The Kindness of Stranger [Part Eight] by Lou Poster

X

The heat was another mountain that summer I was twelve, another something to be dealt with on the way to and from living. Michael and I lay shirtless in the clover, swatting at sweat bees and picking around for the four-leafers that our grandfather made seem so easy to find. 

“There ain’t no damn way,” he said.

“It’s true.” I had seen Margaret Weston at the creek that morning, and she flashed me her white cotton panties from across the water, brave as a bull, and smiled.

“No way.” He squirmed around, lying on his stomach. I couldn’t tell if he was uncomfortable out of embarrassment, or had a hard-on, or what. Reading people has never been my long suit. “She’s too good for you.” 

“The hell’s that s’posed ta mean, ya little shit? She aint no better’n any damn one else.” I spit hard at him, right between his shoulder blades, and he hollered and rolled instantly on to his back, wriggling around in the grass trying to scrape the hocker off, and I could see his shorts were swollen. I pointed and laughed. His tears were instant and he ran off to the house to tell mom, his favorite activity.

The beating that I caught from that one was different in that it was delivered by my mother herself. Usually she played judge and jury, our father the grim executioner. I had never heard some of the words that she used in describing poor Margaret before, as she laid into me with her wooden spoon, not even bothering with the ceremony of bending me over a chair, going at my head and hands, neck and chest, and particularly the groin, but I tried resolutely to remember them and their context for later use.  

About a week later we were taking some tall grass for hay in the long meadow, Mother scowling from her perch atop the tractor, Michael and I baling away behind. As she turned to make another pass by us, I lay down across her path, just my feet protruding into the cut grass from the tall. Michael saw and started yelling, barely audible over the din of the motor. She slowed to a stop just a foot or so from my head, practically screeching “What in all hell’s gotten into you, boy? What’s the GOD DAMN MATTER with you?” She dismounted and ran around to my side in the tall grass, kicking at my ribs and screaming “Git UP!” and threatening the brimstone violence of my father. But I figured he was tired of beating us, maybe.  When she bent down to pull me up by the arm I swung the large rock I had pocketed that morning, catching her solidly on the temple. She went limp and silent on top of me, and I had to slide out from under. Michael looked on, stunned mute. I climbed behind the wheel of the tractor and released the brake, lowered the blades, and eased out the clutch. When I felt the rear tires bump over her I jumped clear of the machine and let it continue rolling toward the trees at the far end of the meadow. I walked back to Michael where he sat blank and wordless in the fresh crimson stubble. “If you ever say a word about this, I swear to God, I’ll do this to Dad, too. And Frederick. And William. And I will save you for fucking last.” Then I ran like hell over the rise toward the house, working up tears as I ran, to tell of the horrible accident, how Michael had fallen in the path of the tractor, that mother tried to help him and the handbrake must’ve slipped again, how she threw him aside and he barely survived. From then on, until he went to that hospital down in Phillipi, Michael never said a word. About anything. The only reaction I could ever get out of him was when I’d sit up in that tall tractor, grinning over the wheel, and wink down at him.  

XI

I awoke to the smell of the bone pile choking me, vomit filling my mouth and nearly aspirating my lungs, violently gagging and heaving as I thrashed my head to the side, but there was strangely no sound save the splash of bile on the rock at my back. There was pain in my throat, my face, unbelievable pain, crushing and searing at the same time.

My body tried to cry out, but again no sound would come. I looked up at the sky through the bars of the iron grate and remembered that in my desire to spend our last hours together I had kept Helen conscious for her preparations, and so she would have learned to not only slice the vocal cords but to remove the tongue and lips as well. Stripped naked and chained to the stone I felt the slow trickle of water running down my spine, along the back of my thighs, and turning my head away from the vomit looked directly into the eye sockets of my own father’s skull. To my other side lay Duncan’s broken body, cut through the belly and slowly bled dry. The involuntary hissing sounds emanating from my face intensified. I could hear them like a distant stream, unconnected to any apparent source.

Helen appeared and knelt on the grate, holding my pistol in her remaining hand. She leaned forward so that her disfigured face was directly above mine, our eyes locked in synchronistic oblivion, soundlessly, for what felt like hours, the words “JACOB BAXTER DID THIS” written on her truncated arm in black permanent marker. I tried in vain to plead with her, to say her name once more, to scream for help. She only looked more deeply into my eyes and slowly shook her head.  In time she raised the pistol slowly to her temple and ended the long silence, her blood pouring through the grate and filling my eyes, running along my cheeks and into my ears. I knew already what had to be done and set about pulling my wrist up toward my mouth.  I worked briefly at it, my jaw making the right motions and wet suckling sounds in the blood, but getting nowhere, and I suddenly had an image of a baby trying to eat an ear of buttered corn.  I began to chuckle, and the chuckle grew to uncontrollable laughter, but the only sound was a staccato hissing from my ruined head, from which Helen Cooke had cleverly removed the teeth.

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Tune in to Dispatches Every Sunday to Continue Reading “The Kindness of Strangers” by Lou Poster.

Start from the beginning of “The Kindness of Strangers” on SVJ’s Features.

This is Lou’s first published piece.

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Lou Poster is a Native West Virginian, current resident of the poorest county in Ohio. Appalachian songwriter/singer/storyteller. Son of a third-generation coal miner.

Greg Abbott Can Go Fuck Himself by Leigh Chadwick

It was not the girl’s blood, but she took it, smeared it all over her cheeks, the same cheeks her mother kissed before she walked down the street to get on the school bus, and as I sit on my couch and watch the news, I can’t stop wondering what her mother fed her for breakfast that morning, before she borrowed her friend’s blood, before the DNA swabs and the cookie jars filled with thoughts and prayers, and as I continue to watch the news, I can’t stop wondering when a number stops being a number, or when fog grows weeds. I’d ask my therapist, but I don’t have a therapist. Is that something I should admit? I am sad in a sad way. I haven’t felt the same since I imagined Sandy walking around with a hook for a hand. Still, yesterday my daughter said the word bubbles. Still, I’ve never shot a gun, but this morning I fed my daughter waffles—her mouth full as she hummed the word yum in reverse. Right now, she has her thumb in her mouth, her stuffed rabbit clutched against her chest, as she watches an episode of Sesame Street. What the politicians on the news keep saying is that two doors is too many, and that locks don’t have to be broken in order to not work. By the time the episode of Sesame Street ends, my daughter has dropped her stuffed rabbit and is reaching for her wand of bubbles. Soon, I will take her outside, spin the wand full of soapy water around as she chases the bubbles, trying to catch what was never meant to stay.

—

Leigh Chadwick is the author of the poetry collection Your Favorite Poet (Malarkey Books, 2022) and the collaborative poetry collection Too Much Tongue (Autofocus, 2022), co-written with Adrienne Marie Barrios. Her poetry has appeared in Salamander, Passages Identity Theory, The Indianapolis Review, Pithead Chapel, and Hobart, among others. She is the executive editor of Redacted Books and is also a regular contributor at Olney Magazine, where she conducts the "Mediocre Conversations" interview series. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.

The Kindness of Strangers [Part Seven] by Lou Poster

VIII

“Jacob, I think I’d like to stay.”

She stood on the porch that third day, watching me fuss with the Edsel. 

“What’s that?” I asked, wiping my hands on a shop towel and walking around the front of the car.

“I’d like to stay here awhile, with you, if that’s alright.”

Two days later we found Duncan loping through the clover, covered in fat ticks, gaunt and dehydrated. We fed and bathed him, her nurturing demeanor a magical effect, and he thrived.  I built a swing in a tree up the hill where we could watch the sun set longer together, ease into our evenings, playful those first few times but gathering in intensity like winds through the valley heralding storms. Some nights I found myself gasping and exhausted, the leather strop still in my hand, her body welted and bruised from waist to knee, asking for more. We filled our days tending the garden in the flat beside the driveway, canning vegetables, reading aloud to each other from the medical books old Mildred had left behind, hiking around the steep ridges. And then, just as suddenly, it was over.

We sat in the kitchen and I listened to her soft crying.

“It’s just time, is all. It’s time to go. Please, try to understand. I’ve been here near two weeks, and this has been wonderful, you’re wonderful, but this is not my home. And I’m too old now to stay in someone else’s home.”

I walked around behind her chair, rubbing her back with my thumbs, small circles near the spine, broadening out around the shoulderblades, and pressed her deltoids with my palms. I leaned down and kissed her neck, just below the earlobe. “It’s OK baby, don’t cry. Shhhh. Don’t cry. No one’s leaving here today.”

I pulled the pistol from my belt and struck down hard at the base of her skull.

