshly baked dough and savory chicken, I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of contentment. In that moment, amidst the laughter and camaraderie, I knew that I was exactly where I was meant to be – surrounded by the warmth and love of my cherished friends.

—

Whether it’s the joy of squeezing one more friend into a packed car or the sheer absurdity of our heated debates over inconsequential matters, each memory holds a special place in my heart. These are the memories I hope to retain even when I’m gray and old. I always found my memory to be useless, not being able to remember equations for class but being able to remember the color of the dress my mom wore for my sister’s graduation. These are the details I want to keep.

As I grow older, the idea of fate plays constantly in the back of my mind, as I watch my friends argue over who gets shotgun, or yell aggressive compliments while someone feels insecure. All my actions, my decisions, and the other things I didn’t have control over led me here, to a place with people I cherish and plan my future with. I’m not sure if I believe in fate but I do believe in whatever is leading me here and maybe that makes me more of a sentimental person than I thought.

Furkan Addow is a recent graduate from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities where she obtained a BA and a minor in creative writing. She lives and works in Minneapolis, MN with her pet cat Sesame.

No Meat

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Mia despised working in fast food and felt she had a higher calling to write award winning porn films starring her favorite actress, Anne Angel. Mia put salt on the fries and then took off the shaker’s lid and added heaps more. Mia had gone to the University of Nevada Las Vegas and majored in hotel management but her favorite classes had been her three elective film classes. It was there she had an idea for a porn film that could win her favorite porn star, Anne Angel an award. There was no way up in the world working at what she called “Jack off” the Box but her only other options in Las Vegas were to work at or for a casino or worse, for Amazon or Uber.

She realized if she drowned the greasy potato strips in sodium chloride it discouraged residents and delivery services from returning but it had worked too well. The owner had noticed there had been a decrease in foot and online traffic ever since Mia was assigned to fry cook plus two cardiac events had occurred on site required the EMTs. Roger, the twenty-two-year-old manager, two years younger than Mia, had never gone to college, also noted there had been an over four hundred percent increase in soda consumption when she worked.

“The owner makes most of his money off of soda, and he’s upset, so I have to promote you to grill,” said the manager.

She protested the promotion because she was vegan, which to her should have granted her a religious exemption. To make herself feel better, if someone ordered their burger special, she didn’t care, everyone got the lettuce, tomato, pickles, and sauce and double what they wanted none of. If they wanted no pickles, they got eight to ten. If they wanted no sauce, it would be dripping with it. If they didn’t like it, they should go to a fancier restaurant, she thought, there were plenty of them. The night shift seemed longer than normal and at the end she was confronted by the manager about why she didn’t honor individual orders and he described her as overtly passive aggressive.

“It’s more money for the owner the less you put on the sandwiches. You have failed at fast food. There is nowhere else to put you so I must let you go,” said the manager.

“Capitalism sucks. Will you at least give me a good reference?” asked Mia and the manager walked off without answering but shaking his head east to west.

Mia was worried that she would be broke soon. She had about three-hundred dollars and some change in her bank account. Anne was now offering private sessions on OnlyFans for two-hundred dollars for twelve minutes. Mia admired Anne’s entrepreneurial tendencies but she knew paying for OnlyFans was a sacrifice but she wanted the time to pitch a movie she thought Anne might like, 2069: A Sex Odyssey Too. Mia turned on her computer and was surprised a slot was open in forty minutes, and as she signed up to have private time with Anne, her hands started to cry and her stomach felt like she had ingested too much sodium.

During the wait was an Anne Angel video. A “policewoman” arrived at Anne's house and kicked the door open and Anne is in the kitchen seated on the counter, naked except for some six-inch candy apple red slut heels, legs open, licking something invisible off of her knuckles. The officer shredded off her police uniform shirt. Anne’s hair was Rudolph nose red. She had translucent skin and her blue eyes matched her opaque veins. The only hair on her body was on her head and it was long enough to cover her breasts. She only wore heels that were shades of red in her videos, and Anne always wore a fresh pair.

The policewoman said, “I’m here to arrest you. However, I think I can get you off. I get a lot of women off. And if I can get you off, you will be free.”

“Get me off? What will I have to do to get off?” Anne asked.

“Do what I say criminal. Obey me but especially this,” the officer said and whipped out her Dirk Diggler sized night stick.

“That looks like a nightstick worth obeying and getting off for,” Anne said and she shoved it into herself.

The cop cowgirled Anne, who shouted out that the officer was the best ever but she told every man and woman she acted with that. The women always looked confused, the men look flattered and believed it.

“Fuck yeah! Ride me” Anne yelled over and over.

“I told you I would get you off,” the policewoman said.

“I understand why people say ‘fuck the police’ now,” Anne said. “I will scream at everyone to fuck the police!”

That was horrific dialogue thought Mia. Anne’s talents were being wasted. How did Anne become this when she was an award nominated writer for an adult film award five years ago she wondered? The nominated script was based on the women’s suffrage movement called Susan B(anged) Anthony. It was marketed as historically accurate slice of life fiction. In it the women are led by Susan B, played by Anne, who bangs a man named Anthony and they realized the way to get men to allow women the right to vote was for women to have sex with men in power. The final scene was epic as dozens of naked women gathered at stripper poles and danced and grinded and then had an orgy with the male poll workers to get the right to vote. It was not what she had been taught in history class, but it made sense. The link to join Anne live popped up.

Mia joined the link but kept her own camera off.  Anne had clothes on, a white business jacket unbuttoned with a black skirt, and the area from her knees to her forehead now looked foreign to Mia, except her high heels or her red hair.

“What is your fantasy with me?” asked Anne.

“I want to make a film called 2069: A Sex Odyssey Too with you as the lead,” Mia said. “It will be in space and the ship will be led by an unhinged misogynist-incel computer with an Oedipus complex named JCN pronounced Jason. JCN hates lesbians but of course loves lesbian sex and wants to control all women and keep them in their place.”

“I’m surprised you pitched a film when most men want to pitch tents,” Anne said. “I love the idea of computers getting to an awareness where they need to watch sex and make people their sex objects and of course they try to oppress women,” said Anne as she looked at Mia who turned her camera on.

“JCN will yell out angry vile weird quips and the two female leads must shut it down because it has grown so furious with women it is willing to self-destruct the whole ship and itself if they don’t get in the 69 position or are stereotypical women. JCN makes it clear it will provide oxygen to the women now only if they are having sex or are in the ship’s kitchen cooking even though in space you get freeze dried food,” said Mia. They finally get in the 69 position but it's too late. The counter is seen at 00:01 and the movie fades to black. What do you think?”

“I say you are brilliant. We need the money shot so let’s say the counter stops when they disconnect the computer at 00:01 and start to celebrate but the camera fades to a white opaque liquid substance exploding at the viewer as the ship explodes. This movie could launch my all-women Hallmark Channel, the Enthrallmark Channel. But instead of making all the successful women fall for a too good to be true guy, it will be successful women pursuing other successful women,” Anne said. “Our twelve minutes is almost up, but I have some slots open and I want you to join them for free to work on the film. Any chance you are local?”

“I’m live from Las Vegas,” Mia said.

“Then maybe we can meet in person instead?” asked Anne. “The thing about your average porn video is there is no emotional connection to the characters and the plot is always the same but this sounds unique. I fake every orgasm with men by the way,” she said.

“And the ones with women?’ Mia asked.

“No,” she said, “no need to fake those. What do you do besides come up with compelling plot driven porn films?”

“I went to UNLV. Hotel management. Hated it. Got fired from Jack off the Box today,” she said.

“I was smart enough to get a degree in engineering but dumb because I got it at Devry. I went to Hollywood and the same thing happened and men were inappropriate; I experienced the Big Hollywood Lie. I figured if I did porn, I could have all the power and all the money would go to me. I can look at myself in the mirror with this job, naked or clothed,” Anne said.

“I hope you do start your own company and I think we can develop our movie,” Mia said.

The adult film awards show was opulent. Every woman was dressed in their most revealing and sheer gown and no one cared what the men wore.  2069: A Sex Odyssey Too was nominated for best film, best directing, best climax, best writing, and both Mia and Anne were up for best actress. Anne had filmed the final scene with an actress she had felt there had been no chemistry with so she talked a reluctant Mia into starring. Mia was mortified when she saw herself on screen but knew it was for art. It was an immediate hit. Strange men came up to Mia and Anne offering them money for private threesomes to which they politely responded they were millionaires and neither were into men. Some men told them they could turn them straight which always elicited a kick to their nuts from Mia. The fame and nomination had strained her relationship with Anne and they had spoken little in the last few weeks of their now eight-month relationship as Mia got more and more nervous about the awards. They rode saying little in the limo to the strip.

