“I disagree with Merriam-Webster.

Art cannot be defined. Art is limitless.

Alongside art, you will find love, friendship, and potential.

Do not let them tell you your worth.

Do not let them barricade you with mainstream perceptions.

Do not let them tell you no.

I disagree with Merriam-Webster.

Art cannot be defined.

Art is limitless.

I’ve never found repeating stanzas to be effective.

Then again, I don’t think editing makes modeling attractive.

Don’t let them limit your beauty.

Embrace your sense of YOU.

And, ultimately, own it.”

- SHANNON CASSADY

ACUFF, gale

SEN, adreyo

MAHONEY, donal

LIAKOUNAKOU, alexia

McFETRIDGE, G.D.

KANTOR, loren

CASSADY, shannon

TUMBL’ with us

http://thewritewing.tumblr.com

BLOG with us

http://wingedwriters.blogspot.com

FOLLOW US

https://twitter.com/thewritewing

LIKE US

https://www.facebook.com/thewritewing

The day has finally come! Thanks to you, we

have successfully been able to publish our first

issue. We have been blessed with a great

group of applicants for this opening display. I

would like to thank all of those who have sub-

mitted, those who are reading, and those who

have been apart of our support system. It’s

been a rough few weeks figuring out how to

compile all the works to display them in an at-

tractive, and modern fashion. I hope that you

find this first article a hit, and are excited for

our next issue! God Bless.

Gale has had poetry published in Ascent, Ohio

Journal, Descant, Adirondack Review, and many

other journals. Gale has authored three books of

poetry: Buffalo Nickel (2004), The Weight of the

World (2006), and The Story of My Lives (2008).

All three of Gale’s books have been published by

BrickHouse. Gale has taught university English in

the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.

Loren Kantor is a Los Angeles-based Woodcut Artist and

writer. He worked in the film industry for 20 years as a

screenwriter and assistant director. He is a huge fan of

Classic Cinema and iconoclastic American Writers. He's been

carving woodcut images for the past five years. Loren’s blog

can be found at woodcuttingfool.blogspot.com .

Alexia is a Greek-American; she lives in Greece, but was born in the United States.

Alexia studied in the United Kingdom. Alexia is a photographer, and her works can

be found at www.krop.com/alexialia. Alexia is a regular writer for Think Africa

Press, The Africa Report and Greek maga-

zines and newspapers on issues of culture,

art, and society. Alexia also finds a sport in

writing poetry. Officially, Alexia is a

social anthropologist (MA) and an art his-

torian. Unofficially, she is everything and

everywhere– both a good thing and a

'damn it' attribute)! If she could of-

fer one description of herself, she would

say that she is a restless, explosive mess

hiding and fighting inside a very calm,

seamless exterior.

Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, Donal Mahoney

has had work published in a variety

of print and electronic publications in

North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Some of his work can be found

at booksonblog12.blogspot.com .

G. D. McFetridge writes from his wilderness home in Montana's Sapphire Mountains.

His fiction and essays are published

across America, in Canada and the UK.

Adreyo Sen, based in Kolkata, hopes to become a full-time

writer. He did his undergraduate work in English and his

postgraduate work in English and Sociology. He has been

published in Danse Macabre and Kritya.

Miss Hooker says that God loves me, Jesus

too, which is good I guess but I'd rather

she love me and love me the way a wife

loves her husband, if she loves him that is,

instead of how teachers love their students

or how folks are supposed to love each other

anyway, the way Jesus said we should,

even our enemies. Miss Hooker's my

Sunday School teacher, a pretty good one

if I'm any judge, even though Jesus

said not to judge lest we be judged. I think

that's Jesus. At least it's God and almost

the same thing, maybe identical. I

thought Abraham Lincoln said it but she

put me straight on it, Miss Hooker that is.

So one day I'll need a wife and she'll be

perfect, red hair and green eyes and freckles,

not that her freckles are green. They're pinkish.

Every night she can put me to sleep

with a Bible story, and the moral.

Maybe she'll let me guess it like she does

us kids in class. My classmates don't say much

so I take up the slack to help her out,

Miss Hooker I mean. She told that good one

last week about David and Goliath.

She got angry at me when she asked us

What's the moral of the story, children

and I raised my hand and answered even

before she called on me but no one else

had their hand raised and I replied without

thinking, Don't take no shit off a bully.

