Deborah Rudacille

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SOUTHERN GOTHIC

by Deborah Rudacille

A man named Knuckles is running for sheriff of the Florida county where my Uncle Al settled after he retired from the Air Force in 1971. The current sheriff is named Slaughter. My aunt and cousins were bemused by my exclamations of glee over these Dickensian surnames when I visited in July. But I was snatching at any excuse to lighten the atmosphere as the occasion for the trip was a sad one: I was accompanying my 79-year-old mother on a last visit to her big brother, confined to a hospital bed and slipping in and out of consciousness since a mini-stroke earlier in the month.

Uncle Al had been on home hospice for inoperable lung cancer since February, but up till his 82nd birthday in June he had been tooling around town in his Jazzy, able-bodied enough to rise and hit a few golf balls at a course near his home every few days. The stroke felled him in a way that cancer and chemo couldn’t, paralyzing the left side of his body. It was clear to all of us that my mom had better fly down quickly if she wanted to see him while he was still able to talk with her.

So in mid-July my cousin Tom claimed my mother and me at the Jacksonville airport, driving us down the pine-fringed highways to Trenton, a one traffic light town in the rural north central region of the state. It was an odd place for my uncle to have put down roots. Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Baltimore, he had enlisted in the Air Force during the Korean War, serving in the war zone though not on the front lines.

Over a twenty-year career as a USAF radioman he had lived in Alaska, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Key West, Florida. In one of the murkier phases of his career, he had served as a member of a five-man “secret Air Force” team monitoring nuclear tests from Chile prior to the election of the socialist Allende government in the mid-sixties. But my aunt had been raised in Florida, and her parents, brother, and sister lived near Trenton, so my cosmopolitan uncle settled near his wife’s family like a good husband. As a dark-skinned Italian with a name that ended in a vowel, he didn’t exactly blend.

When I was a kid, my parents, brother, and I road-tripped south every couple of summers to visit them, stopping overnight in South Carolina to break up the sixteen-hour drive from Baltimore. Swimming in a motel pool the first night of the trip was a treat, but merely a tantalizing appetizer for the main event—meeting up with Uncle Al, Aunt Peggy, Michael, and Tom in Trenton and together hitting all the Florida attractions within a couple hours’ drive of their home. My brother and I marveled at the curvaceous mermaids at Weeki Wachi and glided over crystal waters in glass-bottomed boats in Silver Springs, a “nature theme park” in Ocala. And of course, we screamed in the Haunted Mansion and giggled through Mister Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney World.

But we had just as much fun swimming in the snake-infested waters at Hart Springs and tubing lazily down the Itchnetucknee River near Trenton. My brother was even brave enough to try water-skiing in the river till my cousins told him to hail them with a wave if he saw a gator slide into the water. After a face-saving spin on the skis he hopped right back into the boat.

Once we hit adolescence my slightly older cousin Michael and I discovered other shared interests. Soon after my family pulled into Trenton in “Old Paint,” our family Chevy, Michael would say, “want to take a ride, Debbie?” and we would jump into his battered pickup truck. Driving down some long dusty country road bordered by watermelon fields, we’d see another pickup filled with his friends in the distance, stop side by side and pass a joint back and forth between the trucks. Michael always introduced me as his “Yankee” cousin and teased me about how fast I talked. On one memorable occasion when our families were vacationing together in Fort Walton Beach on Florida’s Gulf panhandle, Michael proposed drinking Kool-Aid mixed with the juice of psilocybin mushrooms before a family dinner at Howard Johnsons. After dinner we took our little brothers to see The Deep with Jacqueline Bisset and laughed through the whole movie, which was not a comedy.

Those were halcyon days to be sure, and a lot more fun than our latest meeting, which was shadowed by my uncle’s looming death, which none of us could bring ourselves to acknowledge. Instead, we sat in the living room, where his hospital bed faced the big flat screen television, and urged him to drink water from the pink and purple sippy cup I bought him at the Dollar General as he could no longer drink from a regular cup without spilling. We worked in teams to turn his emaciated body from side to side to ward off bedsores. We brought him back mashed potatoes from the barbecue joint where we went to dinner and cheered when he took a few bites.

