Category: Nonfiction

Remember to Drink Water

Lynne Schmidt

I’m sad to say I can’t remember the first time I met him. I’m possibly more saddened to admit I was disappointed the second time I met him. But by the end of the second time, I can say I was sad to see him go.

So the third time I knew I’d see him, I sit in a summer camping chair under a screened canopy and watch the road like a lover waiting for a letter from the mailman. I worry I may not remember him again.

I’ve only seen him in the winter, not the summer heat and sun. But then a boy in a dark t-shirt emerges from a car with a baseball cap on, and my heart jumps into my throat with the force of a sprinter. I know him the second I see him.

Though there are people all around me, I rise from my seat, step down from the platform my chair is on, exit the gate. I take two steps, each one makes my smile more uncontrollable, like my face could actually split in two. My walk bursts to slightly jogging and throwing myself into his opened arms with the speed an accuracy of a football player. Most guys fall over when I do this. He doesn’t.

“Hi!” I say when he puts me back on my feet.

He smiles. “Hi.”

“I only know one other person here beside Mat and Becky. So I might latch onto you. This is your warning.”

We walk back to the party together. I’ve already had a beer before he arrived. As we walk in, a guy in a blue polo who’d given me the first beer offers me another. As he tries to talk to me, I glance as my friend sits down.

Be careful, he mouths. I can’t usually read people’s lips, but he made sure I see him.

I reply with a questioning look, but he’s already turned away. In response, I take the beer from Blue Polo, thank him, and head toward my friend.

“What was that warning for?” I ask.

“I don’t know him. I don’t have a lot of respect for guys who just feed girls drinks,” he says.

I take a sip, processing his words. Blown away by the simplicity, the protectiveness. I haven’t eaten much. This is my second beer. I’m a lightweight. “Thanks,” I say.

For a few moments longer, it’s just the two of us. “You have a spider on you,” I say.

His body stiffens. “Kill it. Get it off me!” The panic in his voice is unmistakable.

I give him a look, cup my hands around the little resident, and place the spider on the wooden fence before making my way back. “Scared of spiders?”

He points to his nose. “Only since one took a small piece.”

I look close. Sure enough, there is a small crater on one of his nostrils. I chuckle. “Well, you’re safe now.”

His friends surround him. I expect to fade into the background like I do with most of my friends and all of my family. Instead, side conversations were started; with a red-haired woman about snowboarding, a tall man with a tongue ring about my gloves being his paintball team’s colors.

I finish my beer.

“You should drink water,” he says quietly under the volume of the other conversations.

Instead, I get up to pee and my head is spinning. He’s right. I need water.

Near my return, he brings up water again. Then says, “How much have you eaten?”

I smile the way fucked up girls do, I tell him, “I’m fine.”

We convince his friend to make me a hot dog. He has me drink another bottle of water.

An older gentleman I don’t recognize interrupts us. “What you’ve been doing the last hour? That’s marriage,” he says.

We make eye contact. I stop moving, desperate for his response. He shrugs, still watching me. “It’s not so bad,” he says with an easy smile.

I smile and look away before he can see how hot my face is.

He’s here. I’m drunk. People are friendly. I try to give him space and socialize with people I don’t know. One gets an electric fly swatter. I convince this person to touch it until it shocks him. He jokingly swings it at me. I run to my friend, who’s standing with an older couple.

Without a word, and without asking permission, I link my arm through his. He doesn’t stop the conversation he’s having, but looks sideways at me. He doesn’t move away, doesn’t change his body at all, so I continue holding on. We stand like that, and I nudge him though he’s clearly in the middle of talking. At an appropriate time, he tilts his head toward me so only he can hear me. These small side conversations are as though we’ve created our own little world, and I want to live here orbiting his galaxy.

“They were trying to electrocute me. I save you from spiders, you save me from creepy guys.”

He nods with a small smile and resumes the conversation without missing a beat. I’ve held on to him long enough. My arm slips back through his and rests at my side.

