‘Immerensis’

Elizabeth Agre lives in northern mn with her husband alongside the bears, wolves and bobcats.

immerensis

n. the maddening inability to understand the reasons why someone loves you—almost as if
you’re selling them a used car that you know has a ton of problems and requires daily tinkering
just to get it to run normally, but no matter how much you try to warn them, they seem all the
more eager to hop behind the wheel and see where this puppy can go.

after all of the stars have been outshone by the burning sun I lie still
when you hold my hand in the quiet dark i am overwhelmed by immerensis

i’ll always wait for you to change your mind because rust is never nice
once i'm home, whist i lay in bed, i text you because i’m consumed by immerensis

and i wonder how it is possible for someone like you to like me
when the room is quiet, alone in my thoughts, i’m surrounded by the immerensis

people like run their mouths and they like to whisper that you’re beautiful
when i hear them all i can do is agree but it always fills me with immerensis

when you leave me in the restaurant and i get scared of being alone
and when you come back i’m surprised because voices in my mind sound like immerensis

you take my hand and for that singular moment i question all my fears when you hold me close in your heart i feel it dull, the immerensis day after day i give you a

way out as the clock ticks to the next morning
i hear your voice calming on the other side i forget the impending immerensis

Linhly Harwell is a junior at a liberal arts high school specializing in creative writing. From a young age, Harwell displayed an interest in writing which led to her pursuing writing seriously. Over the years, she has been able to dabble in different fields of writing such as poetry, short stories, nonfiction, screenwriting, and more!

‘Ode to Frankendick’

Aaron Beck is a poet and pianist.

‘Leviticus 18:22’

Ners Neonlumberjack was born in a tiny town in central Indiana in 1986. Having lived throughout the Midwest, Southern, and Western United States, the variety of landscapes in which they have lived informs a wealth of variety and interest in plants and animals in imagery as well as material choice. After graduating Herron School of Art and Design with degrees in Painting, Sculpture, and Art History in 2009 the longing for a sense of place and being conscious of the fragile nature of mortality has been a current within the works.

Leviticus 18:22

“The Aftons got a new scarecrow today,” I announce at dinner over a table of mashed potatoes I had been pushing around for the past five minutes, refusing to put the last clump of the under salted vegetable in my mouth. My father looks up from where he had been flipping through the sermon he has written up for this Sunday, focusing on Corinthians, and the dangers of temptation. 

“No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.” That’s his go-to for whenever he suspects I might be having fun. His tanned face, wrinkled from years in the sun, is pretending to be interested, but I can see the pull of his eyes to the paper, finding Mathew, Mark, Luke, or John more interesting than me. 

“Mm?” he asks, unsubtly sliding his eyes back to the stapled-together papers. 

“Real creepy-lookin’ thing,” I exaggerate, trying to capture his attention once more. Of course, the scarecrow I had seen had been barely more than a flash in my peripheral on my bike-ride back from Katie’s house after school. It was nothing more than a set of straw-stuffed clothes on a pole in the distance. But the kitchen had been quiet for far too long, and I can’t stand the quiet sloshing of my mother washing dishes in the background being the only noise. 

“Mm,” my father responds, deciding that the conversation was thoroughly complete, going back to the sermon and muttering something underneath his breath as he flicks to Psalms. Deciding I will get nowhere with him, I pick up my plate, smearing the last bit of mashed potatoes across it to make the mass smaller before he can see I haven’t finished my plate and make me sit back down. When I enter the yellow-tiled kitchen, my mother spots me subtly trying to slide my dish into the full sink she’s working in, the steaming water going up to her elbows as she scrubs the pot the forbidden potatoes were cooked in. My futile mission is halted as she raises an eyebrow, and I’m already walking to her right with a towel before she even gets the word out to tell me to. 

“Saw a creepy scarecrow today,” I tell her as she passes me a soaking wet plate and I swipe the towel once, twice, across the plates edged with a checkered pattern. We’d had them for years, given as a gift to my parents for their wedding. These plates were nothing compared to the china my mother received from my grandmother’s house after she’d passed away, because these were chipped at the edges while the others were trimmed with silver. Of course we only brought them out for the holidays when family visited, but I liked that we did that, because there was something about watching the fragile edges of the China catch the light of the candles in the center of the coming table that made it feel magical. With the China on the table, anything in the world can happen. 

“Hm?” she asks, but in a much more interested grunt than my father’s, but still not particularly. I hope my story is more interesting than the dishes. 

“In the Afton’s field,” I explain, taking a glass she hands me, still dripping with watered-down milk from where she didn’t get it washed all the way. I say nothing, not wanting to have to be handed a dish twice. “Was real creepy lookin’.” 

“It was really creepy looking,” she repeats back to me, forever exhausted with my failing grammar, a forever plight of my generation. I fight back a sigh, knowing it will be taken as a sign of disrespect, rather than frustration that they seem to be missing the point, that the scarecrow was creepy. It wasn’t really, but that wasn’t the point either. 

“It was really creepy looking,” I follow her lead, but in a town that makes her raise a side-eyebrow at me that I knew what it meant, and so did she, but after our incident at the mall last week, we were both on thin ice around each other. 

“The Mall Incident”, as I had recently dubbed it over an angry phone call to Katie, was where my mother and I had fought so loudly on whether or not I could wear a halter tank top that “Myrtle” the attendant at the mall politely asked us to leave. What was the most disappointing was that it had taken us forty-five minutes to drive to the mall, and we were only there for about thirty. 

“I didn’t even get a soft pretzel!” I had cried to Katie over the phone in the hallway, aware my mother could hear me after the return drive that seemed to last longer than forty-five minutes. Katie, I had known, would understand the tragedy of the lack of a soft pretzel better than any other friends at school, who lived closer to town, so the idea of a mall trip for them was an average weekend, as opposed to a shining pillar of hope that only appeared once a month. After my declaration, I heard a sigh from down the hall, and I knew that despite my indignation, my mother would not see the tragedy that lied in a soft pretzel. 

It’s getting to the point of the year where it’s too dark for me to walk to Katie’s after dinner, so I shut my door gently after dinner, so it doesn’t seem like I’m slamming it, and I pull out a copy of some teen magazine Katie had given to me that I smuggled in my backpack before I left her house, and go back to the quiz we were working on. 

Earlier that day, the two of us had been lying side-by-side on her bed, giggling over the quiz as she crossed off A, B, C, or D, each answer depending on fake scenarios on what she expected Devin, the only guy who had skipped out on a summer growth spurt, would do. 

“Do you think if I’d drop my books he’d help me pick them up?” she asked me, gnawing on the tip of her pen, “Or do you think that he would just step over them?” 

A or D. I had tried to picture shy Devin being the devil air hero she wanted, swooping in from the back of class to pick up Katie’s books her for, but I couldn’t still, in order not to burst her Devin-bubble, I nodded enthusiastically, saying, “He’d pick them up for sure.” 

I flip through the questions, trying to figure if my crush would A: Notice if I’d changed my hair and compliment it, B: Notice if I’d changed my hair and not say anything, or C: Not notice it at all. This is suppose to tell me if my crush likes me back, and I flip and desperately wish I actually have a crush to answer the questions. As my classmate’s faces click through my mind I try to pick one--not Trey, who I remembered being the slowest person in kickball from gym glass, not Ryan, who I had overheard his ex Samatha telling her friends that he’d tried to open-mouth kiss her on the first date, and absolutely not Caleb, who always smelled like egg-salad. 

Far away, in the faint sliver of darkness that comes through my pulled curtains, there’s a movement. So imperceptible that I’m not even sure it’s happened, and I almost count it up to being nothing more than my curtains moving from the faint wind that comes through the top of my windows that aren’t fully able to close. Then again, something flicks in the darkness, on the faint shadows of where my parent’s land is cut off by a row of trees before we hit the Afton’s field, is interrupted by movement. Knowing that anything would be more interesting than the inapplicable quiz, I toss the magazine to the side, hearing it crinkle as it hits the floor, and with a wince I make a mental note to apologize to Katie if any of the pages are wrinkled. The carpet below me muffles my steps, and my room is turning cold with the changing of the months, so I regret getting off of my warmed spot on the bed. But, I’m halfway there already, so I lean onto the ledge of my windowsill, and pull the polka-dotted curtains that my grandmother made for me years ago out of fabric scraps to the side. Air bubbles showing age pucker the glass, making it hard to see. 

As I press my eye as close as I can, I can still see the tipple of the movement in the trees far away, as someone pushes their way through the Afton’s field to ours. 

“Abso-fucking-lutley not!” Izzy says with a punctuated slam of her hand into the lunch table, appalled by the idea of a potential pop quiz after lunch. 

