L'Écureuil Mort

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L'Écureuil Mort

I write with a leaky pen
Because I like to get dirty.
I want to see myself,
Flowing,
Leaking unceasingly
Onto paper.
I want to leave a mess.

I want to feel the day’s labour
Upon my hands, soaking in with
The colour of my blood.
Applying itself onto page
After page covered in crimson
And finally turning
Into rust.

I don’t mind that the ink is everywhere.
It’s an intricate mess that takes
A bit of work to wash out.
Let the ink seep into me.
I want to feel my work,
My words upon myself.

Everything can remain a mess,
Everything cam remain askew.
All I ask in return from you
Is beauty.
Make me see the world as you do
So I don’t have to be in mine,
All awash in ink
Seeping into my clothing
And my skin,
Until I cannot see
even myself.

Use your words
And rinse me through,
Come wash me clean
And wring me dry.
Then leave me on the side
For the next passerby.

Crash
by Gavin Lytton

You’ve always been attracted to caution,
airy yellow lines of a road.
Nobody trusts
a stranger until they’re
a stranger themselves.

Driving alone
you imagine crossing the line:
lustful connection
of metal bending
bodies demented
togetherly in a
savage harmony.

You saw a crash once.
Hers. People screamed
noise needs air but her–
she was beautiful then.
You saw fireworks, unbinding
reds and oranges touching
the sky — you wanted within, that
trace of sky with skin.

Since you shared that moment
you began to watch crash tests.
The airbag shoots out, finally
a pillow to dream on always.
A flailing arm wanting
to hold heaven’s hand.
The dummy’s head slow
motion snaps
speaking something very human
to you.

The ambulance split
cars like crimson sea, how
you only wanted her to wash
over you. The caution tape
held your hand, but
you need to hold her.
You see her everyday
in stop signs, at red lights
in slow motion. Now,
all roads lead you to
that contact you crave,
the reunion.


Stranger Then
by Gavin Lytton

When I passed you on the street
the other day, chin tucked in,
without saying so much as anything.
I did so because I am a liar, and
I did not want to lie to you.

I didn’t know what to say
as rain and humility mocked
my holistic intentions. Your blouse
sobered me almost deft and

I am idle willingness. Had
I said “good evening,” I would’ve
thought of that fragile morning
when I left—shirt and shoes in hand—

of the snickering sun.
The lamppost buzzing
with daft purpose, shone a dull
accusing spotlight that revealed each

or neither of us, but not both.
We were angles a part
of an awkward geometry.
Never more symmetry than six degrees

but so much more. A sick child
will stare at dessert, looking for seconds,
countless seconds. Separate from radiance,
can you see how far it is to be close?

When I passed you on the street
it was that evening all night long.
You were a stranger then and
things are stranger than they were
before I passed you on the street.

The Wolf River
by Zachary Rosen

"Their nightly singing became as soothing as rainfall on a window,
an ancient sound of the earth, of life itself"
- J. Dutcher

Most men had forgotten about the King property on the south bank of the Wolf River, halfway between Rossville and Piperton. The land was overgrown with vine and bushes, and the steel gate on the country road was rusted beyond repair. The path that led up the hill from the waterfront had long since been overrun, and was not easily traversed. Atop the hill stood the old house with the thick timber walls and the tall windows overlooking the water. The Wolf River flows slowly through Tennessee, and its winding curves make for a pleasant and unchallenging course. It’s said that the local Indian tribe, the Chickasaw, used to travel from village to village on a calm day without paddling their canoes, drifting down the stream like leaves on a lazy wind. The spring-fed Nashoba, as the Chickasaw called it, is no more. In its place sits the Wolf, silted and contaminated. Eroding banks and sanded bogs now littered the shore, the bright sounds of yesteryear long since faded into eerie quiet.