“You need to eat,” I whisper in a tone mocking his earlier suggestion.

“I’m fine.”

“No. You made me eat. You eat, and get me a beer.”

I bounce around the party awhile before returning to him. Eventually, he eats a hot dog and hands me a beer. If it weren’t for him, I’d be hammered right now. Instead, I’m buzzed and happy.

I stand beside him, like I’m welcome or I belong there. Somehow, whether it’s gravity or magic, I stand too close and my leg rests against his. Instinct tells me to pull away, but something else dares me to stay. I stay. So does he.

One second goes by, then another. Heat flashes through my body. I press my leg a little harder against his to tell him I notice, to allow him to move away from me. Instead, he reciprocates the gesture, pressing back into me.

Did he just push back? Did I imagine this?

To test this, I relax the tension in my leg and begin to separate. If I’m not mistaken, his weight shifts. His leg follows mine. My heart threatens to burst out of my chest and into his hands.

Every cell in my body is daring me to move closer. To see what else, where else, I’m allowed to push against.

“Are you two dating?” the woman in the couple asks.

The moment, our legs touching, rips away like shattered glass. We chuckle. He answers, “No.” The tone in his voice suggests this isn’t the first time someone has asked today.

I want to kiss him. I notice how tall he stands beside me. The small piece missing from his nose, the tiny imperfection in his teeth.

I want to kiss him.

He glances at me from the side. How often has he been watching me today?

I take my beer, thank him again, and venture off again.

It’s closer to nighttime. Most everyone has left. I’ve somehow managed to piss the future bride’s best friend off but I’m not 100% sure how I managed to do that.

He gets ready to leave. He’s called me a bitch, jokingly. I’ve spit water at his face and he laughed. This could be everything I’ve ever wanted and I don’t want him to leave.

We make plans for the morning. He wraps me in his arms and before I’m ready lets me go, gets in his car and drives away.

I go inside and I curl up alone on a loveseat. I don’t sleep. My knees hurt, a boy I barely know is on the human-sized couch. It’s too hot.

So I fixate on the moment where my leg was pressed against his.

He runs his fingers through my hair and pushes his lips against mine. He holds my hand.

He….
He….
He….

And I fall asleep with his invisible hands touching me.

Lynne Schmidt

Bunker is Dead

K.T. Slattery

One of the most unfortunate side-effects of having many animals is you tend not to go too long without one dying on you, while one of the most unfortunate side-effects of my parents going on holiday (and leaving me to keep an eye on my grandmother) was that one of these many animals was always fated to die, and not just die, but die in a spectacular, awkward, or extremely costly fashion. (I would like to note the exception of my cat, Rum Tum Tugger, who must have been buried five times, and would always miraculously reappear when I came home, but Rum is destined for a story all her own). With all of this having been said, it should have been no surprise that Bunker died when I had flown down to mind the ‘homestead.’

From the moment I walked outside that sweltering July morning, hot air hitting me like a sonic blast at seven o’clock in the morning, I knew something was amiss. Perhaps it was the dogs, noses up sniffing the air in excitement, or maybe it was the vultures I spotted when my eyes looked in the direction their twitching noses were pointing, but something was dead. Looking back, I can feel the air putrefying around me, and I can almost smell the rotting corpse. Maybe that’s how it really was, or maybe it’s just my imagination embellishing the moment, but either way, as it turns out, Bunker was dead.

I can remember exactly how old Bunker was because his birth certificate had the same numbers typed in the same order as mine. 1 9 7 6. When I was much younger, I used to look at all of the horses’ papers, coming up with similarities between myself and them, something to give any of us a close bond. Bunker, having chosen to enter the world just a few months ahead of me, was nominated to have an even closer bond with me than my own horse, Thunder (Bless Thunder, I loved him dearly, but he was not the sharpest crayon in the box of Crayola).