“Will you ever be okay that millions have seen you naked?” asked Anne. “I am so used to it and I just don’t think the film would be what it is, nominated for all these awards, if you hadn’t stepped in and it was your concept. If we win, the sales jump will fund more porn films for women and our channel.”

“I hope I lose best actress but I do want the Entrallmark channel to succeed,” said Mia as they were escorted to their table. “But I hope you win and I hope our film wins and if I have to star in another movie to advance our cause, I will.”

Their biggest competition was a film called La Isla Boneita and starred a man called Blaque Stallion. His film was him masturbating for about three hours on an island and it was filmed in black and white and it had his thoughts appear in text such as I am an island, looking for Atlantis. He was nominated for a writing award, best climax, best actor, and best director as well.

After three hours of porn puns, it was time for the major awards. The first was for best climax, which Blaque Stallion won. The second was for Best Actress and Anne won. Mia gave her a hug and for the first time since she was four, felt like crying, because she was so happy for Anne and ecstatic that she hadn’t won herself.

Anne stood at the podium with her award.

“I appreciate this award, but it shouldn’t go to me. I really didn’t have to act since the love of my life costarred with me. I am going to have to decline the award but thank you so much and it means a lot to me.”

The confused drunk on champaign Elvis dressed host came back onstage.

“Hound Dog! This has never happened. It will have to go to the next highest vote getter and they are looking it up. Here’s the envelope now,” he said.

He ripped it open into undignified shreds.

“I’m sure you have suspicious minds but the winner this time is Mia. Come on up and get your award. Great performance in an amazing film. Not just some guy jerking off.”

Mia looked at Anne who was laughing.

“I didn’t know that is what they would do,” Anne said.

Mia walked slowly with her head held high to the podium.

“I also must decline this award as well. I wasn’t acting. It was all real so I too, must decline the award. Anne let’s make things work,” she said and kissed Anne when she returned to the table.

The disoriented host came back on.

“Dang this has never happened. They are seeing who got the third most votes,” he said. The crowd anxiously awaited the results and who would turn down the award next. The envelope came out and this time he opened it like it might break.

“Oh my god, the award goes to Margaret Livingston, congratulations. Margaret, I think I’m falling in love with you,” the fake Elvis said.

Margaret Livingston was seventy-nine years old and was now the first person to win the award while acting in a porn fully clothed and the first winner over thirty-one and first to use her given name. She had played Rose’s grandmother in a porn version of Titanic called Titpanic and had one line, “Rose quit being a bitch and let Jack onto the floating plank! His dick’s shrinking!”     They did win the best film award and best director and accepted those. Anne and Mia dedicated the awards to all the women being taken advantage of by men and those not recognized in corporate America because they were women.

The crowd gave them a standing ovation but the men only stood up after the women did.

Their chauffeured limousine was pink and was in a long line of limos waiting to pick people up from the awards. Anne was more determined to start her Enthrallmark Channel on her own despite the many offers blowing up her phone she had gotten from established ones run by men. Margaret left with Blaque Stallion in his Hummer limousine.

As their limo pulled up, they settled in the back seat and Mia asked Anne what was next.

“I am having the limo take us someplace familiar,” she said.

The limo headed away from the venue and was soon in solitude off the strip.

“Oh god not here. I thought our relationship was back on,” Mia said as she saw the red sign. “This is where I got fired.”

“You need to show them there are dreams beyond Jerk in the Box, and see how far you have made it,” Anne said.

As they walked in, the people working there and in the small dining room looked at Mia and Anne. Her former manager realized Anne was there with Mia and gave her date a carnivorous look.

“Hey Roger, remember me? The fry girl?” Mia asked.

“I do. You’re also the woman who turned down an award I think you earned. What can I get you or are you just here to gloat?” he asked.

“Gloat? This is where winners who turn down awards and become nonwinners but go on to win other awards go,” Mia said.

“I’m ready to order,” Anne said. “The number three combo, with onion rings, large. What would you like Mia, my treat.”

“I can’t believe you are fry shy. I’ll take a large fry heavily salted, a burger with two and a half pickles, two top buns, one tablespoon of sauce, and no meat,” Mia said.

The manager scowled at her and retreated to get their food. Mia didn’t miss this place. They grabbed their order and people eventually lost interest in them.

“Mia, I don’t ever want you not to be in my life,” Anne said, as she sifted through her onion rings and held several up, eventually she settled on one.

“I found it; I think this onion ring will do. I can’t believe I’m doing this at Jack in the Box but will you marry me?” Anne asked.

Mia put the onion ring on her finger; it was a perfect fit.

Robin Trimble is a Navy veteran who enjoys writing absurd short stories and surreal poems. She is pursuing her creative writing certificate at Mesa Community College. She also does 3D animation and creates art and video games. Her favorite games are Pac Man and Call of Duty. She grew up in a tiny town she has never returned to, but she imagines not much has changed there. She has two sixteen-year-old cats who act like kittens.

Burnt Offering

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Burnt Offering

The old marketplace, the center of the gathering, could be dated back to the glorious Romans so many years ago. Cauchon squirmed uncomfortably as he stood in his white robes outside of the church in Rouen. Standing there, he thought of how those ancient warriors, that red legion, would honor their pagan, heretic gods with burnt offerings. He wondered doubtfully,
with the silent weight of guilt like a tomb balanced on the tip of his pointed mitre hat, if he was not doing the same.

They brought her out, head shaven and in men’s clothing. This heretic fool. He had tried to save her from this, tried to bring her back from demonic damnation at that trial. But she was
insistent, persistent in delusion. She heard voices, she had said, as though the tongue of Satan flapped from between her lips. She stated it was the saints in her ears; Catherine and Margaret.
She claimed that God almighty, in France’s great time of need, would speak to this peasant farm girl.

What true God spoke to women? None. This was not Genesis nor the book of Luke, where God and his angels would send the golden voices of divinity to speak truths to humankind’s ears. This was France, four hundred years had passed since the First Holy Crusade. If anyone, God spoke to the Pope, but to filthy girls like her? No. It is just not so.

One or two of the armed English soldiers stifled a laugh as the pale young woman squeaked slightly in pain as they shoved her forward into the old market square. Only nineteen they believe, a beautiful girl, even with her hair gone and that gap between her teeth, she had done so much―too much―too quickly. From peasant to leader of all the armies of France, shining in armor underneath bloody banners at Orleans and Patay―Cauchon thought she was a half-witted girl who was lucky in leading some good fighting men forward. No hand of God, no voice of the Almighty blessing her ear. Yet, as she staggered forward bound in the malice of others, Cauchon thought that her bald head and her ragged men’s clothes shimmered with the same metallic glint of steel armor she had worn only a month ago.

Cauchon looked down at his white tunic and patted at the wrinkles on his chest. Yes, yes, his conscience was clear. No woman would hear the voice of God―she had to be lying, she was
a fool, and no God would support the French over the English and Cauchon’s own Burgundians. He had captured, tried this girl, and thus, God had to be on his side. Who was ending their story
bound and put to death? Not him―it was her― if that didn’t prove guilt enough, then what did? He thought of another being he had studied who had been bound before, but shook the example from his memory― he sniffed loudly, this was nothing like that. He looked down and spat. Some of the crowd looked up to him. He thought he could smell the burning scent of Roman offerings―the scent of frying pork skin riffled through his nostrils. He spat again. No. The drunk English men tied her to a tall stone column built long before anyone could remember. The soldiers started singing in English as they gathered wood in front of the murmuring crowd:

“Our King went forth to Normandy With grace and might of chivalry; There God worked marvelously for him, Wherefore England may call and cry out: Thanks be to God!”

The girl’s eyes pierced through the thundering silence which roared even under the drunkard song of the English. A mountainous stoicism bound to the unnerved frame of this pale, bald, gap-toothed girl. Cauchon could see her teeth from his position above the crowd. Was that a smile? Or was she wincing? He saw the whole universe in the gap of her teeth and he looked down again to spit.

He shook his head. A heretic deserves hell. God would say so, God had said so. From Revelations: “the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those
who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur.” Had this girl not been cowardly and sexually immoral by dressing in men’s
clothing? Had she not been idolatrous, by pretending to hear voices? Of course. This was holy practice, Godly practice. The will of the Lord, the want of the Shepherd. Cauchon knew his responsibility, and he too had a flock to keep, to herd from danger and hell. The girl smelled coarsely of hell of wrongdoing, of vulgarity. He could smell it from all the way over here, her wrinkled face almost like a moon in the water of time. That scent―that burning pork again―again he thought of those red Romans and their burnt offerings.

