DREAMSCRAPES BY STEVE BREYMAN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 139 PREVIEW

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CHOP SUEY BY KATHLEEN J STOWE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 003

'“I like the color of your hat,” I said. “It matches the pattern in your scarf—and your eyes, too.”

My sister adjusted the bright blue cloche she wore, tugging it down over her ears. “Yours fits much better,” she said.

“Not really. And it’s such a dark ugly shade. I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I bought it.”

We sat at a table next to the window, in the long gray shadows of a January afternoon. Too early to light the small lamp with a chartreuse green shade that sat in the center of the table. And probably too early for dinner, but we weren’t the only ones in the restaurant. My sister moved the lamp to the windowsill. Her hands were restless and she repositioned the ashtray as well.

It might have been that she was simply hungry—we’d already ordered egg foo yung for her and shrimp lo mein for me and the service was usually fast even with the crowd for the early bird specials—but I thought her hands twitched and fluttered for another reason.

We’d agreed to meet to discuss last minute wedding plans. Mine not hers. I mentioned the problems with the bridesmaids’ corsages. And we laughed over our mother’s dress.

“Is she still calling it mauve?” my sister asked.

“Oh, yes. No one’s going to convince her it’s periwinkle.”

“And what about the catering?”

I smiled. “Oh, the catering is just fine.”

A Chinese girl delivered two plates of steaming food. With a bright smile, she asked, “Chopsticks? Soy sauce?”

I unwrapped my chopsticks, while my sister used a fork to scrape away the brown gravy that coated her egg foo yung. “You could send it back if you don’t like the gravy. They’ll do it over for you.”

“No, it’s fine,” she said. “And anyway I wouldn’t think of imposing.”

“No, really.”

“Actually, I love the gravy.” She lifted a limp bean sprout into the air and dangled it in the space between our two plates. “But what exactly is this?”

I laughed. “You didn’t have to come here to eat. We could have gone somewhere else. I didn’t know you didn’t like Chinese food.”

My sister let the bean sprout drop to her plate, then picked up her knife and began to cut her food into bitesize pieces. She stopped her careful micro-surgery to look across the table at me. “Speaking of likes and dislikes, what is it exactly you like about this man you’re about to marry?”

“Why—why—”

I struggled to keep the confusion out of my voice, to sound a little more self-assured than I felt. I set my chopsticks one on each side of my plate and sat up straight.

“Why I love him, of course.”

“Oh, patooey, love, love, love. That’s not an answer. You can buy love at every five and dime, at Woolworth’s, at all the card shops. Love on lace-edged cards, love in chocolate boxes, love in so many inconsequential places.”

“I’m not sure what you mean then.”

“I want to know what it is you like in him.” My sister picked up her still-wrapped chopsticks and with a flourish pointed them across the table at me. “Sister dearest, I command you to tell me true, what it is you like in a man.” Her voice was the voice she’d used in a million secret games we’d played together as little girls.

“I—”

“Let me give you an example. I don’t like men who drink. I don’t like men who hit. I don’t like men who lie. Smoking? Well, I guess that’s not a like or dislike at this point. I suppose I could tolerate that for a few weeks.” My sister had only stopped smoking six weeks before so I was surprised she was that tolerant. Her hands trembled slightly, but she continued. “Those are all dislikes. Simply a way to narrow down the field. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten. So maybe that’s why I’m an old maid—”

“You’re not an old maid.”

“I’m 28 and all I have is a list of dislikes. You’re 22 and all the invitations have been mailed. So you must have decided what you like in a man. There must be things that this man does that make him special for you.”

The restaurant hummed with voices discussing the latest stock market news, the war in Europe, the price of milk. Glasses clinked. Chairs scraped across the tile floor. And the swinging doors leading out of the kitchen swooshed open and closed. The neon lights on the sign outside the window blinked on. Blue lights on a red background, spelling out “C-HO-P S-U-E-Y.” Except that three bulbs in the “U” were burned out.

“Okay, I’ll give it a try.”

My sister pushed her plate away and leaned forward to listen.

“I like a man who wears shirts, ironed and starched, smelling like powder, and as white as an eggshell. I like a man who cleans the waffle iron after fixing waffles on Saturday morning, a man who sings show tunes in the shower, who wipes out the sink after shaving.”

My sister said, “Ooo-la-la,” and giggled.

I blushed. “Don’t say anything to mother.”

“Even about her dress?”

I shook my head. Now that I’d been drawn into my sister’s crazy game, I wanted to finish. “I like a man who arm wrestles with his brother until the veins stand out on his arm like wet, swollen ropes on a ship’s deck. I like a man who cooks perfect rice exactly the way his grandmother taught him, who knows all his grandmother’s secret stories. I like a man who warms his hands around a cup of steaming tea, who can sit in silence and do nothing but watch a fire burn down to embers.”

I took my sister’s hands in mine, and pulled her close across the table.

“I like a man who cries when his cat dies, writes haiku for her, and places her cremated ashes in a place of honor on the mantle above the fireplace.”

As I spoke those last words, a tall Chinese man with the cuffs of his white shirt carefully folded midway up his forearms and a white apron tied around his black pants stopped at our table. He smiled down at the two of us, and a lock of black shiny hair fell onto his forehead. He pushed it back into place, and said, “How were your meals, ladies?”

We giggled. He pointed at my sister’s plate. “Mabel, you don’t like brown gravy? Helen told me you like gravy.”

“I like some gravy—just not—”

“Just not this gravy?” He frowned.

“Just not so much gravy.”

“So I suppose this means no tip for the waiter, no gratuity for the chef?”

We were all laughing by then.

“Sit down,” my sister said.

“What will the owner say?”

“His sister-in-law will take care of it.”

“Sister-in-law take care of tip also?” He made a mock honorific bow to go along with the tone of his voice, then took a chair from a vacant table and pulled it up to ours, facing backwards. As he sat down in the chair, his arms resting on the back, the neon sign outside the window caught his attention. “Damn bulbs. Seems like every other day another one or two burn out. Costs a fortune to keep on replacing them. And then when the customers no longer like the food—” He pointed at my plate.

“I love it. Really. Mabel got me talking. Playing a silly game.”

He picked up the chopsticks and with a movement as graceful as an egret’s, and snagged a piece of shrimp and several long noodles. He fed me as my sister watched. I blushed again and reached for a napkin.

He took the napkin from my hand and wiped the sauce off my chin.

I whispered, “I like a man who feeds his wife tiny morsels with wooden chopsticks, who wipes away the sauce on her chin, and tastes the food on her lips with gentle kisses.”

My sister blushed then, and she reached for her purse. A pack of cigarettes spilled out on the table and she pushed them back in. “I’d better check out the powder room,” she said. “Make sure my lipstick is still there.” She stood up from the table and her scarf dropped to the floor. She stooped to pick it up and there were tears on her cheeks when she stood again and turned away.

KATHLEEN J STOWE

OCCUPATION BY WINDY LYNN HARRIS 34TH PARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 03

I deferred to my husband to handle the conversation during the meeting with our financial advisor at the bank. We sat in the masculine world of investments at the desk of a man in a suit. Our chairs were pulled up close. The sheets of paper were between the two men, just a little too far to my left to see clearly. I listened politely as my husband answered questions about our stocks, life insurance, and account balances.

My husband and the suit spoke the language of men: deep tones and full-size words. They were assuring each other of their intelligence with shared advice and guffaws. The men sized each other up during this and decided on a rhythm for their dialogue. I watched the predictable exchange not really hearing the words, smiling when faces briefly turned my way.“Do you work too?” the suit asked.

I was startled to be included and only blinked at first. He was waiting for me to answer with his pen poised over the form. He shook his head–just barely, but I saw the way he was coaching me to say no. “Just say no and we’ll get on with the rest of these questions,” he said without a sound.

I dropped my eyes to think. Normally I would have told him that I’m a stay-at-home mom. The suit had one of those on staff at home too, I could tell. But something had changed at home recently. I had picked up my paintbrush again.

I wanted to explain that I was an art major in college until I got pregnant unexpectedly. I wanted to tell him that I bought new canvases a few months ago and I spent time at my easel every day when the kids left for school. I wanted him to know that the woman next door had been encouraging me. She hung three of my paintings in her coffee shop downtown. Someone even called her about the one with red circles asking if I could do it in blues.

I didn’t look at my husband. He was annoyed that I was spending money on supplies and wasting time painting again when I could be out getting a real job. One that made money. One that could be named on the sheets of paper at that table.

The room felt muddy and oppressive. I was invisible to them, inconveniencing them by making them wait for the expected answer.

“I’m an artist,” I said evenly. I held my head high, daring them to defy it.