“Yeah, no way in hell,” I add on, and I hate hate the way that my voice automatically dips down to a whisper on the final word. I’m not suppose to swear, because my father says it's considered a sin. But I’d rather sin than be the last in my friend group to say “hell” without fear. I never say the lord’s name in vain though, because I figure that God will be more willin’ to turn a blind eye to the sinning if his name isn’t involved in it. Still, the word hushes itself as it leaves my lips, and I can see Izzy give me a side eye as I don’t match her energy. 

“I haven’t even fucking studied,” Izzy continues, and I resist the urge to tell her that none of us did, it’s a pop quiz. But I agree with her--the idea of a pop quiz is dreadful. I spent most of last night posed on the edge of my bed, leaning out to the window with the curtains fully pulled to either side, watching for movement. For five minutes from when I had first noticed it, there was something constantly crashing through the trees, brushing the undergrowth to the side before it fully appeared on the very edge of our property, a far off spot that meant something was there. There it stayed. I had moved to the bed because when I first spotted it, I felt like not being on my bed was unsafe. I hated that feeling. It was the same one of being eight years old, and convinced there was a monster in my closet, and that being underneath my covers would protect me from whatever imaginary claws it had. When I felt it, I pressed my bare toes into the cold carpet and crept back into bed, staring at the window as whatever was on the edge of the trees stared back at me. 

“I failed a pop quiz today,” I blurt out over the dinner table. The words had took up so much room inside of me for the entire length of dinner that I wasn’t able to take a  single bite of the cornbread my mother had made for fear I would explode. So I eventually took the trade, and I spit the words out as fast as I can before shoveling in a butter-soaked bite. It goes stale immediately as I see disappointment flood my parent’s eyes, and I attempt to swallow the cornbread chunk that has absorbed all the moisture in my mouth, and it goes down in a solid lump. My mother’s fork pauses from whether it was about to stab the last bite of green beans off her plate, poised like a dagger about to fall. Silence sits for a moment as I watch my parents lock eyes, each of them deciding what my punishment should be. 

“It’s not my fault!” I follow up, taking the beat of quiet I get to try to explain, knowing that those are the wrong words to say, but not sure what would be better, “There was something outside last night-” 

My father looks over at me, and my mouth shuts like a fish on a hook. 

“Go on to your room,” he says in the tone that I know means not to argue, because it's the same one he used whenever I was disrespectful as a child and got my bottom spanked. I swallow the last dried-up crumbs of cornbread as shame fills me, lapping at my insides and turning them soft and warm as if they’re melting. I start to pick up my mostly filled plate, but my mother shoots me a look before shaking her head. Go right on to your room, it means, and I leave it on the table. The smell of the slice of ham on it turns my stomach sour, and I know that even if I wanted to, if I took a bite of the glimmering edge coated with honey it would taste rotten. 

In my room, even with the door closed, I can still hear the murmurs of my parent’s “talk” building into a fight as they debate on what to do with me. Tears sit at the edges of my eyes, and I try to tune out the varying punishments they’re thinking of (Grounded for a week, extra chores this weekend, having to help Grandpa with cleaning out his garage tomorrow) as I crawl onto the floor to under the bed, which is more disorganized than my mother would like, and grab a stuffed bunny I tucked down there last year before I turned thirteen. Its eyes are two sewn on mismatched buttons that stick out above a pink nose, and it's right ear is fraying on the inner panel. The insides of me, already hot with shame, grow hotter, burning me internally, but I ignore that, pressing the baby-powder scented toy to my face and let its fur absorb the tears that finally fell over the lip of my eyelids. 

As I curl up underneath my covers and wait for my father, he’s always the one they decide to send, to come yell at me, I stare out the window through the curtains I never closed and watch far in the distance. Where the tree line separating properties is, I can see a faint glimmer of movement from underneath the setting sun.

I’m not sure what it is at first. All I can see is a rumbling figure pushing its way through the back to back trunks, weaving in and out of the undergrowth, and ignoring the branches as they spring back and smack it across the face. From a distance, I try to see if it’s a bear or a particularly stubborn deer, but start to make out how human it is. Two arms, two legs, something of a head pushes its way under the bleeding sun that has started to fall beneath the leaves, and as the red halo of light crests over the world, I can see the Afton’s new scarecrow push onto our field. 

My mouth goes dry with fear, and subconsciously, the stuffed bunny is crushed in my hand. My lips open and close themselves to scream, but no sound comes out. 

It stumbles across the edge of the trees onto the field, and the light turns its burlap body fiery orange. The straw stuffing makes it awkward and uneven, and it sags on the right side from where it was over-filled. Its face is a burlap sack, still tan instead of being bleached from the sun, and its mouth is a crossed line of string that’s been stitched into a permanent smile. 

I am cleaved in two: the part of me that sees the Afton’s scarecrow, and the part that doesn’t. The part that doesn’t says that these things don’t exist, they don’t happen, and that it isn’t real. That part of me is blinded with fear. The other part sees it--I see its shambling form picking its way over the field, trampling the shorn corn stalks. I see it's emotionless eyes finding me through my window. I see its legs picking up high so it's torso is thrown back in a loose march, flinging straw out of its tattered overalls. Blankly, somewhere in the back of my mind that isn’t blacking out, my lips finally manage to move, and in a cracked and very small voice, I start to sing what I used to when I was very young and had a nightmare. 

“...all day all night,” I whisper to myself, and I feel that tears that froze for a moment come back with twice as much fevor as the Afton’s scarecrow takes another massive step through the fields, headed toward my window, “Angels watchin’ over me, my Lord.” 

It takes another step, and its head lulls to the side slowly. 

“Well its all day all night,” I keep going, and it steps forward again, reaching halfway down the field, “Angels watchin’ over me, my Lord.” 

A scream tears through me as my door suddenly opens with a thunk that my father decides was too harsh. I see the apology in his eyes as he catches the door from where it bounces back toward him. There’s a beat of confusion as he looks at me, a furrow on top of his glasses, unsure if he should comfort me. Then his back straightens as he decides he was sent to be the bad cop for a reason. I glance toward the window and see an empty field. My father puffs a breath of air underneath his mustache, and it’s so strange to see how normal he is after my world has been shattered. 

“So kiddo,” he says in a voice that tells me he really doesn’t want to have this conversation, and would rather be in his office working, “what happened with the test?” 

How can he be asking me about tests? 

“I failed it,” I say dumbly, and in a moment of dissociation, I realize it is just me who has changed in the world, and everyone else will go about the rest of their days as they always have forever. My father’s eyebrows creep higher on his face, and I wonder if he sees the change in me. If he knows I am different forever. 

“Would you like to explain yourself?” he asks, and I can see the line he is giving me. So I take it and try to drag him with me. 

“I saw the Afton’s scarecrow come to life last night and I couldn’t sleep as I failed my test,” I blurt out, and the words float for a moment, fresh as clouds, and I want to grab onto them and travel all the way to heaven to demand answers from God. As I had known, and as I feared, I watch my father’s face fall, and I know he is running through the lectures he can give me on the sins of lying. “It’s outside if you wanna see, go look!” 

I know, of course. In the same way that you know you can never tell someone the exact dream you’ve had, and any chance you try to explain it it’ll make the dream drip through your cupped fingers like water, I know I can not make him understand the scarecrow. It wouldn’t be there. Even if it was, part of me doubted he could see it. With a sign, he steps around my bed up to my window, and around his disappointed form, I look through the window to see an empty field and feel an emptier heart. 

I wonder if it will appear once more, the second my father leaves, or if it will wait until I’ve gone to sleep to peer at me through my curtains. I wonder if it’s there at all, or if my mind is breaking like my grandmother’s I never got to meet. But that matters so much less than the lecture my father is giving me. He tells me I’m grounded for the next week. He tells me if I fail another test I’m grounded till Christmas (I don’t bother to correct him that it was a quiz). He tells me that he and my mother are both very disappointed in me, and that stings the most, just slightly less than the indignity of telling the truth and not being believed. 

When my father leaves, and my heart stings from the scolding, and my eyes sting from the tears I can’t stop from coming, I turn back to the window, glaring out at the field as if it made me fail that quiz. In a way, it did. I stare out into the darkness, trying to find the leaning, pointed tip of the scarecrow’s hat in the nooks and crannies of the darkness. But whether or not the scarecrow was here, it disappeared. But I don’t move. I stare out the window, and wait for it to come back. 