His white robes ruffled in the light breeze as he heard a pile of wood clunk against the base of the column the girl was tied to. She remained motionless as the pile of wood grew around her feet―she was a fool who deserved this. He looked down to spit again but he saw at the knee of his glowing white gown, a smudge of mud. It must have splashed up from the mud of May in
Rouen’s streets. It was a brown and black pupil that sneered upwards, a smudge of filth. There was that pugilent smell again―and then the thought that came with it: what had she said,
through that gap between her teeth at her trial? What were those words she had said with the spite and skill of clerical expertise?:

His tail had tightened between his legs as she had gone on and on of the voices of Saints Catherine and Margaret and the love of God above. The jury of
clergymen had shaken their heads in unison, a forest of disapproving skulls. Cauchon was onto her; he knew in her heart was the heart of the false shepherd, the idol of darkness sewn tightly into the fabric of her soul. His patience had run out and so he had asked her, this peasant girl who knew not her letters nor anything of royal courts nor law, he had asked: “Do you know, in fact, that you
are in God’s grace?”

And the clergy at the trial squirmed in excitement, a law they had learned in their universities, in the instruction of logic on the will of God. Surely the girl who had sworn to have heard the female saints above in her ear knew she was in the grace of God. The question was a tricky one, a trap to show her as the dark idol he had known her to be. If she said yes, he’d call her a heretic―only God Himself can know if one is in God’s grace. If she said no, she’d be admitting that she was a false prophet, a liar mincing the words of saints for witchly powers. But the silence of the room felt hollow, like a rotten trunk in a forest. The many heads in their white gowns of purity pierced the girl in her mannish clothes as she stood pale as snow in the center of the room. Her hands were bound, her eyes trembling, her body as calm and quiet as mountains of southern France. Cauchon, himself, felt the roaring impatience of the ocean breaking upon Normandy’s shore, chewing at timelessness and silence with bereft, incessant motion.

“Answer the question;” he said with shark teeth, “Do you know, in fact, that you are in God’s grace?”

The girl exhaled as though the very tome of patience was being written in the breath winding out over her tongue, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” She said this slowly, her enunciation like the great royalty of old, the clarity of doctrine thundering through her quiet, yet powerful words. The forest of clergy rocked in the wind of her deposition, and Cauchon splashed in the suddenly calm waters of her profundity, his shark teeth dulled in her iron stoicism.

He had had her jailed anyway. Looked the other way as Englishmen had their way with her. Punished her when she had stripped herself from her dress and put men’s clothes back on. She was guilty, in every action, she was a heretic at best, at worse, a witch. The scripture was very clear. Fire. Fire. Fire at the stake. He realized now, the memory flowing through him, that that had been the moment when he first smelled it: the burnt offering smell, that stench of roasting pig fat broiling on a spicket. That flashing visage of red Romans uttering some mantra to a pantheon of dead heathen gods. That was the first time, and he smelled it again now as the torch of the sacrifice―no, breathe,

Cauchon―the torch of the sacrament of God was being lowered down around her feet. He had apparently missed the announcement of her wrongdoings, her public sentencing, and he refocused now as the orange torch spread the flames which began to lick around her ankles. Her mouth finally found its anxiety, its concern, its devine doubt as the kissings of flame found her bare skin and the small hairs populating her legs began to scorch black. Small shrieks were splattered out from that gap between her front teeth, and though Cauchon was certain he saw a flash of summer sunshine emanate from between them, her words became partnered with steaming tears as she squirmed and wriggled against the column holding her firmly to her sacreligious punishment.

She moved like the worm she was as she shouted out the name of the lord, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” as the flames turned her bald white skin pink and as pink began to ebb into black. The smell was putrid, it was overwhelming. Cauchon looked away from the sacrif―sacrament and back into the black iris-stain on his robes. He felt his smile fade, like it was yanked downward and away from him. He closed his eyes but the Romans shouted their mantra at him beneath his eyelids.The thunder of drumming banged along as he heard her high whimpers and the hushed gasps of a hungry crowd.

The fire was short yet cruel and the screechings of the witch passed like the May breeze. The crowd shuddered at the squealing of this girl, once the proud knight of the people, the banner of the crown of France. The vigorous body slumped into crooked black cruelty, a charred remain bent in holy prayer folds, like a large pair of prayerful hands clasped black from the ash of holy incense.

The smoke was worse than the flame. Cauchon thought so as he stared at the smoldering pile spit its black color into the blue void of the sky. He thought he saw faces in the smoke.

Female saints? A gap-toothed woman? Eternity was above, yet also, eternity drooled below in the pits of hell. That black smoke, as he walked over to the pyre through the crowd leaving the site, past the drunken English soldiers, seemed to smolder so quickly into the heavens. He looked at the charred body, the white skull beginning to glimpse through the falling ash of burnt flesh. The Romans in his brain were shouting now, their mantra of polytheism berating like a drum on the inside of his skull. He saw the white set of teeth peer through the ashen black, smoke whispering in whisps from a jaw still unclenched from the world’s cruelty.

He fell, knees first, into the ash. His white robes soaking in the soot. He stared at that small gap between the ruin of her skull. He smelled the burnt flesh of pig skin. He heard the hammering of drums, he felt a strong current anchoring him downward beneath the stonework. His ashen knees began to bleed and blister upon the hot cobblestone.

Two clergymen saw Cauchon’s fall and they ambled over to him. Try as they might, they struggled to lift him from his knelt position, a position almost as in prayer, so close to the still hot ash and coals of the public execution. He started shouting, hardly words at first, and then his words fell to a constant incoherent mumbling as yet more clergymen pulled Cauchon from his troubled kneel. They brought him to the infirmary. His mumbling never ceased.

He was blanketed and someone lit a fire in his hot room to sweat out the demons from his body. It was probable that devils had made him sick in the first place, they suggested, being in such close approximation to the witch’s death.

Cauchon’s eyes stared at the little fire in his little room, his eyes unsleeping, unwavering from the coals replenished and replenished by concerned clergymen of Burgundy. But as they cleaned his sheets and changed him, as they fetched him french water and bled him from disease, they heard him ask a quiet question to himself, over and over as the fire continued to flicker. It was a question none of them answered nor interrupted, nor wrote down. One they ignored, for though they would not say, they felt it too:

“Am I in God’s Grace?”

He would shiver with each inquisition as the words rolled from his tongue. All the while, his eyes watched the fire and his nostrils smelled the burnt flesh of burnt offerings to pagan gods as he laid in his shadowed monk cell sweating through his sheets.

Peter Randazzo has a bachelor’s degree in Social Studies Education from SUNY New Paltz and a Master’s Degree in Curriculum Instruction with a focus in Literacy from SUNY Empire. He teaches history in upstate New York, is a poet with Dead Man’s Press, runs the Clever Name Collective writer’s group in Albany, and runs the No Poet blog on WordPress. He has published in the anthologies of Eber & Wein, Hidden in Childhood, Penumbra, and has self-published "Dandelions & The Right Notes" on Amazon.

Kenny-Boy

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Kenny-Boy

Mary wasn’t born in Alabama, and she knew she certainly didn’t want to die there, either. The landscape flickered by outside her car window, longleaf pine trees streaking into a single flare of green. The smudged skyline of Birmingham faded behind them, its squat, gray buildings a miserable excuse for a skyline, and Mary’s throat tightened with disappointment. Her husband, Randy, nodded his head to the radio, drumming his hand along his upper thigh. He was off-beat, and though he pretended not to notice, Mary knew it bothered him. She heard it in his exhale. In the sudden, frustrated click of a tongue. A chorus, half a bridge, then the meaty staccato of his fingers stuttered. Paused. Began again. The 80’s station was punctuated with bouts of static and Mary felt the slow tendrils of a headache begin to tighten at her temples. She spoke.

“Could we change the station?” She asked.

Randy kept his eyes on the road.

“No,” he said, “I like this song. You know I like this song.”

Mary pressed her forehead against the cool surface of the window. This was a celebratory vacation. It was meant to be a grand hurrah. They had just left their forties behind in a fanfare of silver party balloons and a shared birthday cake, too many candles haphazardly stuck in its frosting. Their friends had hugged them close and left wine-stained kisses on their cheeks before heading home early to care for dogs or children or newly minted teenagers, of which Mary and Randy had none. Instead, they answered the summertime siren’s call of the beach and packed their suitcases.

