by Stephanie RossA sentinel to the Sleeping Giant, its old red bricks define the rigid rectangular building dominating the marina. Each imposing brick laid a hundred years ago striving to represent higher values; elevated symbols of justice. Each brick falling flat in societal need for change. It stood as an old courthouse with incipient foolishness winding up the ivy on its shady side. I crouched at the bottom of this hill the morning after a white police officer was convicted of murdering a young man of colour. The dew on the morning grass soaked through my hiking shoes as I remembered feeling a visceral sense of relief at the verdict. That court ruling was not in ‘my country’ nor from the system I saw towering before me on the hill. It didn’t matter. It was our shared humanity with governing wisdom gone awry somewhere in time. The words “my” and “country” could disperse but my feelings would not. This brick building that had failed to serve its surrounding indigenous peoples evoked the same feeling as those historical circumstances to the south allowing power filled violence to prevail without justice for so long. Sadness. Sadness that this system reigning over us has a history of ongoing abuse. Sadness that we have a world requiring an imposed external system at all. My heart longs for a world in which humanity has a restored heart. Hearts in each of us so filled with love, respect, and humility that this kind of hurt could not happen. Human hearts embracing life in such a way that hurting living creatures of any kind could never be possible. Humanity living in a state of real connectedness; such a pure embracing of each other that we would be a true civilization. This seems a steep hill to climb from where we are now. Yet, this is the ascent I choose each morning – waking to take one more step. On the edge of new creation, this path climbs higher into the clouds than the one I view now. Its peak surpasses my perception of unity. Its wyrd trajectory climbs into a world I long to see; a destined movement into truth if one chooses. As I wake each day and connect with my heart, I move one step higher. Each moment I remember to stay in self-awareness, each time I catch myself in moments of patterns I wish to change, and each time I am willing to examine the parts of my existence that could use a little more uplifting, I hold out my hands to embrace something greater than the physical forms we build here. I walked back up the hill to the red building that had recently surrendered. What was once a place of judgement and punishment had become a hotel, a place of rest. Surrender – a word so often tied to war yet carrying so much more potential. Couldn’t we surrender to the goodness within us without the war? Couldn’t we view this as an active ongoing commitment and not a hopeless resignation? Both allowing and creating the restoration of what has always been within us – waking what was forgotten in the quest to make ourselves better than others, instead of just better. Can we honour the deep longing within each of us to move toward a higher self; a higher standard within ourselves? Perhaps each day we can choose an expanded view. Perhaps each hour we can choose to be a little more entrenched in love. In this way, in each moment, we disperse the divisiveness deluding us. May we all find time to rest in our hearts’ softness and examine the multitude of perspectives available to us. It is time. Stephanie Ross is a pilot, sailor, and home-educating mom. Her writing explores living from the inside out as the adventure of a lifetime. You can find her feet on the ground on Vancouver Island practising Yuan Qigong, walking in the forest, and sharing her approach to cultivating life.
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by Steve CarrSunlight sparkled on the glass jar that lay on its side in white sand. Inside it, Itsy opened her bright blue eyes, yawned, and stretched. The jar was long enough for her to comfortably touch the air holes poked into the tin lid with her outstretched fingers and at the same time touch the bottom with the end of her toes. She rolled onto her back and gazed up at the cotton ball-like clouds that slowly drifted across the early morning sky. A mixture of sounds filtered in through the air holes; tides gently lapping at the shore, the screeching of seagulls, breezes rustling the sunburnt blades of scrub grass. Itsy lowered her arms and slid up closer to the lid. She put her open mouth on one of the holes and inhaled, filling her lungs with warm, salty sea air. When there was a tapping on the lid, she put her eye to a hole and peered out. Carrying a gray and white seashell on its back, a hermit crab pushed sand aside with its legs. Its two black eyes mounted on small appendages became fixed on her eye. “Excuse me,” Itsy said through a hole,“can you help me?” The crab reared back and began chirping like a hyperactive cricket. Its antenna waved about frenziedly. “I'm afraid I was dropped here by mistake,” Itsy continued. “If only I could get you to help me remove the lid, then my situation would be much improved.” The crab quickly turned around and ambled off through the sand. Itsy slid back from the lid and reached into her tunic pocket and pulled out a piece of cracker. Fred had given her water and crackers before he put her in his backpack before taking a stroll on the beach the evening before. It was the first time she had been out in the world. The fall from the backpack was a jolt, but she wasn't hurt and the jar hadn't been damaged. As she nibbled on the cracker, she thought about Fred. Surely he knows I'm missing. She put what remained of the cracker back in the pocket. In