The suit turned to my husband for confirmation. A look passed between them. The suit smiled and checked a box on his form. He didn’t bother to write my occupation. My husband didn’t correct him.

And then, to my husband, “Any dependents not living with you?”

WINDY LYNN HARRIS

MAN & TROLLEY BY ALAN EMMINS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 001

I see the trolley with the flags, and once again it is loaded with big black bin bags. The market is on in Union Square, people sit at tables selling paintings photography and crafts. I ask some of them if they know who the trolley belongs to.

“That guy is a total asshole,” comes the first reply. “Stay away from him!” “You don’t want to meet that guy,” comes the second reply. “Trust me!” Before I ask anybody else, I see him for myself.

He is a black man in his mid to late 50s with a grey curly beard and glasses. His wears jeans and a Day-Glo orange workman’s bib that are dark with grime and dirt. He looks livid and moves angrily. But then who wouldn’t? Whenever he finds a can or bottle he drops in into a big black bag. When I say the bag is big, if he is 5ft7, the bag is 5ft. He fills the bag to the very top, leaving just enough space to tie a knot. He appears oblivious to all those around him. He is like a machine, unrelenting. His expression is irate, tight. He looks ready to trample anybody that gets in his way.

Is this a man to speak to about canning? I have already canned with JR and Lisa. Is there any more to know?

The thing with this man here, is that he just doesn’t seem approachable. Which is exactly why I must approach him. Also he is canning in a different way. He is not canning until he has enough for some beers, he is canning until he can’t carry any more.

But should I just present myself now or wait until he has finished collecting cans? I don’t have the answer, but the man looks so angry about life that I am almost afraid to approach him. Still I wait.

He takes his beaten baseball cap off and finishes his drink. He takes a little look around the park and then walks over to the trolley, which contains three more gigantic bags, all bulging to capacity. He removes the bags from the trolley one by one.

He attaches one bag to another by tying rope to each of the bags knots. He does the same to the other two bags. Once they are secure he takes two bags, placing the rope over his right shoulder and he walks them to the entrance of the Union Square subway. He comes back to the trolley and picks up the other two bags. He walks them to the entrance of the subway. But this time he doesn’t stop, he takes them down the steps and walks them over to the service gate that is twenty yards in. He climbs back up and, collects the other two bags. He signals for the attendant in the booth to open the gate.

Click.

He slides all four bags inside the gate so that it can be closed. Then he throws two bags on his shoulder and walks them 50 yards, through rush-hour commuter traffic, to the top of the stairs that lead down to the 5 Train.

He goes back. Comes back. Down.

Up.

He walks the bags, two at a time to the far end of the platform and stands waiting for the train.

And this seems like as good a time as any to introduce myself.

After the usual explanations, homeless, England, book etc...

“Alan.”

“Preston.”

Preston speaks to me.

He says, “I been doing this 15 years, you know why?”

“No.”

“America is the land of the poor. Home of the idiot. This is what I have to do to put food in my belly cos the white man has had his foot on the neck of the black man forever. But not me, you try to tread me down and I’ll put you on your back! If you try to talk down to me I’m gonna put you on your back! If you’re gonna come to me you better come as you. White people treat the black man like shit.”

He says, “I do this ‘cause I ain’t gonna play your white man game no more!”

And, “I ain’t gonna be treated as second-class and fight my brothers for the little tidbits of life the white man throws our way every now and again.”

And, “I ain’t gonna fight my brothers and sisters the way the white man wants me to.”

And, “I got my own way of surviving.”

And, “I don’t need you!”

Preston speaks like this while we ride the 5 train all the way from Union Square to 149th street. It is hard to take everything in. I get the impression that he hasn’t spoken to anybody in a while. When the train doors open at 149th Street he jumps off with two of the bags. I follow with the other two.

“Well, what are you doing now?” he asks when he sees me with the bags over my shoulder.

“Well I’m here now,” I say. “Why don’t I just help you with these?”

He says, “You wanna try it? Well OK let’s go.”

Off we go, Preston leading the way out front, me five paces behind. There’s an elevator at this station that takes us straight up to street level. Outside we turn left and walk back on ourselves along a road overflowing with people who stop at vending stalls for batteries, belts and socks. People march up and down with thin transparent plastic bags that look as if they will split and break. There are mothers with litters of children hanging off them and fathers selling knick-knacks from foldaway tables. Dollar stores. Drug stores. Five-T-shirts- for-ten-dollars stores. We cross, turn right, cut in between a police car and a postal van and start walking away from the throng and up a hill in a side street. We keep walking. Now and again Preston turns around and asks if I am OK.

The bags are heavy - really heavy. Manageable, but heavy. I’m 30 and in reasonable health. This is the first thing I’ve lifted in weeks, maybe even months.

It is manageable, but for how long? What does this weight feel like to Preston, who does this ‘job’ four days a week every week of the year? What do these bags feel like to a 63-year-old man?

“OK, let’s rest up a minute,” Preston says, half-way up the incline. “It ain’t far now.”

We walk for maybe another five minutes.

We turn a corner.

Along the outside wall of a supermarket there are 10 recycling machines. Some take bottles of one size, some take bottles of another size, while the rest take cans.

In front of these machines stand a collection of human beings that you might expect to see on an envelope for the Red Cross. A collection of people so thin and drawn it is deplorable on the eyes. There are men, magically held up by thin wiry frames and then thrown off balance by swollen bellies, women dressed in rags, in T-shirts that are too small and full of holes. They stand in shoes that are falling apart.

Not only is every machine in use, with two supermarket employees manning the machines and fixing jams, every machine has a queue of people waiting to use it. Trolleys and bags full with collected cans and bottles sit in rows, their owners sit on top of them.

“Sir?” asks a woman desperately to a man at the front of a queue. “Please can I go in front of you? I’ve only got a small bag and I need to get diapers for my baby?”

The man, although shaking his head, tells her to, “Go ahead.”

What is he shaking his head at? The inconvenience or the desperation? Best not to ask, I wouldn’t understand. But could it really be that this woman left her house with the sole purpose of collecting enough cans so she could buy diapers for her child?

No, it’s easier to think that she lied, that really she’s going to buy half a pint of tequila.

I follow her into the store.

She buys diapers.

She takes them to the checkout, hands over her printed credit note and receives no change. She leaves and I make no attempt to talk to her, to find out about her life. What could I tell her? That I am writing a book about it?

Bully for me.

This is the most desperate gathering of people I’ve ever laid eyes on.

They are in New York, struggling and fighting for food.

Preston says, “This is America’s slave labour force right here, this country is run on slave labour, even right down to this here, canning. We get five cents a can, what do you think the supermarket gets per can? Who else is gonna do this for five cents a can? The fucking hungry, that’s who.”

He says, “Yeah, I saw your face on the train, you thought I was full of shit. You thought racism was a part of history.”

He says, “But tell me, who’s the only white person standing here?”

I look around.

I say, “I am.”

It is hard for Preston, who comes here daily, to grasp my shock. He leaves his bags in the queue and takes me over to the deli where he buys me an iced tea.

Preston asks, “In your weeks living on the street, how many Vietnam vets did you meet that were homeless?”

I confess the number is high.

“They take the lives of these young boys and when they can no longer function, when the atrocities that they had to witness and commit in war for their country breaks them down mentally, this country turns its back on them. Their own country leaves them hungry on the street, calls them names, “filthy”, “animal”, “nigger”, “boy”, “bum”!”

He says, “The black man is good enough to die face down in the mud for his country.”

He says, “But he ain’t good enough that he can get a decent job, a yellow cab, a safe place to sleep after he gave his youth to this here USA!”

I stand next to Preston while he slots cans and bottles into the machines. Almost fatherly he says, “You wanna try?”

I find myself thinking, “There’s a hole with a spinning belt, what is there to try?” But I take the bottles anyway and feed them in. The machine just keeps sucking. Whether there is a bottle there or not. It just keeps sucking.

After five bottles Preston steps back in and takes over.

“I don’t expect you to do them. I just wanted to see if you got it.”

I don’t think he is referring to recycling.

EXCERPT FROM 31 DAYS—A NEW YORK STREET DIARY

ALAN EMMINS

Alan Emmins wanted to be a golfer but became a writer instead. “I wanted to be a professional golfer, of all the rock‘n’roll things,” he says. “Basically from the age of 13 to 18 that’s all I did.”

Then I found out what a social life was, started chasing girls and partying. From that day on I was always too tired to make it onto the practice ground at 5am.

“But while writing was never something I considered for a living I did write a lot of really bad poetry.”

He started writing with some freelance stories for magazines in the UK, and sold the first one in a space of a few days.

