The Battered Suitcase November 2008

by Battered Suitcase

  Dressed entirely in brown,

  he resembles any other clod.

  The horses in the dead grass,

  their blonde manes blown in a wind

  so warm he cannot think

  what it has to cry about,

  they are the most beautiful women he's ever seen.

  He thinks most everything mirrors

  the same dull tones,

  the unemployed hay rake,

  the rusted oil rig trailer, the word

  Flammable flaking away,

  yet everything seems so unbelievably satisfied,

  like retired men fishing.

  Only he and the osprey are still hungry.

  And black cattle loose on the road groan

  in desperation,

  trying to find themselves

  a hole in the stiff wire fence.

  Sean Patrick Hill is a freelance writer, naturalist, and teacher living in Portland, Oregon. He earned his MA in Writing from Portland State University, where he won the Burnham Graduate Award. He received a grant from Regional Arts and Culture Council and residencies from Montana Artists Refuge, Fishtrap, and the Oregon State University Trillium Project. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Exquisite Corpse, elimae, Alba, diode, In Posse Review, RealPoetik, Willow Springs, Unlikely 2.0, and Quarter After Eight. theimaginedfield.blogspot.com , www.seanpatrickhill.typepad.com

  Jan Melara

  Nighttime in the ER

  Cool white walls

  Linoleum glistening under hard fluorescence

  Someone vomits behind a pink and blue plaid curtain

  The gay girl puts down her magazine

  (carefully so she doesn't lose her place)

  We all play cards into the night.

  The radio squawks

  Static blurs the words

  We are control.

  The snap of a latex glove

  Red cart marked Snap On

  at the ready

  A son not quite following in his dad's footsteps

  a steel stretcher

  dingy rubber wheels

  Fast, so fast.

  The purpose of communication is transfer of information

  Sensible shoes slap smartly

  Air humid with adrenalin at 93%

  A woman screams, then sobs.

  "Put her in the quiet room."

  Another hand is dealt.

  Jan Melara graduated from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas with a degree in nursing. After twenty five years of working in health care, she has retired to an idyllic lake in South Carolina. Short fiction by Ms. Melara has been published in Dew on the Kudzu: A Southern Ezine and in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

  ICU

  Angie Pelekidis

  My mother has finally been transferred out of the ICU and is now sharing a regular hospital room with another patient. I sit by her bed and watch her sleep, something I’ve done a lot of during the past three days. The clot that caused the stroke that brought her here became bleeding on the brain, and then swelling. This led to something called a mid-line shift, the worst thing that could have happened according to her neurologist.

  My cellphone rings, broadcasting a static-y version of a Busta Rhymes song that’s utterly incongruous in such grave surroundings. I answer it quickly to cut the music short. The caller id tells me it’s my sister Trish.

  “How’s Mom?,” she asks, without saying hello first.

  “About the same.”

  “I wish there was something I could do. Do you want me to come up?” Trish is two hours away from Binghamton, New York, in Poughkeepsie, where she lives with her husband Frank and their two sons. She’d come up the day Mom had the stroke, stayed the night, and then gone back in the morning. She was in the midst of planning her mother-in-law Adele’s 75th birthday party for today, and had complained about being roped into hosting the party for obnoxious Adele. But the fact the old woman had helped her and Frank with the down payment on their latest house hadn’t left her with much choice.

  “No. There’s nothing you can do here. When are you coming up tomorrow?”

  “After I take Mom to the mall in the morning. I’ll call you when I’m on my way.”

  It takes me a second to realize by “Mom” she means Adele, because in my unmarried mind there is only one mother.

  “Fine. I’ll talk to you then.” I close my cellphone quickly without waiting to hear her say goodbye. In that instant I hate her, for asking whether she should come up today, for not canceling going to the mall with her mother-in-law to be with her real mother, and with me. But then I wonder if my anger is misplaced. Do I have cause to be angry at Trish or is frustration over my mother’s situation landing on her because there is nowhere else for it to rest?

  For years, my mother and Adele have been playing a game of financial one-upmanship, competing for the title of favorite, most-generous Grandmother. Just before Adele’s house payment gift, my mother had given her oldest grandson her two year old second car, keeping for herself the 10-year old one my Dad bought her when he was still alive. The newer car was the last thing of any real value Mom possessed, and it was obvious now that Adele had won the game. She was alive, healthy, and had plenty of money left to give.

  The nurse wearing the large gold crucifix comes in to check my mother’s temperature and vital signs. She ignores me as she goes through her routine as though I’m invisible and I can’t blame her – I feel beaten so thin you can see right through me.

  “You never know how much they’ll bounce back,” she’d said to me earlier, with a comforting hand on my arm. “The Lord can work miracles.”

  “Well, if anyone get by without their brain, it’s my mom,” I’d replied. “It’s not like she used it much before the stroke.”

