RATHALLA REVIEWrathallareview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/RR_Fall... · 2019. 12. 11. · Rathalla Review | 9 Hands by Rebecca Ruth Gould He dreamed of doing magic with his hands,

RATHALLA REVIEWFall 2019 | Rosemont College

Rathalla Review | Fall 2019 | rathallareview.orgARTSam Talucci

Sam Talucci has studied artwork at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for seven years. Recent work has been done in watercolor of wine bottles and the guitar. He has participated in the Rosemont College writer’s retreat the past four years. He is currently working on two philosophy manuscripts titled “The Truth and the Void” and “The Way and the Reason.” He sews patchwork fabric bookmarks for a local bookstore. He is 37 years old.

https://samtalucci3art.wordpress.com

Managing EditorRachel Kolman

Fiction EditorKyle Robertson

Non-fiction EditorWatsuki Harrington

Art EditorNoelle Marasheski

ReadersLauren Bruce, Linda Romanowski, Ann O’Neil, Meg Ryan, Larissa Mariani, Aurore Uwase

Flash Fiction EditorVictoria Giansante

Poetry EditorStacy Wong

Production ManagerJess Callans

Away With The Wind by William Cullen Jr.

Hands by Rebecca Ruth Gould

Your Shoes by Doug Harrison

Broadcasting by Richard Weaver

Night Vision by Toti O’Brien

Lessons Learned by Michael Chin

Solvency by Sara Tabin

Down A Narrow Path by Cheryl Davis

Idle Woman by Gail Tyson

Deluge by E. Kristin Anderson

CONTENTSContributors

Creative Non-Fiction Flash Fiction Poetry

Fiction

Travel inspires much of Gail Tyson’s writing. It has taught her that encounters with landscape and history can offer visible signs of human connections across time and space, and lead to inner discoveries. Recent and upcoming journals that feature her work include Artemis,The Ekphrastic Review, The Other Journal, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. An alumna of Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and the Dylan Thomas Summer School at the University of Wales, she has attended juried workshops at Collegeville Institute, Looking Glass Rock Writers Conference, and Rivendell Writers Colony.

Toti O’Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. She was born in Rome then moved to Los Angeles, where she makes a living as a self-employed artist, performing musician and professional dancer. Her work has most recently appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Moth, Hypertext, and Atticus.

Sara Tabin is a journalist in the Bay Area originally from Utah. She graduated from Yale University where she studied creative writing and social psychology. She wrote and revised “Solvency” as part of a trauma writing seminar with Roxane Gay.

Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He is the author of two full-length short story collections: You Might Forget the Sky was Ever Blue from Duck Lake Books and Circus Folk from Hoot ‘n’ Waddle; his third collection, The Long Way Home is forthcoming in 2020 from Cowboy Jamboree Press. Chin won the 2017-2018 Jean Leiby Chapbook Award from The Florida Review and Bayou Magazine’s 2014 James Knudsen Prize for Fiction. Find him online at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin

Cheryl Davis is a Central Florida native and CPA with a love for words and language. She is currently studying creative writing with The Center for Creative Writing.

Doug Harrison lives in Victoria, Canada, where he works and writes. His other obsession is music, and since 2000 he has released numerous recordings with his progressive rock/metal band Fen and his solo project Slug Comparison.

William Cullen Jr. is a veteran and works at a social services non-profit in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in Gulf Stream, I-70 Review, Lake Effect, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, Spillway and The American Journal of Poetry.

Richard Weaver lives in Baltimore City where he volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank, acts as the archivist-at-large for a Jesuit college, and is the official poet-in-residence at the James Joyce Irish Pub and Restaurant. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press) and has been published in various literary magazines such as the Loch Raven Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Southern Quarterly.

Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of the poetry collection Cityscapes (Alien Buddha Press, 2019) and the award-winning monograph Writers & Rebels (Yale University Press). She has translated books from Persian and Georgian, inlcuding After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Death of Bagratt Zakharych and other Stories by Vazha-Pshavela (Paper & Ink, 2019). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was a finalist for the Luminaire Award for Best Poetry (2017) and for Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize (2017).

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and glitter enthusiast living mostly at a Starbucks somewhere in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on ‘90s pop culture and her work has been widely published in magazines. She is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, Fire in the Sky, 17 seventeen XVII and Behind, All You’ve Got (forthcoming). Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked nights at The New Yorker.

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Away With The WindBy William Cullen Jr.

Coming home for the holidays

I see our childhood oak

has been cut down for firewood.

Our carved hearts stayed together

for almost forty years

as I watch them now

in the fireplace

being absolved of the vows

we took one night so long ago

when summer seemed forever.

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Handsby Rebecca Ruth Gould

He dreamed of doing magic with his hands, of becoming a perfumist, making magic potions and aphrodisiacs based on ancient Iranian traditions. Perhaps, she decided, he was testing the limits of the legal system in which he lived when he extended his hands to her, seeing how far the regime was willing to go in its persecution of the innocent. Maybe he extended his hands to her unbidden on that day in order to show the world—and himself—that he would not be cowed. Asserting his dignity in an authoritarian state.

Or maybe shaking hands with a foreigner was as routine for members of his generation, in their secular milieu, as speaking English. Surely there were many worlds she had not been introduced to on her guided tours, led by scholars of Islam from Qum to Mashhad. Constant accompaniment by these state-approved escorts was one of the many conditions of her entry into the Islamic Republic. As a result of such barriers, there was much she did not know about him or his native country.