“This is easy, I thought. But I didn’t sell another story for six months,” he says.

“I decided at this point that if I was going to make it as a writer, even a magazine writer, I had to get serious. So I quit my day job, booked a ticket to New York, and arrived there four weeks later armed with my savings and a battered second-hand laptop.

“Two months later, while waiting tables illegally in a Thai restaurant, I got a rejection letter from the editor of the Village Voice. He said, ‘quite frankly, I can’t stand your prose’. Things weren’t looking good.”

But Emmins re-edited the story and sent it to the New York Post. This is how he tells the story:

Three weeks later, when I hadn’t heard a word I called the editor, John Mahony.

“What was it about?” he asked.

“It was about the African drummers being thrown out of Central Park just for playing their drums, it’s beautiful...”

“Nah, that’s been written a dozen times.”

I was about to hang up when the editor said, “What are you doing here anyway, in New York I mean?”

“I’m a freelance writer,” I told him with a gulp. “I moved here just recently, hoping to pick up some work and experience a new country.”

“I did that 10 years ago,” he laughed. “Look, send me the piece again, I can’t use it because it’s an old story, but if you can write, I’ll see if I have anything for you.”

Three weeks later I had heard nothing from him. Somehow I managed to feel put out by this, and I called him to ask if he’d read the piece.

“Sorry I haven’t called you,” he said, much to my surprise, “I loved it. I’ve just been so busy. But look, can you come by Wednesday at 3pm, let’s see if we can find you a story?”

One of the first things he asked me when I sat in his office was, “So what have you been up to since you arrived?”

“Just going out mostly.”

“What did you do last night?”

“Actually, last night I ended up in these illegal after-hours bars. Crazy places. I was with a doorman from this other bar I go to. They are totally secret, some have passwords that change every week. Others have hidden doorbells. They generally don’t open until around 4 or 5am.”

John said, “There’s your first story. Have 500 words to me by the end of the day, just so I can see where you’re going with it. If it works, I will want around 2000 words.”

It was the deep end. One of the biggest selling newspapers in the world, a strange and crazy city, and a story that well, if the people at these bars realized what I was doing, I was going to need that health insurance that I hadn’t opted for. It kind of set the tone for the stories I would continue to do. Ten days later my story ran as a double-page spread, I had a New York Post press card, and a new assignment to get stuck into.

That break was huge. On the day the story ran I called every other magazine and newspaper in New York to introduce myself.

Everybody had a copy of the New York Post within reach and when they asked me who I wrote for, I told them to turn to page 34. I was in. Very soon I had regular work and a monthly feature, based on New York, in a UK magazine.

Outside of bad poetry, the first thing Emmins wrote was a novel.

“I was around 22 at the time,” he says. “I was writing it by hand until my girlfriend came home with a used typewriter she’d bought for me at a boot sale.

“But by then I was depressed by my crap, badly written story with a lousy plot and unappealing characters. The typewriter, with much grunting as it was a big prehistoric bugger, went up in the attic with the golf clubs.

“I’ll give you a brief synopsis of the novel as it still makes me laugh. It was about a girl, the town whiz. A girl talented in many ways, but mostly in photography. She dreamed of being a journalist (where are we going here I wonder?).

“One day she met the guy of her dreams. Handsome, charming, rich and a drug dealer to-boot. She was soon addicted, sharing needles, contracted HIV and gave birth to twins who were also carrying HIV. When she died of full-blown AIDS, the twins went to live with their grandparents. But as their condition worsened, the kids not the grandparents, the grandfather found it hard to watch the deterioration of the two children he loved so much. So one day he took a shotgun and killed them, then his wife and then himself. And nobody lived happily ever after.

“I got to the part where she was diagnosed with HIV, realized I knew nothing of the condition and would have to do lots of research, and gave up.

“Luckily this experience didn’t put me off writing. Somehow I found out what I was good at and spent the next eight years meeting people who were willing to help me and give me a chance. My first book deal was much the same. Corvo books publish fairly highbrow journalism, written for the most part by academics. I don’t know how I managed to engage them for more than a few minutes, when they offered me a book deal, which was to be an expansion on one of my published articles, I was very surprised. But they gave me more than a book deal. Working with the editor, Julia Rochester, I got an education in quality journalism and writing. Up to that point writing was something I could just do, which limited me on how far I could take it. It was only after working with Julia that I felt I knew not only what I wanted to write and how I wanted to write it, but how much there was to learn and experiment with. I was hungrier than ever. It prepared me for a bigger, more challenging projects.”

One of those projects was Emmins’s latest book, 31 Days - A New York Street Diary.

When writing a feature about murals painted in the train tunnels of Manhattan by homeless artists, Emmins was challenged by a homeless dancer. She told him that to better understand what he was writing about he needed to live homeless himself.

MOTHER’S DAY BY STEPHEN KAHN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 86

I woke up to four missed calls from Zed. Before I could throw off the covers the phone rang again. “He’s not picking up, Felipé. I told you he wouldn’t.”

“It’s still early,” I said.

“It’s Mother’s Day,” Zed said.

“I know. I’ll be over soon.”

I had not seen Zed’s place in almost a year, not since she said we would be better off just friends. A grand house. Once the local freemasons lodge, Zed said. She had dreamed of raising her boy in the house but when that dream died the place fell by the wayside of lonely living, the knocker tangled in ivy, the gutters clogged with black leaves.

It had just stopped raining and the only sound was water dripping from the trees. On the steps of the wraparound porch, I remembered where not to step, Zed would hold my hand and point to the rotted boards.

We worked in construction, met on a job site, a new Olive Garden in Harrisonburg. She was the civil engineer and I was her helper because I spoke better English than the rest of the crew.

We never even shook hands on the job. But the guys would tease me, ask what color thong she wore, as if they never peeked. Tu novia this, tu novia that, tu novia needs you, tu novia owns you, and that may have been true because at that time I would have done anything for her. But time is time, always unfolding, less and less of it forever.

I found Zed around back sitting on the little wall circling the fishpond. “Still good,” I said, patting the wall. I had made it with hundreds of slates out of the brook that ran behind the old apple-packing garage.

“It’s good to see you too, Zed, especially not on a workday.” She looked ready for the field though, dirty blue jeans, a checkered short-sleeve button-down, muddy boots, neon vest slung over her shoulder. The lengthening days had worked on her farmer’s tan, kissed her blonde hair a shade lighter.

She was staring at something, a look full of wonder or a dead-eyed gaze, I could not tell. I sat beside her and traced her sightline. Through the overhanging tree limbs I spotted a bird gliding through the air.

“A hawk,” I said.

“That’s not a hawk,” Zed said, “that’s a vulture. But let’s say if we see a hawk this morning it’s a sign that we’ll see Daniel, too.”

“Sure,” I said, “but I have a feeling we’ll see him either way.”

I wanted to pull her close, but didn’t. I wanted to marry her, father a child, and make a nursery in the parlor where she used to read all her old books to me, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was in her late 40s and she claimed it would be impossible to make a healthy baby. “Besides,” she said, “if he comes out wearing a pencil mustache like you, we’re all in big trouble!”

Zed was a self-proclaimed reject, one of a “mutant subculture”, so she said. She was no soccer mom. Zed seemed to conceal some secret I felt content with never knowing.

We watched the sky change second by second, the clouds drifting apart, shadows crawling across the yard, up the wood-frame house. Birds flew in and out of the broken windowpanes. In the pond a few orange fish made small, jerky movements, surprised in our reflections.

Zed’s phone buzzed. Her husband Rutson texted: happy cunts day. we love you cunt. come up school lane. we might be here.

This was pretty typical of Rutson. He would also call just to hang up on her. Zed wasn’t fazed any more. They had been separated for years.

She hadn’t had a drink in years either but her alcoholism had awarded the husband custody of their child, and now Daniel was old enough to decide for himself who he wanted to live with. This was how I understood it.

Zed said that one day she would be with Daniel again, that somehow she would find a way back into his life. Zed said a lot of things and I believed her on some level. But I guess deep down I knew she would never win.

Maybe that’s why I drove her car on that Mother’s Day. Even though she wasn’t my lover any more, I wanted to see her through this. I drove, and Zed rode shotgun, the two of us on a lonely parallel of hope.

The air that followed the rain that morning turned green coming down through the trees. Potholes steamed in the sun and frothed in the rearview. The asphalt crumbled to an end at a ledge in the mountain. We wheeled onto a dirt road, imposed upon on each side by slanted wildflowers watching us like craning one-eyed children. Somewhere a fire had been extinguished but the smell of smoldering pine lingered.

