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That Time We Got Married at a Tent Revival by Michael Shay On the third day of her first semester, Bobbi was getting ready for what her dormies said was a ballbuster of a chem course when Joanna came running into their room wrapped in a towel. “You gotta see this.” Joanna grabbed her hand and pulled. “I got chemistry, Jo.” She pulled away and went for her books. “No. Come with me.” There was really nothing to do. Jo was bigger and taller than Bobbi, a mismatched pair through high school that Bobbi’s Dad called Mutt and Jeff although nobody in the St. Francis class of 1969 knew what the heck he was talking about. One hand on the towel, Jo used her other hand to pull her through the dorm room door, down the hallway, and right to the big windows at the end of the hall. “Look,” she dropped her friend’s hand. Bobbi saw another sunny Florida day that would make her a sopping mess by the end of the day when she collapsed in her room. Another girls’ dorm was across the creek and the boys had three dorms off to the left and they all looked like they were built as barracks during her father’s war. “What?” Bobbi said. Jo hitched up her towel and cinched it tight. “Down there.” She pointed to the grassy swatch of territory that began at the dorm and ended at Creekside. An army-green pup tent was pitched right in the middle of the summer-browned lawn. “It’s a tent. So what?” “But whose tent? I ask you. Whose?” “How am I supposed to know. Am I in charge of tents at the U?” “No, but…” The tent flap flew open and a guy’s head poked out. He had lush sun-streaked hair and she was beginning to get a strange feeling when the guy looked up and saw her. “Oh my God. What’s he doing here?” He scrambled to his feet. He wore a T-shirt and shorts. He smoothed the shirt which was a bit wrinkled and then looked up again. “Hi Bobbi,” he said. She couldn’t hear him as the big windows were shut to keep out the gathering heat. Her heart beat faster as she raised her hand in greeting. “Hi Paul,” she mouthed to the window. Some of the other girls in various states of undress had gathered. Linda pushed her barely covered chest up against the glass and looked down. She ran her fingers through her blond hair. “He’s cute.” One of the other girls who she didn’t know yet said, “He is cute. Is he a surfer?” “He was. And he’s not supposed to be here,” she said, first to herself then she raised her arms, pounded on the glass and shouted, “You’re not supposed to be here. You’ll lose your scholarship!” He shrugged. “Is he your boyfriend, Bobbi?” someone else asked and all she could do was nod. “He’s not…” she began again. “Someone open the window.” Linda cranked open the window. What passed in Florida for a cool morning breeze swept in. “Paul,” she yelled out the window. “What are you doing here?” He smiled. “Hey Bobbi. How you doing? I’m coming up.” “You can’t. It’s not allowed.” “You can meet in the lobby,” Jo said. “Is he your boyfriend?” Linda said. “I don’t have a date for Saturday’s game.” Paul disappeared around the building. “Oh God no,” Bobbi said. “Is he your boyfriend?” Bobbi wanted to take Linda by the bra strap and strangle her. She’s forgotten all about chem class. “He’s not my boyfriend,” Bobbi said. “I gotta get down to the lobby.” She turned around. Linda stood in her way. “Not my boyfriend.” She moved past Linda and sprinted to the stairway. She shouted over her shoulder. “He’s my husband.” * * * * * Husband. That was the word on Bobbi’s lips when she awoke. That dream again—damn. She looked over at the clock and gasped. Lunch with Carol! She had showered after aerobics class and dressed before stretching out on her bed “just for a few minutes.” Should have known better. The elevator was at the far end of the hall so she took the second-floor stairs. Take your time—stairs are the enemy after 65. Slowly, cane at the ready, she made her way down and shouldered open the first-floor door. The sun-drenched lobby illuminated a fountain surrounded by a flower garden and she noticed other people in the room and someone was calling her name. “Bobbi!” A woman with gray-streaked short hair, a sweater around her shoulders, sat in one of the comfortable chairs that surrounded the fountain. She returned the wave and knew exactly who this woman was. Carol . “You were expecting someone else?” Carol took her hand and looked through thick glasses. Bobbi slid into the adjacent chair and sighed. “Your hair looks nice.” She primped her short hair. “My glam chemo look. Did I tell you that the cancer center has its own hair stylist?” “Yes.” “Chemo brain. I repeat myself a lot. Why so late?” “Took a nap after morning chair aerobics. Had a crazy dream.” “That’s what we get, Bobbi. Dreams, and tuna surprise for lunch.” “Again with the tuna surprise?” “Again.” She jerked her thumb at what they called the food court at Sea Wind Villas. “They never tell us what the surprise is.” “Food poisoning.” They laughed together. It was the early-to-lunch crowd and she and Carol liked to sit and watch, naming names, talking about which of the women may have slipped into which of the men’s rooms last night. It was always a guessing game because by the time sneaking into rooms had begun, Bobbi usually was snug in her room, watching what the kids call streaming channels and there were a million choices. “That dream again,” Bobbi said. “The tent?” “The tent. It always seems so real.” “It was, wasn’t it?” She had to admit it was, a big part of it. Fifty-five Septembers ago, a handsome boy had once traveled 357.5 miles to see her during that first week of college when she was only thinking about getting to chemistry class on time. She scolded him for endangering his and possibly her college scholarship and sent him back on the bus the next morning. They kissed madly and deeply at the station. He waved to her from the Greyhound window. “We phoned a lot during the next month or so. I flew up for the last football game in November. He told me all about the Gamecocks.” “The Gamecocks? Sounds slightly salacious.” “It is, or was, I guess. Paul’s friends always said it with the accent on the ‘cocks.’ Ah, freshmen boys. They still had panty raids on his campus.” “You time travel to 1959?” “It was 1959 in 1969. Freshmen had to wear beanies during registration.” “You’re kidding. Kids are getting naked and tripping balls at Woodstock and 18-year-old Gamecocks in Columbia wear beanies and go on panty raids.” “The Deep South, what can I say? A few weeks later, I got a pair of skimpy panties in the mail. Carolina Red. Big black lettering: Gamecocks with Cocks capitalized.” “Did he snag it in a panty raid?” “God no. The price tag was still on it. Give him some credit.” “OK, I’ll give him some credit. But what was he like? Was he nice to you?” The first time she dreamed the dream, she cried into her pillow. a thousand tears. It might have been the boy—his name was Paul—or it might have been her dead husband—his name was Jim. Paul had broken her heart or she had broken his—they were only 18. Jim broke her heart a dozen times, mostly without meaning to, just the way men do. The kids too, all three of them, their visits tapering off with time, as they moved away from Florida to make their own memories. They were all heartbreakers. “It’s more memory than dream. He did hitchhike to campus and pitch a tent outside my dorm,” she said. “Not sure where he got the tent. Caused quite a stir. He was a handsome boy. He spent the night in my room and my roomie—she was my best friend from high school—was kind enough to go elsewhere.” “You shoot off any fireworks?” She laughed. “There were fireworks that night at Disney Resorts. People might have heard me all over the hotel.” “Great memory.” “God love you. Those visions hang on, don’t they? Doctors lie about old age. You forget something and they say Alzheimer this and Alzheimer that. It’s not the forgetting that’s the problem. It’s the remembering.” She paused. “I was reading a book of stories by Jane Campbell, Cat Brushing, it’s very sensual. Anyway, it was her first published book when she was 80. One of her characters talks about the ‘persecution of remembering.’ The character, I can’t remember her name, says that we remember so much and late at night ‘remorse bites hard.’ ” “Cheery.” “Not supposed to be. You ever felt it?” A shadow passed across her friend’s eyes and she composed her mouth in a grim line. “Of course,” she said quietly. “Sure.” “You want to talk about it?” “No.” “OK, but you would think our imaginations would be in tatters by the time we get to Sea Wind Villas. But here we are, talking about the past.” “You ever see Paul again?” “That November, I took the bus to Columbia for the last football game of the season. Stayed with him in his dorm which was a definite no-no. Went to the game and then an all-you-caneat buffet place that didn’t like the students coming in and scarfing down all the food. We cruised downtown after. Went out into the sticks and drove by a tent revival—see a lot of those in South Carolina. We parked and went in. Preacher up front chided his audience about this and that. Halfway through, he asked if there were any couples in the congregations who wanted to get married in the eyes of Jesus. Paul pulled me up there and I was too buzzed to resist. The preacher came over, peeked down my halter top, and put his hand on my forehead the other on Paul’s. “Do you believe in the Lord God as your savior?” he asked. “Paul said yes. I nodded.” “The preacher told us we were married in the eyes of the Lord. He had strong hands and gave us a little shove and we fell into the arms of some of the preacher’s people and they showed us a donation plate and asked for money to do God’s work. Paul dug into his pocket, grabbed some change and dumped it on the plate. He took my hand we ran out of there into the night. A beautiful fall night with lots of stars. Paul wrapped me in his arms and said, ‘Bobbi, we’re married now.’” " 'Not in the eyes of the church we aren’t.' 'This was a church. Sort of.' 'Not our church.' I told Paul to be sensible. Told him this tent revival was a carnival religion, all show. “I may have hurt his feelings. His eyes looked so funny. He said that Catholic priests put on a show. He had a point. “I told him I was getting cold and he slipped my arms into his high school letter jacket and led me back to the car. His friends joined us. Paul said let’s go dancing to celebrate and we went to one of the 3.2 bars. Paul danced with a succession of women and I just watched. There was something off about him. We’d smoked a joint in the car but he was flying high on something else. He came over and pulled me to the dance floor. Showed me how to do the Carolina Shag and I caught on pretty quick. I started dancing with another guy and looked up to see Paul hanging all over this other girl. He just wasn’t there, you know. We got back to the dorm at 2 a.m. and had to slip in the back door—the guys propped it up with a rock on weekends since curfew was midnight. The R.A.’s didn’t make a big deal of it. We got to Paul’s room and he was all over me and I pushed him away, told him I was on my period. For a second there, I saw daggers in his eyes and I thought something bad was going to happen. But his face went from some sort of madness to the look I was used to, friendly Paul, Paul the boyfriend, Paul the guy I’d known since eighth grade. He turned and stormed out of the room. “The next morning, I found my own way to the airport. Was a bit rattled when I finally got back to my dorm. Jo said I looked like shit and what happened and I said I got married and she laughed. I didn’t have the energy to tell the story but the next day in the cafeteria, the girls asked me about my trip and I told the whole story and I could tell they were worried about me. Jo put her hand on my forehead and said I was burning up and took me to the student clinic. Next thing I know I’m in the hospital with pneumonia and I miss all of my classes. I am sad and pissed off at the same time. “My parents come to pick me up and take me home early for Thanksgiving. I had to call all of my professors. I was just a basket case. I didn’t go back to school in December. The week before Christmas, Mom brings me a letter. ‘Who do you know at Fort Jackson?’ ” “Nobody,” I said. She handed me the letter. It was from Paul. He addressed me as his ‘Dear wife.’ He then wrote he’d got draft number five in the Selective Service Lottery on Dec. 1 and didn’t like school anyway and had joined up the next day and now was in basic at Fort Jackson. His last line: I guess this is goodbye. He signed it ‘Your Devoted Husband.’ ” Carol grabbed her hand. “You’re not going to tell me he got killed in Vietnam?” “I am not. It was worse. He came back a junkie. It was my senior year and I was walking on the beach in Daytona with my new boyfriend and a car went by that looked familiar. A guy got out of the back seat, while it was moving, tripped and rolled in the sand, beer flew out of his hand. Spring break, you know, not unusual. You can drive on the beach there, or at least you could back then. Guys sitting up, swigging Bud, driving their convertibles with their feet. Guys trying to be cool for all the girls who were also trying to be cool. Paul stood, brushed the sand away, staggered, and looked right at me. “He yelled: ‘My lovely wife!’ Almost got hit by a car and stumbled over to me. My new boyfriend gave me a strange look. Paul wrapped me in his arms. Reeked of beer and sweat. He tried to kiss me and his beard scratched my face and I pushed him and he fell on his ass. He got right back up and stared at me with those dagger eyes I saw in the South Carolina dorm that night. My poor boyfriend, well, ex-boyfriend by the end of the day, walked over to challenge him. Paul looked down at Lloyd who was about six inches shorter but muscular. Both seemed ready for a fight. Paul just looked down at him, shook his head, and stumbled off, splashing through the shore break like he was going somewhere. “The last time I saw him was at the 25th high school reunion, 1994. He asked me to dance, told me he had met his second wife at an NA meeting, said he got his shit together working with fellow vets at the VA. I was a little drunk and wanted to kiss him right there, not him in his 40s but his 18-yearold face, that lovely face. But it didn’t exist anymore. I looked over at our table and saw my husband flanked by two of my female classmates who never gave me the time of day in the hallowed halls of St. Francis. I told Paul I had to rescue my husband. I squeezed his hand and let go. As I walked away he said, ‘We’re still married, you know.’ I kept walking, showed him the back of my hand and was just about to respond with ‘ No we are not.’ But the words caught in my throat. I turned to him and said, ‘I know.’ He smiled. He was missing a couple teeth but it was still a beautiful smile. I got to our table, shooed away those she-devils, took Jim upstairs and had my way with him. Several times.” She paused. Saw Jim’s face as it was that night, and then his still-life face in the casket at the front of the church. “I miss him.” Carol took her hand. “I miss my crazy Richard. Went too soon. It still stings.” The lobby loudspeaker crackled into life. “Ladies and gentlemen, luncheon will now be served at Sea Wind Villas Food Court.” There was a lot of shuffling and squeaky rollator wheels. “You ready for tuna surprise?” asked Carol. “No,” Bobbi said. “What about Mickey D’s? I love those little burgers with the shiny cheese and tiny onions and pickles and ketchup. We used to get ‘em for fifteen cents.” “Gosh you’re old.” She gripped Bobbi’s arm. “Let’s get it delivered.” Carol plucked her phone from the mostly empty spaces of her bra, punched in a few buttons and made the selections. “And two chocolate shakes,” Bobbi added. “Large.” Carol punched a few more keys, clicked off the app, and slipped it back in her bra. “Fifteen minutes. Want to eat on the patio?” Bobbi nodded, used the cane for leverage to stand. They took each other’s arms and walked into the sunshine. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Sometimes an idea kicks around in my head until I stumble upon a way to tell it. I first wrote this as straight narrative and then reminiscence. It’s about a dream I’ve had over the years and I decided to let the dream tell the story through one of the women characters. I thought it added a bit of magic to the telling. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MICHAEL SHAY writes short stories and essays. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies including Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams from Coffee House Press. His first book of short stories is The Weight of the Body . He recently completed an historical novel set in 1919 Colorado with the working title Zeppelins over Denver . Next - Worry Poem by Alexandra van de Kamp Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue LETTERS FROM HOME: Surprise Lake Camp, Cold Spring, New York, 1957 Robert Cooperman Knowing I was lost-puppy homesick, my mother wrote every day, breezy letters to let me know that she, Dad, and my kid brother missed me (about which I was dubious) and were hoping I was enjoying myself, (I wasn’t) and eating healthy, delicious camp food, which, if she were fed that slop she’d have rescued me immediately from that Sing-Sing. I read her letters once, reassurance there was still a world beyond the metaphorical barbed wire of the camp, and didn’t look at them again. The one I did treasure was from my dad, his chicken-scratch not my mom’s pen-beautiful cursive: a man who wrote only when figuring out his piecework-pay for the week. He told me how the Dodgers— recently absconding for L.A. like sneak thieves—were doing; both of us wishing them rat-chattering torment in the NL cellar, forever, and confided he’d made a big score on a bet, and had a surprise for me when I was freed from that pit of deepest hell: my reward for sticking it out and not whining, too much. "Letters from Home" is part of a forthcoming collection entitled A Tale of Two Summers . Some kids love going to summer camp. I wasn’t one of them. So I cherished the letters I got from my mother, and even more, the one I got from my father since he never wrote anything except to figure out his weekly pay and to work the daily crossword puzzles. And of course I cried my little wussy eyes out with each letter. Previous ROBERT COOPERMAN, "a Brooklyn boy, right down to a B.A. at Brooklyn College," moved to Denver in 1974 to study in the joint Literature-Creative Writing Program, and received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and 19th Century British Literature. He has taught English at the University of Georgia and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He lives in Denver with his wife, Beth. His volume In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Pub. Co., 1999) won the Colorado Book Award in 2000. coloradopoetscenter.org/poets/cooperman_robert Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue EXTRAS AT THE GATES OF EDEN Alison Moore They were hired for the crowd scene, the one near the end where Eve resists temptation—a cheering section, of sorts, for humanity. But they were never called, nor sent home with severance pay. So they wait patiently, then not so patiently, as humans do. The Styrofoam cups and newspapers, which at first were put neatly into trashcans now blow freely, sticking between the bars of the gleaming gates of Eden. It seemed like a good gig at the time, but they’ve just run out of cream; the catering truck departs. Rumors arrive: They got it in one take, Eve was a pushover, the snake handler didn’t even get overtime, let alone scale. In anger, he left the snake behind. It’s coiled now, in the tree, listening to the grumbling outside the gate. All but one finally go home. A boy peers through the bars at the tree still heavy with uneaten fruit, at the serpent, disconsolate now, in the boughs. “Want one?” asks the serpent, half- heartedly, trying to look interested