Todd Heldt is a librarian in Chicago. His first collection of poetry, Card Tricks for the Starving, was published by Ghost Road Press. Other things written under various pseudonyms have appeared in print, on the internet, and on movie screens. Since becoming a father his biographical statement has less time to be interesting.

The Gardener

Pesticide garden, ocean of plastic.
But soil crescent moons crown her fingers.
Her hair swims the carbon monoxide clouds.

Breath

Trees taken from the wind
and buildings burden the clouds.
Silence sounds the language of ants
out of air, dead breath in our ear.
Boxes of plastic flowers line
the concrete sidewalk, and we
are the heel that crushes us.

Acceptance

In the grocery store the everything
wells up inside you, hollows your gut,
and dizzies your head with the vastness
of love so useless it cannot hold
pins to a map or people to the earth.
There you are in the produce aisle
scavenging among the somnambulant,
knowing that we all will die,
that the sun one day will swallow
the earth, and the ones you love
are incandescence in your eyes,
like these fluorescent lights that float
above the stench of the back aisle butcher.
You did all you knew how to do. Now
slip some ice cream into your cart,
a flavor you’ve never tried.
Take it home for your kids to devour.

Mark Antony Rossi’s poetry, criticism, fiction, creative nonfiction and photography have appeared in The Antigonish Review, Anak Sastra, Bareback Magazine, Black Heart Review, Brain of Forgetting, Deep Water Literary Journal, Dirty Chai, Enclave, Expound, Farther Stars Than, Flash Fiction, Gravel, Indian Periodical, Japanophile, Journal of Microliterature, Kulchur Creative Journal, Mad Swirl, On The Rusk, Purple Patch, Scrivener Creative Review, Sentiment Literary Journal, Snapdragon, Syzygy Poetry Journal, The Sacrificial, Toad Suck Review, Transnational, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Wild Quarterly and Yellow Chair Review. He is the Editor in Chief, Ariel Chart

Kind

I’m not an animal hater. I got a dog, two cats and two goldfish.

But I’m still deeply suspicious of people who turn pets into family members. I wonder how much humanity has disappointed them. Are they more disposed to be humane towards animals than their own kind?

I am not trying to start a fight. But I don’t give a hoot about a stray cat when homeless vets sleep under a leaky bridge. Not too impressed with blowhards blabbing about human rights abroad while stepping over vagrants to rescue Taco Bell dogs here in the homeland.

If I hear another lecture regarding lizards I going to beat a hippie with their nasty hemp sandals until they declare hygiene is not against their religion. And by the way I don’t give a flying frack about frogs in the ecosystem. And no, plants don’t have feelings. I do you dickheads.

But let me share this episode. When I was young I dogsitted for a woman so darn old she left her purse in the Garden of Eden. She said “take care of Alice for me. I love her more than my last husband.”

Which didn’t surprise me. She let the dog pee on her husband’s plot. And once Alice broke a frame with old guy’s photo in it. None of this raised her blood pressure. The dog could do no wrong,

This is probably where I started to see animal obsession as a replacement addiction like religion or alcohol. Hamsters are not the only creatures running on that wheel. People become puppets to their own insecurities.

The tell-tale sign of that ancient woman is she died and left her proceeds to the animal shelter and Alice. Her dog got $50,000 her grown children with children of their own got nothing. Alice is running around in the park right now oblivious she’s a bit player in a human drama meant to exclude humans.

I volunteered one day to walk the dog and promptly drove her to the old lady’s plot. Alice left a heaping pile of steamy crap right in front of the tombstone. Was it justice or just jaded junk? I don’t know and neither does the dog. That’s the point. Animals are animals. They should never be mistreated. They are not substitutes for the broken hearted. They are not surrogates for lost loves. They are animals. Be kind. But wake the hell up!

WK Lawrence is the author of the novel The Punk and the Professor. He holds an MFA from the Southampton Writers’ Program and a doctorate in education from Northeastern University. Born and raised in New York, he has also lived in Oregon, Virginia, Florida, and Rhode Island. He currently lives in North Carolina, teaches writing at NC State University, and directs the NC State Young Writers’ Workshops.