Out from the wall of flowers we reached a less fertile land, signs of humanity interrupting the wilderness, dragging us back to the uncertainty of everything. Rusted car rims, slouching single-wide trailers and scorched trash barrels were embedded in the earth, as if someone got tired of burying it all and quit digging. This place, this flaw in the iris of the mountain, School Lane, reminded me of my home in Mexico. Not the individual things (our garbage wasn’t as rich, we would have used those rims), but the landscape as a whole, the quality of life, the grade we were born into and could not graduate from. The lane snaked down between trailers, a crooked spine ending at the asshole of the neighborhood.

Zed glared ahead as if molding a mother’s wish in the new day, perhaps sizing up her own demise. The light carved wrinkles below her blue eyes. How was it possible to have such old-looking skin and still have such young, bright eyes? Zed was a strong woman. Before the booze and childbirth and the hard life under the Virginia sun she had been beautiful too, and someone beautiful never stops deserving to be. I looked at her, not as a lover any more but as an old friend.

Her phone rang. She held it in front of her like someone on their knees holds a crucifix, and said: “Hello.” No-one answered.

“Here,” she said, tapping her nail on the window. “There. Come on.”

She was out and walking, her neon vest flapping in the wind, her big buttocks swaying. She always wore her neon safety vest. Life’s a construction site, she said once, you never know when you might get run over.

A red gasoline can sat beside a black pit in the dirt; in the pit, a charred bicycle. A microwave lay on the ground, hooked to an extension cord that ran in through fabric hanging over a window. The skeleton of a Christmas tree leaned against the trailer’s plastic siding. And Zed’s husband, stepping out onto the porch. He flicked his cigarette into the yard and his hands reached for the gutter over his head as if he was going to show us how many chin-ups he could do, but he just kind of hung there, gazing down on us, a proud white soldier standing on his plinth. A big dude, solid muscle and gut, blue-collar skin, his hair in a bun, an allure in his light eyes the color of rust. Younger than Zed, closer to my age, although like his wife, he had lines on his face too: grape-colored blood vessels covering his nose and cheeks.

Rutson looked at me over the flame as he lit a cigarette and said, “You brought your little chihuahua with you.” It was nothing I hadn’t heard before.

“Is this the guy you’re finally gonna give me a divorce over, Zed?”

“Hello Rutson,” Zed said. “This is Felipé.”

“O-la,” Rutson said.

“Hola,” I said.

“What’s he doin’ here, Zed?”

“It’s Mother’s Day. We came to see Daniel.”

“Daniel?” Rutson scratched his head. “Is that the name we settled on? I could’ve sworn we went with something else.”

“He’s drunk,” Zed said.

“Drunk. That’s it. We named him Drunk. I knew it started with a D.”

“Fucktard.”

“And you are!” Rutson said, the veins in his neck popping. “Bringing him out here on Mother’s Day? You must be wasted.”

“I haven’t had any in years, Rutson. You know that.”

“You’re fucked up on hope.”

“It’s Mother’s Day,” I said. “She has a right to see her boy.”

Rutson laughed. “Look at this spic standing on my property talking about rights. See amigo, there are rules on Mother’s Day. One of the rules is no outsiders. I can tell you’re not a typical amigo—stepping to me on my property—I can tell you’ve got your own little bullshit dream. We might have more in common than I’d like to admit. But it would’ve done you some good to build that wall. You got no business being here.”

“Yes he does,” Zed said. “American or not, his heart beats for something.”

“What—a green card?”

“Lord knows there ain’t nothing domestic about any of this.”

“Go home, amigo. You don’t know where you’re at.”

“Just let her see her kid, man. I don’t understand—”

“That’s right you don’t. Now go back. Go home, amigo. I’m doing you a favor.”

“You raising a child here?” I said. “I’m illegal and I’ve got a bigger piece of pie than you.”

“Come on then,” Rutson said, rolling up the sleeves of his flannel shirt. “I dare you to find out how much I’ve got to lose.”

“My ass,” Zed said. “You’re not gonna do shit.”

“It’s okay, Zed,” I said, not scared of Rutson, but willing to bow to him and his empire of trash if it yielded something good for Zed. “I’ll wait outside.”

“No you won’t,” Zed said. “You’re in this now.”

I didn’t feel like I was being included in a family ritual but implicated in one.

“Go home, amigo,” Rutson said, flicking his cigarette. “I’m doing you a favor.”

“He is home, Rutson. Isn’t it about time we give Daniel a chance? We’ve got to give him a chance or he’ll never grow up. Out of this. Out of us. Felipé believes.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“Trust me,” Zed said.

“What’s he look like then?” Rutson said. “If he’s such a big believer, he can tell us what our son looks like.”

We were silent a while. Nothing stirred inside the trailer. Clouds got trapped on the mountain, the sky the color ash. The ground felt stony under my feet; nothing could ever grow there.

Rutson lit another cigarette. Zed looked at me, her eyes resembling the ever-glaze of the Rivanna River.

“Tell us, Felipé.”

I had seen Daniel so many times in my American dream. So many times, I couldn’t forget. He looked exactly like me.

STEPHEN KAHN

I don’t fully understand the piano. Sure, I can play some stuff but I don’t really know the language. Playing Carnegie Hall doesn’t look too good. But I still love it. The music has a hypnotic effect on me, especially the waltz. My top-played track is Chopin’s Mazurka in A Minor, in which Chopin breaks the key signature and seems to enter a trance himself. I listen and listen as in a daydream. Here’s where the writing comes in. Much like music, writing has mood, tone, and rhythm. I allow my imagination to become attached to the music. As I listen, the “story trailer” starts to play in my mind with its own color and sound. As well as classical there’s plenty of pop rock and punk music too that gets my fingers dancing on the computer keyboard. Like with the piano maybe it’s best that I don’t completely understand it. The inspiration to play is enough.

FAUX KING EARTH, WIND, & WE ARE ON FIRE BY BEN UMAYAM 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE ISSUE 133

I am used to protests. I remember in the 70s pulling into a rest stop in Maryland, buses full of queer folk running in to pee. Act UP, Dignity, Dykes on Bikes attending a protest, gay bowling league after, drinks at The Boots and Saddle late.

At the Denver No Kings, the 70s people are a group of “Are You Experienced” folks, with their canes, walkers, ski poles. Friend Barb says the young ’uns find out from the oldies what to do at these things.

We come to the big city Denver, big protest rally. Other reason, we have tickets to Earth, Wind & Fire at Fiddler’s Green.

No Kings. It is organized. Yet disorganized. We approach the Colorado State Capitol, walking down 16th. It used to be the 16th Street Mall. After four years of renovation, torn-up streets, they now call it 16th Street. Just that. Even though it really is like a mall now. It is one big walkway.

We are fashionably late, you know gays. People are already walking away, signs pointing down.

There are no scheduled speakers, just some impromptu music under a tent. No Band. No Dylan. No Neil Young. A local bluegrass group sings about the mountains.

A big bear bearded guy wears a blue grass skirt, a long one, he sticks out in front of the audience. When he sways, his coconuts threaten to stick out as well. The gays, again, long experienced with this.

We catch this when we arrive. Aha, I conclude hence the early exodus of people.

The numbers are in and about 250 thousand. Like Arlo said, “That’s a quarter million people man. You guys have closed the NY Thruway.” Sixty years ago, in this case, the NY Thruway is the RTD, the Regional Transportation District. Downtown Denver closed due to the events happening today. So says the guy on the PA system. Sixty years ago, “such a long, strange trip it’s been”.

Some of the protest signs are scruffy, last-minute scribblings on cardboard. A lot of NO FAUX KING WAY. One that stands out is NO DICK TATERS.

We do a lot of walking, more so than on our summer trip thru the ruins of Pompeii. We have walked to and from the Union Station. Our steps app proves it. 16 thousand steps down 16th Street, no longer the mall.

We hear reports from the birthday parade, updates on the big screen at the Noodles R Us. We watch the organized/disorganized shuffle of the armed forces. Not the stylized choreography of North Korea or the Russians. Someone yells over their pad thai, “Well what do you want, these guys are trained to fight, to defend our country, not to march in birthday parades.” Next to us a gal yells out with a mouthful of bolognese, “Not to prance like tin soldiers in some Nutcracker fantasy.”Later they are saying, “Let’s give him a show by not giving a show.”

No Kings has shut Denver’s transit system downtown. “Yas queens,” we shout boarding the delayed E that will take us to the F that will takes us to the K and G. Takes an hour, normally a 25-minute trip.

The concert. It is hot, radiant at Fiddler’s Green and although we arrive an hour early, the line at security is long, long, long. In our seats the setting sun is a hot one. It is a wait for E, W & F to take the stage.

