[fiction]

She starts training for everything at once: motherhood, the apocalypse, a local 5K. The Pulitzer-winning earthquake that promises to obliterate the Pacific Northwest. A high-altitude decathlon. North Korea.

She stops drinking (but still drinks some, because obviously the world is terrible and who can bear it?), stockpiles prenatals, buys new shoes. Functional shoes.

She reads a book about real/whole/just-totally-no-holds-barred-fucking-totally-real food and the pleasures of a radiant pregnancy. She skips presumptuous chapters contingent upon the handy availability of tropical organic produce.

She goes to the woods and looks around, hard. She is underwhelmed by the prowess of the survival-guide illustrator. She intently wants to recognize the edible leaves—to discern poison from nutrition—but they all look the same, green on green on green.

Days pass. Weeks. She gets better books, listens to podcasts, writes her senator. She runs, everywhere, but always, ultimately, to nowhere, sleeps the thick black sleep of the irretrievably exhausted. She buys walkie-talkies, wonders to whom she should give the second device.

She rejects excess, donates wildly.

She wades through old photographs, despising them—their flat immortality, their shallow, bulletproof intimacy.

She returns to the woods—marginally older, the same—pockets packed with color print-outs of leaves.

She studies the earth, glides her thumbs over the flimsy fawn-soft green. Panic rises in her like a fist, a tight and bloody, aching thing.

She studies the photos. But every leaf looks like a leaf, especially the ones that will kill you.

Even so, now, while the hospitals still run on power and the mountain is standing and there’s no propitious alien life-form blossoming in her gut, she must learn.

So, she plucks a leaf—a leaf that looks as much like the artist’s rendering as any leaf—

and she begins to eat.

Amanda J. Bermudez is a writer and director based in Los Angeles, California. In addition to film and television, her work has been featured at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, the National Winter Playwrights Retreat, the Yale Center for British Art, and in a number of literary publications, including Concis, Sick Lit, Spider Road Press, and Iron Horse Literary Review. She is a National Merit Scholar, a recipient of the Jameson Prize for excellence in essay-writing; a Writer’s Digest national award winner, a nominee for the Spotlight Culture & Heritage award, and winner of the 2017 Cinequest Film Festival screenwriting award.

[creative nonfiction]

New in Indianapolis and recently divorced, Charles went out to Madame C. J. Walker’s Ballroom in 1942. He heard it was the place for Negroes to mingle. On a mission to find a nice colored girl to start over with, he straightened his tie before following the music up the stairs. There he found a tuxedoed band, perched up on a roulette wheel bandstand, shimmying out the foxtrot that couples danced to.

He took in the scene from the bar, his eyes flitting from one lovely lady in a fancy dress to the next. As he sipped a too-expensive shot of bourbon, he saw another man eye his broad shoulders and shined-but-worn shoes before coming over.

“See somethin’ you like?”

“Plenty,” Charles said.

“Looky here, Jack,” the man said. “Meeting a girl at Walker’s depends on how much you got in your wallet and who your daddy is, see? And if she ain’t happy with both, all you’re going to get is ONE dance, if you’re lucky.”

As Charles watched smooth-talking men in stylish suits lead those women onto the dance floor, he realized he couldn’t make any time here. So he stayed a while for the jazz, and watched the spectacle before walking back to his boardinghouse.

Where else was there for a colored man to find a suitable girl? Not like the wife he had to marry down in Georgia when he was seventeen, the one who said the baby was his, and later that it wasn’t.

He hadn’t found that suitable girl at the churches he’d tried. They were either too old, married, or not very attractive. And the mother of the one he had approached had snatched her away because he was divorced.

Neither had he found the girl he was looking for out at the Sunset Terrace, where the brown sugar went to dance. They were good-looking all right, sporting outfits that clung to their charms, with jaunty hats tipped over done-up hair. The ones he talked to sho’nuff looked like sugar, but their salty talk tasted too much like his past.

On his walk back home, that girl in the mailroom at work ran through his mind. Like always. The white girl with enough guts to talk to him like a straight-up man. The sweet one whose soft skin he imagined touching, even though the Klan would string up his damned fool self for looking at her, like they did those two boys a few years ago, down the road.

And yet, Charles did finally sneak down to the mailroom, whispering sincerely to her what he’d practiced in his mirror.

“I don’t mean to be out of line, but I want you to know I like you. Very much.”

She stared at him. Weighed his words intently.

“I’ve thought of you too,” she said.

E. Dolores Johnson’s writing on race has appeared or is forthcoming in The Buffalo News, the Women of Color Anthology: Boundaries and Borders, and Narratively. Her multigenerational memoir about mixed-race life also shows the browning of America and changing attitudes about race-mixing. She is looking for a publisher. Johnson completed the Memoir Incubator program at Grub Street and studied creative writing at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. She has been awarded residencies at Djerassi, Blue Mountain Center, Ragdale, and the VCCA colonies. She has consulted on diversity for think tanks, universities, major corporations, and nonprofits. Johnson holds a Harvard MBA and a Howard University BA. Follow her on [email protected] elladolo.

[creative nonfiction]

for Rose Williams

Close-cropped curly hair, pitted, blueberry skin—my first reaction was dread, with my incipient bias spluttering warnings: They are all violent. All a bit crazy. Stay away. We ignore each other—I huddled by the corner grading answer sheets while you ruled a coterie of veterans of shelters, prisons, rehabs, halfway houses. Bianca a juvie at twelve. Her girlfriend DeeDee who spent the days in class braiding her hair. Whose ex, Ariana, hissed at them in Spanish throughout the high school equivalency class.