IX

I made my way back up along the low creek bed nearly two miles until I reached Baxter’s Run, half dragging my right leg. The kneecap had dislodged in the crash and settled in on the lateral side of the joint. I sat in the stream and banged it back into place with a smooth flat rock, but it would barely hold weight. Checking for traffic I clambered across the highway and onto the pitted gravel road, lurching toward home. How many times had I crossed this way? On bikes, in cars, in dreams? Thousands, surely, maybe tens of them. Days like pond-ripples in time, a perpetual wave, back and forth, passing through old memories of yourself.  

As I approached the house I saw that the side door was open and there was a trail of fresh blood smeared through the grass leading up to it. I followed it down into the house, past the cellar doors, and into the kitchen where an acrid haze of burned flesh filled my lungs. On the cast iron stove was a smoldering ring of cauterized skin and gristle, and here the blood trail ended. I called her name as I searched the bedroom, living room, the dining area where yellowed photographs hung, their stoic subjects yet keeping a watchful eye. I heard Duncan whining from across the yard and pushed myself back outside. Struggling up the embankment past the old cattle trough to the bone pile I found that the iron grate had been removed, shoved aside, and Duncan lay bleeding at the bottom. Next to his nearly lifeless body there in the furrow, staked into the rock, lay a riveted shackle encircling a blue-tinged hand at the wrist.  I got on my knees and reached down toward the poor dog. His eyes rolled over to meet mine as I placed my hands under his belly. He looked at me briefly, raised one eyebrow, then the other, and then he turned his head and was gone. Tears came warm and fat to my cheeks and I cried out, sobbing hoarsely as the stench of the pit overwhelmed me, and I began to get dizzy, felt the strength leave my body, trading places with pain. I could barely turn my head as I heard rustling in the brush behind me and saw her bare feet emerge, covered in dried putrescent flesh and human waste. I felt a heavy blow land below my ear, caught a flash of white light, and slipped into syrupy opioid darkness.

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Tune in to Dispatches Every Sunday to Continue Reading “The Kindness of Strangers” by Lou Poster.

Start from the beginning of “The Kindness of Strangers” on SVJ’s Features.

This is Lou’s first published piece.

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Lou Poster is a Native West Virginian, current resident of the poorest county in Ohio. Appalachian songwriter/singer/storyteller. Son of a third-generation coal miner.

SO STOP by Sean Ennis

Unfortunately, I can’t go into more detail, but oh god, I was home alone finally sharing in the mystical belief that I am just a passenger in this body.  With no one to talk to, I was getting deep. Those fireworks were to thunder like me watering Grace’s plants was to sex.  Those barking dogs were really just scared.  July 5th now, and the heat index is 103, and a man is hitchhiking on Old Taylor Rd. I mean, there’s nowhere to go. “Thanks,” he said. “I need a ride and a glass of water and a sandwich and some sunscreen.” I think I'll work on being buddies during the drive. I tell him Grace is out of town and I’m lonesome and bored. I tell him I can take him as far as Kroger.  “You don’t have to talk so much,” he said. “I’m not a child.” I prefer this route to the highway. It’s greener and less-traveled. I stow my desire to interview this hitchhiker. There’s this donkey grazing with the cows in a field on the right, and I don’t even point it out. Grace wouldn’t think picking up a hitchhiker was the best idea, but she already has five or six good friends. People need what they need, and in Grace’s case, I’ve decided she needs the weirdest, sharpest cactus at the grocery store.  After suffering unaccompanied, it's with great joy that I ride with this quiet, fearless traveler.

—

Sean Ennis’s recent work has appeared in New World Writing, JMWW, Bullshit Lit and Maudlin House. More of his work can be found at seanennis.net

The Kindness of Strangers [Part Six] by Lou Poster

VII

Sherriff Stanton eased out onto the highway southbound, craning his neck to see around me, checking for oncoming traffic. 

“Thanks for coming along, Jacob. The sooner we can get this vehicle ID’d the sooner we can get this thing done with.”

We were driving to the old mine at the head of Bent Creek, just a couple miles away. Jim said that one of his deputies had received a call that the slurry pond had breached, and when they arrived found the blue roof of an Edsel protruding from the surface.

“It’s a goddamned mess up there, I tell you what. Gonna have crews cleaning that shit up for months. But it leaked out just enough to expose our car.”

“Happy to help, Jim.” I’d had to leave Duncan behind, shut in the house, Stanton refusing my request to bring him along with a guffawed “Hell no!” and a look of disgust so thorough you’d think I asked to take a shit in his boots. Had to leave the pistol, too.

“You know, I haven’t seen you much since that business with your father, when he went missing.”

“When he ran off, Jim.”

“Yeah, ran off. Never heard from him?”

“I guess if he wanted to be heard from he wouldn’ta left. Didn’t say much even when he was around.”

“He did decline pretty quickly after your mother. I know I grilled you pretty hard back then, but you’ve got to understand my position. Man just up and leaves his son alone out there, just don’t make a lot of sense.”

“It didn’t make much sense to me either, Jim.” My head swiveled around as we passed the road to Bent Creek. “Think you missed the turn there.”

Stanton did not slow down. “There’s a couple things never really added up for me when it comes to you, Jake. Now we got this thing here. You see, what I’m finding strange about it is…is how does a girl with no idea in the world where she’s at end up with her car in a slurry pond three miles from the main highway?”

“I don’t know Jim, but if I'm gonna ID that car for you you’d better turn us around up here.”

“We can’t get down to the car to tow it out, not just yet.  Be a few days while they clear out the sludge. But you and I are gonna sit tight down at the station until we do.” He kept his eyes forward, his right hand at twelve o’clock on the wheel. “Then we’ll see about your little splice job.”

A curtain descends over my mind at times.  A dark wash that pushes the thing that pretends to be me into deep corners, cowed in impotence. I can feel my hand reaching for the wheel independent of my will, jerking down hard, sending the county truck into the ditch and rolling it over onto its roof in the creek alongside the highway. This motion is involuntary and inevitable, like falling once you’ve been pushed from a ledge. I can feel my weight being borne in my shoulder by the safety belt, my fingers working to unclasp the buckle and invert myself. I am merely a passenger looking out through my own eyes as I walk around to the driver’s side and find Sherriff Stanton on his back, bleeding into the clear shallow water half-conscious, hear his ocular orbit collapse and grind under the heel of my boot, his strangulated breath giving way to high pitched gurgles as I force his mouth and nostrils into the flowing current.

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Tune in to Dispatches Every Sunday to Continue Reading “The Kindness of Strangers” by Lou Poster.

Start from the beginning of “The Kindness of Strangers” on SVJ’s Features.

This is Lou’s first published piece.

----

Lou Poster is a Native West Virginian, current resident of the poorest county in Ohio. Appalachian songwriter/singer/storyteller. Son of a third-generation coal miner.

Happy New Year by Michael McSweeney

Sugar-brained nitrous-wired conviction demanded we choose potatoes over eggs pranking houses was Art at fifteen years old we painted pay-phoned death threats sculpted lawns with shit-spackled underwear the pizza slapped on L's new Ford pickup was an ars poetica fuck eggs we were geniuses not monsters seeking fortune across South Montford's mass-produced mazes our last New Year's Eve together D found handles of 40-year-old vodka in his father's attic relics of an abundant age splashed Red Bull in our blindness G brought a sack of 20 russets under dim starlight we skulked through lawns windows lit our way with New York's sponsored content dream to L's snowless brown-crunch lawn we launched a spud storm against the roof because the sound goddamn that sound was glory then we shrieked back to safety an hour later we unleashed a second barrage L appeared shirtless shoeless shouted Cowards Fucking Cowards because he knew us because his doorbell reminded him almost every night that his wife was gone our pride clamored for a third assault potato skins barely airborne when L the mad drunk god victim of a thousand neighborhood lies burst outside pursued us nude through the ice night to powerlines beneath the boundless hum of American energy L snared G both tumbled to sand he throttled G's neck with its newborn beard L long past mercy what would you do knowing another year had left you behind the rest of us grabbed L begged forgiveness like it was mother's milk Let Him Go Please We're Sorry Just Let Him Go.

Michael McSweeney lives in Massachusetts. His first novel, Heroman, is forthcoming from Expat Press.

The Kindness of Strangers [Part Five] by Lou Poster

VI

I walked back down to the driveway on the seventh try. The flywheel continued to spin as Helen cranked the key and pumped the accelerator, flooding the engine in the process, the singular smell of gasoline filling my nostrils, and the headlights began to dim with each gradually slowing surge. 

“Might want to give it a break there. Don’t want to run down the battery.” I could see that tears were starting to form, surface tension alone holding them fast to her lower lids. One good blink and they would start to run.

“This damn car,” she sobbed. “Nothing ever FUCKING works!” She slammed her fists in rapid succession against the steering wheel, hitting the horn occasionally, tears now streaming freely down her cheeks, the tantrum of a woman long accustomed to holding such outbursts at bay, far more fury than a disabled car could possibly warrant. I took several steps back from the car and counted twenty before speaking again.