Bunker and I were both bicentennial babies—well, me a human baby, whilst Bunker was a foal. I was twenty-two at the time of his passing, home from my first job after I graduated from university, feeling all adult and responsible—and braced for the inevitable calamity which would be launched upon me while my parents were watching humpback whales.

I put the dogs away and moved through the thick, humid air towards the circling vultures. And there he was, poor Bunker, lying in the pasture, already starting to swell in the heat. It will be alright, I told myself. I will not get hysterical, and I will handle this. Now, who buried our other horses when they died? Keith, oh no, he is out of town. The Camps? They might have a backhoe. Unfortunately, the Camps were out of town too, as was the horse vet, so I rang the small animal vet and asked his advice.

“You will have to ring the sheriff’s department. They will handle it.” I might add, he answered with some glee, which I am assuming was down to the fact that he would not have to deal with the drama that surrounded the death of any of our animals.

So, ring them I did and was assured by a perky, drawling receptionist (who I am fairly certain managed to fit honey, sweetie, dear, and darlin’ all in one sentence) they would be with me as soon as they were free. I did not ponder too long on exactly who they might be, but instead patted myself on the back for my great adulting skills and went to tell my grandmother the bad news.

Thirty minutes later (and what felt like 20 degrees hotter), the patrol car pulled up. I guided him around to the back of the house and he stopped, opened his door and heaved himself out.

Twenty years later and he is still filed in my memory with the other two most famous sheriffs from the south: the first being the sheriff from one of my favourite James Bond’s, Live and Let Die. (Though I would like to clarify that Sean Connery is my favourite Bond I, however, found myself drawn in by the voodoo and the 7 Up man) and the second being a very similar stereotype from Smokey and the Bandit. Well, as it turns out, either they were not a stereotype, or they were both based on the man who now stood before me. I took him in as I walked towards him, hand extended. Sweat dripped out from under his wide-brimmed hat. He pulled out a red bandana and wiped the back of his neck before offering me his ample, sweaty paw to shake. He left on his large aviator glasses, and I am fairly certain this is just an embellishment of my overactive imagination, that he had a piece of straw hanging out of his mouth, which he chewed on like a cow chews on cud.

“Hello,” I said. “I am Kathryn. Thank you so much for coming out. We have friends who usually do this for us…”

He cut me off. “The backhoe’ll be here soon. Now I’ll need the death certificate.” (For those of you not from the South, that is pronounced, ‘Sir- Tif- Kit.’ Most Southern words tend to get drawn out, but this is one of those rare exceptions.)

“Well,” I responded, “I can assure you he’s dead. I did not hire the vultures.” I pointed in the direction of poor Bunker’s corpse, sad that he died, but still cursing him for dying on the hottest day ever registered in Mississippi.

The Sheriff considered me for a few minutes, then crossed his arms, leaned on his squad car, spit out of the right side of his mouth, then said, “Well, I gotta have me a death certificate, fore we can bury him.”

My nostrils flared as I witnessed bureaucracy in action. Then I remembered, you win more flies with honey, and I shrank into myself a bit, batted my lashes and switched on my native tongue, “Can’t I just get it to you when our horse vet is back? It’s sooo hot—and it is just me here.” I almost got carried away and said little ole me, but caught myself just in time. Maybe that would have actually helped because, much to my surprise, he was immune to my charms, or he had already sussed that I was not the helpless little lady I was pretending to be.

“Well, ma’am, I sure am sorry—but that’s the law. What kinda PO-lice would I be if I went around bending the rules for every pretty little thing that I met?”

My nostrils flared again (this time accompanied by my left eyebrow cocking itself in dismay). I was about to try and plead my case again when we were interrupted by the backhoe noisily making its way up the gravelled driveway. Bubba (I named him that) pulled up and stopped, assessing the situation—before slowly lowering his sweaty mass from the backhoe. He came and stood beside the sheriff, leaning on the patrol car next to his buddy and assuming the exact same stance.

I put out my hand and he ignored it. The sheriff broke the silence, “This little lady needs a horse buried and she ain’t got no death certificate.”