I am taunted by the hour: “You speak funny. Whatcha doin here? Why don’t you go back where you belong? You Arab bitch! You think you better than us? Meet us outside… What, you chicken? What, you Buddhist or something?” I had dreamt of becoming the female version of Sidney Poitier in To Sir with Love. Now, I cringed and started searching for another job.

Till one day you surfaced showing a piece you wrote. “You really brainy, huh? Which grade did you study up to?” And then, “I write good?” Flashing a smile at my nods. The next time the class mimicked me, you stop them. “Let her be. She’s Bomb Diggity!”

I learn about your babies: “They my angels even though they got different baby daddies! Girl, I was bad. I sinned then.” About your dealing at Detroit. “Girl, I wish I had just had a taste of it once before the cops came!” This time though you claim, “It’s different. Jesus is here.” And, “Read the Bible with me! Jesus will save you!”

You predict a brilliant future for me. “Just watch, you will get a good man. And lotsa babies.” You leave outlining plans to try for your GED, and then college, and promise, “You are my dawg. I will write you.” You send one letter—bordered by brown stick-figures and red-pencil flowers. And I never hear from you again.

Jonaki Ray studied chemistry and computer science in India (IIT Kanpur) and the US (UIUC), and, after a brief stint as a software engineer, has returned to her first love, English. She is now a poet, writer, and editor based in India. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in The Matador Review, So to Speak, Indian Literature, Sigh Press Literary Journal, Coldnoon, The Four Quarters Magazine, The Wire, The Times of India, and elsewhere. Her work is forthcoming in the American Journal of Poetry and For the Sonorous.

Honors for her work include first prize, EAL category, at the 2017 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Contest; longlisted at the 2016 Writers’ HQ International Fiction Contest; shortlisted, ESL category, at the 2016 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Contest; and longlisted for the 2016 RL Poetry Award. She was selected as a writer-in-residence at Joya: AiR, an inter-disciplinary residency program in Spain (Spring 2016); and La Macina di San Cresci, Italy (Summer 2017).

[creative nonfiction]

(after Wilkins)

What I remember most clearly is the heat.

What I remember is driving in the heat to the house with a chain-link fence surrounding the front yard that was patchy with green and yellow grass. I can see the tree in the front yard with its one branch that curved toward the porch where there were chairs (plastic, maybe). I may have been wearing shorts if it was summer. Was it summer? Or was the heat because it was California? There may have been a dog. There were most assuredly other people, maybe a younger brother, a man, a girl.

What I remember is walking inside the house, being asked if I wanted a drink. It may have been Pabst or Natural Ice or Bud Light or Budweiser or Corona. I don’t know. I don’t know what I drank. I’m sure now that we talked, in a group or alone. I can hear myself laughing, full throated and boundless. We might have played dominoes smacking them onto the wooden kitchen table or knocking with our knuckles when we had no bone to play.

What I remember is nothing, nothing and then the wall near the bed, pale and cold, staring at my face partially submerged in dark sheets. Eyelids weighted by mascaraed lashes, I looked at the white wall and waited. My cheek slipped and pushed in rhythmic waves. Do I move my arm back, push against him with my hand? Does he shove it away? When do I whisper into the pillow top, no no? Will the man in the next room hear? I don’t know. I don’t know who lives here. I can still hear my blood throbbing through my ears, feel my heart still, then pound, banging around inside my chest. A piece of me wants to say I can taste whiskey on my breath, smell smoke in my hair.

What I remember is lying still. The television could be on in the background, the muffled sounds of dialogue sweeping over my empty thoughts. Do I fall asleep? Or do I lie awake for hours in a trance waiting for the light to spill through the tattered curtains in the morning? Are my eyes closed, or is it the wall I am staring at in the dark? I don’t know.

I am there through the night awake or asleep. I don’t know. Whether I was awake or asleep, whether I stared at the wall or slipped into a cautious rest, the light spilled in through the tattered curtains and the room is stifling when I sit up on the edge of the bed. I look around for my clothes. Do I clutch a sheet to cover my skin? I don’t know. I can’t see the pieces I collect or recall the order in which I put them on. A piece of me wants to say I said something or he did. Is my breathing rough? Is my voice low and cracking from the smoking and the dehydration?

When I leave the room, I go to the kitchen to get a drink of water. I can see through a door ajar that no one was in the next room. I drink water. Do I bring him a glass? Or does he follow me to the kitchen? Is it his hand on my shoulder that tenses every muscle in my body?

I see myself closing the door to the house, the screen smacking against the frame, walking past the tree and the grass, shoving the key into the car door, holding the wheel in my hands. I am numb and confused, and I am alone. Do I really just drive home? Do I maybe stare at the house, at the shadows the limbs make on the spotty grass, at the splashes of dirt behind steel fence links? Am I breathing when I start the car engine? How hard do I press the gas pedal with my foot?

There is so much I cannot remember. I want to say, it doesn’t matter that I don’t or can’t or won’t remember. I search the dark stumbling with my hands out groping for the missing. I can feel the heat, can see in snatches grasped as if by the flickering fire light of the Bic I used to keep in my pocket. Snap, spark, flame, heat, breath.

Kari Treese is a writer and mathematics teacher in Southern California. She received a bachelor’s degree in writing studies from University of Washington Tacoma and a master’s degree in education from UCLA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Crab Fat, and The Fem. Find her outside counting rocks or climbing them.