Closed

These are the vapors around the rising sun—
The common man that opens learning eyes.
The strong rise on what the weak rely on
Until they speak with new leader high
Above with the great spirit on his side
And victory follows upon our time
Of world peace and unity
And we have made greatness our companion
Until the hourglass is once again flipped
When the common man closes his eyes to the sun.

The Court Yard

The sycamore speaks in the night.
Rhododendrons in full bloom below
And beside a brick wall
With ivy running up and around
Choking the wall, masking it.
Unmendacious and inscrutable.
There’s a beast who goes in and out
A hole in the wall along the bottom
Without paying a single toll
Unfazed by what is on either side
Waiting for it to fall into the teeth of consequence.

Book of Faces

Read this book of faces
a common determiner of fate
a place to show your fears
in the very way you hide your tears
in photographs that don’t measure
the loneliness in the room
or the addiction to bodies, parties,
just people in a room
to save you from the thriller
of an empty space
where most don’t go until they’re dead
because they wouldn’t know how to survive
with a door closed
long enough to get to know themselves
so it’s a show
and tell
ring the bells of lunacy
waste your time
in a world of buoyancy.

Elaine is an unpublished* writer, although earlier versions of this story won a trio of kind rejection letters. She is an active member of Grub Street, a fantastic, inclusive writing community and school in Boston. One of her greatest reading aspirations is to become an Amazon Top Book Reviewer. (She’s currently only at #639,167, but she enjoys a challenge.)

Elaine has also completed a suspense novel about corporate and political intrigue in Boston that centers on the decline of the newspaper industry. As a veteran of a community newspaper, she worries who will comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable if newspapers disappear.

*Editor’s note: previously unpublished.

Letter to My Replacement at the U.S. Park Service

Help Wanted

The United States Park Service seeks a Junior Park Ranger, to start immediately. Area of coverage: Beaver Dam Wash National Conservation Area and West Mountain Peak, Utah. No experience necessary. Low pay. Must enjoy camping.

Dear Applicant,

The Park Service won’t tell you about the snake bites, not during the interview at least. They’ll ask if you own a pair of thick hiking boots–and mark a ding on your application if you don’t.

They won’t tell you because the 1.5 million acres of southwestern Utah that you’ll be covering are home to the Western Sidewinder snake, one of the most venomous reptiles in the continental U.S. They don’t want you knowing that Sidewinders can kill a person with a single bite until you’ve sold all your personal belongings and moved across the country to a cheap motel in Shivwits or Gunlock, where the engines of the long-haul trucks on Old Highway 91 will keep you awake all night.

They also won’t mention that, due to budget cuts, the supply of antivenom has not been replenished in years. After the Great Recession in 2009, Congress cut funding by thirty percent, making syringes and antivenom luxuries that the Park Service can no longer afford.

As I unfortunately discovered, the biggest snake of all is Ranger Magilla. He conducts the final interview and he’s the reason you must like camping. Pity there’s no antivenom for him.

Ranger Magilla practices the opposite of Equal Employment Opportunity hiring. He insists on only hiring women, the younger and more wide-eyed the better. Each applicant must submit a photo and he devotes a good portion of the interview to staring at the interviewee’s breasts, as if assessing whether they’ll bounce under the olive drab shirt that would be her new uniform. Rumor has it he has never yet hired an A-cup.

If you’re like me, you’ve experienced one college internship, spending the summer before graduation in a bleak cubicle farm. You struggled to stay awake during afternoon PowerPoint presentations, envying your less-employable friends, who texted from Cape Cod describing intense games of Frisbee on the National Seashore. While they played Beer Pong, you fielded customer complaints for Chief Service Officers and wrote marketing copy for product brochures. As they rode the waves, you endured a stiff censure from the Human Resources Director the one time you were caught surfing the web during work hours.

You emerged in September a sickly shade of pale that only fluorescent lighting can produce. You’d gained ten pounds from sitting all day and your once-supple muscles, which aced the Peacock pose in college yoga class, make a mockery of the company’s ergonomic chairs.

You returned to campus desperate to avoid a decades-long stint answering emails, rushing to strategy meetings, and dreading your annual performance review. You’ve always loved animals and hiking, so you dream up the idea of escaping the grinding boredom of Corporate America by becoming a Park Ranger. All senior year you fantasize about an exciting career fording cold mountain streams and exploring ancient Native American settlements. You long to commute by horseback, not subway.