“Now, Helen, it’s gonna be ok. There ain’t much can go wrong on a car engine that can’t be fixed pretty easy. I’ve got some tools and there’s a pretty decent parts store in town, if it comes to it. Not much I can do out here in the dark though. How about we go on back up to the house and figure out what’s next? There’s a couple rooms off the back of the house you can have all to yourself for the night if you want ‘em. You can stay there and I’ll get you all fixed up in the morning. How’s that?”

She didn’t respond for a moment, several hard heartbeats passing through my collar and into my ears while she stared at her hands, now resting on the wheel. Then she opened the heavy blue door and slid out, came to stand beside me, looking at the car.

“Alright.”

The house was once a three room log cabin, originally built by my great-great grandfather in the mid eighteen hundreds for his family. As his children had children and stayed to work the farm, additions were built. There is a storage cellar in the rear, dug back into the hillside, maintaining a constant sixty-five Fahrenheit degrees regardless of the season, and two cedar-lined rooms were added above it. Eventually the two structures were connected by a porch once the road separating them was rerouted to the front of the home, but a person still has to exit one to enter the other. This is where my brothers and I had shared bunks throughout our childhood. As we grew, Frederick and William tired of the country life and lit out for the west coast. Shortly after our mother suddenly passed, my youngest brother Michael went insane with grief, being only ten at the time, and had been in institutions ever since, leaving just myself and my father to work the land.  I had lived in the cellar rooms all my life until I awoke one day the lone occupant of this patch, solitary in the elements at the age of nineteen. 

“There are more blankets in the closet there,” I said as I replaced a burned out bulb on the wall by the bed, “and extra pillows in that chest by the wall. My brother’s wife left some clothes behind in the other room there, they’re stale but clean. Might see if anything fits if you’d like to change.” 

“I really don’t know what to say, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me, Jacob.”

“Oh, now it’s no trouble. I’ll get after that vehicle early in the morning while you sleep in, and hopefully by the time you’re up and about it’ll be out there all warmed up and ready to go for you.”

As I moved past her toward the door she caught my elbow in her hand and looked up at me. “It really means a lot that you’re helping me. Maybe you don’t see it. But it does.”

“Well, alright then. Happy to oblige. You have a good night’s rest, sleep in as long as you like. Goodnight.”

“The restroom,” she said quickly. “Is that the only one? In case I need it in the night?”

“Door to the main house is always unlocked, ma’am. Come and go as you please.”

I cleaned the kitchen and walked into the adjacent bathroom. On the back of the door still hung the leather strop my father used to beat his children. My brothers and I would sometimes joke in gallows tones about the fact that we had never seen him dress the edge of a single blade on its surface. There were whetstones aplenty in the shed. The strop’s sole purpose was the enforcement of his arbitrary and unassailable law. After our mother died what little light he had behind his grey eyes went cold. He rose and set with the sun, mute sometimes for weeks on end, save the beatings. He slowly sold off the livestock, demanded fewer acres of corn until there was nothing left in the enclosing wilderness to suggest that generations of farmers had eked out a living from the unforgiving soil. As I washed and rinsed my face in the sink I could see it hanging dormant in the mirror over my shoulder. Somehow I had not thrown it out with the rest of the old man’s things, a two pound strip of leather weighing six tons. I shut off the light, stepped into the bedroom, disrobed, and crawled into bed. Within twenty minutes she came to me, wordlessly, naked, hair down over her slim shoulders, gliding under the sheets, pressing her mouth over mine.

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Tune in to Dispatches Every Sunday to Continue Reading “The Kindness of Strangers” by Lou Poster.

Start from the beginning of “The Kindness of Strangers” on SVJ’s Features.

This is Lou’s first published piece.

----

Lou Poster is a Native West Virginian, current resident of the poorest county in Ohio. Appalachian songwriter/singer/storyteller. Son of a third-generation coal miner.

After Fire by Amina Kayani

for Aiya

In the unused kitchen, Samrina waits for water to drip from the tap. All that ever dripped from the tap was the same mud sludge that ran through the creek in the back. The wooden chair where she sits was already in the house when they arrived there. Shailesh pulled it from the attic. Shailesh left five days ago on a supply run and hasn’t dropped a single strand of his curly hair on their wood floors since.

She calls this house – one story of mouldering wood with peeling paint redeemed by functional roof–her own, though her name isn’t on any deed. Shailesh found it in a wood miles north from where they had both grown up and when no one showed up to take it back from them, they let their scant belongings etch the moist wood floors as they dragged them in.

Samrina has no desire to leave the house. Since they found the house, she hasn’t left it once. Shailesh lets her do this. He collects firewood for the old-fashioned stove heater. He goes on supply runs even though the closest store they know about is a two hour walk. His walks give both of them space to be alone, which, despite everything that happened, they continue to need. She didn’t worry that he was gone because he was angry. She’d stopped worrying at all. When she was a girl, Samrina learned that if she was hungry and she waited without saying anything, another hungry person would come along and feed her. If she was angry and waited in silence, eventually the person who cared about her would beg her to speak and offer their apologies. Waiting works well for Samrina. Her immediate needs are fulfilled by her patience.

There is no way to see the front door from where she sits, but maybe he will come from the back, where the woods are, where they first came to see the house. She can see the back door from a clouded mirror on the wall. On the first day, she’d turn her head quick like an anxious cat at any flash of a cardinal outside. That was on the first day.

When they unburdened their belongings to the house after first arriving, Shailesh looked at her with tired eyes and said, “It’s so nice to be in a home,” and she hadn’t let him know how his words started the frustration boiling that nothing was going to be home again, least of all this place. She hadn’t let him know because it wouldn’t have changed anything, and it was always better that one of them felt good and hopeful. She showed Shailesh she was hopeful by staying in the house. He could tell she loved it there by how well she stayed, and he loved it the staying for her.

The kitchen waits for water to burst from its pipes and Samrina lets the roots in her feet spread through the hardwood and reach back toward the forest where they came. It feels good, stretching out. Once the water’s on, she decides, she’ll make soup. Shailesh loves soup. She can put the mushrooms in it, the ones peep between her toes from the floorboard, the ones that tell her all the water is beneath her feet or used to be. 

— —

Amina Kayani is a Muhajir writer and teacher from Atlanta. She holds an MFA in fiction from Purdue University and has served as the Managing Editor of Sycamore Review and the Art Editor of Kajal. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, the Florida Review, Joyland and elsewhere.

The Kindness of Strangers [Part Four] by Lou Poster

Below the bone pile is a yard-wide furrow about twenty inches deep and ten feet long into which some runoff from the creek collects. The water level never rises above an inch or two, even in heavy rains, due to the drainage dug out years ago to divert water to the livestock that once made this land profitable. Laid across this is a heavy iron grate that keeps the accumulated carcasses from clogging the spillway. As the remains decay, small portions of flesh drip or fall peeling off between the bars and linger for a short while until the water can carry them away, eventually leaving an exposed skeletal array which needs periodically to be cleared. As I prepared to add the raccoon to the pile, I noted that it would soon be time for this unsavory task and looked to Duncan ruefully.

“If you were worth a damn I’d-a trained you to do it.”

The dog looked at me in that quizzical way which likely ingratiated his species to mine eons ago, but quickly turned his head toward the road as we heard the careful approach of unfamiliar tires. I threw the raccoon onto the pile and began the hundred yard walk down to the barbed wire fence-line that runs the width of the property above the road. 

Sherriff Jim Stanton was a big son of a bitch, two-hundred-sixty pounds if an ounce, and at least six inches better than six feet tall. His tan and brown uniform never seemed quite able to contain his torso, always on the verge of a terrible collapse. He wasn’t a particularly skilled investigator, at least not much better than anyone else around these hollers at deducing a man’s intentions or the odds of his guilt. Having failed at every other attempt at elected office, he found a home among his high-school-bully-cum-unemployable-adult brethren on the local police force, and flourished. I counted the handful of times I had interacted with Jim Stanton as some of the least enjoyable of my existence, and it wasn’t simply a natural aversion to law enforcement that made it so.

“Well howdy, Jim,” I smiled as he pulled in front of the house. He rolled down his window.

“Jacob, how are you this morning?”

“In need of a second cup, if I’m bein’ honest.”

“I am moving a bit slow today myself. Late night.” He glanced at the sky. “Does it look like rain to you? They’re sayin’ rain today.”

“I ain’t seen the leaves turn over yet, so I’m optimistic.” I stood at the gate, hands in pockets, the .22 visible in its holster on my belt.

“Well, there’s that. New dog?” he asked, and jerked his head toward Duncan.

“Few weeks now, I reckon.  Got dropped off up the road a piece, couldn’t stand to see another one starve. Still had his tag on ‘im.”