They hadn’t been married long. Just a handful of years. Mary, her hair frizzled by years of bleach and ragged at the tips, struck up a conversation with Randy at the local pharmacy. She held a prescription for thyroid-support medication, her body recently gone soft amid middle-aged hormonal famine, and Randy palmed a blue-printed hand cream. He was nice enough. At 47, tired and the sole 2 owner of a 1500 square foot split level, nice enough was all Mary was looking for. They went on a date to the local pizzeria. She learned he hated fishing but loved trout at a restaurant, was kind to waiters but winced behind their backs, paid for dinner but only in $50 increments. He called her the next week, and they were married in six months.

The trip to the coast was cheap. With retirement looming, Randy was less willing to fork over a handful of cash that could be earning interest in their 401(k)’s. Mary hoped they would pack a few of their lightly used suitcases for a trip to Maldives or even spring villas in Tuscany. She wanted to lick marbled salt from her fingers after dinners of fish-and-chips in London and sear the top of her mouth on pizza in New York City. Heck, she said, one evening when their discussion reached an argumentative pitch, “I’d choke on a pita if it was on a cruise in the Mediterranean!”

Instead, they were driving down the hard-drawn center of the United States, leaving the leafy summer suburbs of Chicago for the wind-scraped beaches of the Gulf Coast. To his credit, Mary knew, Randy did make it sound exciting. Exotic, no. Glamorous? No. But quiet, and good. He did make it sound good.

He asked her before bed: “What do you think about driving down to the Alabama coast?”

A crossword puzzle was open across the hairy plain of his belly. His legs were spread long across bed, creating dual humps beneath the comforter.

“We could rent a car, grab some sandwiches or something and make a go of it. We’ll drive straight through the meat of the country.”

Mary chewed the inside of her cheek. Her face was soft, still damp from her evening moisturizer. She took off her glasses and placed them on the nightstand.

She answered, “I haven’t been all the way through the South. It might be nice.”

“Might be?,” Randy laughed. “I’m going to make it the best damn trip you’ve ever taken.” He sighed long and slow before humming to himself in a self-satisfied pulse. Mary rolled over and bit his shoulder, kissing it quick.

They left early on a Monday morning, striking the US hard through its greened middle on I-65. They drove through the sweeping cornfields of Indiana, stopping at a small barbecue joint for lunch and sharing cornbread by the whirr of an undulating fan. Their car was an old BMW model, a deep green with broad fenders. It looked formidable, the kind of impressive vehicle someone would have been proud to own in the 1970s, but the air conditioner was on the fritz and neither had remembered to get it serviced before they left town. It froze over quickly, until there was only a buzz from the air vents. Randy turned it on and off in spurts, their underarms and the tender place at their lower back growing damp. The American South bloomed across the state of Tennessee, an experience that spanned a quick few hours spent eating an early morning breakfast in Nashville and stopping for gas downtown. Mary knew her husband hated to be low on fuel, so she bit her tongue when he stopped every few hours.

By mid-afternoon on Tuesday, just past Birmingham, the creased lines of Randy’s neck had grown red with sunburn. The radio crackled in and out, unbidden stanzas broken and disjointed. Mary twisted herself over the passenger seat and stretched her arm backwards in search of the brown sack of snacks she had packed just that morning. The biscuits and gravy from breakfast left her body heavy and sodden. Randy barked at her, sweat dribbling down his temples.

“What did you bring?”

“Hold on.”

Mary felt something in her shoulder pop and she breathed in hard with pain.

“I’m freaking starving here. C’mon, babe.”

Randy’s eyes cut towards her then back at the road.

“Fine.”

She unbuckled her seatbelt and shifted herself entirely over the seat, leapfrogging her hand over empty water bottles and warmed soda cans before locating the half-crushed sack under the seat.

“It’s kind of messy back here.”

“I didn’t ask for a sermon, just something to eat.”

She handed him a bag of cut apples and Randy’s jaw jutted forward, mouth open.

“Really? Apples? Do you even know what they do to your gut?” “There’s fiber in them. They’re good for you.”

“They’re full of sugar, and if I’m going to have sugar on a road trip I’d rather it be some sort of piece of crap candy.”

A blue sign painted with fast food symbols streaked by the window, and Randy merged hard. The car vibrated as it jumped the rumble strip.

“Candy sounds great.”

They stopped at a Trucker Travel Stop. The brown, yellow and fleshy pink branding reminded Mary of the thick carpet and wood paneling at her grandmother’s house, forever frozen in the 1970’s. While her husband perused the candy aisle, Mary wandered towards the fountain drink station against the back wall. It was tattooed with soda; sugary liquid lacquered the metal countertop and grey tiled floor. A tray of hot dogs steamed next to it, sweating sausages spun between slick metal cylinders. She filled a dented Styrofoam cup high with ice before spurting streams of Coca-Cola on top. It fizzled and popped, the excess bubbles tickling at her nose.

“You ready to go, sourpuss?” Randy held two bags of sour gummy straw in his hands.

Mary never knew if he meant it, the nickname. She never laughed. He never stopped using it.

“Yeah, hold on.” Mary turned towards the waist high wall of snacks and knit the tender space between her eyes together.

Her eyebrows were thin and fair, so they never quite met. Still, the ridges were deep and spread from her hairline almost to the bridge of her nose. She chose a bag of sun faded cheese popcorn before second guessing herself and snatching a small carton of Goldfish crackers instead. She took a moment to straighten the forgotten popcorn back on the shelf before following her husband to the cash register. There were still a few more hours of sun before they would stop for the night, and the sugar cocktail or perhaps strange effects of the candy dye had Randy talking.

“You know, my parents listened to the radio all the time. Talk radio, you know. The occasional baseball game when we were out camping. But otherwise, it was just talk, talk, talk, all the time.” Mary murmered her assent.

Alabama was seeping towards Misissippi outside the window, the weeping kudzu stretching towards the road in sage, sweeping arcs.

“My dad, he was a real man. He’s why I drive so well,” Randy took both hands off the steering wheel and balanced it between his knees, jolting the car before he straightened it back on the highway. “I wish you knew him. You know, I know, he was a truck driver. Which I guess makes me a professionally trained driver. Taught by the kind of guy who can’t mess up.”

Mary realized she was gripping the doorhandle. She loosened her grip, her knuckles reddening with blood flow.

“He was smart. I like smart people, you do, too.” Randy bowled over her concerns, smiling. “That’s why you fell in love with me, right?”

Mary smiled tightly. Ruefully, she thought? Was it a rueful smile? Was there something dark in it, something bitter? She didn’t question Randy’s intelligence. Still, her was brash. Brazen. Unliked. The ebb and flow of electronic impulses in his brain were hardly governed by societal expectation or emotion, and instead he relinquished his ideas on unsuspecting audiences with little thought to their digestion. Brash and loud spoken, he hid the ugly flare of his self-doubt behind her. He could transfix a room with sordid tales of death culture in Central America or lighten a party with jokes that teased at the political dealings of the host. Even so, and perhaps because, he treated his mind as if it would suddenly dissipate. Sometimes the loudness of his voice was too brash for the moment, revealing sweat at his hairline and the untamed stench of insecurity. The air conditioning wheezed, and Randy turned it off to defrost. The cab boiled. Mary tapped her fingers at her temples, drawing her legs up onto the car seat, crossing them like a child. She noticed newly painted veins of dirt across her white tennis shoes.

She spoke. “If you would’ve known better, would you have wanted something different? With your life?”

Randy didn’t answer. Mary saw the tension build in his jaw as he clenched his teeth.

“Would you have wanted kids? To live somewhere else?” Mary’s voice was small, but there was an ache to it. Something tender and small, a question that required an honest answer.

Randy said nothing. The radio continued to play, the sound a tinny, country twang. Thunder growled in the cloudclotted sky. The storm muted the springtime sprawl of color outside the window. The craggy hills of the north had long since softened into flatlands, and even those were giving way to the Gulf region. Just past Montgomery, the highway rose above a streak of swampland and straddled the Mobile River. Trees cloaked in kudzu reached brazenly over the road, eerie, monstrous things. Outrageous, craggy, lifelike as they clawed at the cars speeding down the empty highway. The storm clouds trapped the heat low along the road. Randy glanced at the fuel gage once, twice, three times. No one had spoken in an hour.

“Let’s stop quick,” Randy said.