Finally, when the edges of my vision start to go white with exhaustion, I find myself too tired to care, and in a quick movement, I pull the bunny tight to my stiff body, and flip over on the bed, turning my back to the window. I wait for a terrible second. I imagine the shatter of the glass and the racking of claws I never saw across my back, even though I know that my sight wasn’t what was keeping it from appearing. I breathe once. Twice. No claws come. No class. No scratching of straw or the resp of burlap. The scarecrow has either disappeared completely or stayed hidden, and I sit up all night on my side. In the morning when the sun slips into my room, I see a faint shadow narrowing as something moves back into the field. 

“I’m grounded for a week,” I announce at the lunch table, and Katie is the only one whose head turns to me with the motions of a pout on her lips. 

“But we were going to hang out after school!” she whines, and I want to frown but can’t. The muscles on my face have atrophied in the hours lying on my side in bed, and fear has frozen on my features. Stiffly, forcing each movement, I make my shoulders move up and down in a shrug. “I had something to tell you.” 

I feel myself stare at her, and I’m so tired I do not know what expression I am supposed to make. Something inside of me has changed irreparable, and I am forever separate from Katie. When I don’t egg her on to continue, she does anyway. 

“Devin and I are going to the mall tonight!” she says, and the edges of her voice tilt up in a squeal of excitement. I try to picture Devin’s face, but am too tired to do so. Still, a part of my heart hurts at the distance that grows between me and Katie, and I see the rope between us tighten with tension as we are stretched in different directions. Katie peers at me with unperceptive eyes, and I see a flicker of hurt cross her face. “Isn't…that exciting?” 

Not as exciting as a scarecrow coming to life. “Yeah.” 

“So you’re gonna have to help me pick out my outfit and I’m deciding between these two skirts, and my mom’s gonna drop us off…” Katie’s rabble drowns out to a fair roar as she details every detail of how Devin has asked her the day before after she dropped her books (apparently he did pick them up) when she’s done, all I can do is lift my head from where it had fallen to the table. 

“I can’t help you pick your outfit, I’m grounded.” My voice sounds dull and flat, but I can’t figure out how to fix it. From my numbness, I feel a beat of my heart breaking, as the news of Katie not being just my own hits me. She stares at me, and the confusion and concern in her eyes changes to something more malicious. 

“What is wrong with you?” she asks me, and it has the bite that tells me she isn’t actually concerned for my well-being. 

“My neighbor’s scarecrow is coming to life and haunting me.” 

“Well,” she says, and scoots slightly further away from me on the lunch table, pointing her nose up in the air, “you don’t have tell me if you don’t want to.” 

I’m staring out the window and watching the scarecrow through the glass. Earlier, I had watched it push unsteadily through the brush. It's head had twisted unnaturally, and it's sewn eyes stared at me. I saw that there was a mistake on the left one that was making the thread slowly fray and come undone. Its forever smiling mouth gleamed at me as it pushed forward until its body was pressed against my window, and with its straw hand it tapped slowly against the glass. 

A scream squeezed through my throat and came out as a wheezy whimper. I was disappointed in myself. When discussion fire drills in school, or watching the news, I always had this idea that I would have full, fat lungs, and be able to scream fire if I was being abducted. I knew I had enough rage within me, and expected it to all come pouring out the moment I needed it. It didn’t. Instead the rage in me has pressed down, closing my throat and courage, and turned me into the one thing I never wanted to be--a teenage girl. 

Now, with hand that seem to move better than word, I reach forward, and my fingers tremble like leaves in the wind. 

“Well?” I ask it, pretending to be brave. “Are you going to do anything?” 

It doesn’t respond to me, obviously. It might not have been that oblivious, because it obviously wasn’t supposed to walk either. 

“You made me fail my quiz,” I tell it through the glass and it looks on silently, and rage bubbles inside of me, “I don’t suppose that you’re going to retake it for me. Oh and I’m grounded for a week. And Katie…” 

The scarecrow stares at me, and its head twitches ever so slightly. Then it disappears as my hands swipe the curtains to the middle once more, but it shadow continues to glare at me, relentless as a nightmare. I wait for a long moment, wanting the shadow to disappear and it never does. It waits for me to open up the blinds. I wonder if it can see me just as well with them closed. As both of us refuse to relent, hours pass. The stuffed bunny remains squeezed tightly in my hands, and tears pour and dry, pour and dry on my face over and over again. I don’t think I blink in that time, waiting for it to fade away. 

I sit through dinner with my parents where conversation is replaced by the scraping of forks on nearly empty plates. My parents occasionally make eye contact over the table, each one raising their eyebrows in turn to egg the other on. Neither did, always waiting on the other. Cowards, I think through the meal. I’m facing a monster. They can’t even give me a lecture. When I’ve spread all the mushy peas across my plate to make it look as though I’ve already taken a few bites, I stand up, and see my father’s head shoot up, ready to tell me to put my plate in the sink. I hold his gaze through his glasses, and my reflection looks much taller than him. So I turn around, leaving my plate, and march off to my room. 

The phone rings in the hall, making me jump a foot out of my bed, and as I let my soul settle into my skin, I glare out the covered window to the shadow of the already-appeared scarecrow as if it personally was making my phone ring. I’m not supposed to answer the phone right now, because I’m grounded, but the fact that there’s a living scarecrow at my window puts things slightly in perspective. With my shoes kicked off so I don’t creak the hardwood, I tip-toe out of my room, turning my back to the scarecrow. 

My father has disappeared to his study, and my mother is in the kitchen, so no one spies me as I lift the phone gently, pressing it to my ear. “Hello?” 

My voice comes out in a creak, fear stealing almost all of the volume from my throat. 

“You have to come over!” Katie peals into my ear. “I wanna go over the whole date with you! We went and got pretzels, then went to the arcade, and at the end of it-” 

“I’m grounded,” I repeat for the third time, and I know that even if I wasn’t I couldn’t bear to hear about Katie’s date. 

“Oh whatever, come over, sneak out!” Kaite convinces me, and I worry about the effect Devin is having on her. The idea sounds preposterous, and I can already hear my father’s lecture for when I would get caught, telling me that one of the ten commandments is to head one’s father and mother, and that by not obeying their rules I’m direction disobeying God (even if they’ve never technically told me not to sneak out). That technically it what I hinge on, and the idea of disobeying God sounds incredibly appealing right now. I breathe a sigh out into Katie’s side of the conversation, and I realize I desperately want to sneak out. I cannot spend another night staring at the scarecrow. Even if I’m about to head outside, where it is. Without a goodbye, I place the phone down onto the receiver, and without even putting my shoes on, I creep down the hallway past the living room, keeping my eyes trained on the kitchen where my mother is washing the dishes. Swish swish, clink, each one goes, and I can hear the wet pile of dishes building up without me to dry them. Slowly, but with no fear battering my throat, I slink into the living room. I know better things to be afraid of than my mother. 

She doesn’t spy me as I pass through the living room like a ghost, and pull open the front door while I wait with a breath for the clinking of dishes to stop. They don’t, so I pull it open a little more, and dart out into the night. 

It’s come down after the cusp of fall, and it’s too dark to walk out after dinner. I walk out anyway, and for a moment, I close my eyes and let the hum of the porch lamps turn the world to white noise. The air is crisp against my skin, and I can feel pebbles stabbing into my bare feet and hear insects singing in the distance. I know that when I open my eyes the scarecrow will be there. So I keep them closed, fighting against the fear inside of me to do so, trying to cling to the seconds of darkness I have. 

One. 

Two. 

Three. 

I peel them open, and I wasn't wrong. Next to the path that leads from the door is the scarecrow, four feet away. The first side of our property stretches far in front of me in a moon-lit field that turns the shorn corn to a watery illusion. The waiting scarecrow is the only dark spot. I take a step onto the path, and its head twists slightly to the side, watching me take the path down to the gravel road that leads to Katie’s. I hear swishing me, and I see the scarecrow marching behind like an escort. Every step of mine it matches, and I watch as its weight swings from side to side, somehow balanced enough on the straw so it doesn’t fall over. 

“What, are you coming too?” I fire at it, and it says nothing, just matches my increasingly speeding gait. When I reach the gravel road, I pray that the moon gives enough light to walk. The field is briefly cut off by a line of trees before it's the Afton’s field, and the scarecrow is right next to me again, both of us taking the way to Katie’s house. 

For a moment, it’s peaceful. Somehow the most peaceful it’s been. The air is cold, and every swallow makes it feel like water, and when I peer up the moon is clear and bright. The animals of the night creak and whistle and hoot around me, and up in the sky there are thousands upon thousands of stars. I think about Devin and Katie, and how three years ago, Katie and I wrapped our pinkies around each others and promised to never get a boyfriend. Too tired to have felt much when she first told me of the date, under the waking night I feel the sting of betrayal, and wonder why I still felt like boys have cooties when she did not. I feel the pressure of my parents, and the eyes of their God versus the eyes of mine. I thought that seeing the scarecrow was the break between me and the rest of the world, the fissure that I could never cross to be normal. But underneath the moon, I realize that I had been splitting off long ago, right when I was told it was a sin to be lustful, and me and Katie sat up that night, her giggling over the modeling pics in the magazine, and me not finding anything particularly interesting other than the way her hair smelled like strawberries. 