The dead branches on the ground crumpled underfoot as Michael stepped out of the dinghy. The dock swayed in the current as he tied the boat in place and slung the canvas bag over his shoulder. Standing tall, he spat into the murky depths and stepped onto the shore of the small pebble beach. Aside from the bag and the machete sheathed at his waist, Michael had brought little with him. He wore a cotton shirt that hung loose at the neck and a pair of old infantry pants tucked into wool socks. With the tip of his boot, he scraped through the long grass, pushing aside dry leaves until he found the rocks hidden underneath. The bushes, once kept trim by his brothers at his father’s behest, had grown wild and tangled, their leafy branches intertwined, obscuring the graveled path.

Michael dropped his bag to the ground and took to the brush on the hill with the machete. He pushed methodically upwards; sweat dripping from his arms into the soil. The blade was sharp, and struck quickly through the wood and leaves. He was halfway up the hill as the sun began to fall beneath the trees on the river’s opposite bank. The sunlight flickered and reflected off the windows up above, the glare reflecting in his eyes. Cutting through the last of the overgrowth, Michael stepped from the path onto the well-worn wrap-around patio. As he turned towards the water, the sun finally settled across the shore. The Wolf River grew dark, but the constant whispering of the current remained.

There had once stood a cabin on the land, small but sturdy, almost a hundred years ago. Now, in its place stood a grand old home, built by Michael’s grandfather Marlon after his war. The front of the house was built facing the river, and was perched precariously over the side of the steep slope where the path led down to the dock. The porch was dotted with wrought iron benches, where Michael and his brothers used to sleep on hot summer days. When he was young, their home had been the pride of the county, but now it was grey and rot with age. Every door had been bolted shut from the inside, save the one overlooking the lake. Michael laid his bag at his feet and patted down his jacket pockets before finding the iron key hung on a cord of twine. He had received it in the barracks post in ‘43, attached with a form letter from the bank, explaining that the house was his property now. He hadn’t understood until he received the letter from his cousins in Rossville the next day. Though the escutcheon had long since rusted, the lock held true, and the key slid easily into place. Michael heard the grinding of the unused gears, and pushed the door unstuck into the living room. No one had set foot in the house in eleven years, and the floors were choked with dust. As he walked past the fireplace, Michael dropped his bag on the wide dining table and stepped into the kitchen.

He remembered his brother Robert taking him on a walk towards town when they had been only five and seven years old; they had cut through the wheat field across the road, and trucked through a shallow pond just north of the Twin Lakes. As they came down the gentle slope onto the McInnes farm, they had seen the old man and his wife out in the orchard, and had offered their hands, picking the low hanging fruit near until sunset. They had left with wide smiles, sore arms and a small hemp sack of apples given in thanks. Walking back, Robert got the idea to cut the apples and ask their Ma to bake a pie. When they climbed the steps and walked through the back door, their father was sitting in his favourite chair smoking from a small bruyere pipe. The chair was old and worn, but he loved it well, as it had been his father’s.

Their father hardly lifted his head from his book as the boys made way to the kitchen and Robert drew a long sharp knife from the block. He stepped onto the stool, and as the pipe smoke floated above their heads, began to slice the apples methodically. All of a sudden, he hollered like a beast, and the knife slipped from his hand and fell and stuck in the floor inches from Michael’s feet. There was blood everywhere, and the screams woke the baby and Ma yelled from upstairs, but before the panic truly took hold, their father was there with his clasped iron box. The case was well polished, with silver latches, a thick leather handle and the arms of the U.S Army emblazoned across its front. It clicked open, and their father removed a small tin sewing kit and several pads of gauze. He was calm, and his lips were taut under his thick red beard as he told Michael to hold the gauze to the wound and told their Ma to stay upstairs with the baby. The cut was deep, Michael could see that much, and the pale white bone of Robert’s thumb was visible halfway between the knuckle and wrist.

