< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Just So You Know Carol Coven Grannick Eight years ago I parked here, right here, this spot by the elevator on ‘Bing Crosby’ as if it grounded me for the day to come. This is the song, Georgia , that played then each morning at 5:30 when I got out of the car already sickened, nauseated from the moment I saw familiar sights on the drive there in anticipation of what they might have done to you overnight— and always did. This is the elevator that led to the bridge, the bridge that led to the desk where I validated the parking ticket. This is the ticket that cost too much. This is the floor, the second floor, with gift shop and restaurants, Vietnamese, Vegan, Greek, Au Bon Pain where I bought Cape Cod kettle chips each night to stay awake while driving home, crunching them, banging teeth against one another while slow-steering through Western Avenue snow tracks of others. This too is the floor where I walked up, down and around, ascending and descending the pair of escalators each time around so legs would carry and heart would pound for myself and you, in bed in delirium on a floor I don’t remember unless it was 8—yes, it was 8— with a tube in your throat to breathe with doctors like vultures saying long-term care long-term care as if hungry for some foul and spoiled food. I walked up and down escalators in moments I hoped they wouldn’t notice, but they did, and when I left the room to walk or pee they came in to do to you what they couldn’t when I was there. More propofol. More fentanyl. Keep him quiet. Keep him quiet . And this: this is the coffee I bought. This is the table where I sat for a few minutes on the many days that passed— This is not how I sat though, not how alone I was: this is me being with you now, alive you, a little impatient with my memories because you don’t have them you don’t know what it was like or know why even years later I watch for the lanky surgeon in his fancy suit and dream of hitting him, hurting him, hurting, hurting, hurting him until he cries out, What did I do to her ? "Just So You Know" was published in Matter Anthology (Oprelle Publishing, 2023). It was drafted in the rush of my visceral response as I sat waiting for my husband at the site of his previous devastating hospitalization, during which he barely survived neglect and mismanagement after the post-surgical trauma. The draft, and each subsequent reading or revision, clarified a personal breakthrough: the beneficial, though painful, awareness of post-traumatic stress that medical neglect and mismanagement had caused, and which persisted eight (and now twelve) years beyond. My husband was going to be left to die. It was up to me—with the constant and priceless support of my sister—to get him out alive. The breakthrough of awareness of this long-lasting PTSD energized my determination to continue telling the story, and educating others about the importance of patient advocacy when a loved one is hospitalized. Previous CAROL COVEN GRANNICK is an award-winning poet and children's author of Reeni's Turn (Fitzroy Books, 2020). Read more at carolcovengrannick.com . Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Reconsidering god Dennise Gackstetter I cannot believe in the god that lurks in the tall tales on the dark crowded pages shuttered between heavy covers of tarnished gilded books. The god I could believe in would dance in the wide margins, skipping from white space to white space until the page’s edge, and then with arms wide take an elegant leap into the unknown. I cannot even use the word “god.” It is too small a word to contain all the possibilities of divinity. It is a stony sounding word, bounded at both ends by two hard consonants that strain to compress the small “o” that is an exhale of delight, the “ahhhh” of wonder, the first sound of joy. "Reconsidering god" was first published in Blue Mesa Review . For years, I sought to understand the possibilities of divinity in this world. After exploring many kinds of religious theories and spiritual beliefs, I left the idea of “god” behind. The path led me back to the muck and mud of our own humanity as the place where holiness arises. I understand now that our ability to open and transform ourselves is the truest expression of divinity. This poem was a breakthrough because it was the first poem that I ever had accepted for publication. This gave me a boost of encouragement that has kept me growing as a writer. Previous DENNISE GACKSTETTER is an artist, educator, and writer. Recently retired from Utah State University, Dennise was a Principal Lecturer in Art Education and the Art Education Coordinator. She was a part of the Writing Team for the new Utah Core Fine Art Standards. She lives happily in Logan, Utah. dennisegclayworks.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue At the End of October Dennise Gackstetter All day I worked to ready the garden for winter, kneeling on the earth to trim spent seed heads and crispy curled leaves, bowing low to cut brittle stems and browned stalks close to the ground. From far overhead I hear sandhill cranes call to each other in flight, their harmonic clicks and whirrs and bugles traveling through the clear expanse of sky. I leaned back and turned my eyes upward, but I did not see them. I stood and searched across the brilliant blue and still, I did not see them. Standing amidst untidy piles of plant debris saturated in sunlight, I continued to listen long after their voices faded away. This poem expresses the deep reverence I have for the world in all the ways it reveals itself, and in all the ways I can meet it. It stands as a breakthrough for me because I successfully engaged the power of narrative in a prose poem. My poet friend, Star Coulbrooke, called this a strong example of “incantatory prose.” Through sound, rhythm, and repetition, I conjure deep sensuous qualities that invite the reader to share in the visceral magic of the moment. Previous DENNISE GACKSTETTER is an artist, educator, and writer. Recently retired from Utah State University, Dennise was a Principal Lecturer in Art Education and the Art Education Coordinator. She was a part of the Writing Team for the new Utah Core Fine Art Standards. She lives happily in Logan, Utah. dennisegclayworks.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Awkward David Romanda “God, this is awkward, eh? Pulling off our clothes and trying to look good while doing it.” She stops. Looks up at me with a question mark. I smile, attempting to play it off as a joke. She accepts this (at least I think she does). Gives her head a little shake. “You’re funny,” she says. And it seems like a compliment (I decide to accept the compliment). The breakthrough in “Awkward” is a simple life lesson: when you’re feeling awkward or off or whatever, it’s probably better not to say anything. Just play it chill. Previous DAVID ROMANDA 'S work has appeared in places such as Columbia Review , Poetry Ireland Review , and PRISM international . He is the author of three books, including Your Lover Stabbed in the Streets (Frontenac House, 2025). Romanda lives in Kawasaki City, Japan. romandapoetry.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue River Dog and the Shadow Man, a story Michael Henson I. It started out as just another long, gray shadowy muddle of an October day, not the best, but not so bad, as good a day as any to fly a sign. It was the foggy crack of dawn, or what passed for dawn in that cold, gray, clouded-up soup of a Cincinnati morning, and a young man stood with a cardboard sign that read Homeless Please Help at the Interstate-75 southbound Mitchell Avenue off-ramp where he could catch the inbound suburbanites. The fog was thick as cake. It had rolled up from the channeled waters of the Mill Creek and scrolled over the leveed creekbanks and over the fences and across the vacant fields and parking lots and through the strip malls and the railroad yards and over the roaring highway. The shrouded lights of the cars on the highway moved like luminescent fish at the bottom of the sea. It was still early. Just a few cars peeled off the highway and down the ramp to where the young man shivered with his sign. And those few were as blind in the fog as he was. If the drivers had the green light, they gave him no more than a glance. And if they stopped for the light, they stared past him as if he were no more than a shadow. He lucked out, finally, when a hard hat in a pickup truck laid a five-dollar bill on him. “Get yourself some help,” the hard hat said. The young man wanted to say, I don’t need your fucking help . Instead, he said, “Yes sir, I will,” and “God bless,” and made ready for the next car coming off the ramp. The hard hat looked like he wanted to say more, but the light had changed to green and the next car had come crowding up behind. Five dollars, not a bad start. Enough to get, for breakfast, a power drink and maybe a candy bar. But not enough, really, not nearly enough. * Over the next hour, the wind picked up and the fog lifted. He was in the day’s first dope-sick hours, and nothing mattered but to get enough money to get himself well, and no one would stop but one old lady who waved him a dollar bill as she slowed through the light. Just a dollar bill, next to nothing, really. But still he shouted, “God bless,” as she rolled past him. The fog lifted with the hour; the young man began to sweat and ache and he was dope-sick and miserable and cold and so he did not notice that the wind which blew the fog away had also blown the gray clouds black. So when the rain came, it jumped him like a junkyard dog—a sudden clap of thunder and a brutal slap of rain and a goatish wind that nearly butted him off the curb. He pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, folded up his cardboard sign, grabbed his backpack from its hiding place behind a tree, and splashed through the swamped sidewalks and gutters to the shelter of the underbridge. The rain had sluiced the steep downhill path and he skidded down the clay bank, past the honeysuckles that crowded against the path, and slid almost to the edge and a ten-foot drop to Mill Creek below. He reached for the honeysuckles and missed, and his backpack slid off his shoulder to the crook of his elbow and threatened to drag him over the edge and down into the water. But he grabbed the flange of an I-beam, held fast, and swung himself and his backpack onto the dry concrete floor of the bridge abutment. As soon as he straightened himself to stand, he saw a movement on the other side of the abutment. Cat-quick, slim as a shadow, a man, a smallish, thin man, a bone-skinny stranger in loose black clothes, rose from a crouch and looked the young man’s way. His eyes were dark and his face pale as bone and he showed his teeth in what was either a grin or a grimace. Then, he slipped out from under the bridge and flitted like a bird up the guttered embankment. The young man wondered, Who the fuck is that? He half-expected to see the man come rafting back down the hill in