I think I was right but used the wrong words

or word, shit I mean, you shouldn't say that

in Sunday School or church or probably

anywhere on church grounds or within sight

of church or even within twenty miles

of church but I had to go and say it,

Every night she can put me to sleep

with a Bible story, and the moral.

Maybe she'll let me guess it like she does

us kids in class. My classmates don't say much

so I take up the slack to help her out,

Miss Hooker I mean. She told that good one

last week about David and Goliath.

She got angry at me when she asked us

What's the moral of the story, children

and I raised my hand and answered even

before she called on me but no one else

had their hand raised and I replied without

thinking, Don't take no shit off a bully.

I think I was right but used the wrong words

or word, shit I mean, you shouldn't say that

in Sunday School or church or probably

anywhere on church grounds or within sight

of church or even within twenty miles

of church but I had to go and say it,

I'm a sinner and proud to admit it,

I mean that I'm proud to admit it but

not proud that I sin. Then the other kids

gasped, gasped like they do in my comic books

--Gasp!--and Jimmy Amacker giggled so

I guess he would've gone to Hell with me

if we'd died then and there. Don't die in sin

Miss Hooker warns--you'll go to Hell straightway.

So I had to stay after Sunday School

and pray with Miss Hooker about my mouth,

how she hopes that only good and pure words

gush from it. I'm not sure what gush means but

I think it happens when the pipes freeze and

soon there's water all over the damned place.

Miss Hooker said Amen and I did, too,

but after she did so I got the last

word but Gd will have the last one on me

just like He did the first. Genesis is

where you find that in the Bible, right at

the beginning of it all and I'll bet

everything else He ever wrote as well

and He could write without even using

words. But that's why He's God, I guess. Jesus

can do the same--I'm one with my Father,

He said, or something like that. I'm just 10.

Miss Hooker's 25. There's fifteen years

between us. If she'll marry me one day

I'll watch my foul mouth. I'll satisfy her.

Then she'll die, being so much older,

and go to Heaven, where I'll join her if

I keep my sinning down. I'll pray like Hell

for that every evening before bedtime.

I'll say good night to her up in Heaven.

I won't be able to hear her here but

I know what she'll say. Don't talk so damned much.

- Gale Acuff

Miss Hooker says that after a life ends

it's time for eternity, which isn't

really time at all. She's my Sunday School

teacher and she's 25 to my 10

so she'll die before I do, unless she

dies accidentally, but she says death

means being called back to God again. That's

in the Bible, I guess, or in a hymn

or prayer but I never sang it or

spoke it. The older you get the more you

know, maybe. I'm not sure. That means that folks

on their deathbeds know more than anyone

else but they're usually not in shape

to pass on what they know. Grandmother was

that way. I had to visit her before

she died. Maybe she was asleep but she

opened her eyes and looked at me--I guess

it was me--and said, Hello, then shut them

and that was all she wrote, not that she wrote

anything. If she told me all she knew

then maybe it was swaddled in Hello

and I should think about it more. Maybe

it's in secret code. Maybe it stands for

Goodbye, too. I was only 6 and scared

and she was 90 but seemed pretty cool.

Then I left her hospital room and sat

outside in the hall while Mother went in

and left me practicing tying my shoes

just to pop out again and lay on me

Your grandmother's gone to Heaven, and she

says that I asked, When is she coming back?

But you don't--come back, that is. You're gone for

good. Now I'm in the third grade. Grandmother's

been dead four years. That's long enough to know

whether she likes it or not and whether

she'd do it again. After Sunday School

and that was all she wrote, not that she wrote

anything. If she told me all she knew

then maybe it was swaddled in Hello

and I should think about it more. Maybe

it's in secret code. Maybe it stands for

Goodbye, too. I was only 6 and scared

and she was 90 but seemed pretty cool.

Then I left her hospital room and sat

outside in the hall while Mother went in

and left me practicing tying my shoes

just to pop out again and lay on me

Your grandmother's gone to Heaven, and she

says that I asked, When is she coming back?

But you don't--come back, that is. You're gone for

good. Now I'm in the third grade. Grandmother's

been dead four years. That's long enough to know

whether she likes it or not and whether

she'd do it again. After Sunday School

this morning I asked Miss Hooker if she's

afraid to die. At first she looked at me

as if I might try to snuff her. No, Gale,

she finally said--I'll go to Heaven.

