Insomnia Chronicles IV
The night is full of insomniacs Googling insomnia. Don’t eat a full meal right before bed. There are some jobs I’d like to have for a day, like choosing the food in movies and TV shows. The rabbit and Beaujolais Bill serves Frank in episode 3 of The Last of Us. The cereal boxes Seinfeld had for all nine seasons. Once when my family was away, a stranger lived in our home for a week. Neighbors said he seemed friendly. Waved as he came and went. They thought he was my mother’s brother. My mother doesn’t have a brother. Her bed was rumpled. Our Rice Krispies were mostly gone. But they weren’t Rice Krispies. They were Crispy Rice, the generic version. That’s all we could afford. I can think of at least a dozen things in my pantry I will never eat. Applesauce, expired beans, canned sliced carrots. People are starving in India, my mother told us when we didn’t clean our plates. Why India? Why not down the street? Why not the girl in my class who wore the same clothes every day and smelled like cat pee and old cheese? There are things you think are normal until someone else sees them. My friend Kim pointed to the countertop crock where we keep our forks and spoons and butter knives and said So this is how you store your silverware. I read about a boy whose family never talked at meals. One night he had dinner at a friend’s house where they asked about each other’s days and laughed and debated politics. Here is where you think he’ll realize what he’s been missing. But no. He thought These people are BATSHIT CRAZY. Just shut up and eat already.
Insomnia Chronicles XVI
The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. In the Starbucks drive-thru, a magnet on the back of a Camry said GO TO MASS. All caps, black & white, no-nonsense—basically nun as bumper sticker. Surely there’s a more clever (cleverer? clevererererer?) way to say it, like GO TO MASS OR HELL…O THERE! At first I misread it as mas, Spanish, as in GO TO MORE, which is what I’ve been nudging my newly widowed mother to do. Just say yes, I tell her, to walks with a neighbor or a free ticket to a play. When my daughter learned baby sign language, her favorite word was more: fingers and thumbs scrunched like two ostriches kissing. Soon she abbreviated it to stabbing only her index fingers together, which for all I know means fuck off. I never taught her full, let alone fulfill, which sounds like a made-up word. But then, all words are made up, aren’t they? Full, fill, fulfill. Makes me think of veni, vidi, vici—which is pronounced weni, widi, wici, something you’d learn from a nun, though my Latin teacher was the baseball coach, Mr. Moore. These days, fulfillment is all about commerce and supply chains, how quickly you can ship a package of AirPods from A to B. Remember the band Air Supply? Cheesy music but great name. I’d rattle off a few lyrics here, but songs are notoriously expensive to quote. I’ll rephrase a popular chorus: I am without feeling of reciprocated affection; your absence makes me feel adrift. Which is how my mom must feel. Even an exceptional day without my stepdad isn’t as fulfilling as an ordinary day with him. Steadying the ladder as he cleaned the gutters. Chuckling when he called his jon boat a yacht. Offering him a taste of simmering spaghetti sauce. No more. No mas. Death can just fuck right off.
ERIN MURPHY
Employee of the Month
Midmorning on the last Friday of the month, all of us rise from our desks to crowd into the break room, where we will listen to this month’s official announcement. I wonder why, though, since everyone knows who the winner will be. Sure enough, over the PA system, comes the voice of our manager: “Good fellows, colleagues, and associates, I am proud to share with you that Erica Sistek is once again being recognized for her robust contributions to our organization!” In a whisper, I ask Dana why the boss is “proud” to make an announcement. Shouldn’t he be “proud” of Erica? Dana snorts and tilts her head, speaking out of the side of her mouth: “What I wanna know is how Erica always wins.” Meanwhile, at the break room table, Erica is slicing up a sheet cake, and our co-workers clap as they encircle her. Blushing at the center of the nexus, she looks like an overripe tomato. “Just can’t stop winning,” Erica squeals as she sets aside a piece of cake for herself twice as large as those she is making for everybody else. “Look,” I say to Dana, “the employee of the month gets the parking spot nearest the door, right? So, Erica is always first in, and she can always be last out and never stay late. Erica’s work isn’t any better than yours or mine or anybody else’s. She just looks like she’s here more.” Dana doesn’t miss a beat before disagreeing: “No, I’m pretty sure it’s the spiders. Haven’t you noticed? There are never any of them in this place. Haven’t been for months.” I had not noticed the absence of spiders. However, I had observed an awful lot of bugs lately, and I supposed that might correlate to there being no spiders. “Sistek eats all the spiders,” Dana continues. “She’s like a Renfield or something.” It’s been a long time since I took an English class, and, as I try to process the literary allusion, I miss a beat. I look at Erica who has something dangling from the corner or her mouth. It could be drool or frosting or a piece of webbing. From my vantage point at the edge of the room, I can’t tell. But I feel sure that neither Dana nor I will ever hear our names over the PA system. So I elbow my way through the throng, toward Erica at the center of it all, wanting to make sure I get a piece of the cake before it’s all gone.