the rush of rainwater. But he was gone up top without a single glance back, gone like a thief in the night. The man might well have been a thief, though there was nothing much here to steal. The young man had laid out some flats of cardboard to lie on and an old blanket to shudder under in the cold. He had stuffed everything else he owned into the one large backpack, which now hung half off his shoulder an inch or two above the ground. The young man sat down with his pack and cursed his life and cursed his luck and he cursed the man in black who had found his way to his campsite under the bridge. There were camps all around here—under the overpasses, up and down Mill Creek, and in the narrow woods between the north-bound off ramp and the cemetery. So why , he thought, does this stranger have to barge in here? He’s got plenty of other places he can go. The rain continued to pound the pavement above and to set the I-beams humming. Cars crossed the bridge with an overhead whisper and trucks with a rumble. And every few seconds, the young man could hear from across the creek, on the other side of the underbridge, an irregular metallic stomp and crush . It took a moment to sort out what he was hearing—Stompandcrush. Stompandcrush. Stompandcrush —but then he saw the old man, his advisor in all things, River Dog, the king of cans, pale face and pale hands visible in the shadows, crushing cans to sell for scrap. “Yo, River,” he called. If anyone knew what was up with the shadow man, it would be River Dog. River Dog looked up. The young man pointed to where the shadow man had been sitting. “Who was that?” he called. River Dog raised his hand and cupped his ear, so the young man called again, “Who the fuck was that?” He pointed again toward the spot where he had seen the man. “Get your ass over here so I can hear you,” River Dog called. The rain had not stopped and the wind had not relented. The young man hesitated a moment. But he wanted to know, so he ducked his head and lunged for the honeysuckles. He caught them this time and began to pull himself up. Each drop of rain was like a driven nail and his feet slipped at nearly every step, but branch by branch, he pulled himself, step by slippery step, up the slick clay bank. Up on Mitchell Avenue, the young man looked around to see if he could spot the man from the shadows. But there was no one on the sidewalk, no one out on the bridge, no one out on the traffic island at Mitchell and Spring Grove. No sign of Sugarfoot, nor any sign of Wonderbread, nor Casper the Ghost, Jody the Judge, Uncle Big Boot, Patch, Silverback, Boxcar Billy, Too Short, Jim Cherokee, nor the guy from Ethiopia who called himself Obama. And no sign of the Shadow Man. By the time the young man turned to see if there was anyone working the off-ramps from the Interstate, the rain had slapped him half-blind. So he crossed over to River Dog’s side of the bridge. Below, in the shadows of the underbridge, he found River Dog among his cans, in mounds and clusters to the right and the left and before him, as if he were the emperor of aluminum. An aluminum lawn chair, an aluminum fold-up table, and an aluminum chaise lounge sat among the heaps of cans and plastic bags. A blanket lay neatly folded on a pallet of cardboard flats. The lower end of an I-beam formed a pantry lined with cans of beef stew and pumpkin pie filling. “It’s a hell of a time to be selling metal,” the young man said. "It’s pouring down rain out there.” River Dog looked up. “Due to unforeseen circumstances beyond my immediate control,” he said, “my dividends failed to partriculate for the month. So, I have to sell off some of my assets.” He paused in mid-stomp. “What’s up? You got that what-the-fuck? look in your eye.” “Who was that guy?” “What guy? “The guy that was in my camp.” “I wasn’t informed you had a camp.” “You know, my spot, on the other side of the bridge.” “Your spot?” “My spot, on my side of the bridge.” “Your side of what bridge?” “This bridge we’re standing under right now.” “So, you own a piece of this bridge?” “No, I don’t own it.” “Then it ain’t yours.” “You know what I mean.” “Right, I know exactly what you mean. But it’s not what you think you mean. You mean you think you own the title to that little cave you set yourself up in.” “I was there first. I claimed it.” “Yeah, well some Indian claimed it before you. And where is he now? And then, here come Daniel Boone or some other pioneer motherfucker and he claimed it and now he’s gone too. Then some farmer claimed it. And where the fuck is he? And then some factory guy. And he’s gone too. There’s been hobo camps up and down this creek for over a hundred years. And where are they now? They’re all gone. And now the city comes along and puts a bridge over it and you think you can claim it like you’re Columbus and it’s yours. Ain’t nothing yours but what’s under your hat, if you was to have a hat.” “But you’ve got a camp.” “I got nothing.” “What do you call this?” “I call it nothing.” “But I bet you want to keep this bit of nothing.” “If that Creek comes up like it did last spring, it won’t matter what I want or don’t want.” “Then why do you have it?” “I got it because I got it. I didn’t get it because I wanted it and I won’t fret about it if I lose it.” The young man looked again at the piles of crushed aluminum cans and River Dog’s assortment of castoff furniture and supplies. “This sure looks like a camp to me.” “It’s not a camp,” River Dog said. “It’s a collection. I collected it once, I can collect it again. If the Creek wants it, the Creek can discollect it and carry it away.” “Would the Creek ever come this high?” “Look for yourself.” He pointed to the nests of stream litter on the shelves of the I beams, then to the mudline on the wall that showed the high-water mark. “That’s how high it got last spring,” he said. “Not as high as ’37, but high enough to cover us up where we’re standing now. It don’t usually come up this high in the fall, so I’m not too worried. But it could. These days, you don’t know what it might do.” “But anyway, that guy . . .” “What guy?” “The guy who I just saw on the other side of this bridge . . .” “What about him?” “That’s what I wanted to ask you.” “So, go ahead and ask.” “What was he doing under this bridge?” “What were you doing there?” “I was getting out of the rain.” “Don’t you reckon he was doing the same?” “But he could see I was there first. So, what’s he doing there?” “Are you really as stupid as you look?” “Ah, fuck you, River.” “Now don’t get all argumentatious again.” “I come over here looking for a little information and all you do is fuck with me.” “I’m just trying to tell you the truth. I tell it like I see it and if people don’t like it, they can kiss my ass.” The young man had started to shiver again. He crossed his arms and held himself close and shuddered. He tried to hold it in and not let it show, but the effort made him moan a little thin moan. “You’re geeking,” River Dog said. “Ain’t you?” The young man nodded. “I been telling you, man, you got to give that shit up.” “You’re an alcoholic. That’s just as bad.” “Yeah, but my just-as-bad doesn’t cost me six days hustling for a two-minute buzz.” “So?” “So, I can sell this little bit of cans and have enough money to keep me at a perfectly intoxicatious state for four straight days. And I don’t have to wait on some dope boy to feel like he’s in the mood to sell me some dog food.” The young man shuddered and sniffled. He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his coat. “Fuck this,” he said again. “See, you’re miserable.” “I’m not miserable.” “And my name’s Donald Trump.” “Everybody’s got their misery.” “Yeah, but my misery only costs a buck fifty-seven for a twenty-four ounce can of the finest malt liquor made, a medication which, applied once every few hours, is entirely efficacious to my needs. But you got nothing.” “I got six dollars. Ten dollars is a hit.” “You still get your shit from Mexican Dick?” “Why you asking?” “Do you know how he got his name?” “No, do you?” “No, I don’t. But I’ll tell you this. I don’t think he’s a Mexican, but I do know he’s a dick.” “He’s dicked me a few times.” “And he’ll dick you again if you let him.” “So what am I supposed to do?” “I don’t know, but just because you’re a piece of shit doesn’t mean you should let people treat you like a piece of shit.” The young man looked out at the rain sluicing down the levee. “If this rain doesn’t quit,” he said, “I’m fucked.” “Rain or no rain, you got to roll back out there and do some serious panhandling to get you what you gonna need, though you could help an old man out with these cans first.” River Dog got up and lined up a row of cans and began to crush them one after the other with a sharp stroke of his heel. The young man picked up each can and tossed it into a big, black plastic bag. The rain continued to pound the asphalt and to keep the I-beams humming and the cars and trucks kept the bridge floor whispering and rumbling. Below them, in the concrete shallows of Mill Creek, still visible in spite of the rain, a line of carp, each of them two or more feet long, ranged across the floor of the creek, each one beside and slightly behind the other, like ascending notes in a bar of music, holding their places in the current with small movements of their fins. The young man stopped a moment to shiver and to wipe his nose on his sleeve again. “So, River,” he asked, “Who was that guy under the bridge?” “I don’t know who the fuck it was and I really don’t care. I didn’t even see the motherfucker. As far as I can tell, there’s been nobody under this bridge but your geeking ass.” “He was right over there, just this side of my camp, which you say isn’t really my camp.” “You sure you’re not seeing things?” “River, I know what I saw.” “Well, since he owns just as much of this bridge as you do, he can’t take anything from you that you don’t already don’t have. So, what are you worried about?” “Why is this guy sneaking around my camp? And why did he take off as soon as I saw him? And how come I never saw him before?” “There’s your problem.” “What?” “You’re thinking. You think, think, think. You think too much. You got all the pistons firing and you got that brain running like an old car with the timing belt thrown. You’re always thinking about questions you can’t answer. You see those carp down there? You need to be like one of them. You think they read any books? You think they got any thoughts? You think they worry? They don’t worry about nothing but that little bit of whatever the fuck they eat. See that?” He pointed to a fish that had moved out of its holding place. Its snout popped at the surface, then it drifted and finned back into position. “You see that? He’s not thinking, Am I too fat or Am I too skinny? or Am I rich? or Am I poor? None of that. He ain’t thinking shit. He just wants a good place to catch some food.” “So what’s your point?” “Consider the lilies, motherfucker. They neither toil nor do they neither spin.” “It sure looks like we’re toiling right now,” the young man said. “That’s