I almost asked her how she was so sure

but maybe she wasn't anyway--some

folks say what they want to believe and if

they say it enough then they believe it

or hope they do. In class we must've said

the Lord's Prayer a million times. I'll bet

I could say it backwards. I can say it

in Pig Latin, too, but I don't, just that

once up in my bedroom. Then the light

went out. That's why I believe in God. Then

Miss Hooker said, like she always says, if

we believe in Jesus and never sin,

though we will because we're cursed that way--but

try hard not to sin and ask Jesus to

forgive us when we do then when we die

it won't really be death at all but life

eternal. She means up in Heaven. So

I had to go and ask her if there's life

eternal in Hell and she said, Umm, but

that she wouldn't call it life, exactly.

So I asked her what the difference is

between life in Heaven and life in Hell

and she answered, The difference is life

down here. On earth, she means. That shut me up

good and I don't even know what it means

unless it means I talk too much. Amen.

- Gale Acuff

“Are you feeling any better, dear?”

Helena wiped the sweat off Anna’s forehead; the fever seemed to be dropping. Anna crouched on the metal bed, her dark green floral sheets like

a warm garden hugging her tired body, and coughed; yet she seemed alert. Her cotton robe was untied to reveal a young, nicely formed stomach

and her skin shone in pink opulence. Helena looked at her young acolyte in a motherly gaze and stroked her shoulders.

Anna slowly tried to get up and her face grinned from a lingering headache. “I want to go tonight, I’ll join you and the girls”, she said. Helena mut-

tered something in disapproval, but didn’t object. They both got up from the bed and lead themselves to the kitchen. Tea was prepared, and they

sat on the large wooden table to drink it. It was only midday and the sun was shining outside. The sounds from Wardour Street, horseshoes and

carriage wheels, as well as far-off voices from Charing Cross Road were coming to a halt as the midday sun rested its rays on the lane.

While dusk approached, all the girls started getting ready. Seven in total, their rooms were all echoing giggles and girlish preparations. Makeup,

stockings, nice clothes, high heels, shared mirrors, glances at each other’s fashion choices and comments went back and forth in a happy frenzy.

The girls were far from teenagers, both in age and in spirit; marks of time - their wear and tear - were visible in discrete scars near their buttocks,

in bruises near their shoulders, knees and elbows, and in bites from the gentlemen’s bursting agonies which found retreat in Helena’s Home. Yet

their girlish temperament was the ointment with which pains, time and life itself rubbed away from their skin. Anna was helped by Helena to get

dressed; she sat down on her bed while Helena applied red lipstick and brown eye shadow, and got up looking beautiful in her fatigue.

“Do you think Robert will be there tonight?” she asked Helena in an eager voice.

“I think he will be”.

The bar was an underground old tavern near Charing Cross station. The lighting was low and the whole place boasted burgundy and reddish

tones. Small lanterns helped pave the way towards the tables, and a stage with a velvet curtain stood empty at the far end, reserved for private

parties and shows. Feather-adorned waitresses glided through the tables serving beer and whisky. The atmosphere was choked in corroded

sounds of swing music and tobacco smoke.

Anna and Helena sat at Mr. Walker’s table, where five or six older gentlemen sat smoking cigars and drinking whisky. They talked of sports and

politics and fussed over the upcoming British Empire Games at the White City Stadium. Mr. Walker was an old acquaintance of Helena and a very

good client at the house. The other girls, Sophie, Mary, Ruth, Denise and Harriet had spread out and sat at other men’s tables, all drinking and

laughing in their extravagant makeup and provocative dresses.

Anna was conscious and did not feel at ease. Her forehead was getting feverish and her body was bypassed by shivering strokes of cold. She

wondered what time it was as her eyes ventured around her table in search of details in the old men’s grayed hair and wrinkled faces. She gazed

at Denise across the room, her loud laughs, her big mouth, and focused on the way she held the cigarette, with elegant and relaxed fingers. Denise

was a little older than Anna, she was ripe, curvy and shined in her mischievous confidence. She bet that her own face would look the exact oppo-

site of Denise’s – anxious, jaundiced, bored. She ordered a martini and played with the cold glass in her fingers. Some minutes later she noticed

John walk in, a friend of Robert, and suddenly felt warmer in her anticipation.