Mary pointed at the GPS. “We only have a half hour to go,” she said. Her voice was low.

Randy smirked. “A half hour is better spent with a full tank.”

A fleck of candy clung this right canine. The exit was almost hidden by the overhanging heft of tree branches, the blistering orange of synthetic lighting just beyond a bend in the road. There were two gas stations across from each other, each boasting empty bays. Tom & Jim’s Gas Stop boasted a slick tin roof, slanted at an impossible angle and pockmarked with dirt and uprooted vines, but light burned from inside. Mary saw an older man at the counter, leaning backwards with his arms crossed, head tilted towards what she was sure must have been a television hung towards the ceiling. It was too lonely, Mary thought, and she wordlessly pointed at the Chevron across the street. Randy obliged, turning the car hard into a brilliantly lit gas station chain, the concrete scabbed with spilled condiments and oil stains. The Alabama forest hung heavy behind the stark white and silver metal of the place, bending over the clean lines of capitalism as if bowing in reverence. The seat belt alert pinged as they both unbuckled, opening and closing their doors in unison, the staccato sound loud against the chatter of cicadas from the trees. Mary wondered how many were there, their beady eyes black against the night. Randy looked at her, eyebrows raised.

Mary said, “I need to stretch my legs.”

“Don’t go far,” Randy answered, tapping at the pump keypad.

Mary stood on the passenger side of the car; arms folded on its roof with her chin on her hands. She watched her husband’s back flex beneath the thin cotton of his shirt, noted the new lines that streamed across the back of his neck. She hardly knew his body. She’d only seen it for the past few years, already quiet and tempered by middle age. She didn’t know how the tautness of youth had calmed across his chest, small patches of fat cropping up at the bend in his waist and along his upper arms. Youth had long since left him, twisting his physical self towards someplace softer and unknown. Mary felt a sharp twinge of love for the person he must have been. The softer, kinder self. The emotion was easily overwhelming and just as quickly gone. Was it even real, she thought? This kinder person? The stranger walked out of the forest with little fanfare. He wasn’t there, then suddenly he was fully formed and breathing, just beyond the line of gas pumps, as if he’d been split from the earth. He walked with the slope of a wounded animal, tangy and wild with presence. Everything moved. His fingers plucked at one another, bloodying cuticles into crusty lumps, and his tongue worked behind the pockmarked stretch of his cheek. Haggard eyes darted back and forth, from Mary’s tight face to Randy’s curious scowl. “Well hey there, you two.” His voice was raspy with disuse.

“Hey, man.” Randy towards the man, pulling his hands from his pockets.

“You got a couple bucks to spare?” the man said.

He tapped his foot against the ground, the sole of his boot loose and flapping. Rap rap, it went. Rap rap.

“We don’t have anything,” Randy said.

“You expect me to believe that, with that high-oh car you’re drivin’?” There was expectation in his voice.

“We can’t help you out. Sorry.” Randy leveled his eyes at the man inching across the asphalt, incredulous with his defiance.

The man tilted his head and smiled, revealing a mouth full of straight, white teeth. The man’s right canine was broken, leveling the point into a jagged line.

He spoke, louder this time, “Hey man, you know who I am? My names Kenneth, Ken, Kenny-Boy. I live out past the tree line there.” He held his hands up in a mock surrender. “Pretty sure I was born there, too, but who knows? It was a long time ago.” His breathing hard and oddly distinctive, each exhale accompanied by a grating wheeze.

Kenny-Boy continued. “All I need is a couple bucks to get me through the night.”

“We don’t have anything for you,” Randy said. “But you sure as hell better stop right there.” Randy’s hackles were raised, the air lit with primitive territoriality.

“What’re you going to do?” Kenny-Boy stopped. “Hurt me?”

Randy pocketed his credit card and unhooked the pump nozzle from the car, placing it back in its cradle. Kenny-Boy moved closer, his voice wheedling. Dangerous. “Hey buddy. I’m talkin’ to you.” Kenny-Boy jerked his chin up, his left nostril twitching.

“Look man, I don’t have anything. I have a card. Do you want a card?” Randy sucked in his cheeks and squinted his eyes, incredulous. “Even if you get the damn card, I’m not tellin’ you my zip code, so good luck using it here.”

Mary breathed out, her body weakening against the car door. “Randy…”

Kenny-Boy spit. “Shut up, lady.”

Randy fired back. “That’s my wife, asshole.”

Mary couldn’t turn her gaze, couldn’t look at anything but the stranger’s face. It was sunburnt, but it couldn’t hide the leathery complexion and dirt-speckled expanse of it. The corners of his mouth bubbled with spit and blood, and thick flakes of skin peeled from his lips. Mary couldn’t smell him, but she knew he would be earthy and pungent with sweat.

“You give me some money, and we’re all good. And don’t offer no fuckin’ food. I don’t want it, I don’t need it.” His words fell hot on the pavement.

Randy sighed and turned back towards his wife, who was frozen on the passenger side of the car. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, his smile pitying. “Do you have anything?”

Ken, Kenneth, Kenny-Boy clucked his tongue once and his nostrils twitched in unison as he turned towards her. “Yeah, baby, you got anything?” He bit his lip and shrugged his eyebrows up and down suggestively. “I don’t have anything, he’s right. I’m sorry.” And she was. She was sorry, that she was meeting this man at a gas station in god-knows-where Alabama. That he’d walked out of the forest, the remote tropics of the American South, and had run into the brunt of her husband’s insecurity. She was sorry that he was alone and she felt alone. No one was guilty of anything but the accident of proximity, and she realized it just might be enough to ruin them all. Mary’s quickly escalating panic punctuated her words as she apologized again.

“I’m so sorry.” The edge of her sentence broke, and she felt the muscles in her stomach clench. She suddenly missed the five-dollar bill she spent on Goldfish and Coke that afternoon. Randy mistook her tone for fear, perhaps for panic and, he reacted hard.

“You hear her? She doesn’t have a damn thing. Neither of us do. So get the fuck out of here.” Mary thought about that night for years. Maybe if he’d sounded more apologetic, the man would’ve made off with a scowl and thick wad of phlegm spat to the pavement. Maybe if he had acted like the man mattered more, like his unwelcome presence held weight, that they would have ended up at the beach like they planned. Their world would have continued like they planned.

Kenny-Boy held out his hand. Grime striped his palms.

“Give me the keys,” he said. “I get the car.”

He jerked his head towards the forest, “you get the woods.”

“Are you fucking kidding me -”

Time moved quickly. It stumbled over itself, losing minutes to seconds as Ken, Kenneth, KennyBoy pulled a knife from the deep pocket of his cargo shorts and stabbed Randy in the stomach. Both men gasped in unison. One hand was sunk deep into another’s torso, where the thrump of blood, pushing and pressing onward, spilled up and around the blade. It was a secret place no one was meant to touch, perhaps only the being that knit blood to bone, but here they were. A colony of germs spread through Randy’s gut, latching onto blood vessels and spilling into tiny capillary canals. The blade, unseen and deadly, nicked the abdominal aorta and skewered his right kidney, unleashing a torrent of blood into his stomach. The delicate balance of Randy’s internal organs was upset and violated.

“Lady don’t you touch him! Don’t you move!” Kenny-Boy screamed across the car, eyes still trained on the gory scene in front of him. Mary held her hands up, bent at the elbows, pale fingers shaking against the clouded sky. The convenience store lights flickered, and the world went dark, the scene lost in the night for a moment before Ken, Kenneth, Kenny-Boy, the man from the swamp, the man from the woods, ran. If Mary had known any better, she would have prayed to the croaking depths of the Alabama wilderness to open its jaws and swallow him whole. She would have pleaded with the swaying kudzuchoked trees to tear the limp threads from his emaciated, tobacco-stained limbs, to leave them in shreds on submerged cypress branches. She would have prayed for a belch from the bayou, summoning alligators on their nocturnal night flights to train their eyes on his circuitous course through the trees. For their hunt to be silent but their enjoyment to be long, drawn out, the screams from their prey unwholesome to the human ear. If she had known, she would have sent a fiery strain of energy towards the sky, electrifying the tunneling wind channels and constellations with an arc of lightning so bright it would crack the darkness straight through the middle, igniting the man’s body with celestial fire.