His father’s hands were steady, never faltering, threading the needle back and forth through the flesh of his brother’s hand. Robert was crying, trying to stifle his sobs by clenching his teeth as the stitches brought sinew and skin together. Their father’s concentration never wavered, his pale green eyes set solely on the task at hand. He didn’t speak other than to ask for gauze or thread, and for a moment, Michael felt as if he were standing by his father’s operating table in town. By the time they were done, Robert’s tears had dried. Their father reminded them that they were too young to handle knives, and called down their Ma to dote on the patient. She did, and had kisses for Michael and Robert both. She had made them throw away the apples, which had been sprayed with blood, but she promised to buy more.

Michael stood and slowly walked towards the basement door in the northwest corner of the house. As he did, the floorboards moved and creaked beneath him, the dust jumping and settling with every step. It was then that he heard the howling whistle through the cracks in the walls, carried adrift over the river from up in the hills. Quickly, he rushed to the door, and opened it to swallow the sound. It was beautiful, he thought, to hear as the wolves joined each other from miles away. The moon was crisp and white, only a sliver away from full, its light hanging soft on the trees like snow. Every howl was followed by another and as each joined the baleful orchestra grew stronger. The Nashoba was alive with the night as the moonlight played off its surface, like a projection in a cinema, with the wolves as a beautiful accompaniment. Each voice was different than the one before it as they cried out to their brothers and sisters from miles away. Suddenly, the song began to fade and the voices dropped off one at a time, as Michael stood silent, shivering from the cold.

Stepping back inside, he climbed down the basement stairs and opened the cellar door. He stood before the large antique cabinet with wound metal handles and fumbled in his pockets for the key he had found in his father’s safety deposit box in Rossville. It was small and silver and it bore his grandfather’s initials engraved in block letters. As he moved to turn the lock the door gently swung open on its own, revealing the collected armaments of four generations of the King family. That the door was unlocked was worrisome, but to his relief all the weapons were accounted for. On the far left was the Enfield rifle laid down by his great-uncle William at the skirmish at Moscow. Next were his grandfather’s three hunting rifles, with which Michael, his brothers and his father were all taught to shoot, firing at cans perched on a dock out on the river. His uncle’s Lee-Enfield, which his father had bought back after the Great War, reddened with rust, hung next to a leather holster with his father’s pistol.

Their father had first killed a man in the Belleau Wood, though he had rarely spoken of it. He had been reassigned from his battalion to the Marines, and followed Sergeant Daly’s group as a medic on the first charge through the field. Sixteen men were dead in the blink of an eye as the machine guns tore through their ranks, their bodies disappearing beneath the waist-high wheat. His father had been lucky, and had time enough to drop flat to the ground. Crawling on hands and knees, hidden to the enemy, he could find no sign of life in any of his men as the second wave charged the enemy encampment. He heard someone shout for a medic from the nearby wood, and had run to help. The man was an officer, and badly wounded, blood seeping through the front of his shirt. His father had reached for his kit, but before he could open it, a shot rang out and the officer’s chest burst open in a splash of bright red. He turned to see a German soldier advancing slowly, rifle in hand. Their father had always insisted that he had “only done what was necessary” that day, sparing the details until Michael and his brothers were old enough. He had feigned surrender, but when the German stepped closer to take his gun, he swept the man’s legs out from under him. They had wrestled in the mud, tearing at each other blindly. In the end Michael’s father had prevailed, and had drawn the German’s own dagger and sunk it in his throat.

Michael took the pistol, climbed the stairs and stepped through the back door into the yard behind the house. Even in the dim light, he could make out the trees several yards away. The woods had seemed infinite when he was a boy, climbing over fallen trunks and through the thicket at dusk. It was an old oak forest, and the ground was thick all year round with dried leaves and twigs that crackled underfoot. He had only ever been lost once in those woods as a young boy, though he had not been scared. It had been so quiet and peaceful. Robert and Patrick had found him hours later, sitting with his back to the trunk of a tall birch tree, eyes closed, a smile hanging on his lips.