But the night passed and Robert didn’t show up. John had joined another table and was entertained in conversation with some young men Anna

didn’t know. Helena noticed Anna’s frustration, pardoned herself and her young friend from the table with the excuse that Anna wasn’t feeling

well and greeted them goodnight before exchanging some words in laughter with Mr. Walker. The old man pinched her bottom as she walked

away from him, and Helena laughed, acting embarrassed. Truth is she was getting quite old for pinches.

While the two women, like mother and daughter, held each other to walk up the stairs to the street, Anna glanced across and saw Robert, tall,

sharp and mysterious, standing his three usual friends at the opposite corner. Robert motioned that they go across to him, so the women unhurried-

ly crossed the street. Anna had to make herself slow down her walk to conceal her eagerness and keep up with the old woman. Robert proposed

that they visit another place he had in mind, adding that his company was in need of a good drink, even though they all already seemed to have

consumed a considerable amount of alcohol. Helena felt tired, but decided to accompany the young group to this other bar, mostly because she

didn’t feel comfortable in leaving Anna alone with four men. London’s gentlemen tended to overlook their etiquette when it came to women like

Anna and herself. Robert didn’t seem to have asked; he had almost demanded it. She walked slowly as she leaned on Anna’s elbow and looked

down in order to hide a grin on her face caused by pains on her left foot. Freezing cold air blew as they walked down the road and its power car-

ried with it a piercing humidity coming from the Thames. They stopped at a heavy wooden door, with no number nor doorbell, at belowground

level.

Before placing a firm grip on the doorknob, Robert took out a small emerald bottle from his jacket’s inner pocket and forcibly opened Anna’s

trembling mouth to let two drops fall on her tongue. Anna smiled nervously and lost focus in her eyes as she glimpsed at Helena before walking

through the doorway.

They entered a dark place. A long and narrow gray corridor lay ahead with pale lighting and smudges of dirt on the walls. They stepped on

what felt like fishnets and knocked over some bags and suitcases, and perhaps even walked on shadows of people sitting on the floor -half-

dreaming- under a blanket of heavy opium smoke. Sounds of a groaning machine, a rusty ventilator perhaps, echoed in Anna’s ears. As they

walked, they passed through small passages, old doors, muted sounds, cracking noises and various sealed windows with dirty curtains that bare-

ly revealed some slim, hazy silhouettes behind them. Finally, they reached the end of the serpentine corridor and took of their coats. A large

bench and a small table was all that could be discerned in the foggy, barely lit room.

The four men laid Anna down on a straw-filled mat placed atop the large bench, and all sense of slow movement, cautiousness and fogginess

which encircled their trip down to this far end was suddenly replaced by what became a fast and ferocious race; Anna felt the rough fabric

and the straws rub against her neck as the men pushed down on her body, but she could not manage to keep her eyes fixed at one place. The

men all climbed on top of her; their weight crushed her. Helena, as if suddenly awoken by a nightmare, rushed to stand by Anna’s head and

placed it firmly in her hands while the men ripped clothes and untied intricately laced undergarments, Robert being the most zealous destroyer

of the beautiful attire lying beneath him. The dress fell, torn to pieces, on the dark floor and Anna’s breasts, pink and round, appeared in front of

Robert’s face; he paused to look at them only for a split second, then devoured them with bites of vanity, her tiny moles filling his mouth and

mixing with his saliva. The other men tore her stockings, revealed her white thighs and exclaimed animal groans before one of them rushed to

take her. Anna moaned in pain but her voice could not exceed that of the loud ventilator still filling the corridor. Robert turned around and

pushed away the first man who fell with a large thump on the floor, then took his place while the others stood up to stare, their eyes dazed

and dirty from alcohol and ecstatic in their violent lust. While Anna rocked back and forth under Robert’s weight, Helena caressed her feverish

head, removing hairs that stuck on her face from the sweat. She looked deep into her eyes in an effort to soften her pain, as a midwife would

look into the bewildered eyes of a woman in labor, and exhaled small blows on the feverish forehead to cool down the pain’s heat. Robert

groaned with pleasure and slapped Anna’s cheeks, breasts and arms, then held her neck and squeezed it tight by pushing harder into her body;

he released himself on her white, well-formed stomach and while doing so squeezed it so tight than it reddened under his fists. Anna vomited

on Helena’s lap and her blued lips found comfort in sealing themselves around the seams of the old woman’s skirt. Robert stood up with a vile

grin on his full, red mouth and covered Anna up with the tattered dress, and waved to the others to follow him. They disappeared in the dark

smolder of the corridor, and the two women were left alone like two emblazoned sculptures frozen in darkness.