again. But the boy, having read the script, says, “No way— look what happened to her.” The serpent contemplates the clever little face, then watches the strong back of Eve still visible in the distance heading out into the world, before she had a word for home. Subject now to climate and natural disaster, the myriad dilemmas of the wondering mind. Rent to pay, loves to start and end for the right or wrong reasons, the heartbreaking desires of her children for all the flimsy things the world is already hard at work making. The shadow of her own death, throwing itself over everything, dogging her to the grave. Traffic jams and bad connections, chain letters, and real estate scams, shoddy workmanship and dead-end jobs, unpublished novels and always, always men who will try to trick her. All this for knowledge of the fine line between good and evil. What a trade-off, the serpent thinks, but not unkindly. He knows what was lost on the fundamentalist screenwriter, what slipped through the script, was the metaphor of bitten fruit: skin broken open, the risk of marred perfection for the awkward oozing ecstasy of music, sex, and art. If this is sin, he thinks, then let’s have at it. The serpent stares at the fox- faced little boy, flicks his forked tongue once, for special effect. “Chicken,” he hisses. “Eve,” he says, “had nerve.” I have to admit I view the story of the Garden of Eden and Eve’s role in the expulsion as a biblical breakthrough. She may have been blamed for the loss of paradise, but I think she wanted to taste all of the world, not just some of it. In order to do that, she had to see the serpent as part of the whole picture, not the shadow of Satan and temptation. In my mind, she did the right thing: she bit down and broke the law. Previous ALISON MOORE was conceived in the caretaker’s cottage of the Harriet Beecher Stowe estate and born in Stockbridge, MA. Since then, she has traveled extensively, written and published both poetry and prose, and graduated from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Alison is the author of four books of fiction, the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fiction fellowships, and a Dobie/Paisano fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in a vintage Spartan trailer in Driftwood, TX, with a rescue dog named Honey. substack.com/@alisonmoore Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue RIVER DOG AND 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 THE CURSE OF SEVENTY EIGHT Mona Mehas My sister just turned seventy-nine; I called on her birthday, said congrats. “I broke the curse!” she said, “Damn the stats!” I’m afraid to take this as a sign. Sperm-donor passed at seventy-eight; my sister just turned seventy-nine. Sisters called him Dad, with blood aligned— no, his sperm does not a dad equate. At seventy-eight, our mother died; she’d a weak heart and a crooked spine. My sister just turned seventy-nine— I’m growing old, my age amplified. First sister, same age. Was it bloodline? At dinner, unspoken, thinly veiled superstition and fear, now exhaled— my sister just turned seventy-nine. "The Curse of Seventy-Eight, from my book Hand-Me-Downs (LJMcD Communications, 2024) , deals with the day I came to grips with my own mortality. Previous MONA MEHAS is a retired disabled teacher in Indiana, USA, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize (Paddler Press , 2023, and TV-63 , 2025), and for Best New Poet (Lucky Jefferson , 2024), with eight published chapbooks. Mona's work has appeared in multiple publications and online museums. She works with Cicada Song Press and Engage! , an online Star Trek fan magazine. Mona is a former President of the Poetry Society of Indiana and is Indiana Co-Leader of Authors Against Book Bans . She is editing her second novel while perpetually distracted by her next chapbook. monamehas.net Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue FROM COTTON TO WOOL ... and Beyond Alex Barr It was the worst year of my youth, and who did I end up working for? That blustering mountebank Aeneas Kelly.* When we first met, I was a bus conductor. The job was meant to fill the summer vacation between second and third years at university, but now there was no third year. I had dropped out. For a year I had endured a weird eye disorder with no physical cause, which made reading almost impossible. Because it was labelled ‘psychosomatic,’ I was having psychiatric treatment. This consisted of an hour a week lying drugged alone in a small room spouting rubbish, and taking mysterious red and blue pills. My fiancée was cooling on me and would soon break off our engagement—not that I blame her. The Garrick, an amateur theater in my hometown of Stockport in the North of England, said I had to spend a year working in the scene dock before I could audition for a part, so no relief there. Aeneas did public relations for my father, who ran a laboratory researching felt for hats. I don’t know why a competent, self-sufficient scientist like Dad needed such a charlatan to promote his work. But by 1960, few men wore fedoras, so maybe he worried about his future. He certainly worried about mine, which was why he arranged the job with Aeneas. Trainee management consultant, office junior, gopher? My role was never defined. I still see Aeneas enter the office, weary from some expedition. He looked like a cross between Nikita Khrushchev and Danny DeVito—round head, chunky body. He would put down his briefcase, stand hunched in his black wool overcoat, and sigh heavy exhalations which blew out his top lip. It was hard to tell what he was thinking, but it seemed life wasn’t treating him fairly. There were four strands to his organization: management consultancy, light engineering, PR, and ‘research facilities,’ whatever they were. He had been ‘in cotton’ all his working life and now had an office in Manchester’s Royal Exchange, ten miles from my hometown. When that office oppressed me, I would hurry down to the vast empty floor where cotton was once traded, and study the display—like a giant scoreboard—of the last day’s figures. An elegant theater now occupies that floor, and playgoers can still see that relic of ‘Cottonopolis.’ Ah, Cottonopolis. Back then in 1960 the title was fading. In the city of dark satanic mills and gritty businessmen, replacing old machinery was uneconomical and labour was cheaper in the East. Maybe there was bad karma from the blockade-running days when Manchester needed slave-produced cotton from the Confederacy, even though the workers, despite being laid off, supported the Union. But I cared for none of this. The red and blue pills made me bovine and apathetic. I dated a few girls but must have seemed halfhearted, so nothing gelled. I was still in love with my fiancée. The office number was one more than her house number, so I felt fate had thrust me away from her. My work with Aeneas felt like a penance for failure. He sent me to a dismal trading estate, to a factory where pressure vessels were lined with lead. He had devised a Byzantine bonus system for the workers which he wanted me to understand. He also wanted me to learn the rudiments of estimating lead-lining, to the annoyance of the head estimator, who complained, “You’re training as a management consultant, Barr, not an estimator!” But there was worse to come. In Aeneas’s company prospectus, with its glowing assurance of splendid service, was the sentence All our employees are graduates. So to save the phenomena, he said I had to finish my abandoned physics degree. The red and blue pills left me no energy to resist. In a grim classroom at the College of Technology in Manchester’s sooty twin town of Salford, I experienced what T.S. Eliot calls “the rending pain of re-enactment.” I lasted a few weeks. The eye problem lingered. I still couldn’t leap the hurdles of quantum theory and vectors. And anyway, I realized the prospectus was false. It conjured up a bustling headquarters out in the Cheshire countryside packed with graduates, the Manchester office being but a branch, but whenever I phoned the alleged HQ to relay a message, the same voice answered: that of a middle-aged woman who sounded (was it my imagination?) less receptionist than housewife. The red and blue pills made me sleepy and I was glad when Aeneas went out so I could doze in his inner sanctum. I sometimes woke with a start when he returned from an outing. (He reminded me of that when our relationship reached its dénouement.) On one expedition, he found a small machine for printing information on the ends of spools of cotton thread. He bought the patent and sent me to buy oil-filled bearings. A mildly spoken middle-aged engineer appeared, commissioned to take the machine and build more like it. Meanwhile Aeneas sent me to a printing-ink firm to ask whether we could print several spools from one charge. (Why?) I was told printing ink is designed to release in one go. I heard no more about the project. He gave me a weird task I was too compliant to resist, which in these days of photocopiers, office printers, and word programs seems medieval. I had to type identical letters to mill owners, inviting them to buy a tension meter for warp threads on looms. A most inefficient process, and I was no great typist. After I produced dozens of letters he sent me to sell the machine. The idea was to place it against a warp thread, pull the trigger, and read the dial. A mill owner tried it, the thread broke, and he said mildly, “It’s no bloody use.” I had no answer. When I reported back, Aeneas just grunted. Another project I heard no more of. He turned to cotton converting—buying raw woven cotton and finishing it. I thought I would see him bleach fabric to make lighter colors, starch it for body and shine, mercerize it with sodium hydroxide to strengthen the fibers, calender (industrial iron) it, and even print it with colorful patterns. A nattily dressed Egyptian appeared with his charming wife, and Aeneas took the couple to lunch. A few weeks later, a hefty roll of raw fabric four-and-a-half feet long was deposited in the inner sanctum. There it stayed the rest of my time there. The cloth was full of end-breaks, little knots where broken warp threads had been tied. Egypt, it seemed, had need of the tension meter. There was also the novel. Aeneas told me, “In 1939 I had a play about to go on in the West End. The war killed it.” His latest oeuvre was handwritten in those familiar six-by-four exercise books with shiny red covers and avoirdupois weights on the back. Thanks to my limited typewriter skills he had employed a secretary, a modest young woman from the West of Ireland, and asked her to type it. If her Catholic sensibilities were disturbed by the hero “exploring the welts of Miss Jones’s stockings” as prelude to sex, she gave no sign. I sneaked a look. There was something familiar about it. The characters worked for an organization offering management consultancy, light engineering, PR, and research facilities. I don’t know what became of the novel. The Irish secretary left and was replaced by a girl I dated—until she ditched me because I laughed at finding her hair full of hairpins. And because I squeezed her breast (this being the pre-pill purgatory of the early sixties). I never explored the welts of her stockings. Cotton failed to satisfy so Aeneas turned to wool. In my pill-induced stupor I didn’t realize this transition would change my life, and that after drudgery as a pupa I could take wing. My boss had spotted an opportunity. One of his PR clients made shrink-resistant woolen garments. He decided to start a magazine promoting the entire wool industry, with backing from the Wool Industries Research Association, Bradford Dyers Association, makers of industrial dryers, and anyone else he could lure in, while sneaking his clients in under their skirts. The Wool Record and Textile World was the technical voice of the industry—this new magazine would be the trumpet (or puff) of hope. He sent me across the Pennine Hills to sell advertising space to hard-headed Bradford wool men. I don’t think he expected results (and there were none), just wanted me to know it’s a tough world out there. Back in the office I practiced writing articles. One exercise was to explain the manufacture of terry cloth, another to describe the contents of a fashion brochure. I struggled with words that seemed uncontrollable and felt waves of panic in case my eyesight let me down, but at last felt the satisfaction of a piece coming together. I learned to choose typefaces, lay out pages, edit text to fit them, create halftone and line blocks, use Ben Day dots, crop photographs, and deal with a printing firm. Something in me woke up despite the pills. I tried to imagine living in Bradford and decided the first thing I would do would be to join a drama group. I passed my driving test and borrowed Dad’s car to take girls I dated to dances at the Winter Gardens in Buxton. With one girl the relationship even lasted several months, and only fizzled when a letter from my ex unsettled me. It came from Switzerland where she was a courier for a travel firm. She asked whether I remembered early mornings when we went jogging together. My reply saying I still loved her probably landed after she left the hotel. Would arriving in time have made it alter my destiny? I doubt it. Much later, in a letter saying she was about to marry, she