Such is the grief of a woman, when a woman comes to know grief. Randy cradled his stomach and met his wife’s eyes with a rounded look of surprise. Pain seeped from the corners of his mouth, visible in the white strain of his lips, tunneling down his neck in a trail of wildly pumping arteries. Mary dropped her arms and sprinted around the car, hand skirting the dirty green hood. She gathered a crush of bug corpses in her palm. She caught her husband as he began to slide towards the concrete, wrestling the crook of her elbows underneath his armpits to soften the slump. Her arms burned as they sputtered awake, blood suddenly racing towards her fingertips.

“Hey, you’re okay. You’re okay.” She repeated herself, her words rote and meaningless.

She tossed them towards the gash in his belly as easily as if she was comforting a child, knees red from the itch of summertime grass. What damage could it have done, she thought, her mind clicking back and forth in time, dredging up models from high school anatomy class and off-base chemical equations. The kidneys, heart, liver and lungs, all nestled around each other in perfect pink and purple hues had seemed so approachable when they were flattened against the stretch of a poster board. It was so different from the sweating, bleeding, oozing body in front of her. Adrenaline sped through her limbs and ignited her throat as she screamed. Guttural and harsh, over and over again. She screamed. Kenneth, Ken, Kenny-Boy, did he hear her, Mary thought later? Did the sound of it twist itself around his chest, squeezing his heart as thoroughly as hers broke? Her screams, didn’t they sluice through the trees, gathering weight as they crackled through the saw grass and alligator weed? Grief was grief was grief, Mary thought. For the kind and the unkind. For the dead, the dying, and the ones who should be.

Meghan O'Brien is a graduate of the University of New Orleans MFA program, and works in the publishing and digital media industry.

By the Cherry Tree

Photographer - Tobi Brun

“By The Cherry Tree”

Prudence Dickson did not mean to be defiant, truly she didn’t. Somehow however, her tone, or her look, or her choice of words always seemed defiant to her father, and Thomas Dickson tolerated no defiance. His wife and his other children soon learned to keep their heads tucked in, especially when he had a mood, but Prudy had never mastered the skill. In truth, in her 17th year, they had clashed more than ever.

“My child, will you never learn that a soft answer turneth aside wrath?” Clara Dickson asked, as she surveyed the results of the latest thrashing Prudy had suffered, dabbing the welts with an ointment of willow-bark, plantain leaves, and calendula. Her daughter hid her face in the pillow and tried not to wince or move too much as her wounds were dressed.“I didn’t mean to,” Prudy answered.

“You never mean to, child,” Mrs Dickson said. “You never did. But it’s never stopped the consequences, has it?” She placed a square of light linen over the belt marks and bound it lightly in place. She shook her head, sadly. 

“How do you bear Father, Mommy?” her daughter asked. “It’s not like he’s never beaten you or the others. How do you stand it?” 

“My parents decided I should wed your father,” Mrs Dickson replied. “He’s a good provider, and well-connected. Yes, he has a bad temper, but he does not drink to excess, or scandalise our family, like some men do.”

“But do you love him?”

“Love is just for novels, Prudy,” her mother said, with resignation in her voice. “It’s fine for the characters in Miss Austen’s books, but in real life...love doesn’t often fit into marriage.”

“That’s awful,” Prudence said, sitting up and turning to face her mother. “I can’t imagine it.” Her mother smiled at the folly of youth.

“In time, you will,” she said. “Your father will find you a good match and, if you are lucky, he’ll be a good man. Who knows? You might even grow to love him.” In truth, Mrs Dickson doubted her words and if she suddenly recalled, fondly, a young man’s face from her own youth, she did not say so.

Thomas Dickson was well-respected in the village of Queenston. Starting with his own land-grant of 300 acres, through connections, luck, and 150 acres Clara had brought him as a dowry, he’d become a wealthy man. His home – the Stone House – was the largest and best appointed all along the frontier. As collector of customs, and the owner of a large estate, he had only a few equals, and no real rivals. His family sat in the first pew at St Saviour’s Church, and even the curate looked to him for approval as he delivered his sermons, rather than the deity he served. No one would have dared call him a petty-tyrant to his face but, in that small corner of Upper Canada, he was never gainsaid.

As the family left the church on the next Sunday morning, Dickson greeted the curate, who was pleased to have received the great man’s approbation; he had wondered why Mr Dickson had requested that particular topic for a sermon, but gathered from his face and handshake that he was not displeased by the result.  After that short delay, Dickson turned aside to address the real goal of his socialising, today.

“Mr Chase! Just the man I was hoping to see,” Dickson said, as he drew aside the older man. Nearly 60, and recently widowed, Uriah Chase had no children who had survived, and Thomas Dickson was not one to miss such an opportunity. Chase owned nearly 400 acres of land, had a grist mill, and a smithy that he ran at a considerable profit.

The two men chatted for a while about assorted local matters, before Thomas Dickson got to the point.

“You know, I was listening to the sermon, today,” he said. “When Reverend Dawson reached the part about ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him,’ I must admit, my thoughts turned to you, in your bereavement.” He smiled at the frail, old man.

“What am I to do?” Mr Chase asked. “I am robbed of my support and succour. I suppose I shall go to my death unmourned and forgotten. Alas.” Chase evidently thought his wife’s decline the most extravagant of self-indulgences, and the resultant loss as a personal attack on himself and his position in the world.

“It’s very sad,” Dickson agreed with him “Have you thought of looking for someone to ease your burdens and gladden your closing years?” He glanced over at his wife and daughters, as if by chance.

“Oh, I’ve no time for courting,” Mr Chase said. “Such a foolish waste of time is suitable to the young, but, an established man, a man of business, can’t be engaged in such frivolity as paying calls, and taking women to dances, and the like.” Dickson knew that Chase had been making inquiries, but his disagreeable and miserly nature had led to him being rebuffed by many of the older women – spinsters and widows both – that might have afforded him a suitable match. No one with a modicum of independence would likely yoke themselves to such a man, and those with no dowry or inheritance stirred no passion in his avaricious heart.

“I do understand,” Thomas Dickson said. “If only such matters could be conducted like a business transaction.”

“As they were, in the old days!” Chase said with some vigour. “The parents would decide such matters, the partner would be chosen, and the matter set to rights on a proper basis.” Mr Dickson, certain Mr Chase meant on the basis of the property each partner brought to the altar, smiled to himself.

“I hear your wisdom, sir,” he said. “And having only daughters left, I am much concerned that they marry into substance. I have not been well myself, and worry lest all I have built up be scattered on the winds.” This last was a total invention, but he suspected an intimation of his own frailty might bait a trap for the older man.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Uriah Chase said, insincerely. “But I’m sure your eldest girl  – what’s her name – doesn't lack for suitors. Half the bucks along the frontier must be vying for her hand.” He gazed at Prudence, appreciating the view of her slim waist set off by the full skirts of her dress. Thomas Dickson did not miss this glance.

“Silly boys, wastrels, mostly,” Dickson said. “I’ve seen several off. No, I would have her wed a man of substance, someone with judgement. Someone who’s demonstrated sound sense in cultivation and business…Well, in short, someone like yourself, Mr Chase.” Mr Dickson gave a deep sigh, as if the frustration of finding such a match weighed heavily upon him.

So it was that Mr Chase was invited round for Sunday dinner at the Stone House. He lingered afterward and, between sips of port, appraised the four young daughters of his neighbour: Prudence, Charity, Emma and Maud. The last two – 13 and 11 – were, of course, too young to be marriageable, nor would it do for Mr Chase to make his suit for the 15 year old before her 17 year old sister was wed or, at least, engaged. As it chanced, Prudence had a bosom that he found most pleasing, especially when set off by her slender waist. The prospect of a fat dowry –  and a fourth of Thomas Dickson’s worldly goods should he die, God forbid – was even more pleasing to Uriah Chase.

If Clara Dickson was surprised when Uriah Chase was invited to stay for supper too,  she did not say so. Only Emma noticed the funny way in which she looked at her daughters that afternoon, but she did not know the reason until later. After dinner, the two men concluded their arrangements in Thomas Dickson’s office.

“Mommy, I will not marry that man,” Prudence said, when her mother told her. “He’s so old! And he looks at me as if I were a prize pig that he wished to fatten for slaughter.” Clara had not known, and did not commend what Thomas had decided, but there seemed little chance to evade it. She stroked her daughter’s hair as Prudence buried her face in her shoulder. 

“My child, you had to know that your father would pick you a husband, soon,” Mrs Dickson said. “And though Mr Chase is older, well, that means he will not trouble you so very much, as a younger man might. He will not stray with others, and you will be a rich widow, soon.” She realised that might not have been the best thing to say, when Prudence began to sob again.