- Alexia Liakounakou

- Loren Kantor

- Loren Kantor

Zenobia Jackson told Officer Murphy that her husband, Rufus, was 73 years old and "a wonderful man when he was awake" but for the past

year he had been jerking "something terrible" during his sleep and had kept waking her up. He'd swing his arms, she said, like those martial arts

men he liked to watch so much on television. When the bouts were over, he'd give her a big kiss on the forehead and go to bed.

"Oh, he was just a doll," she said, "when he was awake."

In the last month, however, Rufus had fallen out of bed three times "fighting" in his dreams. In the morning he'd tell her he'd been dreaming that he

was in a fight at work or back in high school many years ago. Sometimes he dreamt he was shooting at burglars breaking into their house in the

old neighborhood. That's why they had to move to a different neighborhood and why he bought a gun, a little pistol he kept under his pillow just in

case he heard someone in the house. You can't be too careful these days, he told her. He even taught her how to shoot the gun one night when no

one else was on the tennis courts in Sherman Park. He said she was real good. Not many women, he said, can aim straight.

But last night, she said, he was dreaming again and swung his arms at least ten times, like he was chopping sugar cane back in Louisiana before

they moved North. He caught her with an elbow to the eye and then another to the nose just as she was ducking. That's why she looks the way she

does, she told Officer Murphy.

Long ago, she had stopped trying to wake him when he was thrashing about. It was because of the pistol under his pillow. He had reached for it

one time right after she had shaken him. She had screamed and that woke him up and he wasn't too happy about it. He said he couldn't get back to

sleep the rest of the night. And he wasn't lying because she was awake all night, too, listening to him grumble and curse.

Just a week ago, she had taken him to a sleep clinic where he had stayed overnight. The doctor said he suffered from sleep apnea but she had nev-

er heard of anyone with sleep apnea thrashing and kicking about like her Rufus. She had a lady friend in the choir at church whose husband had

sleep apnea but all he did was "snore too loud," her friend said, no thrashing about.

"So that's how it happened," Zenobia told Officer Murphy, who was busy taking notes. Rufus had reached under the pillow for the pistol and she

had to stop him.

"Two in the head," she said, "and he be dead."

- Donal Mahoney

Violence can be done to violent men

with white shirts and excessive pride

in their English

with the wrong kind of ‘you’.

The wrong kind of ‘you’

negates their careful years acquiring English

like a jackdaw and dispensing the Hindi

they still speak with the fluency of outrage.

No longer are they self-made hard men

with carefully repressed wives who wear chiffon saris

and habitually check the distance of the

pavement from their opulent jail cells,

but squirming lads with no keener sense

than that of injury,

torturing the street cats

and glaring at women with swishing skirts

under the awning of their father’s

fish-fry shop.

- Adreyo Sen

Last night, unable to sleep, and yet half-dreaming

still, of the creature I gave life to

in my head a bare fortnight ago, a creature

that surprised me by moulding herself so readily

to the apparel of my brightest hopes,

I noticed that the shadows on the wall

looked like two ancient figures. A man and a

woman.

They were fighting.

I contrasted idly, the man’s stunned heaviness,

his nevertheless rapid, menacing, flickering

to and fro, and the woman’s still alertness,

her seeming to expect a blow that would justify

the absoluteness of her despair.

The blow never came. The shadows continued

their dance. And then the woman froze into

herself, a torpid shell. She became a

blackness. The man continued to bluster before

becoming a sullen extension of my room’s

resistance to the moonlight.

I blamed myself. If I’d digested my dinner better

and had been in a less cynical mood,

the man and the woman might have

made up and re-fallen in love.

But for the woman though,

that would soon prove to be a bad ending.