wrote, “I had all the time I was in Switzerland to think about it.” Aeneas’s wool magazine arrived from the printers looking good. Fate was on my side when I ran into an old pal from my days in the Scouts. (His nickname Elzy was short for Beelzebub, I have no idea why.) He showed me a book called How to Get a Better Job . I took its advice and applied to be an editorial assistant on a technical magazine in London. Preparing for the interview I sat in the echoing rotunda of Manchester Central Library and studied a copy. The title was in a font called Chisel which has an air of reliability. Chisel is rarely seen today, but a local boatyard uses it and it brings back the excitement of those days. I showed the wool magazine at the interview and got the job. When I returned Aeneas was furious. “You’ve done nowt for me except fall asleep!” “I’ve produced a good magazine for you.” “Get out. Now !” So I went. I’m grateful to Aeneas for starting my career in journalism, which reached its zenith four years later when I was wire editor of The Wichita Beacon (after which I became an architect). And for memories: the din of a shed full of power looms, the twitching of the leather straps driving the shuttles, and the tang of hot oil, the scent of lanolin in a wool-combing shed in Bradford, and other sights, sounds, smells, and personalities of a vanishing textile empire. I don’t know what happened to the wool magazine. I don’t know when Dad ended his PR contract, and it’s too late to ask. I discover that Aeneas died in North Wales in 1981. Calling him a blustering mountebank and charlatan is unfair—like him, I’ve had projects and plays come to nothing, I too scribble in notebooks and indulge in fantasies, and I often sigh blowing out my top lip. When I moved to London I was given the lead in an amateur production of The Winter’s Tale . Quite a change from The Garrick. At the same drama group I met my future (and present) wife, who urged me off the pills. My ex faded into the past without regret. I remember that on the train to that interview in London I read Peyton Place, in which a character says moving to a different city makes you a different person. It does. *Not his real name, but with the same flavor. This memoir records my transition from academic failure, a broken romance, and despair to a breakthrough into hope, a rewarding new career, and a new lasting love affair. Previous ALEX BARR 's publications include two short fiction collections and three poetry collections, the most recent of which is Light and Dark (Kelsay Books, 2024) . He is assembling a collection of nonfiction. alexbarr.co.uk Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue HAIRBRUSH David Romanda I hand her a hairbrush (her brush). You have the floor , I say. She says, Brush or no brush, you’re going to interrupt me before I can finish. That’s bullshit , I say. See? she says. You finished your sentence , I say. At least twenty seconds pass. She’s holding the brush, but doesn’t speak. I reach for the brush. She shakes her head. She says, I’m not finished. “Hairbrush” was originally published in Columbia Review . Often, when you’re fighting (arguing) in a relationship, neither party is completely “following the rules”—that’s the breakthrough in this one. 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

Fake Soldiers by Kase Johnstun With fake soldiers in fake armies, we fought over fake boundaries, rivers, mountains, and countries. Our fake generals led men on fake horses into fake battle, and the roll of the digital dice decided who stayed alive and who died on the electronic battlefield made up, at its core, of ones and zeros. On December 31st, 1999, my older brother and I, in our midtwenties, played RISK, the game of world dominance, on my PlayStation 2. We retreated to our cabin at the edge of Yellowstone Park on the Idaho and Wyoming border with enough wine, beer, and potato chips to make it through the apocalypse. It was the eve of the Y2K disaster, when the world’s computers would send nuclear missiles into the air, where the World Bank and credit history of all the world’s people would crumble, and where fires would spark from the fingertips of civilized people thrown back into savagery without computers. Walls of snow, stacked five to six feet tall, surrounded the little cabin. The tops of baby trees peeked out from the snow, their lives too short to stand above the wintery ground like their elders that stretched up to the blue sky and, during the day, sliced the snow with their shadows. The sun dropped down behind the mountains before five p.m., and clouds drizzled more snow onto the already thick base that covered the ground. It was cold outside, but inside, the fire burned. Two cigars sat on the end table near the sliding glass doors that opened up to the deck. They would be saved for midnight. In the mid-1980s, my brother beat me at everything. It didn’t matter what we played, he had the upper hand, and as most older brothers do, he played the upper hand with a lot of weight. He bankrupted me in Monopoly— I went for the fat pigs on Wall Street—Park Place and Boardwalk—while he became the slumlord of the Avenues (Baltic, Mediterranean, Oriental, etc.), stacked up hotels, and made the district right after “GO” a money pit for my flying shoe. He outwitted me at UNO. He knew when to back things up, when to keep things going, and when to turn one of the wild cards I had saved up all game into my own demise. One day, sitting on the floor of his bedroom, bored in the late days of summer when the 103-degree heat finally pushed us indoors, my brother laid RISK out on the floor. I was sick of losing, so earlier that year I vowed to never place another soldier in harm’s way. Hadn’t I killed enough men? Hadn’t I waged pointless battles on imaginary borders that never ended in peace? Countless lives of men thrown to the ground on the whims of their leaders who looked down on them from the comfort of a carpeted room in the middle of summer. Hadn’t I learned my lesson? No matter how much I fought, I would always lose it all, eventually being pushed into exile with no capital or government or land to call my own. “Let’s play RISK,” he said. His eyebrows and lips turned upward with the vision of another imminent victory and the slaughter of my men. “No,” I said. “I’m not playing again. I always lose.” “Come on. What else are you going to do?” he asked. At the time, he was right. “I’ll even spot you Australia.” My greed welled up inside of me. I could own a continent right from the start. I would own all its extra armies. I could demolish Indonesia and its people with two turns. “I’m in,” I said, thinking he had sealed his own fate. I owned