Bubba shrugged and looked at me as if I had just shot his wife (or his dog, whichever he liked more). I really could not blame him, I would not like to have driven that contraption, with no air-conditioning, down roads that could melt a layer of skin off bare feet.

I racked my brain for a solution—knowing I had to think quickly before they both left. Then I had it, I would call the dog vet back and plead—and if that did not work, I would call the vet’s wife. She would listen. So, I told them to give me a few minutes and I would be back with a death certificate. I ran to the house, praying I could get the dog vet to help me. I rang, and he answered. I explained the situation and he said he would sort it… he just needed my fax number. So, there I stood, awaiting the fax, which I grabbed and practically forced from the machine, running outside, waving it at the Sheriff in triumph. He looked at it, mulled it over while he chewed on his piece of straw, looked at ‘Bubba’ and relented, “Go on. Bury him.”

He handed the piece of paper back to me and I smiled triumphantly before I remembered my manners and offered to make them both a nice tall glass of iced tea. I turned towards the house and was halfway there when I looked at the piece of paper in my hand. There was no letterhead, no signature, just scrawled, in the messy writing indicative of all medical professionals, the words, Bunker is dead.

K.T. Slattery

Confessions of a Poetry Editor on a Bad Work Day

Justin Karcher

I’m smoking in the cold on my lunch break and have, like, 10 minutes left before I have to go back. That means I have enough time to smoke another cigarette and to read over the two poems in my inbox. I’m the editor of Ghost City Review and like most, if not all, editors in the poetry community, it is just one of the many jobs I have. Because of this, I struggle with separating poem and reality. I’m not complaining. It’s a beautiful side effect, but sometimes it makes me a little lost.

Anyways, I’m late getting back to my real job, the one that gives me health insurance, because those two poems in my inbox pulled my beard off my face with the force of their spunk and sprinkled each little hair across the dull courtyard. I tried gathering the hairs together, but a winter wind came off the river and blew them away from me forever.

I can’t explain to my boss that I’m late coming back from lunch because of poetry. They would just look at me with uninterested eyes and take me into a secret room in the dark corner of the office where a corporate-sponsored therapist would drop from the ceiling like a dusty ghost and ask questions about my mental state, like, “Is there something affecting your ability to do this job effectively?”

So, I won’t bring up poetry, because that totally affects my ability to do, well, anything. I’ll just take the heat. Maybe it will burn away the bags under my eyes.

I don’t get much sleep and when I actually do, it’s because I’ve passed out on the couch with an open laptop on my chest, Gmail slowly undressing like a digital burlesque show, casually tossing Word docs off the blurry stage like pieces of clothing. It doesn’t matter…morning or moonlight, energized or sleep-deprived, I like scooping up every poem I come across, cradling it in my arms and doing my best to find it a home. Someplace where it can live out its days comfortably and at peace. Like a retirement home, I guess, but for poems and not depressing. Maybe retirement home is a bad analogy. Maybe I’m being overdramatic. Maybe I keep chapbooks in the fridge. Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Obviously, poetry editors aren’t in it for money or notoriety. We sincerely care about language and the individual voice. The world does everything in its power to dissipate the sound clouds in our chests and poetry protects our skies. But to put it simply, poems turn us on. They are knives twisting into tyrants. They are an endless box of tissues next to a lake of eyes. They are shovels we use to dig up the past and then we dig another hole next to it and tunnel into the future with the ferocity of a million blooms, a million failed romances, a million manifestos handed down from our mothers. This energy must be encouraged and sometimes all a poet needs is to get there.

In many ways, poetry editors are chauffeurs taking poets to a secret club in the middle of the night and as they open the limousine door, they declare, “Here it is! Have the time of your life.”