And we talked politics. On the ride down from Jacksonville, my cousin Tom, a budget analyst for the Florida Department of Corrections, had pointed out four razor-wired prisons on the highway between Jacksonville and Trenton. The prison system is one of the top employers in North Florida, he told my mom and me. But the Republican governor and legislature are itching to privatize corrections and he is worried about his job. “I’ll have thirty years service next year,” he said, sitting in his dad’s wheelchair, which has become just another sitting option in the living room. “But I don’t think I’ll be around for forty.” Like his dad, who retired from the Air Force at forty-one, Tom is pretty sure he’ll have a second career doing something else. Though he never said so, I’m pretty sure he will be voting for the Democratic ticket this fall.

Meantime, Michael works for one of the few manufacturers left in Florida, making boats. He’s been there for twenty-eight years but is worried about how he’ll pay the bills when he has to take off for a couple of months following surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff. He doesn’t have disability insurance and doubts that he will be able to get workmen’s comp, though it is clear that the injury is caused by years of hard physical labor. His wife is worried that if he takes time off, his employers will fire him. Nonetheless, he is planning to vote for Mitt Romney because, he says, “he fixed Massachusetts.”

Tom says that Florida was a solidly Democratic state for decades, but that battles over abortion and gay rights pushed the state into the Republican camp. I wondered aloud how that could be. My aunt, a Republican who used to work for the Board of Elections, said that the state’s Democrats no longer felt at home in the party. “The party left them,” she said. “They didn’t leave the party.”

My uncle, a lifelong Democrat, roused himself to croak a single word—“Dixiecrats”—before slipping back into dreams.

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Deborah Rudacille is an independent journalist and science writer. Her first book, The Scalpel and the Butterfly (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), was named one of the year’s best nonfiction books by the Los Angeles Times. The Riddle of Gender (Pantheon, 2004) was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her latest book, Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town will be published in January 2010. She teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Marion Winik

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MY LIFE IN THERAPY

by Marion Winik

Not long after I moved to Baltimore in 2009, I realized that I needed help. I was still a mess about the implosion of my marriage, I was having no luck with dating, and neither hot yoga, white wine, or what was left in the prescription bottle from the last time I sprained my ankle was killing the pain. However, having been in therapy on and off since seventh grade, I knew well that finding a therapist is no easier than finding a boyfriend and often “help” is not a good description of what you get.

The first psychiatrist I ever saw was a Chinese-American woman with a son in my middle-school honors science class. I was sent to her after I wrote a long, spooky, cry-for-help type poem and swallowed a bottle of Excedrin. A C- in seventh-grade English (I think we would now call this a Jewish F) and a broken heart were the nominal causes of my nervous collapse but I was also fascinated by mental illness as portrayed in books like I Never Promised You A Rose Garden and The Bell Jar. Ah, that Sylvia Plath. An ongoing danger to America’s young romantics.

I would later realize that by limiting her responses to mmhmm-mmhmm and tossing any question I asked back to me, my inscrutable therapist was following classic psychoanalytic procedures. At the time I thought she was one of the most annoying people I’d ever met. To her credit, she did manage to explain some of my self-esteem issues to my bewildered parents, who were as always just trying to help me. But the approximately fourteen doctors I was seeing at the time, including a speech therapist, were making me feel like The Elephant Man instead of just a somewhat chubby, slightly pigeon-toed, crooked-toothed, lazy-eyed preteen. The physical issues were all eventually fixed or went away on their own; my sad little soul would prove more intractable.

My teen years featured an old-hippie psychologist my sister Nancy and I both saw, sometimes together. He said we should bring as many of friends as we liked. He smoked bidis with us—Indian clove cigarettes rolled in leaves, very popular in the ’70s—and hypnotized me to help me lose weight. One session involved me descending into an imaginary theater and visualizing my favorite food making an entrance on the spotlit stage. My favorite food was Dannon vanilla yogurt.

He explained to me that this symbolized the male orgasm.

Also around this time I participated in a therapy group run by the mother of one of my high school friends in her basement. Grassroots-style group therapy was quite a craze back then, as were bean bag chairs, blond-veneer paneling and shag carpeting, and everyone in our drama-club clique crowded down the stairs to the bi-weekly meetings, not wanting to miss a moment of the action. “Group,” as it was known, was less like therapy than like an MTV reality show thirty years before its time, with all the parties to every slight and betrayal on hand for its confession, a domino-effect freak-out waiting to happen.