Australia, and with much bravado, I pushed forward into Indonesia and Thailand before his Asian forces punished me on the Indian mountains and forced my troops backward. Then the onslaught came in full force, and within two turns, he had vanquished my armies, rolling the dice and his forces across the globe, pushing me out of Kansas and Ontario, cornering and conquering me on the Sahara, and, one army by one army, killing my Australian stronghold until I had one guy standing on Cape Pasley, begging for mercy. I had enough, and instead of waving my white flag with honor, I flipped the entire board upside down, tossing armies across the room, into the AC vent, onto piles of dirty clothes, and beneath my brother’s bed. I was done losing. If I couldn’t conquer the world, I couldn’t handle the thought of anyone else doing it. It was supposed to be mine, all mine. “You cheated!” I yelled, the world upside down at my feet. “I can’t cheat,” he said calmly, which made me even angrier. “ The dice do what they do. I’m just better.” “You cheated,” I yelled. Then I stormed out of the room and vowed to never play him again. In 1999, some people far away from our secluded cabin partied, some sang along with Prince, some prayed, some hid in shelters, and others slept without worries—midnight in 1999 had finally come. We held our controllers in our hands and watched our armies fight on the screen. Our brains floated in a bath of wine, and our game of RISK had yet to be completed. We knew the game could stretch out for many more hours, so my brother grabbed the cigars from the table, and we walked out onto the snow-covered deck and beneath the moon. The cold surrounded us. It was quiet, very quiet, like there-wasn’tanother-soul-for-miles quiet. My brother looked at his watch and counted down to the end of the millennium, a slow methodical count that added to the feeling of seclusion. We knew that if things really did go to hell that night that we would be together out there in the wilderness. “It’s time,” he said. “Let’s do this,” I said. I wish I would have said something less cheesy, but none of us really believed in Y2K. He handed me one of the cigars, lit his own in his mouth, and then handed me the lighter. I clumsily lit mine and inhaled the rich smoke into my lungs. It warmed my gut. We stood in silence for a few minutes. Snow flickered on its descent. At the end of my cigar, I saw the bright red flame that circled the cigar edges like the sun burning at the edges of a solar eclipse, bright reds sparking out from behind the curved edge, but beyond the cigar, no fires burned, no sirens screamed, and no missiles cut through the sky. We stood in the snow until the cigars burned down to the edges of our index fingers and thumbs. Then we walked back into the cabin to play a game between brothers. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link First published in 1:1000 . “Fake Soldiers” was published a decade ago, but it is the one I read 7 out of 10 times for nonfiction readings. It is by far a favorite, still timely and sadly, timeless. Back Back to Current Issue .................................................................................................................................................................................... KASE JOHNSTUN is an award-winning essayist, memoirist, and Manager for The Utah Center for the Book (Library of Congress). Kase is the author of the award-winning memoir Beyond the Grip of Craniosynostosis (McFarland & Co., 2015), the award-winning novel Let the Wild Grasses Grow (Torrey House Press, 2021), and the novel Cast Away (Torrey House Press, 2024). kasejohnstun.com Next - First Sighting by Trish Hopkinson 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 whose courage and curiosity have taken her to many places across the world and around her own backyard. In all her creative practices, she celebrates the levity and gravity of wonder and connection. She and her husband live happily in Logan, Utah. dennisegclayworks.com Next

Waiting Around after Walking Around by Pablo Neruda by Trish Hopkinson It so happens, I am tired of being a woman. And it happens while I wait for my children to grow into the burning licks of adulthood. The streaks of summer sun have gone, drained between gaps into gutters, and the ink-smell of report cards and recipe boxes cringes me into corners. Still I would be satisfied if I could draw from language the banquet of poets. If I could salvage the space in time for thought and collect it like a souvenir. I can no longer be timid and quiet, breathless and withdrawn. I can’t salve the silence. I can’t be this vineyard to be bottled, corked, cellared, and shelved. That’s why the year-end gapes with pointed teeth, growls at my crow’s feet, and gravels into my throat. It claws its way through the edges of an age I never planned to reach and diffuses my life into dullness— workout rooms and nail salons, bleach-white sheets on clotheslines, and treacherous photographs of younger me at barbecues and birthday parties. I wait. I hold still in my form-fitting camouflage. I put on my strong suit and war paint lipstick and I gamble on what’s expected. And what to become. And how to behave: mother, wife, brave. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Waiting Around” has been published in Voicemail Poems , Nasty Women Poets Anthology , Thank You For Swallowing , PoetryPasta , Motherhood May Cause Drowsiness , East Coast Literary Review , Verse-Virtual , and was originally published by Wicked Banshee Press. This poem remains one of my all-time favorites. I wrote it before my first non-university publication and it received second place in a university contest, so this is the piece that really pushed me to seek out publication in literary magazines. I’d say in that way, it also led me to a very important step in my poetry career, which was to start my website to help other poets learn about how to get published. Today it is my most published poem and still a favorite to read at events. .................................................................................................................................................................................... TRISH HOPKINSON is the author of A Godless Ascends (Lithic Press, 2024) and an advocate for the literary arts. You can find her online at SelfishPoet.com and in western Colorado where she runs the regional poetry group Rock Canyon Poets. Next - The Problem with Mrs. P by Michael Shay Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue REACHING Terry Jude Miller In artificial light, a claw-like motif is found on the Island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Its fingers turn back