“Poor bastard.” He spit heavy brown tobacco juice from the driver’s seat of the county truck, staring hard at the dog. “God damn he’s something to look at.”

“What can I do for you, Jim?”

“Had a bit of a dust up downtown last night, Jacob.” Yeah. Downtown. “Seems a lady from up Little Washington went missing last month, only no one noticed till the lawyers tried to divvy up some estate or other, went round looking for her. Found the house open, abandoned. Nobody’s seen her, heard tell, nothin’. The Pennsylvania boys put out the word. Ay. Pee. Bee.”, drawing out the acronym. Jesus, I thought. Self-important prick.

This is what the world does to us-- puts us on sides, teams in opposition, wins and losses, a cycle of energy inexhaustible throughout history. I stared out toward the dirt paths leading down to the creek.

“What caught our notice,” he continued, “was the vehicle. Blue Edsel. Don’t see many of ‘em. Ellen Bishop, though, she says she seen one come up Baxter’s while giggin’ for frogs about a month ago, and damn if I can remember anyone in the county having one, let alone anyone with business up this way.” He leveled a look that I met head on, cold and steady. 

“Jim, you’d better come up and join me for that coffee,” I said.

He killed the engine and opened the badge-emblazoned door. “Sounds like I might.”

In the kitchen I poured the coffee, offered cream and sugar though I knew better than either of us doctoring a morning brew in front of the other.  “Jim, there was a lady driving a blue Edsel stopped by here last month,” I said. “A bit lost, had some car trouble.” I sat at the kitchen table and gestured to the empty seat across. “A Helen, oh,” snapping my fingers. “Baker, or other.”

“Cooke,” he said, pulling back the chair.

“Cooke. She was lookin’ for Wetzel, but I don’t think she knew what it was or why she was a-lookin’. She stayed on a couple nights while I fixed up her ignition coil, up in the cellar rooms out back, and then she went on her way. I gave her all the gas I had in my can out there,” gesturing with a finger looped through the coffee mug’s ring out the window toward the shed. “I figured she was headed back to Washington.”

“Ignition coil, huh?”

“That’s how I started to figure it. Turning over but no spark. Thought I was gonna have to come into town and order one from Ben Shaw, but then I realized it was just the coil wire was shot. Could see it arc inside the insulation once the sun went down. So I took some wire off the tractor and spliced it up, ran just fine. I told her to get a new set of wires soon as she could.”

“And she stayed here.”

“Just the two nights. Out back above the cellar.”

“When’s the last time you saw a woman, Jacob?” Adrenaline tightened my scalp like a bucket of ice water, running down into my shoulders.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, seems to me a pretty young city girl shows up on your doorstep, knowing you, maybe you try keeping her around for a bit? Maybe take your time with the repairs?” He looked knowingly over the rim of his cup with a wry smile. Just needling me. I relaxed into my chair and laughed sheepishly.

“Oh no, now, Jim. I wouldn’t do that. It just had me stumped at first is all. And she wasn’t all that young, neither, damn near my age.”

He smiled and set down his cup and lifted his Stetson, pressed the opposite palm against his growing forehead.

“Thing is, Jacob. We found the car.”

----

Tune in to Dispatches Every Sunday to Continue Reading “The Kindness of Strangers” by Lou Poster.

Start from the beginning of “The Kindness of Strangers” on SVJ’s Features.

This is Lou’s first published piece.

----

Lou Poster is a Native West Virginian, current resident of the poorest county in Ohio. Appalachian songwriter/singer/storyteller. Son of a third-generation coal miner.

Crescent Wrench by Josh Boardman

Sometimes he pictures himself being interviewed. He floats across from a composite interviewer the result of thousands of hours of online videos. The interviewer’s question that prompts his last words—What does it feel like to ride?

In reality, he feels nothing because he’s suspended in midair having been launched from the saddle of his motorcycle. In these few seconds of hangtime his legs are knocked crossed by impact with the handlebars and he tents his fingers. I have never had a mechanical mind he digresses. I work on computers for a living but very much on them rather than inside. I never open the box. I’m better at what I do than ninetynine percent of people but if I were asked to repair a machine’s hardware I would fail. That’s what made the motorcycle so attractive. A blue Honda from fifty years ago. Something like three thousand miles on it. It seemed so simple to fix up—its tires rotted the paint chipped and only one mirror intact but when I visited the listing the engine started up immediately. I trusted the kid—that was my problem. 

Wait a second his interviewer asks—The kid did all the previous work himself? 

Old Hondas are simple machines. There are hundreds of videos online. I pressed the starter and the engine took to life—I didn’t yet know to check if it was hot. Who cares if the headlight didn’t light? Candy Sapphire Blue was doublestriped with orange and black running down the line between the tank and sidecovers. I was free. See my right shoe? By the time I handed over my cash and got the bike to forty it started sputtering. Oil streamed down my pantleg and stained the white leather deep yellow. I had to park it till I found somebody with the right tools to drill a broken bolt. If only I had bought the tools myself. Videos online show men with chestlength beards pushing junkyard frames into their garages packed with hardware. Bald men. Men with neck tattoos. Or else men with expensive jackets and programmer’s humor that makes you think they hate women. 

Would you say a particular demographic of man is attracted to motorcycles?

I’ll say this—on my second trip to the bike shop they asked if I had caved yet and bought a ratchet set. I recognize now (twigs slice red marks across his cheeks as he strokes his chin philosophically) that a ratchet set would have been less an indulgence than a safeguard. I should have noticed the mounting bolts all rubbed down to rings. The throttle cable that rattled loose on idle. The muffler flanges twisted loose. To answer your question, this particular demographic of man doesn’t say goodbye. He warns you to look out for cars. But once I replaced the headlight I didn’t have to be watchful—I could fly free. I hummed through midnight air on Sundays when there’s no cars on the street. Moonlight reflected over the river and bended around curve after curve road after road. The feeling of freedom pressed me to throttle it faster until the sole of my shoe scuffed the ground. I laughed at the impossibility. I work in tech!

The interviewer shakes his head. It’s time to go he says. It’s been time to go for a while now. You’ve accomplished more in your lifetime than ninetynine percent of people. Why did you call me here? What is it about people like you that’s so concerned with setting yourselves apart?

The words of the interviewer rattle through his mind. In fixing up the bike he once tightened the axlemount by crescent wrench (never having bought a ratchet set) and unknowingly lost the pin that secured it in place. One corner at twenty miles over and the bolt shook loose dropping the front end down to the asphalt. Rain of fire jumps from the scuttling forks. What is it about people like him? People like him? He soars through the air Candy Sapphire Blue between spectating trees and he wants to answer the interviewer’s question but his brain goes white with oxygen. He’s hyperventilating. One final breath before he utters his last words—but they’re lost in a crash of chrome and timber.

— —

Josh Boardman is from Michigan. He is the author of the chapbook Plantain (West Vine Press, 2018) and conducted the Latin translation project We, Romans (2015). His stories have appeared in journals such as New York Tyrant, Juked, and Catapult. Since 2021, he has been a partner of the Gilliam Writers Group, a coaching and tutoring organization aimed at elevating aspiring writers. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is working on his first novel and a collection of stories about his hometown. joshboardman.com

The Kindness of Strangers [Part Three] by Lou Poster

IV

Helen Cooke almost arrived in Wetzel, West Virginia on a Sunday. Her husband had died nearly a year prior, his body having rejected the kidney she had miraculously been a match for and selflessly given him. In the dark days that followed she tended her ailing mother, reversing their roles as folks sometimes do near the end until the mother, too, passed on. Having nothing left to tie her to the Pennsylvania community in which she had been raised, no employer, no children, no close friends to speak of, she walked straight from the tiny cemetery where they buried her mother, climbed into her car, and headed south along US 19. Maybe she felt the pull of the hills, the gentle rocking drive along switchbacks leading deeper into unknown lands, dark and hypnagogic. Or maybe she had simply reached her end and was still breathing just enough to start the car, pull the transmission into drive, follow the double yellow lines. In her state she managed to lose track of both time and fuel consumption, and as her gauge neared E she pulled onto a gravel road parallel to Baxter’s Run looking for a filling station, a hotel, anything really.  Instead she found me.

Helen was shaky and eye averted as she stepped from the old Edsel, struggling to form words into questions. 

“Sorry,” she finally got out straight. “It’s been a month of a day.”

“S’alright, ma’am. You get turned around out here?” 

“Maybe, I’m not sure.” She looked around at the hillsides, as if that might help. “If you could please direct me into town, I saw a sign a few miles back but it’s rusted out where it should say how far it is, and I’m nearly out of gas.”

“Well, it’s about seven, eight miles on in to Wetzel from here, but there’s not much to it once you get there. Just a stoplight and a diner, really. Tell you what, I’ve got a five gallon can out the shed there, be happy to give you enough to get you on your way.”

