Issue Seventeen

Campfires at the Barn

By Mick Perryman

Swan Creek is a special place, twenty five mile east of Sandpoint Idaho, two miles west of Clark Fork. A mixture of dense forest, grass fields, and river delta, it is packed with beaver dams, fish, deer, elk and ducks. A virtual sportsman’s paradise. And then there’s the structure erected on it on it, a “wooden tent” as my father calls it (as it lacked plumbing, and the only power we had came from two solar panels that provides just enough electricity to run a small fridge), though deep down it’s much more than that. It is built on stilts (Swan Creek is considered a flood plain, and all permanent structures had to be above the ground) and we use the space underneath as storage, keeping everything from lumber to clay pigeons. This is where we host barbecues during the summer, where we hunt deer in the fall and winter, where we fish in the spring, and where, in every season, we have late night campfires, lasting into the deep hours of the night, until the stars shine like more than pinpricks, and the milky way cascades across the sky like a silver river. A beautiful, ebony colored, star spotted, silver river. These campfires are exemplary, sometimes holding on into the night in silence, all of us looking up into the sky, or into the fire.

Sometimes, they are filled with stories. Memories. Sometimes fiction, trying to scare ourselves to the relative material comfort of inside. Most of the scary stories seem cheap to me, always ending in blood or death for an overused, commodity thrill. The ones I prefer are the ones leaving the end to the listener, the unknown being much more terrifying than anything told to us explicitly. These stories are most often told my my uncle, and I still try to recreate them when he isn’t there, with much less effect. Everybody has their own nightmare. I like the memories better, losing myself in the past lives of my family, imagining what it was like to be them. I most love the stories about my father’s father. I had met my Bapa Jerry, but had no memory of him. He died of a heart attack when I was two or three, other than my father’s stories, I only have pictures to remember him. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a story is worth a thousand pictures. On the surface, they are stories of laughter, of anger, of decisions good and bad. Deeper down, they are stories of remembrance. They are stories of legacy. And they are stories of love.

One such story my father tells often, was about a dog. Growing up, they had hunting dogs. Dogs that slept outside, dogs that were not for petting, only for flushing out pheasants. One day, one of my grandfather’s friends offered him a purebred blue heeler, one of the better breeds of bird dogs. For free. The dog wouldn’t work for my grandfather’s friend, and he didn’t want to go through the trouble of training it. My grandfather took advantage of this opportunity, and took the dog out with my father to do some pheasant hunting and see how bad the dog really was.

When hunting pheasants, the bird dog is supposed to run out in front of the hunter, scaring the birds up into the air so the hunter can shoot them. This dog would not leave my grandfather’s side, sometimes walking behind him and scaring pheasants in the wrong direction. My grandfather got so furious at the dog’s noncooperation that he picked it up and threw it in front of him, sure that this would send the message that the dog needed to stay out in front. This was in knee deep snow, my father and grandfather were wading through the middle of an asparagus field, for pheasants like to make nests in the mounds of mulch piled over the asparagus plants after they are covered in snow.

The dog ran right back. The entire morning preceded like this, my grandfather throwing the dog out in front of him, the dog running back. My father had been walking above my grandfather on a ridge, and had missed all of this. At one point he looked over the edge, to see my grandfather spitting mad, pitching his purebred bird dog in front of him, only to have it sprint back like some kind of game. My father collapsed on the ground in a fit of laughter, the humor of the situation greatly unappreciated by my grandfather.

“Stop laughing and get the hell down here you son of a bitch!” and after a thought; “I’m not talking about your mother, you son of a bitch!”

At the end of the story, my father laughs, tilts his head back slightly. His breath fogging in the mellow light of the campfire. I’m never sure, but whenever he tells this story, I can almost swear I see a reflective flash on the corner of his eye. Like the smallest inkling of a teardrop. But maybe it’s just the firelight.

Such are nighttime campfires at the barn.

Mick Perryman is an 8th grader at Moscow Middle School in Moscow, Idaho. He likes running, playing soccer with friends, and writing. This is his first published piece.