that instant, the yellow, webbed feet of a fat black and white seagull spread across the glass. The jar rocked slightly back and forth. The gull lowered and tilted its head sideways and with one eye gazed at Itsy. Itsy tapped on the glass. “Can you get me out of here?” she said. The bird tilted its head the to the opposite side and stared at her with the other eye for a moment, then tapped on the glass with its long yellow bill. “If you break the glass you might hurt me,” Itsy said. “Maybe you could contact Mason and tell him I want out of his jar.” The gull raised its head, then walked up and down the length of the jar, struggling to keep its balance on the slippery surface. It did one last hard tap on the glass, then spread its wings and lifted into the air and flew off toward the ocean. Itsy scooted back to the lid and put her mouth to a hole and hollered, “Help.” When no one came to her rescue, she laid back and stared up at the sky. She never imagined that such a large open space ever existed. By late afternoon the sun-heated jar became a glass oven. Itsy stayed as close to the lid as possible, seeking relief in the ocean breezes seeping through the holes. She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. She was awoken a short time later when she felt the jar move. “Itsy Bitsy, I thought I'd lost you forever,” Fred said as he lifted the jar out of the sand and brought it to his face. Itsy smiled wanly. “Let's get you back home where you belong.” he said. He stuffed the jar in his backpack. In the darkness, surrounded by a pair of Fred's unwashed socks, an empty water bottle, and a musty smelling book, Itsy sat on the bottom of her jar and thought about the sky. She knew they had arrived home by the sound of the garage door rising, and then a few moments later, lowering. Lifted out of the backpack by Fred, she was placed in her usual spot on a shelf crowded with other Mason jars. As soon as Fred left the garage and went into the house, Mini Mary in the jar next to Itsy's, said, “We thought you were never coming back.” “I wouldn't have, but I couldn't get out of my jar,” Itsy said. “What's the outside world like?” Tiny Teri in another jar asked. “It's has creatures that carry their jars on their back and creatures with big feet that fly,” Itsy said. “But most amazing, the ceiling isn't like the one in here at all. It's blue with floating balls of vanilla ice cream and it goes on forever.” “Did you get to meet Mason?” Mini said. Forlornly, Itsy said, “No, but after being outside and seeing all there is to see, I'm sure Mason didn't intend for us to be trapped in this glass our entire lives.” Steve Carr, a gay writer from Richmond, Virginia, has had over 570 short stories, new and reprints, published internationally in print and online magazines, literary journals, reviews and anthologies since June, 2016. He has had seven collections of short stories published. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice.
by Steve CarrSurrounded by tall prairie grass, the rusted remains of the piper cub baked in the afternoon sun. The plane’s right wing lay half-buried in the dirt a few feet from the fuselage. The tail section was missing as was the left wheel. The plane tilted to the left and the tip of the left wing rested on the ground. The chrome yellow paint that had once covered its fabric and steel had been worn away by the extreme seasonal weather on the plains. The seat and stick remained in the cockpit but the gauges on the dashboard were smashed. The windshield was cracked in several places and covered with dirt. Although covered in rust, the plane’s propeller was intact. Bird droppings covered the wing and the exposed part of the fuselage. The skeletal remains of a deer lay in the shadows under the fuselage. Connie’s two children played on a bare patch of ground five yards away from the plane. As a result of a lightning strike, the dirt was black and the grass that surrounded the edge of the patch was burnt. Thomas, age six, jabbed at the ground with a twig, trying to divert the direction a line of ants were taking. His sister, Marie, age four, sat in the dirt and rocked her doll in her arms while watching a garter snake winding its way through the blackened grass stalks along the edge of the patch. Connie had her back to them as she stood near the plane drawing a sketch of it. Drawn to the short, melodic chirping of a meadowlark she looked up from her sketchpad and saw that the bird was perched on the broken trunk of a small tree. When it flew off she watched it until it disappeared in the hazy distance. She turned to look at her children, and not seeing them, thought they had wandered off into the grass. She called their names several times as she walked to the bare patch of ground. Their feet and hand prints were in the dirt. She dropped her sketch pad and pencil and frantically searched the area all around the patch, making increasingly wider circles while screaming out their names. She searched for them until the purple and pink colors of the Badlands formations became more pronounced in the shifting colors of the twilight sky, and then nearing exhaustion, she staggered through the grass to the gravel road where her car was parked. There she discovered her keys weren’t in her skirt pocket where she had put them. Bordering on hysteria she scanned the area of prairie she had just walked through and thought that finding her lost keys would take too long, so she began running down the road toward the highway that led into the Badlands. Thirty minutes later she stumbled onto the pavement and fell to her knees. The man who stopped his car and quickly got out asked, “Are you okay?” “Help, my