- Adreyo Sen

Literature with all its ambiguity—and the same could be said of life—begins to possess intrinsic value when an emergent order appears in

the midst of what seems a vast yet vanishing chaos. This retreating chaos, deciphered and appreciated, thus stands in relation to itself as the

order within us confirms and extends a foothold beyond the fundamental paradox.

For consciousness is evidently realistic to a degree; it clings to fate, registers, so to speak, the higher and lower temperature of our for-

tunes, and so far as it can, represents the agencies on which these fortunes depend. When this dramatic vocation of consciousness remains un-

fulfilled, consciousness is wholly confused and the world it envisages seems consequently a chaos. Later, if our literary experience has con-

gealed into shape, and there are settled categories and constant objects in human discourse, the assumption is made that the original disposition

of things was also orderly and indeed conducive to those feats of enjoyment and intelligence to be partaken. With this broad perspective in

mind, we say with great enthusiasm that we have worked with unwavering determination to make this dream worthy of undivided attention.

Father always called our mother My Little Green Bean, for she was long and slender. But the first step he took not long after marriage

was to plummet into the penitentiary, and it might appear as a surreal soap opera were I confess the entire confusing truth.

For about nine months in the mid 1990s, when I was twenty-seven and a graduate student, I shared a house with a boisterous waitress

named Lilly. And I was quite fond of Lilly, she was very pretty and I wished no ill on her. She already owned an iron, of course, but not one

with a cell phone built into the handle.

“What will they think of next,” I groaned. The Cubs were behind eight to five, in the bottom of the ninth, but they had loaded the bases

with one out, and Sammy Sosa was at the plate taking warm-up swings.

The long strip of the Florida Panhandle is nothing more than an extension to south Alabama, Delta Mississippi, and the bayou network of

muddy Louisiana, nothing more than another end of the earth bounded by highway and water. When Dean Alger asked me to drive to Califor-

nia with him, I was sitting in the house in South Carolina with both the iron-phone and my feet resting atop my uncle Louie’s massive steamer

trunk. A maple branch extended horizontally from the top of the refrigerator, weighted by a three-litter jug of cheap red wine, and from it

dangled an old wind chime. I’d like to sketch this scene. In my head I already arranged the work; so I nudged the silver-leafed olive tree closer

to the place where a tangle of wild flowers had forced their way through a crack in the old redbrick wall. It wasn’t raining, not yet, but dark clouds were low and steely, and I could taste that thick metallic taste a stormy day in the Carolinas always leaves on my tongue. I said to

- Adreyo Sen

Dean: “It has something to do with the modernist notion that anything is possible.”

To which he replied, “Do you think it has anything to do with your training on the classical guitar?”

“I was never that good on guitar,” I said.

“What traditions are behind your writing?” he continued.

“In college, as a junior, I walked into an elective literature class consisting of all the lame, halt and disaffected crazies on campus. But more

than that it was the postmodernist position that everything is exhausted—profoundly exhausted.”

Dean was a slightly famous painter, eight years older than I was, and I found myself staring out the window. It wasn’t raining, but the

light had turned an odd, wet lemony color— it could have been an oil painting by Paul Steen.

Paul Steen’s paintings were reflections of Van Gogh and Monet. I still imagine dear Vincent in 1889, the year the fountain poured forth

its greatest abundance. His face is open and eager as he comes toward you, wanting to know who you are. And a sense of solitude, often, and

of physical energy and exuberance. All this before he fell into the blind abyss. Taking me with him.

“Do you have a schedule you try to stay with when you’re working?” Dean had asked, interrupting my ruminations with a significant

look.

“No! I am against schedules of any kind. It’s the modernist thing. Or really it’s more the post-postmodernist idea, the philosophy. You

see, since everything is exhausted, everything is permitted. Think in terms of no restraint. Schedules are suffocating and they deny me … per-

mission.”

Sixteen months after my sister put a bullet through her brain, I found myself standing atop the highest cliff on the south coast of Spain,

wondering at great length what it would be like to jump. Crows and ravens speckled red-clay roofs and strips of ploughed earth. Who knows,

I thought, if she’d focused her stare deeper into but one sunny spot, might she not arrived at a final littoral where bits of atoms explode into

quantum froth?

My sister sleeps now, but when she wakes for good her eyes will already be open, and she’ll find herself looking at the very thing she

looked at before her eyes closed, the door, the wall, the cold bluing of the .38. Blacker than a raven’s eye.