  She had smiled politely but hadn’t laughed, and I’d made a mental note not to joke with the nurse wearing a crucifix. She’d then explained how my mother would eventually have a tube inserted into her stomach to feed her since she wouldn’t be able to eat on her own and couldn’t remain on an IV indefinitely. On the first day, the nurse with the missing molars on the left side of her mouth had, on my mother’s doctor’s orders, given me a do-not-resuscitate form to sign. A third nurse, sporting inhumanely red hair, had on the second day described a worse case scenario that involved something called “comfort feedings,” which given to someone who can’t swallow leads to pneumonia and eventual death. She had called this a humane option. I thought of it as the stroke-victim’s version of a last meal only it’s administered over the course of a few weeks.

  In her infrequent waking moments, my mother has looked around blearily, a 71-year old infant waking from a nap. Her eyes move about of their own free will and are unable to focus on anything. The lid of her right one, on the side that’s paralyzed, stays half-lidded, as if it’s squinting into the sun.

  A loud, long belch comes from Betty, the patient sharing my mother’s room. The sound resuscitates my mother and her eyes open. But her face remains blank and I wonder if her brain can decipher the sound.

  “Excuse me,” Betty says in the wet, crackly voice of a lifelong smoker. She’s in the process of calling yet another friend or family member, something she has been doing since I arrived at the hospital three hours earlier. My now mute mother, once a non-stop talker herself, has gotten stuck with a chatterer as a roommate.

  I peek beyond the half-opened curtain separating the beds to look at Betty. She’s sitting in a chair, leaning forward to change the channel on her small hospital TV while holding the phone to her ear. I look away to preserve a privacy she’s indifferent to but not before I catch a glimpse of her fatty, white shoulder and upper buttock where they are revealed by her haphazardly worn hospital gown. She has the upper body of Santa Claus and the thin, delicate legs of a twelve-year old girl. Her hair is cut severely, like a man’s, and is black and gray.

  I look back at my mom and notice the lines on her fo
rehead are slightly wrinkled. The ones on her undamaged left side are more pronounced, as if she is struggling to hear something.

  “Hello, Irma? It’s Betty. Not so good. It’s heart failure. But listen, I’ve decided something,” Betty says portentously.

  I turn away from my mother to eavesdrop on the momentous decision Betty, who must surely be aware of her own mortality given her situation, has arrived at. Between each sentence she lets out a hard huh exhalation that adds to the suspense like a horror movie soundtrack.

  Betty takes a long breath in and speaks: “I want my hair dyed. I don’t want it gray no more. It makes me feel old.”

  I turn away from Betty, disappointed that that’s the best she can come up with. I look at my mother and see a familiar expression. She’s looking directly at me, seeing me and knowing me. She’s wearing a muted version of her look of scorn, the one she reserves for the worst white trash on Cops or the most blatantly cheating husbands on the Judge Judy Brown show.

  I don’t know exactly how much of what Betty has said that my mother understands or whether her expression is a coincidence. But I want to believe that without words, we are sharing the same thought about poor Betty’s foolish desire to forestall death with hair dye.

  Angie Pelekidis was born in Brooklyn, NY, where she's lived most of her life. She's also lived in Long Island, Florida, Alabama, and Vestal, NY. She recently graduated with an MA in English from Binghamton University, and is pursuing a Ph.D there. She's a reader first and foremost, who started taking her writing seriously five years ago. Prior to that, she worked in public relations for some NYC non-profit organizations, including the New York Aquarium.

  Luigi Monteferrante

  Photos

  Before cameras made

  Pictures instantaneous

  Development took a fortnight

  Where we were

  A village by the sea

  Things happen

  Each day and minute

  So imagine

  What might happen

  In two weeks

  Fifteen whole days

  The subject of the pictures

  May vary and change

  The relationship

  Between you

  The photographer

  Or some stranger

  And schoolmate

  In a week

  There's time aplenty to

  Draw near to someone new

  Out of the picture

  At the time

  Move away

  That's one big promotion

  Whatever the deal

  It's so long

  Goodbye

  I'll be back

  And the house was empty

  The furniture gone

  The clothes packed

  As you extracted the pictures

  Wondering

  What went wrong

  No forwarding address

  And you were alone

  Spiteful

  You sighed

  To me

  They're like dead

  You flung the pictures

  Like stone on a lid

  They landed to the floor

  You exited

  Left open the door

  It was raining aslant

  The pictures a-floating

  Your hand a camera lens

  Cover

  A Classics student from Montreal, Canada, Luigi Monteferrante moved to Italy to write. His first novel was followed by a 3000 km North American book tour on a Vespa scooter. Short stories published in Chicago Quarterly Review and Happy. Since completing his second novel, "Life During Wartime" in the fall of 2007, he's been writing poetry. In 2008, his work has been published in Neon, Kudos, Poesia/Indiana Bay, poetryreading, Yellow Mama, Wordslaw, Sonar4, and Poet's Ink Review. Luigi is also Italian co-director of Summer Literary Seminars: www.sumlitsem.org. HQ is a seaside B & B for creative spirits: www.villamonteferrante.com

  The Things We Tell the Silence

  Stephanie Kraner

  He doesn’t know but I know. I haven’t told him.