I think about this music, the 70s post-innocence after the summer of love Woodstock, the burning of LA. The Motown music that bridged between black and white gives way to two divisions on the Billboard charts, black music versus white music, the line drawn thicker as the decade ages. Earth, Wind & Fire are formulaic, a sound that recording conglomerate Columbia pushed and defined, a 70s R&B music for everyone. It defied the trend with music that united the divide between black and white in America. This audience at Fiddler’s Green, like Colorado, is mostly white.

Philip Bailey, a native of Denver, his falsetto soars above it all, him at age 74. Google says he has a four-octave range. A bold beautiful black Julie Andrews, rising to the sky like Mary Poppins, thrilling the crowd. A different time, a different age, the 70s. A symphony of tight three-part horns, intertwined with a trio of funky bass and two rhythm guitars, that wail like solid rock, and with the trio of harmonies topped with Bailey falsettos, all held together by the Maurice White arrangements, long-gone Maurice White, a genius like the other recently departed Brian Wilson. Poetry in audio this throwback to a past age.

And this Denver day all takes place on the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the escalator ride down the tower on 5th to the music of Neil Young, Rockin’ in the Free World. Young threatens this first presidential campaign never to use his music again.

The Earth, Wind & Fire encore is the iconic song September, the defining Filipino line dance.

The line dance, arguably, was invented by Filipinos, a sort of Electric Slide version of The Hustle danced by not two people, a couple, but by a group, a line of people. Go to a Filipino wedding and the whole room will literally line dance to September. Perhaps it is the catchiness of the tune that Filipinos like me relate to.

More likely it is the irony. The song line goes, “Do you remember, the 21st of September.” September 22 is the date when the first Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines. The song is not about this eve. Filipinos have appropriated the date, a celebration of the innocence of the Philippines before its darkest day.

On this eve of the 10th anniversary of the escalator ride, I wonder if this encore, is the celebration, the jubilant calm before the faux king declares martial law on trumped-up charges of insurrection.

ONE MORE THING BY STEFAN SCHUMACHER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSSUE 001

My father wasn’t there. He was meeting a woman at the bowling alley. “I’ve got what you call a romantic date,” he said to me.

“Oh, where is it?” I asked.

“It’s down at the bowling alley bar.”

If I was who I am today I would’ve said, ah, the bowling alley bar. That’s very romantic. Especially at three o’clock in the afternoon.

But I was only 16, and at 16, you’re barely past the level of mental retardation. So I’d thought nothing of it and watched as my dad put on a shirt (he was bare-chested when he told me he was leaving), grabbed his keys, and drove off down the narrow driveway in his old VW Bug with the passenger seat missing.

I didn’t live with my dad, and didn’t spend much time in his house. The only TV he had was a black and white with a rabbit-ears antenna, so I started snooping around.

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TWO SHOTS RANG OUT BY INDIGO MAGAÑA 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 106

The 20th President of the United States James Abram Garfield was shot twice on July 2nd 1881 by Charles Julius Guiteau. The President lay ill until he died on September 19. In a letter written before he was shot, Garfield had said, “Assassination can be no more guarded against than death by lightning and it is best not to worry about either.”

My name is James Garfield too. I wonder what good my parents saw in naming me after him.

I found out about him in a letter from my dad. Dad was a history professor with an encyclopedic knowledge of American presidents. He wrote to me about James Garfield but spared me the details of his death.

That was the last time dad wrote to me, but I had only to wait a few months to hear about Garfield’s assassination.

I had stolen something or broken something of my sister’s—I don’t entirely remember—and getting no proper revenge from our mother, my sister took it upon herself to tell me the story of Garfield’s death, sparing nothing.

Opening one of the history books dad had mailed us, she turned to a black-lined etching of a figure with a smoking gun and President Garfield clutching his back and screaming.

“Do you know who this is?” she asked. She sounded genuinely curious, and I looked at the page for a while, wanting to have an answer for her.

“No,” I said, finally. The image frightened me, and I was confused. I’d only seen my sister open father’s books for school, and she’d certainly never spoken with me about them before.

“This,” she said, a pleased smirk going up one half of her face, “This is–you!” She pointed at the shot man.

“No, it’s I not!” I said. I felt a rush of terror. I knew it could not be true. Father’s books cared very little for living men. But even so, I could not help but stare into the eyes of the dying man. I didn’t have a beard, but his eyes? Well, I had eyes too, didn’t I?

“Yes, it is you!” my sister snapped, “That man is James Garfield. That’s your name isn’t it?” Her voice took on a high mocking pitch.

“Yes, but–no! I’m not him. Take it back!” I felt like crying, and this only encouraged her.

“Yes, it is you. That’s what’s gonna happen to you.” She closed one eye and pointed two fingers at my head. “Bam! Bam! Just like that.”

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GABRIELLE ESPOSITO

Writing has been a part of my life since late one night I read a sentence by Stephen King: “You must not come lightly to the blank page.” I straight away grabbed my journal and wrote four pages of utter nonsense.

From day one Mr Christopher DiLeo, horror author and teacher extraordinaire, who taught my creative writing class, held my attention, every student’s attention, with the way he moved around the classroom as if it were a stage and we were an audience in the dark, far from his view but close. He read aloud short stories, poems, and plays, and every word jumped out in full, living color.

He required students to read a chapter from Stephen King’s On Writing. It was late, maybe 10 o’clock at night, but I wanted to finish the reading before class the next day. I was sitting up in bed, holding the photocopied paper to the bedside lamp. I read something fantastic. King wrote, “You must not come lightly to the blank page.”

It is a statement of boldness. It is a statement of fearlessness. It calls for you to explore whatever the fuck you want to explore when you write and make no apologies. On a blank page you can be as detached, forceful, present, quiet, disgusting, or as clever as you please. On a blank page you are nothing and everything. But whatever you decide to be you must take pride in your work, as King calls for you to enjoy the risk of a blank page.

Writing means whatever you want it to mean. There is no one reason why a writer writes. Some of us don’t even enjoy the knuckle-breaking work it takes to complete a work that will never really be “finished”. I am of the opinion that nothing I write will ever be “finished”. There is always some word that can be improved, a thought-thread that I can delve deeper into, or a paragraph that isn’t working. It’s part of the fun, at least for me. I write because I enjoy it. Furthermore, I enjoy the risk-taking it requires to put more than 30 hours of work into a story that may never be seen by anyone else. Carving out precious moments of before-work dawn to write is part of the challenge of persistence. I like to think that these moments I steal to write are working.

I’m just the cable repair guy.

There’s enough in my bank account to hold my apartment down for another month. And now that I’m thinking about it, cable repair is a special kind of shitty job.

SERVICE CALL BY GABRIELLE ESPOSITO 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 85

My phone rings and before I even look at the caller ID, I know it’s my boss. Lou’s going to chew me out for being late. It’s humiliating to get yelled at by Lou, not because he’s clever with his insults but because he’s so stupid that it’s degrading to work for him. Might as well get it over with. I take a deep breath and answer the phone.

“Hello Lou.”

“Can you please explain to me why Mr Newman had an hour-long conversation with me about how to run my business?” Lou said.

I’ve learned to understand Lou through whatever food he has in his mouth. This time it’s something greasy, something that really slimes up his vocal cords.

And Lou looks exactly as he sounds, a big guy with a gut, a wreckage of teeth, and a backstory about his wife divorcing him. Rumor has it that Lou lived in a ritzy house down by the Hudson River before they were divorced. Now he lives on Grand Street in the city of Newburgh. Being lucky to Lou means waking up to find that your tires weren’t slashed overnight. It almost makes me feel sorry for him. Almost.

“Mr Newman is a complainer,” I say. Mr Newman is a 78-year-old man who accidently switches the television to HDMI2 at least once a week and can never figure out how to get it back to HDMI1 even though I’ve shown him 17 times.

Mr Newman calls Lou to tell him that I arrive too early. I was only trying to get it over with.

Today I arrived a half-hour past the four-hour time slot. It wasn’t my fault though, not really. I stopped off for breakfast at a diner and the server was slow. That’s not my fault.

“Don’t be wise with me,” says Lou. Wet, heavy drops of cheese fall on wax paper. “You’re a smart kid. Start acting like it, otherwise we’re going to have a chat.”

“If I were smart you’d be driving around and I’d be the one sitting at a desk,” I say. I mean it as a joke but there’s too much bite in my voice. Lou can hear it. It’s too much to miss, even for him.

“How many jobs do you have left?” asks Lou.

“Just one, in Newburgh,” I say. I was going to stop off at a QuikCheck to grab a milkshake but it’s out of the question now.

“Stop by the office after that. We’re going to talk.” Lou hangs up.