“That’s very good of you,” she said, relief cascading over her face, and stepped forward, her hand extended in the default greeting of our tribe. “I’m Helen.” I shook her hand without wanting to, and it folded like a Kleenex in my palm.

“Jacob Baxter, ma’am. Nice to meet you.”

I fetched the gas can down to the car and emptied it into the Edsel’s tank while she looked on. Her nerves seemed to relax a little as the liquid belched and gulped down the filling spout, trading places with the air. 

”You look to me like you could use a meal, maybe some rest. I was on my way inside to cook up some rabbit, if you’d like to join me.” 

“Jacob, now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve eaten in days.”

Inside, I stood over the cast iron stove, agitating the stew with an old wooden spoon while Helen told her sad tale. An early miscarriage had made her gunshy on the subject of children, so her husband and mother were all the family she had. It seemed as though she was still in a fugue state as she spoke, wide eyed and nearly monotone. I kept my words to a minimum, allowing her silences to linger until she cared for them to be broken. I ladled stew into bowls and placed bread and warm butter on the table, and as I listened I felt an old curiosity building. 

“Thank you so much,” she said, finishing a bite. “There’s really not enough kindness to go around these days, is there? Well, not where I’m from anyways.” 

“People up Little Washington way, all crowded together, don’t seem to have much room for each other.  ‘Least not the couple times I’ve been. Can’t even imagine what it’s like in Chicago or New York.”

“All this technology, it’s just driving a wedge between folks. You sit in a dark room and watch a box full of light and sound for hours and never think to talk to the kid at the grocery store or the clerk at the hotel. They’ve got stories, too, you know.”

“Maybe their stories are dull,” I said, taking another bite. 

“Maybe so, but they’re real.” As though it mattered. I had watched a few times when in town, and even I could see that television was meant to sell soap and motor oil, the programs not more than saccharine fruit in the bottom of a commercial snare. Television elevated the art of the story for the sake of the sale. 

“I guess so.”

She joined me on the porch for a cigarette as the sun began to set behind the western ridge.  We watched the shadows begin to stretch and bend in their encroachment on the house.

“Nearest hotel’s gonna be about thirty miles in the direction you’re headed. Or you could double back north about fifteen.”

“I really don’t know which direction I’m headed. I think I was sleepwalking, almost. I think maybe I still am.” Something in her gaze out over the property in that evening light set a hook in my belly, and I made a decision. 

“Well, you’d best be on your way if you’re gonna make Clarksburg before it gets too late, if you decide to go that route. You can use the restroom to freshen up before you go.”

“If you don’t mind? I’ll just be a minute.”

She walked inside and I moved down off the porch to the Edsel and popped the hood quietly. I reached over by the air intake and pulled the coil wire from the center of the distributor cap, just enough to feel the click of disconnection, and gently eased the hood back down. I was lighting a fresh cigarette on the porch when she reemerged, blinking quickly and saying hasty thank-you’s, her eyes avoiding mine once again.

“It’s really no trouble at all, ma’am. Turns out I needed the company. Nice to hear a woman’s voice for a change.” She looked up at me earnestly now, and I could see the redness around her irises as they receded from her pupils, the dark spots dilating even in the growing dusk.

“Well,” she said, “goodnight then.” Smiling for the first time, maybe in months.

I waved from the steps as she sat in her car and turned the key.

----

Tune in to Dispatches Every Sunday to Continue Reading “The Kindness of Strangers” by Lou Poster.

Start from the beginning of “The Kindness of Strangers” on SVJ’s Features.

This is Lou’s first published piece.

----

Lou Poster is a Native West Virginian, current resident of the poorest county in Ohio. Appalachian songwriter/singer/storyteller. Son of a third-generation coal miner.

Blink by Kip Knott

Celeste

Today 7:14 PM

Hi Dara. I just read the text you sent before you took off this morning. Sorry I couldn’t text back before you left but there wasn’t time. I’m at the hospital now. I know you want to be here too but you and Jeff have been planning this trip for so long that Mother would’ve never forgiven herself if you canceled because of her. Even if you were here there’s nothing you could’ve done. Mother’s gone. 

Celeste

Today 7:17 PM

The nurse just came in to check on Mother but like I said she’s gone. I don’t mean that she’s dead. At least I don’t think she is. What I mean is that she keeps disappearing. Literally. One minute she’s here lying in bed and struggling for breath and the next minute she’s gone. She just disappears. Maybe for a couple of seconds maybe a couple of minutes. And then she’s back as suddenly as she left. It’s been happening on and off ever since I got here first thing this morning. 

Celeste

Today 7:21 PM

The nurse just came back to check again. Right now Mother has been gone nearly 30 minutes which I guess is much longer than usual. I just asked the nurse if we really even have a mother. He just shrugged his shoulders and said he’d get the doctor. So now I’m just waiting.

Celeste

Today 7:28 PM

Nothing new to report. I’m still waiting for the doctor. Mother did seem to recognize me when I first got here. She kept reaching out to me. She still couldn’t talk after being intubated from before so I’m guessing it was me she was reaching for. I’m pretty sure she could understand me. The nurse agreed that Mother seemed to be reacting to what I was saying. Like when I asked her if she was hungry and she motioned like she wanted me to feed her some ice chips. I only stopped when I realized I was dropping them onto an empty pillow. 

Celeste

Today 7:33 PM

The nurse just told me the doctor is on his way. I’ve got to tell you Dara that empty bed looks so big and so deep that it’s hard to imagine anyone ever having been in it. Especially Mother who looks smaller now than ever. Looked smaller than ever? I don’t know which is right. 

Celeste

Today 7:38 PM

The doctor just left. He had to rush off for a code blue. Before he left he said not to worry. He said she hasn’t been gone long enough whatever that means. I asked him the same thing I asked the nurse. He reassured me that we do have a mother. All I know is that when I look at this empty bed I don’t feel as if we ever had a mother at all. I feel untethered and alone like some doomed astronaut floating

Celeste

Today 7:41 PM

Mother’s back! She just appeared in her bed while I was texting. I heard the nurse cry out Dios mio! and looked up from my phone to see Mother reaching out for me. The doctor is on his way back right now. 

Celeste

Today 8:31 PM

Mother’s been back for over 45 minutes now. She finally seems to be breathing easier. She just keeps motioning for more ice chips. The doctor told me before he left that he’s seeing this kind of thing more and more lately since the pandemic began. I guess some people near the end are starting to blink in and out of reality. Blink is his word, not mine. He told me to think of it like a failing light on a Christmas tree. One moment it’s beautiful and glowing and the next moment all you see is its absence among all the other lights. I don’t pretend to understand. The nurse is going to try and give Mother a bath before she blinks away again. Visiting hours officially ended at 8 so I’m heading out. I’ll text more when I get home.

Celeste

Today 9:12 PM

I’m home. What a day! I’m going straight to bed. I’ll text you tomorrow with any updates. I hope your flight went smoothly. I won’t be able to make it back to the hospital until after dinner tomorrow because if I’m being honest Dara I’m exhausted. I haven't been sleeping a lot since Mother was admitted. And after today I have to tell you that I’m afraid to close my eyes. The dark that’s behind my lids scares me. But opening them frightens me even more.

— — —

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, teacher, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His debut collection of stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches, is available on Amazon. His writing has appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, HAD, Jellyfish Review, MoonPark Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He spends most of his spare time traveling throughout Appalachia and the Midwest taking photographs and searching for lost art treasures. You can follow him on Twitter at @kip_knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com. 

The Kindness of Strangers [Part Two] by Lou Poster

II

Above the meadow, inside the tree line, the hill slopes steeply to the ridge. From just below the high point knoll there is a ravine bisecting the property down to the bottoms, cleaving it into north and south faces. Deer trails, old logging and mining roads, gas and water line right-of-ways pass above its steepest walls, cut through the brush and old growth. Down in the flat at the end of the ravine, near the creek formed by the wellspring on the south side, is the collection area for the animals I trap. It sits far enough from the house that the smell never reaches the porch in summer, and below the creek so as not to corrupt the water. Some nights I sit with a .25-06 in the shed and spotlight the coyotes that gather around like Thanksgiving family. Those I leave where they lay.

  It was on this property that I learned how to walk, fish, ride a bike. Not much later I learned to drive a tractor, then a car. As boys my brothers and I tended the cattle and chickens, cut trees to be sold for support timbers to the mines, plowed the rocky clay until it would yield scrawny corn for feed and trade. I was born here, in this house, along with the past three generations of my family. Sometimes in the waning purple light of evening I’ll think on those older pioneers, squatters in a wilderness not yet described as Appalachia, utterly alone save for each other. I wonder what they had hoped to find here, if this was truly a better life than what they had left behind, whether or not they had a choice. I think about the winter they burned the split rail fence to survive when firewood ran scarce, about the stillbirths, the smallpox, influenza, and farm equipment casualties that populate the family cemetery halfway up the opposite hillside and I wonder if I would have measured strong enough against that standard. There was a time I once carried my older brother Frederick home fireman-style the two miles from our favorite fishing spot. We’d fought after a disagreement involving me popping the eyes off a bluegill with a pen knife. We decided to tell everyone that he had slipped on a rock, breaking his jaw and tearing his ear nearly clean off in the fall. So maybe. 