I didn’t want to go to Katie’s house tonight, I realize. I don’t want to go and listen to her giggle over the date with Devin and talk about how he gave her a kiss at the end of the night, and how she tasted like peppermint without knowing it myself. I don’t want to go home and look into my mother’s face as I open the front door and see the realization that I had disobeyed them. I pause on the road, feel the sting of gravel underneath my feet, and breathe in the sweet smell of corn before turning to the ever-present scarecrow. 

Slowly, as if it was afraid that if it moved too fast I would run away, it raises a burlap, straw-stuffed arm, and holds it out to me. When I touch it, it’s cold from the night, and the straw pricks my fingers. The scarecrow turns around, taking a step further into the field, and I hesitate on the road for a minute, behind the safety of the gravel. Then I follow, crushing the broken stalks beneath my feet, and disappear into the field. 

Holly Jones (she/her) is a student studying Creative Writing at Missouri State University. She is a volunteer editor for University magazines Moon City Review and Logos. She is currently an unpublished author and the host of The Not Natural Podcast.

‘Confessions of a Scammer’

Katie Pippel is a resident of the Pacific Northwest and is an English Language Arts teacher, writer, and dancer. She began embroidering at her mother's side in 1996. This meditative piece is a reflection on the adversities of life. The proliferating knots evoke her experience with chronic pain from endometriosis and the way traumas and victories blend together. We are inherently a composite of experiences and relationships knotted together, helplessly entangled in our interconnected lives.

Confessions of a Scammer

I came to Manila in 2016 by the urging of my mother, having just graduated from college a year before that and having spent a good part of that year being in a rut in our house just playing video games. My mother—I can understand her—felt like she had wasted all her money and effort in my education only for it to be as fruitless and hollow as a bad coconut, its tree only waiting to be rid of it because it has no use. My mother too wanted to be rid of me, if only in secret, because we didn’t really talk much even as we ate dinner, we just let this silence grow in on us, fueling the hate in her of me, and the anxiety in me of becoming like the person she had always expected of me to be, a person who does not amount to much, exacerbated as a response. 

And so, one evening, I found myself at the doorstep of my uncle in the slums of Manila, away from the province I grew up in, away from my mother. Their house stood beside a road where a lot of vehicles were parked—tricycles mainly where most families in the area’s source of income came from. They busied the side of the road so that a large vehicle such as a car could not freely move through the road without the smaller vehicles making space to some extent. Not to mention, there were always people on the side of the road, talking or selling something, and children flipping coins on the only concrete they could find. It was a close-knit neighborhood, everybody knew each other, but at the same time, they were also used to strangers passing through so that when I first stepped here, I had not attracted all eyes, or if I had, it was because of the number of bags I was holding (three)—I had brought all my clothes; my mother was not expecting me to go back any sooner, or I looked like a wet kitten, shivering from the anticipation that I was going to live in a shanty of some sort, sleeping on hard bed, all the comforts I had known left in the bygone era of the past.

But I was greeted with a warm welcome. My aunt, my mother’s sister-in-law, immediately dispatched for her pre-teen daughter to buy her cousin some snacks. A bottle of coke and some biscuits. And it was as warm a welcome that you could give to an unemployed nothing. (They did not know that of course. I looked like someone respectable in their eyes because I had graduated college. But at this point in my life, I had already anticipated everything. And I knew what I was going to turn out.)

The inside of their house looked as I had expected of an average-income household. There were bamboo chairs and a table. An off-brand flat-screen TV by the wall in their sala. And their sala too and the kitchen were not separate. — I don’t know how to describe it. Just imagine a cube and you have to cram the sala, kitchen, CR, and a bed in it, the bed being on the loft above us. 

They were renting the house, I noticed, not just because I imagined they weren’t happy with the small space and that they could’ve chosen differently had they got the money, but because the exterior of the house looked similar as the other ones beside it, as if they were owned by one man, a mogul, who was here before everybody else and built all these houses to rent them (and he built them all identically for convenience).

My aunt made me sit down at the sala and entertain myself with the TV while we waited for my uncle, who was going home from his IT job. She said he would be here any sooner and that he was stuck in traffic. She was also cooking “bulalo,” a type of soup with beef and vegetables in it. Her back was to me as she was cooking, a woman with a small frame. She was in her late-thirties—she and my uncle.

“Gosh, I didn’t know you would arrive this early,” she said, stirring the pot. “Your mother said you would arrive later in the night. Now you are a witness to our filth.” Then she ordered her daughter, Niña, to put her uniform and skirt, which presently lay on a chair, to the laundry basket upstairs.

I felt complicit somehow with Niña, as if I too were being ordered, and I imagined being ordered like that someday because I would be living here and was scared by the idea.

Niña picked her clothes and went upstairs, all while her head was glued to her phone.

“I thought so too, auntie,” I said, chuckling, “but the plane was very quick. It was my first time on a plane too.”

“Oh, really? Me, I haven’t been on a plane. … Was always too scared.”

That was all she said and I thought: we’re off to a good start, though I was still anxious that sooner or later my true nature would be unveiled—that I am lazy—and what my mother found tolerable she would find not only intolerable but disgusting, and no sooner would I be thrown out than die in the streets.

My uncle arrived several minutes later. He was happy to see me. He arrived by motorcycle—his motorcycle—and left it outside before he went in and set his helmet on the table.

“My nephew,” he said as we hugged each other, “you’ve grown. How about we have a drink later, huh?” 

I was smiling. “Of course.”

“Niña, get your cousin’s bags upstairs. He will be sleeping there.”

After dinner, we did drink. We had placed a table outside in front of the house and bought two big bottles of beer. 

At first, I thought there were just the two of us drinking, but then my uncle called a neighbor. This neighbor was about the same age as me, had more or less an attractive face than I had, and was taller than I’d care admit. Because he advantaged me in every respect that I cared most about myself, I found his thinness (he was so thin his neck looked like that of a camel’s) and poverty something that could offset the advantages, that way I could stop myself from showing my hostility towards him, and even regard him with fake-pity. 

We shook hands and introduced ourselves. He said his name was Harold; I said my name was James. After that, we seldom spoke to each other. 

My uncle took most of steering the wheel of our conversation, and drunkenly so. He said he was happy to see me, patting me on the shoulders, and then to Harold (re: me): “You know this motherfucker graduated top of their class.”

“Not top of our class, uncle. I was from the bottom rung.”

“I was only kidding, of course,” he said, laughing.

Harold only looked at me with a well-meaning look of his, not even understanding that he was supposed to be jealous or insecure, or to at least cower from the achievement that was to open a lot of doors for money to come in for me and my family.

It was a one-sided conversation, and only when my uncle had a bathroom break that Harold and I were forced to speak to each other, to break the silence that was encroaching upon us bit by bit. And of course, he was the first to pick at it:

“So, are you like, living here or something?”

“That’s about right.”

It was moments like that: he would ask me a question and I would answer it as meekly as possible, that much pervaded the first night I was there. And my uncle going to the CR every few minutes because of the onset of something in his prostate.

We soon called it a night as we all got drunk, and as much as I would like to continue for reasons I could not yet name, I also became stinking drunk at the point of passing out, and the lights, as me and my uncle went inside the house, hurt my eyes.   

My aunt had to be the one to get the folding table outside while also supporting her husband to not fall, and they were to just sleep at the sala using a cot while I take the bed upstairs. She even asked me if I could manage to walk the steps going upstairs. I said I could, though I wanted nothing more than to continue drinking outside just to see what could happen.

The next several days or so, I helped my aunt sell barbecues at her barbecue stand. It was a way of hers, with Niña being in school and my uncle at work, to pass the time or use it to her benefit. The stand stood just outside the house where people walking on the road might see it, and she said (even though she did not say this, this is just my speculation) that ever since I helped her sell, her sales had increased, as the “newcomer” who’s helping her at the stand is very approachable by women. I did notice that most of the people buying were girls, and often if not always, they were forcing a conversation with me, which I did not like not because I found them ugly, but because I just did not like girls in general. And so, after about a month of doing that, I stopped altogether and retreated to my room upstairs to play video games. 