“I do not wish to be a widow at all!” Prudence said. “And I would rather be a poor widow, and have been truly loved, than a rich man’s widow who never loved her husband.” 

Mr Dickson, however, was unreceptive to any such arguments. He had made a good match, one which would see his eldest daughter well settled. Then, should Mr Chase happen soon to die – which event Thomas Dickson fully expected – then his daughter, knowing little about land and business, would of course turn to him, and he would gather all that Uriah Chase had scraped together over 60 years, into his own hands and to his benefit, although he would never say such a thing, openly.

The next Sunday, which was as pretty as a May Sunday can be in that part of the World, Mr Chase sent a carriage round to fetch Prudence to visit him. Mrs Dickson went to chaperone but, taken with the pretty day, and the blossoms on the trees, she did not seem to notice that her daughter and the young driver exchanged looks, both going and coming.

Over the following weeks, Prudence took many long walks out to the edges of Thomas Dickson’s fields, and lingered beneath the black cherry tree, along the road to Durrand – a hidden spot that the girls had often visited when avoiding their father. If Emma discovered her older sister’s visits there,  she never breathed a word to her parents. Thomas Waters, the young drivere who worked for Uriah Chase, came often to the spot, and brought flowers he picked for Prudence. Their meetings seemed to Emma like a scene from one of the novels she loved to read. And Clara, if she learned of them, did not hinder Prudy’s frequent trips to the cherry tree, though she wondered if her daughter had ever noticed the initials and heart carved into the bark, almost hidden after many years, and forgotten by all but her.

One morning in June the household woke to find that Prudence had left a letter at her father’s accustomed place at the family table. What it said, exactly, none of them were sure, but the scowl on Thomas Dickson’s face as he tore the missive to shreds was one they long remembered. Emma was not surprised by the event, but Clara Dickson’s curiously dry-eyed weeping managed to distract the ire of Thomas Dickson from noticing any conspiracy.

“I’ll thrash the girl until she cannot sit for a week,” Dickson thundered. “How dare she throw herself at trash like this Waters? I’ll have that young puppy put in the pillory! How dare he sully my name?”

“You will have an apoplexy, if you do not calm yourself,” Clara Dickson told him. “No one has been put in pillory since before Prudence was born.” Even though this was true, Thomas Dickson did not wish to be calm. He swore out a warrant for the arrest of Thomas Waters and, as justice of the peace, he signed it. He sent men after the pair but, as they had set sail from Newark in a schooner, there was no prospect of apprehending them. A disappointed Thomas Dickson realised that, by the time he could find Prudence and bring her back, she would be ruined; Uriah Chase was not the sort of man to accept his hired man’s leavings.

So, with the blackest ink he could find, Dickson crossed the name of Prudence out of the family Bible. He tore the silhouette and pencil sketches her sisters had made of her to fragments, and burned the family portrait he’d once hung with pride over the dining room fireplace. He forbade his daughters – his three and only daughters, as he said – to ever mention the name Prudence again. When, in due course, a letter with familiar handwriting  arrived for him he consigned it to the fire, unread.

It was the same when other letters came, whether sent to him, or Charity, Emma, or Maud, he inspected them closely and, if there was the slightest suspicion in his mind as to who had sent them, the letters were burned. If any letters that came to Mrs Dickson, she kept that secret to herself and read them in some quiet moment, committing them to heart, before disposing of them.

It was not possible to forbid all mention of Prudence by those outside the Dickson home, of course. The girls heard from others that their sister had married Thomas Waters, and that they were living in Durrand. If Thomas Dickson also knew, he never mentioned it, but he did send letters to every substantial man in that district and beyond, traducing the name of Thomas Waters, and enjoining them never to give him gainful employment. 

Thomas Waters had guessed that his father-in-law’s wrath would be exceedingly great, and had made such plans as a young man with little money and few connections could. His strong back served him well, and he managed to persuade the Board of Police in Durrand to take him on as the new gravedigger before he had even run away with Prudence. A cabin went with the position, since the burial ground was some distance from the village. A relic of fortifications from the late war with the States, it was rough, dirt floored, and small, but sturdy enough.

Prudence might not have been used to such rude surroundings, but she did not complain. She took in sewing, and from scraps of material her patrons did not wish to claim, she made little curtains for the paper windows, and a quilt for their marriage bed. She walked the three miles to the village, and the three miles back daily; sometimes more than once. She swept the floor and did the cooking and the laundry, carrying the basket of clothes and such linen as they had down the steep banks to the creek and washing  them on the  stones. Had she married Mr Chase, such chores and many more besides, would all have been done for her, but she did not dwell on it.

Over the months, rumour had come that Uriah Chase had wed, and she worried it might have been Emma who was forced to be his bride. All Prudy’s letters went unanswered, and she needed to know more than the rumours occasional travellers brought. In due course, little Thomas Waters was born, yet still no word came from Queenston. When May had come again, and the boy was three months old, Prudence decided that she could bear the silence of her family no more. She kissed Thomas Senior and, carrying little Thomas on one hip, with a pack of needful things on her back, she set out to walk the 50 miles; they had no extra money for her to take a stagecoach nor a schooner.

“I should go with you,” Thomas Waters told his wife. “It’s cowardly for me to not face your father.”

“If you leave,” Prudence told him, “Then you might lose your job. It will take days to walk so far – longer, carrying little Thomas. People will complain if their dead go unburied for a week or more.” Thomas knew she was right; people had complained in the Winter, when the ground was frozen, and the bodies had to wait in the brick charnel house for a thaw to come. 

“Could we not wait?” he asked. Thomas Waters loved her dearly and the idea of Prudence being gone for five days or longer bothered him. He did not fear she would stop loving him, but he was not sure what Thomas Dickson might do; he’d seen the marks her father’s belt had left on Prudy’s back.

“It will be hotter in the Summer,” Prudence told him, her eyes steady and her chin slightly tilted upwards to look at him. “And the baby will weigh more. It’s better to go now.” Thomas kissed her and watched her as far as he could, until the road took a sharp bend around the earthworks of the old forward battery, and he could see her no more.

Prudence had walked the distance from her cabin to the centre of the small village of Durrand more times  than she could remember, and it was not long at all before it was behind her. From there the King’s Highway ran out generally eastward, although it wandered a little from south to north, on occasion, to find a footing on the driest land between the escarpment and Lake Ontario. It had been a well travelled route even before the first settlers had arrived and, although but a dirt road, it was the best and quickest way to walk the long distance.

Twice a day, stagecoaches passed along the highway, from Queenston all the way to York, or the reverse. The whole journey took some 17 hours, but none could not stand the bumping and lurching that far, and horses and drivers were both changed at Durrand. Half such a trip on Upper Canada’s roads was no joy for travellers in those days. A barefoot walk would spare Prudy and the baby an ordeal, nor would the girl be much wearier at the end of it.

At Big Creek Prudy faced her first real challenge; ’til then, the road had been mostly level, but that stream lay at the bottom of a deep gorge, about a quarter of a mile wide. The road ran steeply down to the water, and then climbed again quickly on the far side of the ford; she felt a little breathless by the time the road levelled out again. Less than a mile to the east lay the Gage’s farm; a fine piece of land, their front garden marked the high-watermark of the American invasion that was beaten back just before Prudence was born. Their house lay on the far side of the Stoney Creek, as they called it, but the Gages had built a bridge across the small stream.

People had begun to plant fruit trees on the farms that lay beyond that, and the road was scattered with fallen blossom; the scattered petals and fragrance were some relief on the long and dusty walk to the next hamlet. It was called Fifty, since it stood on the banks of the fiftieth creek between that spot and the great Niagara River. Prudence was a little worried that she might be recognized and handed over to the justice of the peace there, to be returned to her father. John Willson knew Thomas Dickson well, as both sat on the bench, and in the Legislature, but Prudy’s fear was childish. The pampered young lady who had fled the Stone House a year before little resembled the barefoot mother in homespun cloth who was trudging along the King’s Highway. The gossip as she passed through Fifty, was not about her, for that was old news, but about Willson’s son, Hugh; John had his own family troubles to attend to, without getting involved in her father’s.

By the time she reached Grimsby, it was late in the day. She had no money for lodging, so she found a spot beneath some bushes at the edge of Robert Nelle’s fine farm, and spread a blanket there. There was water from Forty Creek to drink, and the baby nursed quietly; Prudence ignored her own hunger. In the morning, she rose at first light and walked on. 