For example, when I stupidly messed around one night in a red Chevy Nova with Billy Donnelley, who was not my boyfriend but who reportedly had porn-star type anatomical equipment so often discussed by the boys in our crowd that it was difficult not to be curious about it, the big showdown occurred in a room that contained Billy, my boyfriend, me, all of our various siblings, other girls who had had indiscretions with Billy Donnelley, their menfolk, and our well-meaning, middle-aged group leader. Though Billy and I had not gone all the way, things were never the same again for me and my sweet, young boyfriend. Ah, those stupid ’70s. Like Sylvia Plath, another wellspring of dubious inspiration and poor moral guidance.

In college, where I had developed a pioneering case of bulimia, I saw a Student Health psychiatrist who made me so mad with his insistence that my eating problem was really a sexuality problem that I threw my purse at him in our second session. I was a little edgy after the vanilla yogurt thing.

Still I wasn’t completely discouraged, though I continued to have meager success. More obsessive love, more body image issues, now throw in substance abuse . . . in my twenties, I practically drove a young Jungian therapist into another line of work. I was losing patience, too. At one point, I actually threatened to sue a guy who listened to me for a couple hours, diagnosed me with ADD, wrote me three prescriptions, and sent me a bill for $1,369. Multiple couples counselors threw up their hands at both my first and second marriages. When I started to believe one of my kids was a dangerously manipulative charmer who had everyone around him bewitched with his lies, I of course sent him to see a therapist as well. She called me after a few visits to tell me that I shouldn’t worry about my son. Everybody lies a little! And he was so charming.

Unbelievably, none of these experiences had destroyed my faith in therapy and so I set out once again to be healed, this time in the living room of an elderly, cadaverous, former Episcopal priest whose main advantage was that he was right in my neighborhood. On our first visit, he said he wasn’t sure he could help me with my problems, since they were so severe. On our second visit, he decided he’d rather not hear the pages and pages of dreams I had written down at his suggestion (though they seemed at the very least to be full of lottery number picks.) On our third visit, he pulled out his Bible and started reading aloud. When I called him the following week to cancel our next appointment, I got the impression I had barely beaten him to it.

Then I sprained my ankle for the third time that fall, and my friend Ken insisted I go the emergency room. Against my better judgment, I let Ken drag me to Patient First. While we were waiting I noticed a paperback copy of the book Desire, a memoir of sex addiction by Susan Cheever, on the chair beside me, atop a crocheted blue shawl. I picked it up to see if they had used a quote from the review I’d written of the book. They hadn’t, and I put the book back. Who was the person who had left it there, I wondered. When a friendly-looking, blond, blue-eyed woman gingerly carrying her hurt left arm in her right returned to claim her things, I told her I had looked at her book.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m a therapist!”—obviously wanting to dispel the impression that she was reading it because she was a sex addict.

“And I,” I quickly replied, “am a book reviewer.”

She was taken away to have her arm fixed. But as I sat there, I thought about the woman, feeling more and more drawn to her. This, I was sure, was my therapist. So I sneaked down the hall and peeked in the cracks between the curtains of the treatment rooms until I found her. She and her attending physician looked up surprised as I boldly swept in. “Can I have your business card?” I said.

I saw Tracy on Tuesdays, right after my hot yoga class. We talked about my ex-husband, of course, whose anger and blame were still very live issues for me, and about my recent bad experiences with the race-car driver in Annapolis. This seemed to exemplify another disastrous element of my character: the power of good looks and good kissing to blow my circuits. One does get to a point in life where it’s sort of exhausting filling in the same old back story, and then even more discouraging to realize how similar the new stories are. But Tracy was a good listener, neither a pushover nor a super-confrontational critic, and I never had to throw my purse at her once.

God knows I have always been too restless and impulsive and impatient for my own good, sometimes drastically so, and I have long suffered with the burning desire to climb out of my head and go someplace else, often with some sort of chemical assistance. While motherhood has made me a much healthier person—as it couldn’t Sylvia Plath—it didn’t fix every glitch. Tracy wouldn’t either, but she did help me out of the post-marital pain pit and onto more solid ground. I miss her, which is more than I can say for most of my old pay-pals.

Just like love, therapy is always worth another try.

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Marion WinikMarion Winik is best known for her commentaries on All Things Considered since 1991 (collected at NPR.org) and is the author of eight books, including First Comes Love, The Lunchbox Chronicles, Telling, and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. She is a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and an expert on the ethics of creative nonfiction. A performer in the tradition of David Sedaris, she has read from her work in large and small venues all over the country. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore and writes the Answer Lady advice column for Ladies Home Journal.