III

On mornings when foodstores are running low I tend to rise early, well before the sun, and hike silently to my favorite hunting spot, a place above the ravine and below the ridge, where the terrain bottlenecks deer as they travel from the grassy fields in which they feed to their thicketed bedding grounds. Taking a spot on the ground below an old oak in the still-dark I’ll watch the woods come alive. First the songbirds cheerfully calling one another, then the squirrels barking and rustling, the distant cluck of a hen turkey. At all times present is the high distant whine of the ventilation-shaft fan at Flat Run, the one that just a few years back in ’68 had quit, filling that mine with gas till it sparked up and blew like the devil himself was coming out of the mountain. Fifty- some-odd men died in it. My maternal grandfather was on the radio with the few of those men who had survived the blast, and who were to be sealed in down there under fly ash concrete to contain the fire, preserve the coal. The fan hasn’t faltered since that. Through binoculars I scan the ridgeline, backlit by the pale sky of first light, looking for any brief, halting movement, the flick of a tail, an ear. A horizontal backline against the cool blue morning. These times allow for quiet reflection, and for the past several days my thoughts have been with a woman.

Her name is Helen, and she is gone from me now.

As a child of seven or eight I wounded a deer on one of my very first hunts. It was last light, the sun well below the crest of the hill, and all I could make out was the silhouette of a buck on the ridge a good eighty yards above me, antlers and an elongated neck swollen from the rut. I laid the ironsights on his neck and squeezed the trigger, and when my eyes returned to the spot where he had stood there was only empty sky. My father and I climbed through the saplings and undergrowth to the water line right-of-way, flat and open above the ravine, and found a six-point motionless in the dusk. We decided to field dress the deer down by the house before the pitch dark took us, makes the dragging harder but the deer was small and we had the downhill slope to our advantage. Halfway down, the buck started to thrash and wheeze, trying to regain his feet.  I had heard injured deer before, and they can bleat and cry like wounded children when taken in the night by coyotes. But nothing more than barely audible gusts of air came from this one. My father leapt on its back and, producing his skinner from its sheath, beheaded the animal in three short pulls, save a thin band of flesh above the severed spine, grunting loudly with each jagged cut. The stench of blood and animal shit rose with steam from dark pools collecting at our feet.

I had only managed a shot through the neck, knocking the buck unconscious. “Don’t shoot unless you can hit vitals. No need for an animal to suffer like that.” He did not look at me. 

“Yessir.” 

After dressing and then hanging the deer for a few days we went into the shed to skin and quarter it. On close inspection we saw that its vocal cords had been obliterated by the bullet, its jaw shattered in the upward trajectory.  Then we began the slow process of peeling the hide back from the meat, pulling down hard with one hand while teasing free connective tissue with the razor-sharp edge of a knife made for no other purpose. 

----

Tune in to Dispatches Every Sunday to Continue Reading “The Kindness of Strangers” by Lou Poster.

Start from the beginning of “The Kindness of Strangers” on SVJ’s Features.

This is Lou’s first published piece.

----

Lou Poster is a Native West Virginian, current resident of the poorest county in Ohio. Appalachian songwriter/singer/storyteller. Son of a third-generation coal miner.

I Remember by Fran Schumer

I keep my eyes on my mother’s hands. Tremors, a shuffling gait, sometimes paralysis, all symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. I worry she’ll spill the iced water. “Ah,” she sighs, but even with tremors, she manages to set the glass safely back on the table. I lean in closer. “Nothing tastes as good as pure, ice water," she says, her voice faint. 

She never liked to drink water, anything. “Why won’t you put the iced tea on the table instead of serving it after dinner?” my brothers complained. “Or at least bring out a pitcher of water?” Now she’s always thirsty. It’s the medicine. She finishes, and the look of satisfaction on her no lipstick, un-made-up face causes my heart to gallop. It’s so rare.

  After she was diagnosed, she wanted us to kill her.

“Where’s my pill?” she would scream into the telephone.

“What pill?” we’d ask.

“You know, the one that kills you.”

“Mom, you don’t want to die, do you? You don’t want to leave Daddy.”

“Ha, daddy! What good is Daddy? He just sleeps. Sam? Sam? Are you awake? See? He’s no help. I’m hanging up. Go away.”

  Instead of four places, the waiter sets three places, one for my husband, my mother, and myself. He maneuvers her wheelchair expertly -- a lot of old people live in this building – to fit at the table. It’s early spring. I babble idiotically about the kids, the new house, the crocuses, anything to keep the conversation going. My husband tries, too, softly and more gently. She finishes one of her blintzes and then looks at the empty seat across from her. “Daddy should be sitting there.”

“Mom, Daddy died last Thanksgiving. You remember.”

“That’s the mystery of it,” she says, not looking at anyone. “No one told me he died. People came up to me and asked me about him, and I didn’t know. No one told me.”

“Of course, we told you, Mom. Don’t you remember? We were all in his hospital room -- .” I go on with the litany I now recite every time we visit. “You were tired, remember? Vera brought you home. About ten minutes later, Daddy died. We called you but you were in bed. Remember? On Friday, we had the funeral. You asked the soldier to give the flag on the coffin to Adam, the youngest grandson. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, I remember.”

  On a recent visit, I push her wheelchair.

“I have no one left. My mother and father are gone. My brother is gone. And Daddy --," she says.

“You have us. You have your three children –," I say.

“And me,” my husband adds.

“I know, but it’s not the same.”

  My mother was diagnosed with late-onset Parkinson’s at 90. Now, she can’t walk, read, go to the bathroom, or even wipe herself. She has no agency over her body. A teacher once said of a character I devised, “she has no agency.”

The term stayed with me. Every time we wheel my mother back to the apartment, Vera, her aide, must lift her into the lift chair. Multiple times a day, she must be lifted from the wheelchair to the lift chair or into the shower, or onto the toilet. No one has ever dropped her, but still, she screams. “I’m falling. No, stop. Stop! Stop. Vera, help me.” When she is safely in the chair, she sighs. “I’m tired.” She takes my hand, still warm and smooth and miraculously tan although it’s been years since she’s been to the beach. Every summer she went to the beach. She swam twenty laps a day and walked along the ocean. Once a year, she and her friend Shirley Parker walked the six miles from our house past the airfield, over the bridge, and to the beach, then collapsed and ordered chicken salad sandwiches on toast, with extra tomato, no chips.

She looks up at me and squeezes my hand.

I can barely hear her.

“I love you,” she says.

  Last week, I wheeled her from the coffee shop back to the apartment. She complained about a scuffle with Vera, a bad night, a new pain, I don’t remember what.

“Oh well, that’s life,” I said or something equally idiotic.

“That’s a real consolation!” she said.

My heart leaped. I was so happy. She was still my mother, my old mother. The one I’m losing a piece of every day.

#

Fran Schumer’s poetry, fiction, personal essays, and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The North American Review, Hole in the Head, Cerasus, Poetry Quarterly, and other publications. She won a Goodman Loan Grant Award for Fiction from the City University of New York and in 2021, a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing poetry fellowship. She is a native of Brooklyn, N.Y.

The Kindness of Strangers [Part One] by Lou Poster

I

A three-legged dog is easier to befriend when it’s a hind limb he’s got shed of. The gait is hitched, and the rear haunch follows a vertical parabola in an ungainly manner, sure, but when seated or laid out at the master’s feet there is little to betray the loss. You can get used to being in the presence of that kind of sadness. 

Not so with Duncan.

The Tennessee cur’s front passenger side had been ruined while in the care of a previous owner, most likely a resident of one of the hours-distant cities, moneyed enough to finance surgical repairs, with plenty of options at hand to square his abandonment once the sight of the thing had worn thin. Duncan’s curved horizontal scarring, which he was fond of rolling on his brindle back to display, was reminiscent of the double mastectomy scars of my late Aunt Mildred, who in my youth had walked unabashedly shirtless through the clover-filled bottoms near the creek in summer, my brothers and I looking on. 

“Ain’t nothin’ left to cover up, boys, and it’s hotter’n Hell’s own wrath.”

Damaged goods like Duncan are brought out this way from time to time, in waxed and well-muffled vehicles, backseats full of tearful children unaccustomed to the dust of gravel roads, to be set free from their comfortable lives, ceded to certain death.