Five Years Warmer

By Kendall Bistretzan

I am fifteen and I take the city bus to school. I am the only one of my friends who lives on the West End of town, so my mornings are lonely, and I am accustomed to that. In fact, I embrace it, opting to take the earlier bus to avoid the 8:30 crowd. Morning after morning I stand in the blistering Saskatchewan cold, hands clasped firmly to my purple thermos, the taste of French vanilla cappuccino staining my tongue. My ear buds, the ones they give you for free when you buy an iPod, are only held in place by my toque. I listen to old OneRepublic songs ripped from YouTube. The quality is terrible. The bus schedule, the coffee, the sound, all of it. But I have never known anything else, so I am at ease.

The sky is a different colour at this time of day. In fact, I’m not convinced it’s a real colour at all but rather a majesty that can only be witnessed by the exhausted hopeful bunch who venture out of their homes at seven in the morning. It’s almost the Crayola pencil crayon that tries to pass for dark purple, but there is a rich royalty as though God Herself plucked the purest blue from a sea untouched by man and smeared it across the barren sky. The sun has yet to rise but the trees are nothing but shadows, so dark that they have been erased from the universe. Only the shell of where they once stood remains. More peculiar is the lack of wind. Wind, always raging in Saskatchewan, has yet to wake up from her slumber. It is just me, the sky, and the sharp chill that never rests.

The bus comes and I am warmer now.

I get to school around eight. Most kids hang out in Sion hall before class, but most kids don’t have the best locker location in the school along with their friends. Second floor, north corner, across from a staircase and a window. From this window, I can see the sunrise. There is no sunrise in Sion Hall.

Derrick will get to school before I do. He lives in South Hill, but also opts to take the early bus. He sits with his back to the adjacent wall; gangly legs sprawled out, drawing notice to his slightly-too-short jeans. His shaggy hair often covers his downcast gaze. Before, my presence would draw that gaze up. We would talk, and joke, and kill time until drama. It’s not like that anymore, and I think perhaps it’s not the sky or the chill that make mornings so cold, but him.

We sit in silence and I try to ignore the way my heart aches. I look at him and he looks at his phone. I divert my gaze to the window, where the sun paints her picture. I lose myself in the blue that fades to lilac that fades to rose that fades to fire. In times of stress my friends and I joke about throwing ourselves from the window, but I would never do that to the sky, and perhaps that’s the only thing that keeps me on the ground.

I am twenty and everything is both different and the same. Alberta air is forgiving enough that my hands can be ungloved as I clutch my to-go cup. The coffee is black. I made it with my Keurig – the first thing I bought when I moved out. The sun doesn’t rise in my neighbourhood and I don’t know how this can be, but every morning at the bus stop I watch the sun turn on like the rising of a dimmer switch. There isn’t light, and then there is. I miss the land of living skies, but there is no point in dwelling on what is different. I have adopted a new favourite view; the city lights at night. They are a manmade wonder, but they’ll do.

I am twenty and I am everything that tenth grade Kendall hoped I would become, except that I am a multitude, and good cannot exist without bad. I am a journalism student, a published writer, I am entering adulthood with a solid group of friends, and I have a part-time barista job that I happen to love. But I am weary. The people I love worry about me. And while it has been half a decade since my first heartbreak I have only recently uncovered the burden of breaking another, and it is so much easier to be sad than to make sad.

I try not to dwell on my shortcomings when I’m doing all I can to make good. I fill my head with music to battle it out with the worry. Everlong, but not the acoustic version. Motown, to remember better times (maybe I’ll tap my foot a bit). Not Imagine Dragons, at least not yet. Arkells; I share this love with new friends. These songs belong to me, and if I’m cold waiting for the bus, I don’t notice.

The ride leading up to my transfer is short and offers my favourite part of the day. The only people on the bus are the driver and I— the exhausted hopeful bunch who venture out of their homes at seven in the morning. We sit in silence. The bus lurches around the corner of Windermere road and there it is:

The sun rises over downtown Calgary. She actually rises. I say hello to my old friends: the blue that fades to lilac that fades to rose that fades to fire, but where there were once blacked-out trees is the skyline of a city that is bigger than my dreams, and in that darkness, there are lights.

Everything is both different and the same. I take the bus to school, and finally, I am warm.

