Issue Seven

Corn-maze dust does the Devil’s jig around two pairs of feet. Meena’s toes are brown and slim, probing the earth like curious pitchfork tines. Salome’s feet are pale and sturdy, thumping the ground with her solid heel. Corn pokes the sky. Way up above their heads, there could be astronauts watching the waving stalks from the outermost edges of space. Salome wants to reach up so high that they see her too. She’ll wave to the astronaut lady with the very red hair: her ginger astronaut looks like a superhero and has a laugh like galaxies of light.

Meena would make a fair explorer, Salome knows. High fashion is her game, even in overalls with crusty knees and denim hiding her scraped-up shins. Questions are all the rage these days. So is art. Meena has bushels of both. She has no distain for Salome’s soiled polka-dot dress with the high collar.

 

“Salome, let’s run away! We could thrive here!” the sprinter shouts and spins in dizzy face-up spirals. Words like ‘thrive’ come out so spontaneous that nobody gives her lip. “You’re so clever, Salome,” she continues, after flopping on the ground. “Make us a cornhusk fire. I’ll roast corn on the coals. We can catch crows and tame them! Can you imagine having your own battalion of crows? And then we could stay here, and sleep with the stars all watching!”

“What about the smoke? They’ll find us. We’d get sick of corn after a few days. And then it’ll frost. This whole field will be bleached and creepy. All the stalks will turn into zombie fingers.” But fearless Meena is up and away, flirting with straw men. If there were zombies, she would make friends with them and lobby for equal rights regardless of race, gender, age, social status, or speed of pulse. It’s all about the content of character, and Meena is contented.

All these years later, she uses her long dark braid to swat flies away down by the swimming pool. Nobody has ever seen a lifeguard so likely to drown a man with just a look. Once a month or so, she thinks of her childhood friend who burned easily in the sun. She wonders where that girl is now.

Salome is not as far away as Meena thinks. The girl repented. Devil dust got her young, so she went to Christ to beg forgiveness. The sins were yet to come, but sins there might be.

Behind convent hedges, she wears white and brown. Black is for women fully fledged.

Salome bends over her evening soup but doesn’t eat. Eating is an earthly pleasure. Pleasure is weakness, and she wants God to see her strong. Strangely, though, this doesn’t make her strong. Bones push up against her skin, becoming a collar around her neck and bars across her chest. Visions come, of fire and of blood. Salome kneels to these sweaty illusions.

Today is a Thursday afternoon in snow. Down at the swimming pool, Meena is a sleek red seal. Between her breasts she has a white plus sign where Salome carries a dead man on a chain. The water is so electric blue that it looks like summer sky over a cornfield. Someone is screaming, and it isn’t in pleasure. A man cradles a dripping infant with pink eyelids and drenched eyelashes. He’s shouting for help.

“Does anyone here know CPR?” yells a woman. All eyes turn to Meena and her glistening brown thighs. She’s already halfway there.

Salome kneels in her husky skin. All her sisters are baking bread this afternoon. She told Ms. Superior that she couldn’t partake, which isn’t a lie, really, is it? Now she worries that a lie by the omission of truth might be a sin. Forgive me, father. Forgive your Salome. She got a bottle of bleach from the cleaning cabinet yesterday. Is that stealing? Tears run down her cheeks. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Cradling the wet duck-fuzz head, Meena uses two fingers to compress that little chest. One, two, three, she counts quickly to thirty and then seals her lips over the little mouth and nose. Two breaths, just enough to move that tiny chest. The father of the child is sobbing uncontrollably. Meena ignores him.

The bleach is Mr. Clean. Salome takes a swallow to scrub out her guts. She drinks Mr. Clean without a moment to appreciate irony. It burns her like the visions do. She chokes and splutters.

 

When butterfly lungs flutter, eighty-five birthday cakes practically bake themselves. The little body convulses, and Meena flips it over to drain away milky sputum. Plum lipstick is smeary on puff-pastry cheeks. Those baby-blue eyes are the color of the sky over a corn maze. A wail starts up as the baby squirms, and Meena reunites father and child. She feels like she’s just run a marathon. And won.