children are gone,” Connie said hoarsely. Then she passed out. # The room was almost perfectly square with a two-way mirror along one wall. There was a door but no windows. The room was painted battleship gray, including the floor. Connie sat in a metal chair in front of a metal table, hugging herself, fending off the chill in the air. Recessed lighting in the ceiling bathed the room in a harsh white light. A large fly buzzed around her head. The door opened and Detective Bryce and Detective Kline entered, both attired in dark blue business suits. Detective Bryce’s skirt was tight and as she walked to the table she tugged on the material. She carried a manila file folder that she tossed on the table, and then she sat down across from Connie, while Detective Kline leaned against a wall and nonchalantly crossed his arms. “Do you want to tell me the story again?” Detective Bryce asked, a steely look in her eyes. Connie swatted at the fly. “I’ve told it to you and everyone else a hundred times already. One moment my children were there and the next moment they were gone.” Detective Bryce snapped the fingers of her right hand. “Poof. Gone. Just like that?” Connie sighed as a shudder coursed through her body. “Yes, like that,” she stammered. “Why aren’t you out looking for them?” Detective Kline uncrossed his arms and looked at his fingernails. “We cut the grass a half mile in every direction around that plane, had dogs and hundreds of volunteers scour the area for miles around it, used helicopters and drones, and not a sign of your kids anywhere. Where else do you suggest we look?” Tears streamed down Connie’s face. “I don’t know what else I can suggest. You also tore up my home and yard looking for them. You’ve treated me like a monster who would kill her own children.” “Are you sure you don’t have something to tell us about what happened when your children disappeared?” Detective Bryce asked, her voice cold, her eyes locked on Connie’s. “I took them with me so that I could sketch that plane. That’s all there is to tell you,” Connie replied angrily. “They’re my children. I loved them.” “Loved?” Detective Bryce said. “Love.” # Around the piper cub short stalks of prairie grass poked through a thin layer of snow. A steady wintry breeze had kept the snow from collecting on the outsides of the plane, but the seat and dashboard were wet. Scat and clumps of brown fur on the cockpit’s floor were the only signs that anything living had been near the plane for several months. Connie stood on the spot where she had last seen her children. The hair that curled out from her knitted cap was tousled by the wind. She patted her gloved hands trying to keep them warm. Hearing their squawks, she looked up to see a skien of geese flying in V formation across the cloudy sky. When the birds were out of sight, leaving a deafening silence in their wake, she turned her attention back to Evelyn who was standing by the plane with the palms of her hands on the side of the fuselage. Connie stomped her booted feet on the ground, wondering if her toes were frostbitten. Evelyn turned, hesitated for a moment, and then walked to where Connie was standing. “You know nothing about the history of the plane and how it ended up here?” she asked. “Nothing,” Connie answered. “Before my husband died he said he and his friends used to play here when they were kids, but no one in town knows how it got here.” Evelyn tightened the wool scarf wound around her neck. “The pilot was a woman,” she said. Connie glanced at the plane. “Does that tell you anything about what has happened to my children?” Evelyn shifted her gaze to the haze that surrounded the Badlands formations. “No. I get no trace of your children being anywhere near here,” she said. “Why did you bring them out here?” “I felt this urgent need to bring them here,” Connie said. “Something was pulling me, maybe the memory of being here with my husband. We used to come here for picnics and I’d sketch the plane.” “Did you do any sketches of your children while you were out here the day they disappeared?” Connie closed her eyes for a moment, reliving that day, remembering. “No. I only sketched the plane.” Evelyn glanced at the piper cub. “Some souls leave imprints behind for a very long time.” She then looked down at the ground where they were standing. “And some souls leave no imprints at all.” Connie looked at the plane and watched a sparrow fly into the cockpit, settle on the seat for a moment, and then fly out and away. “What do I do now?” “Keep searching, but remember there’s not an answer for everything.” # The spring air was filled with the aromas of rain-moistened earth and sprouting green prairie grass. With her sketch pad tucked under her arm, Connie trod across the soft earth to the front of the plane. She opened the sketch pad and took a pencil from her skirt pocket and began to sketch the plane. She worked fast, filling the page with several images of the plane. Then she walked to the side of the plane, turned the page, and started anew. She circled the plane, drawing it from every angle. Walking to the last place she had seen her children, she began to sketch them as she remembered them just before they disappeared. As if her hand was being guided by another hand, she drew the children with wings. She drew them rising in the air. She drew them flying away. Steve Carr, a gay writer from Richmond, Virginia, has had over 570 short stories, new and reprints, published internationally in print and online magazines, literary journals, reviews and anthologies since June, 2016. He has had seven collections of short stories published. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice.