because you never seen real toil.” River Dog continued to crush his cans and the young man continued to bag them up. The rain continued to whisper and drum above them and the creek steadily darkened with the runoff. River Dog nodded toward the stream. “See how that creek’s beginning to muddy up? In a couple hours, it’ll start running through here like a freight train.” He pointed to the line of carp. “In a little bit, you watch. Once the creek muddies, you won’t see these fish anymore until it clears up again. They’ll dive deep and wait it out. Then, in a day or two, it’ll clear up and they’ll be back.” “So, what do you make of that?” River Dog paused in mid-stomp. “Do I look like a fish?” He hefted one bag and then the other and decided they were full. Then he picked up one of the leftover plastic bags and, with a knife, cut out holes for his head and arms and slipped it over his head for a raincoat. The young man shivered again. He shivered and ached and looked out at the rain. “I’m fucked,” he said. “You don’t have to be out here, you know,” the old man said. “You can always call your mom and dad and get you a bus ticket back home.” The young man shook his head. I can’t go home strung out like this, he thought. “No,” he said. “It won’t work.” He shivered again. “I’m fucked,” he said again. “You are,” the old man said. “You’re double-dog-fucked and packed for shipping.” He pulled a strip of towel out of the pocket of his coat and tied it to the neck of one of the bags. “But in the end,” he said, “we’re all fucked. Heart attack, cancer, skinheads, seizure, pneumonia, car wreck. One way or another, we all got to go. There’s no need to worry about it. We’re all food for the fish when it’s over.” River fastened the other end of the strip of towel to the neck of the second bag. With a swift movement, he swung the bags onto his back with the towel settled across his shoulders like a yoke. “It’s a short trip, no matter how you take it,” he said. “So, you might as well enjoy the ride. That’s what I plan to do. I’m gonna turn these cans in for a little bit of money and I’m gonna take my little bit of money and meet up with my old friend Malt Liquor. And the next time you see me, I’ll be in a completely inebriatious state of mind and body.” He looked out at the rain and adjusted the pack of cans on his shoulders. “So,” he said, “we have had our little moment of bonding. Leave the key under the mat when you go.” In a slick minute, River Dog was up the levee bank and gone. There was still a plastic garbage bag among the leftover cans. The young man picked it up and, following River Dog’s pattern, cut him out a raincoat of his own. It didn’t fit him as neatly as River’s had, but it would do the job, so he set to climbing up the bank. By the time he reached the guardrails of Mitchell Avenue, his hands and knees were covered in mud. River Dog was a hundred yards away, already turning onto Spring Grove. At that distance, the old man looked small as a bird. The wind gusted him along the sidewalk and the bags on his back sailed out like a pair of wide black wings. II. It had started for the young man as a personal test. He was bored with college, super-bored with life in the suburbs. He was taking too many crazy risks, drinking too much, smoking too much, trying a little too much of this and that. A little weed, a little Adderall, a little Vicodin. Not much, just a petty little knick-knacking snort-a-little, chip-a-little, eat-a-little, smoke-a-little sort of a thing. He knew it could get out of hand, but he had it totally under control. What bothered him was all the craziness and hypocrisy and waste, all the gaming and trash talk and cruising the endless strip malls of his little world. He needed to purify his life. He needed a quest, a goal, a path to a new vision, something to lift him out of the triviality of his life, something that would save him. He decided to see just how low he could go and still survive. Could he divest himself of possessions, contacts, and connections and use only his own native survival powers? Not in the woods. Not in some corner of a state forest, but in an urban environment, the real test of these times. His friends from high school, his friends from college, any of them had enough Boy Scout know-how to survive a week in the woods. But what about a week in the streets? Or better, how about a month? A whole month living on the street by his own wits. He set that as his goal. What would he need? What would he take with him? He decided it was no true test if he took a lot of gear. Instead, he would take as little as he could. Just a little money to get him started, but no ID, no credit card, no cell phone. Just a change of clothes, a backpack, a few sticks of beef jerky and half dozen apples to get him started. This test would not work in his home city; it would be too easy to run into friends or to call his parents and to stroll back into his old life when things got tough. So, when he heard about a friend driving to Cleveland, Ohio, he invited himself along. In Cleveland, he said goodbye to his friend, made his way to the Greyhound station, and found he had just enough money to make it to Cincinnati, where he knew no one and where he had never been. He told no one, so no one could come and try to rescue him before he had done what he wanted to do, which was to look rock-bottom life in the face. One week into his experiment, he thought he would starve. Rock bottom was not supposed to arrive so fast. The apples and the jerky were gone by the second day and he found he couldn’t get a temp job without an ID. Even a homeless shelter wouldn’t take him in without an ID. Will Work for Food got him neither work nor food. He was a total failure at hitchhiking. The soup kitchens and sandwich windows were all downtown, miles away even if he knew which way was down. He was too nervous to shoplift. By the time he got his nerve up to try it, his hands had gone shaky and weak and he couldn’t trust them to do the job. Exhausted, half-starved, he lay himself down on the banks of Mill Creek. I see how people just give up and die, he thought. I feel like I could just drift away and die right here. But before he could drift any farther, someone kicked his shoe. It was a withered up old man, scrawny as a baby bird, with pale, out-sized hands like those of a mole. “Look here,” the man said. “You’re not allowed to die over here and bring a bunch of investigatious police down on us, so eat a little something or move it on down the road and die there.” “Who are you?” “What the fuck do you care? I could be Mother Fucking Teresa for all you know, but if you call me River Dog, I might answer.” He reached down to the young man and handed him a sandwich. “See if you can get that down,” the old man said, and he hunkered down to watch. The young man could get the sandwich down. He downed it in half a minute without even knowing what it was. In the next half minute, he staggered to the bushes and puked up everything but his kidneys. “I knew it,” the old man said. “Come on down to my camp. I got some soup. If you can’t handle that, I’m gonna have to feed you to the catfish.” For the next several days, River Dog nursed the young man back to some measure of strength. He taught the young man procedures for panhandling, what the police would and would not allow, where to get food from church pantries, and which bikers were helpful and which ones were out to kick some homeless ass. One day, while they were walking Mitchell Avenue in search of cans, the young man asked, “So, River Dog, what’s your real name?” “River Dog.” “No, I mean your real name.” “River. Dog. Just like it sounds.” “But I mean, what’s your given name?” “First name, River. Last name, Dog.” “That can’t be your given name.” “Why not?” “Nobody gives their kid a name like that.” “River Dog is my given name. I given it to myself.” “Why?” “I live by a river and people say I smell like a dog. So, there you have it.” “But don’t you have a regular, birth-certificate name?” “Of course, I do.” “So why don’t you use it?” “I do use it. Whenever I get arrested.” “How come you never call yourself by that name?” “Because the guy named River Dog is a free man. When I was under that other name, I was in chains, but now I’m free. I’ve been reborn in a new place with a new name and now I’m a free man.” Everybody, River Dog’s notion ran, has somebody or something they have to bow to. Someone always has to surrender somehow. The cop on the beat has to surrender to his sergeant and the sergeant has to bow to the captain and the captain has to bow on up the chain to the chief of police. The chief of police has to bow to the mayor who has to bow to his funders and a few thousand voters. But the suburbanite, River told him, is the biggest slave of all. He might think he owns that little trim house in the cul-de-sac, but to keep it, he surrenders all his independence and in the end, the little trim house owns him. “The credit card is the chain and the mortgage is the whip,” River Dog said. The man under the lash of the mortgage has to surrender to the boss, the bank, the wife, the homeowner’s association, the township trustees, the school board, the parish council, the zoning board, the neighbors, and the in-laws. On the job, there is the clock, the corporate culture, the office gossip, the boss, and the boss of the boss, and the boss of the boss of the boss and all the other bosses. And even to get to work in the morning, there’s the lash of the gridlock on the Interstate, the traffic cop, the rent-a-cop, the meter maid, and the highway patrol. “He thinks he’s Adam in the Garden, but everybody wants a bite out of his apple.” River said he had once been that suburban slave. He had the house in the cul-de-sac, the two cars in the two-car garage, the boat on the lake, the wife, the well-behaved children in private school. For years, he slogged down that corporate trail. But alcohol slowly freed him from his subservience. The job, the marriage, the children, the little trim house—alcohol’s golden hammer broke each link in his chain. River Dog answered now only to the bottle. And the bottle, kindest of masters, asked little of him. He could collect his cans and other scrap in a few hours’ time, and the little he made went mostly to the bottle. In return, the bottle took him to that place where nothing bothered him, nothing disturbed his bliss. “I got nothing,” he said. “But I need nothing. A man can’t get more free than that.” * The place where River Dog sold his cans was called Garden Grove Metals, some fifty acres of dust and engine noise where people brought scrap metal in pickups, shopping carts, dump trucks, and the trunks of cars, all piled with rejected screen doors, blown engine blocks, shards of sheet metal, outmoded desks and metal shelving, fenders of wrecked cars, the wrecked cars themselves, the poles for swing sets and the chains that held the swings. Dinosaurish cranes plucked metal from one pile and dropped it in another amid the constant roar of motors and clang of metal. River