There was another thing occupying my mind at this time: Harold. There, I confess it. I liked him, and every time he passed by my sight, going inside their house and out, I would not fail to sneak a glance. Their house stood beside my uncle’s and it was my dream to get inside it someday, if only to confirm that it was indeed built similarly as my uncle’s. (I’m lying of course—who wants to check out a house?) 

He's got a mother and a sister. His mother sold “pagpag” and various other goods from a small store jutting out of their house. It was here, sitting on the bench under its forecourt, sipping soda or playing video games, that I hoped he would speak to me about what I found so interesting with the game I was playing, and perhaps that would be the start of a friendship. But I soon gave up with the effort, owing to the fact that I seldom saw him near their house—he was driving my uncle’s tricycle, or renting it, out of mutual dependency that neighbors have with each other, and because my uncle was at work anyway, and this was his way of earning money. 

I soon got the feeling that I was competing for my uncle’s apprenticeship (esteem, reverence) against him, Harold, and I realized that even before the feeling came to me, I had already lost. They’d had years of being dependable with each other and I imagined my uncle treated Harold like his own son too. 

One day, he and my uncle worked on a wreck in my uncle’s motorcycle, and he helped hand him the tools while my uncle did the repairs. I was at the stand at the time so you can imagine the jealousy I was feeling of not being included in their little bonding (I wasn’t). I suppose I’d still be useless even if I was included, but they could’ve at least asked me to bring them water, some small thing that would make me feel like I was doing a man’s job, not at the stand where I was doing what my aunt was supposed to be doing while she watched TV inside. She seemed to be relying on me, on my submission to her and perhaps my own fear of being thrown out of the house and into the streets, to run her store. And so, bit by bit, I stopped helping her. That translated into a false belief among her and my uncle that I hated them, hated the own hand that fed me. But that was not so: I just felt stuck, I was unhappy, with only Harold to save me. 

Accordingly, I felt like a stranger in my own uncle’s house, so much so that I found comfort—too much comfort—in retreating inside my head and into my phone that I was slowly alienating the very family I was depending my own survival onto. And the shame, of still not having found a job after a month (because it’s the reason why I came there in the first place), was just too much to bear. I didn’t even know what to say to a recruiter if he asked me what my strengths and weaknesses are; I didn’t even know what papers were needed (I only bought my birth certificate and diploma). And so, one day, my worst fears finally came true. Lying in bed after waking up one morning, I overheard my aunt and uncle talk about what they were going to do with me, having been established among them already that I was lazy and hopeless. My uncle suggested I work at a car repair shop; he said he knew someone there.

“Cars?” my aunt said. “What does he know about cars? Would you look at him? He looks like a twig; he couldn’t even be bothered to pick up a wheel.”

“Well, what are we going to do with him? We can’t just send him back.”

That very morning too, out of a need to prove myself, I set out to get the papers. I went to an internet café to build a resume, then to a photography studio to get my picture taken. After that, I went to the police station to get a clearance. It was at that evening—I was going home from the internet café—that Harold’s sister, Jacqueline, made a move on me. She had been pestering me for weeks now, flirting with me at the stand, so that I stayed inside the house more. One thing led to another; we had sex, in a weed-ridden plot of land, shaded by banana trees. I didn’t like the sex on my part; it was forced and I did not find her attractive, but I figured it was the only way to get me close to him. — I was content to throw it away too, a person’s first sex and all its pleasure, for the possibility of a second even better, more delectable kind.

One day, Harold talked to us about where he could’ve found me a job. I figured my uncle probably conferred to him that he was fed up with me still not having found one. We had just finished replacing the front wheel of my uncle’s motorcycle and I helped them anchor it so it wouldn’t topple over while they retrofitted the wheel.

“Do you have your papers?” Harold asked.

“Yeah.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Why not?”

“Just dress yourself so we can go.”

I took a bath to remove the grease out of my hand and put on my uncle’s formal shirt—because I did not have one—and Harold and I went to the job site, which was a run-down, abandoned convenience store that did not look like there were people inside it. Harold told me to get inside and I would meet people there, and to tell them I needed a job. 

“Are you sure there’s people there?” I asked him.

“Pretty sure. And go at the back.”

With my envelope in one hand, I went at the back—because the glass front and the old entrance door were covered in newspapers anyway—and I soon found a door. There was cold air emanating out of it and when I peeked inside, there were indeed people there, hitting keyboards on rows and rows of computers and answering calls. When they looked up to see me, it looked like I had woken a horde of zombies. One woman in a formal attire went up to me and said hi. I said hi back.

“Please follow me.”

I followed her to a glass-enclosed room where we could see all the employees answering calls from their headphones. Then she made me sit down on the seat in front of her desk while she took up the seat behind it. She had a friendly face which I imagined could turn on you without you noticing it.

“What’s your name?”

“I’m James, ma’am. James Balagtas.”

“Is that your credentials?” she asked, noticing the envelope in my hand.

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“Let me see.”

After she had a look at my credentials, she said: “Wow. Impressive.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” was all I could say.

She gave me a long hard look. “Well then, you’re hired,” she said, smiling.

I could hardly conceal my joy; I shook her hand repeatedly.

“You know how to speak English, right?”

“Yes ma’am.”

That night, we celebrated by drinking ourselves to excess. Both of the families also knew of my going to marry Jacqueline in the future and it was also a cause to celebrate. I recounted them my feat that was the world’s fastest hiring of an employee ever and they enjoyed every second of it.

“You know I didn’t even have to go through all that ‘what’s your strengths and weaknesses’ kind of questions,” I told them. “She just hired me on the spot.”

“Wait, what job is it again?” asked my uncle.

“Call center.”

“Wow, baby,” said Jacky.

“I thought at first she was going to make me eat her pussy because of how fast she hired me…”

“I’m glad you did not, baby.”

That night too, I got to eat dinner with the three of them—Harold, Jacqueline, and their mother. I was a part of their family now; I was Jacqueline’s husband. And even much later that evening, I was on the cot beside the three of them, trying to sleep, a wide grin on my face.

For the next month or so, I worked night shift at my job answering calls from foreigners. The callers were mostly old people—elderly—and I was instructed to “fool” them into giving me the money they had in their gift cards. One caller, Bessie, from America, called to ask how to repair her “Microsoft.” I tell her: give me your security number; she obeys. One of us even swindled 500 dollars from a man named “Frank” in Chicago, but our boss says we do not work by commission. 

I dress up at 9, 9:30, because work begins at 10, then Harold drives me there in my uncle’s tricycle and I work until 6 in the morning, after which, he drives me home again. Jacqueline goes with us in these excursions, and I wished she wouldn’t do that as often so he and I could have a chance to talk. She would always say how proud she was of me and would kiss me goodbye before I went to work. It was tiring; my mother had suddenly contacted me to ask for money and my aunt was trying to get close to me only at the last second to beg for a loan. I could not refuse her, lest she would turn it on me the time that I was living with them, eating with them, and call me ungrateful. I had without realizing gotten myself in a position in which there was no possibility of getting out in sight.

One night, noticing me tired, Harold offered me a cigarette—or at least that’s what it looked like at first until when I held it in my hand and realized it was marijuana. I hit it and that jolted me awake. I soon made the connection: 

“Oh, that’s how you found me the job! You sell marijuana to these people!”

“Yep.”

We sat there at the curb outside the office for a long time not saying anything; I’d asked for a bathroom break but had instead gone there and Harold seemed to not want to go home and go to sleep. It was an exhilarating feeling: the marijuana and just being with him. And I did not want it to end. 

Eventually, I asked him (I had to): “What other attractions does this city have? I’m tired of going to the same place.”

“I know one.” 

“Will you show me?” I said, hoping to god he would say yes.

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Sure.”

We left work as it was hopeless anyway and it wasn’t worth the effort of doing it for so small a salary. We drove using my uncle’s motorcycle to this hill overlooking the city and it was amazing. There was a bay next to the city and it was my first time, ever since I left the province, seeing a body of water that was not a puddle or a ditch. 

From the hilltop, the city sprawled before us like something from a movie. There was the cold night air, fresh, but not biting in its coldness. We sat on the grass, passing a joint, and left the motorcycle just behind us, parked in a level piece of land so it wouldn’t slide down the slope. 

“Wow, this is amazing,” I said. “Do you come here often?”

“Not so much lately but if I wanna hit a joint, then yes.”

“Alone? At night?”

“No. I can’t borrow your uncle’s motorcycle whenever it suits me, can I?”

“That makes sense. … Well, how’d you find this place?”

“I didn’t. This place is pretty well-known. So many people camp here; they have sex there. You see that small area there? The one with the bush? That’s where they do it.”

“Ah…” 

We sat in silence; I passed him the joint. He rubbed his arms, clearly cold. I offered him my jacket. “No thanks.” We sat in silence for more.