Maybe that’s taking it a little too far, but this means everything to me. I know that other editors feel the same way. To be honest, I’m not sure why I decided to write this. Maybe to emphasize how we need each other. Maybe to emphasize how important it is to merge our ideas together to create something immense and beautiful, something bigger than ourselves… but at the same time, protecting and showcasing the individual voice. Maybe I’m being cliché, O captain my captain. Maybe this is an overstuffed commentary on my sleepless ways. Maybe no one’s texting me back. Or maybe I’m just trying to pass the time at work until my next break when I can read the poems in my inbox and feel alive again, when I can feel that heat.

Justin Karcher

Scarzone

Hibah Shabkhez

When you touch the edge of something hot—a frying-pan, a clothes-iron—you gasp and flinch away, before the knowledge, before the shock and the hurt and the searing of flesh. Locked in the thumping of your heart then, there is the secret triumph of assault successfully withstood, the inexpressible comfort of knowing it could not and cannot hurt you because you did and can again make it stop. But the drenching heat of liquid cannot be flung off, only sponged and coaxed away from the skin. And so they say doodh ka jala, chhaachh bhi phook phook kar peeta hai. It doesn’t take all men, you see, it takes only one; and just so, it takes only one vile lie to break a language’s heart.

When first you write a lie, a real lie and not simply a truth incognito, whether it be falsehood or treacherous half-truth, language recoils from you in pain, vowing never to trust you with words again. But if you must go on writing lies, for money or grundy-respect, seize the language and let it feel the sting and the trickling fear of the skin parting company with the flesh, over and over and over again, as you hold it unscreaming under the current. You must let body and mind and heart and soul be quite maimed then, until there is no difference left for any of them between truth and lie, between the coldness of lassi and the heat of milk-tides rising from the saucepan. Thereafter you may plunder with impunity all of language and force it to house your lies. And if you will never again find words to tell a truth in, it will not matter, for you will have no truths left to tell.

Hibah Shabkhez

Summer Memories

Kyla Houbolt

1. Fruit Parade

Once a man courted me by bringing me round fruits. He started with a single grape and
worked up to a watermelon.

The next day I left town.

I wonder if the size of the fruits would have started to diminish then, there being no fruit
bigger than a watermelon. Or perhaps he would have started bringing me some other set
of gifts. Or he might have escalated, made some proposal. Had I been the kind of person to stay, I would have said yes, and that would have made us both miserable. So I did him a favor by disappearing at the end of the fruit parade.

But I’ll never know now what he would have done next.

And the sad thing is, he wasn’t even the reason I left. My story was going west, and he was just a forgotten footnote.

2. Cowards

There was the time the FBI came to visit. We were on the unshaded porch of a DC rowhouse on a sticky summer noon, talking about how to make bombs. Learning about bombs was what we thought we needed to do to be the change, like the man said.

The FBI were three men in three-piece suits who wanted to talk to us and be our friends. They showed us badges. They had a picture of Bernadine Dorn and kept looking from it, to me, to it, to me, asking each other “is it her?”

My roommate kept saying “go away, we don’t want to talk to you.” I just stared at them, noticing they did not sweat. Vests. Ties. Jackets. No sweat. It was maybe 98 degrees out there.

They finally left after about ten minutes of this. We went inside and burned our bomb-making notes over the toilet.

3. One Way to Go

Driving past a trailer park that had a marquee. RIP. Somebody’d died there, they were going to miss him, it said.

Right down the way, a Dollar Tree, and a little bit further a Circle K advertised “Good Pizza Made Here”.

I turned to my sister and said, “Person could live in that trailer park, walk to the Dollar Tree for the groceries, to the Circle K for a treat once in a while, and when you die they put your name on the marquee, say RIP, they’ll miss you. What more could I need? Take me back,” laughing, “Okay”, then we passed a big cemetery and I said “And when you die they can just…” and we both cracked up and she said “Yeah and buy your plastic flowers at Dollar Tree, keep them on the kitchen table until…”

Driving past the cemetery, tears running, laughing about this, home in the hot afternoon.

RIP William Bryant, thanks for the laugh. Hope it was
a good life.

Kyla Houbolt