Michael stuck to the edge of the forest and collected birch bark and kindling. Passing the old wooden storehouse in the yard, he strode back towards the door of the house. He lit a match, and lay it gently under the birch in the small stone fireplace until the bark began to smoke and crisp. Adding the kindling and the logs, the flames spit and crackled, the heat creeping into Michael’s bones and bright yellow light flickering throughout the room. Once again, the house felt like home, and Michael could almost hear his Ma yelling at Patrick to finish his chores or calling the boys down for dinner. He remembered the sound of Patrick’s shouts when he caught his first trout, and their father’s laughter, and Robert smiling when he got his AGCT results in ’39. He was old now, Michael realized, and his brothers were gone, and here he was on the old sofa in their house, burning the old wood and staring down at the same old river. The fire wavered, reflecting in Michael’s eyes as his eyelids begun to shut. He felt the day and the night and the day before it in his bones. The heat softly cradled him against the pillows and he slept, the way a man can only sleep when he feels at home.

The howl carved through the silence and Michael woke with a start. The embers were fading, and he shivered in the early morning cold. The light filtered through the trees and dew collected on the windowpane as he rose with the fur blanket draped around his shoulders. He wiped the sleep from his eyes and walked out onto the porch into the dawn. He thought it queer that the wolves were howling now, with the night long since faded into day. The howl sounded again, and reverberated against the shore, along the river and through the trees, but there was no answer. It was a lone mournful wail, a pup looking for its pack. Michael turned and stepped back inside, leaving the door ajar to let the wind whistle in with the fresh country air. The wolf must have gotten lost. He hoped that its brothers were looking for it.

The fire’s embers had turned to charcoal and the house was dark, as the sun had not yet fully risen from behind the trees on the opposite bank. He opened the first drawer nearest the back door in the kitchen, and pulled out an old wooden box. Sitting down at the chair near the window, he set the box on his lap and opened it. The seat creaked, and the well-worn cushions spat up dust as he settled in. Michael sat back in his grandfather’s chair and loaded a single round from the box into the chamber of his father’s pistol, and stared out at the calm waters of the Wolf River as the sun rose above the trees and the last howl of the lone wolf rang out across the dawn.

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Somethingsomethingcountrygirlsomething
by D. E. Glass

Seeing in her something of a country girl—though most especially when she tells me candidly that life is not sane living simply with our memories—I look past the salient superficialities of her social associations, an act by which I look quite deeply into the very social associations from which I wish to have her separated. Conversely, that I emphasize that I see in her the quaintness and fortitude characteristic of the country girl suggests that I might see in her little else. Whether this is of any consequence is chiefly beyond any of my immediate concerns, unless, of course, there is uncontested evidence that I actually do see little else in her apart from her vaguely traditional Southern qualities, which I by all means do intend to conflate with country-like qualities mentioned above, if only to satiate the palate of the general reader whom it is likely would not even have noticed the leap from “country” to “traditional Southern.” However, considering her social context—unfortunately—does not suffice to eclipse the subject of her filial context. It follows then that her Southernness is unquestionably unquestionable, albeit uniquely and rightly beside the point: Seeing in her something of a country girl bears no consequence unless I, like a sort of graceless literary Private I, attempt to understand her history, the majority from which I had the grave unluck of being, quite simply, removed.