 I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking, that both of us were not what we were pretending to be and that we were both longing for each other’s arms. And besides, if the question were to be asked, the question of whether he liked me or not, there was my handsomeness to answer for, and it’s not like people had an apparent reason not to like me, not even him. As we sat there, my heart was pounding.

Finally, I broke it; I broke the silence: I did not care if, once he knew who I was, who I really was, he was going to make it known with everybody. I’d just change places.

“You know I’m gay, right,” I said, “and that I like you?”

A smile crossed his face. “I didn’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. You just don’t look like it.”

“Fair enough. How about you?”

Without looking at me, he nodded; took a puff, then exhaled. It was all I needed to hear—or see—from him; my heart burst with joy. I kissed him, and no sooner were we sprawling on the ground than were tearing off each other’s clothes. 

“I love you,” I said, feeling his skin at last.

“I love you too,” came his answer.

We had spent the night on a different spot away from where we had first planted the seeds of our love. Once we woke up, I teased him: 

“I knew you were gay once I met you. How could a handsome guy like you not have a girl?”

“Please don’t say that word.”

“Which word?”

“You know which. Don’t let me hear you say that word again.”

“Okay.”

The sun was coming up from the horizon; we brushed the dirt off our clothes. Then we got on our motorcycle. But as soon as Harold kick started it, it wouldn’t start. Then he tried kicking it again, to no avail. “Ah, shit.” 

It was already close to noon when we got home. We had left the motorcycle to a repair shop and just walked home. My uncle too just commuted to work, seeing as his motorcycle was in disrepair again.

In the days following since, we tried to keep our affair between ourselves. We would only meet after work, at the top of the hill, then relieve each other of our desires. It did not occur to us to despair on our situation, having only a sliver of a time between work and home to ourselves. If it dawned on us that we were stuck having to do that forever, with no freedom in sight, no light at the end of the tunnel, the pleasure we had shared with each other and would share for more days to come gave us the strength to continue walking in the dark, and we deemed ourselves victorious. We had created a world on top of the hill, one in which all our troubles could never catch ahold us. 

But, as was the fashion of most love stories of that era, our relationship was not smooth-sailing. There was Jacqueline to mind for, for one. We were still together. And when, after dinner, all of us were gathered in the sala watching TV, she would hint, by a poke to the side of my belly, that she wanted to have sex upstairs while her brother and mother were immersing themselves. Of course, on our climbing upstairs, Harold would catch notice of this, but all I could do was swallow my spit and let it get over with. Harold understood this; if he was jealous, he never spoke of it.

There were instances when it seemed there were only the two of us in a room, and before I could hold his hand or pretend to hump him, Jacqueline or his mother would barge in and we would pretend to be doing something other than show affection. Those were the moments that gave us such a fright.  

One day, having lunch at an eatery, Jacqueline and I talked about Harold. We had just a stroll around the city, and I bought her a new pair of sandals.

“Why don’t you like my brother?” she asked.

“Who says I don’t like your brother?” I said.

“You. I mean I could tell it by your actions.”

“What do you mean you could tell it by my actions?”

“Well, for one, I haven’t seen you talk to each other. You don’t talk to each other. It’s like you secretly hate each other.”

“I don’t hate him,” I said. “I really don’t. And besides, we talk. Yes, we do. You just haven’t seen it.”

“Promise you don’t hate him?”

“I promise,” I said, holding her hand.

She smiled; went on eating.

Later that night, before work, Harold and I talked about it. 

“Jacky says we secretly hate each other,” I told him.

“What do you mean?”

“That because she hasn’t seen us talk to each other, that means we secretly hate each other.”

“Well, what did you say?”

“That we don’t. Still she does not believe it.”

“What do you propose we do?”

“You have to talk to me. You have to talk to me first.”

“Why I gotta talk to you first?”

“Because it’s natural. Because you’re older than me.”

“I’m not older than you.”

“Yes, you are.”

“When were you born?”

“December 1997. You?”

“January. … Fair enough. … Well, what are we going to talk about?”

“About work or something. Ask me about work.”

“About work? What am I, your father?”

“Well, what do you propose we talk about? Basketball?”

“Even better.”

“Well, I don’t watch basketball. How about we just talk about this game I’m playing on my phone?”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“You have to play it first. You have to install it on your phone.”

“Okay.”

At dinner the next day, we talked about the game we were always playing on our phones. We talked about which heroes were stronger than which heroes, or I told him I played better than him. We kept it subtle; we never made a show. And even afterwards, outside the house, we played an actual match and even enjoyed it.

We had kept our relationship low-profile for a while and successfully so. It was also during this time that the city was implementing crackdowns on drug abuse among its citizens. I told Harold to stop peddling the thing and gain some weight. He said he had, but you couldn’t trust the motherfucker especially when you barely saw him during the day.

I was now many months in the city and I had come to share its cynicism. I constantly had dark circles under my eyes and my aunt no longer tried to borrow money from me, sorry as she was that whatever ounce of innocence had I brought with me when I first arrived here, it was already gone. I had also come to learn how the gears inside her were turning as she faked a smile all those times that she was borrowing money from me.

I was only myself when I was with him, on top of that hill, and it was our little refuge from all the hustle and bustle and turning of the world around us. I loved every inch of his skin, and it was my dream that we leave the city behind and start a new life somewhere, near the sea or deep in the woods, just me and him, indulging every second in the fruit of our love.

I tried to communicate to him my idea; he met it with apathy:

“What do you mean we leave? Where do we go? Do we even have the money?”

I confess he was more realistic than me at these daytime reveries and so I trusted his judgement. We put it on the back burner for a while and just continued to live as properly as we could. Still, there was, in the back of my mind, a nagging suspicion that he only refused because he did not fully perceive the extent of my struggle; that he did not have to work at night and sleep by day; that he did not have to pretend to love a girl just to prove he’s not of a certain sexuality.

It became even more difficult when we found out that Jacqueline was a few weeks pregnant. She had started retching and avoided certain foods which had a strong smell. 

I explained to Harold that we had always used protection, and at times we could not, I would always pull out.

“Then why did she get pregnant?” he asked. “How do you explain it?”

As absurd as the question might be, there was only one explanation, and I tried to remember when I could have failed to pull it out. It did not matter now. The deed had been done; a baby was coming. It gave us such a headache, and our solution was to lay off for a while in fucking each other, fearing that we might reveal ourselves at so bad a time. 

As for the baby, I kept nagging Jacqueline to abort it, but she was against it. And I suspected her mother had something to do with her decision, as she always kept saying at the dinner table:

“Why do you want to abort the baby? It’s a blessing that you two must raise each other.”

I liked her; she had been nothing to me but kind. She had always agreed of me marrying Jacqueline. But in her own old-fashioned way she could be dumb and dangerous. 

I worked neatly and with dispassion at my job, only looking forward to the day I get paid and have a tub of ice cream to myself. Then soon, if the pain I was feeling still wasn’t enough, Harold started seeing someone, a girl, jealous as he was that I was having a baby and in need to compensate for his own lack of masculinity. His girl was a pretty girl too; I got to eat with her at dinner one time, when Harold introduced her to us. Somehow also, they had the regard of my uncle: whenever Harold wanted to take the girl to places, my uncle did not once hesitate to lend him his motorcycle. Contrast that with his disdain at me, sneering at me whenever he met my eyes, for having made a girl pregnant at so young an age. 

I did not have to imagine where Harold was taking the girl. I hated him, okay. And I wished the motorcycle they were riding skidded off the road and they both die. I did not mean that of course, and anyway, that wish sort of came true:

It was just a normal day for all of us. It was a Sunday. I was outside at the time, sitting in front my mother-in-law’s store under the forecourt, playing a video game. My aunt was at her stand, grilling barbecues, talking to people. Jacqueline was inside, watching TV and resting. Her mother too was with her, in case she felt sick and nauseous and needed to go to the CR. I didn’t know where my uncle was at the time, but I did know that Niña was inside, using her phone as always. 

At the road in front our house just a few feet away from me was Harold, sitting on the driver’s seat of my uncle’s tricycle, waiting for passengers. 

It was a mildly hot day. The sky all morning was sunny, then it was overcast by noon. It was afternoon now, but it was still overcast. We had just had a big lunch. Pig’s blood stew, sun-dried fish, and rice. We were all groggy, tired, and sweating. 