by Julie YoungThe sun and humidity showed no compassion for the bereaved. The undertaker opened six double hung windows an hour before the service but the prairie wind was hot and unsettled and it whipped and twisted the thin curtains made by the Ladies Aid and blew the service programs from a folding chair and finally Pastor Meinken closed the windows. Perspiring mourners wearing suits and best cotton dresses crawled from pickup trucks and used cars and sluggishly mounted the stairs of the little, white, steepled church, their burden as heavy as the anvils in their farm yards. At 2:05 p.m. Mrs. Wizer pumped the organ pedals and as the old instrument moaned and the congregation stood to sing Beautiful Savior, an usher helped Ruth and Theo Schott to the front pew. The open casket was close enough for them to touch it where they sat but they did not. Ruth leaned her head on Theo’s shoulder and held a worn and limp handkerchief over her mouth. Across the aisle Sally Westerly sat looking at the coffin. Under her yellow sundress her thighs were stuck to the pew, and her arms itched from last night’s mosquito bites. Sally was seven. In a little while she and Daphne Lutz and Donald Pfaff would stand and sing Jesus Loves Me for the boy in the coffin and his parents and all who were assembled. Those were Pastor Meinken’s words. “We are here assembled.” Sally stared at the boy’s slicked-down blonde hair and white face and light blue shirt. He was four years old, her brother’s age. The boy looked fine to her, not at all broken or bruised, but when a fly buzzed around his mouth and then over his folded hands, she saw that he did not dash it away and she knew he was dead. Next to her Daphne sucked on the end of one braid and swung her legs rhythmically, as if she had to pee, but Sally sat stiffly, hardly breathing, her eyes intent on the fly. When they close the lid will the fly be in there, she wondered. Then a tremendous sobbing and gasping and groaning rose up somewhere behind her and Sally turned to see Owen Klein. She knew he was Ruth Schott’s brother-in-law and that three days ago he had backed up a truck against a stock tank without knowing that his nephew was there watching water bugs flit and scoot across the stagnant water. Owen’s white shirt was stained and wet and untucked, his dark hair was hanging over his eyes and his face was red and unshaven. His shoulders shook and heaved forward and from his mouth came sounds Sally had never heard from her father or uncles or any man and she knew it was called guilt and she wondered: Did Jesus love him? “Jesus Loves Me” was previously published in The Timberline Review, No. 2, Winter/Spring 2016. Julie Young is a writer and community activist living in Portland, Oregon. Her literary prose is influenced by a Midwest prairie childhood, the wildness of the Pacific Northwest, and her social work career. Julie’s short fiction has been published in The North Coast Squid and The Timberline Review.