Kendall Bistretzan is from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and resides in Calgary, Alberta, where she studies Journalism at Mount Royal University. She has previous publications with Windscript, Polar Expressions, Local Drop Magazine and Rebelle Society, and also writes for the Calgary Journal. You can find her on Instagram @kendallbistwrites.

Up in Smoke

By Hailey Bartlett

Ms. Hillberry liked things difficult. She would ask her butler of twenty-five years to steep her tea with not one, but three bags each cup. If you were to ask her why, she would explain that her taste buds were far more advanced than common folk who only drink from one bag. She also required that her sugar cubes be expertly sliced in oddly precise measurements to which she never checked, no matter how many times she threatened it. The butler knew the cubes must be placed on the side of her plate, never to be put it by any hands other than her own.

Next to her tea was a handcrafted sandwich, cut in the shape of a heart with crusts on the side and cut into fours. Every ingredient had to be visible, the cream cheese, cucumber, pepper, and alfalfa sprouts that would get stuck between her yellowing teeth. Her teeth were just as yellow as the satin curtains in each window, specifically drawn at a ninety two degree angle, which again, was never checked. The walls soon followed suit with a yellowing color, causing Ms. Hillberry to demand the walls be covered in elaborate oil painting of every single member of the rich family holding a cigarette between their pale fingers. Her butler, however, was not a painter, but he learned for the sake of the “royal atmosphere” Ms. Hillberry and her ancestors worked so hard to create by smoking indoors.

Not only did he dislike painting, but he disliked the stench of cigarettes and the effect on the older woman’s lungs. The butler would tell her that one day, she would lose hold of her lit cigarette, leading lace tablecloth, imported from Bordeaux, France, to catch fire, which would make its way to the circular rug from Istanbul, and finally connect with the drapes to ignite the entire royal atmosphere in flames.

She replied the same way every time he cautioned her: “You know what they’ll say once that happens? The butler did it.”

Hailey Bartlett is a seventeen-year-old writer from Freedom, Pennsylvania. She still can’t swim or tie her shoes very well, but she CAN make people laugh.

Crucifying Fish, Waiting for Death

By Zoha Arif

Nana hasn’t seen an ocean or lake for decades, since she left the business of fish bladder trafficking, since her husband, a middle man for the fish mafia, was thrown overboard into a ring of hammerheads on a wet night. Perhaps that’s why she’s so easily excited by thunderstorms. When I visited her a few years ago, she sat for two hours watching a passing storm. At the time, Nana lived in a one bedroom apartment facing the inner courtyard of her brick high-rise complex, a matted grassland dotted with weed, mosquitos, mice, and thickets of vines, crawling up the brick walls like arms jabbed and poked by needles. When I tilted my head far enough, I could see the opening above the courtyard through the window, where black clouds billowed from the west, their brassy countenances fattening the air and dulling everything. We sat in silence that evening, Nana with green tea, me with my bitten finger-beds, rain slapping the window a thousand times over, both of us watching the courtyard bleed with water and the vine fade away in a blur of mist. Nana soaked in the brilliance and brute violence of the storm, intrigued and fascinated, whilst I didn’t see anything different with this thunderstorm than the last.

When mama plows us to Nana’s house, there are eruptions of periodic yelling and questions of do we really have to go? God, it’s so boring there, there’s nothing to do. And always, with clinging fingers to the front door, we drive to her house in silence. For a couch, Nana has a tower of three mattresses. There are always cockroaches on these mattresses because Nana eats here, so we have learned over the years to glance over the tower before pressing ourselves together onto the thing. The Pakistani flag, just a patch of dark green and the vertex of a crescent moon, melts out from in between the bottom two mattresses like cheese in a burger.

Nana has had the same pack of 12 assorted colored pencils for decades, each one accentuated with bite marks in the places the pencil was held in between her teeth for concentration when she’s meticulously drawing sharks on the corners of napkins. Her drawings seem childish to me now (the sharks looking more like a portly circular whale), but when I was more naive, I thought otherwise. Her sharks were once blue and white, with full bodies and sharp, canine teeth, eyes, bulbous hair, and always a toothy smile. But on the back of a Chipotle napkin once, Nana drew a shark with a trace of red around the mouth, like lipstick, and said “something like Kool-aid, that’s what it ate.” From there, the innocent blue and white sharks vanished, and to replace them were purple sharks with mozzarella sticks and tarantella-shaped rings and glittered sharks with disco balls for eyes and chicken tenders for a fin.