Derrick Austin

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SYRINX

by Derrick Austin

We are a song without a chorus. His fingers flutter
over the valves: crescendo, crescendo, crescendo,

legato. Outside, evening’s sulfur blows 
off the marsh where herons rest, white fires on dead trees. 

In my dream, I am the reed he plays. 
Water lettuces haul their skirts, twirling in the undertow.

Palmettos fan toads, squat in green velour,
and herons in their white suits quicken. In my dream, 

I am the reed he cuts. He teaches me to howl. 
I can’t tell the music from the knife, the moon, his teeth.

He carves new registers and plays a song that lights the air—
blood on a wing, a splash, the moon’s

staccato, toads lashing what flies closest
to their mouths—then goes as water rushing off the sedge.

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Derrick AustinDerrick Austin is an assistant poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming inKnockout, Waccamaw, Crab Orchard Review, storySouth, and other journals. He won the 2011 Editorial Prize Contest sponsored by Tidal Basin Review and will be pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan this fall.

Paul Kavanagh

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MAGALÍLUISMILI

By Paul Kavanagh

After many months in a dull hotel room on Strait Street, Valletta, I concluded that I had arrived too late, too late to write an old-fashioned account of travel. Half asleep, I had journeyed through Malta. I drank too much while in quest of something elusive in Saint Paul’s and Saint Julian’s. I had spent too much time in bed hiding from the sun dreaming of the Past. I hardly interacted with the people, the cathedrals blurred, the buildings merged, the myths muddled; the streets became just one long ascent, dusty, narrow. Waiting for a bus to take me to the Ġgantija Temples, I listened to two young girls asking their father many questions. We were in Città Vittoria. It was very hot and I had no water. “Why is water blue in the sea and clear in my bottle?” asked the smaller of the two girls, the pretty one. “Papa, could Aquinas fly?” asked the other girl. They were English. Their burnt flesh only matched their questions. I left Malta and traveled to Gozo. Without searching for it, I found the cave of Calypso. I had taken an early morning walk with the hope that the walk would wake me up. I left a dirt road with the wish of reaching the sea. I was worried that I could feel the first signs of heatstroke. I found myself on a craggy hill overlooking the sea. As I made my way down the craggy hill, I saw a sign for Għar Calypso. I stood before the cave. A young boy greeted me.

“Hello,” I said. He smiled. He followed me into the cave. I handed him some money and he lit a small white candle. He handed me the candle and stuffed the note into his pocket. Splintered sunbeams danced iridescently upon the glistening, dank rocks. It had a kaleidoscopic effect. The rocks were beautiful. I can’t explain why. They were simply beautiful. I thought about Odysseus’s futility. The wax from the candle was running down my hand. Fear made me rotate. The candle boy was still there. The flame danced upon the candle. The boy’s contrapposto made me think of Caravaggio. I had spent a week staring at Caravaggio’s “The Beheading of St. John the Baptist.” It is an extremely violent painting. St. John’s Co-Cathedral I found very beautiful. If I were to attempt to describe the cathedral I would describe all the cathedrals to be found in Malta. The boy was wearing jeans cut at the knees. The bottoms were frayed. The naked legs were hairless and almond. The white jean strands next to the almond skin caught my eye. The boy was shoeless. The toenails were dirty. The boy moved slightly, searching for a more comfortable stance. The cave was not a cave but a lacuna where once a tooth had been located. As the wax dripped onto my toes, as the light from the candle danced upon the pockmarked walls, I tried to read the graffiti that covered the walls. Somebody had written something about the size of Odysseus’s penis; the graffiti was very witty, but crude. I sat down where Calypso and Odysseus kissed and decided that I would go to Magalíluismili. In my rucksack, I had The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and Melia Klepht’s For Those Who Love to Fight. The latter book was an account of the war between Ayeléticia and Magalíluismili. It had been a bloody war. Ayeléticia had been rebuilt after the war and was now just another city. I had heard that Magalíluismili had not changed at all, that all the wealth they had accumulated before the war had been wasted on the war. I spent the rest of the day on the beach at Ramla l-Hamra reading The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The sand was golden and the waters undulated softly. I swam when my eyes started to feel the strain of trying to catch the words as they endeavored to elude the sun. The water was warm. I watched a young couple fooling around in the water and imagined Calypso and Odysseus caught in the same act by some minor god.

*

After the Conquistadors, after the Pirates, arrived the Northern Europeans. Magalíluismili was to be a Utopia in the clouds, a paragon of man’s aspirations. Therefore, why they built the village at the bottom of a valley is a mystery.