When you accept the job as a Junior Park Ranger, life appears bright. Your salary is so low you’re advised to apply for food stamps, but you hear the mating call of Western Bluebirds as you arrive at work each morning. Even though you constantly need to remind tourists—who never listen—not to feed the wildlife (“Patting a cougar is a terrible idea,” you say to a New Yorker with deep gouges on his arms), you wear a badge, the wind tussles your hair all day, and sunlight warms your cheeks from dawn to dusk. Sure, Ranger Magilla blows on the nape of your neck when no one’s looking, but you’ve survived lecherous professors. You can handle him.

Everything changes the day you’re assigned a black bear survey, with him supervising. The Park Service is concerned that the population of bears is exploding, so you win an entire week alone with him, following trails of reeking scat and counting bears through your binoculars.

When you’re told of this assignment, your stomach lurches, but he prepares like it’s high school and you’re his C-cup prom queen. The morning you leave, he’s slapped on so much Brut cologne that your eyes sting. He’s even dyed his combed-over hair dark brown and wears it gelled, like his idol Tom Cruise, whom he resembles in no way whatsoever.

He jumps into the driver’s seat of the Park Service Jeep and inserts his favorite CD, “Greatest Love Songs of the 1980’s,” into a boombox. You sit in the passenger seat, jammed against the door. Whitesnake screeches “Is this Love?” as you roar up the mountains on Hell Hole Pass Trail. While a California Condor circles overhead, you remove his liver-spotted hand from your knee and decline—politely, of course—to call him “Top Gun.”

It’s only when you reach the most remote forest in the Beaver Dam Mountains that he will announce that he has forgotten his camping tent. Darn it. He’ll have to share yours. You debate stealing the Jeep and fleeing back to headquarters in New Harmony, but you don’t. A stint in Timpanogos State Prison on a grand theft auto conviction just wouldn’t look good on your resume.

You awake hour before dawn, stuck 7000 feet up a canyon, with him begging to climb inside your sleeping bag. A Western Sidewinder is slithering into your thick hiking boots and, outside the tent, a black bear is scratching his itch on a Joshua Tree. Trust me, as you fend off Ranger Magilla, the snake and bear will strike you as preferable adversaries.

So, best of luck on your application. I’m going to give him a swift kick in the ass and then I’m becoming a yoga instructor. I wish us both success.

Namaste,

The former Junior Park Ranger

Travis Stephens was raised on a dairy farm. He earned a degree at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, before departing for the West Coast. Stephens became a sea captain and now resides in California. He has been published in the Upriver anthology, NOTA, Stoneboat Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Havik, and Pennsylvania English. His was a Poem of the Week for Silver Needle Press and other work will appear in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature the winter of 2018.

Single Women in Threes

watching three women drink coffee
seated outside
beneath a summer awning
bright one in black lace
blouse might be mother,
a straw hat, purple lipstick
the daughter in a jean jacket
line of turquoise studs along
the curve of upper ear,
that color of black hair that
shines dark blue. Eyes too.
Her friend a
curly swirly brown girl
with serious
judgmental brows
that speak of promise,
of promises questioned for lack of detail.
Single women in threes
in the shadow of an elm,
beneath the silent orb of a
camera set to watch the
sidewalk strollers,
furtive pigeons and me.
The little sister of my first wife
had hair black as thought,
eyes too, led groups of
Swiss visitors through the
New World wonders of America.
They teased her, of course, and
she answered in perfect Bernese,
until they pressed phone numbers
of grandsons and nephews to her.
Alas, she married in Wisconsin
and soon divorced.
She comes to mind for the way
she wore her hair in
loose curls, waves and smiles.
Not like this one under the awning
with her fierce bangs
a straight line cut into my heart
while she, her mother and even
her friend looks casually away.
Buses wait and kneel.
Cars touch the curb.
Like the camera I will watch
and do absolutely
nothing.