Nana cannot understand English, yet the only channel she can tolerate is CNN, as if there is comfort in letting the foreign voice of a newscaster plump her apartment. She throws a fit coupled with a period of verbal shunning if we ever do so much as request a change of channel. So we sit quietly, quaintly on the tower of mattresses. One time, Nana asked about the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton debate broadcast on CNN, but my pashto vocabulary on political jargon was not stellar and so my explanations did not suffice her questions. But still she kept pressing me, more questions that I could not answer, and so before my patience wronged me, I fled to the bathroom with the intent of staying there until Nana’s faze passed. Standing in front of the mirror, in a dull, yellow light, a part of me thought that I won’t miss this when Nana is gone. But I quickly buried the thought because what sickened grandchild wishes for their grandmother’s death. When I emerged from the bathroom, CNN still hummed against the walls, as always, but Nana was resting by the window, one cheek pressed against the glass like a pancake. On a napkin in her lap, there was a shark with a party hat, a cake balanced on its head, green teardrops springing from its gills. I sat on the tower of mattresses and looked at the wedding ring in the fishnet underneath the row of army medals by the door.

One summer Nana stayed over for Ramadan. She’s had joint pain for years around the perimeter of her knee but never believed in doctors so its been left untreated. She slept on an air mattress in the entry hall of our house because she couldn’t trek up the stairs to the guest room and refused to be carried. She spent her days with the front door open, watching the cars and cradling her 12 colored pencils. A friend once came over and asked, what’s with your grandmother and sharks? and I stared at her wide-eyed.

During Ramadan, we took Nana to Target. She was awed by most everything in the store, pointing to this and that and commanding me to push her wheelchair over so she can touch this and that. She spent an hour staring at the selection of biking helmets and I sat on a tricycle, utterly bored. As we passed the stationary aisle, I plucked a pack of fresh colored pencils for Nana, remembering her finger-sized and dilapidated set, bitten from decades of shark drawings. But Nana hissed and slapped them way when she saw them, asked how I could commit such an abomination of an act, and verbally shunned me for a couple of hours, her usual way of voicing her distaste. Later that day, as we sat at a McDonald’s, Nana licked her fingers of the remaining crumbs of a chicken McNugget, her bony hands and ivory limbs reaching across the table for more, brown eyes wide and excited, almost like a child. That night Nana drew a shark modeling a bicycle helmet and hid it underneath her pillow.

After each visit, the joy perspiring from our bodies from the feeling of driving away from Nana’s house, on the road to our normal lives, our outside lives, is a fire on its own. As Nana’s brick-high-rise complex shrinks into a facet of the far-off scenery, looking back at the thing, infested with mice and cock-roaches and riddled with constant power-outages, I wonder if Nana wants more from life than this.

Later on, in my teenage years, Nana became outwardly devout to God. Visits compromised of shark drawings and long epilogues on the Prophet Mohammad, Jesus, Moses (peace be upon them), and Allah, the all-knowing, the most-gracious, the merciful. Imams and Islamic Scholars replaced CNN. Nana cannot understand Arabic, but she still lets the voice of the Arabic quran, the holy scripture, plump her apartment. Strangely, Nana lightened during this time, and carried herself as if she had a sweet secret, as if God had given her a glimpse of the seven heavens.

The night before my cousin’s sixteenth birthday, in the early morning hours, Nana rolled to the freezer and threw the ice-cream cake out the window, explaining the next morning that birthdays are not to be celebrated in this way, this Western way. Praise God on your birthday, she said, for letting you live this long and recognize that you are one day closer to the Day of Judgement, the promised meeting with your lord, and death. I refused to say what the others said, that Nana is crazed, because she was 84, and not much longer.