Dog and the young man turned in their cans and got their money and headed back toward the Mill Creek bridge. For a shortcut, they crossed the vacant field where a meat-packing plant once stood. Over the ground worried by the ghosts of slaughtered pigs and broken men, Queen Anne’s Lace had grown thick and the stems of it snatched at their legs and ankles. “Ain’t this a bitch,” River Dog said. “Fucking bunch of flowers got us snagged.” About halfway through, the field cleared around a broad concrete platform. They high-footed it through the remaining yards of tall stalks and, relieved to be free of the snags, were about to step up onto the platform when River threw up his hand for a signal and they stopped. “Hold up,” River Dog said. “We got us a situation.” “What’s up?” “I think I know this motherfucker.” Just at the edge of the platform, half-covered in the greenish-white flowers, lay the body of a Black man. Blood still gleamed at his temple. “Is he all right?” “Fuck no, he’s not all right. He’s a dead motherfucker.” “You sure?” “Look at him. You want to give him mouth to mouth?” “Well, who is he?” “Yesterday, he was a guy named Cornbread. Today, he’s just another dead junkie. Let’s go.” “Shouldn’t we call 9-1-1?” “What phone do you plan to use?” “Well, shouldn’t we do something?” “We shouldn’t do nothing but get our asses out of here. Come on.” They high-footed it again, faster this time, and broke out of the field into a little stand of trees where they paused to catch their breath. “So why are we running like this?” “There’s no happy ending to this story. There’s no way this doesn’t end up bad news for you or me. So, it’s better we stay out of this story altogether. You tell the police, you’re either a witness or a suspect. Either way, you’re fucked. If you get charged with it, there’s nobody to take up for you. If you’re a witness, you’re asking to get your own little plunk in the head.” “So we’re just gonna leave him there?” “That’s exactly what we’re gonna do.” “Well, somebody ought to know.” “Like who?” “Surely, somebody wants to know. His family?” “If there was anybody who cared about the motherfucker, do you think he’d be a homeless junkie with a bullet in his head?” “Nobody?” “Nobody. And if you ever find me like this one day, don’t call nobody. There’s nobody to call. And don’t turn me over to the county. Just let me rot or feed me to the carp.” “Whoever did this is going to get away with murder.” “Yes, that’s exactly what they’re going to do.” “It’s not right.” “You act like that’s news. There’s a lot of things that ain’t right. If there’s a heaven, and if I get there, on both of which improbabilities I doubt, God is gonna have to answer for a lot of shit that’s happened in this world.” “So now you’re judging God?” “Exactly. And I find him guilty as charged. You name anything that’s wrong in this world, the devil might have brought it, but God’s the one who sent it.” * The young man’s apprenticeship lasted about ten days. Then River announced, “Alright, little birdie, it’s time to get the fuck out of my nest.” And so, he was back out on his own, but better prepared this time. A homeless camp, he had learned, might be anywhere: tucked under an overpass, in a little patch of woods, in the corner of a parking garage, on the third floor of an abandoned tenement, re-plumbed and wired to tap the electricity of the building next door and renamed an Abandominium. There were camps built of scrap lumber and furnished with Ikea castoffs and divided into rooms, camps run over with cats, half pet and half feral, and even an under-Interstate camp with a white picket fence, couches set up for conversation, a pet rabbit in a shopping cart cage, and a portrait of Jesus painted onto an overpass pillar. For himself, the young man decided to keep his camp simple—he didn’t plan to be out there that long—so he set himself a spot across Mill Creek from River Dog with a few flats of cardboard to cushion the concrete of the abutment and a blanket to throw over him at night. He kept everything else in his backpack and he carried his backpack with him everywhere he went. He panhandled every day for enough to eat and he visited the pantries and the agencies for everything else and he got to where he was living fairly well. For the first time in his life, he began to feel competent and free. Two days after River Dog sent him off, he saw the old man on the levee, stretched out in the sun, leaning back on his elbows with his shirt and jacket open like a buzzard with its wings outstretched. His ribs made a washboard of his pale, bony chest. He was gazing up at the sky, his wide-open eyes gone to glass. He was fixed in a celestial stare like an ancient Chinese poet, oblivious to all. “River,” the young man called. “River Dog.” The old man did not move. “River,” the young man called again. “Are you alive?” The old man still did not move. The young man shook him by the shoulder. “River,” he called again. River Dog slowly turned his gaze toward the young man, moved his lips as if he wanted to speak, then turned his head away again. “River,” the young man called. “What’s up? Are you all right?” The old man slowly brought his head around again, like the turret on a tank. He formed words in a whisper and the young man leaned in to hear. “River,” he said. “Say it again. I can’t hear you.” He leaned even closer and heard River Dog say, in a sandpaper whisper, “Leave me the fuck alone.” * Finally, the young man completed his month, which stretched to two months, then three months. Some days, the young man was not sure what day of the week it was or how long he had been standing at the Interstate exit and sleeping the night under the bridge. He had now been in so long and gotten so deep, he was not sure he could ever get out. For by now, he had collected, among other items, a pocketknife, a plate and utensils to eat with, a change of clothes, a copy of Moby Dick , a pen and notepad, three pairs of extra socks, a black marker for making up a new sign, rolling papers and a pouch of tobacco, three cans of ChiliMac, four power bars, a couple Trojans in case lightning struck, a badly-healing gash on his left cheek from a fight with another panhandler, and a heroin habit that he picked up in the final week of his self-imposed test from a woman who came to share his blanket and left after shooting him up for three straight days. On the fourth day, she and her stash of heroin were gone and he was sicker than he had ever been. The heroin he had kept as a pet had turned into his master. The leash had become a chain. III. The morning rain had settled into an all-day drizzle that was likely to continue into the night. The young man wanted to stay right where he was under the bridge, cold but dry. But his dope-sickness was steadily advancing and he dreaded the hammers of withdrawal even more than the rain. So, covered in his garbage-bag raincoat, the young man pulled himself up the bank and headed back to his place by the highway exit ramp. But there, in the spot he claimed for his own, stood the Shadow Man in his loose black clothes. His bony shoulders were bent under the rain. A cardboard sign shivered in his hands. “Hey, motherfucker,” the young man yelled. “This is my corner.” The Shadow Man looked up. It was the same man for sure, the same skeletal frame in the same black hoodie, baggy black jeans, and heavy, black coat. The same bone-pale face turned toward the young man with the look that was either grin or grimace. He made a sound that was either laugh or taunt. Then. bird-like, he lurched into the trees and disappeared. Running the Shadow Man off was almost too easy and the young man felt a little guilty, though not as guilty as he felt sick, so he pulled out his sign, set himself in position, and faced the oncoming cars. * The rain continued into the afternoon, relentless as God. The young man was getting steadily more dope-sick and he had a spasm of shivering so intense it was hard at times to hold his sign straight. But he had finally been able to flag down enough dollars that he would be ready when Mexican Dick showed up. If Mexican Dick showed up. If Mexican Dick didn’t show up, the young man would face some serious withdrawal or else a run downtown, where there was a dope boy on every corner, but could have serious consequences for a white boy from the suburbs with no car and no friends. So, for now, he stood beneath the awning of an abandoned carry-out to wait for Mexican Dick. The dollars warmed the young man’s pocket and the rain continued to fall, sometimes heavily, sometimes, just a hint. He had no idea what time it was or how long he had waited. It could have been high noon or sundown for all he could tell from the rain-heavy, slate-dark sky. * Mexican Dick drove a large, black, fat-tire pickup truck that was tinted dark at the windows and fitted in the back with a pair of speakers the size of coffins. Out of the coffins rolled a steady, blinding bass line so dense it felt to the young man as if he were swimming through butter to walk the fifty yards through the vacant lot to where Mexican Dick waited behind the wheel. The window slid down and the young man showed Mexican Dick his money and shivered while he counted it out. BombPa BombPa BombPa Bomb , thundered the speakers. The thunder of the speakers half-blinded the young man. It was hard to see into the dark of Mexican Dick's truck and hard to see around the frame of his dark glasses, but River did have a point: Mexican Dick didn't look Mexican at all. Any other time, Mexican Dick would now drop a little envelope into the young man’s palm. The earsplit speakers would drown any talk. But this time, Mexican Dick reached to the dashboard. For a moment, the young man feared he might be reaching for a pistol. Instead, the speakers snapped so suddenly silent, it nearly knocked the young man over. When Mexican Dick turned to the window and spoke, he didn't sound Mexican at all. “I don’t think it’s healthy," said Mexican Dick, "for a fuckhead like you to stare so hard at a person like me.” “Sorry,” the young man said. He hadn’t realized he was staring so hard. “A guy like you could hurt his eyes staring so hard at a person like me.” "Got it," the young man said. "Sorry." Mexican Dick dropped the packet into the young man’s hand. The window slid up and the caskets began to blaze again. At the far edge of the field, the Shadow Man in his crow-colored clothes nodded in time to the BombPa BombPa BombPa Bomb from Mexican Dick’s coffin-size speakers. * I got to quit this shit, the young man thought. I got to quit all this and go back home and get back in school. He meant every word of it. This is insane, he thought. Some guy threatens to kill you because you look at him too long. And there’s nobody to care if you’re alive or dead. I got to get out of this one way or another. I’ve got to go home. But for now, he took his treasure in hand straight to the place where he kept his kit behind a loose brick in the wall of an old gas station. It took a minute to spoon it up, fire it up, and