There is only one road to Magalíluismili. It is a long, winding road. The road cuts through the deep jungle. It rises steeply with the hills that surround Magalíluismili, descends, cuts Magalíluismili in two, ascends with the hills on the other side, traverses the hills, and continues to Ayeléticia. The road ends after more jungle in Claudfani.

Magalíluismili is surrounded by six hills and one mountain.

The Northern Europeans were very superstitious, and the names they gave the six hills and mountain illustrate their deep-rooted superstition: there is Devil’s Elbow, Devil’s Knee, Devil’s Heel, Devil’s Chin, Devil’s Ear, Devil’s Hump.

The road cuts through the Devil’s Hump.

The mountain is named Pachocle after Captain Wilhelm Pachocle, the first man to have climbed the mountain. It is 2,130 feet (650 m) above sea level.

Captain Wilhelm Pachocle, it is believed, declared war on the Devils in the clouds. He stood on the roof of his hut and cursed the rain. The rain fell unabated, impassive to the wild expletives of Captain Wilhelm Pachocle. Fearing defeat, he aimed his shotgun at the clouds, shot, and kept on shooting until the clouds reacted. Captain Wilhelm Pachocle fell through the roof of his hut and broke his neck.

*

Taxes are very high. There is much unemployment. The price for the simple things, like bread, milk, butter, and wine, is breathtaking. There is a thriving black market. Everybody is on the make. I was able to employ a guide. Vaz was a small man with a head full of gray hair, which was once black as coal. He liked to rub his potbelly, and he possessed a contagious laugh. Before employment, Vaz had been living on the streets, so I allowed him to sleep in the commodious closet. He found me a small room at the O’Higgins Hotel, which is on the Main Street. It was a rundown place. The room contained a bed, a table and chair, a restroom with latrine, shower, and washbasin. From the window, there was an excellent view of the Main Street and the Devil’s Chin, Devil’s Ear, and Devil’s Hump. During the hottest time of the day, Mount Pachocle blocked out the sun.

Walking along the Main Street, Vaz told me how the street happened to be paved. He pointed to a beautiful older woman standing before a shop and said, “It is because of the likes of her that the streets of Magalíluismili are paved. The men being men were more than happy to tread in mud, but the ladies being ladies and having a liking for high heel shoes and the men having a liking for ladies in high heel shoes and knowing that ladies in high heel shoes cannot walk up and down the Main Street if the street is muddy, thought it best to pave the street, and so my beloved Main Street is paved. And so have no fear of muddying yourself as we hurry through Magalíluismili.”

There was no Directory for Magalíluismili, and so if I were ever to get to know the town, I would have to visit the cemetery or the most dilapidated bar. A cemetery will tell you what families run a town, which families are powerful and rich; it is an advertisement, a mausoleum of black marble that works just as well as a Rolls Royce. A dilapidated bar will contain as much history as a cemetery. Vaz informed me that the cemetery was deep in the jungle. Not wanting to spend my first day in the jungle, I asked Vaz to take me to the most rundown bar.

Drunk, Vaz wanting to show me something did the chicken pox dance. It was a very fun dance.

The first part of the dance, Vaz scratched himself crazily from head to foot.

The second part of the dance, Vaz fell to the floor and gyrated.

The third part of the dance, Vaz quivered until still.

My bed was comfortable. The mosquitoes did their best to spoil my sleep. Vaz snored loudly. During the night, I watched the rainfall through the moonlight. It turned out not to be rain, but insects. I sat by the window and watched for two hours. A little flying insect was eaten by a bigger flying insect and that flying insect was eaten by a bigger flying insect and on and on it went until finally an insect so big it struggled to fly was picked off the window ledge by a bat. The bats were big. I climbed back into bed. I could hear the jungle, and its whispers metamorphosed into the refutation of Vico’s theory that imagination is memory reshaping itself within the cage that is the brain. I read a few chapters from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville until sleep. I dreamt of Christopher Columbus. In the morning, I asked Vaz if he could get me a copy of Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America. Vaz said, “You have more chance of climbing that mountain.” “I could,” I said. He laughed loudly. It was a mocking laugh. I wanted him to stop laughing. I took this for no. I handed him The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and told him he could exchange it for a few bottles of wine. He thanked me. I eyed the mountain as though the mountain were on the other side of the net and we were about to start a game of tennis.