Now that they were alone together for the second time in Abu Dhabi, his hands were more reticent than she had ever known them to be. It was as if they belonged in another place, on another body, or in another time. She decided she would wait until they said goodbye to question why his hands were so restrained, so hesitant to touch her body. And then, in the airport, there was a rush of people, as there always was. The lines extended out into the arrivals hall as the boarding time

approached. All passengers for Tehran please approach gate 6D, the intercom blared. It was the wrong time to speak—she wanted to first touch his hands.

The endless deferral of discussion meant perpetual, potentially permanent, avoidance, of the most pressing issue: when would their hands meet again? He asked her to watch his luggage while he went to the bathroom. When he returned, he had to rush to catch his flight. There was no time to say goodbye, no time to repeat the gestures that brought them together in Tehran and Tbilisi, no time for her to take the measure of his hands, to impress his knuckles on her memory, to lift his fingertips to her lips and to tell him how much she wanted his hands, or the entirety of his mind and body, in her life. Perhaps, she decided, the rush of people was the best way of deferring this impossible speech. Maybe silence was the preferred option. Not knowing what to say in the little time remaining to them, she closed her eyes and imagined his fingers stroking her hair. When she opened her eyes, he was gone.

What struck her most were his hands. They were long and lanky, like his body. Even more remarkable than their shape was the way he used them. When they first met, he shook her hands boldly and directly, as if it

were a normal thing to do and not a violation of the law in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Taken aback, she forgot to respond. Her hand hung limply in his palm until he dislodged it.

Just the day prior, she had read about a poet who had been arrested after returning from abroad for shaking a woman’s hand. She wanted to warn him: You shouldn’t do that. You might end up in jail for shaking my hands. But he must know what he was doing, she reasoned, and who was she to tell him how to behave in his own country?

His hands didn’t fit anywhere. Not in his pockets, or at his sides. They dangled oddly from his arms. The lines on his palms were long, stretching from his wrist to his index fingers. If a fortune-teller had been asked to read his palms, she would have predicted for him a long life, a fulfilling marriage and many children. His hands were like an autonomous body. She imagined them keeping her warm at night, soothing the aches in her back, providing a resting place for her lips, caressing her hips.

She touched his hands again in Tbilisi, a city where they had arranged to rendezvous in order to get to know each other better. There in the Georgian Republic, they could say things about politics and to each other that could not be said whilst they were within the confines of the Islamic Republic. She found it funny how law interacts with morality, indeed with honesty: what is licit in one country is suddenly an offense when the jurisdiction shifts. It’s funny how acts of affection, expressions of love, can be made a crime. Her hands pressed hard on his body. Certain parts of him yielded in certain ways, though not every crevice and not in every way. Her hands traced a continual arc on his back while they worked together, stimulating the flow of words, summoning and cementing memory.

She saw his hands again in Abu Dhabi, but this time it was different. She was cautious and more curious to see what his hands would do with her body when left unprompted. Nearly all of their contact had been initiated by her hands in Tbilisi. This time, she decided, she would let his hands determine their movements, harkening back to when he shook her hands unbidden, in full public view, in violation of the law, in Tehran. Looking back on that moment, it almost seemed a performance, not for her sake, but for the state. A form of civil disobedience that dared the government to punish him. Shaking hands is a sign of respect, he seemed to be saying to her in retrospect. Surely you will not imprison me for showing respect to the visitor?

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Your ShoesThey tumble from the coat closet, a subtle few at a time, until the bifold doors no longer close. Then they multiply along the baseboards and pile up behind the front door. When I get home from work they push back—resistant leather and synthetic—creaking as I shoulder my way in. I turn my back to lock the bolt and they avalanche down. I kick them aside and they try to trip me, headed to the living room or kitchen. Some of them land flipped over like bugs.

You say I’m lucky you’re not like most women who only wear brand names from name-brand stores. You shop for deals; you’ve made a lot of savings. Some pairs just fifteen, twenty dollars. And you buy only the essentials. The ones in the entranceway you wear almost daily, and the rest are out of season or for special activities or particular outfits. That some pairs wind up in the hall is the result of not having a proper shoe rack, in an apartment gravely lacking in closet space. The ones you don’t wear, you give away. Fifty pairs all told is nothing. I should see some of your friends’ collections. I have no idea how lucky I am.

I’ve never said you have too many, just that you have a lot. Last night I dreamt them creeping in a line into our bedroom, piling up to gain the quilt, and then attacking me like the rats in 1984.

Headed drowsily to the bathroom, I’ve glimpsed Right and Left turned on top of one another, or on their sides, hole to hole. One day at work I found a lace-up boot packed next to my lunch. That’s what I get for leaving my bag on the floor, you say. There’s a hook for a reason.

By Doug Harrison

It bothered me the afternoon I saw an unkempt tenant wearing the flip-flops you’d put out the day before, his grubby toes hanging-ten off the front and his too-big heels squashing off the back as he shuffled around the dumpster, developing a taste. I volunteer now to drop your discards at the Sally Ann.

When I come home feeling good, your shoes are like so many dogs wanting attention. Up on my lap, they expect me to remove them. I’m not a foot guy, especially, but I do like yours, petite and sturdy. Hoof-like, I tease. When they’re desirous of a professional I keep my grumbling to a minimum and later make it up with a contrite massage. My hands slowing, you remind me: Don’t forget about the other one!

They say that after a car accident, the victims are rarely in their shoes. If I got that call, that knock, I’d bring all fifty pairs under the quilt, and all your socks, your leggings, your jeans, your shirts, your coats—every thread in the apartment that once wrapped around you. And I’d bury myself in the heap and huddle folded over in its darkness, become the liver of some giant heaving animal.

BROADCASTING

Pairs of small birds bobbing

on the sea oat stalks. The wheat-gold

blooms swaying with the west wind,

dipping together in slow measure

as the seeds scatter and life extends.