Leslie McGriff (Leslie Dianne) is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, playwright and performer whose work has been acclaimed internationally in places such as the Harrogate Fringe Festival in Great Britain, The International Arts Festival in Tuscany, Italy and at La Mama, ETC in New York City. Her stage plays have been produced in NYC at The American Theater of Actors, The Raw Space, The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater and The Lamb’s Theater. Her screenplay, Strivers Row, was chosen as a finalist in the Urban World Screenwriting Competition. She holds a BA in French Literature and is currently working on a collection of poetry.

I Try To Separate

I try to separate
the faces of the
families, friends
and strangers
pressed against
each other
outside the station
trying to enter
I cannot distinguish
one pair of black
eyes from the other
I cannot tell
the shape of one head
from the one next to it
I cannot tell
the gnarled leg of
the rickshaw driver
from the twisted hand
of the field worker
I have trouble
seeing which bare feet
go with which
bony knee
I move through all of you
brownskinned and foreign
I am visiting your planet
like a meteor crashing
lost in the swarm
of cardboard suitcases,
toddlers, thick heels
shuffling in cheap flip flops
no way
to know where
to go until an eager teenage boy
guessing at my language
sits by my side
and says hello
and an entire
train station moves close
to hear my destination
and help me
on my way
tomorrow Shanghai
another train station
and another hello boy

October

It would happen in October
the fortune teller said
when the leaves
lose themselves
and pretend to be
something else
gather their rust and brown
into clumps of defiance
to fight the cold
they believe that their green
will not survive
they believe that they must
change their color
in order to bend
with the wind
the frost
the snow
the too harsh rain
but it is not true
that they have to fight
they can ease into the
next season
release their hold
on the branch like
the fortune teller
said I would
release my hold on
you, let go and
begin the dark
beginning that
would guide
me to the truth

There is more me
without
you

On a Sicilian Beach in Milazzo

On this rocky beach
a thousand pebbles
washed white by the waves
are stamped with the memories
of distant soldiers marching
pressing their weight
into the earth after having
whipped the sea

they are ghosts
here beside us
Al Kalbi’s sons
marching on this
beach of Bal’harm

their Moorish sweat
travels in the mist
that conceals the shapes
of dozens of African ships

you offer your brown jacket
and on this spot
where you insist
we stop
and kiss
history watches us
fall in love

Morgan Boyer is a Carlow University alumni with a BA in Creative Writing. Her debut chapbook, “The Serotonin Cradle”, is being released through Finishing Line Press in 2018. Boyer’s writing has been featured in Rune, the Critical Point, and the Pittsburgh City Paper.

German class vs French class

Cool kids took Spanish. Geeks took
German. The leftovers weirdos took French

My 9th grade German class was the most
ethnically diverse one at Peters
with a Chinese & Indian
in a roll call filled with
Kayla’s, Lindsay’s, Zach’s & Taylor’s.

Cool kids took Spanish. Geeks took German.
The leftovers weirdos took French.

My sister was a so-called “leftover”:
not geeky enough for German
not cool enough for Spanish

Alex watched a woman shove a baby out a window.

I watched a German-speaking Sam comfort Frodo
in Minas Tirith while Isengard was being
destroyed on the projector
in dimly-lit room of sleepy sixteen-year-olds.

Cool kids took Spanish. Geeks took German.
The leftovers weirdos took French.

I had a crush on Ritvik, the only Indian-American boy in our grade
I stood up in front of a class of Italian-German
Catholic wonder-bread, stuttering over my words
as I pretended to be his waitress in Munich cafe

Alex came home & cast her French notebook
on the table next to her SAT prep sheets.

Cool kids took Spanish. Geeks took German.
The leftovers weirdos took French.

Ghosts of Second Avenue

One moment, a concrete cocoon shell left
behind on weed-ridden gravel lies on its back.

The undertaker has a one-story-tall pile of dead branches made
of the bones of Frick the prick as spiders claim the windows glazed

with dust from the Reagan era when the steel mills took their final
breath and they cut off the life support, watched them die in a
hospice bed with a chaplin restraining their relatives from

wringing each other’s necks over which hymns to pick
for the funeral service. Next to it, a building
no older than my second cousins, with grass cut

so evenly that’s so flat you could use it as a dinner plate. A parking garage
designed by a Carnegie-Mellon graduate student sits next to
it like its depressed, heteronormative, Donna Reed-era wife.