My sister was pretty from the time she was seven to the time she was twelve. Before then she was too skinny and after that she was

too plump. And she could do many things well, but they were strange things, like walking on stilts and doing yo-yo tricks. For several years

she thought she might have unusual ESP. She could hear beneath everything anyone said, although most thought she couldn’t because her

eyes stayed closed. Silver faucets and white clock faces, moon dials, Mexican guitars, molecular farts—it was a sickness to hear her talk

sometimes.

And she liked to sit on the roof and stare at the moon. She saw images of animals and faces in the silvery craters, colors of the spec-

trum in starlight. She wore taffeta, shiny stockings, mystery skin, and later we went to her apartment, the baby sleeping peacefully, the bed-

side light on all night.

Dean and I had met while walking someone else’s dog; the three of us truant from the same party, one of those north Florida beach-

house parties. Dean was more interested in Buddy, the black and white dog, than he was in me, so I was glad not to talk. I find parties diffi-

cult unless I’m drunk. The shadows had an inky feel and a ghost-green phosphorescent glowed in the small breakers, the tiny creatures riding

the surge. Later on someone said the word resurrection, but I didn’t feel anything godly in the room—I had the impression we were all waiting

on something, listening for particular resurrections, which is to say, maybe we believed. Or maybe we were desperate to believe.

My sister’s resurrection was all around us, filling the spaces between us, more solid than what was solid looking. If you had ever been

reborn, you might agree. Might remember a time when being “me” in the world seemed very queer; in short, get over it before deciding to let

yourself mutate into one of those graying creatures known as middle-aged adults. Perhaps try hanging yourself first.

No seventeen-year-old can be expected to realize that “what” depends on “why,” and yet juxtaposition alters content, and vice versa.

Our context fitting the natural world, awareness of its details changes our reality, moving us nearer to what and why we really are. Every

step toward revealing “why am I?” implies, thereby, improved self-knowledge.

And Dean said, “What did you do differently when you started over?”

“The catalogue is the iteration of characters through metonymy. One sort of reasoning would be this: Instead of saying that you are

going to the kitchen just now to make coffee and that that is going to reveal you, we could say, metonymically, that it is the very strong Peru-

vian coffee that reveals your character. That’s what I did—I took that leap.”

“I am surprised that no painter of today has yet devoted a work to the automobile, to the modern highway, to roadside inns, to gallant

sojourns, encounters along the road in Spain. Why not?” he said profoundly.

“When you come at last onto the cleared road, you see a gas pump. How splendid! But it is also the sole and unique gas pump in the

world surmounted by a cross. And my good sister is there, like a hermit, smiling at you but saying nothing …”

This took me back to another time: Did you dream of magic when you were a boy? When I was very young, I dreamt the gravel roof

of our house was a landing field for my imaginary ancestor, the Baal Shem of London. I’d listen for the sounds of hoofs and carriage wheels on

the roof. When I was a child, I learned to make time fly! To soar! And the poor spider has such a bad name. She represents an odious, crawl-

ing, fanged and noxious creature, which everyone hastens to crush underfoot or saturate with bug spray. And against this harsh verdict we set

the beast’s industry, its deftness as a spinner of webs, its wiliness in the hunt, and its awful nuptials.

I never liked my own face. The deferential smile hiding in a corner of the mouth, the strong round eyes. Facing myself in the mirror or

catching my reflection in a store’s window, I would often wince and scrunch my brow, but it didn’t help much; for I always saw through my own

foolish disguise.

I awoke with a start—my sister tapping on my shoulder. All done? I rubbed my eyes. You finished already? Yes. All done, my sister

repeated, aiming out the window with her right hand. My eyelids shut, I leaned forward until my forehead almost touched the glass.

“That’s the summary and misfortune of my life, Dean,” I said.

He looked at me without speaking. I opened my eyes and the light was too harsh.

Lilly, who had just woken, was making her way to the front porch with my pale and hollow-eyed sister. Holding her hand. But was the

pathway preordained, was it an existential trap?

“Tragedy,” she muttered. “Life is brutal tragedy.”

I laid my wet cheek against the cold fingerboard of the guitar.

“Yes, it’s true, true what they say. A thousand times, it is true. But who among us really knows the meaning of those words?”

- G.D. McFetridge

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