By Richard Weaver



Once again, the woman who had lost her son shared her story.

I had heard it before. And she wasn’t the only woman-who-had-lost-her-son I had heard talk. I remembered them all. All the women, the stories, words carving my chest, words of panic and un-healable pain.

Un-healable. Such a paradox in the world where I live, where these women lived or live. A world where we hear of trouble and we instantly seek cures, solutions, where the idea of ‘incurable’ seems weirdly obsolete.

Stigma. What is it? We don’t wear it anymore.

Then the woman who in the blink of an eye had lost her only son—loving, happy, young, talented—shared her tragic story of irreparable loss and we, the small group of women there gathered for the most trivial reasons, stood up.

One by one we hugged her, and she let us do it, and she embraced back with great strength, but softly. She embraced back with wholeness, and that wholeness, I felt, was like a plant. Like a ball of wool.

Her thin body was wiry like a twig, like those reeds that thrive by the water’s edge, inconspicuous but flexible, resistant. That, I couldn’t understand: the resistance.

Night VisionBy Toti O’Brien

Of course she had a name, but I called her June in my mind.

Though each time that it was repeated her story grew richer in details, as if slowly, slowly, June found the courage of peeling a bandage off a huge open wound, I did not know when her son had passed. Why did I call her June?

She looked young and strong, like a sapling. Now and then she looked like a knot, a bundle, like a crimson spoonful of raw…pain isn’t the right word. Grief isn’t either. Both are too dull in color. Her shade was more screaming, more desperate.

And yet she was composed, dignified, didn’t try to elicit compassion, didn’t indulge. No. The story of the dead son simply occurred, just materialized itself, rolling out of her mouth—a stream of rust, scarlet, pink, effervescent, bursting, cascading bubbles, sunbeam, laser beam, thunder bolt, a tide of electricity cutting the room in half, running out to the street, seeking escape, unstoppable.

She was not the only woman who had lost her son, perhaps her only son, whose story I had heard.

I had heard the story, I intend, from the women themselves, which is different than hearing it from anybody else. Because when you are witnessing both, the story and the woman, mother-and-son, the indissoluble dyad dissolved, you are exposed to the paradox.

Paradoxes are dangerous, tricky, more than all unforgiving.

All the women who had lost their sons…how could they be so many?

People die all the time, and they all have parents. I am focusing on mothers of sons, because I am one of them. I have witnessed the pain of fathers, and it is the same.

But I am focusing on mothers and sons because of proximity.

I believe in proximity as I believe in paradoxes. These hurt, split and decompose. Sometimes it is needed. It is good. Then, proximity cleans the broken edges, makes them shine either with saliva or tears. Proximity is clear-eyed. Proximity mends.

How many stories have I heard from mothers who have lost their (sometimes only) sons? So many that the Virgin Mary, I am sure, isn’t an archetype but an a-posteriori creation, the mere summary of a way-too-common experience. Just a drop of the crimson river, sanctified as the source. Just the frame for a picture with a million of faces.

***

When I drove home, still cracked, shaken by the paradox of the woman who had lost her son—death-so-alive, life-so-mortified, agony-so-raw—it was night. I was driving on the right lane of the freeway, not too fast, when my headlights hit a fawn.

Though the image must have lasted less than a second, it was extremely distinct. Perhaps the blond color of the animal’s fur, in contrast with the blackness of the asphalt, was enough to ensure perfect definition. Or it was the beauty of the beast that impressed itself—the beauty so imposing, it creased my sense of sight.

The fawn rested in a curl, in fetal position. Maybe its quasi-circular shape focused my attention, mesmerizing it like a magnet would. Pale and calm on dark asphalt, the fawn was a moon. It must have been just killed because it looked fine, I believed. I didn’t see blood—no interruption to the smoothness, no stain, no streak segmenting the curve of its tender body.

Of course, I can’t be sure. But the fawn looked peaceful.

It looked enchanting, intact.


There were complements and contradictions in what Erica had learned about professional wrestling from her mother and what she’d learned from Tigress Numero Uno.

Mom taught her to walk down the aisle to the ring with confidence and purpose, before Erica transitioned to adding a tremor to her step, a moment of hesitation to play scared, to sell the story that she wasn’t ready.

Tigress taught her to fly off the top rope. First leaping forward, then backward. Twisting, turning, tumbling from the sky.

Mom taught her to save her money because she’d never have as much left as she thought. You shouldn’t have to wrestle when you’re my age. You want it to be your choice. Always get the economy rental car and pack it with five bodies. Three in the back. Pack it with six, one laying across them. One can sleep for a few hours, then take a shift driving.

Tigress taught her to spend her money. That custom-made ring boots with her initials made her look the part of a star over the generic white ones. That skipping the continental breakfast in the hotel lobby for a real steak and eggs meal offered real protein, real energy, real vida.

Mom taught her to sleep as many as you could fit in the motel room. As many as were good to pay their way.

Tigress taught her the benefits of booking a room for two.

Mom taught her never to get in a shoot fight—a real battle without planned spots or cooperation, without a predetermined victor.

Tigress challenged her to wrestle, but for real. She said, in a real fight, you learn what your body can do. You learn things you’d never imagine.

Mom taught her not to get hurt.

***

That first time they wrestled for real, Tigress caught Erica’s neck and arm between her thighs in a triangle choke on the bed. Erica fought to

breathe, face inches from Tigress’s crotch. When she tapped out, Tigress loosened but did not release the hold. She said in the sing-song voice of a schoolyard bully that if Erica wanted her to let go, she’d have to kiss it. And Erica asked, kiss what?