I was born as Ivan Ilyich was dying, his colleagues gambled away his
mansion, and Lisa’s husband Fedor bought a flat on the South Side, got
a job in web development as his wife became a nurse, picking up the

shards of glass of a broken man, as they baptize themselves in the
Allegheny to reincarnate themselves, fly back upwards, to form the new
castes by the shore that sit awaiting for the day their life-support cord is cut.

Eric is a Humanities teacher (his favorite class to teach is Literature in Film), a former professional baseball player, and he’s taught chess to children for over a decade. Eric holds an MFA in poetry from Murray State University, and his poems have appeared, or will be appearing, in such publications as: Plain Spoke, The Stray Branch, Atlantic Pacific Press, Ceremony, The 2018 Surrealist/Outsider Anthologie, and The International Anthology on Paradoxism.

Norman, OK

All the ingredients are there for a fine Midwestern
story. The old horse is by the dirt road, large head

chewing sideways the hay, muzzle hanging out over
the gray split-rail fence, tasting hay, sniffing air.

And at the boy passing, he does not neigh—the boy,
not a boy anymore, but home. The un-locked back

screen door creaks as usual, he walks in. After a hug
from his mother, a shared smile while she holds his shoulders,

no words, he sits down at the kitchen table with his father, his
mother, the silk blue flower arrangement in the pale white vase,

which hasn’t changed in years, between them. His dad
says he’s happy to see him. Coffee is brewing on

the stove—begins to percolate. The boy picks at the edge
of the placement in front of him—just as he used to. His

mother says, “don’t pick”, his father says
nothing, but he takes his thumbnail; digs

the nail in deep between hard plastic and soft foam,
and says, while not looking at them but instead

at the placemat, which has a teeny tilted windmill
pictured on it, “I’m seeing someone. It’s not a he.”
Coffee is ready.

Ben Ririe is an English Major at BYU-Idaho. Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, he first took an interest in writing fiction at the age of eleven after reading several books by R.L. Stein. He now writes fiction, poetry, and music for the enjoyment of it. He writes with such influences as Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, and Robert Frost.

Highway Migrants

A dry wind brought the scent of fire from out of the west as if it were coming from the sun.  It sat behind a veil of smoke, burnt and low over the plain, and Charlie held it there in his gaze without squinting.

The boy walked alongside an old black lab at the rear of a highway caravan going north along I-15 away from Blackfoot.  He kicked at pieces of gravel and talked to the dog, said things to it about the hardness of the asphalt and how it must hurt walking all day without shoes, while the dog just looked ahead and let droop its tongue as it sauntered with him down the middle of the road.

“You’re gettin tired,” Charlie said.  “You’ve been walkin all day.”

They lagged some twenty yards behind the group in the knee-high shadow of a volcanic shelf running alongside the interstate.  A dead tangle of weeds blew in front of them and wheeled over into the shoulder of the road.

“But you can lie down when we make camp for the night.  I’ll get a big old bowl of the soup for you, and you can have that.”

From up ahead, Charlie’s mother called his name.  He ran up into the group, leaving the dog behind where it plodded at a slowing pace.  The sun fell lower and the dog trailed further behind.  When Charlie looked back, it walked a long stone’s throw from the group.  He turned to his dad who pushed a dolly with stacked and bungeed cardboard boxes.  “Dad.”  He pulled on his dad’s flannel shirtsleeve.

“Yes.”

“Ringo’s still back there.”

The dad didn’t turn to look.  “He’ll catch up.”

“He’s way back there though.  Look.  We have to slow down for him.  He can’t keep up.”

“He’ll catch up.”

“You sure?”

The dad looked ahead smiling.  “Yeah.  Don’t worry about him.  He’s a dog.  He’s tough.  Always been tough.”

A while later the sun settled under the horizon and left the sky overhead blue and fading and turning almost all dark opposite in the east.  Charlie looked back, and the old lab was gone somewhere to the divots in the highway or maybe behind the stretch of road going all the way past the last point where it dipped down and out of sight.

He yanked on his dad’s shirtsleeve again, trying to pull it away from the dolly.  “Dad, look.  He’s gone.”  His voiced cracked.

The dad turned his head to the boy and then over his shoulder for a second and then back to the boy.  “He’s okay.”