It was Duncan that watched me now, hunched in anticipation and safely five yards distant, as I checked the traps around the house.  The critters that these woods produce will decimate the foundation of a home in a single season if left unchecked, as the leaning attitudes of the pitiful and long vacant structures in the surrounding countryside would attest.  First chore of every morning, before the bitter film of coffee can dissipate fully from the tongue, is to clear, reset, and bait the half dozen or so traps around this sixty-odd acre property.  A .22 caliber pistol forged in the year of my own birth, 1930, the sole kind gift of an otherwise cruel father, has always accompanied me on these rounds. Groundhogs, raccoons, opossum, and the occasional skunk are to be found in the first weak light that trickles down off the ridge to my valley floor. They have been here for millennia; only Duncan and I are novel here.

As I approached a small paw-trap behind the ancient shed, the familiar refrain of a frantic animal locked in steel caused Duncan’s ears to stand tall and swivel front. Rounding the corner, I could see blood in the dirt path worn bare by many predecessors pacing the length that the chain allows, unable to free their tiny humanlike hands from the rusty grey cylinder. The clanging and scratching abated as I approached the raccoon, giving over to low, muffled growls, and I saw that it was attempting to chew through its own forearm in order to free itself.  I stood, head cocked slightly, in genuine admiration of the creature, who had finally reached his last resort (for surely what chance has an amputee raccoon in the wild, with coyotes about?) and was hurriedly executing his will. I had seen the evidence before, tiny tragic paws still gripping rancid bait fruit, tendons damp and ragged in the dewy morning air, protruding with blood-matted fur from the snare, itself connected to three feet of linked chain staked deep in the ground. I had not once, however, witnessed the act. An amazing feat, countering eons of evolutionary programming.  I looked on intently as the animal growled and gnawed. Brief survival via self-mutilation. An excruciating loss of a part to preserve the whole. No choice.

A sharp crack from the .22 silenced the raccoon, and as I looked back I noticed Duncan had crept ever closer as I’d ruminated, nearer than ever before. 

I pulled the spring back on the trap, fished a few chunks of melon out of my pocket and traded them for the mangled paw in the cylinder. Duncan came hopping over to inspect our prize, pushing hard into its gut with his nose, snuffling and whining. I let him have at it for a minute or two while I chewed at a handful of sunflower seeds and looked out over the meadow, watched the breeze trace white lines through the green underbelly. 

“That’s enough.”

I nudged Duncan away with the point of my boot, picked up the carcass, and headed to the bone pile.

----

Tune in to Dispatches Every Sunday to Continue Reading “The Kindness of Strangers” by Lou Poster.

This is Lou’s first published piece.

----

Lou Poster is a Native West Virginian, current resident of the poorest county in Ohio. Appalachian songwriter/singer/storyteller. Son of a third generation coal miner.

At Least I Didn’t Burn the Wine by Rose Jean Bostwick

The girl’s grandmother lived in a nice house in the country. She collected retro coasters, magnets, napkins, and dish towels with smiling 1950s housewives printed on them. The housewives were in the middle of cooking dinner, saying ironic things such as: 

At least I didn’t burn the wine.

By eight, the girl was already a big girl, taller and broader than her eleven-year-old sister. At the time, she was proud of this: she was built better for running and climbing, that was what her mother always said. Her grandmother, though, poked her in the sides and fed her the smaller portion of mac n’ cheese. 

My secret ingredient? Xanax.

The girl’s sister got along better with their grandmother. The girl’s sister would tuck her bird legs beneath her body and nap on their grandmother, who read quietly, for hours. 

Hopes and dreams would only distract me from making all these casseroles.

Meanwhile, the girl went into the woods, collecting insects and foraging mushrooms. Before she came back in, her mother would hose off her body like a dog's so she wouldn’t smear mud on her grandmother’s linens.

Oops! I dropped my brain in the aspic mold.

A few years later, when the girl began to grow breasts and hips, she decided to be thin. 

This is how she did it: she watched the women around her and told herself to eat like they did. If she was really feeling a challenge, she ate even less.

A woman’s place is in the kitchen, surrounded by sharp metal objects.

The girl got into the habit of eating quickly standing up in the kitchen while her grandmother was in a different room. She tried to ignore the ice cream, cake, and pastries. She ate her grandmother’s little fake things: dairy-free yogurt, gluten-free crackers, sugar-free soda.

Her mother caught her eating in the bathroom once and shook her head.  “Don’t let her get to you,” she said.

If by happy, you mean trapped with no means of escape, then yes, I’m happy.

The girl got older and went to college. There, she lost weight like crazy. One day, she fainted in class. Her friend took her to the hospital. She had to stay for a couple days. 

Eventually, the girl dropped out of school and moved back home. She spent her days walking to her parents’ fridge and drinking protein shakes and eating apples and popcorn, then walking back to her bed. She ran, before she lost her running privileges. She looked at herself in the same full-length mirror she had looked in when she was eight years old. She was turning twenty-three.

That’s okay: I didn’t want a real life anyway.

The girl never spoke with her grandmother about what happened, but she guessed that her grandmother knew, because she began telling the girl she loved her. “I love you,” like that, instead of her usual “Miss you!” or “Sending love!”

  “It’s funny,” her mother replied when the girl pointed this out. “I have noticed her saying it lately. She never used to before.”

“Not even when you were a kid?”

“No,” her mother said. “She does, though. She just was raised in a different time.”

Rose Jean Bostwick is a lesbian writer and social media manager living in Montreal, Quebec. She attended McGill University, where she received an Honours BA in English Literature & Political Science and served as Executive Editor of the Bull & Bear Magazine. Rose is the author of one short fiction chapbook, And They Were Roommates (2022), published by Bottlecap Press, and has works in or forthcoming in Wrongdoing Magazine, Catatonic Daughters, Pink Plastic House, Sinister Wisdom (in the Common Lives / Lesbian Lives anthology), and many more. She tweets @softboiledbabe and posts on Instagram @rosej3an and @portraitoftheoslo (on behalf of her kitten).

GRNMTN by Joshua Vigil

He was a naturalist at heart. I thought, at the time, this meant he was a nudist. I had many visions of him creeping across his yard, his sun-kissed skin gleaming of sweat, his balls hanging freely in the hair, his penis a humbling image. He lived at the foot of the Green Mountains in Vermont. That he was a nudist wouldn’t have been surprising. He had a garden that he kept during the summers, tilling the soil in May, spreading mulch come June. He fed me persimmons when I visited. I told him the ghost of my mother had come to me again. He said he didn’t believe in ghosts. Genies, witches, demons. I’m a naturalist, he said. If it doesn’t fall under science, I don’t believe it. I tried explaining that it was real, she had been visiting me. 

She appeared at the end of my bed, her skin a film of white. Her hair was matted into thick strands. Black marbles for eyes. But she carried the scent of before: a burst of citron and lavender. This was how I knew it was her for certain. That and she looked like my mother, despite all the decay. Let’s say I believe you, he said. Does she say anything? I shook my head. She just growls. Like a dog. 

At night, he slipped out of his clothes, leaving them spoiled and strewn across the floor. He smelled of damp soil; I found it calming. He led me into his bedroom. The mattress creaked. A sharp, unholy sound. The windows trembled, fierce winds lashing the small clapboard house. He kissed me tenderly at first. Later, he bit my lip, a small pearl of blood sprouting to the surface. He eased himself into me, a burn that shot up my spine. His fingers were laced through mine. I saw his nails, how they brimmed with dirt. I told him I loved him. I couldn’t, at that moment, remember his name. I thought only of his username on the app in which we met: GRNMTN. At some point, between GRNMTN’s thrusting and my declarations, I heard a growl. It was a familiar sound. I didn’t mind it, paid no attention. I focused on his face, the creases, the flecks of hair, the sun spots. When my mother growled again, he stopped, he turned, he screamed. 

GRNMTN bolted out of the house. Naked, he tore through tall grasses. I drew the covers towards my chin, pressing my back against the headboard. My mother watched. Seconds passed. I reached out, leaving my palm open.

Joshua Vigil lives in New York. His writing has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Neutral Spaces Magazine, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere.

Sandwich by Koss

Devon, AWOL since the day Grams died, 12 years ago, now leans against the torn floral arm of Grams’ davenport, with me flanked by Di, my estranged schizophrenic mother, also MIA (for two decades). Devon is my father, although he bragged unabashedly, I was more like his younger sister, and, to be honest, he was like my derelict older brother, a narcissistic musician rarely seen except when he stopped by Grams’ for sandwiches or cash, both devoured like Starburst candy. Taking and being fed was as evolved as relationships ever got with Devon, and sadly, once Grams couldn’t make sandwiches anymore, there were extended echoes we learned to endure on his rare calls.