Mom taught Erica to live her gimmick in front of the marks, but to maintain a line between fact and fiction. Not to lose herself to kayfabe, the make-believe of wrestling, or she could never live in the real world again.

And Tigress. For all these months, Erica hadn’t seen her without the mask, hadn’t learned any other name for her. So that night when they wrestled again in private, that night when Erica pinned her, kneeling her body weight down on her shoulders—that night when she had won—Erica let go of her hold on Tigress’s thigh inside her elbow and went for the mask. Slow, tender. The way she’d approach petting a cat, she thought. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You can trust me.

Erica didn’t know exactly how it had happened, just that one moment she had her thumb beneath the lip of the mask. She had moved it.

The next moment, Tigress had her. She’d contorted two bodies in one fluid motion, and threaded Erica’s right side into a cross armbreaker that threatened to pop her elbow. She had to tap. Forget the mask. She had to save herself.

Mom taught her not to trust anyone completely in the business. Because when it came down to it, there were only so many high profile spots to go around. So many championships. So much money. The matches may have had predetermined outcomes, but that didn’t mean professional wrestling wasn’t about competition.

But that night, when Tigress snored softly, it occurred to Erica that this woman trusted her not to take the mask in her sleep. And Erica trusted her, too. More than she had anyone since her mother cradled her body during that first lesson on the living room floor about how to lock up, how to take a fall, how to transition from a headlock to a hammerlock and the myriad possibilities that might unfold from there. Erica was that comfortable here, eyelids heavy, transitioning from war to peace to slumber.

Lessons Learned BY MICHAEL CHIN


“Did you see this?” Pete asks over breakfast.

“See what?”

I stir my coffee with a teaspoon, counting each turn, the metal humming as it skids across the ceramic. I read the newspaper while he was in the bathroom, and I’m pretty sure I know what he’s talking about.

“Another big-shot actor got accused.” Pete snorts. “I guess that’s what happens in crowds like that. No morals, too many drugs.”

He tosses the paper aside and tears into his egg and cheese sandwich. Melted cheese and yolk ooze out between his fingers. The sight makes me nauseous. The morning air is cool, even though it’s almost June, but my face feels hot.

“How do you know she was on drugs? What kind of an assumption is that?” I ask curtly, my heart pounding.

Pete looks up at me, surprised.

“Babe, I didn’t mean it like that.”

He pauses and swallows. “I just meant… I’m sure this guy had it coming. It all goes together you know, the money and drugs, being a pervert. Not that it was the woman’s fault or anything.”

My cream and sugar have long since dissolved into the coffee, but I’m still stirring.

“C’mere.” Pete wipes his hands on his napkin and brings his fingers to my face, pulling me in so he can kiss the top of my head. I flinch. He doesn’t notice and draws me into a hug.

I breathe deeply, slowly, in and out. The smell of eggs on his breath is still making me queasy.

“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

“It’s okay. This stuff is upsetting, I get it.”

He pulls away from me, cheerful again. “I’m late, but let’s talk when I get home, okay? You’re clearly upset.”

He stands and pulls on his overcoat.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He will have forgotten the article by the time he gets home, which is fine because I don’t want to talk about it. Dozens of similar stories have been in the news over the past year. At first it was a trickle, and then

the floodgates opened and a torrent came through. I never want to talk about them.

When he leaves, I put down my spoon and bring the coffee to my lips. It’s cold. I drink it all in one gulp.

—

I’m lying on an examination table, naked under a single filthy blanket. I can’t feel it, but I know it’s there. The whole room is filthy. There’s human excrement and urine on the floor. I wonder if it’s from me. There are two masked doctors hovering above me, talking about me, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. One of them leans in closer and tells me he has to perform a pelvic exam. Otherwise, how will they know if I’ve really

SolvencyBy Sara Tabin


been violated? I want to say that doesn’t seem medically accurate, but my words catch in my throat and the sounds slur. The doctor pulls away my blanket.

My body lurches and I awaken with sweat running down the sides of my face, dripping onto my pillow. Pete is snoring softly beside me. I gasp and swallow, feeling the air fill my lungs, leave my lungs, fill my lungs, leave my lungs.

—

Maybe I have too much time on my hands. My job as a kindergarten teacher keeps me so busy during the school year that I can’t think about myself. I’m always thinking about the kids. I should’ve gotten a summer job--my co-workers often do to make ends meet--but Pete thought I should use the time to focus on the novel that I’ve been nominally working on for three years.

“The extra time you have doesn’t hurt your cooking, either,” he says with a chuckle.

—

Most days I run while Pete is at work. I pull on my white sneakers slowly, twirling the frayed laces in my fingers before I loop them around each other and finish the knot.

I push my body until my lungs burn and my stomach heaves, sweating

and gasping as I hurl down the side of the long, dusty road that stretches out beyond our house. The space between the homes here is so vast that I’m often alone for miles.

I hate running, but I love how I feel when I’m done. When I get home, my endorphins are surging and my anxiety is gone. Sometimes I use my extra energy to write. Other times I shower slowly, enjoying the feeling of the water as it hits my skin and mingles with my sweat, and then head back to bed. I place one of our pillows under my pelvis and rub back and forth on top of it until I come. It’s mindless but safe. I feel clean, alone, unwatched. Then I sleep and I do not dream.

—

One morning, I take a new route. Instead of hugging the road I run down to the beach, heading towards the boardwalk, where I pass tourists in gaudy shirts holding ice creams and cheap carnival trinkets. Seagulls circle above my head, crowing happily, soaring across the beach and over the ocean. I run closer to the clear blue water, wanting to feel the sea spray on my face.