the clock of man’s first art to 68,000 years ago, 232,000 solar rotations as Homo sapiens before the painter filled his mouth with ochre, spread his fingers upon stone, and spat history upon his hand, halo of red, giving meaning to something beyond the reach of explanation, an inflection only the heart can find, struggles to perfect itself through language, religion, science, and stories recorded in a new medium, by torched vision, innate to man, but as puzzling as the stars above Indonesia, that never see this creature’s masterpiece, yet the artist emerges from the place beneath ground, awed and mesmerized by their dance of light. This poem was inspired by a BBC article on the world's oldest cave art. The poem investigates how art is the springboard to language, religion, and science. Every poem I write owes itself in some way to these first artists who possessed a thought and made art from it. Previous TERRY JUDE MILLER works in academia in Houston, Texas. His poems have received multiple Pushcart nominations and have been published in Sontag Mag , Feed the Holy , Encore , Equinox , Trigger Warning Magazine , Exomorphosis , Ars Sententia , The Nature of Things , The Bayou Review , Boundless , the Poetry At Round Top Anthology , and Rattle . His latest book is People of Ink and Bone (New Dawn Unlimited, 2026) . Miller is the former 1st Vice Chancellor of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. terryjudemiller.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THE DYING ROOM Paula Harrington Our father was seventy-six when our mother died. For almost three years, he’d been taking care of her while her health failed and her mood plummeted. She morphed from a fun-loving, kind, irreverent redhead into a cranky, frightened, white-haired old woman. The whole time, Dad somehow managed to remain solicitous of her. He loved to cook, so he would make her tasty little treats. A pioneer in the kitchen, he was hip to small plates long before most Americans knew they existed. His real agenda, though, was to get our mother to eat something. Anything. Her illness had made her lose her appetite, so whatever he cooked—no matter how tempting — she’d turn her nose up at it. He’d bring her a ramekin of ratatouille, say, with a flaky fresh biscuit on the side. Or a half-serving of baked stuffed scrod with two spears of steamed asparagus and a dab of lemon aioli. Maybe a few spoonfuls of his trademark pea soup flavored by a hefty hambone. “Here, Peg, try this,” he’d say, as if she were his taster and he was seeking her professional opinion. She would take it politely and thank him. But we all knew she didn’t mean it. What she really wanted to do was throw the food to the floor and never touch any of it again. But as furious as she was about getting sick and enfeebled, she did her best to fake it. She’d scrunch up her face, take a careful nibble, then concoct some excuse for putting the food aside. “Mmm,” she’d say. “Very good, Kev. Maybe just a little too salty.” Or “Oh, scrod. Wonderful. Did you remember to put dried parsley in the breading?” So Dad realized he had lost the woman he loved—the “real Peg”—well before she died. And we all knew we had lost our beloved mother. The day she finally left us for good, we dressed her in a coral-colored nightgown and matching robe. She lay all afternoon and into the evening in a hospital bed we’d set up downstairs while friends came and went to say goodbye. One brought her yellow roses, another rubbed sweet-smelling cream on her hands. She was already in a morphine fugue, though, only letting out the occasional noise that sounded like a cross between a mumble, chuckle, and growl. I guess you could say we gave her an old-fashioned Irish wake while she was technically still alive. After night fell, our brother came over with his guitar from his home nearby. Then he, my two sisters, and I sang Mum out. Our last song, I remember, was “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead. There is a road, no simple highway Between the dawn and the dark of night And if you go, no one may follow That path is for your steps alone. Like a child again, I cried to myself, No, Mum, no! Don’t find that highway. But, of course, she already had. When she breathed her last, Dad was upstairs in their bedroom of forty years. We had encouraged him to get some rest, but the truth is I don’t think he wanted to be there when Mum actually passed. My brother didn’t either; he went home around 2 a.m. I understand how they felt. If you’d told me I could have been in the same room when my mother died, I would have said, impossible . Now I am glad I was there; it seemed only fair. She brought me into the world and I helped send her out. I found a poignant symmetry in that. So, in the end, only my sisters and I were present. Just the women of our family, which also seemed about right. For all our adult lives, the four of us had stayed up together whenever I, the family wanderer, came home to visit. My sisters would drive down from their homes in New Hampshire and Maine, and we would chat away with Mum about our lives, family friends, politics, books, and world events until we fell asleep in place. On the sofa, in the arm chairs, sprawled on the rug, flopping against each other, sharing sofa throws and pillows for bedding. That last night of her life, it felt only natural for us to lie down on the floor around her bed. We looked at each other and knew what to do. “The party’s over, Mum,” one of my sisters said. “We’re shutting our eyes and going to sleep.” Then we stayed still and quiet until, minutes later, we heard her death rattle. “The dining room has become the dying room,” my other sister whispered. Then we got up from the floor, linked arms, and went to tell Dad. "The Dying Room" first appeared in Grande Dame Literary Journal . It tells the story of my family's coming together for an old-fashioned Irish wake for my mother while she was technically still alive. My personal breakthrough was that I could be present in the room when she actually died because "she brought me into the world and I was helping to bring her out. I found a poignant symmetry in that." Previous PAULA HARRINGTON is a Maine writer and the former director of the Farnham Writers' Center at Colby College, where she also taught writing and literature. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris and is the author, with Ronald Jenn, of Mark Twain & France (University of Missouri, 2017). Her essays have appeared in 1455's Movable Type , Grande Dame Literary , Colby Magazine , and the Mark Twain Annual . Before entering academia, she was a newspaper reporter and columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Next