Prudy’s resolution to walk the whole way wavered when a passing farmer and his wife offered her a lift on the back of their wagon. She hopped up in back of the buckboard, which rattled and bounced along the road until they reached Thirty Creek, where the couple turned toward their destination. Prudence thanked them for their kindness as she set out, again. Though little Thomas had not enjoyed the rough ride, she was less footsore than she had been, and the farmer’s wife had given her some bread to eat. 

From Thirty Creek it was a long walk to Glen Elgin. That stream ran down the valley, from the mills at the edge of the escarpment into the broad and safe harbour that opened onto Lake Ontario. People had started to call that pretty spot Jordan, and Prudy wished she could tarry there to enjoy the Spring day, but whatever balm or gall awaited her in the Gilead of her fancy, it lay beyond Jordan’s shores. 

Beyond Glen Elgin, the several creeks that flowed down into the Black Swamp were a bigger obstacle; all of them had to be forded, and they swarmed with biting flies that tormented Prudy and little Thomas. Twelve Creek – the largest of them, more like a river than a stream – ran down, deep and wide, from the escarpment to the Great Lake, and the bridge over it had a toll which she could not afford. To cross over Prudence had to make her way up to the village of Beaver Dams, a steep climb to the top of the escarpment. Weary at the end of a long-day’s walk, she lingered in the village and watched a woman beating her rugs outside a substantial house.

“That’s a big job,” Prudence said, with sympathy, for beating rugs is dirty and tiring work. The woman looked Prudy over; seeing a barefoot young woman with a child, both dusty and tired from the road, she guessed that the girl might be in need.

“If you help me finish beating the rugs, you might have supper and a place to spend the night,” she offered. Prudence was quick to agree, although she had never done such work herself. Still, she’d seen the hired girls at the Stone House do it twice a year, and she knew what to do, and the dust of the task added little to the dust of the road. Thomas lay on a mossy spot and watched his mother work, not understanding in the least why she was doing something so funny.

In the morning, Prudence and Thomas set out once more. From Beaver Dams, it was an easy, downhill walk along the Limestone Heights, past Stamford and St Davids.  It was only 13 miles to Queenston, but Prudence found she was walking slower as she neared her destination.

“Thomas,” she said to the baby, “I don’t know how your Grandfather will act when he sees us. It would be wrong not to give him the chance to meet you, or to deprive you of your grandparents but…” She struggled to put her fear into words, while little Thomas gurgled and paid no attention. 

It was just before 11 in the morning when she first saw the Stone House. Her memories of growing up there flooded back; although she loved her mother and sisters, it had never been a happy place. It did not feel like home, the way the cabin did. It might have fine floors, glass windows, and a grand staircase, but she did not envy those who lived under Thomas Dickson’s roof. She stopped and put on her shoes; she was not going to stand before her father barefoot. Then, bracing herself for any storm, she walked up the long drive to the door. 

It was time for luncheon Prudence realised as she knocked. It would take a minute for someone to come from the dining room to answer the door, so she waited patiently. She expected it might be one of the hired girls and, since they never stayed long, it was likely that whoever answered might not know her. But it wasn’t a stranger whose face appeared; it was her sister, Charity.

“Prudence!” Charity said, her hand rising to her mouth in shock. Her wide blue eyes took in her sisters’ road-worn appearance, and the small child she was carrying. Behind her Prudy saw Emma, Maud and her mother crowding the door from the dining room, and staring at her. Their expressions ran through surprise, wonder, shock, envy, joy, and worry, but no one dared to say a word before Thomas Dickson passed sentence.

Then, pushing past the women, her father appeared. His face was expressionless as he approached. Prudence moved slightly, holding up the baby as if in offering; showing her father his namesake. Thomas came to the door and Charity stepped aside. Without a word he closed the door in Prudence's face.

Prudy Waters took a deep breath; later there would be weeping, but she would not do so here, not on the doorstep of the Stone House. She would not give Thomas Dickson the satisfaction of driving his wayward daughter from his door in tears. She held her head high and walked down the drive. Her steps were firm, and no one watching would guess that she was worn from the long road she had walked, and heart-broken from her reception. 

The road could be seen from Stone House for some way, and she kept her pace steady but, as Prudy came over a small rise, Emma was waiting for her by the cherry tree, where once they had hidden from Thomas Dickson’s rages. Down in that hollow, they could not be seen from the house, but they were not too far to hear if Emma was called. Prudy smiled as her sister came toward her, carrying a loaf of bread in her hands. Emma’s presence was a comfort; the sisters had always been close.

“Mother told me to bring it,” Emma said. There was a slight hesitation in the younger girl’s voice, as if she wasn’t sure if the gift would be accepted. There was a steel in Prudy that was new-tempered, an edge she did not recognise.

“Why didn’t Mommy come, herself?” Prudy asked.

“She’s making sure Father is distracted,” she answered. There was something in the way she said it that made Prudy realise the source of her hesitation.

“Has it been worse since I left?” Prudy asked; she could not keep a note of fear from her voice. The question hung for a moment, and Emma’s eyes looked bright with tears.

“Yes,” she answered. “His temper is worse, and he demands greater obedience.” 

“I didn’t know, I’m sorry,” Prudy said.  She wondered if she was telling her sister the truth; she knew her father well enough to know her defiance would goad him. The guilt she felt was relieved, a little, by the knowledge her sister wore no wedding ring.  “You didn’t have to marry Mr Chase?” Emma shook her head.

“Father spoke of it, but Mommy said she was not going to lose a second daughter,” she answered.

“I was afraid Father might make you,” Prudy said. “I wrote to ask, but never heard a word.”

“You wrote?” Emma asked; she’d thought her sister had forgotten her. Prudence nodded.

“Whenever I could find paper, and a coin to pay someone to fetch a letter to you,” she said. Emma looked at Prudy and realised that could not have been as often as she wished. Emma relaxed a little, then hugged her sister. 

“I’m glad you escaped,” she said.  “He’s wrong to drive you away.” 

“I never expected he’d welcome me back, but I had to give him the chance to see his first grandson,” Prudence said. Emma came closer and looked down into the boy's eyes; he looked back with the thoughtful gaze of a child seeing someone new, but still safe in his mother’s arms. “Does he know you’re here?” Emma shook her head. 

“He went into the study and locked the door,” she said. “Mommy gave me the loaf, and told me to come. I didn’t know she knew this spot.” Prudy looked at the old tree; there were many initials she did not know carved into the trunk, her sisters’, too, and her’s and Thomas’, set into a heart. 

“You must have run, to catch me” said Prudence. “I wasn’t walking slowly.” Emma grinned and Prudence knew her sister had hiked up her skirts and torn across the fields to arrive ahead of her. Then the smile faded.

“Does he hit you?” Emma asked, and they both knew whom she meant.

“He’s never hit me,” Prudence replied. “Thomas isn’t perfect, but he loves me, and I, him.” Prudence looked in the direction of the Stone House. The rough cabin she shared with Thomas was not a fine house; no one riding out on the York Road would ever stop and admire it as passers-by admired the Stone House, but within it dwelt no heart of stone. It had something her birthplace would never know.

“Mother worries that you’re penniless,” Emma said.

“I am,” Prudence replied. “But I have a roof over my head, my husband has a job despite Father, and I can sew or do laundry. We get by.” Emma ran her hand down her own silk dress as she looked at Prudence’s rough homespun; it looked the worse for the dirt of the long road on it but Prudy did not seem embarrassed by it. The younger girl watched her sister sit on the dirt to take her shoes off; she could tell that Prudy’s feet were most often unshod, these days. Emma wondered whether she could make such sacrifices.

“Will you come back?” Emma asked. She put the loaf – still warm from the baking – into her sister’s bag. Prudence smiled at her; she appreciated the kind gesture.

“No,” she answered. “Never, as long as Father is alive. But you can write to me. So can Mommy, and Charity, Maud too, when she’s old enough to keep a secret. Mrs Waters, in Durrand, on the York Road. Just don’t let father know.” Emma hugged Prudy, a strong embrace that ended in a sob, before she turned away.

Standing still under the cherry tree Prudence watched Emma, until she disappeared back toward the Stone House. The tears she had feared just a little while before did not come; there was no longer a cause for them. Prudence Waters looked up into the tree’s leafy boughs; there would be many cherries, this year.

Peter McGuinness recently retired after teaching History, World Religions, Philosophy and Visual Art for nearly 30 years. Before becoming a teacher, he was an editor and a journalist. He have a B.A. in History and Politics, a B.A. and an M.A. in the History of Art, and a B. Ed. He recently had a story published online in Grim & Gilded.