Ahead of me, I spot an older woman dressed in rags with dirt streaking her face--homeless, perhaps. I slow down to wave at her, and it’s then that I see that she’s surrounded by men. They are tearing at her rags, grabbing at her body as she cries for them to stop. No, I want to cry out. I want to run to her, to help her, but

a wave overtakes me, dragging me into the ocean.

Pete shakes me awake.

“Babe?” he asks groggily. “You okay? You were gasping again, sounded upset…”

Air returns to my lungs. In and out, in and out, in and out.

“I’m fine. Sorry to wake you.”

“S’okay,” he says, yawning and turning back over to sleep.

I stare at the splashes of moonlight that have escaped through the cracks in our blinds, splayed across the ceiling.

There is no ocean anywhere near this house, I remind myself, as I focus on my breath. There are no waves. Outside my window there are only miles of yellowing fields. Inside my house there is only Pete. It is safe here.

—

I’m not always like this. I’m a good wife and a good teacher. I enjoy having sex with my husband a few times a month, and I sleep through most nights. I think I’ll be a good mother.

But then another scandal breaks, erupting across the pages of the news, and the dreams come back. I can never breathe at the end of my dreams. Sometimes I worry I’ll

suffocate on my thoughts while lying safely in my own bed.

You know there’s a story behind my nightmares. You want me to tell you what happened.

I was fifteen. So was he. Neither of us had money and neither of us did drugs. I don’t know if you need to know anything else. I don’t know that I can say anything else.

When Pete and I were engaged, I told him something bad happened to me as a teenager, something with a boy that ended violently. He didn’t push me for more.

“That son of a bitch,” he said, his face reddening and his hands clenching into fists.

He said the right things, but his rage made my heart beat faster and my tongue feel dry. After that, I swallowed my past.

But lately my memories are uncontrolled and overflowing.

On nights when I don’t want to have sex, Pete never asks me why. He’ll tell me cuddling is plenty and wrap his arms around me as he drifts off to sleep. Sometimes I don’t want to cuddle, but it seems unfair to burden him with that, so I let him hold me and try not to feel claustrophobic under the weight and heat of his arms.

—

“The governor too, wowee,” Pete whistles through his teeth while

scrolling through his phone one evening.

I focus on cutting my baked potato into smaller and smaller pieces. My knife shreds the skin from the potato flesh. I am delicate, careful not to crush the potato as I slice. If I crushed it, I would end up with mashed potatoes, which is not the dish I intend to have for dinner. The thought amuses me. I guess I must start to smile because Pete decides it’s okay for him to continue.

“This is great,” he says. “This fucker’s finally gonna get voted out. About damn time.”

Satisfied, he puts the phone back in his pocket and puts a slab of butter onto his potato. It drips over the sides, pooling next to the fat on the side of his steak. He covers the whole plate in salt and pepper before taking a large bite.

“Delicious,” he says, reaching for my hand. “My favorite part of the summer is dinnertime. Everything you make is just great.”

As Pete sops up the last juices from his steak with a bread roll, I pour myself another glass of wine and remind myself that Pete hasn’t done anything wrong.

—

Heat makes the air heavy in August. Sweat beads grow along my forehead and breasts and down my legs no matter how little energy I expend.

Nothing dries, not our bodies after we wash our clothes if I put them out on a line or even the dishes unless I wipe every inch of them. I haven’t run in days and my nerves are on edge, but I can barely force myself to walk to the end of our driveway and get the mail, let alone exercise. I’ve stopped preparing hot food. The kitchen is stuffy enough already, so I leave the stove off and serve salad and watermelon and cheese sandwiches.

Pete comes home annoyed one evening. A coworker is being let go after an internal investigation. His intern complained that he tried to ask her on dates, tried to hold her hand, kept her alone in his office after her shifts were supposed to be over. I don’t know what else, but I can’t see why the girl would have made it up.

“Who knows, really?” He picks at spinach leaves soaking in a pool of ranch dressing. “It’s trendy lately, to play the victim.”

He sees my brows furrowing, but this time he doesn’t back off.

“Sometimes I think this whole thing has gone too far,” he says, standing up and turning away from the table.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” I ask.

He looks back and I nod toward his dishes.


“I cooked, I don’t want to clean up everything, too,” I say.

“I don’t know that slapping a bowl of vegetables and ranch on the table counts as cooking,” he says. “You don’t have much else going on lately. It doesn’t look like your book has come very far.”

“Are you kidding me?”

I throw my napkin on the table, pick up my wine, and head into the living room. The remote is lying on our loveseat and I switch the TV on, flipping to a crime drama I’m not really interested in. Pete’s favorite newscaster is airing soon, but he won’t get to watch tonight.

If he comes in to try to get his remote back, I’m ready to fight. But instead, he stays in the kitchen. I hear the clang of dishes as he clears the table and begins to wash up.

—

It’s nearly fall when I leave. The air is cooler, drier, and I don’t feel angry. I make my decision calmly.

Pete doesn’t understand. I assure him it’s only temporary.

“Just for a few weeks. I’m sorry,” I say as I pack clothes into my suitcase. One sleeve, two sleeves, fold, and crease. One sleeve, two sleeves, fold, and crease. The shirts look clean and bright against the inside of my black leather bag.

“Baby please, talk to me,” he implores me. “Help me out here. I just… what happened?”

His voice cracks, and his eyes begin to redden.

“Are we…” He gulps. “Are we getting divorced? Is it over?”

“No, of course not. I already said that,” I say. “I just need some time to myself. There’s something I need to do.”