 

Pain curdles Salome’s stomach. She pukes white nothingness on the floor and cleans it up with the rest of the bleach. Nothing truly colorful is allowed in the convent, but the bleach bottle is blue. Salome remembers a wild brown heathen that flew on curious feet. She wonders where that girl is now, and pities her- not one of God’s chosen. There was a day in a maze on the death rattles of summer. That girl was running so sure, and she had followed. Meena must have had a map in her head. When the parents were just on the cusp of calling the cops, the girls emerged victorious. Meena’s father scooped up his little girl, swung her around and held her tight. Salome’s mother didn’t say a word until she was safe in the car.

“We were worried sick,” she said, “You ought to be ashamed. What do you have to say?” Salome looked out the window, then down at her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said. And meant it.

 

 

Willow DeLyon has loved telling stories, as long as she can remember. She grew up in the hills of Massachusetts telling stories to whoever would listen. At seventeen, she left home to travel, and met many people who shared their own stories, and in doing so, helped her along the bumpy road towards adulthood. One thing she learned was the importance of listening to strangers and learning from their joys and sorrows, good choices and regrets. Although she’s not been collecting stories for very long, she hopes to share the right stories with the right people at the right times.

 

She called you and said she was tired, that she couldn’t sleep the night before because of con ma, a ghost. You weren’t listening; you didn’t ask. But she answered anyway. He’d come for her at the Devil’s hour, dressed in all white. His smile a crescent moon at dawn, he’d knelt at the foot of her bed, eyes like two black bubbles. She’d laid awake, frozen. Come morning, she’d looked and saw that her husband had gone, as if he’d fizzled out into nothing but dust and slow, amber-tinted light.

You didn’t believe her.

Lifting your glasses, you rubbed the side of your nose with two fingers. The voice of your grandmother, your bà ngoại, was small, soft. Swiveling between the textbook and the solutions manual, you scowled in frustration. You breathed in: black coffee and cheap erasers. And you breathed out, swearing under your breath that next semester, you’d start studying sooner, much sooner. You turned off speakerphone, clamping the iPhone between your shoulder and ear. You were busy, and you said so—twice. Loudly and firmly, as if she was a slow-learning dog. She spoke in broken, faltering English.

She said, “My grandson is a hard worker.”

She said, “I’m proud of you.”

She said, “I love you.”

You hung up. In that moment, you had no way of knowing what your face looked like (blank, with eyes like iced-over rocks). You had no way of knowing that the following night, while you wrote your organic chemistry midterm, grandma would take grandpa’s hand, the two of them disintegrating into nothing but dust and moonlight.

#

In the summers between grades four, five, and six, your grandmother cooked you lunch every day. When you saw her at the door in the morning, snug in a dotted cardigan, you struggled not to smile. A white plastic bag, stuffed with sweet buns and coloured sticky rice, always hung from one wrist.

The day before grade four started, she’d held your hand and the both of you ran—giggling—through a thunderstorm, from No Frills to your house across the street, white plastic bags stretched over the tops of your heads. The world was a dark and soggy place, an anonymous jungle of dripping power lines and shiny rooftops. A world without any framework or handholds. But as long as bà ngoại held your hand, you thought, you would know where to run.

The summer between grades five and six, you grew almost a foot taller. You were eating bánh xèo on a quiet August afternoon when you heard them outside your front door—those boys from school who would kick the back of your chair and flick elastic bands at your bare arms and legs. Boys who would yank the skin around their blue and green eyes, spitting the word chink in your face.

Your fingers sticky with fish sauce, you scrambled out the door to see them wheeling away your bike. Before you could take off running with clenched fists, bà ngoại yanked you back by the elbow. Tottering onto your front lawn, she screamed at the boys in Vietnamese, her little, wrinkled face turning red. Furious, she flapped a dirty rag at them until they dropped the bike on the sidewalk and sprinted away, wide-eyed.

The next summer, you told your mom you were old enough to stay home alone, that you could eat whatever was in the fridge. You were embarrassed by bà ngoại—by her broken English and blackened teeth. By then, you were more than two heads taller than her. Having stumbled upon new friendships and new, mesmerizing ambitions, the world had unfolded into someplace effervescent and white—someplace comfortable, where you no longer needed to hold anybody’s hand.

#

In front of the apartment building were huge, old willow trees, their leaves drooping, almost touching the ground, as if they were people lost in thought.