I never called them by normal parent names as “mom” or “dad” would trigger a gag reflex, then dangle on my tonsil like a dry wood depressor. Don’t think I didn’t try, as I was a polite child burdened by my own sense of propriety—but quickly learned convulsing never sparks the hearts of visitors. Nor did I call them by their proper names, Devon or Di. It was always “hey you, them, they, him, or her,” and mostly I’d let someone else initiate a conversation about them, or, if they were present, I’d point or gesture towards them with my head cocked like a fat gun. They were both absences, so I developed a language of lack to match the drought of their visits. Yes, it was lazy—and very effective. And if you think I sound like a bitch, well, the secret weapon to use against narcissists is to withhold the candy supply. “Don’t feed the narcissists” was my mantra, even at age ten, if you can believe it. Aloofness is not an artful weapon, for sure, but it freed my energy and attention for more important things like frog collecting, comic books, and building corn stalk canopies. My second favorite weapon was garlic, which I devoured before they visited, and unleashed like a breath of bad fairy dust if they came too close. It worked on Christopher Lee. . . so it was good enough for me.

In case you haven’t figured it out, my grandparents raised me. This was a wonderful, lucky and fortunate thing, as were the mounds of pickled garlic in the bottom of Gram’s canned pickle jars.

Last time I saw Di was at her sister’s funeral, which she wanted to skip to go junking. We accidentally stayed at the same hotel, or the universe put us there, or maybe it was the only hotel in Ovid, a scrubby cow town in a Midwestern vacuum. 20 years had passed since our last meeting and she wanted to tell me everything she accomplished in that time. I sat, back aching, in an uptight no-armed chair in her peach hotel room, as she filled in my blank spaces with urgent, choppy Baptist tales, the dented Chevy truck the pastor gave her, the exploding Florida yacht with the Cuban drug dealers, the anti-abortion protest in which she was arrested . . . her many lives.  She paused briefly to dump the Ho-Hos and bananas she had lifted from the 7-Eleven onto the bed. I recalled the giant purses she carried in my childhood, her spindly, adept wrists and the circular, toe-tipped dance she did after lifting useless shit from the aisles of K-mart, or Kroger . . . before stores and civilians were armed with cameras . . . 

Eventually, she switched gears and talked of her love for my father. “We could have been stars, a rockin’ duet, had I not left him,” she sobbed. Truth was, neither could sing a lick, but Devon’s adept guitar playing and handsome, Rock Hudson mug, raised snakes from baskets and rivaled the mermaid’s song.  He destroyed multiple women, one after the other, like clay pigeons at a skeet event. While Di had surely heard about Devon’s antics, she stayed protected by her own delusions, indulging her alt-universe of stardom and romance, which didn’t include us kids, but was, I tell you, really OK.

Then she jagged some more, between childhood, random, anger-inducing bits of story, and the other lives she might’ve led. I was polite. She was, well, unwell. Unmedicated. 

No query was made about me, my sibs, our adventures, education, relationships. Nothing. But to say an unmedicated, abusive schizophrenic person (she was often very violent) is also narcissistic, is as redundant and assholey as saying a tiger has stripes and is carnivorous. Well, that’s a crappy analogy, and yes, I am an asshole, but know I forgave her for leaving us by the end of that evening, which I thought she might need to hear. 

The next day, when they marched my aunt’s dead body post-service out the reception/dance hall/pole barn door, I slipped out the side exit unnoticed, and we didn’t speak again for years—until today, as I sit sandwiched between Di and Devon like a filmy, flecked piece of head cheese left over from the funeral feast . . . 

Koss is a writer and artist with over 150 publications in many journals including SVJ, Bending Genres, Rat's Ass Review, Diode Poetry, Five Points, and Chiron. They won the Wergle Flomp Humor Contest in 2021 and were nominated for BOTN for fiction and poetry by Bending Genres and Kissing Dynamite Poetry. Connect with them on Twitter @Koss51209969 or their website: https://www.koss-works.com.

Passing By by Steven French

Every night, late at night Dougie Hampton walks the streets. He used to do it so he could take the dog out for a last pee before bed but then the dog died and he carried on, just to get out, clear his head, ‘review the events of the day’ as he used to put it. Even when the weather was bad, when it was coming down with that freezing, almost thick rain that the wind would push in under your collar, he would step outside and just walk. 

There was one street in particular that his feet seemed drawn to so that he marched down it almost every night. And there was one house on that street where the living room curtains were kept open, even as late as it was, so Dougie just couldn’t resist looking in as he passed. The first time he did, all he could see across the garden, from the pavement outside, was the flickering light of the television and an empty sofa in the otherwise dark room. Nothing remarkable but somehow he couldn’t not turn his head and peer in as his feet carried him past. The second time, whether the next night or later he couldn’t say, there seemed to be a figure on the sofa, watching the tv. But what with the wind and the rain and the television flashing from one scene to the next. He couldn’t see. It was still windy and raining the next time he passed, and he wondered when the weather would break and when was the last time he’d seen the moon or the stars. He thought of not turning his head, of keeping his gaze straight ahead but in the end he couldn’t resist. There was the flickering tv, the sofa, the figure slumped on it but now behind the sofa, partly hidden in the shadows he thought he could discern someone else. For a second he felt he should stop but that was immediately followed by the thought that the couple would think he was some kind of Peeping Tom, so he kept on walking. 

And the rain and the wind kept on too, so that he was constantly wiping his eyes and shrugged his coat even more tightly around him. The curtains were still open when next he walked by and the light from the television still erratically illuminated the room, casting odd shadows across the walls. But the person on the sofa seemed to have slumped down even further, so Dougie could only just see the top of their head. And the person behind it was now looming over and had something, something he couldn’t quite make out, in their hand. 

Dougie’s feet pulled him on but with a conscious effort, he stopped and leaned forward over the low garden wall and waved his hands to try and catch the person’s attention. “Hey!” he cried out, “Stop! Stop that!!” He waved his arms some more but it seemed he couldn’t catch either figure’s attention. They seemed transfixed in the flickering light of the tv, which now spread outside the window and across the garden, so that it was all around him. Dougie blinked the rain from his eyes and looked at the man who had appeared next to him. “In there,” Dougie told him, pointing to the house, “Something’s going on in there!”

Steven French is semi-retired and lives in West Yorkshire, U.K. He has stories published at eastoftheweb, Bewildering Stories, 365Tomorrows, Idle Ink, Land Beyond the World (soon to be defunct, sadly), Liquid Imagination, Literally Stories and others due to appear elsewhere.

Inside Happy Dragon by Thad DeVassie

She did not depart with her takeout and sits alone at a booth for six or more. 

The young woman eats fried rice straight from the small box with chopsticks, refusing to mix it with what remains concealed in the other container. 

With great agility, she lifts each bite to and through an inch-wide slit in her mask, as if it were custom-tailored for this specific activity.

There is a loud hum coming from a fan. Not a kitchen fan, but a tilted box fan on the kitchen floor. 

A small child plays with a 90s-era GameBoy on a folding chair next to the register, too young to possess his own phone or risk damaging his mother’s. 

Nearly ten minutes in I finally decide, then contemplate whether to attempt placing my order in Mandarin. 

I notice the young woman, presumably still a student, in the booth softly weeping, looking down at the paperback book she brought with her, the one thing she has chosen to extract from an overstuffed backpack. 

Dim lighting mixes with the blue haze of a Golden Girls rerun playing on tube television mounted on a shelf. It is near the tip of the tail of a painted dragon mural. Its placement is equal parts awkward and intentional. 

I step forward and order the chow fun in English. 

The young woman, whom I now think is more girl than young woman, stabs her chopsticks into the rice, takes a highlighter to the book, and begins speaking to herself, gradually increasing her volume. I’m not sure if it is Mandarin or Cantonese or if it has anything to do with the book, her story, or what comes next. 

I feel an awkward uptick in my heart rate as I wonder how long it takes to prepare chow fun, my eyes roaming the room so as not to make eye contact.

I steal a glance at the boy and his mother near the register in hopes of a social cue. They are unaffected, as though they have seen this before. 

The girl closes her book, resumes her careful ritual. The strip mall restaurant goes quiet. My ears are unable to locate the hum of the fan. 

Then enters heated banter between widowers Rose and Blanche, and we are all looking up to the television. When the laugh track is missing it is a signal for the audience that a serious shift has taken place. 

Maybe there is something to glean here from two aging actors working out a paper-thin plot line, something about how to move forward while leaving certain things behind. And because nobody will ask me how the chow fun was tonight, or what transpired inside Happy Dragon, doesn’t mean it was just another inconsequential night of takeout.   

Thad DeVassie is a multi-genre writer and painter who creates from the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. His collection SPLENDID IRRATIONALITIES was awarded the 2020 James Tate International Poetry Prize (SurVision Books). Find more of his work at www.thaddevassie.com.