Nana died on a Tuesday in March. At her funeral, we played hide-and-seek. The ceremony itself was hushed and startlingly short, and afterwards we stood in the parking lot of the cemetery, talking and running and enjoying a great deal of hilarity. Nana who stole napkins to draw sharks, drained everyone with constant warnings about God, lived in a place we all pitched in to pay for but were all too happy to leave, why did she bite the bait but not stay hooked? The fishing is good, better for us, when Nana is on the other side of the lake, because that way the bass and salmon will have nothing to fear and come near, fill our pooling bellies, something Nana wouldn’t do.

When Mama and I went to her apartment to empty it for the landlord, I found three cereal boxes full of napkins littered with shark drawings. The last shark left by Nana was the strangest one I’d ever seen; it had a round stump for a tail, massive, bulging eyes, humanoid legs, and arms jetting from the gills and fins. In a cookie tin-can, I found the remains of Nana’s 12 assorted colored pencils. Mama looked at them once and said that they’ve got no worth, utter trash, but I shuffled a few into my backpack anyway. That night, I tried not to think of the army medals, the piggy bank filled with ashes, the twenty thousand pakistani rupees left in a safe underneath the kitchen sink, the binoculars and fishing net and fishing rod thrown on top of the fridge, Nana sleeping on an air mattress by the front door with her shoulders shaking and sagging like teardrops, her hollow stare at the bleating rain, the strange joy she found in chicken nuggets and thunderstorms, her cracked countenance, this knowing that there will be no more fits during the drive to Nana’s house, the certainty that this is what we internally, quietly wanted.

Zoha Arif will graduate from the Academy for Information Technology in the spring of 2021. She lives in Union, New Jersey and melts away her free time appreciating peanut butter, eating books, breathing computer science, chasing squirrels, and spilling her strangest ideas into her works of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Polyphony Lit and the Showbear Family Circus.

Songbird

By Isabelle Kang

She was his sweet child, fair and spring-like and blowing in the wind. A vat of English cream; a sugared wine; thick honey in one’s tea. At night, before he slept, he saw her golden face quirked in that everlasting smile, the expression always still, the wind mussing the strands of her hair. It seemed to him like a picture, or perhaps an infinite scene in a movie, in which she remained forever-young.

They met at church. Her family only came a few times every year, mostly on Easter or Christmas, occasionally on the rare Sunday, if the children accepted it, and the mother felt particularly devout. He had been there on one of those rare Sunday mornings, sitting in the pew, mopping his brow – humid, July – listening to the sermons. Then the choir was introduced, and there, bathed in the morning light, stood the newest member of the congregation, a short and delicate girl of twelve-or-so, dressed in her robe, licking her lips until they were moist. Her voice came to him tender and unripened, tart upon the mouth like a fresh wine. Her very face allowed the hymns to pass through her like a shuddering wave of pleasure. It was then that he knew she ought to be his child, a little one to nurse and advise and walk among the church with, whispering secrets and sworn to the other through unbloodied ties.

After the sermon he had introduced himself and complimented the girl’s singing. He’d asked for her name.

“Winnifred,” her mother said, “but she prefers Winnie.”

From then on he held her name close to his heart. He found himself shivering at the very sound of it, shivering all the more if he said it aloud. One morning, walking to church, he saw her like a ghost skipping beside him, hair gold and fine, radiating strong smells of shampoo warmed by the sun. She stayed beside him throughout the service, and he imagined she was fidgeting with something beside him, head locked into concentration, her nose bunched into a gentle scowl.

In the evening, as he made dinner, she would dance across the floor, sweeping her skinny legs to fast-paced music, and at night she would ask him, “Tie my shoes, won’t you?” and run off into the yard, laughing devilishly. Sometimes when he was driving, he would look into the rear mirror and imagine her sitting there, imagine how her body would glisten with excitement, how, in the heat of the summer, he would watch sweat weep down her face. He would buy her candy from the gas station near his work; he would pick her up in his arms; her laugh would fill the empty house.

One Saturday he saw her walking home from school, hair like fine strands of gold in the afternoon light. It settled upon her shoulders in waves. He decided he was going to talk to her. He’d built up the nerve. He had his words lined up in front of him.