My stomach twists thinking about Lou slurping down an Icee as he tells me how useless I am. The GPS tells me to turn right. I guess it would be fine if Lou fired me. There’s enough in my bank account to hold my apartment down for another month. And now that I’m thinking about it, cable repair is a special kind of shitty job.

It’s like you’re an unnoticed spectator to people’s lives. They yell at the dog, their significant others, or their kids. At one call the cable box was smashed to bits. When I asked what happened, the man said, “Television makes me lonely,” and then he asked my sign.

I see so many people who talk over their screaming children and so many sad old people who tell me their teeth have gone soft and they can’t drink soda any more. Their faces come to me late at night. I sink lower into the driver’s seat. I’m making myself depressed.

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34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 003

Raymond Federman knew Samuel Beckett not only as a writer but as a friend. Federman, a French-American writer who always spoke with Beckett in French, said: “Each time I would leave him holding on to a few precious words he had given me like a fragile gift.”

The glimpses that we have of the intensely private Beckett from his friends reveal a man, a writer, driven by his commitment to words, not just any words, but words stripped bare, edited, and reduced, as if by doing this he could remove every inconsequential modifier and reveal meaning in its simplest form, the most direct form, without embellishment, without fluff.

This was in contrast to his mentor’s style. Beckett once said of Joyce’s writing: “James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.”

So it is even more moving how Beckett’s words influenced those around him. This writer who was so careful, who wrote in French to prevent himself from attempting to write for style, seemed to say the most poignant things with the fewest words.

When Federman first met Beckett, he told him that he wanted to become a writer. In response, Beckett replied: “Raymond, whatever you write, never compromise, and if you plan to write for money or fame, do something else.” Federman cherished these words and hoped never to betray them.

KOYAANISQATSI BY ANAMYN TUROWSKI 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 66

Back then, I ditched school regularly and walked to the I-10 on-ramp, put my thumb out, got a ride to a Palm Springs motel with a pool, put my towel out, and rubbed myself down with baby oil mixed with iodine. You’d think I’d have taken one look at Mom’s wizened face and realized—not a good idea. 

It would’ve been safer to hitch with a friend, but I didn’t have friends. Most motel managers didn’t notice me but once or twice I was asked to leave. Inevitably I got hit on. Some guy would come over for a conversation. Most of the time I jumped in the pool and did laps till they tired of waiting for me and left. 

Not Ben. I met him at the Holiday Inn on Indian Canyon. He pulled up an aluminum chair and sat across from me, staring intently. I was on a chaise, the vinyl slats dug into my back.

“You’re incredible,” he said. 

He had dark brown eyes and a slim build. Tall. “Where are you from?” he asked.

“Santa Monica.”

“Here, let me help you,” he said. I was pulling at the strings of my bikini top. My skin tingled when his calloused fingers brushed the back of my neck as he tied them. 

“Let me show you the desert,” he said, sitting back down. He smiled crooked teeth.

I felt myself blush. 

“Are you a painter?” I asked. I’d just finished reading Life with Picasso. I’d been looking for something, maybe escape, but I didn’t know how. I wasn’t sophisticated like Gilot, nor particularly artistic. But he was an adult, easily in his 30s. I was 16. 

“I’m a pool cleaner,” he said. 

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She’s read (just) enough Nabokov to know where this is all heading.

THE NEXT YOUNGEST DAUGHTER BY JR BARNER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 114

//

The paneling in this place is either oak or hemlock

But she can’t tell the difference,

Tucked away

With downturned gaze & scoliosis slouch,

Illuminated only by her phone’s unflattering light.

Her parents dance some distance away

To some seventies R&B hit

Dashed out by the half-drunk college kid on the

Bösendorfer in the corner.

Her younger sister clamoring on about

Boogie-boarding that afternoon

With a petite blonde from Bowness-on-Windermere

While she tanned alone on the beach.

God, she wishes, half-out-loud,

To be that innocent again.

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This place seems so remote but then I spy a woman with her dog down on the beach and realize it isn’t as far-flung as it feels.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE ROSEMARKIE SEAL BY EMILY NEVES 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 103

//

A sign says, “Caird’s Cave, 1.2 km”, with an arrow. If there’s a cave I have to see it. I take up the trail, the hills I hiked earlier that day springing up to my left, a patchwork of emerald and muted rust and gold and winter-tree gray against a sky the color of an old, dingy sock. The churning bay roars softly to my right. The crunch of gravel beneath my boots, the whistle of the coastal wind, and the cool mist on my face lull me into a sort of walking trance.

I attempt the math of converting one-point-two kilometers to miles but decide I don’t care. It will take the time that it takes. Crunch, crunch, crunch go my boots.

Then I wonder what would happen if I fell. How long would it be before someone found me? I have my phone and a power bank to charge it. I could call for help. Still.

//

Ever since you died I do not fear death. All things die. All is fair because nothing is fair. Nature is not so much cruel as indifferent. She took you from me all too soon but not out of malice. All life is transitory and not a day passes without the excruciating brevity of your life reminding me. You went and then Christian went 10 years later, dumping me twice into the wine-dark depths of grief. While I did not dissolve into the abyss, its alchemical brine changed me forever.

//

This place seems so remote but then I spy a woman with her dog down on the beach and realize it isn’t as far-flung as it feels.

I leap over a stream that flows into the sea. I press higher. After a while there is nowhere further to go. I turn back and I am startled by how far down it is to the stream. I step unevenly on a rock and it flips out from under my boot. My body lurches backward, my feet sliding out from beneath me. I bend my knees like a surfer and coast. The toothy tread of my boots grips the soil, and I grab an outcropping of granite.

My heart pounds like a tribal drum and my vision quivers with each thundering contraction. I take a deep breath. I note that I might not be as fearless as I thought. In some alternate timeline, I think, I just plummeted to my death.

Making my way back down I scan the trail to the end of where I can discern it, I try to track it past the stream. I can’t. I walk closer to the bank opposite where the footpath meets the stream, and there, I see it. The path is obscured by tall marram grass this side of the syke, a few feet downstream.

Rounding a little outcropping, I glance up, and the misty majesty of the Scottish coastline stops me in my tracks. I take out my phone and frame the landscape, the rust and yellow grass at my feet, the black granite crumbling into the green-gray sea, and three cliffs beyond, like the extended front paws of giant sphinxes, each more muted than the last by the distant, vaporous air. The sea and the sky are almost the same color, the sea slightly darker and greener, and the sky holding more blue tones. As soon as I take this photo I make it my home screen.

Breathing in the cool, wet, salty air, I feel more at home here than anywhere else on earth. Here all illusions of separation from nature evaporate into the fog with every exhalation. I am the burn that flows into the sea. I am the rock and the sand. I am the dormant grasses and dripping emerald moss. I am the churning bay.

My eyes scan the terrain to my landward side, and I see a gaping black maw in the foot of the ancient granite. Pareidolia takes over and I perceive a ghastly face lying on its side, the visage of a slain giant, the trail furling out from its mouth, a lolling, serpentine tongue cutting through the marram grass.

I raise my phone and hit record as I approach the mouth. “Dare I enter?” I whisper to myself and my future audience. “I think I do.” Of course I do. This is what I came for.

//

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CARVING A NICHE BY KAREN BREMER MASUDA 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 69

Jun Kosugi ran his fingers along the top of the desk. He could and would carve it into something spectacular. It was one thing he was grateful to his father for, that he’d built the desk of wood. No synthetics here. Jun could carve the desktop. He had a feeling of such joy and anticipation for what he might create. 

He had removed the plastic covering. He put it in the hallway. In the night Jun snuck out from his room and grabbed his father’s ashtray and lighter. 

He needed to get rid of the photos that had been mounted under the plastic, photos of a long-ago soccer tournament, when his team had won a first-place trophy.

Now he had no fond memories of soccer. He burned the photos one by one, watching his smiling face and those of his soccer teammates turn to ashes in the heavy cut-glass of the ashtray. 

Soccer was his little brother’s game, not his. He lived in the shadow of Nao, who did everything seemingly effortlessly. While Nao got better and better at soccer, Jun seemed to get worse and worse. Jun was benched during games for a girl on his team. 

Jun’s father went out to kick the ball around with him and Nao. But then Nao would just run circles around Jun making him feel stupid and hopeless. 

Jun would use any excuse he could to get away. He would go to the toilet and simply not return. His mother would ask him what was wrong when nothing at all was wrong, only that he did not like soccer. In junior high he got out of soccer and into art club. 

His father would say, “Why don’t you get on the basketball team?” Jun knew it would be a re-run of soccer. He would never be able to make his father as proud of him as Nao did all the time.