A crowd had formed in front of my aunt’s barbecue stand, a group of middle-aged women. They were probably talking about us, me and Jacky, being the newest pregnancy in town. There was also a group of teenage boys at the store on the opposite side of the road, playing the same hit video game I was playing on my phone. It was a busy neighborhood, the people were busy with buzz, busy with rumors; the road was busy with people walking and tricycles passing. There was the constant noise of vehicle engine, murmur of people, TV show audiences clapping and cheering, and from afar, someone singing at a karaoke. It was a normal day for us all; nobody could have expected a tragedy to happen, no word such as “tragedy” in our minds.

I kept looking up my phone to see if I could meet Harold’s eyes, because then at least I’d know that whatever had gone on between us, it wasn’t all for naught, that he remembered, if not wittingly then instinctively, everything that happened; as if I had left him something, a taste on the lips, a handkerchief, that he needed to return, that he would want to return, and ultimately, to be in my arms again. 

But he wasn’t looking. He wasn’t looking. Not even a glimpse, a side-glance, a peep, a quick-look. 

I muttered a “fuck you too” to myself; thought: If you don’t want my dick, then I hope you can stand it, before returning to my phone. Until, without warning, I just heard a gunshot. It rang inside my ears then was gone. And who should I see when I looked up: Harold! He was clutching his neck as if he was being choked. And blood was coming out of his hands. 

The first, second, seventh cries reverberated from people. Some were running away, some stood on their places, ducking. 

It was the two people on a motorcycle wearing ski masks, one driving and one holding the gun, who shot him. We saw them rev up their motorcycle, speed away, and disappear at the distance. 

Harold got off the tricycle and staggered towards me. His eyes were bulging, pooling as they were with blood; the muscles of his face were twitching. He had a look of horror on his face, as if it was his end and he knew it. He was about to fall when I caught him, but he was heavy so I laid him on the ground with me, placing his head on my thighs. 

I might have shouted to call an ambulance; I must have cried. I must have frozen in shock. Then Jacqueline and his mother got out and on seeing Harold, screamed the most piercing cry I have ever heard in my life. 

They kept calling his name, tried waking him up. They kept telling everybody to call an ambulance. But it soon proved to be futile. He was losing—had lost—so much blood. The ambulance arrived several minutes later, at which point Harold was already gone, dead.

The next day, there was set up, in front of our house, a canopy to accommodate people who would want to view Harold’s body or to gamble. Many people came to visit us and some of them held a vigil in front of the casket. There were talks among them as to who could have killed Harold, or that they said his death was inevitable, if not deserved, because he had been peddling drugs. His mother—and I had come to call her my mother also—emptied all her life savings and I went penniless too. She was crying for many days that there was nothing we could do to console her. 

We buried Harold on the 12th of July, nine days after his death, on a cemetery outside town. And when we got home and all the people had left, there was a kind of painful silence about the house. My uncle was the one who drove me to work that night and he had also come to learn that my job was not legitimate, but I didn’t care. I was also thinking of leaving, of getting away.

I didn’t care about Jacqueline; I didn’t care about the baby. The only person I cared about was dead, gone, never to be seen again. I had no reason to be there, to be in that city, to live.

It’s funny: before I met him, I’d kind of given up on living but also didn’t want to die. I was just a piece of garbage floating in the river, just letting life take me by its current. If a bus had rammed me while crossing the road, I would have been ready to end it all there, I would have said to the person trying to get me into an ambulance: “No, I’m fine. I’m okay. Just leave me alone,” as my blood rushes to the pavement. And now that I found myself in the exact same position, I kind of surprisingly wanted to live. I wanted to get away, maybe love someone like him again.

Instead of going to work that night, I walked the highway towards the hill. I had packed a few clothes on my bag and was ready to take the midnight bus. But first, I wanted to see the hill.

The night was cold as big trucks carrying canned sardines passed by me. I had a few bills on my pocket, and would just ask some money from my mother the second I’d reach my destination, preferably a town I knew nothing about with people who did not know me. 

I walked for about twenty-five minutes before I reached the foot of the hill, at which there were no houses but a big acacia tree near the entrance of it. 

I had not trekked it before; Harold and I always drove uphill using a motorcycle. So a minute on at the slope, I was heaving for breath. 

Halfway through, I realized how dumb it was what I was doing trying to climb it I almost cried. I did cry, but not for that reason. 

Thankfully, the moon was bright enough to lit up my path.

When I was close to the summit, I noticed a motorcycle being parked on the spot where Harold had always parked ours. I thought I was hallucinating for a second and imagined Harold was waiting for me at the top. 

He wasn’t there. Instead, a girl and a boy less than a few years my age looked up from their kissing and was a bit surprised to see me come out from the shadows. 

I muttered a sorry and walked back down the slope again. 

I spent the night at a bus terminal, slept on the seat trying to wait for the bus. It did not come. I had missed it. 

When I woke up it was already 3 a.m. and I asked the officer there if there was another bus coming. He said there wasn’t. Then I walked back home again.

When I reached the house, it was already five; the sun hadn’t come up yet. My mother, though, was up and at the kitchen trying to get this big sack of leftover meat and bones into a large pot. 

“You’re home already?” she asked when she saw me.

“Uh, yeah, our boss made us go home early,” I lied. 

I noticed she gave up in trying to pour the bones all at once and just grabbed what she could by her hands and putting them in piecemeal. “You need help with that?” I asked her.

“No, no,” she refused, “you might stain your jacket.”

“I’m okay with that.”

I grabbed the sack which was not so heavy and poured the bones in while she held the handle of the pot to steady it. 

“You’re a good kid,” she said. “You’re going to become a great father.”

“Thanks,” was all I could say.

Derek Go

‘The Ears of Spring’, ‘On the Village Green’, ‘A Tangible Sum That Doesn’t Add Up’ & ‘It Used to be so Easy, Back in School–’

Breanna Martins

The Ears of Spring

Around the Ides of March 

a flock of swooping

fleet-wing-sheen’d 

Violet-

green 

swallows

roller-coaster-in

glimmering

aerialists 

from Guatemala

ever-far away

returning to the eaves

above the back/front door

of our Hodeo

facing the brow-mind 

of the wilds 

of White’s 

Hill 

now & then they will alight 

& cock their heads 

& listen––

with the poise of one 

wholly

present

Buddha’s

Ear

buddies 

I call them

half in 

jest.

On the Village Green

Apple tree leaves are tongued-under with spring down. 

Not yet blotched with aphid mould or cobbled by moths.

On the town diamond, the pitcher winds up and cranks 

the grass-stained ball––thwack! into the catcher’s mitt. Full 

count! In the stands, sweaty-T Joe pumps two meaty fists,

(his kid’s in the game). How can Joe know that each pitch is a wind-up 

for the consumptions of  full, fat, endless summer? 

In the Big Leagues, boardrooms of the Fortune 5—, 

there aren’t any seasons, just business quarters. 

The field isn’t game with townies, it’s global. 

Between Big Leagues and the bush leagues, 

there’s no contest––Junk Bonds eat corndogs alive, 

Scorched Earth torches burgers, Shark Repellents 

bite beer. The Big Board keeps score. Maybe we should 

grandstand-it. Picnic in the bleachers above the deficit-

littered field. But heck … show me a VIP who wouldn’t risk 

a crypto’s bit of hit for leaving his rot in the Big/ly Apple. 

Come fiscal/fire or legal/flood or bank/ruptcy,

they’ll jet-out on golden parachute & scoop up a mega-yacht…

On that day, baseball’s more ballsy fans will spit tobacco and jeer.

A Tangible Sum That Doesn’t Add Up

Over coffee at Malvina’s, Joshua and I 

deliberated on whether petty death or daft 

allegiance to blobfish-faced kleptocrats

were all they were cracked-up to be; 

and whether hoary power player dicta 

like seeking ‘just and moral retribution’ 

could be more than green screen window dressing 

behind which craggy-cheek magnates 

settled accounts. (No way did we resolve it), 

but when I saw him next, all hell had broken 

loose; from husky blocks of Klamath granite 

he’d been sculpting bold, fetching monoliths, 

obelisks and gravid funerary monuments, 

in a raw, no-holds-barred, neo-Palladian 

style. They made me quite queasy, to be honest. 

On packed fairgrounds at CAL EXPO, Josh said, 

The orders, like fools, rushed in. Money talks–– 

nobody walks. Success could be due to his moral 

critique on (yet sensual indulgence of) the zero-sum. 

Death is good for business, I thought––always will be 

when you know how. The pom-pom’d Walmart

casket with Dear Deceased, primped and proper;

epitaph in purple prose laser’d into marble, 

copycat Clydesdales to bear the coffin.

For the ilk of Undertakers––these temporary sums, 

these quiet, buried profits, are bulwarks 

against fear, scarcity, against the mute cries 

and stasis of death, the indifference

of an eternity without premium pick-ups, 

buxom babes, gold vaults––or, maybe, 

without even God! But the bad/good news is––

they’ll be none the wiser for the lack of Bud. 