That’s not exactly true. In truth, I don’t want to do anything. I need a break. I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to cook dinner. I don’t want any updates about the news.

“Do you not want to go back to your job? I already told you that you don’t have to. I can support us just fine,” he says urgently, taking my forearm and beginning to rub it.

I love my job. Each year, I get a new class of bright-eyed, chubby-cheeked children who clutch at my hands when they’re nervous and run into my arms if they get a scrape on the playground. It feels so easy to protect them when I have them in my classroom. But even that is soiled when I remember that I don’t know what happens to them when they go home, that I will never know what happens to them after they graduate into first grade.

“Maybe it’s time for us to have a baby,” Pete continues. “Is that what this is about? That we don’t have a baby yet?”

“I don’t want a baby yet.” I pull my arm away. Then I feel sorry, so I force myself to peck him on the cheek.

“I love you,” I say. “I really do. I just need some time to work on the book.

I’m not getting anywhere right now with it, and I need some time alone.”

This calms him down a bit. He steps back, allowing me to go.

“Call me, okay? When you get where you’re going? I need to know you’re safe,” he says.

“Of course.”

I place the suitcase in the back of my red Honda and put the keys in the ignition. The car starts, and I pull out of our driveway.

But as I pull onto the road, the engine sputters and stalls, and I see them off to the sides, angry men, yelling and running toward me.

They pound at my windows, shake my car, try to pull me out. I feel their heat and anger.

I call for Pete, but he can’t hear me, and I am drowning.


He led me down a narrow path into the dark and misty

Night. Where in my tiredness I stopped to rest, and soon

A slumberous sleep arose, within a blinded, wordless quiet.

I dreamed a dream of love and kindness, then saw at once

An open clearing where deep mysterious shadows gathered,

Ill-fated harbingers, empty and faded. Silent languages laid

Buried beneath the wild land, all feverish and bitter, and

Hungry for sight. I saw then a world in reckless delusion,

A coursing, engulfing, darkness brought low—crushed hard

Against a divine immovable love. Ethereal promises hung

In the air, shiny and sparkling like sensuous diamonds—of

Grace, and peace, and union with life. Unsure if awake or

Still asleep, I heard a kind and loving voice now seeping

Through my mind—whispering to me, beckoning to me,

Urging me with a directive, “If you’re willing to go deeper;

Willing to give deeply—you’ll find there a love beyond any

Thought possible; a love that has eternal presence, a love

That grows, strengthens and gives back.” I listened quietly

In rapt attention, when at some point love stole into my

Dark red blood—coursing throughout my body—bringing

With it a deep satisfying luxuriance I’d never felt before. I

Stayed there sleeping into the night, my heart and soul in

Calming peace, under that faithful cover of light, surrounded

By the heavens.

DownA

NarrowPath

By Cheryl Davis

Well-behaved women rarely make history.


Narrowboat crews, who transported England’s essential materiel during World War II, enacted the epigram coined decades later. Unladylike by 1940’s standards, they kept pilots flying and factories running, and they charted their own place in history. In May 2018, their stories inspired me to cruise with friends down the Stratford and Grand Union, two canals that my heroines had traveled. Did we have anything else in common with them?

One misty late afternoon, our crew puttered from Wooten Wawen—an Anglo-Saxon tongue-twister. Only Lois, my friend of forty-plus years, had helmed a narrowboat before, and now she steered us into the Cotswolds. These canals are called The Cut because men hand-dug the channels, and ours curled through countryside that kept us spellbound. Four of us could perch on the bow or aft while wrens and chiffchaff piped, bleating lambs scampered,

and the hawthorn’s pink petals sweetened the breeze.

Shakespeare country.

Lois had proposed this adventure; I’d met most of the group a few times before. We followed a long wake left by women I revered. Seventy-five years had passed since female volunteers took the helm of narrowboats. Those twenty-year-old Brits worked for the Department of War Transport; we, mostly Americans, were on vacation. They fled stifling desk jobs; our female crew, except for one fourteen-year-old, teetered on the edge of retirement. That word points to a hidden likeness. Retire originally described armies in retreat. A century later, in the 1640s, it came to mean “leave an occupation.” As our week on the water elapsed, I came to see just how much women from different eras can share.

An English narrowboat is six feet, ten inches wide and up to sixty-nine feet long. It was designed, 200-odd years ago, to easily pass other boats in the U.K.’s navigable canals and rivers. Each one fits into an eight-foot wide single lock or, in a double, beside another vessel. Travel is slow: Boats move at four miles per hour, to avoid eroding the banks.

Inside, our Enterprise stretched lean, chambers lined up in a row. Behind the galley lay eighteen-inch sleeping berths, a body-hugging shower, and a claustrophobic bathroom. All day long, ten of us squeezed past each other on our way to the aft or the bow. Sharing tight quarters was as close as we privileged ones came to the wartime experience of “living rough.” The 1940’s crews dug up potatoes and rutabagas, or petitioned eggs and lettuce from farmers, to augment meager rations: cocoa, condensed milk, wholemeal bread, peanut butter. We picnicked on Shropshire blue cheese with fig chutney, and we moored at canalside pubs for a “Snakebite”—half roasty Guinness, half hard apple cider. They sprinted in and out of London’s docklands while V-1 flying bombs buzzed overhead; we crouched when flocks of mallards swooped low down the canal. When I washed off the day’s grime, I pictured women jumping in slime-green waterways to bathe, using buckets for loos, and toiling twenty hours a day.

Wartime challenges, one boater testified, gave her “a kind of underpinning” for the rest of her life. In retirement, aging is our adversary, and little prepares us for it. Every female fights different battles: aching joints, waning energy, caregiving, impoverishment.1 Yet with those younger women, we share a common conflict.