Jun left the ashtray filled with the ashes of the photos outside his room next to the plastic desk cover.

“What is this?” Jun’s mother woke him from the sleep he had finally succumbed to, still sitting at his desk, carving tools at hand. 

His mother rattled the bedroom door. “What am I supposed to do with this? Open this door, right now! Are you all right?” 

Jun retorted: “Leave me alone!” and then a feeble, “I am fine.” There was no lock on his door. He had blocked it with a bookcase that fit under the door handle making it impossible to turn the lever down. 

Jun’s mother was being locked out of her own son’s room. The hurt slapped across her as though her son had thrown a wet blanket in her face. 

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I just made a bank-shot when everything stop. We never seen that guy, not in our life. He come out of nowhere looking for trouble. That how weird it was, him at the far end of the roof.

BRONX ROOFTOPS BY PAMELA WALKER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 129

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Luís

We wasn’t doin nothin, just shootin hoops on the roof. We rigged a hoop we found in the trash. We play teams of five. Whole bunch, not just me and Luís, but Will and Tito. Jesus, Santos, all our guys. My team’s hot.

I got to tell it straight. Luís, he don’t listen and he too fast to play by rules. You want the truth? He Special Ed even if he read and do fractions good as me. I never choose him for my team but now I keep thinking if I would’ve took him just this once, he would’ve been right close to me.

We strip to our T-shirts and I’m sweatin. When I shoot I smell my stink, strong and bitter. If I lick my arm I taste myself but not on the roof with the boys from the hood. Be cool we say. Or die.

I just made a bank-shot when everything stop. We never seen that guy, not in our life. He come out of nowhere looking for trouble. That how weird it was, him at the far end of the roof.

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I slurped my cocoa as I pondered my next question. The time felt right for the big one. “Is Santa real?” Dad’s eyes narrowed, deciding whether he should tell the truth. “No,” he said. “Dad?” He looked over and smiled at me. “Juni?” “Is Mama ever coming home?”

ON A SATURDAY IN MARCH BY SPENCER STOREY JOHNSON 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 79

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Dad nosed the car up to the curb outside Sue’s Café, the wheels displacing a wave of grey slush. Dad got out first and swung me over the icy black water. We went inside hand in hand.

We stomped our boots as we crossed the mudroom and as we pushed through the interior door we were met by a blast of warm, sweet air.

The smell of food and the rolling chatter of the diners always revived something in my father and I saw him relax.

Dad did his best to keep some sense of normal life. Mom was dying and our world was falling apart. In the beginning I only knew that she was very sick.

Sue’s café was packed, the eating, talking, breathing fogging every window.

Maura always held our booth for us. She led us over. Dad nodded to a couple of regulars. Our booth was at the big front window, the one with the Sue’s Café logo painted on it in cracked red and gold letters. I liked to peek out through the hole in the “a” at the people passing on the sidewalk.

We took off our coats, tucked scarves and gloves in the pockets, and hung them on hooks at the end of our booth.

As Dad and I slid into our places opposite one another the burgundy leather squeaked.

Maura brought our drinks—coffee for Dad, hot chocolate for me. Dad warmed his hands over his steaming mug of coffee and I counted the marshmallows. Fifteen this time. Two more than last week. I dunked them in the hot chocolate and scooped them one by one into my mouth.

I looked at the other diners as we waited for our food. In the corner by the kitchen I spotted the librarian and her husband sharing a bowl of fresh fruit. The owner of the deli where Granny bought me school snacks sat at the bar alone, hunched over a heap of scrambled eggs and a tall glass of iced tea.

I noticed a boy from school, a fifth grader, a year ahead of me, with his family at one of the big round tables in the center of the room. I hoped he hadn’t seen me. Not that I thought he knew me as anyone other than the girl whose mom was sick.

Maura weaved over with our food. She lifted the tray from her hip to the table and spread out our usual breakfast feast: two perfect stacks of pancakes.

Dad’s came plain with a jar of peanut butter. He peeled the stack apart and spread some peanut butter between each layer and topped it off with a square of regular butter.

My pancakes came smothered in whipped cream, powdered sugar, bananas, and blueberries, which I drowned in syrup.

Maura refilled our drinks, and I begged for more marshmallows, but Dad shook his head. Maura gave me an exaggerated what-can-I-do? shrug and retreated to the kitchen with the tray.

I ate my sugary mess in minutes and waited as patiently as I could for Dad to finish. His progress was measured, not cutting a new bite until he’d swallowed the one he was chewing, taking a long sip of coffee after every third bite.

I kicked my heels against the bouncy leather seat and scratched lines with a fork in my leftover berry-stained syrup. I poured a Splenda packet into a small mound on a napkin.

When our plates were cleared, our coffee and cocoa topped off, it was time to talk.

Dad looked across the table at me. “What have you got for me, Juni?”

I thought for a moment, running through the list of pressing questions that swirled in my mind. “Why am I called Juniper?”

The corners of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly under more than a week’s untrimmed stubble. “That’s an easy one. Your mama likes the smell.”

“What’s juniper, then? And what’s it smell like?”

“It’s a tree. Or a shrub.” He shrugged. “I should know that. And it smells sharp. Like gin.” He chuckled at the obvious confusion on my face. “It’s like a Christmas tree, mixed with mint and oranges or lemons. Kind of.”

I processed this information, trying to blend my memories of those smells.

“What’s gin?”

“A grown-up drink. Like beer or wine.”

“What’s a shrub?”

Dad laughed, only a small burst, but enough to draw attention from nearby tables.

“A small tree? Or maybe more like a bush. I don’t really know. We’ll have to find out.” He drew a pen from his pocket and scribbled “shrub?” on a napkin.

We stayed on plants. Why do trees have bark? Dad didn’t know. It went on the napkin. Is a tomato really a fruit? Yes. Why? Something to do with the seeds. Onto the napkin. Why do I have to eat vegetables? Because they keep your bones and brain and blood healthy. And they help you poop. I burst into a fit of giggles.

My questions wound down and Dad called for the check. He paid and we sat quietly finishing our drinks. Dad set down his mug and sighed. “Are you ready to go see Mama?”

I nodded and imitated his sigh as I put down my mug.

As we slid out of the booth and put our coats back on, I asked my usual closing question: “Is Mama coming home soon?”

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She did not exist in his head any more. Nor had she for years. The name did not anger him as it once did, but it still saddened him. And more than anything confused him. Collette was no longer a person he recognized himself to be.

NO SMOEKING BY S LEE BENNETT 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 95

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Cole’s third-floor apartment was a sweltering 80 degrees in a frigid February. Winter in the apartment felt the same as the scorching summer. He shoved his mattress to the other side of the studio from the radiator.

On occasion over the phone he’d bring up the heating with the landlord, Micah, who spoke in very short breathy bursts with mostly vague affirmations and assurances which inevitably led to little follow-through.

Cole’s neighbor across the hall informed him of the back-story to Micah’s incompetence. The neighbor knew Cole’s name while he’d never caught hers. Nevertheless he had entered her into his phone as “neighbor”.

She told Cole that Micah had inherited the property from his girlfriend after her sudden death years ago. He fell into a deep depression and pushed the apartment deeper and deeper into the dark recesses of his mind.

“It’s sad really,” Neighbor said while she ashed her cigarette on the railing of the stoop. “He should just sell it.”

Cole didn’t notice it was his turn to speak until Neighbor’s eyes narrowed and her lips stopped moving.

“Why doesn’t he?” Cole asked.

“I dunno.” She shrugged. “It’d probably suck to fail at your dead girlfriend’s business.”

She dropped the butt of her cigarette in the trash bin, hopped up the steps, keyed the door, and disappeared behind it.

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She wasn’t no Coltrane, you see. But Indonesia had one special song that she would do—Nina Simone’s Since I Fell for You. That song hit home like a fist. Every time I heard it, felt like my heart was being snared and slapped like a drum.

INDONESIA JAZZ BY ASPEN GAINER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 22

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Music sparkles off his clothes, drips like sweat from his black brow. It pours out of the gap in his front teeth. The crowd, mesmerized, hears the melody in the way he smiles, the way the light flashes from his teeth. They hear it in the way he lifts the saxophone to his lips, caressing it like a lover. His liquid black gaze pierces my own, and a grin twitches at one corner of his mouth.

A burnt-out jazz joint. The air is thick and hazy; twitching, convulsing, ablaze with Coltrane-Davis-Monk notes. He’s sitting up on stage on the edge of a stool (the well-loved and well-polished saxophone on his knee) scatting and joking with the crowd. The breathy, bosomy back-up girl adds a voluptuous ambiance. He raises his sax to his lips again and his jazzy sorrow jumps out at me and fills me up.