Inside the apartment, the smell was nothing you could’ve imagined: a sickly sweet, like cantaloupe rotting under the afternoon sun. Even with her body gone, the smell still sank into your hair, your clothes. Your throat was plugged. Outside, though the chintz curtains, you saw a flock of pigeons nosedive behind the willows. The engine of a motorcycle in the parking lot out front filled the small apartment with the moaning of a torture machine. Behind you, your mom was folding the one, tattered winter jacket your grandma had ever owned, the jacket she bought at a Sears outlet mall when she’d first immigrated to Canada.

You stacked her books into a cardboard box. Thumbing through the pages of a notebook, you saw that she’d written the days of the week in English, over and over again, in stiff, slanted letters. She’d penned the names of furniture, of animals and countries. You ran your fingers over the popped-out curlicues on the backs of the lined pages. You bit your lip until you tasted pennies, squeezing your eyes shut.

In another, slimmer notebook, you skimmed through the phone numbers and addresses of her family doctor, dentist, hairstylist, and a few names you didn’t recognize. An unopened pack of gel pens, with Dollarama’s green and yellow sticker still on it, was hidden beneath a thick Vietnamese-to-English dictionary.

Next to the phone on the kitchen table was a spiral-bound notepad with a holographic kitten on the cover. You took it and sat down on a chair she’d lined with a sheet of plastic. Each page in the notebook had a tiny paw in the upper right corner, with a page number in its center.

Bà ngoại had written on the front page, “My name is Linh. How are you? I am well.”

Your mom was taking silverware out of the kitchen drawers. The clink of forks and knives sounded like faraway, heavenly bells. You flipped to the last page with words on it.

She’d written, “My grandson is a hard worker.”

She’d written, “I’m proud of him.”

She’d written, “I love him.”

 

Carolyn Chung is a nineteen-year-old living in Toronto. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in FreeFall and tenderness, yea.

 

Madison, standing arms folded by the linoleum counter, watched Kyle eat another grubby fistful of Cheetos and lick the dust off his palm. His round face, splattered with grease, peered up at the TV. Some sort of marathon was on- Power Rangers- and Kyle’s beady eyes hadn’t left the screen for hours. It seemed inconceivable that her son cared more about fictional superheroes than he did about the melodrama unfolding outside. Kyle loved Lassie, right? The dog, not the movie. Kyle hated that movie. Not enough explosions.

She turned and caught a glimpse of her husband through the cracked window of their trailer. He was holding Grandpa Turner’s gun, tears streaming down his face. Madison looked away. That’s how you do it, she thought. She glanced back at her child. There was something distorted about it, the way this scene was unfolding- the crying outside only contrasted the sickly glow of their cluttered living room. And there Kyle was, unmoving. Why wouldn’t he move?

She didn’t want him to be sad, she told herself. She just wanted to see him be sad. But what she wanted, the hysteria and the breakdowns and the screaming, that wasn’t going to happen. The television was on.

It wasn’t their fault. They just didn’t have the cash to go to the vet to do it. Blame the economy, blame the president. It was cheaper this way. Still, it made her want to vomit when she looked at their flat screen and saw all the money they could afford to waste on that piece of garbage. Deep in her gut, she had known that Rick’s promotion was a temporary respite. Nothing ever went well enough for them. Besides, all they ever watched on it was Family Feud and the goddamn Power Rangers. Her child loved it, and she hated it more.

The boy finished the Cheetos and sucked his plump fingers clean. Kyle’s eyes were small and beady and completely unmoving. She felt bile rise in her throat.

A bark came from the outside of the trailer. Rick’s muffled cries soaked through the cracked tile.

She just wanted Kyle to care. She wanted to grab that fat face and push it against the window until his snot ran down the glass and tears welled up in its eyes and Kyle could see her husband, its father, blowing the dog’s brains out. And she wanted that boy, that parasite, to cry, because that’d at least prove that it was human, and that it cared about anything or anyone. She thought about doing it, she really did. But Madison didn’t think she’d be able to forgive herself.

Sounds stopped trickling in from outside the trailer. She could picture her husband taking deep, even breaths, trying to swallow his emotions back into his stomach. Madison turned away. There was a yelp and a gunshot and then nothing but the birds, voices like wind chimes, nature correcting itself through music. With one misshapen finger, Kyle turned up the volume on the television.

Madison felt a tug at the corner of her mouth. Kyle didn’t look away from the screen, didn’t blink, because Lassie was just a movie and the dog was just a dog.

 

Henry Wahlenmayer is a Literary Arts student at LPPACS. He likes chickens.