cook it up, and his hands shook the whole time. Rain still drizzled across his face and hands as he needled it up and tapped it free. He took the needle into his teeth like a pirate would a dagger and wound a strip of rubber tubing around his left bicep and pulled it tight to tie off. The veins stood up, smart and alert. The point of the needle found a fat one and he drove it in, pressed the plunger, and watched the fix roll in. He pulled the needle out quickly and capped it and hid the whole kit back behind its brick before the mess had time to hit highway speed and to roll around through the Interstate of his pulmonary system and into the back roads of his brain where the real deal would happen. And yes, it was the real deal. Damn, he thought, while he could still think, this is some powerful shit. It was powerful enough to make the rain stop falling. The dictator clouds, which had ruled the skies for over a day, were now overthrown. The exiled sun returned like a prince. Everything was lit like a coronation. Sunlight flared over the scrambled bricks around him. The peeling walls of the gas station, the disrupted concrete floor, the rusted frame of an abandoned Jeep, the shards of glass that surrounded the Jeep, and the wildflowers growing up in the cracks of the concrete. All were illuminated. He leaned back against the station wall and stretched himself out. He gazed at the newly bejeweled parking lot around him. The sunlight warmed his face like the hand of a lover. * Two days later, the young man stood on the steps of a hospital with a paper in his hand, looking at the everlasting rain. He remembered the smack of sudden light when the Narcan hit his brain and his lungs snapped open like an umbrella. He had a shadowy memory of two men in blue who folded him onto a gurney and strapped him to the gurney and rolled him into an ambulance, a vague memory of lying propped on a hospital bed with an IV strapped to his arm. And just when things began to come clear and his brain began to work like a brain again, a doctor came in to tell him he was lucky to be alive and a social worker came in to give him a lecture and a list. I’m not ready I’m not ready I’m not ready yet , he told her, so they wheeled him out the door and set him on his feet on the hospital steps with his legs all shaky and the clean, rainy light of morning blazing up his brain. The list—he looked again at the paper in his hand and the list of treatment centers and their phone numbers. He had no idea where these addresses were and he had no way to make a phone call. He had no money. His only address was a cardboard pallet under a bridge. He had no ID. He wondered to himself, what was I thinking? He could have called home. That would have fixed it all. The social worker had offered to help him call home. Mom and Dad would have bought him a Greyhound ticket. Or they would have come and picked him up. They would have killed for him the fatted calf. But he had turned the social worker down and now he had no way to call. What the fuck was I thinking? He balled up the paper with the list and threw it into the shrubs at the side of the steps. He looked up into the rain and thought, What now? What the fuck do I do now? * First, he went back to the gas station to retrieve his backpack. The rain was little more than a whisper of a rain by then. He had walked the whole way and, because he did not know the way, it was getting late when he finally got there. His backpack was still in the alcove where he had left it. But someone else had found it first. The clothes were there, and Moby Dick , and his notebook, and most of his other belongings. But his knife and all his food were gone. He mumbled a curse and stuffed his soggy clothes and his soggy Moby Dick into the backpack and headed down toward the bridge. The rain had finally stopped. He had thought the waters, after all this rain, would be roaring downstream. But the creek, having taken on the runoff from a hundred hillside rivulets, tributary runs, gullies, gutters, culverts, over-run sewers, and industrial ditches, had run its burden up against the dam at its gate to the Ohio. There, it paused, eddied back on itself, spread bank to bank, and back-watered upstream for miles. It had flooded the willow brakes and honeysuckle thickets, robbed the nests of the birds, and collapsed the muskrat tunnels hived into the levees. The carp had found pocket water and lay low and the catfish and bluegill and suckers did the same. The great blue herons watched from nests perched in the crowns of the sycamores. The creek seemed still as a farm pond, the surface smooth as glass, broken on the margins by the upper branches of the half-drowned willows and honeysuckle and by the reflections of those branches on the glass of the water. But, once he looked long enough, the creek’s strange, mist-spectral, seeming-stillness was marked with eddies, ripples, and cross-currents. Near the far bank, a black bundle, snagged on the branches of a honeysuckle, slowly bobbed and spun in the hidden current. The sun had started into its big slow dive. The mists had already started to swirl up from the surface of the creek like sleeping sentries called to duty. The underbridge camps were flooded on both sides. So where, he wanted to know, was River Dog? He asked all up and down Mitchell Avenue and all up and down Spring Grove, but no one had seen him. Most of them had been driven out of their camps by the rising waters and most carried what little they had left in their arms. I got troubles of my own, they said, whether they said it or not. * He sat down on the levee to think. The waters had dropped a foot or more in the time since he had come back down, but not enough that he could get back in under the bridge. And even after the waters dropped, it would be days again before it was dry enough to make a camp, even such a bare camp as he had made before. He had passed his test, though it had almost killed him and might kill him yet. He was done with camps and panhandling. He wanted to go home and start his life again. Tomorrow, he would call. He would find a way to call. He had just a little daylight left. He was hungry now; he would be even more hungry in the morning. There was a girl at the Subway who might sneak him a sandwich if he talked to her right. If she wasn’t there, he might still be able to panhandle money enough to get himself something to eat. But it bothered him that he could not find River Dog. He scanned the creek once more. Bats had begun to flit like shadows over the water and into the honeysuckle and the willows on the levee banks. There, on the bank, mingling his skinny limbs with the limbs of the willows, stood the Shadow Man. It was as if he had flown there with the bats. The young man thought the Shadow Man might flit away as he had before. But this time, he turned and met the young man’s stare. As before, he said not a word. But he pointed a pale finger toward the creek. The young man turned to see where the Shadow Man pointed and saw what he had not noticed before: the pale hands and face and black bloated body of his friend and mentor, first name River last name Dog. He was snagged in the willow branches and bobbing slowly with the current. It could have been any of the homeless men who camped along Mill Creek, but the young man knew it was River Dog by the bone-shiny knob of his forehead and the yellow-tooth grin. The young man suspected what had happened. The rising creek had caught River Dog in his aluminum kingdom and drowned him as he lay utterly drunk and perfectly free. “River,” the young man called. He knew it was useless to call, but he called again, “River Dog,” he called. “River Dog.” He ran to the creek’s edge, then past the creek’s edge. Suddenly he was shin-deep in October-cold water. “Goddamit, River,” he shouted in a fury. He threw his backpack back onto the levee and started to wade out to where the willows had snagged the old man. The water was deeper than he thought it would be. And colder. In a few steps, he was waist-deep, then chest deep when he finally reached the hem of River Dog’s coat and began to tug him loose. If the Shadow Man would just reach him a hand, or a branch—that branch that lay at the edge of the creek—together they could pull the old man ashore. “Dude,” he called. “Help me out, will you?” But the bat-flit Shadow Man was gone; the branch was out of reach. “Goddamit, River,” the young man muttered. He continued to mutter as he grabbed the old man’s coat with both hands, dug his heels into the mud of the creek, and pulled River Dog free of the willows. The force of his pull nearly took his feet from under him and he leaned against River Dog for balance. The current tried to push River back into the willows and the young man tried to pull him back to shore. For a moment, they were mutually encumbered, the young man and the dead man, in a balance of currents. The sun had reached the crest of the levee; the creek took on a copper sheen. It seemed placid as a copper plate. But there were currents and cross-currents and the young man’s feet were on tip toe; he had no purchase by which to pull River Dog to shore. He looked at the face of the old man once more. His one open eye was blank as an egg; his lips were pulled back in a victorious grin. “Okay. You win, you old sonofabitch,” the young man whispered. With a shove, he launched the old man toward the middle of the stream. The old man bobbed and spun as current and counter-current took him around and under and up again. Finally, the main current took him, steady now as a driftwood log. The young man scrambled up onto the levee; he watched River Dog slowly bob and tumble down toward the Ohio until he disappeared in mist and shadow. ### In "River Dog and the Shadow Man," a young man caught up in homelessness and addiction seems to have arrived at a point at which he is ready to bury his pride and seek help. This story derives from my experience working with addicts and the homeless (as well as my own experience of recovery). Previous MICHAEL HENSON was born and raised in Sidney, Ohio and came to Cincinnati to go to college at Xavier University. After teaching school in Adams County and completing an M.A. at the University of Chicago, he worked as a community organizer, machine tender and forklift operator in a paper bag factory, union steward, substance abuse counselor, and adjunct professor at Xavier University and other colleges. He is the author of six books of fiction and four collections of poetry. His work includes Maggie Boylan , a finalist for the Weatherford Award for Appalachian fiction; Crow Call , poems in response to the murder of housing activist buddy gray; and The Triumphal Descent of Donald J. Trump into Hell, as Recounted to the Archangel Gabriel, from a Manuscript Discovered, Edited, and Translated from the Original Aramaic , a political fantasy. Henson is a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and the Carter Bridge Bluegrass Band. He lives in Cincinnati. michaelhenson.org Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Dead Man's Money Michael Henson She was up in the park giving head to some old man in the front seat of his raggedy Chevy, and he was about to do the deed. His back arched, his body stiffened, his hand caressed the back of her head, he rose up two inches out of his seat. Then everything came to a stop. All the starch went out of him. He sank back down, his hand slipped away, he wilted and he sighed. “Come on baby,” she whispered. “You can do it for me.” But he had stopped all his rocking and moaning. He had gone limp as a sock. She raised her head; she was puzzled. This was something new. And strange. Then she heard the cackle. It was a strange, brittle, crackle of a sound like paper when it’s crumpled. From her angle, she could only see the business end of him, but the strange, mocking cackle seemed to come from somewhere else, from above, or to the side, or from deep inside him. She could not tell. It scared her; she sat up and backed away so she could look him in the face. “What’s up, honey?” she asked. “What’s the matter?” But the man would not answer. He clutched at his chest. His mouth gaped; he made little nods; he stared; he pleaded with his eyes. But he did not –could not—speak. Oh my God , she thought.