Animal Wellness
When my emu, Robert, collapsed, I was distraught. I had bought the bird to make a statement. Lots of people had dogs or cats—but nobody had anything like Robert. When I walked him down the street, I could feel everybody’s envious eyes on me. But then, Cindy, who lived on the corner, bought two emus. And some old guy a few blocks over—who walks by my house every day—picked up a vulture. My pride ebbed. Although I still walked Robert, I stopped paying attention to him. His feathers began to droop, and his amber eyes grew dull. Now, as I approached the fallen bird, I promised Robert I would take better care of him. I even called him “Bobby Boy,” something I had only done once before, on the day he first came home. But Robert did not move. I leaned closer and saw he was not even breathing. I clasped my hands to my head and began to keen. Eventually, a door in Robert’s belly opened, and a koala stuck his head out. This was a truly exotic animal! There might not be another one in the state or even the country. The koala stepped out from inside of Robert and gave a little wave. I held out my open hand and asked if he wanted to take a walk. He said nothing but nodded. “I think,” I said, “we’ll call you Robby Robertson.”
NOEL SLOBODA
Letting the Dog Out, Detroit
We were stupid. Prince, our first dog. The previous owner let him out to roam the neighborhood at night. It whined at our door, so we let him out too. When done roaming, he barked again, we let him back in. Only action on our night streets took place in cars. On the time-clock chain, we worked shifts banging out cars in the boom years. He didn’t bark except at the door, and nobody minded his jingling tags. When he got old, sometimes a neighbor had to redirect him after he showed up at the wrong door. I apologize to all dogs and dog owners for his wild ways with bitches in heat. Neighborhood puppies with a striking resemblance. Nobody had their dogs fixed. We were fixed, so maybe it seemed cruel. I apologize to all the lawns he shit on. Sometimes he stayed out all night. One morning he came back with his belly sliced open, ran straight to his water bowl and lapped it empty three times before we dragged him off to the vet. I was a boy who had never seen anything sliced open. A boy who had never seen such thirst. During the war, my father had. He didn’t know much, but he knew Prince was a dog, and he knew when to put him down.
Elegy in Fake Coins
The Church recognizes 100 Incorruptible Saints … Incorruptible bodies are said to have the odor of sanctity exuding a pleasant aroma … Pope Paul VI celebrated Holy Mass at the altar where the holy corporal is kept in its golden shrine in the Cathedral of Orvieto. (His Holiness journeyed to Orvieto by helicopter … the first pope in history to use one) …Incorruptibles are saints whose bodies allegedly don’t decompose. At least, not as much as most.” (italics mine)
A lot of time and money invested in keeping bodies incorruptible. You can’t put a price on faith—where would you attach the price tag? I gazed upon a few incorruptibles in dark damp churches while stumbling through Italy, but I never got a whiff of sanctity. Maybe if I’d paid extra, I would’ve been led into the back room for a snort or two. Like the extra fee at the state fair to see the three-headed cow or to go behind a curtain in the burlie tent to see the pasties daintily removed. I preferred the cow—worth every penny to gaze into its many eyes. While I believe Jesus walked on water, I also believe he fell through the ice and the water was damn cold. The host exploded into blood in Orvieto, though it didn’t explode for me. The Story of Easter was a real bust. My kids couldn’t get beyond what kind of nails they used, much less the whole resurrection thing. In middle school, my friend Jack concocted his own miracle, shaping tinfoil into coins and sealing them in his collection envelope. What happened when the ushers ripped it open back in the rectory, smoking cigars and drinking holy wine with the pastor? The miracle was they never caught him. He cut his own hair and wore no socks, which put him in the company of many of those saints. He refused to finish high school and instead got a PhD in Philosophy from some Ivy League school he would not want me to mention, then took up meditation as his religious practice. His whole life, he had a problem with time and money. They’d put him on the spectrum today. Not today. Today, his family is disposing of his ashes in undisclosed unsentimental locations. When they got to 100, did they just stop looking for incorruptibles? We rode bicycles through Canada as teenagers. In Montreal, I turned around to ride back to Detroit. He kept riding to the Ivy League, where he was expelled for placing illegal bets against the system. I never flew in a helicopter, and I’d bet time and money he never did either. How much is not as much as most? His glasses taped together by the clumsy lamb of God, and that stye under his eye, a tiny thumbtack stigmata. He was my one incorruptible. I’m working on a donation to his favorite charity, but it takes a long time to shape all that foil into all those coins.