His was a poor upbringing, raining pain and sadness on the small boy who had nothing in his life but music. At first it was the choir music in his church; that beautiful full-lipped, full-hipped, full-bosomed gospel burst forth with enough force to shake Jesus down from the heavens, enough force to shake the seeds of music off the tree of life right into the dirt of his little soul, where they flourished and blossomed despite rocky ground.

In youth, music was his spirituality. Music was his prayer. Whenever he needed to call out to Jesus, he climbed up to the choir and belted out his woes.

And the church belted right back—wailing as he wailed, rejoicing as he rejoiced. It sealed his fate.

Jazz. Of course his mother told him it was a waste of time. She didn’t spend fifteen years breakin’ her back workin’ just so he could be a no-account jazz musician. Why didn’t he do something respectable like Hettie’s son and lead the choir? Then he could have got a job repairing houses with the church boys, with them nice respectable young men. But no, not him.

He knew it was lodged deep in him, the music seed. At fifteen he left home, knowing he would never be free to follow his heart, his compulsion, otherwise.

Got a job cleaning a bar after close. They paid him a few bucks, just barely enough to have one meal a day, and they let him sleep in the back storeroom. That’s where he fell in love with the saxophone, and with Indonesia Brown, the woman who taught him to play.

It was a love story I first heard as I passed by his toll window, looking for a taste of the Big Apple. He scratched out his story right there in his velvet-gravel tones, paying no mind to the line of cars bleating behind me.

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FENCE PLAYING BY COURTNEY LEIGH KIRBY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 11

Carla, she is sitting on

the neighbor’s fence, one leg

dangling over either side.

She is smiling because her daddy

won’t be home tonight, and she

don’t ask why or how come mama?

has all her clothes packed up

in paper bags they’ve collected

from the grocery store. (I know

I won’t see her no more, that

they are going far away and

one day, in 15 years, I’ll

hear her voice again through a

phone line and she’ll be crying about

her mama, saying she’s gone and

do I remember when we were kids?

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Slabs and more slabs of weighty concrete sections of highway piled next to dry grass and corrugated metal walls of abandoned buildings, stores, houses, farms, factories, telephone poles, and baseball fields remote as my desire to be the first 11-year-old girl on a team of 12-year-old boys.

NJ LINE NORTHEAST CORRIDOR BY COOPER SY BLUMENTHAL 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 68

Trenton NJ at 11.50pm dark, abstract fragments through gray

train windows of what was and now is post-mortem America.

Slabs and more slabs of weighty concrete sections of highway piled next 

to dry grass and corrugated metal walls of abandoned buildings, stores, 

houses, farms, factories, telephone poles, and baseball fields remote 

as my desire to be the first 11-year-old girl on a team of 12-year-old boys.

Behind rusted wire fences vermicular wood stadium seats are weapons.

Splintered sharp edges flay bare flesh under cotton short-shorts and 

halter tops the terminus quo of womanhood. My team is waiting 

in position on a diamond etched into green somewhere close, 

not quite close enough. 

A young batter hovers over the plate two outs at the bottom of the ninth.

Sweat beads roll down his forehead cheeks and dark creases in his neck. 

The guy hugging third inches forward. Bruised cowhide smacks wood. 

The batter rides a gust of wind SAFE on first. The crowd echoes 

the wind. High tops on third slide home in time to score. The

batter poised for flight spots his old man nursing a beer, 

“Wow,” he says inhaling the honey-scent of victory.

Riding along the Northeast Corridor the vibration of rusty wheels roll 

across the once-upon-a-time of America. Painted black against 

white on wood names of NJ stops hung from steel beams 

good for a lifetime of weather: Chilly, chilly ice, swirling 

flakes of snow turned day into holy night. Warm hot, 

hot-humid, wet-heavy, gray-black clouds, 

cannon-balls of thunder cracked open 

the sky. Rain-rocks pounded steel 

roof tops. Bugs whipped by 

splattering against glass. 

Billboards from my train window no longer hide

what sunlight turns into sexless porn

A factory without a roof

A factory without an entrance

A factory with machines lying in grass

Like dead cattle or straw-hard crops of corn.

Linden and North Elizabeth, pit stops blacker than coal.  

No one enters or exits. Wind blows through trucks without 

windows or wheels waiting for a crane to carry their remains

to a grave without a name. 

Not long ago colorful and new humming-birds sawed wood 

bees drilled holes through rosebuds.

COOPER SY BLUMENTHAL

I was visiting my sister in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, returning to New York before taking a plane home to Los Angeles. I’m not sure why I was compelled to look at life passing outside the window of a train rather than work on my computer or answer emails.

In the last hours of daylight, I saw ruins as reminders of a working mill, steel plant, foundry, landscape of farms, the green hills and valleys of mid-summer. 

As we slowed down at suburban stops like Princeton Junction there were no freshly painted storefronts, tidy lawns with the cast shadows of Victorian porches, or in the distance a sand-lot baseball field. No, the America of my childhood was an unattended graveyard of broken windows temporarily held in place by the brick façade of a factory surrounded by cannibalized parts of trucks, cars, machinery without wheels or engines. 

I was dumbstruck by the images and wondered why decades had passed before I could accept, even after the infiltration of corporate greed into academe changing higher education and my own role as a college professor, such a formidable reality. 

My father was a manufacturer from the end of World War Two until the beginning of the 1960s. He bid on military contracts during the Korean war. There were a few years of prosperity before Goodrich, RCA, General Electric, Westinghouse, Emerson Radio Corp, Lockheed, Chrysler, General Motors, etcetera, forced him to declare bankruptcy. 

The Military Industrial Complex vs the individual creator, manufacturer, inventor, scientist, artist, manifests our current political and economic woes. 

My poem is personal and political, inspired by a reckoning with unadorned truth. 

Like other people I fight to stay optimistic about democracy. I try to have faith that the freedoms guaranteed to citizens in the US Constitution will survive the impact of so many solid hits from a powerful corporate elite who have marshaled an army of followers without the benefits of wealth or understanding of what’s at stake.

I studied poetry with Rachel Blau Du Plessis and thought that I would continue as a poet and Chaucerian scholar in graduate school. But I was seduced by the excitement and frenetic activity in Temple University’s Film Department. I was accepted as an MFA candidate with a specialty in documentary filmmaking. 

I was also a single mother of a seven-year-old son which made working as a graduate assistant and learning the aesthetic and technical aspects of the medium, well…let’s just say it was a little more than a piece-of-cake. 

By the end of three years I was close to bankruptcy but was rescued at the 11th hour by ABC TV who hired me as an editor of a mini-documentary series, Prime Time. I edited, wrote narration, shot film, and occasionally produced mini-doc segments.

Then I was accepted as a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute. In nine months at the Institute I wrote and directed three short student films. 

Surviving the criticism of the Director (the school’s head honcho) was a rite-of-passage into the overcrowded Hollywood job market which provided me with continual opportunities for rejection. 

It was also the beginning of a new life and school in Hollywood for my son. 

I needed a regular income and when I saw a job opening in the Daily Variety for a professor of film at San Diego State University I applied and was hired, once again at the 11th hour. 

After two years I transferred to Cal State University Long Beach, much closer to the Industry, and my son’s education and passion for flying airplanes.

I wrote and directed movies including The Poet’s Wife and Walking to Waldheim. My first indie feature, Take Two, premiered at The American Film Institute and was distributed internationally. 

I wrote and directed three films for a Showtime Anthology series: As Always Madelaine, The Photographer, and Woman on a Train. 

More recently I directed and co-wrote a two-act play with Kathy Jones, Acts of Faith, based on short stories by Grace Paley. The play had its first three-week run at the 10th Street Theater in San Diego, California. 

The Leonard and Susan Nimoy Family Foundation funded my feature-length documentary, The Phoenix Effect, about the lives of second and third generation holocaust survivors. 

So I studied, taught, and made films, theater, and TV programs, but my first love and ultimate goal is to be recognized as a writer of poetry, short stories, and a novel or two. 

My poetry and short stories have been published in Battered Suitcase, Love Notes, an anthology of poetry published by Vagabondage Press, Montreal Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ray’s River Review, Steel House Review, Petrichor Review, and 34thParallel Magazine. 

Although I have a film waiting to be edited, I’m enveloped in the characters in two novels close to completion. Every day I ride my bike along the Pacific Ocean to a special café where I enter the lives of my flawed, complicated, troubled, mysterious, weathered, and wholly real men and women who I can count on to show up as soon as I’m sitting at a table with a cup of coffee, and turn on my computer. 

My son became a pilot and eventually a Captain at Frontier Airlines, and he’s living in Paris, France, of course.