“Oh my God,” she asked him. “Are you gonna die right here?” Was this a heart attack? She tried to remember, what do you do when somebody’s having a heart attack? “Are you okay?” she asked him. “Honey, are you okay?” He said nothing, but his eyes still pleaded. You are , she thought. You’re having a heart attack and you’re gonna die right here. Slowly, his hands relaxed across his chest. Then she heard again the weird cackle. Where did it come from? He shivered; his hands dropped slowly to his lap. His eyes still seemed to plead, but his lids drooped, slowly, like a schoolhouse flag coming down, bit by bit, until they closed altogether. Then his head tilted forward toward his chest and he slowly slid against the car door. She backed away, way up against the opposite door. She was afraid to even touch him. He didn’t breathe and he didn’t move. What do I do? she thought. What do I do? Was he dead? Just like that? She made herself brave and lifted his hand, then dropped it right away. His hand fell limp as a rag. Oh my God , she thought. Oh my God, what the fuck am I gonna do? She had her cell phone, but who would she call anyway? 9-1-1? The police? Her mother? If only she could call her mother. What the fuck , she thought. Please Jesus, what the fuck am I gonna do? There was no one around. They were in a tucked-away nook of a big park that overlooked the river. It was all woods to one side and a picnic area to the other. It was late afternoon in mid-week. A late-November wind kicked leaves around the empty picnic benches. No one was likely to come by here, but they might. The police made regular sweeps. High school kids came here to smoke weed and make out. And the joggers didn’t care what the fuck the weather was. It was an all-right place to conduct a little quick private business, but someone was bound to come around eventually. She couldn’t stay here long . Not with this poor guy sitting next to her dead as a hammer. A car was headed their way, slowly, so she thought it might be undercover. “Okay, darlin’,” she said to the dead man. “I gotta make like I’m talking to you, so don’t you fall down.” She raised his head and turned his shoulders so that he faced her. “Please don’t fall down,” she said. “Please. Please. Please.” He did not fall down, but his jaw went slack and his mouth fell open as if he really were about to speak. And his eyes, having peeped back open, still seemed to plead. What? She wanted to ask, What do you want? The undercover car—if that’s what it was—rolled on by and out of sight. She was ready to get the hell out of this car. But she looked the man over one more time and realized she couldn’t leave him like he was, with his dick still hanging out. He’s probably got kids and all, she thought. Grandkids, probably, from the look of him. She did not want him to haunt her for what they might see if they found him. Carefully, she put him back together decent. She tucked him in like a baby, pulled up his zipper, buttoned his trousers, and fastened his belt. “Now, motherfucker,” she said. “You owe me. No one’s ever gonna know you died getting a blow job from a crackhead. So you owe me.” To collect what she was owed, she first looked around to be sure no one was watching, then reached around him to where he kept his billfold. It took some doing, but she maneuvered it out of his pocket and opened it. Oh holy fuck! Her eyes went wide. The wallet was fat with bills, more than she could count. She fanned through the stack and she saw a thick wad of twenties, fifties, and even a deck of Benjamins. “You must have hit the fucking lottery,” she said to the man. “And I was your celebration.” All that money. It gave her a little buzz just to think of it. She could stay fucked up for a week on this much money. She could pay the rent, buy up some food and pay off her phone. She could send some money to her mother for the kids and still stay fucked up for days. But she knew better than to take it all. Somebody would find him, sooner or later. Somebody would wonder what happened to all his lottery money or back wages or Black Lung money or whatever it was that got a man who drove an old beat-up hooptie a wad of cheese that was thick as a brick. If the billfold was empty, they would think he had been robbed and they would come looking and if they looked long enough, they would find her. “I might be a dope fiend,” she told him, “and I might be a whore. But I ain’t stupid.” Still, he owed her. She took out a bill, thought about it, and took another. Fair enough, she thought, for what she had been through. A couple hundred bucks for an hour’s work. She hesitated a moment more. It was a lot of money to leave behind, a lot of blow jobs on a lot of old men. No, she couldn’t let it all go like that. It was like God had put all that money in her hands and was she going to turn it down? Fuck that . His kids and his grandkids would just have to suck it. None of them was willing to do for him what she did or else he wouldn’t have to come down to the hood looking for the likes of her. So she thumbed through the billfold again. This time, she took about half the bills and stuffed them in a wad into the pocket of her jacket. She shut up the billfold and worked it back into his pocket. She looked around once more to see if anyone was watching. Please, Jesus , she begged. Don’t let nobody come by now . Then she slipped out the door of the car and into the woods. But which way to go? She hardly knew where she was. The park covered many acres and it was looped through with woods and winding roads and hiking paths. She knew better than to try the roads. Too much traffic, too many cops. So she figured she could weave her way through the woods until she was back on some street she knew. Then she could hit the turf again like nothing had happened. Just another evening on the stroll. But first, she had to get off the hill and out of these woods. It would be dark soon. This ain’t gonna be no picnic, she thought. She was dressed for the street and not some wild place like this. She guessed that she was on a trail as she entered the woods, but it petered out quickly and she fought through briars and honeysuckle that scratched her ankles and slashed at her face until she broke free of the thickety stuff and came into a deeper, older woods. It was as quiet in here as a chapel. She paused to catch her breath. She was not used to walking anywhere but the streets, and these were totally the wrong shoes with their thin soles and open toes. There’s got to be a path, she thought. And as she stared into the woods a moment, there it was. Out of the maze of tree trunks, deadfalls, intersecting branches, and littered leaves, a pattern emerged, a deer trail, as if it had just formed itself right before her. Still, it was no easy thing to follow the deer trail. She had to duck under and step over a series of branches and logs, but eventually the deer trail crossed a path laid out by the park people, a clear easy path, soft with mulch. But which way? She had no idea where she was and which direction to turn. She guessed to the right, and she prayed, Please, Jesus, don’t let nobody come down this path, nobody walking his dog, nobody meeting her boyfriend. Her heels kept sinking into the mulch, so she took off her shoes. The ground was cold and she began to sniffle. I’ll catch cold for sure , she thought. Or maybe bronchitis or pneumonia . And when she thought of being laid up with no way to make a living, she regretted the money she left behind in the dead man’s wallet. Winter would soon hammer down onto the streets. It would be sweet to have one of those nice down coats, all bubbled up with feathers inside and warm as toast. She could see herself work the corner in her fine, fly, warm, high-collar coat. But she knew what would happen to her coat. She would have a slow day and she would need a hit. She would sell the coat for a nickel and her coat would go up the pipe. She would stay high for a hot minute while some other bitch walked around all warm in her coat. And she would be straight back out on the street in her little shivery thin jacket that she would never sell because nobody would want it. So fuck the coat , she thought. She was glad to have the thin jacket now, for it was colder in the woods than it had been on the street and colder yet, now that the day was getting late. Her bare feet were cold on this path, but at least she had her jacket. She continued down the path until it opened on an overlook. There was nothing to mark it but a little bench, but the view was clear from off the hill. There was the river, far below, and there were the Kentucky hills on the other side. A barge tilted downstream. Here and there, houses along either shore and way up in the Kentucky hills had winked on their lights. She stood up on the bench for a better view. Directly below her was River Road. Miniature cars and trucks barreled out toward the suburbs. And to the left, there was the pattern of dark buildings and small lights that she knew was her neighborhood. It looked incredibly far away. * For an hour, two hours, she had no idea how long, she walked, scrambled, plowed through the woods and thickets, blind and scared, full of dirt and tears. The darkness had dropped on her like a predator. She lost the shoes somewhere in the thickets. She had left the path once she realized it was taking her right back to the place where she had left her poor dead trick. She knew it when the path started to turn back uphill and she knew it for sure when she saw the lights flash through the trees. So someone had found the dead man and called the police. Their radios squawked and scratched. The trees were slashed with red and blue lights. * For an hour, two hours, she had no idea how long, she scrambled downhill through the dark thickets, away