Idle WomenBy Gail Tyson

– Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 1976“ ” Both retirement and wartime impose privations.

In lock chambers, crews raise and lower the water level so boats can travel canals through land that rises or falls. The five of us who worked the locks discovered natural aptitudes: Lois steered our 25-ton craft with assurance; Sue, Suzanne, and I pulled opened and pushed the locks back in place; Jean held the tow ropes taut; Aislinn swung nimbly up the lock ladders. Everyone filled in where needed. Our rhythm evolved, first over two days on the gentle Stratford Canal, then down and back up the more challenging Grand Union. The process requires strength and patience, in a prescribed sequence:

When Idle Women navigated these canals, three of them managed a narrowboat and its towed butty boat that carried extra cargo. Lockkeepers helped them, just as fellow boaters gave us a hand. A fraction of the hours those women toiled left me fatigued but exhilarated. IW Daphne March, I read, carried more than 7,000 tons of cargo—from shell cases to spam and sugar—in her years on the Heather Bell. Besides managing locks, she and her crewmates had to load heavy sacks and steer through pitch-dark tunnels. Pride, surely, motivated such gutsy girls to adopt the name Idle Women, and for Susan Woolfitt to title her memoir with that sobriquet.

Female crewing finished when men retook the tillers in 1946. What did the women do next? Emma Smith, who had “starred” in Pathé newsreels about the Home Front, traveled to India to work on a documentary film. She also penned several bestsellers, including Maidens’ Trip, a memoir of canal life. Sonia Rolt helped lead the Inland Waterways Association; the monarch appointed her Officer of the Order of the British Empire at age 91. Olga Kendos recounted her adventures to The Independent in 1992: “incredibly fit and strong” by the end of the war, she bicycled all over Paris for a year, traveled across Europe, and founded a travel agency. In 1948, she launched a second career as a competitive motorcycle racer, winning two international six-day gold medals—the only woman to do so.

No wonder, I thought, the morning we worked the stairway to heaven. In these twenty-one locks, formally named the Hatton Flight, boats rise (or fall) 148 feet in two miles. It took all of us three hours to crank, pull, push, and sprint our way down (and three days later, up) the towpath. In wartime, three-woman teams made the journey over and over, bringing Spitfire and machine parts, coal that covered them in black dust, paper bags of cement that thunderstorms turned into dead weight. My admiration for them multiplied lock by lock.

All these experiences made them fearless. Where did our futures beckon? Jean’s goals: help construct Habitat for Humanity houses (adding to her builds in New Zealand and Portugal) and hike Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. Sue would join Jean on the 73-mile walk along the Roman wall; before that trip, she would visit female entrepreneurs in Kenya for a foundation that finances small businesses. Lois and her husband Michael had long lived in Santa Cruz, California, today one of the world’s least affordable cities, and they debated where they could afford to retire. Fourteen-year-old Aislinn, Suzanne’s agile and capable daughter, planned to study sword-making for her dream job: hewing weapons for action films.

Distant from cell towers, we shared our experiences not on Twitter and Instagram but, like the women who went before us, on the blank pages of our journals. In mine I asked myself, how was this journey preparing me for what lay ahead?

1. Crank paddles—four bullet-shaped valves at the front and rear of the lock chamber—with an L-shaped metal winching tool. Twenty turns with the windlass opened the locks; the first ten strained shoulders and back until the tremendous pressure eased and water filled or emptied the chamber.

2. Thrust the lock gates open; release them after the boat has passed through. It took a combined body weight of 250 pounds to open or close eight-foot balance beams and release many gates.

3. Guide the narrowboat into the lock. Astride the top of the boat, Aislinn would toss tow ropes to those of us on grass or concrete verges. We stretched the cords tight to prevent our vessel from bumping the sides of a lock or, in a double, the boat beside it. Once Lois steered the Enterprise into place, we cranked the paddle closed and shut the entry gates, repeating the operation at the exit. Because the earthen towpath recedes into marsh or abutments on one side of the canal, crew must cross to the other side on a foot-wide gate plank, seven feet above the water. Within two days even I—fearful of heights—braved that span.

Both times call forth hidden talent.

My idols steered the narrowboats from 1943 to 1946. Wits dubbed them Idle Women, a nickname prompted by their badges embroidered “IW” for Inland Waterways. “In the forties we were an alien race—women who wore trousers! Scandalous!” Margaret Cornish wrote in Troubled Water. A fellow intrepid, Emma Smith, told the Daily Mail in 2009 that bargemen and dockers respected their competence. She craved independence and challenge: “how grateful I was to be liberated from my [conventional, middle-class] upbringing…that war was an escape route for countless girls.”

Of the original recruits, only a quarter—thirty women—toughed out the six-week training. They bolted from boring jobs and from futures confined to homemaking. Several of us were also breaking away—from being marginalized in American society, where work dominates individual identity. Turning away from lifetime employment can feel like a loss of self. Desire for purpose in the “next act” and love of travel also seem to propel women more than men.

Pent-up energy can surface when we withdraw from socially approved arenas. It propelled the Idle Women, week after week, through exhaustion from delivering fifty-ton cargos between London and Birmingham, the Coventry coal pits and Midlands factories, and from clearing narrowboat engines choked with grit while rain lashed them on icy nights. Our helmswoman, Lois, shared their concentration. With one hand always on the tiller, she peered at us on the bow, where we would signal—locks, bridges with tight bends, oncoming boats ahead—because our voices did not carry 69 feet to the aft. I’d bring tea for the tiller woman and sit, quietly content. Regret over my sidelined career had finally ebbed, and writing filled most of my days. Now I only missed the collaboration I had loved in creative teams, a joy revived when we took the Enterprise through the locks.