JIM DANIELS
There Goes Hawthorne
It was a brilliant Concord afternoon and fall apples—Cloth of Gold, Lyman’s Pound Sweet, Pomme Royal—slipped from brimming baskets in the market. I stood with Emerson, who reeked of cigar smoke and peach pie, and Bronson Alcott, who was rubbing his belly and picking at his beard. “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit,” Emerson said, smiling, as he lifted his hands and took in the brilliant yellow hue of the white pines, the orange-red of the sugar maple, the reddish brown of the white oak. “What joy,” I muttered. Can a moment be more imbued with the spirit than this one right here?
Then a lone figure ambled across the road, tapping the ground with his walking stick. And as he went by, it was as if spirit had abandoned the surroundings. The trees turned a pathetic gray and the falling leaves tipped black. “There goes Hawthorne,” said Alcott. Hawthorne who saw evil ready to pounce like a lynx from the river’s edge. Hawthorne, scion of the dreaded Salem judges, who clutched with his spindly fingers the stone lodged in all our hearts.
He Remembers Marcus Aurelius
“You can have the money, or you can have a family,” Dr. Rao had said to his son. He took a bite from a ripened Granny Smith. A bowl of them sat before him, their green skin dappled with morning sunlight. How many years had he studied so that he could enjoy a better life? 18? 24? His mother had picked ants from the rice every evening before washing and boiling three handfuls over an open wood flame. Meat in those days was a rare treat. Sometimes his grandfather would find a chicken in the market which he’d rear in a mesh wire crate. When an occasion called for a good curry, Dr. Rao would cover his ears during the strangling and lose his appetite when a stray feather landed in his bowl. It was his wife, now deceased, who noticed that some accounts had been altered; that some property that belonged to Dr. Rao had been gifted away. It must be a mistake, he had thought, but it wasn’t a mistake. It has been seven years since he spoke to his son. He has no other children. He looks out into his driveway, filled with late model cars, then looks at the rare works of art he’s collected — the Buddhas smuggled in from Nepal, the rare cubist paintings, the eyes of African idols made with blood diamonds — and remembers Marcus Aurelius, who knew the royal purple robe was just sheep’s wool dyed in the excretions of murdered shellfish.
VIKRAM MASSON
Erin Murphy’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Waxwing, Guesthouse, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Paterson Literary Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her newest book of poems, Human Resources, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and poetry editor of The Summerset Review.
www.erin-murphy.com
Noel Sloboda is the author of two poetry collections and several chapbooks, most recently Creature Features (Mainstreet Rag Publishing Company, 2022). He has also published a book about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein. Sloboda teaches at Penn State York, where he coordinates the English program.
Jim Daniels’ latest fiction book, The Luck of the Fall, was published by Michigan State University Press. His most recent poetry collections include The Human Engine at Dawn, Wolfson Press, Gun/Shy, Wayne State University Press, and Comment Card, Carnegie Mellon University Press. His first book of nonfiction, The Abridged Book of Water, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. A native of Detroit, he currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
Vikram Masson writes at the intersection of faith, identity and culture. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Denver Quarterly, Gone Lawn, Juked, and Rust + Moth. His chapbook, A Scattering of Salts, is with Kelsay Books.
Image credit: Loepa genus (one of the Golden Emperor Moths) Image via: Rapport présenté à la Chambre de commerce de Lyon par la Commission administrative Lyon: A. Rey, 1885; biodiversitylibrary.org/page/14091716