“You’re Winnifred,” he said, pulling up beside her. “Am I right?”

“It’s Winnie.” With delight, he watched her pick at the hem of her dress, knobby knees poking out under her skin.

“Sure,” he said. “I like your dress.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you walking home from school?”

“Yeah.”

He paused to look at her. “Need a ride home?”

“Okay.”

He opened the car door. She sat down beside him. “Thanks,” she said.

“Sure. Mind if I make a quick stop before your house?”

“Where?”

“I need something. It won’t take long.”

“Okay.”

He drove off.

They reached his house not long after. He looked over at her. She was sitting with her knees pressed against the door so hard they were turning pink.

“It’s too hot in here for you to stay,” he said. “You should come inside.”

He opened the door and reluctantly she slid out. “What do you have to get?”

But he didn’t answer. He unlocked the door and showed her inside. “Stay right here,” he said, “I have something to show you.”

She stayed still, standing evenly between her two legs, hips rigid and arms holding onto one another. He ran to the top floor of the house. At the top of the landing there was a room painted pink, mostly empty save for a couple of magazines and a stack of women’s clothes. There was a box, too, a white cardboard box with a red ribbon.

She was still standing there when he got down, legs and feet sewn tightly together. “Is this what you had to get?” She stared at the box, eyes drawn to the bright red ribbon.

“It’s for you.” He gave it to her, but she didn’t open it.

“Thanks,” she said, “but I really have to get going now. I can just walk home the rest of the way.”

“Wait,” he stepped towards her. “I want you to tell me what you think of it.”

She looked down at the box. Her hands couldn’t hold it steady. “Okay.” She set it down and loosened the ribbon. Inside, there was a white silky dress, spaghetti-strapped and trimmed in a cheap lace; the fabric pooled into all corners of the box.

“Do you like it?”

She picked it up. It dripped from her arms. “Thank you very much. I love it.” But her face was cold as stone.

“You have to tell me the truth,” he said, reaching forwards for her arm, “you have to.”

“Stop it!” she said, backing away as the fabric rolled with her. She trembled; a sweat was brewing on her forehead.

“I need to know,” he said, “just tell me what you think of it.” But she kept walking away from him. He was scaring her. So he stayed still as he watched her fiddle with the door, then as she opened it,— and fled outside.

The dress remained on the floor. She’d dropped it. Weeping, he placed it back into the box and carried it upstairs, put it next to the other clothes in the pink room. He cried – for the emptiness of the room, for the beauty of the light coming in through the window, for a beauty he had no one to share with.

For how long, he wondered, could he live in a house so cold? He watched the dress as it simmered beneath the sunlight. He put the top of the box back on. How long, he wondered. How long before he peeled away?

Isabelle Kang is a seventeen-year-old Korean-American writer. She attends Denver School of the Arts for Creative Writing, and has been published in the school’s literary magazine, Calliope, for four consecutive years. She enjoys incorporating her writing into other interests, such as music, painting, and psychology.

semi-colon

By Syie

The days of pain she undertakes;
The nights of crying that force her body to

Will be forever stained in the tears under her eyes;
And in the scars on her thighs;
Blood

from the razor;

As she looks for a savior;
She will finds one;
Her search, now, finally done;
Because she knows that she has a friend;
Who won’t dare let her life soon end;

Why the name Syie…?

I wasn’t born with Syie as any part of my name, nor did it come from some text that I read. It’s a completely made up name for my equally made up religion. In that religion’s language/dialect, the word, “syie” means “warrior/fighter of many battles”. I don’t just have mental illnesses, but I was born with a genetic mutation that causes Cerebral-Palsy-like symptoms, such as impaired speech, difficulties with tasks like writing by hand, etc… I think that my physical disability is what made my emotional disorders so much worse. For about seven or eight years, I’ve been battling with depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies. Due to my physical condition, I’m somewhat withdrawn and do not have that many friends. So I turned to writing to cope with the day-to-day struggles and stress of never being able to keep my own body still. I did somehow manage to be still enough to get a tattoo of the ; on my upper left arm… after I wrote the poem, that is. I type all that to say: I think I’ve earned the name Syie, and I’m never looking back.