Betelgeuse! Oh Betelgeuse!

Tonight––star light, star bright, 

said Hank––up there’s Betelgeuse!––

(falling star) I see tonight, 

on Orion’s eastern, blue, wise ‘shoulder’ 

of the fair hunter … 

        and should I say this––

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”––

then we who play 

faire 

will be seen by villagers of Mormon Bar

as standing on the shoulders of giants, 

against men with cudgels 

who promise us kernels 

of the -isms of capital––

  which works now as it always has–– 

(By Beetlejuice’d rules:

“These aren’t my rules. Come to think of it, I don’t have any rules!”) 

To the mad, shrill voices of M.A.G.A., we say:

Muck-thistle, muck-thistle, muck-thistle!––you

M/aniacal A/ntagonists––G/ulag’s A/nus.

We swat-away your thought-gremlins, troll-speak 

and gizz of toxic-bubbling Weasel-mousse.

It Used to be so Easy, Back in School––

Just rock it:  “I wanna be your back door man!”

But there is no back door in the labyrinth–– 

in the feral maze of life choices, there is 

only one entrance, the way we came in … 

and now … I could be lost between 

the center, where the Minotaur hunkers, 

he who is my forbidden self, he

whom I fear to find yet irresistibly seek–– 

and the outside, beyond the labyrinth, 

where the world is evidential, existential, 

where the world is a chaos of quasi-

sentient surfaces that don’t reflect me, 

and chicanery gaming to devalue me

just to enrich the gotchas ever more…

There must be an allée trouvé, a path 

of doing well by doing good, a way 

of trailing by the thread of my breath 

through the labyrinth of noesis, 

slipping the noose of strictures, shaking-off 

the taint of grappling hands that once slapped, 

belted and hair-brushed me, my wounded 

child. There must be a way of speaking 

I can find to trick, by acts of ventriloquism, 

that voice that issues from my face, that voice 

that reasons away childhood’s end.

William Binzen's expressive medium of choice is words. The elements in this poetic process include: narrative invention, emergent theme, intentional structure and sound crafting. He tries to make every line a meaningful moment and one that corresponds to how both individual words and whole lines unfold across a page. His poetry and photography were featured in the anthology, Beside the Sleeping Maiden, and are forthcoming in the winter issue of the Banyan Review.

‘My Kingdom’

Yazmin Munoz, from Dallas, Texas, is a Mexican-American woman and oldest of thirteen from a single-mother household. Her identity and personal experiences with prevailing issues such as poverty, sexual assault, mental illness, and substance abuse shape both her writing and desire to befriend and uplift everyone in our community.

My Kingdom

“Here ye! Here ye! Thank ye for gathering together this evening. We have a special guest with us today, my fair sweet lady. Unexpected and very much welcome to the kingdom any day! Her sweet gifts come forth in accompaniment of the bakers most renowned confections!”

Gerald sat a bottle of syrup in the passengers seat, facing the windshield. His left hand held half of a dried out donut. Both of which were amongst the glorious treasures found along the days outing. Now he was home. The rain had started and the temperature dropped with the sun. The windshield and all of the other windows had a thick layer of fog. This was Geralds favorite moment of the day, settling in for the evening, to privacy and the most warmth he could get. He closed his eyes and leaned back with a deep breath. His mismatched socks kicked back, pushing his shoes under the seat next to two bottles that their necks partially sticking out. They were just in reach. He took one more bite of his maple coated treat before starting to whisper. 

“The king has returned, he sits on his throne, in his domain. It’s his. His domain. He owns it. This whole kingdom. No one else. They aren’t allowed into his kingdom. His kingdom. His domain. He owns it.”

Gerald stretched out his legs, wriggling his feet beyond the pedals at the floor and pressing his palms to the stained felt roof. When he opened his eyes, a bit of water dripped onto his face. The sunroof had tape around its seal. He thought to the last time it had opened to a bright sun and clear skies. The memory was cut short at the continued dripping of the water. He wiped his sticky fingers across his face. Reaching inside his heavy army green jacket, he pulled out a wadded up plastic grocery bag. A corner of the tape was already hanging down from the continued leak. He pulled it back gently to stuff the plastic bag up against the seal. He pressed his palm against the corner as he began turning around to look for his roll of tape. 

The syrup bottle remained in its place, the woman’s face staring straight ahead. A shadow passed the side of the vehicle, hardly visible by the faint beam of a nearby street light. Gerald froze in the drivers seat, but his eyes still shifted to the back seat. His possessions littered the entirety of the space. A stack of National Geographic magazines were level with the center consul. A small ice chest was squeezed in behind the passenger seat. A mass of jackets, shoes, and other clothes were packed in behind Geralds seat. The two back seats were filled with boxes, picture frames, an old VCR player, CD cases, several old dusty bowling trophies, and a faded globe with a tarnished brass base. The back window wasn’t even visible amongst the piles of books, maps, and papers stuff in every available nook. He placed his remaining bit of donut just in front of the steering wheel. The steering wheel then popped up at the pull of lever. Looking up at a line of figures on the dash, a Hawaiian hula dancer, a dinosaur fast food kids toy, a bendable Gumby, and a stuffed Tigger. 

“Order! Order! I will have order! It would appear that my kingdom has faced a bout of neglect in my absence. This is an embarrassment to me, an embarrassment. I must apologize to my fair sweet lady. Not just that, but there appears to be unwelcome guests about the moat outside my kingdom. I will have ORDER! It is clear now that my being present is of much more significant need than I realized. Everything would crumble here without me, thus I  must remain.”

Gerald paused just for a moment before flipping around dangling his front half into the back seat. Clothes and jackets were flying into the air. The rattle of a metal toolbox came soon after as his body kept shifting and he got closer to the floor of the vehicle. 

“SUCCESS, you fools!”

Gerald flopped back down in his seat with a very ancient looking roll of silver tape. He had it very close to his face now as he scratched at the edge attempting to get his nails under the once loose end. 

“Take note my subjects, as I must do everything myself, as always.”

Once he had gotten it free, he spent moment of silence patching the rest of the leaky corner. His hands reaching up patting at the new tape, he admired his handy work. Reaching over slightly with his left hand, the click of the overhead light brought an extended moment of admiration. The sun was completely gone now and the street light was unreliable. Gerald sat there in his kingdom and stared up at the sunroof, still patting at his repair. The overhead light flickered as though there was little time of it remaining. Geralds watery eyes could be seen in the glow, as could his crooked overbite, with two missing teeth on the left side. His eyes were opened wide, revealing deep wrinkles on his forehead. There were still donut crumbs on his chin. He clicked the light off. A set of headlights turned and illuminated the foggy windows again. 

Gerald reached for the door handle so fast. In one movement he had the door open and was outside of the car. He hobbled after the headlights, a vehicle that was nearly two blocks already. He was yelling, screaming at the car as thought they had personally wronged him. 

“Aaaaaaaaaaaah!! Aaaaaaaaaah! Stay out of my kingdom! Stay out, you!”

Spit and slobber shot out of Gerald’s mouth. Snot was dripping from his nose and tears came from his bloodshot eyes. His heavy breathing started to recede as he shrank back into himself there in the middle of the street. Looking side to side, checking his surroundings, his feet stumbled slightly in turning back towards the opened door of the car. Then he got worried about the rain and started mumbling to himself, hobbling back.

“My kingdom, my kingdom, my kingdom. Its mine, I lead it, I take care of it. Its my kingdom. No one else. They wouldn’t understand, I’ve come so far. We can still go far, as far as we want. Anywhere. Anywhere. Anywhere.”

He paused outside the open door. The rain became heavy again. There was a lot of rust  around the edges of the car. All of the tires were flat and the tail lights were smashed in. Spray paint across the trunk. There were several yellow envelopes under where a wiper blade should’ve been. The wind had accumulated a pile of trash and leaves beneath the front end. 

Gerald sank back into the drivers seat, his dark green coat had deepened in color due to being soaked now. The space wasn’t quite as warm anymore. He leaned his head back with his eyes closed. He had his right arm stretched out, fidgeting with the bottom of the syrup bottle. Gentle whispers floated about as the fog returned to the windows.

“My kingdom, my kingdom, my kingdom.”

Levi Himes was born and raised in Indiana. He currently resides and writes in Colorado with his wife Heather and their dog Birdy. Levi has published his first full length travel memoir The Good Vibe which is available now. He is currently working on his first full length fiction project. He is also actively exploring his abilities in the world of short fiction. His greatest pursuit in writing is the unraveling of perspectives throughout his stories.