While to this day I have not met her mother, I twice met her father: once, oddly, on my twentieth birthday; again on another occasion shortly thereafter. If not to Appease her by meeting her father and stepmother (and their new daughter, whom they adopted from Cambodia—who now seems even more peripheral than she did on my twentieth birthday, so much so I had to chalk out another one of my endless yet predictable parentheticals just to have enough dramatic room for her), I can’t quite remember anymore what exactly compelled me to drive out to the edge of Fulton county on my twentieth birthday (which, for me, marked a sort of expulsion into adulthood, an escape from the placenta-warmth of family life, the purpose of which currently consumes—menacingly—my mind’s mechanisms, despite its essentially tacit knowledge that all such explorations are and will always be arbitrarily (juvenilely, facetiously) Lacanian... please pardon the digression). What I had heard up to that point about her father and her family’s history had not seemed to me especially enticing or warm (two characteristics which I would later realize I had taken for granted in my own family, a misfortune which is likely attributable to my propensity of looking into the relations within the families of others without keeping in mind my own predispositions), especially when I, as we neared Milton1 , mentally underscored those facts (in an exhausting and unrelenting type of way), and thoughtlessly forgot what was bringing me there in the first damn place. I should add that up to that point I had never been to Milton, and that the way she spoke about it made it seem to me a place for which I needed to foster some superficial type of fondness, as if her having descended from the affluent suburb supplemented her archetypal Southern qualities. To advance that notion, the way she spoke about nearly everything (besides, of course, sorority life) seemed to germinate within me—inexplicably—new fondnesses.

Her father was a short oafish man with a tastefully painful-to-watch smile. I suppose his eyes, which were the only physical characteristic he shared with her, were all that made the smile tolerable. During our first handshake, I can remember, I looked down on him: literally, given that I stand, obtusely hunched, around six feet tall; and emotionally, for my contempt for this man was writhing, pulsing with anarchic youthfulness... You see, reader, I cannot quite entirely divulge what I learned of her father before I met him. It would be in a fit of Real infidelity that I made public the things she confided in me and thus in herself. Of course, though, my reader, you are here for something to read, and so I will give it to you: After I met him, and after I had moved away (for good), I learned that her father had—quite ceremoniously—excommunicated her from his life, backwardly citing the stepmother and new-daughter as ample replacements for the daughter he never deserved to begin with. In truth, dear reader, I often imagine him, fake-smiling, making that phone call to his daughter just to cast her into utter estrangement, all the while intendedly oblivious to the replacement family he keeps around, like a musician with old manuscripts.

His old manuscripts, fresh flesh though they may be, sit idly now in his new life, in which they are merely pawns (and this, by his standards, is generous) to the end of his meaningless morose; in which they have become faceless fixations of his malevolent malaise, subject indefinitely to his pitiful and infantile whims; in which their fleeting use was used ultimately without Use. Having a humanist heart, I weep for them as I cheer for her, now that she is one step nearer her own expulsion into adulthood, the conclusivity of which I can only speculate as having nearly achieved full extrication from that eyeful of oaf, her father.

Here we experience an epiphanous ésprit de l’escalier 2 which—if I may backhandedly though most assuredly momentarily offend my readers by making my best decision concerning the defalcation of that other short end of what Buddy Glass claimed was the tendency of the writer “to give the reader, whom we’ve never met, either the short end or the benefit of the doubt—the short end when we don’t credit him with knowing as much about men and mores as we do, the benefit when we prefer not to believe that he has the same kind of petty, sophisticated data at his fingertips that we have”3—an epiphanous ésprit de l’escalier which is indeed naturally epiphanous in several ways, though this claim might force one to think contrarily, to consider that perhaps an experience of l’ésprit de l’escalier does not occur strictly to l’homme sensible,4 but to all humans, those creatures overwhelmed not by the arguments leveled against them, but rather by their own leveling against existence, against finitude, and against temporality

—Trust me, friend, when I say that I loathe speaking in analogical and allegorical terms. At first I was rather immune to bringing up, for example, Plato, but recently I realized that the circumstances at his deathbed were repeated in those of “Papa” Monzano’s.5 And, perhaps, when I bring this up it is not to speak in analogical terms (since, after all, I’m not here to relegate a fantastical connection between Vonnegut’s politico-prosaic prowess and Plato’s intentionally (thoughtfully) ironic wishes), but, much more than that, to emphasize the inevitable bouts of l’ésprit de l’escalier which we all too often take for granted as simply missed opportunities (missed chances, missed glances), and which her father will never exploit so as to gain remission of his sins.

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