“No, he’s not.  He’s gone.  What are we gonna do?”

“Oh, he’ll find us when we make camp.”

“He’s lost, and he won’t find us.  We have to go back and get him.”

“He’s okay.  But if you want, you can go out there and find him.  Bring him back.”

Charlie looked back down the highway.  It ran a straight course down the plain and out of sight, and nothing moved out there except tall grass in the wind.  The pavement grayed to a black against the darkening cyanic blue of the horizon, hardly visible.

“I can’t,” he said.  He started to cry.

Charlie walked along blubbering behind his dad and whimpering with no words.  He quieted to a sniffle after a while, and the group made a late camp off the side of the interstate.  They built the fire and boiled pots of mixed soups and ate at the edge of the firelight, the night now a deep-oil black with only the stars.  No shades of blue at the west edge of the sky.

While the men and women sat on mesh chairs and stumps and talked in low voices, Charlie stood at the edge of the camp and looked up toward the highway.  He glanced back to see if anyone might notice him, and then he made through the sagebrush.  Coming up onto the road, he looked south.  Charlie saw nothing down the highway the direction they came from save the dark column of the asphalt going away and out of the fire’s light a little ways ahead.  A black dog in that black night was impossible to see.  He stepped forward as if to venture blind into the void, but he stopped.  His own feet disappeared beneath him in the dark, and he grew hot and wet about the eyes.  The night just outside the fire might have stretched out forever in all directions, and all of it was unseeable, and all of it was unknowable too, and perhaps nothing could abide it alone whether it be man or woman or boy or girl or dog.

Charlie ran down off the shoulder of the road and back to the campfire.  He slowed to a stagger and stopped to bury his face in his dad’s chest.  “We have to go back and find Ringo.”

“Son, we’re not gonna get him back.”

“He’s out there.”  He pulled on both his dad’s sleeves.  “Who’s gonna help him if we don’t?”

The dad ran his fingers through the boy’s hair.  “No one.  If he hasn’t found us by morning, we’ll just have to move on.”

“But what if he’s still looking for us?”

“Maybe he will be.”

“Then we can’t leave.  We have to stay.”

“We can’t stay.”

“Why not?”

“Son, Ringo’s old.  He isn’t gonna live much longer anyways even if we do find him.  But he’s been a good dog.”

Charlie started to whimper again.

“A lot of people have lost their dogs before.  It’s part of life.  And these days a lot of people are losing a lot more than their dogs.  They’re losing their parents or their best friends.  And they just have to move on same as us.”

Charlie didn’t cry less.  He only pulled harder on his dad’s sleeves and cried himself all the way out until the fire was low to a glowing red patch, no flames escaping over the cinders.

Stefan Stoykov is a film student in Frankfurt, Germany. He spends his days watching, reading and listening. He considers himself a lazy perfectionist.

My Grandfather Who Never Came Back

I was named after my grandfather- Stefan. For all my life I had heard stories about him. He was for me the living legend I thought I would never get to see. I had heard about him fighting with the militia because they didn’t let him have his picnic in the park. I had heard about him smuggling rock vinyls and adult movies over the border. I had seen his photo in my grandmother’s apartment- tall, thin, bushy eyebrows and although it was in black and white I could recognize the bright blue eyes. Just like mine.

One rainy October day in 1985, when I was 15, my grandmother came bursting through the door with a smile on her face as wide as the Berlin Wall. “They are letting him go. He’s coming back.” Could it be true?  The man who spent more time locked up in a labor camp than me being alive is finally free? I felt uneasy. I was damn straight afraid. I was afraid to meet the man I knew from the letters, the pictures and the collective conscious of my relatives and their friends. The man with no fear, the man with the quick feet, the man whom I had to impress. He surely knew about me, his eldest grandson, but what had he heard? He had never seen me, and I had never seen him. Were we all that alike as the stories suggested?

One sunny day in May of 1968 a group of young men and women came marching on the streets holding hands and raising banners of freedom and love. They were walking in unison and shouting in one voice the words one man was directing to them through a loudspeaker. That man was my grandfather. That sunny day in May of 1968 was the last he saw as a free man.