  The appointments are easy to explain away. Brunch with a friend, a drive through the countryside. The same excuses recycled into different words. Lies, all of them.

  I should have told him the truth after the very first check up.

  “How’d it go?” He’d asked.

  What I should have said was, “Oh, they’re not sure yet. They want me to go to a specialist for further testing.”

  It would have been so simple, but he always worries so much. It didn’t seem necessary to give him more cause for worry over something so little, so seemingly insignificant. A wheezing sound picked up by the stethoscope. Asthma, probably.

  “Fit as a fiddle,” I’d told Walt. “Healthy as a horse.”

  I think I thought such ridiculous similes would make the lie less immoral. But I lied after the second appointment, too.

  I look at him lying next to me, breathing deeply, easily. The sheet caresses his waist, casting faint shadows over the contours of his hips and thighs. The hair on his chest, some of it peppered with gray, reflects the early morning light coming through the window. Two months ago, I would have snuggled close and gone back to sleep until the sun rose high enough to pull us out of bed.

  But now I can feel the coughs forcing their way out of my chest the way boiling water forces itself out of a geyser and I know I have to leave the bedroom so I don’t wake him with my maladies.

  I don’t even make it to the kitchen before the geyser erupts. A sudden fit catches me halfway down the stairs and I double over, grasping the railing as though it might save me.

  I’ve no idea how long it lasts except that when I’m finished I feel dizzy and I see specks of light floating in the corners of my vision. I taste blood and hurry to the kitchen to wash the flecks of it off my hand before I put the teakettle on.

  I hate mornings, the wee hours when Walt’s still asleep and I drink tea in the silent kitchen while trying to think of ways to tell him the truth. I wonder if perhaps I should just leave little clues for him to find, like evidence at a crime scene. A bloody handkerchief in the laundry. An open pill bottle on the counter.

  I hear him moving about upstairs and part of me wants him to interrogate me when he comes into the kitchen. It’s much easier to confess under pressure, rather than having to work up the nerve on my own, as though to put words to it would validate it in some way.

  Not that the doctor hasn’t made it clear already. With pictures.

  “These are your lungs,” he’d said while hanging X-rays on a lighted board. “Those are the abnormal cells.”

  He didn’t call it cancer. As I took in the thick patches dotting my lungs, I wondered why.

  “This is the cancer,” he should have said. “This is how you’re going to meet your maker.”

  Instead, he’d laid a gentle hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye.

  “Do you understand?” He’d asked.

  Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t.

  “Good, you’ve made tea,” Walt says, rubbing his belly as he walks into the kitchen.

  “Pour me a cup. I’ll fetch the mail.”

  Not a word about the coughing or why I didn’t come back to bed. So I get up and pour him a cup of tea with two spoons of sugar the way he likes it.

  When he comes back inside, he tosses the mail on the table, the bills and brochures scattering across the varnished wood. He tastes his tea and nods his approval.

  “There’s an invitation there,” he says, gesturing with his cup toward the envelopes he’s just brought in. “Erin’s getting married next Saturday.”

  “I’ll run out and buy them something tomorrow afternoon,” I say.

  “We can just write them a check.”

  “I need a new pair of heels anyways.”

  “Whatever you prefer, love,” he says. “I’ll just go watch the news, then.”

  When I hear the
familiar creak of the couch springs followed by the newscaster reading the details about the latest catastrophe in the world, I pull the appointment card out of my purse and write myself a reminder on the back to pick up shoes and a wedding gift.

  ~~~

  “There are alternatives to the chemo,” my doctor tells me. “We have pamphlets in the waiting room. Pills, herbal supplements, and several other natural remedies, but none of them give any guarantees. Chemo therapy is the only one I’ll vouch for, but ultimately it’s up to you. At this point, the best you can hope for is that it slows the process.”

  “Slows the process,” I repeat. “How much?”

  “I couldn’t say. Even without treatment, there’s no way of telling how fast it’ll progress.”

  I stare at the floor a moment, hating the uncertainty of it but appreciating it at the same time.

  “Why now?” I ask. It’s a question I’ve had burning inside me since I found out. One I know doesn’t have an answer. “I haven’t smoked in twenty years,” I say to clarify.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hannigan,” he says. “These things just happen.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Are we finished?”

  He nods and I leave his office with a stack of pamphlets. In the car, I look a few of them over but I don’t get very far. They’re full of families hugging and looking optimistic but the doctor’s words are still ringing in my head.

  Slows the process. These things just happen.

  I stuff the pamphlets in the glove compartment and drive to IKEA to guy Erin a wedding present. There’s no sense in buying new shoes so I’ll just tell Walt I couldn’t find any I liked.

  ~~~

  When I get home, I find Walt finishing dinner and the smell of lasagna in the oven washes over me. I smile as I push the door closed and try to catch my breath. I’m glad I married a man who likes to cook.

  “Right on time, love,” he calls from the kitchen and the oven door slams. “Bring us in a bottle of Sherry, would you?”