"My Last Memory of My Grandmother" by Adelaide Gifford

in

My uncle says the sea erodes.
Salt, surf, sand,
and wind.
And I remember
six years old,
clinging to my grandmother’s hand,
fearing that
I’d fly away.
I remember
sea spitting, burning sparks of sand on little legs,
fish flailing,
flung from homes beneath the water,
silver bodies spinning in air they
cannot breathe.
I remember shrieking, my own
shrieking. Wet suction
of a thin body, clinging
to my leg, fearing
flying. I remember
our wild eyes,
my small hand slapping,
my small fish slipping
off the skin of my leg
into the air, into
the wind,
ripped away.

 

Adelaide Gifford is a recent graduate of Hamilton College in New York, where she majored in Creative Writing and double-minored in Hispanic Studies and Environmental Studies. Her favorite genre to write is a mixture of nature writing and fantasy, with a bit of magical realism thrown in, and her favorite authors include Richard Powers, Harper Lee, and Billy Collins. She has previously published a short story, “Bullfight,” in Sucarnochee Review, and poems in Applause Literary Magazine and Furrow Literary Magazine, among others. When she’s not writing, she enjoys hanging out with her dog and exploring the natural world. Instagram @adelaideluciagifford. 

"The Plan" by Roger D'Agostin

in

I saw it when I was seven, when Joe Mitchell pushed me in the pool and laughed and
slapped his wet swim trunks until his hands turned red.
Not at first. After I sank, after Joe poked me with the skimming net.
There’s no light. People say that happens. It's not true. I did leave my body, though. I
watched Mrs. Mitchell turn me on my stomach and smack my back while my head hung over the pool filter and stared into the tangle of hair and bugs and leaves.
I saw everything.

***

At the trial, the lawyer told my mom if I crap not to change my diaper. But I didn’t go.
Even when Mrs. Mitchell said she hadn’t been drinking, and she checked for a pulse and
performed CPR.
It doesn’t matter. I’m never going to be me again. The only body part I can really
control is my right hand. But not my arm so I can’t scratch my nose. Or lift a spoon to eat
cereal.

***

Dad used to tell Mom the Lord works in mysterious ways. Mom would shake her head.
But it's true. When Mrs. Mitchell pounded my back I felt like I could walk right into that
tangled mess and begin to make sense of it all. But I didn’t have time. I rejoined my body. It's
like going down a water slide except there's no water which I now think is so ironic.

***

Mondays are bath days at the care center. Lately I’ve been the last one. That's good,
because the nurse isn't careful and I fall and see all this hair in the drain.

When it happened again and my hand landed over the drain I grabbed it. I held it the whole week until Saturday morning when Mom visited. She uncrinkled my fist and tiny white puffs of mold had blossomed like clouds. She screamed when she saw that paradise. Then she ran into the hallway to find Dad, so he could see too.

 

Roger D'Agostin is a writer living in Connecticut.

"The Well" by Elan Maier

in

The moment they let me walk the farm alone
I screamed it in the well.
I had a dog then, a long brown haired dog, who
brought mud through the foyer and sunroom and den.
On summer mornings we’d walk with him, Barky.
I could kick pebbles with my hard and tough barefeet
as the sun rose over the tufts of grandmother elk and
maple, announcing the day on my forehead.
Barky’s nose in the rivulets, the smell of drying fruit
through that honeyed monthlessness, yearlessness, breath.
Unlamenting, without compare, away from the alley
through which I now side-step, wedged between back then
and maybe later.


We’d run to the well after tumblers of juice
drained to drops except for the pulp, specks
instabaked to the plastic pink silos, the eastborne
summer sun torilla’d through the carrot curtains.
Remember when Javi broke his beaver tooth on the
stone wall of the well? Could you believe it? The
first time any of us ever tripped in our lives
thwack
just like that, perfect. Blood through too many fingers
as he howled the whole way home. How they sat us
on the checkered sofa which used to fit all five
and said “no more— no more races— couldn’t we see—
trying to get yourselves killed?” But, ha, there we were
sprinting like always, Javi smiling through his swollen lip.


When I could rent a car, years later,
I drove out to the well.
My hope: smudges of farm dirt on the linen of a suit
I no longer wanted. Setting eyes on the spread of pink house
I’d hear the faraway bell of voices now gone or changed.
In the clean cabin of the car along that ghostly road
I steeled myself to see condos or commercial limbs
or an expanse of faceless industry where the well once stood.
There’d be no more house or back shed or rolling rugs of crop;
cabbage and grape, cherry and lime.
But I needn’t have tried, for I couldn’t find
the farm at all. I’d forgotten the names. I was like
the black birds swimming above, circling nothing,
knowing it lay around the corner but never finding it there,
as the minutes clicked and gas eeked towards empty.

 

Though Elan Maier hails from the mean streets of Silicon Valley, he currently lives in New York City. His writing has been published in the Appalachian Review, Darling Records, and BoomPowSplat. He earned his masters in creative writing from Oxford University and his first novel was a finalist for the Screencraft Cinematic Book competition.