Both times challenge preconception.


Obsession mired me. I might see it everywhere, but it was mine alone. Was our friendship adrift? Or seeking a new level, like water ebbing in a lock?

My internal battle turned on a larger question, one I shared with wartime women: What can I do without? For me not just physical assets, but emotional clutter. The more I cleared space, inside and out, the more I felt free. But it took time, more than one week on a canal. I thought about the euphoria on V-E Day. Female boaters continued to serve until 1946, but how long did it take them to understand that the world would heal slowly? That deprivations would continue? Rationing of meat, butter, sugar, soap, and petrol, for example, continued for fourteen years.

In my case, too, mindful frugality on a short trip would not change me overnight.

The sixth day, returning through the Stratford Canal, we puttered beside vestiges of the Forest of Arden and pastures of chrome-yellow rapeseed. Ducklings and goslings pedaled passed, as they have for centuries; a fluffy gray cygnet hitched a ride on the back of a massive, pure-white swan. Is this what peacetime felt like for the Idle Women? Did they realize their work had changed them? Years they spent steering by moonlight—lights banned by the blackout—and in dense fog or blinding sleet, of waking to find their boats icebound, of sitting vigil, sleepless, after lifting a corpse out of the canal? “It was another form of education,” Emma Smith wrote later. “I didn’t go to university. I went on the canals instead, and it changed my life.”

A swan coasted by, stately in her silence. And with it, as if ready to depart, went worry about my longtime friendship. Tomorrow we would go separate ways. In 1946, daring women left this life behind, and they headed into a new world, with fresh battles to fight. When we put down towropes, windlass, tiller and the unresolved, what would we end up fighting for?

Perhaps the answer would lie in what each of us took up next: Jean’s Habitat hammer. Sue’s microloans. My keyboard. Aislinn’s sword.

Both times make us feel vulnerable.When my career ended, I could measure how depleting the deadlines had been by how much more present to others I could be. This week I luxuriated in slow-growing friendship, getting to know Jean and Sue, Aislinn and Suzanne at work and at rest. For we, unlike wartime crews or Lois at the tiller, could relax between locks. Miles of yellow iris lined the banks, the iris Idle Woman Evelyn Hunt wrote about picking. We’d stride the towpaths beside broad water meadows and dappled winding holes, discussing the headlines of the day.

I kept to myself my emotional fatigue. Proud of making a two-week trip with a twenty-two-inch suitcase, I had also lugged oversized worry about my friendship with Lois. Our bond had lasted more than four decades, despite my move from California in 1978 to Berlin, then New Orleans and Atlanta. Later, my business trips to the West Coast kept us close. Four years ago, though, our contact had dwindled. Our last phone call happened a year ago. Lois answered texts in moments snatched from the non-profit she headed, the winery tasting room she ran, and preparations for her daughter’s move abroad for college.

A hawk wheeled, mewing. Our once-easy intimacy eluded me. Lois was preoccupied with steering and business emails; perhaps for her our friendship had not changed. Kate Tempest’s epic rap, “My Shakespeare,” came to mind:

Both times redirect relationship.

“Every twist and turn of the channel, kept open by the constant passage of the boats, was recognized; to deviate from the channel was to get embedded in the pile-up of mud at the sides of the canal or on the inside of the bend.” – Margaret Cornish, Troubled Water

He’s in every lover who ever stood alone beneath a window,

In every jealous whispered word,

In every ghost that will not rest…

Every eye that stops to linger

On what someone else has got and feels the tightening in their chest.

“Yesterday I was deeply impressed with Nanny who had the courage to pull a little dead boy out of the canal…It is sad to see a drowned child.” – Evelyn Hunt’s diary, July 7, 1943


We’ve had so much rain this summer

and the soil can’t take it. I’m afraid of everything

except the weather. The pressure builds in my jaw

and what I inherit from my fears and choices

is a barrage of ignored phone calls. I block the numbers.

Order coffee. Test the strength of my legs.

I’m standing, anyway, in a puddle by the stoplight.

This body is alien but I still live inside it.

Heavy with rain the live oaks weep, touch the cars.

Traffic arrives after me. I break small machines:

the toaster, the hairdryer, the radio, the television.

They’re mine. I tell my new neighbor she’ll need sandbags—

her patio is known to flood. And a flood is chaos.

Leaves a mess. Moves toward diagnosis,

Wikipedia, insomnia. I wear it like a T-shirt.

Test the strength of my blood. Break my mouth open

to make a claim. Home is where I let the predator

and prey of myself tangle each other in their own wild.

So I pretend I’m not afraid to be warm. Let the water run

hot into the bathtub. Let the mirror cloud with fog.

Test my legs again. Find a lipstick under the cabinet

when I lay my body down on the white tile floor.

Deluge(After Regina Spektor)

By E. Kristin Anderson


Rathalla Review is the literary magazine published by the students of Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing and Graduate Publishing programs. Our mission is to give emerging and

established writers and artists an outlet for their creative vision in our online and print publication. We publish the best fiction, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, poetry, and art, culled from a nationwide community of writers and artists. Rathalla Review’s staff, comprised of MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Publishing candidates, merges the creative arts and the business of publishing into a shared voice and vision.

All written work in Rathalla Review remains copyright of its respective authors and may not be reporduced in any form, printed or digital, without the express permission of the author.

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RATHALLA REVIEWrathallareview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/RR_Fall... · 2019. 12. 11. · Rathalla Review | 9 Hands by Rebecca Ruth Gould He dreamed of doing magic with his hands,