*

We sat in Murphy’s bar to escape the midday sun. Magalíluismili is famous for its cabbages. I had cabbages with everything. I had strong beer that tasted of tinfoil and stewed cabbages. Later Vaz said, “Have you never noticed death smells so much like tin foil.” I had never come across death. We spent the night in the hotel room and Vaz, being light-headed after much walking, drinking, and little food, had to tell me how he arrived in Magalíluismili. I sat on the bed and him on the floor. In Magalíluismili, it never gets truly dark, the moonlight being so strong. The window was open slightly so we could smoke. We could hear the insects and smell the jungle as it claimed the corpses of the day. Vaz started with, “A lie is constructed of many parts. The truth is constructed of only one part. The truth is always whole; a lie is only whole when the lie has reached its end.” He said something else but a yawn obstructed my hearing. He started happily but ended in tears. When I woke in the morning, I was still dressed. I had fallen asleep, sitting up with my back pushed up against the wall. My alarm clock was the ringing in my neck. Vaz slept like a baby on the floor.

*

When in Magalíluismili it is a must that you attend a performance by Zine Kueneau. For the price of a bottle of wine, a cheap meal, and a packet of cigarettes, he will entertain for as long as you are willing to be entertained. He is a thin man, aquiline in features with an impressive voice. The suits he wears shimmer in the sun, you cannot miss him. We sat under the shade of many trees with names that I found to be untranslatable. I sipped mango juice poured over crushed ice, unbuttoned my shirt, and took off my boots. As Zine Kueneau performed, Magalíluismili dissipated; so did the hills, my nemesis the mountain, the jungle, and the world.

*

Yadda Street is lined with beautiful trees that form a canopy over the road. It is a busy road; it is the main thoroughfare for the City of Magalíluismili. A man walking out of the First National Bank just by his very presence hurried a squirrel onto the busy road. The man, shocked, dropped the wad of money he had been counting. The money flew onto the busy road. The man hurried after the money and was knocked down and killed. The air was thick with the smell of tin foil. Vaz said, “It is the smell of blood.” That night I drank a full bottle of Gordon’s Gin. The wind barked outside my window. During the night, there had been a bad storm. I had not heard it, or seen it. A tree had fallen close to the hotel. In the morning, hungover, I staggered outside and looked at the fallen tree. I looked up and saw the skyscrapers of Magalíluismili. I was amazed that one single tree could have hidden the skyscrapers of Magalíluismili. There were so many.

*

Seeing that it was my last night in Magalíluismili, Vaz was able to pick up some of Francisco’s last batch of homemade booze. It was indeed very strong. I opened the window and listened to the roar of cars, trucks, and buses. The neon lights that flashed across the street illuminated the room. The homemade brew was thick and iridescent like oil. We mixed it with water; once mixed, it turned into milk. We added sugar and some lime. We poured the drink over ice. Vaz told me that the locals drink it rare, a thing I could not do, I was not a local, I was a tourist. We got very drunk. Vaz did all the talking. I sat on the bed and listened. From the bed, I could see the skyscrapers of Magalíluismili. The skyscrapers loomed over the hills turning the hills into ant mounds.

*

There was a knock on the door. It was Vaz. My taxicab was waiting for me downstairs. I pointed to the mountain. “The next time I am here I am going to climb that mountain,” I boasted. Vaz laughed loudly and slapped me on the back. I was taken-aback.

“That, my good friend, is no mountain” – he removed the cigarette – “that is a rubbish heap.”

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Paul Kavanagh’s writing credits include poetry and short stories inThe White Review, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Sleepingfish, Burnside Review, 3am Magazine, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Nano Fiction, Evergreen Review, Marginalia, Upstairs at Duroc, Annalemma Magazine, Trnsf, Third Wednesday, and Structo magazine. New work is soon to appear in The Chaffey Review and Bateau Press.

The Art of Ryan Foster

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By Ryan Foster

Sunset (Smiling Landscape)

Sunset (Smiling Landscape)

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Ryan Foster graduated in 2011 from the University of South Florida with a focus in painting and printmaking. He currently teaches 2D Design and Color Theory at The University of Montevallo just outside of Birmingham, Ala. “Recently I have been interested in the grittiness of the land — weeds, rocks, animals, etc. — and where these elements meet the immaterial or spiritual side of things. So I interrupt the horizon with a veil. This not only gets rid of distant perspective issues, but provokes the comparison between the seen and the unseen. Using a stand-in for the sky piece elicits the question: what is behind the curtain?”