by Julie YoungMy sister Sylvie liked rhinestones and cheap perfumes, the sweet kind that make you think of stained, flocked wallpaper in diner bathrooms. Mom called rhinestones and sweet fragrances trampy and a waste of money, but Sylvie had babysitting money and said it wasn’t Mom’s beeswax how she spent it. I was still deciding if Mom or Sylvie was right about this when Sylvie brought home a hair dye kit stamped Marked Down for Fast Sale. All the girls in our family--sisters, cousins, aunts until they turned gray at fifty--had boring, dishwater blonde hair. A girl in Sylvie’s eighth grade room had bleached her dirty-blonde hair to look like Debbie Harry, but Sylvie had no use for Debbie Harry. She let our little sister, Wren, and me watch as she dyed her hair over the kitchen sink. Cherry Red, the box said. The model on the box had green eyes and beautiful skin. I wondered how Cherry Red would look with Sylvie’s blue eyes and acne, but I was in awe of her courage and didn’t mention this. At breakfast the next morning Sylvie dismissed Mom’s judgments with a toss of her shockingly red mane, but when the gym teacher called out during indoor field hockey that Sylvie looked like a floozy, the other girls chanted floo-zee, floo-zee in the locker room, and Sylvie was devastated. She sobbed all the way home from school. Embarrassed for her, I walked two steps behind, my head down. Wren slunk behind me, and everyone could see we didn’t know how to handle bullies. “I only want to be pretty and have popular friends!” Sylvie kicked a stone from the sidewalk onto someone’s emerald lawn. It was true that her only friends were the odd or forlorn kids, like Zoe Binder, who quoted Bible verses, or Dominic Dryer, a chubby foster kid who saw a therapist every Tuesday at ten a.m. He put his head on his desk when he came back at eleven-thirty and stayed there over the lunch break. I felt sad for Sylvie--she was my sister! I said she could have the tortoise shell barrette Aunt Lila had given me for my “classic ‘do,” as Aunt Lila called my bob. But Sylvie threw the barrette back at me and said she didn’t need my pity, she could take care of herself, “and by the way, I hate you and your ‘do. And I hate Aunt Lila!” And she ran ahead of us the rest of the way home, and none of us told our mother about the gym teacher. Sylvie chopped her hair short and let it go back to boring dishwater, but she kept buying rhinestones. She replaced the white buttons on her white cardigan with black buttons that had yellow rhinestone centres. At a secondhand store she found a barrette decorated with six crystal rhinestones. I lied when I said it was more beautiful than my tortoise shell barrette. I wanted so much for Sylvie to be happy. It was around this time that Sylvie started talking about ghosts. “They’re real,” she told Wren and me. “They’re all around, and they’re nothing to be afraid of.” I wondered if Zoe Binder’s Bible quotes had something to do with it, like maybe comparing angels to ghosts, but I didn’t ask. Sylvie might think I was doubting her, and she needed affirmations. Mom stopped mentioning Sylvie’s rhinestones and cheap perfume. She helped her plan a party for Dominic Dryer, who was moving to another state to live with his grandma. Only four kids showed up, and when Dominic’s foster parents brought him, they insisted on staying. They watched without smiling as Sylvie tried to teach everyone how to play badminton (coordination was lacking in all), and soon left with Dominic. Mom had just brought out the cake that said We’ll Miss You, Dominic in dark blue icing. She sent part of the cake with them, the portion that said, You, Dom. After the other kids were gone, Sylvie locked herself in the bathroom, and Wren and I hunted down shuttlecocks in the shrubs and hedge. Later when Sylvie was very sick and in the hospital, she told me that ghosts kept her company in the night. Although I did not believe in ghosts, I was terribly relieved that she had friends. I wanted her to tell me all about them--were they pretty? what did they read? did they read Bridge to Tarabithia?--but by then Sylvie was sleeping a lot, and anyway, my parents did not want me talking about ghosts, which they said were not real, as if I didn’t know. They said my sister was hallucinating on account of the drugs, and that acknowledging the ghosts would agitate her even more. Shush, they said to her as they pushed me from her bedside. We’re here, it’s just us. There are no ghosts. I’ve told Wren but not our parents about the many nights I’m wakened by the sound of a knuckle on my headboard and a sweet scent floating over my face. The first time it happened I was frightened, but now when I hear the knock, I sit up with alert anticipation, ready for the mesmerizing, other-worldly lights that sparkle and dazzle across the walls and ceiling of my bedroom, for the aura of thousands of glimmering, shimmering, glitzy, rhinestones in silver, gold, shades of blues and greens, and always the reds. Red like cherries. It’s Sylvie and her friends. Julie Young is a writer and community activist living in Portland, Oregon. Her literary prose is influenced by a Midwest prairie childhood, the wildness of the Pacific Northwest, and her social work career. Julie’s short fiction has been published in The North Coast Squid and The Timberline Review.
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