And so the groundwork for his return began. For two days straight my grandma took no seat. Her heart was beating ever so faster with every room she cleaned and every dish she prepared- potato salad, spinach meatballs, stew and herself to see her husband once more. The poor old lady. What had she seen throughout the years? Nobody dared to ask. My dad and his sister, my aunt, got their stories straight. They had so much to tell him. How would he recognize them? How would they fit the 17 years he was gone into one single story to bring him up to date with all of the new members of the family? How would my aunt explain to him how she turned into a full grown woman and how would my dad tell the tale of me and my brother being born?

Of course, bad things had happened in his absence too; his brother had died of stomach cancer and grandma had to move from their old house to the cramped little apartment on the fourth floor in a building in a newly constructed part of town. The theater he once loved so much had burned down and no money was found to restore it.

The day came. Grandma, her sister, my grandfather’s sister, all of their kids, my aunt and her husband, my mom and my brother and me were all seated at the table in the living room, waited for my father to drive the man back to his home.

The bell rang.

My grandma jumped with the athleticism she had long lost and opened the door. From my spot I could see my father entering and behind him a dark figure in scruffy clothes. Grandma threw herself in his arms and we all watched them in silence. Quiet, like a dead man, he walked in. Everyone stood up and greeted him. Hugs and kisses all around. When my turn came he shook my hand, firmly and said “are you the one named after me?” A silent “yes” was my retort. I could see myself in him, but he was different from the photo. He seemed not as tall as I had imagined. His back was hunched and his bright blue eyes were nailed to the floor. They seemed dim and uniterested.

All the people in the room were on him like worms on a corpse. Gently and swiftly, he paid attention to everyone, finally sitting on his chair at the end of the table.

“How does it feel to be back on the outside?”

“I can tell you it’s better here” he replied.

“Did you make new friends?”

“The friends you make in a labor camp are like army buddies, forever.”

“Did you try to escape?”

“No.”

“Did anyone try?”

“Yes.”

I sat across the table from him and listened to this one-sided cross examination. I noticed he didn’t eat anything despite my grandmother’s attempts to make him taste the pork chops. I noticed he did not look anyone in the eyes. I noticed him fiddling with his fingers. I noticed the years spent away by the wrinkles on his face. So many things came to my mind that I could ask him, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know where to begin. Did you get beaten? What did you eat? Why did they let you go, after all? What are you going to do now? Where do I fit in your world view? I felt it wasn’t the right time. I felt he wasn’t comfortable with all the attention. Soon the rest of them came to the same conclusion. They let him breathe.

“I beg to be excused.”

My grandfather stood up and left the room. We were left in silence. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I wanted to hook out of him. I stood up and walked out a few minutes after him. He wasn’t in the bathroom or the bedroom. I opened the kitchen door, and there he was- the one man who had turned into urban fiction. The fierce and restless legend was sitting alone by the kitchen table eating soup in the silence of his own company. The image struck me. I couldn’t believe he would run away from his family. Who does he think he is, I thought. I believed he would be this magical figure filled with stories of adventure and suspense, and what do I have in front of me- a blue, emotionless old man. There is a great deal of power and sadness in the image of a once great man quietly throwing pieces of bread in a bowl of soup.

I stepped out before he could hear me. I was disappointed. I was angry. I’ve been lied to. I didn’t want him to be like me. I didn’t want to be like him. I went back to the living room where the rest of my family was and sat down next to my father. I didn’t speak for the rest of the day, trying to hide my discontent. When he came back I didn’t even look at him. I could see him clearly now. No longer could any story about him excite me. No longer was I a child.

Three years later he died. He died in a hospital bed from a brain hemorrhage. We didn’t bury him. His wish was to be cremated and scattered over the valley where the city was. And so we did. We climbed to the highest peak of the mountain and held a wake for him. Hundreds of people came by, and everyone had a story to tell. My grandma told the one where she met him. My dad and my aunt about him punishing them by making them perform Chekhov plays in the living room, his sister about his energetic and eventful childhood, and his labor camp buddies about how he helped them stay alive and motivated during tough times. When my time came, I told the crowd I had no tales of wisdom, adventure or greatness. This was the first time I told the story of him eating soup alone in the kitchen. That was how I remember him to this day- a fallen idol in the dirt.