from the dead man and the red and blue lights. By the time she emerged at the fence line of someone’s backyard, she was scratched up in her face and ankles, her hair was strung all out of place and full of leaves and twigs. Her face was streaked with tears, dirt, and snot. Inside the fence, a dog was raising hell and pulling at his chain. Inside the kitchen, she could see a woman fixing dinner, a big, heavy-boned woman with long, straight hair. The woman had her radio going, and she danced around her kitchen and she danced at her counter and at her stove. She stared at the dancing woman until the woman raised her window to yell at the dog. Then she pulled back into the woods. * She had to work through more thickets of tangled briar and intersecting honeysuckle until she came to a string of abandoned houses, dark and empty. She was scared, but there were no dogs to raise hell and no one to watch her come out of the woods and onto River Road. She was used to cold and hunger. She was used to being tired. She was a street hooker, after all. She could pull long hours on nothing but coffee and cigarettes and that blessed hit off the pipe, that oh-so-blessed, blister-lip hit off that smooth glass pipe. She would have stalked straight down River Road like a soldier on a forced march but she was cold and hungry and tired like she had never been before. And she was lonely and she was depressed and she was crying for pity for the poor motherfucker who died with his pecker in her hand. And she was crying for herself, that she was ragged and cold and tired and shoeless out on River Road. She was shivering and fiending for that hit off the pipe. The sidewalks were hard and cold and full of grit, but she slogged one slow step after another. Her feet, by now, were raw, cut up by twigs, gravel, and bits of broken glass. I used to run barefoot all summer long , she thought. Now I can barely walk . She walked barefoot and sore for over a mile past more of the houses with their lighted kitchens and their living rooms warmed by television, past solid blocks of abandoned shops and tenements. Trucks rolled by and shook the ground around her. She saw no one out but a half dozen children gathered under a light by a dock. The children shouted and threw rocks into the river. They flung them far out into the water if the rocks were small, or if they were larger, straight off the dock with a great kawhoosh that made all the children scream and laugh. She stopped by a telephone pole and listened to the voices of the children, their shouts and laughter and the great kawhoosh of the rocks in the water. My life , she thought, is a curse . * She left behind the children at the dock and walked until she came within a hundred paces of her home. Another hundred steps. The block where she lived and worked was just in sight and a hundred steps would get her to her door. She could see the buildings and the lights in the buildings. She knew that the dope boys watched at their stations in front of those buildings. She had not seen them, and they had not seen her. But she could almost feel their presence. She could almost see the gold in their teeth and the gold at their necks. She could almost smell the sweat in their palms. One hundred steps and she could hand over one of her bills and a dope boy would fetch her a big yellow boulder the size of her fist. And she could take the rest of her money and pay the bill on her phone. She could buy some shoes—good shoes—to replace the shoes she had lost. She could give her mother some money for the kids. It would feel so good. It would be so sweet. And yet, she could not move. She knew what would happen. There would be no bills paid, no shoes, no money to give her mother. She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her jacket and she wiped her cheeks with the cuffs of her jacket and she trembled on the lip of the curb. Around the corner and up the street, a hundred steps from where she stood, there was food and warmth and the comfort of the pipe and yet she could not move. Something had ended and something had begun. She trembled and sobbed with her fist balled up around the dead man’s money and she did not know where to turn or whether to turn at all. She teetered like a child on the edge of the curb. She teetered forward and she teetered back; she shivered with indecision. What now? She thought. What the fuck do I do now? "Dead Man's Money" was published in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel , the annual publication of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. In this story, a woman teeters on the brink of a decision to seek a new life. Previous MICHAEL HENSON was born and raised in Sidney, Ohio and came to Cincinnati to go to college at Xavier University. After teaching school in Adams County and completing an M.A. at the University of Chicago, he worked as a community organizer, machine tender and forklift operator in a paper bag factory, union steward, substance abuse counselor, and adjunct professor at Xavier University and other colleges. He is the author of six books of fiction and four collections of poetry. His work includes Maggie Boylan , a finalist for the Weatherford Award for Appalachian fiction; Crow Call , poems in response to the murder of housing activist buddy gray; and The Triumphal Descent of Donald J. Trump into Hell, as Recounted to the Archangel Gabriel, from a Manuscript Discovered, Edited, and Translated from the Original Aramaic , a political fantasy. Henson is a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and the Carter Bridge Bluegrass Band. He lives in Cincinnati. michaelhenson.org Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Still Life with Fly Shawn Stradley Two concrete strips separated and edged by weeds run between red brick walls, past a corrugated steel garage door, bare lightbulb, crooked wood door, past the weed patch of leftover space at the end of the dead end. Why there's a garage door alongside the alley is a good question, no vehicle could make such a tight turn. Raised, the door provides ventilation, natural light. Closed, it secures. Inside, two dusty double-hung six- over-six divided light windows look out to morning glory, sow thistle, other brick walls, let in muted light, cast shadows. For consistency and night, a couple of flood lights on poles provide directed light, harsh and bare, or softened with a scrim. Tea cups, angel wings, fabric, rusty train shock springs, spoiled fruit, skulls––one human found in a basement among medical school training supplies, one cat found in the corner of the weed patch by the downspout, one beaver found by the river––old books, empty vodka, whiskey, wine bottles. Mason jars filled with marbles, fortunes, rocks, air, pennies, turpentine, thinner. Dolls' arms, radio tubes, bones––vertebrae, jaw, femurs from deer or cow––statues of saints, rosaries, forty-hour candles wrapped with prayers, used coffee filters, condom wrappers, a shopping cart, mannequin torso, the ball cap left by last Saturday night's trick, dead flowers. Stretched canvases lean against bare brick walls, too much accumulated amid the buzz of a single fly. The couch sags. Open beer flattens. There's not enough time to paint it all out, step back, take it all in. Turpentine rags stained crimson, violet, fern and blue, used to clean brushes, wipe up spills, unstain hands, litter the floor like jock-straps in a strip-club backroom––spontaneous, combustible. "Still Life with Fly" was published in Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art . The personal breakthrough in this poem was derived from the concept that the next thing always belongs. If that is true, then why not keep going, keep adding? So I did. I’ve always been fascinated with artists' studios, the mess, the clutter, the curiosities, all the bric-a-brac, the inspiration. To me, these spaces have always held an air of potential eroticism. It’s all so exciting? Based on my many studio visits over the years, I imagined and I wrote, and I brainstormed, and I kept writing, and adding. In this case, even the gradual increase in line length keeps building to the chaos, the clutter, the potential. After the additions though, there is always the work of revision, grammar, sentence construction, flow, enjambment. Are these tools helping to build, helping to hold together? In a "kitchen sink"-type poem, I believe they have to. Previous SHAWN DALLAS STRADLEY grew up in Utah and California. He holds a B.S. in Horticulture from BYU, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from University of Colorado. In 2013, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing and Translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Shawn began writing poetry at age 16. His mystical fascination with the natural world weaves throughout his work, and mixes with the urban. Shawn became active in the Utah poetry scene in 1997 and published his first full-length poetry book in 2003: Beyond October (Black Rock Books). Shawn has worked with poets and artists to produce chapbooks and a collaborative catalog for the art exhibit, The 9 Muses . Two chapbooks of Shawn's poetry were published in 2025 by Moon in the Rye Press, Fragile House and a group collaboration, When Cupboards Open . His poetry has been published by City Weekly , Exit 7 , Panorama , The New Era , Nine One One , The Poeming Pigeon , and My Kitchen Table. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Painting the Cave Shawn Stradley HGTV sends weekly emails showing 38 'what’s-trending' ideas to cover bare walls. Not much different than Lascaux, jonesing to make our mark. If not make it, buy it. Textile: two needlepoint parrots in oval frames, hand-stitched by Grandma. Walk out to the fire pit. Pick up a piece of charcoal. Mark making—Kilroy was here—that speaks to authenticity. Monotype Diptych: The Geology of Language , ink on paper, cream scribbles surface through the black. Indecipherable. People grow restless. "Shelter in Place" mandates attempt, in vain, to prevent the spread of something new. We just had to get out of the cave . Something wrong with your cave? Not happy staying in. Going out, deadly. Photos: black-and-white silver gelatin on paper, taken in grad school, the abandoned flour mill, when you tried to be a photographer. There’s no place like cave. There’s no place like cave. No place … if only ruby slippers… Don’t be dramatic, all we really want is a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie. Shelter. Place. Warmth. Food. Sex. Marks. What could the tally be? It could be feng shui, it’s probably just genius loci. Spirit of Place. Who dances across shadow walls in candlelight? Oil on raw linen: Two Naked Boys Dancing , painted by a bisexual artist. To see Tous les Matins du Mond e, the tragic film, somber viola da gamba scored throughout, but not every sunrise. Enjoy what can be seen from the kitchen window while eating oatmeal with blueberries. Watercolor on paper: Rainbow Grid , graphed like an equation, gift from a previous lover, painted when he was in junior high. A pot of black beans boils on the stove. Biscuits bake in the oven. Mom’s crocheted afghan drapes across the couch. Dad’s high-school wood-shop lamp lights the table. Paper and twigs: Family Tree , leaves twitch in the slightest stir, branch how we came to be born in this desert valley of poplar trees, temples, irrigation ditches, though we descend from fishermen in the fjords. Home— the golden egg—belongs only to you, to everyone. Solitude. Respite. Protection. Tapestry: white ink on green cloth, mass-produced Dalai Lama from a New Age reminds: Be kind . Whisper to every sun that has ever burned and will burn for all brothers and sisters to flourish in caves of dancing shadow. Acrylic on black velvet: dickered for around the fountain in Cuzco town square, Machu Picchu, from the band of boys pretending to be artists. This "kitchen sink" poem relies on couplets to control content, pacing, and enjambment, painting the cave. As a poem, "Painting the Cave" takes the simple idea of home into the breakthroughs that formed a part of 'interesting times." Previous SHAWN DALLAS STRADLEY grew up in Utah and California. He holds a B.S. in Horticulture from BYU, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from University of Colorado. In 2013, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing and Translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Shawn began writing poetry at age 16. His mystical fascination with the natural world weaves throughout his work, and mixes with the urban. Shawn became active in the Utah poetry scene in 1997 and published his first full-length poetry book in 2003: Beyond October (Black Rock Books). Shawn has worked with poets and artists to produce chapbooks and a collaborative catalog for the art exhibit, The 9 Muses . Two chapbooks of Shawn's poetry were published in 2025 by Moon in the Rye Press, Fragile House and a group collaboration, When Cupboards Open . His poetry has been published by City Weekly , Exit 7 , Panorama , The New Era , Nine One One , The Poeming Pigeon , and My Kitchen Table. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue I Saw Her Standing There Scott Abbott Die Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Summer 2024 Since my last visit to this museum, I have written about the standing metaphor in works by Bosch, Holbein, and Bruegel and today have new contexts for paintings I’ve seen here before. Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of “Charles V” (1532) , for instance, features the grotesque Habsburg underbite of the repressive ruler whose son Philip II provoked Bruegel’s “Two Chained Monkeys” (1562) with Antwerp in the background denouncing Habsburg hegemony. Moving from painting to painting today, from room to room, feels like turning pages of a magnificent and increasingly familiar book. I round a corner and there she stands. I visited her nine years ago and she’s been in my thoughts more often than she’ll ever know. Of all her admirers, she knows that I’m the only one who pays exclusive (well, almost exclusive) attention to how she stands. Sandro Botticelli, who loved her first, loved her so much that he painted several versions, this one @1490 . Another resides in Turin’s Galleria Sabauda . One was perhaps seen in Germany by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Others may have been burned in 1497 by the puritanical Dominican Girolamo Savonarola. Most famously, she rises from the sea on a scallop shell in the Uffizi Gallery (“The Birth of Venus,” 1484-86) . She stands less firmly on that scalloped shell than she does on the solid grey surface in Berlin. She stands alone here, with no one waiting with a robe to clothe her nakedness or to intrude on our intimate encounter. I lean down to study her feet, trace her arches with my eyes, note the weight that presses her left foot into the ground—yes, presses, see the slight indentation. Her right foot touches the ground more lightly than the left, the right knee slightly bent, contrapposto . The toes are long and thin, the ankles strong, the tops of her feet slightly swollen. Feet at work. I stand up straight again, stretch my back. Two people have entered the room and are gazing at me curiously. In the presence of a life-sized and fully naked woman, they have seen me bent down over her feet. She stands on her feet, I could tell them. That wouldn’t help. They leave the room. I stand back to follow the contrappostic curves, a more interesting standing, more relaxed, more supple than the upright stiffness of a figure with two feet simply planted on the ground. Above the weight-bearing foot, her leg rises to a raised hip shifted to the side. Her torso rises vertically in contrast to the slanted hips. Her head reclines to the right. This is a gently curved standing, a balanced, strong, and beautiful stance. The navel punctuates her torso just above the center of the painting. Her vulva is covered by lush, swirling, golden-brown hair that hides and yet replicates the folds of the sex below. So much golden hair! Loose and braided, artful and wild. Twin breasts, one almost matter-of-factly hidden by a hand. Her sideward, downward glance is thoughtful; she’s not interested in a viewer like me. Stripped of mythical context, she is simply a standing woman. A person “clearly and distinctly oneself” would “stand,” Schopenhauer writes, quoting Goethe’s “Grenzen der Menschheit,” “with firm, strong bones on the well-grounded, enduring earth.”[1] Against a black background, on and above a bright strip of well-grounded earth, Venus stands unaccompanied, unadorned, distinctly and thematically her bipedal self. [1] The World as Will and Representation , v. 1, tr. E.F.J. Payne (Dover) 284-285. After exploring the range and flexibility of the standing metaphor in major works of literature, art, and philosophy over the course of three decades, I had no idea how to end the book. The answer came during two weeks in Berlin. Visits to three museums on three successive days inspired short essays on Botticelli’s “Venus,” Caspar David Friedrich’s “Monk by the Sea,” and Giacometti’s “Tall Standing Woman.” Previous SCOTT ABBOTT completed a doctorate in German Studies at Princeton University and is a professor emeritus of Integrated Studies, Philosophy, and Humanities at Utah Valley University. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger. (Common Consent Press, 2022). He has translated works by Nobel Prize Awardee Peter Handke and botanist Gregor Mendel. scottabbottauthor.com Next

READINGS BY AUTHORS FROM THE NOMAD Intro - Ken Waldman Austin Holmes Jennifer Tonge Kase Johnstun Rachel White Karin Anderson Lisa Bickmore Maureen Clark Ken Waldman 00:00 / 00:28 00:00 / 08:06 00:00 / 10:03 00:00 / 07:43 00:00 / 05:52 00:00 / 08:20 00:00 / 09:55 00:00 / 07:15 00:00 / 23:40 UTAH BOOK FESTIVAL

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Incunabula, Mother Tongue Max McDonough My mother—blogger, doll addict cyber queen, sniper at the eBay auction computer screen— mixed her idioms. From the get-go , for example, became From the gecko when she said it. Not the sharpest bowling ball in the shed. He side-blinded me. Shithead thinks he’s cool as mustard. Thinks he’s right up my sleeve. I escaped from New Jersey for college, which opened up a whole nother can of germs. In emails I wrote: Professor, I’ll have to mow it over a little longer. Professor, without a question of a doubt. I didn’t realize I made switches too until I re-read them—a nervous, first-gen scholarship student— as I’m sure my mother didn’t think she’d altered anything in her life. But that’s a different chiasmus for a different line of thought, not for nights like this one, alone and happy mostly, my heart at the peck and call , though, of those suburban woods of my childhood again— the ultraviolet yellow feathers of witch-hazel thicket, serrated huckleberry leaves—the understory so dense, tangled to itself, that walking a straight line becomes a tight circle, and my mother’s voice is mine. "Incunabula, Mother Tongue" was first published in Best New Poets . I’d been writing poems about a difficult estrangement from my mother only to realize that half the reason I love language – love to bend and break and rearrange it – was an inheritance. Suddenly grief had a meaning. Maybe even, can I say this?, it glittered. Previous MAX MCDONOUGH'S debut poetry collection, Python with a Dog Inside It, won the 2023 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press. His work has appeared in The New York Times , AGNI , Best New Poets , The Adroit Journal , T Magazine , and elsewhere. maxmcdonough.co Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue West on Piccadilly Shauri Cherie Stop for a moment to feel the air grow colder, chilled by the rush of passersby milling on steps, on escalators, staying on the right to make way for those rushing for the platform. Take a step and listen to the sound of footfall and the grind of the train on the rail and the faint trill of Mind the gap over the speakers. Push between two teenagers stumbling out onto the platform for Russell Square. There’s little room on the Tube at this hour, but squeeze yourself into a corner, wrap your hand around the bar, and bear it as more and more people crowd around you. Some might have come from King’s Cross (they keep luggage tucked protectively between their knees as if anticipating the worst) or perhaps they’re on the journey home tonight (the woman next to you has mascara smudged beneath her eyelids and a seated old man is slumped forward onto his wrinkled palms). The doors will shut behind with a mechanical hiss. Sway with the lurch of the train as it departs, see a girl holding her mother’s hand shift her footing. The train twists and turns and tilts until brakes squeal to a stop at Holborn, Covent Garden, and, finally, Leicester Square. The doors open to a white-tiled wall, and here, the people move faster, faster, faster, so pause in this moment to watch the tide of bodies swell around you. Wait to watch a group of girls sway concert-drunk and tourists take selfies to post on Instagram, men hovering next to their wives, children swinging their feet in their seats while parents shush them and apologize to those seated beside. Wait here until the doors begin to hiss once more, then you, an American in a country that isn’t your own, step off the Tube and onto the platform, careful to mind the gap. "West on Piccadilly" was the first poem I wrote for my European travel lyric sequence as an undergrad. It was originally published in Outrageous Fortune , but this version has been edited in preparation for a chapbook. It's sensory-focused, meant to capture the barrage overwhelming the senses of someone from a rural Utah town in the heart of London. It was a breakthrough experience that boosted my confidence, and rereading it brings the Tube vividly back again. Previous SHAURI CHERIE is easily excited by travel, curry, and stingrays. Her work appears in Trace Fossils Review , Ghost Light Lit , and others. shauricherie.com Next